I think that's just the nature of a laptop, it's not Apple per se. There's only so much space for internal components and connectors. As the technologies improve for external devices we'll see a reduction in the adapters needed, but we'll probably always need something attached to the laptop to backfill to what a desktop could do.
It's not. At least, not to the same degree. My wife uses a MBP and has 4 "adapters" (two of them chained together) to run her desk setup at work. My laptops haven't needed them for the same basic setup.
That being said, neither of us like wireless peripherals, and neither of us have spent what thunderbolt displays cost.
I've seen horrendous drive crashes on my PCs and few on my Macs, so we'll call that a draw.
I had one last week. One of the SSDs in my storage server died. I had a replacement on hand because that data is important to me (recovering from off-site would take forever). Fifteen minutes after the monitoring email went out, I had a new drive in. An hour later, the array was done resilvering and the failed drive was physically destroyed. Two hours later a new cold spare showed up from Amazon.
This was not the first drive I'd lost from that server, and it won't be the last. None of the other stories are all that different.
You can't do that with Apple internal storage.
Time Machine is my local, "gotta look for the file right now because I screwed it up a couple of hours ago" solution. In parallel, I run a separate backup to the cloud that occurs daily, PLUS all my important files, including all my Fractal stuff, go to my Dropbox account immediately.
That's one of the ways it's failed me. Even for quick "oops, I didn't mean to delete that" things, the files wind up corrupted way too often. I have never had a full restore/migrate work. IME, it's literally nothing but a waste of drive space.
The support tries to dumb me down and they piss me off quickly...
Yeah...they do that. It's really annoying, and Genius Bars are far from alone in that regard.
I don't see it getting any better, though. Just a few weeks ago, my iPhone died randomly. Apparently, my Genius Bar won't even start an appointment if "Find my iPhone" is turned on, and I can't log into my Apple account without a 2FA code
that I have to get through the phone. So, there's no way for them to fix a dead iPhone. The independent service centers were booked out 2 weeks, and I needed a phone. And the cel carrier store that was halfway-near the Apple STore didn't have anything but $1000+ crazy BS in stock. I even tried to buy a dumb phone to put my sim card in just to get one text message so I could log into my Apple account, but that was going to cost as much as a new cheapest iPhone unless I wanted to sign my first cel contract in 20 years.
Seriously...their customer support is absolutely the worst I've ever dealt with. Lenovo has jerked me around. Dell has taken
hours to fix something that should have taken minutes. IBM has taken days to fix what should have taken hours. The managed hosting company we use at work has screwed up so badly that half a dozen people (including me) on 3 continents had to wake up and put in 36 hours straight.
But, I've never before had a company say, literally, "Our default settings prevent us from fixing your thing, and all you can do is buy a replacement". As far as I'm concerned, and admitting that for a laptop-based setup, an M1 Pro is probably the best out there...if a device has an Apple on it, it needs to be considered disposable. As in...any hardware fault means just buy a new one and don't even bother trying to get it fixed.
I had a
lot of problems with my Apple hardware from 2005 until around 2015 when I swore them off. I had several warranty replacements that all took a long time. One of them required cold contacting their top-tier customer support. After they took over, it was a relatively painless...they just called me a few hours later and said that I had a new laptop at the Apple Store with my drive cloned onto it waiting for me. But that was after going back and forth with the Geniuses for over a week to try to prove to them that the hardware issue, that they could reproduce easily, wasn't somehow my fault. It was related to some of the known manufacturing issues with the Logic Board at that point. It was early 2011 when it failed...I think the laptop was a 2009 or 2010 maybe. A few days after it was down, I overnighted a relatively cheap Lenovo from Amazon so that I would at least have
something to use. That laptop case was cracked when a careless person knocked it off a desk a week after I got it, the battery only lasts for about 45 minutes at this point, and it's had 2 or 3 RAM sticks and a drive die. Part of it is held together with tape. But, it
still works.
At this point...if I needed big sessions and low latency, I'd probably buy HDX before an Apple "desktop". Avid's service sucks too, but at least you can pay people to actually do things instead of Apple either taking forever or telling me I'm SOL.
IDK...maybe my local Apple stores are terrible. But, it's been like this at 3 or 4 of them.
That's comparing the hardware, not the protocol. Time will tell which protocol wins.
Thunderbolt is PCIe + DisplayPort, up to TB3. TB4 is PCIe + USB + DisplayPort on one cable.
PCIe can be (but isn't necessarily) wider (more lanes). TB is limited to 4 lanes, even on the ones that technically have 2 TB controllers sharing a cable (you can't use 8 lanes for one thing if you wanted to).
The big difference is that it's a fragile connector as opposed to a very robust one inside the case.
I got tired of fiddling with drivers and BIOS and everything else because I just want to be productive. Or screw around with my modelers.
Yeah....that hasn't been my experience since switching back. Not by a long shot.
Yeah....there are some optimizations I did when installing Windows, but there were optimizations I did to OS X as well. Drivers are easy...you download a thing and keep clicking next until it says you're done. And you have to do that on OS X too if you're using anything but bare-bones class-compliant stuff. I mean...you had to install drivers & software for your Fractal. It's the exact same process whether you do it on OS X or Windows.
The closest thing to a driver problem I've had was just Graphics Cards. And, yes, they're really hit or miss. Fortunately, for me, integrated graphics works just fine. So, I don't need to think about it.
I probably spent more time per year in Apple's UEFI as I have on my PC Bios/EFI. Mostly for it's diagnostics. On my PC, all I did was enable XMP and set it for an all-core max boost instead of a single-core max boost, which took like 5 minutes and a couple reboots for memory training (which might be nerve-racking if you don't know what it's doing). I think I might have also disabled the internal sound card....don't remember. I think maybe once a year I remember to check for firmware updates. None of those really matter, but I'd rather have the options.
I don't like Microsoft as a company either. But, I do prefer PCs...because I can tweak and fix things more so than I can with Apple. And it fits what I want to do.
On a laptop....a lot of those things change because most PC laptops are either junk or heavily focused on gaming and graphics performance.
IDK...I don't necessarily mean to scare people away from Apple. I just...I find it hard to stand by and have people say that they don't have problems or that their service is good. That has definitely not been my experience.
Seriously, since I switched (which started in 2011), I've had a lot of parts die. But, I actually have 3 PCs from 2011-2012 that still work. One of them is that laptop that I don't really use anymore. The other 2 were built as a Hackintosh for music and Linux desktop for normal work. Now, they're running ESXi (with a handful of guests, including the router for my home studio/office) and FreeBSD (it's basically a work desktop and a database prototyping machine because I can't function without a unix machine...though I only ever use it over SSH)...they run 24/7 and routinely see uptimes in excess of 6 months. I've had RAM die in one of them and drives in both. And I had to delid one of them and re-do the thermal paste under the IHS because it was over-heating. But, seriously, they run 24/7 and still work, and the younger one is 10 years old.
It's not true if you buy something from Dell/HP/etc. that over-charge for bargain basement office PCs, but PC hardware is higher quality than Apple, at least IME.
