I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users (other than cases where you're required to use one e.g. for work). I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want? In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.
> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users<p>These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.<p>> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want<p>I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.<p>> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS<p>Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.
I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work. It's the same kind of prejudice, but opposite.<p>I like the freedom to run my machine the way I want, but I also enjoy something that is reliable and seamless. My macbook air's battery lasts forever. It works flawlessly, almost always. "oh with nixos if you brick it you can rollback..." that's great, but it does not beat working great on the first try.<p>Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.
> Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.<p>Same here. macOS has been death by a thousand little cuts, and I'm finally accelerating my move away from it, as Apple locks it down more and more, and as they spend their engineering talent on crap I ultimately don't care about.<p>While I've switched most of my computers over to Linux, I still have not moved my daily driver over. There are so many silly little things Linux (and its various desktop environments) gets wrong and are just annoying enough to make me not want to use it every day, like scrolling with a trackpad.
NixOS is an extreme case, and I only mentioned it as a counter to the OP's article which was talking about the mammoth efforts required to remove unwanted processes. More generally, there are plenty of Linux distros which "just work" out of the box for most use cases.
No insult intended. I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers for a power user (by which I mean someone who wants to do tasks more advanced than browsing, email, etc.). From quickly skimming the replies the common theme seems to be a mixture of battery efficiency, hardware compatibility, and Mac-only software.<p>> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.<p>Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "<i>if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years</i>".<p>Starting with <i>that</i> as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).
> what advantages macOS offers for a power user<p>The serious answer is that you get an "it-just-works"⁺ Unix-like operating system that gives you a development experience on-par with Linux.<p>If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.<p>If you care about configuration for your window manager, desktop environment, or systemd services: you will not like macOS.<p>If you are a graphics engineer or a kernel engineer: you will (probably) not like macOS.<p>If you are a C++/Rust/Python/JavaScript/Java/mobile/desktop engineer who wants a rock-solid developer environment and doesn't care about the above: you will like macOS.<p>You get all the Unix tools you could ever want, whatever shell you want to use (Zsh, Fish, even PowerShell), clang/LLVM, etc.<p>Does that answer your question?<p>⁺: caveat being "it just works" is getting less and less true with every macOS release.
> If you are doing sysadmin stuff: you will not like macOS.<p>Even then, that's debatable. Should say if you like doing sysadmin stuff <i>on your own machine.</i><p>I am a sysadmin, and my daily driver is an M4 macbook pro and I wouldn't have it any other way. I admin <i>other</i> machines, I don't want to play sysadmin for my own. But its mostly for the hardware more than any other reason.
> I genuinely wasn't aware of what advantages macOS offers<p>It's been out for a while.. why are you interested in the debate if you've come this far, have no idea, but want to lead with a counter-assertion?
Again, my comment wasn't isolated. It was a response to the article. In that article, the person was concerned with tracking down 500+ potentially unneeded processes, and lamenting the difficulty and time consuming nature of doing so.<p>Perhaps I could have phrased my question better, but what I'm really asking is: for <i>that</i> type of user, why would you pick macOS over Linux when such things are trivial (relatively speaking) in Linux by comparison. Note that I didn't ask "<i>what advantages does macOS have?</i>" I qualified it with: "<i>which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?</i>". I wasn't suggesting that there are no advantages at all. Nuance matters here.
Why are we making personal attacks, instead of simply listing all of the unique system-selling features in macOS?
I'm an occasional Mac user, whenever their hardware and software align to be useful.<p>Right now the m4 airs are a delight in regards to form factor, battery life, performance, and generally they look nice.<p>I have a powerful processor, enough ram, and a battery to drive it and damnit I want to do work on it.<p>Right now the world of laptops is dark. Any non-mac laptop running linux will have terrible standby battery life because OEMs have removed classic sleep modes for always-on mac-like sleeps, but without the polish and no way to re-enable the legacy sleep modes.<p>In a couple years, maybe the AI boom will die down and people will be able to afford RAM again, and maybe non-mac laptops will be nice to use again.
For me it's quite simple: It works and it stays out of my way.<p>I've owned a macbook since 2010, with a short break during the touchbar era when I got myself an XPS with windows which I dual-booted with ubuntu and later a system76 that comes with their own flavour of Ubuntu, called Pop! Os.<p>The situation in windows (windows 10 at the time) was abysmal. Completely incoherent UI, settings spread across different menus, ads in start menu, slow and broken search, constant nagging to update windows, to update the drivers, to tell me that the drivers have been updated, to install or update my antivirus, etc. These were not things that I installed myself, these were included with Dell's setup of the machine.<p>On the system76 laptop things were different. Things were calm, I could configure everything as I wanted and things worked. Until at some point I installed a new version of something, which had nothing to do with sound, but it broke sound, just as I was preparing to join a meeting, and just as we were going into the second phase of lockdowns in late 2020 so online meetings were here to stay.<p>My macbooks are reliable. I've got the M1 as soon as it came out and I never got a single issue with it. I've upgraded twice (I think) across major versions and everything worked. I don't have to worry about it leaving me hanging when I need it.<p>(And that's not taking into account things like build quality, touchpad quality, battery life, silence, etc)<p>In the end of the day, I do a lot of debugging as part of my work. When I don't work, I want to <i>choose</i> what I will be debugging, not have it forced on me.<p>And don't get me wrong: I see where Apple is going, I know that they're a greedy company that want to maintain their iron grip and have the final say on what we can and cannot do on <i>our</i> machines.<p>However, for me for the time being it's the least bad option.
I do like the build of Macbooks and especially the solid casing. Unfortunately I could never get used to MacOS even within 2.5 years and it was not quite as reliable for me as it is for many others.<p>XCode installations failing, Docker installation failing after an OS update never to work again without completely reinstalling OS, plugging in headphones would crash the Macbook (until OS update 6 months after I got it), video calls slowing to a halt, if sharing screen etc.<p>Also there were some things I just never got used to in Mac like window tabbing & minimize working in a Mac way. Maybe if I hadn't had a personal laptop that used Linux at the same time, I would have gotten used to it a little better, but I just plain hated the way it worked.<p>To be fair, I think it was still more reliable than varieties of Windows, especially the later ones! If tabbing worked more like under Windows and it allowed a bit more configuration, I might be using Mac these days.<p>That leaves Linux. Although it's not flawless neither after configuring Debian + i3, it works exactly like I want and the same installation has been reliably working for 5+ years. However, getting to the setup that just works certainly took several tries and depends on laptop compatibility, so... No ideal choices exist right now I think. Just luck and what someone is most used to in the end.
One problem with system76?<p>I have very few problems with linux, despite running a fairly unstable rolling release distro. MacOS does have problems. I have no idea whether its more of less reliable, but going on personal experience is not a good sample.
> It works and it stays out of my way.<p>This was reason for me as well. More than decade. Unfortunately it is not the case anymore.<p>Hardware is still best (in my opinion) but software is not.
> but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't<p>A laptop with an excellent screen, speakers, touchpad, desktop-class performance,, great battery life, and runs cool and silent, and a *nix like OS that can run the proprietary/commercial apps I need.<p>I work on macOS the same way I'd work on Linux; From the terminal with a package manager, docker, etc. Only now I get access to a few commercial apps that aren't on Linux, on hardware that's genuinely a joy to use.<p>There's no other laptop on the market that touches the apple silicon macbook pros. None. Every close alternative sacrifices something I care about. I tolerate macOS for the hardware, and I'll remain on macs until such hardware exists in Linux land.
More broadly, Linux doesn't appeal to me as a primary OS because there's no desktop environment that's a full equivalent of macOS, both in spirit and function. Existing DEs might have some vaguely Mac-like shape or can be configured to be slightly more Mac-like, but nothing gets you the full package (consistent application of a well thought out HIG, holistic approach to design, full embrace of progressive disclosure [as opposed to the extremes of IKEA minimalism or dumping everything and the kitchen sink], etc). Additionally, some things are bizarrely involved to set up despite being commonly needed (see virtualization under Fedora) or will randomly break once in a blue moon (usually after a system upgrade) and require diving beneath the hood to fix.<p>For laptops in particular, it's the absence of laptops that 1) are good at being laptops (great battery life and standby time, are solid but aren't bricks, are inaudible except when being pushed for extended periods, and don't throttle to netbook speeds when unplugged), 2) are designed to be Linux-first, and 3) aren't just a half-baked rebadge of pre-existing models from ODMs like Clevo/Tongfang/Compal.<p>Funny enough, the closest thing to a great Linux laptop is actually the Steam Deck. Nothing else on the market is as competently integrated. If Valve got into the laptop business I'd be interested.<p>I could see myself daily driving Linux on a custom built desktop long before I could on a laptop, but the aforementioned broad challenges remain.
Speaking purely on the software preferences, all of those feel like nice-to-haves. I like a well-tuned HiG and widget library as much as the next guy, but the majority of macOS's features are bloat to me. What am I supposed to do with Stage Manager or AppleTV+? Why is Safari allowed to send me notifications begging the user to boot it up and try the new features? Why does the Settings app show a persistent notification when I log out of iCloud?<p>There was a point in my life when I also thought I <i>needed</i> those creature comforts. Now I've spent 7 years without dailying macOS and I really don't miss it one bit. You could give me a $0.00 Apple Silicon M6 Ultra laptop with 4 days of battery life, and I'd probably still be reaching for my Thinkpad if I wanted to get work done. As a development OS, macOS is borderline intolerable.
I don't need many newer macOS features myself. I'd be happy with an experience that's roughly adjacent to that of OS X 10.6 or 10.9, but that's not on offer either.<p>I do need a laptop that's good at its job, though. If a laptop sucks at its defining qualities, I'd be better served by a backpackable ITX build or maybe a one of those trendy mini-PCs, because at that point the form factor's tradeoffs are too great to justify.
At some age you realize that tinkering with your OS is a giant waste of time.<p>I just want a reliable thing that gets me A to B (car analogy) So what if the infotainment screen is too small or climate controls are annoying.<p>Sometimes having less choice is freeing.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't<p>Your definition of power user may vary but for me:<p><pre><code> - Especially for laptops, good integration with hardware (and good hardware), energy efficiency, power management
- Support from commercial software vendors
</code></pre>
I could probably use linux for a desktop machine, that would work ok. But it's a no-go for laptops. And I've tried... and try regularly...
Perfectly working drivers.<p>As a power user, I want to use, not to fix, my tools.<p>I might tinker sometimes, but that is unrelated for me.
Exactly this. The question pretends that there is a whole group of "power users" who all do the same thing, but that couldn't be further from the truth IMO. There are users like me who program and don't want to spend forever configuring audio driers, etc. There are power users who like to tinker. And there are people who do a bit of both, to every extent on the scale.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?<p>Primarily much better compatibility with graphical apps. Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are two that many people need access to. Both have first-party offerings on macOS, and somewhat poor support via wine on Linux.<p>With Apple Silicon, the hardware is also particularly excellent. And only runs macOS well.
The big thing for me has always been (a) reliability of the hardware (b) good performance/battery trade off (c) nix-like environment.<p>In my prev. job I had a windows laptop with WSL2 though and I actually was super productive with that. But the laptop hardware offerings at the same price point are rubbish, just not very robust. Linux machines if you're in a corp and want one in the next 6 months are usually even more restrictive on hardware than they are on Windows.
I got tired of fiddling with Ubuntu settings. I got tired with updates making my desktop UX worse and having to battle to get things back to what I wanted. I got tired of struggling to get wifi to work.<p>Maybe more than any of that, though, I got tired of every laptop having bad build quality. Maybe the Dell XPS is good, but Lenovo and System76 (my last Linux machine) seemed significantly worse than a MBP. (I could maybe just run Linux on a MBP, but it's a lot more effort for little benefit.)<p>I would like to replicate my 2005 Ubuntu desktop environment, but when Ubuntu shipped Unity, it was a serious downgrade, and at the time I struggled to get back to something good. I'm now in a macOS middle ground without having to fight the damn thing.
I have it not only because of hardware, but because of color matching for photography/processing RAW images. That's as close to 'professional' as I get to using macOS for personal use (photography is nothing more than a personal hobby, for me).<p>I also use macOS at work. Plainly, the machines offered are better (MBPs vs. Thinkpad T440s) and come with less impactful EDR. They're simply faster. I do need to fall back to my T440 every now and then. It's not a great experience. That's not the fault of Lenovo or Windows, though. It's just how IT manages the laptops.<p>But IMO Finder is a piece of trash. The Dock sucks (moves around monitors), how full screen apps are handed sucks... anyway, there's lots of UX issues with macOS. Generally there are 3rd party free and pay-for solutions for all of this... it's just that now I gotta get all this 3rd party stuff and due to the security model, often grant them high level privs.
I think "for work" is very definitely the reason for me. I've run Linux at home since 1994 or so.<p>As a sysadmin/devops person 90% of my life is emacs, a browser, and collection of terminals. When I get a job I get offered a choice between a windows laptop or a macbook. Sometimes, rarely, I'm allowed Linux, but usually they say "compliance" or that their security scanning software won't support it.<p>So I use macbooks for work, but I wouldn't pay for one personally. But they allow me to run terraform, git, shells, and similar things in the way that I'm comfortable with.
I use a Mac because I have no desire to maintain a Linux box. The software I want is all there, it has a great *nix terminal, and the hardware quality is second to none.
I work with computers all day - at home I just want to be able to focus on the task at hand.
A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks, while being able to do a lot of power user stuff without an added layer. Plus many will choose macOS also for the hardware, which support for new chipsets is still rather WIP under Linux.
> A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks<p>This is funny; it's actually the main reason why I asked for a PC when I was up for renewal at work, so I can run Linux on it.<p>I truly like the hardware of the mbp, especially the screen (don't care about battery life, I mostly use it at a desk with power nearby). The OS itself is fine, since it can easily run most of the tools I use. I also like how it handles special characters (I can easily type French on an US-ANSI keyboard) to the point that I've implemented that on my Linux and Windows machines.<p>But what kills it for me is the UI behavior. The window management drives me crazy, especially when multiple screens are involved. And there are quite a few aggravating issues, like being unable to control the audio output of my screen's speakers (connected through DP), being unable to turn off external screens (sometimes I just want to use the power of my monitor, which has an integrated KVM).<p>Yeah, I know there are programs trying to fix these, but I have to go out of my way trying to find them, and then they're hit and miss. On Linux, everything works as expected (though, granted, it's possible I've won the hardware-compatibility lottery, since it actually works better than on Windows).
4 modifier keys vs 3. Can't go back. Maybe you can get your whole Linux env using 4 modifiers one application at a time, but my god would that be another thing that takes forever on top of everything else you need to configure. No ty.
it's the commercial unix desktop that has commercial app support, cool looking hardware and great power optimizations that lead to great battery life. (also in the ai era, unified memory is pretty awesome)<p>personally i choose linux (kde) desktops and laptops where allowed because they've just gotten so good (and seem to only be getting better), but i get it.<p>honestly though i think it's a little sad. the execution just isn't where it used to be and honestly i think the modern macos experience is kinda trash. i would really like to pick one up and be like "oh wow this is so cool everything is so refined if i wasn't so bothered about needing vms and docker for everything i'd consider this" but instead it's more like "wow this is kinda old and crufty and weird and not all that great to be honest i miss kde it's more refined"
It's the hardware.<p>I don't like MacOS, but you can't beat their silicon and the laptops "feel" better in general.<p>I had a system76 for a while and I loved pop OS but that hardware...
It just happens to be so that hardware which power users like to use comes with macOS installed.
For me: pro & creative apps. GIMP/Inkscape will never replace Photoshop/Illustrator/Affinity. Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, etc. are not available on Linux and with the exception of REAPER, the alternatives are awful. And even with a Linux-compatible DAW, very few plugins are available on Linux.<p>On macOS, I can work on hobby software & graphics/music.
How's Bitwig these days? I've not checked it for years.<p><a href="https://www.bitwig.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bitwig.com/</a>
Not bad, but different DAWs cater to different workflows. To me (and most), Bitwig feels much more optimized for creating electronic music than recording guitar or drums. It wouldn't be my first choice for the latter workflow, where I'd prefer REAPER or Logic. You also still have the issue with plugin compatibility and that 99% of commercial plugin vendors don't support Linux.
As far as I know, current Photoshop works fine under Linux woth wine [0].<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.phoronix.com/news/Adobe-Photoshop-2025-Wine-Patch" rel="nofollow">https://www.phoronix.com/news/Adobe-Photoshop-2025-Wine-Patc...</a>
battery management, ARM chips, SoC ram, only decent trackpad in laptops, only good audio output in laptops (3V RMS for 150+ Ohm headphones. literally no other laptop has it), etc. These things are only possible on Macs because of economies of scale. But the most important part, to me, is software. again, economies of scale -- almost every polished app comes to Mac OS as the first OS because of the monetization potential per install. Then apps for Windows or Linux are often an afterthought or are non-native.<p>Mac OS is not great, no platform is perfect. Gotta think what is important to you. Are you using your machine as a thin client? Then maybe Linux is fine. Windows is obviously tragic -- zero advantages there.<p>about the article, Mac OS can be gutted via disabling SIP (I'm doing it on 1 macbook air), but we have so much compute and RAM that it doesn't make much sense for most use cases. I know that some companies do this with minis/studios to make makeshift servers.
I got my first MacBook around 2010 because I was tired of fixing suspend to RAM every few Nvidia driver updates on my ThinkPad. Then I paid for a commercial VM to seamlessly run some Windows software I needed for my freelance work as a translator, removing the need to dual boot two operating systems. Everything just worked, and I could focus on things I wanted to do instead of continuing to tinker with the OS itself. And after years of playing with many different Linux distros, I realised that I did get tired of that. Moreover, a few games that I played, actually had native Mac versions. What's not to like?<p>These days I do have a Tuxedo laptop for fooling around, and I don't even use laptops on the regular, which is probably why it works well enough. That and integrated Radeon graphics, I'm sure.
Define power user.<p>This is such a loaded term. I would hazard to guess your definition would include abilities which just arent possible on Mac which would by definition make it a bad choice. You can't replace the audio stack or run headless for example.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?<p>Access to Apple ecosystem - iCloud e. t. c. If one uses iPhone it's quite convenient to have access to the same cloud services from a laptop. FindMy is a big one for me - if I lost or misplaced my phone I can use FindMy on Macbook to locate it. While it's technically possible to use FindMy via web you'll need the phone as 2FA which is not an option when I'm trying to find it.
I'm a power user who's past configuring things, instead I want them to just work on their own. I also hate to memorize commands but like using the mouse and click buttons.
For me, battery life and power management – even with the number of services that macOS runs. I run Asahi Linux when docked, but on the go I estimate I get a warmer lap and about ~1/2 hr less.
when i read threads like this i remember the ancient slashdot meme: this is surely the year of desktop linux
It actually works, reasonably well, out of the box.
In my experience, programmers fall into either of those categories:<p>1. Those that want to gain full control of their environment, customize to the max and peak in personal satisfaction and productivity, xor...<p>2. those that want their environment to <i>just. work.</i> and not spend days on end ricing a tiling WM that might instead preferably be spent on actually getting things done.<p>Linux users largely fall in category 1, Mac users into 2. I don't see this as a skill issue. Even Linux Torvalds famously has been using Fedora because he prefers to focus on more important aspects (i.e., kernel work) than building his own minimal distro from scratch, which <i>starkly</i> contrasts the last point you made.<p>IMO group 2 is <i>much</i> bigger than group 1, too. I'd find it a boring way of approaching technology personally, but try and find some actual arguments against the established workflows of group 2 apart from slight personal preferences. I can't, really.
>but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't<p>Flawless suspend/resume, best-in-class battery life, best-in-class touchpad drivers, lots of things "Just Work" that are painful and/or tedious on Linux.<p>It might be better to ask what Linux offers the laptop user that macos doesn't. I run Linux on my desktop boxes but wouldn't dream of daily-driving a Linux laptop.<p>>and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?<p>I consider myself a power user. I have never once felt unable to run the machine the way I want. You can disable SIP and Gatekeeper and whatever else if it pleases you. I still have a terminal and a package manager. If there's a particular utility that I need on Linux I just spin up a VM, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to do that in the last 12 months.
As a mobile app dev, I'm <i>forced</i> to use macOS: no iOS SDK on Windows/Linux/etc<p>I'd love to know what's good ARM notebook which works fine with Linux.
Good luck running graphic design, music production, or video editing apps on Linux.
>what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't<p>Better security than any Linux distro.
"Power users" like to get their work done.<p>In LInux, you can spend a bunch of time configuring your system to get simple stuff setup. The opposite of "getting work done".
It was a marketing campaign ("Switch") during the rise of web programmers and web designers who didn't really know how computers worked, during the hot period of startups when all of them were making a lot of money for the first time and it was sold as a status symbol. Not having a MBP among web programmers was like having greentext among highschoolers.<p>Now, they didn't know how computers worked because they "didn't have time or interest to worry about that stuff, they wanted something that just worked" it wasn't because they were limited as computer professionals.<p>And of course, it was unix, so it was at least minimally usable for actual programmers, and then you got homebrew so you had package management and normal software available, and they all started using Linux VMs to run the important stuff, so in the end it was all Linux anyway.<p>With all that, there was no reason not for it to gradually become a totally adequate environment to work in. Plus you got to buy the exact same thing as everyone in your social group. Talk about the next one like you would talk about the next year of a sportscar model. Have it match your phone. Get excited when they did that yearly thing where they all got on stage and sold the new line, then read Daring Fireball's take.
> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't,<p>Quite simply, an OS that you don't have to think about. I moved to MacOS from linux after seeing my co-founder use their Macbook basically without any problems, much longer battery life, nice conveniences like shared clipboard and wifi password sharing, airplay, Airpods integration, better screens and font rendering, perfect migrations to new hardware, etc.<p>While I learned a lot tinkering with linux for a decade, at some point you can't beat something that just works.
Pixelmator Pro
Less maintenance on my own kit after spending a day maintaining some else’s kit.<p>Linux userspace is utter chaos. When I’m pricing out lumber or other personal projects, I don’t want that held up by any number of fresh in memory Linux what-the-fresh-hell-is-this moments.<p>That is it. Will pay nearly whatever Apple commands to avoid having my personal (desktop) time invaded by Linux and the never ending reinventing solved problems and discovering new ones.<p>Upside though, Linux by now may actually have an even dozen of methods to configure a wired ethernet device. I quit counting.
> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption</a>
Haha right. They last so much longer than non-Mac laptops from a hardware PoV, and especially how long they end up being used. That's why they retain their second hand value so much better than Windows laptops, because you can buy a Macbook of a few years old, know exactly what you're getting and that it will last another few years unless you're extremely unlucky.
At this point, not-a-Mac often stands out more if you want to cite conspicuous consumption.
Nobody ever sees my Mac but me and the monitor is a horrible old Dell one with a thick black bezel. If we were talking about iPhones, I might agree with your point.
The same thing is true for laptops like Frameworks or Thinkpads running linux, just conspicuous to a different audience.