It’s difficult to get good support on Linux as well. Most of it is volunteers and that effort is spread over many different projects. Consistent long term support for Linux is only available for commercial operations. For personal computing apple has the best long term support for hardware.
The benefit of Linux is the flexibility and the broad range of options that can be applied to support older hardware. But this requires the users to apply them in a way that can be inaccessible for some people or inconvenient for power users/small businesses.
Technically Linux can provide long term support. Practically, it can’t do it in a useful way. Linux still struggles to support new hardware out the box - this is improving.
Linux has achieved a great many things. Whilst being free and open. But nobody talks about supporting ten year old Linux tablets or even using them. That’s because they are in landfills or museums. Your iPad is still useful.
I believe that this is your opinion based on experience and accounts of people you know. Feel free to offer further insight if you wish.
Also, I don’t know much about apple computers, except they are a lot more expensive than the hardware they’re made of. Which I happen to know a little bit about.
Apple hardware
Although, after watching a lot of apple macbooks being disassembled and repaired (or attempted) by louis rossman, I believe him that apple is doing all they can in making their products unrepairable and don’t care about their customers enough to make louis‘ job obsolete.
They have been sued and paid millions in damages for anti consumer and anti competitive measures, btw.
If you could provide me with contrary evidence, I‘d be happy to believe you instead since this is part of „support“ imo.
What I do know a bit about are apple handhelds. Iphones, ipads and ipods.
And no, my ipad is not still useful. It is a massive pain in the ass to even start up and a constant security risk while apple makes it near impossible to even jailbreak the stupid thing although it would run insanely good with a small linux installation. The same goes for iphones btw.
Apple software
I do agree that linux is a lot tougher to understand than apple OSs. Even ubuntu which I‘m currently using is a lot of work if you‘re doing a complex setup while apple is mostly plug and play.
But there lies a more philosophical question. Do we need an OS that is so polished and perfect because it and the hardware is so locked down that apple can make it e waste with the push of a button?
Also, the support window of windows is comparable to apple. Windows 10 still receives updates until 2025 and works on machines as early as mid 2000s. That is 20 years of machines and 8 yrs of lifetime (2015 released).
So I‘d say both windows and linux are the better choice, while linux is the most consumer friendly (no ads, privacy friendly, free, open source, highly configurable) but a little more complicated than windows and a lot more complicated than mac os.
And yes, if you need the newest and best (statistically, you dont), dont care about cost or the environment and want it for your grandma to use, apple is your choice. Everyone else just does it for image reasons imo.
Btw. getting support for my iphone while still new has been a lot harder than getting support for ubuntu. And please dont forget that apple was sued to give support on their batteries. They are not our friends.
Better alternatives at the moment seem to be: Fairphone for phones and Framework for Laptops. They are environmentally friendly, fairphone is also fairly traded and both are highly repairable.
Ok, I made a mistake with windows. Can we now talk about the point I made?
It’s difficult to get good support on Linux as well. Most of it is volunteers and that effort is spread over many different projects. Consistent long term support for Linux is only available for commercial operations. For personal computing apple has the best long term support for hardware.
The benefit of Linux is the flexibility and the broad range of options that can be applied to support older hardware. But this requires the users to apply them in a way that can be inaccessible for some people or inconvenient for power users/small businesses.
Technically Linux can provide long term support. Practically, it can’t do it in a useful way. Linux still struggles to support new hardware out the box - this is improving.
Linux has achieved a great many things. Whilst being free and open. But nobody talks about supporting ten year old Linux tablets or even using them. That’s because they are in landfills or museums. Your iPad is still useful.
Disclaimer
Let me phrase this in a non toxic way:
I believe that this is your opinion based on experience and accounts of people you know. Feel free to offer further insight if you wish.
Also, I don’t know much about apple computers, except they are a lot more expensive than the hardware they’re made of. Which I happen to know a little bit about.
Apple hardware
Although, after watching a lot of apple macbooks being disassembled and repaired (or attempted) by louis rossman, I believe him that apple is doing all they can in making their products unrepairable and don’t care about their customers enough to make louis‘ job obsolete.
They have been sued and paid millions in damages for anti consumer and anti competitive measures, btw.
If you could provide me with contrary evidence, I‘d be happy to believe you instead since this is part of „support“ imo.
What I do know a bit about are apple handhelds. Iphones, ipads and ipods.
And no, my ipad is not still useful. It is a massive pain in the ass to even start up and a constant security risk while apple makes it near impossible to even jailbreak the stupid thing although it would run insanely good with a small linux installation. The same goes for iphones btw.
Apple software
I do agree that linux is a lot tougher to understand than apple OSs. Even ubuntu which I‘m currently using is a lot of work if you‘re doing a complex setup while apple is mostly plug and play.
But there lies a more philosophical question. Do we need an OS that is so polished and perfect because it and the hardware is so locked down that apple can make it e waste with the push of a button?
Also, the support window of windows is comparable to apple. Windows 10 still receives updates until 2025 and works on machines as early as mid 2000s. That is 20 years of machines and 8 yrs of lifetime (2015 released).
So I‘d say both windows and linux are the better choice, while linux is the most consumer friendly (no ads, privacy friendly, free, open source, highly configurable) but a little more complicated than windows and a lot more complicated than mac os.
And yes, if you need the newest and best (statistically, you dont), dont care about cost or the environment and want it for your grandma to use, apple is your choice. Everyone else just does it for image reasons imo.
Btw. getting support for my iphone while still new has been a lot harder than getting support for ubuntu. And please dont forget that apple was sued to give support on their batteries. They are not our friends.
Better alternatives at the moment seem to be: Fairphone for phones and Framework for Laptops. They are environmentally friendly, fairphone is also fairly traded and both are highly repairable.