As I run all current gen OSes, yes. But macOS isn’t my daily driver, and it’s unlikely it ever will be. Not because it’s bad, but I’m just a Windows person.
The planned obsolescence in Apple’s software is not great for many users.
If that doesn’t get in the way of your usage style, then little to complain. Otherwise, while Apple hardware is over engineered to last a very long time, when the software update stops, you’re forced to upgrade to new hardware.
Increasingly, I have an issue with this planned obsolescence.
Also IMO, a Mac is mostly as good as its OS. If not for the OS, a Mac has been increasingly less attractive to me over the past decades. Because PCs in general catched up and hardware features commoditised fairly quickly.
Most of the time this is why I get rid of hardware, it feels so wasteful 
But I’m learning, if it can’t install some sort of FLOSS OS I don’t buy it.
I spilled black coffee on one all over the centre of the keyboard.
It still works 6 years later.
People say that. If specifically MacOS I get it but when you say “Apple Software”, historically the support period on iOS devices is way way longer than anything related to Android.
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In a ton of cases you can pretty easily run newer OS versions with security patches (at least the non hardware specific ones) by using Open Core Legacy Patcher. But you will see that between necessary features and forced UI element design choices you still kinda need a certian minimum of hardware to have a decent time. So far M1 is still fully supported by Apple. On a lot of the old Intel Macs you can also run some flavor of Linux.
I would say their 7-8year support cycle for hardware is pretty good, FAR better than you get from companies like Minisforum who won’t be making or publishing any firmware or BIOS updates, and seem to just stop producing products that have issues instead of making a new version correcting the problems. Plus there really isn’t a planned obsolescence of Apple’s software.
I will say that NOBODY is even close to Apple for hardware performance in a similar low power, high efficiency package. A lot of fast CPU cores, a very solid quasi iGPU, fast unified memory (more so on the Pro, Max & Ultra chips). Microsoft is so far behind in producing a functional OS it’s crazy, in many ways they regressed from thevWindows 7 era.
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iOS support is pretty much aligned with MacOS. It appears great in front of a very fragmented Android marketplace. That’s the main reason. So you may say, yes, to be great is relative with respect to your competitors.
In recent years, specific flagship Android models caught up on software support. Because the user demand is there: people want longer software update on their phones. Otherwise perfectly fine hardware collecting dust.
You said yourself right before this “7-8 years support cycle for hardware” 
Yes, agree. So enjoy while it lasts.
My main laptop is a 2019 i9 MBP. I have no issues with it. I like the build quality. Just MacOS is quirky sometimes but I think it’s user error since I don’t use it often as mymain desktop is nearby on Linux.
But if the question is would I daily MacOS as my main compute, no.
Same question.
What am I missing here?
I’m liking them, for the value proposition of the price/performance ratio (or at least before the AI bubble).
I’m relatively new to Mac. Got the M1 Air base as my first one. Still works great.
Then got the base model M4 Mini before the price hikes.
I’m not deep in the ecosystem as I use Android for phone.
Glad I played around for a while as the boss man decided he wanted a Mac as he is deep in the Apple ecosystem. He got an M2 AIR to test the waters and I’m IT so I have to support our tech.
Now a few years later we are more ‘Apple’ than ‘Windows’. We have the one M2 AIR, two M3 AIRs, and three M4 minis.
I’m the last holdout staying primarily on a PC though I recently (finally) took the plunge and went Linux (Debian 13) on my main machine. I’d only ever dabbled with Linux and am kicking myself for not switching sooner as I’m loving it.
Not the original author. I can offer my reason for ditching Homebrew entirely last week.
It was a great project but it became Apple-sque. I don’t use often enough to notice when it started that way.
Last week, I wanted to update Homebrew packages. Suddenly It pulled all packages in source form and started local compile. Really not worth the hassle and time for software I don’t care about its performance.
Turns out Homebrew stopped providing binary packages for macOS Sequoia.
I can always SSH into a Linux box for what Homebrew does for me.
as the other post says, unreliable. It’ll spew crap over your filesystem, you’ll do a homebrew update and it’ll all fall apart leave you with some dangling package that just won’t install/update. You get 10 devs installing their dev dependencies with brew and you’ll end up with 10+ unique installations that are not reproducible.
nix is far superior, if you can get over the horrid syntax. Strictly contained to /nix, packages won’t break because some transient dependency updated/got nuked/whatever, and most importantly to me you get a reproducible environment.
As to the question of the topic, yeah I’d buy a mac again for sure. You either like macos or you hate it, I like it for the most part. My daily driver is still KDE though.
Short answers: yes I would still choose Mac, and everyday I have another chance to choose again.
For the Apple ecosystem, yes of course there is a lot of convenience pairing my MacBook Pro with my iPhone, but for me personally at least, there’s no killer feature that would stop me from changing one device or the other if there was a strong enough reason.
That said I moved away from Windows long before moving to Mac… I daily drove a variety of unix-like systems, but ultimately adopted Mac during the OS X public beta (10.0) as a unix-like. Aside from losing the Adobe suite, if Apple went way down the wrong path, I could happily move back to Linux at any time - but I’m still very happy in Mac.
Apple typically has a long period of supporting new operating systems on aging hardware. For example, if you purchased the last Intel MacBook Pro in 2020, you’re still getting security patches today (on macOS 26) without extra costs. I struggle to see the problem here.
Just curious, no judgement, to each their own, but I’m curious why your running Sequoia?
As a Linux user being able to still use COVID era hardware is a hilariously low bar. But I appreciate many in wealth live in an age of fast fashion and waste.
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Not who you asked but I’ll give you my reasoning.
I only update as far as I have to to keep security updates. Generally these days, “newer” is not “better” in the megacorp software biz.
I understand Sequoia will likely get extended support as it’s the highest OS version for many earlier Macs.
The M4 Mini I use at work I’m keeping on Tahoe as that’s the last version that supports Rosetta and I have some apps that require that.
Typically around 7yrs. There were outliers few shorter, few longer.
In the age of Apple silicon, people are speculating Apple may choose to support up to 10 years. That’s music to my ears. In the past 10+ years, one thing personally for me is that for any adoption of new electronic devices, I plan their useful life to be 10+ years. So far worked out pretty well.
The gent above explained well. Another thing to add is the lost of viewable content area. In other words, less screen real estate.
Post Catalina, we saw the lost of screen real estate when compared to previous versions. Beginning with Tahoe, Apple is preparing touch screen Mac’s. By that they increase the size of UI elements that cause further reduction in viewable content area.
As a daily driver, definitely not. KDE has a much superior UI.
That said, I’m considering getting a Mac for two purpose: one as a machine to do test Mac OS builds on, and for running local AI. Not sure the latter is worth the price, especially with the Mac Tax on hardware.
Depends on what you’re doing with the AI. Macs are one of the most affordable ways to get a bunch of VRAM with current pricing insanity, but prefill is much slower than a regular CPU/GPU setup. You definitely want an M5 (massively faster prefill than M4) but it’s still not going to beat an Nvidia GPU.
For reference, I have a base M5 Pro (15C CPU/16C GPU) MacBook Pro with 48GB RAM, and a box at work with a 7950X, 96GB RAM (holy hell was I lucky we bought that before current prices), and two 5060 Ti 16GBs. The M5 Pro runs Qwen3.8-27B fine (my own mixed-bit - 4, 6, 8 bit - GPTQ quant), ~400-600 tok/s prefill and 34-60 tok/s decode depending on workload and context length. I run Strata on the Ryzen box, it’s at… I forget what prefill, I believe ~1500-2000+, and 50-70 tok/s decode (or higher, close to 100 sometimes), running a 4-bit quant of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a 125B MoE.
The real hope for now is that the bubble pops sooner rather than later and the market floods with defunct datacenter parts so us peasants can purchase RAM and GPUs again.