It sounds good, but in reality… how can I quickly connect my friend’s pendrive? Or external disk? Or my Android phone? Or maybe TV? It’s a problem, we need a USB-C hub or docking station. It’s a very, very powerful port, because it can transfer 40 Gb/s, provide audio, video, charge your device etc. Macs right now have 2 or 4 Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C ports. Second thing related to hardware: external ports. In normal shops you can buy 64 GB (2x 32 GB) notebooks for a… 1600 PLN.
For example in Poland you have to spend an additional 2000 PLN to upgrade Mac memory from 16 GB to 32 GB (just 16 GB more). Do you need more RAM or a bigger SSD? No problem, but prices are extremely high. They also limit GPUs, because for a few years, they do not support Nvidia cards. Very limited, because Apple uses only Intel CPU and M1 chip. You can also build your own computer, select what exactly you need, for example extremely fast CPU or GPU. Whow! I didn’t spend time looking for something, like in years before.
I installed fresh Windows 10 as Windows 7 upgrade on my fiancée notebook and Windows Update found all required drivers. Of course it generates some issues related to drivers, but right now it looks much different than for example 6-7 years ago. You can choose an AMD or Intel CPU, you can choose many different video cards, sound cards, disks etc. Probably the most important thing is much better hardware support. I needed 3 weeks to migrate, to move my daily work to Windows machine, but right now it’s ok. It works nice, and I did not observe any issues with it. Two other nice features: that notebooks have a built-in fingerprint sensor and IR camera, so it’s 100% compatible with advanced biometric and Windows Hello login. MX150 is activated only when needed, only when I will run some 3D apps, games, CUDA-based calculations etc.
I do not need that GeForce, but it isn’t a problem: Windows supports nVidia Optimus and uses Intel GPU always. I ordered a model without that discrete graphic, but it was broken, and the shop sent me a better version. It’s not the newest option, but there was an extremely attractive offer – it has Intel i7 9gen (also 6 cores and 12 threads, but it supports some vPro features), 32 GB RAM, 512 GB NVMe SSD and two GPUs: Integrated from Intel and GeForce MX150. In effect, the whole machine is warmer, louder and CPU performance (particularly important for me) falling, because of throttling. Unfortunately, on Mac it’s not possible to connect the external display and still use Intel GPU – Radeon is then enabled, consumes additional energy, and gives off heat. Intel GPU and hardware acceleration which it can provide is more than enough for me. Other things: I really do not need a Radeon GPU, I do not do anything related to GPU, Metal API etc. We use a lot of Docker so… it’s problematic.
Because of MacOS architecture, Docker is slow, especially in I/O. In theory, it should provide a lot of power, enough to work comfortably as a Full-Stack Developer. I’ve used MacBook Pro 15” from 2018, but it’s still pretty nice: Intel i7 8gen with 6 cores and 12 threads, 16 GB of RAM, 256 GB NVMe SSD and both, integrated Intel GPU + Radeon Pro enabled if required or when we connect external display.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I bet Microsoft will win in that race: not because of hardware support, they are dependent on Intel and AMD, but because of software support and still, amazing backward compatibility. At the same time, Microsoft did a lot to convince developers and encourage them to migrate. Of course, they released new Macs with their M1 chips, it looks interesting, but there are still a lot of especially important limitations, in both hardware and software. But… the last two years made me think about both platforms – right now Apple is behind the competition. It wasn’t super simple, because I’ve used MacBooks for about 5 years, and I was quite happy with them. Right now, is an enjoyable time to describe reasons, pros, and cons for that decision. In a few last posts I mentioned that I decided to switch from MacBook and MacOS to Windows.