So, I have an iPhone, which I like, but we use Windows and Linux computers in our household. I’d never seen a Mac boot up until the other day after a friend gave me their old Mac Mini. I was excited to check it out, got it all set up and logged in – but it really just seemed like a giant iPhone regarding what it did and could do (meaning, I would just stick with Windows and Linux for our computing needs, rather than swap over to the Mac). I was disappointed.
What am I missing?
M1 does only support one display natively; I think you can get around this with a usb hub. You can also airplay to displays/tvs that support it (anything you can plug an apple tv into, and many newer tvs). You can also use an iPad as a separate display if you have one.
There are a lot of nice things you can do, especially if you own multiple apple products (like, you can airplay music or video to your computer from your iPhone, or copy-paste between devices that share an Apple ID)
Some stuff is annoying though. Linux support on M-series chips is still evolving (though very usable), it’s really not super straightforward to record the audio of your Mac (think screen recording that also captures whatever audio is passing through your AV Devices) because of implementation decisions way back.
Generally, I use a Mac though; because I get enough utility out of stuff like AirPlay, AirDrop, iCloud, and other random stuff that you kinda need to “just know about” to make up for the downsides of not being able to completely control my system.
Nix/nixpkgs is pretty well supported on Mac, though, so it’s not like I’m forced to use all the default binaries MacOS ships with.
Also, their displays are really really good on the Macbook Pros and the speaker quality (especially on the 16") is by far the best sound quality I’ve seen come out of a laptop. That doesn’t matter if you have a Mac Mini, though.