Big disagree. My Macbook has hard crashed into restarting more times than my PC desktop has in years. The other day I literally just closed my M2 Macbook and it for some reason just completely crashed and shut itself off.
Bad memory maybe? I also have much less trouble with my personal Macs than my personal Linux boxes (although I push the edges on beta and cutting edge software a lot more on linux, while I treat the MacOS as something I can ignore the versions of, unless they notify me to upgrade). But haven't had a abrupt reboot outside of software updates in forever (on personal macs - work mac reboots at IT's whims).
If you want me to blame "software design" then I can point to the fact that the TV app lags constantly on my M2 especially when I click the "download episode" button which should not ever be a thing on their native hardware, that there is a WindowsServer process that steadily eats up all the RAM that consistently needs to be quit in order to free up memory, that the headphone balance constantly resets to some random value where the audio comes mostly out of my left ear which has apparently been a problem for decades, that Spotlight is less than useless and STILL shows "Disk Utility" as the top result when I search "dis" instead of showing Discord an app that I open on an almost daily basis, that randomly the fingerprint login simply will not work for seconds at a time...
This is just the stuff I remember. This is a 16GB M2 Macbook Pro. Not a single native Apple made app or process should be lagging, let alone using up enough memory that sometimes apps just completely crash. Again, my windows desktop hasn't had a blue screen or a hard crash in the decade that I've used it and it had a worse configuration with 16GB of RAM and an old AMD CPU.
Seems pretty a pretty cherry picked list tbh. I could find issues like that on any OS. I suspect you just are frustrated with your particular machine, which is fine, but you were talking about it like it was a universal truth lol
My hot take is all OSes are kinda bad for daily driving.
Apple has no qualms breaking backwards compatibility for core functions like bluetooth connectivity in MacOS. Windows has backwards compatibility, but increasingly worsening UX, throwing ads and subscriptions in your face before you can even log in, and a bad security/process isolation model. Desktop Linux is a case of "how many hours before I find out a critical part of my workflow is unsupported/bad/broken/unconfigurable/pain-to-configure in this particular distro/desktop environment".
I think they’re pretty amazing considering how hard a problem it is. Also, we forget how bad os’s used to be. They’re absolutely rock solid compared to the past.
Aside: I bought my first battery backup because the only thing that ruined my uptime on Windows NT 4 was power outages. I would have kept on using NT 4 as my desktop OS, but MS wanted to sell more licenses so newer directX was unsupported on NT4. I moved to Windows 2000, then eventually to XP x64 Edition.
I installed and fixed a lot of 95, 98[se], ME, and XP OSes for other people, though. Thousands. I never bothered with any of those OSes on my own machines, though. The first "consumer" OS i used was win 7 Ultimate Edition (signed by Ballmer, natch). I use 11, now, and i'm fine with it. I think it's because i am "grandfathered" in to win11 without a microsoft login; i just mentioned last night that if i had to reinstall windows on this machine, i probably wouldn't, due to that requirement now.
Anyhow all this is to say, hogwash. Windows has been perfect in the past. Time marches on, fruit flies like a banana, and all that.
I'm not trying to diminish the complexity of a desktop OS of course, but sometimes it's hard not to feel the priorities are all over the place. Don't get me wrong, I'm not nostalgic about Windows XP, I actually remember how many freezes and crashes I used to have back then.
My frustration is more born out of the OS rough edges constantly getting in the way of tasks I actually want to focus on and accomplish, which doesn't play well with my ADHD.
Big disagree. My Macbook has hard crashed into restarting more times than my PC desktop has in years. The other day I literally just closed my M2 Macbook and it for some reason just completely crashed and shut itself off.
FWIW I abuse my M2 daily and only reboot once a year basically, and only because of some update.
Something could be wrong with your specific Macbook
Bad memory maybe? I also have much less trouble with my personal Macs than my personal Linux boxes (although I push the edges on beta and cutting edge software a lot more on linux, while I treat the MacOS as something I can ignore the versions of, unless they notify me to upgrade). But haven't had a abrupt reboot outside of software updates in forever (on personal macs - work mac reboots at IT's whims).
I haven’t seen a crash in at least a decade of daily use.
Back in the older Intel days I did sometimes, perhaps due to the GPU switching and flakey Nvidia drivers. But even then it certainly wasn’t common.
Something is wrong with your laptop. That is absolutely not normal, and not something you should blame on the software design.
If you want me to blame "software design" then I can point to the fact that the TV app lags constantly on my M2 especially when I click the "download episode" button which should not ever be a thing on their native hardware, that there is a WindowsServer process that steadily eats up all the RAM that consistently needs to be quit in order to free up memory, that the headphone balance constantly resets to some random value where the audio comes mostly out of my left ear which has apparently been a problem for decades, that Spotlight is less than useless and STILL shows "Disk Utility" as the top result when I search "dis" instead of showing Discord an app that I open on an almost daily basis, that randomly the fingerprint login simply will not work for seconds at a time...
This is just the stuff I remember. This is a 16GB M2 Macbook Pro. Not a single native Apple made app or process should be lagging, let alone using up enough memory that sometimes apps just completely crash. Again, my windows desktop hasn't had a blue screen or a hard crash in the decade that I've used it and it had a worse configuration with 16GB of RAM and an old AMD CPU.
Seems pretty a pretty cherry picked list tbh. I could find issues like that on any OS. I suspect you just are frustrated with your particular machine, which is fine, but you were talking about it like it was a universal truth lol
My hot take is all OSes are kinda bad for daily driving.
Apple has no qualms breaking backwards compatibility for core functions like bluetooth connectivity in MacOS. Windows has backwards compatibility, but increasingly worsening UX, throwing ads and subscriptions in your face before you can even log in, and a bad security/process isolation model. Desktop Linux is a case of "how many hours before I find out a critical part of my workflow is unsupported/bad/broken/unconfigurable/pain-to-configure in this particular distro/desktop environment".
I think they’re pretty amazing considering how hard a problem it is. Also, we forget how bad os’s used to be. They’re absolutely rock solid compared to the past.
Aside: I bought my first battery backup because the only thing that ruined my uptime on Windows NT 4 was power outages. I would have kept on using NT 4 as my desktop OS, but MS wanted to sell more licenses so newer directX was unsupported on NT4. I moved to Windows 2000, then eventually to XP x64 Edition.
I installed and fixed a lot of 95, 98[se], ME, and XP OSes for other people, though. Thousands. I never bothered with any of those OSes on my own machines, though. The first "consumer" OS i used was win 7 Ultimate Edition (signed by Ballmer, natch). I use 11, now, and i'm fine with it. I think it's because i am "grandfathered" in to win11 without a microsoft login; i just mentioned last night that if i had to reinstall windows on this machine, i probably wouldn't, due to that requirement now.
Anyhow all this is to say, hogwash. Windows has been perfect in the past. Time marches on, fruit flies like a banana, and all that.
I'm not trying to diminish the complexity of a desktop OS of course, but sometimes it's hard not to feel the priorities are all over the place. Don't get me wrong, I'm not nostalgic about Windows XP, I actually remember how many freezes and crashes I used to have back then.
My frustration is more born out of the OS rough edges constantly getting in the way of tasks I actually want to focus on and accomplish, which doesn't play well with my ADHD.
Man, agree to disagree. What you're describing is somehow still miles better than any experience I've ever had with a windows or linux latptop.
Exactly