M4 Macbook Pro nearly one year later... perspective of a Linux user
I’ve owned my M4 pro Macbook Pro since release last year, after switching from an Asus Zenbook running Fedora Linux. I’ve had a lot of mixed feelings since switching, which I thought I’d share, with emphasis on switching to MacOS after using linux for several years before. I’ll share my thoughts as a student, as a software developer, and video editor.
Brief overview of my model
I decided to spend a significant chunk of change on this model when I got it. It has the higher spec’d M4 Pro chip with 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, along with 24GB of RAM and a 1tb SSD. The 14 inch Liquid Retina XDR ProMotion display goes up to 120hz, peak 1000 nits brightness, at a resolution of 3024 by 1964. The aluminum chassis came in this eye-catching “space black” color. I did not spend the extra money on getting the nan0-texture display, which I’ll share my thoughts on later.
What it excels at
One thing is for certain; apple knows how to build a quality product. I’ve never owned a computer with such nice build quality, it just feels solid. The screen looks great and gets plenty bright, the overall size is manageable and it definitely feels sturdy. The speakers are fantastic, I had heard over and over again before getting a Macbook just how good the pro’s speakers are, but you really don’t know until you hear them. The sound that comes from them is… surprising, especially given the tiny form factor. I’ve heard the 16 inch version has even better speakers, which would make sense, but these certainly don’t leave me wanting more. The glass trackpad is another feature I found surprisingly fantastic, I unfortunately can not go back to using lesser trackpads. The large size and click-anywhere force touch are better than anything else i’ve experienced. Magsafe is convenient, although I usually just charge my Macbook over USB-C when I am docked at home. Speaking of charging, the battery on this laptop is insane. I can use it for hours, close the lid and stuff it in my backpack, come back the next day and be right back to where I was with enough battery left to go another round. Incredible. I’ve never had a good experience with sleep and battery life in any laptop before this in either Windows or Linux.
What it misses
I will say that I find the typing experience lackluster. I’m coming from an Asus Zenbook 14x OLED, and before that a Lenovo Ideapad 5, both of which had a better-feeling keyboard (emphasis on the ideapad). This isn’t to say it’s a bad experience, but I feel like for how thick this laptop is, it should have sturdier keys. They just feel a bit flimsy, they move too much under my fingers, although travel is decent enough for a laptop. I thought the notch would be a bigger issues than it is. I still don’t like it when I’m forced to look at it, tt feels like a waste of space. In the 4+ years Apple has been making laptops with this giant notch they have never included face ID, and for whatever reason they made the task bar go a little bit under the notch in MacOS, wasting space even further. I honestly never really notice it, after a bit it just blends in. And as good and bright the display is, I kind of miss the OLED I had in the Zenbook before it. I just don’t think you can beat OLED in terms of contrast and deep blacks. What’s more is this screen is just sooo reflective, it’s incredibly difficult to get any work done in bright rooms without plugging in so MacOS gives you higher brightness options.
How it compares to previous laptops
I do honestly regret not getting the nano-texture display, but at the time I just couldn’t justify another $100 dollars on TOP of the $2400 this laptop costs. That’s right, if you didn’t know the price before, I paid $2,400 dollars for this machine when it came out. It now regularly goes on sale for a few hundred dollars below that, but even at $2000 it’s quite a hard financial pill to swallow for the majority of people. The Zenbook I had before this had a 14 inch OLED screen with a 13th gen I7 processor, which I purchased new at BestBuy for $750 on sale. At the time it was a screaming deal, that laptop at that price honestly could perform equally to this Macbook 90% of the time. What I mean is it had decent build quality, an excellent screen, and performance that was perfectly acceptable for the majority of tasks I do on my computer. However for the last ten percent of use cases, the macbook pro just blows everything else out of the water. When I need actual performance, if I need to stretch a bit between charges, if I have to go outside and still need to see the screen, there’s nothing else that compares.
Issues with Linux
Back in 2019, I experimented a bit with Linux after using Windows for my entire life. I didn’t make the full switch until 2020, and from then til I got this macbook I used Linux full time on my main machine. I distro-hopped for a while until I found Fedora, which ticked most of my boxes and enabled the switch away from Windows. Linux was a perfect match for my needs as a computer science student at university, and it scratched that customization/control itch I’ve had since rooting my android phones when I was a teenager. Linux has come a long way, even in the few years I’ve been using it, but there is no denying it’s not without it’s issues. There is still no way I’d install it on a computer I’m giving to a friend, or on my parents PC for them to use. While I like solving the kind of problems you run into on Linux, at some point I just got a bit tired of the incompatibilities and confusing errors that took hours of my life to fix. I just wanted something that worked, that got out of the way and let me focus on other problems. I couldn’t go back to windows, I’d be giving up the UNIX-like command line I had become so accustomed to in Linux. Even with the advent of WSL, I’d still be returning to annoying window’s updates, privacy concerns, comparatively worse performance, and above all a design language and philosophy that just didn’t agree with me.
MacOS: best alternative?
This left me with MacOS, which on the surface checked all my boxes. MacOS is a certified UNIX operating system, which means the majority of commands and how the system is organized was already familiar to me coming from UNIX-like linux. MacOS also has a graphical interface that is at the very least consistent, and in my estimation quite good-looking. I already owned an iPhone, so there were many conveniences that came with MacOS. These include sending messages from the desktop, seeing locations in FindMy, copy and paste between devices, and a myriad of other things that are much more seamless than alternatives on other platforms. I recently purchased Airpods, and switching audio between the two devices is near magical. Many apps I had to give up while on linux are on MacOS, like Adobe Premiere pro and Photoshop. I don’t usually game on my laptop, but Apple seems to have made some decent progress in that regard. I can actually play Cyberpunk 2077 at a decent framerate, insane considering how relatively small this laptop is compared to my gaming PC.
MacOS: not perfect
My experience has been less than perfect, however. Most of my grievances with MacOS have little to do with things such as bugs (of which I’ve experienced few) or visual design critiques, and more to do with the insistence of doing things the “Apple way”. For example, some of the hardest things to get used to have to do with viewing photos and videos. Out of the box, upon double-clicking an image you would like to see the preview app opens with said image. But what if you want to see the next image in a series? In Linux or Windows, I’d just press the right arrow key, but not in macos. In Macos, you can only see the image you’ve selected in preview. To see more, you must highlight them and then either press the space bar to get a more basic view of those photos, or right click and open them all in the preview app, at which point you can click through them. I’ve been told the preview app is quite powerful, perhaps I just don’t know how to use it yet.
Another issue, say you want to highlight multiple files in Finder (as to open them all in preview, for example). In Windows or Linux, I’d just click the first one in a series, hold shift, click the last file, and viola! All files in between the two have been highlighted. In MacOS, this does not immediately work. First, Finder has a default sort order of “none”, which means there is no sort order. You can place files as haphazardly as you’d like, even overlapping each other (this feels very un-Apple-like). If you do set the sort in finder (I would recommend pressing command + j, selecting how you’d like Finder to sort, then press ‘use as defaults’) then I’ve been told holding shift to highlight works, but I can’t get it to work for me.
Fixing with 3rd party apps
There are many more little things I’ve had to “fix” by downloading an app so I wouldn’t be driven crazy, things I feel like should be the default, or at least an option, out of the box. Scroll reverser, because MacOS doesn’t allow you to turn on natural scrolling for the trackpad and off for mice. BetterDisplay, because the way mac handles external monitors that aren’t apple branded is horrendous (see: HiDPI). Rectangle, because MacOS only recently began allowing window snapping natively. SensibleSideButtons, because the back and forward buttons on my Logitech mouse weren’t working with Safari.
Some honorable mentions: Keka when working with zip files, IINA as a better quicktime viewer alternative, qView as a preview replacement that allows you to go to the next photo, AlDente to set charging limits (this helps preserve battery health), and Disk Space Analyzer to get a visual representation of your storage device.
I know, I know
I can imagine some of you might be saying that I’m just not doing it right, or that I’m missing this that or the other, but I disagree. I don’t think I should conform to fit an operating system, the operating system should have some leeway to fit me! I get that apple software engineers have an idea of how they want their users to use their OS, but in my opinion they are too rigid and just wrong about certain things.
What I miss most from Linux
My complaints so far have been fairly minor gripes that are easily fixed with the right apps. I’m largely quite happy with my experience with MacOS so far, I like how the OS looks out of the box which means I don’t need to spend time customizing it to my liking. The biggest thing I miss from Linux however is the package manager. MacOS does have Hombrew, which I’m extremely grateful for, but for reasons I can’t quite explain it just doesn’t feel as smooth or as well integrated as, say, DNF does in Fedora, or as APT does in Ubuntu. I still use it to download and update the majority of my apps, but there have been many times where some some command line tool is named differently in Linux and I need to take time to google it. In other cases when I want a desktop app, I find it cumbersome to write –cask everytime and there have been occasions where I have omitted it, leading to confusion on my part when I can’t find it in the app folder. When I download an app of the internet, the drag and drop pop up feels so foreign and unnecessary. Keeping everything up to date is a hassle, I have to remember if I downloaded it online, through homebrew, or in the app store.
Last major gripe
I’ve been doing a lot of complaining, I know. But there is one last thing I just cannot get over, and every time there has been a new MacOS update I’ve looked at the change log to see if they finally fixed it. The way MacOS handles virtual desktops is so far behind Linux and Windows that it’s almost comical. MacOS “spaces” is constantly driving me up the wall. They are not truely seperate “spaces”, as on default when you click an app icon that is already open in another space you are taken to that space. This option must be manually turned off. Even when off, if you click an app that is already open in another space, it does not open another instance of that app, and if you click it again, it’ll bring you to another space anyways! My spaces kept getting moved around without my permission, another option i had to turn off manually. The worst of it is moving between spaces, which is so slow that I’m sure it’s wasted many minutes of my life. Every time you switch between spaces you have to let MacOS do its little animation, which doesn’t let you click or type anything until the animation is done. And it’s a long animation, long enough that many times I will be well into typing a word by the time the animation is done. I’m then left with a half word, missing the letters typed before the animation was through. Some forum members online have suggested enabling the accessibility option to reduce animations. This does nearly eliminate the animation, but it does not change the time it takes before you are able to use a space. I am not sure if there are many who notice this, and fewer who even care, but as a person used to constantly switching between desktops in KDE Plasma it is frustrating.
What does the future hold?
In the end, a laptop is only but a tool. In the time I’ve owned this laptop, I’ve used it in upper computer science courses, taken notes, edited video, consumed media, run several LLM’s locally (including openAI’s most recent 20b open source model at great performance), created a website with nextJS, coded extensively in C, C++, and Python, and I’ve even gamed on it. Half the time spent using this laptop has been on the go, but the other half is at home docked, connected to my 4k 240 hz OLED monitor along with keyboard and mouse. I haven’t taken advantage of thunderbolt 5 yet, as I simply lack any thunderbolt 5 accessories. It’s been a full desktop replacement, whereas before I split my time between my laptop and switching to my desktop PC when I needed more power. My Macbook pro has completely eliminated this need, as in many cases it is more powerful than my huge, hot PC. The convenience of keeping all my work on one machine and being able to continue my work exactly where I was while on the go cannot be understated.
Is it worth it?
I’m able to complete my work faster and with fewer hiccups on my Macbook compared to what I used previously. Does this make the Macbook pro worth the price tag? That will be up to you individually, however I would strongly suggest you examine your use case before pulling the plug. My brother has the 15 inch macbook air, and to be honest, I’m jealous sometimes. Another inch of screen real estate would not be unwelcome, and apple silicone has gotten so good the base M4 has more than enough power for the vast majority of the population (at less than half the price!). Apple also bumped all models up to base 16GB of RAM this generation, killing my biggest gripe with the air lineup. I would recommend a Macbook to anyone in search of a laptop, the battery life + performance duo is in it’s own class. I’ve seen Best Buy offering the M4 13 inch Air for as little at $800, with the M2 going for $700! At those prices you’d be mistaken to get anything else. Does this hold for the pros? I don’t think I could give up ProMotion, I unfortunately cannot go back to a 60HZ refresh rate screen. If Apple were to offer higher refresh rate screens in their Air lineup, I would have a very difficult choice to make if I were in the market.