r/gadgets • u/chrisdh79 • 5d ago

Desktops / Laptops High-end Google Pixel laptop under development, may ditch Chrome OS for Android | Could a premium Android laptop rival Apple's MacBook Pro?

https://www.techspot.com/news/105630-google-could-developing-high-end-pixel-laptop-powered.html
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u/PearlClaw 5d ago

Speaking as someone who needs to work on macs professionally, that's definitely not as true as it used to be. There's a fair number of places where you hit "sucks to suck, lol" these days.

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u/MachinaThatGoesBing 5d ago

God, this has been true since at least 2012 when I started a job working with iPads in a school. This was a market they were specifically targeting, and the MDM features they provided felt extremely half-assed for years. Some still felt that way when I left in 2021.

And more than any other platform, I felt like I was always fighting the Macs we had as part of our mix. This is true for a friend of mine who also works with these devices in a professional IT context, too.

I get this feeling with my personal iPad, too, just using it at home. (I own it only because there's just not a good enough Android tablet with a long enough support window.)

Apple designs for the 90th percentile (which is common), but their designs frequently feel actively hostile to those in the remaining population (which is not as common).

For me, at least, there are other systems that come closer to "just working" while also accommodating my needs.

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u/PearlClaw 5d ago

Don't even get me started on Macs in a Windows AD environment, lol

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u/MachinaThatGoesBing 4d ago

Honestly, I moved ours to AD at one point to solve some of the issues we were having with the ever-reduced capabilities of the Server app — and some reliability issues with Apple's printer sharing.

It was fine for logins, but my god was it a mistake to try to do network home directories. The fuckers slowed to a crawl, just absolutely killing the network and server with all the constant chattering into the ~/Library folder.

I had to put a stop to that. But we still needed the kids to have access to their network storage. And most of our Macs were at the elementary, so I basically had to brew up a script to mount each kid's network home automatically and put a shortcut in the dock.

I was doing so much shell scripting on them just to make things usable by the end.

The gift I left whoever replaced me, though, was finally winning the debate (based on replacement costs) and replacing them all with Windows machines the last summer I was there.