Hi all no idea posting this right area been programming for few years want get into something more specific like writing apps .I'm thinking buying apple mac laptop after some advice from anyone got experience with them if they worth buying having some concerns about hearing some things about them breaking down and hard to get them fixed.

What are your specific goals and which phone are you planning on writing apps for? If it's iPhone, you probably have no choice but to assume the position while offering your wallet. If that is the case, the path of least damage would be a Mac Mini.

I used to use Apple hardware but gave up after two in a row failed prematurely and were not feasible to get repaired. In one a chip's contacts came loose, in another the keyboard's keys started failing quite early. There were other problems with the hardware but those two in series were deal breakers. Later I read about the class action lawsuits about crappy hardware. I didn't have time for that. A friend also used one at work and also had one of the chip's contacts come loose, causing the device to fail. He stubborned it out and got them to replace it, but only after an unreasonable amount of time and effort. Just for entertainment I got another dead one out of storage, which was a few years old at the time, and found upon investigation that it was not possible to get it fixed any more. Apparently Apple abandons its hardware entirely after a few years.

Then with the M1, the DRM is being baked into the CPU. So on the hardware, I'd say a solid, "no".

Then there has been the decline in the quality and, especially, the usability of the system software over the last 11 years. They dropped the ball on OpenZFS support. There's not good (perhaps none at all still) support for the OpenDocument Format. As far as I know, the Finder still fails after all these years to support SFTP. Plus a score of other minor and major gripes. So on the software, it's again a solid "no".

So the only reason to get one would be to develop for Apple's closed, walled garden. If you want decent hardware for GNU/Linux or *BSD development, then you are far better off with System76, Dell, ZaReason, or others.

Just wanted get into app programming hadn't thought about what model phone be writing them for sounds like more trouble then worth with them breaking a lot trying get them fixed

Here's an additional perspective on the UI problems surrounding today's MacOS:
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/2...Apps-Get-Worse

I'm afraid apple's good reputation has been valid at the powerpc hardware era.
A job's colleague had many problems last years with a mac and couldn't have it properly repaired.
My own "good memories" from apple go back to the apple ][+ era, not even III. I knew the first mac (owned by one of my university professors), I was really impressed, I saw the second mac system in Computer Shows, however many things did change since. I never owned myself one of their devices.

House full of Macs, oldest is 11 years old, zero issues. Just my experience, YMMV.

Macs come with an available AppleCare® bumper-to-bumper warranty which lasts three years – and you should always buy it. You can take your Mac to any authorized service center anywhere and they will repair it free of charge, most commonly by replacing the motherboard. It is prohibitively expensive to repair the computer outside of the warranty period, so I normally keep the computer until the warranty expires.

I'm *not* trying to start a flame-war here, just hoping to provide some context to Turbocapitalist's post:

I completely agree with the Mini - they're generally pretty sensible little desktop machines, current generation included.

The bulk of this sounds like you had a machine that was impacted by Bumpgate, which was an nVidia failure (they tried to switch to RoHS, and did so badly) - it resulted in multiple lawsuits, and Apple eventually dropped them as a vendor. It impacted non-Apple hardware as well (every GeForce 7 card will likely fail due to bumpgate at some point), and took nVidia years to acknowledge and address. The keyboards on the laptops have been an ongoing complaint and every few years they claim they've fixed it, I have no real knowledge of whether they have or have not, and that's a valid complaint about the Macbook series, but I wouldn't hold Apple solely responsible for bumpgate (it is also 'ancient history' versus any currently shipping hardware - nVidia did finally address their packaging issues, and Apple addressed the issue themselves by dumping nVidia as a vendor).

The hardware being 'abandoned' I believe is on a ~7 year rotation - some folks can never be pleased and still insist their original PDP-11 should be receiving warranty support (and any failure to do so represents obvious fraud), others refuse to keep machines outside of warranty, and that's all down to personal choice. I wouldn't regard any laptop made in the last 10 years as being truly serviceable/repairable, with a few exceptions (all of which are generally 'hardened' or 'ruggedized' systems) - they're disposable mobile devices that sacrifce serviceability for size and mobility (just like smartphones). This is neither 'in support of' or 'a criticms of' Apple, as this would apply to any other mobile device equally well.

I'm unsure what you mean by 'DRM is being baked into the CPU' - if you're after a fully libre system then little on the current market will be of interest to you, but otherwise I'm not clear what you mean.

OpenDocument is handled fine via LibreOffice (which has a native, first-party macOS release).

SFTP is handled (along with any other non-native filesystem) via FUSE plugin (this is a design choice on Apple's part - you can agree or disagree with it at your discretion) - https://osxfuse.github.io/ - and that will plug right into Finder with no problems (again, 'by design') and mounts SFTP just fine. It is a different approach than what common linux distros support, but it works all the same.

As far as ZFS, that isn't something the base system would likely use, but a quick search yielded a github project that adds this functionality: https://github.com/openzfsonosx

Overall I would agree that macOS requires a 'different way of doing' than linux (just as 'linux is not windows' - 'macos is not linux'), that doesn't mean it is 'better' or 'worse' just different.

I'd largely agree with this from a development perspective - if you need xcode or other Apple-specific features, that's the best approach, but don't try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Also note: ZaReason went out of business a year ago. I'd also be leery of buying a brand-new Dell these days, as they've gotten pretty aggressive about bundled subscriptions with the purchase.

This sounds far too vague/inchoate to base a serious purcashing decision on - perhaps rethink what you're after before rushing to buy something. I'd also add that 'breaking a lot' is relative - it's easy (especially on the Internet) to find unhappy customers of [brand] willing to dump on [brand] and arrive at the conclusion that [brand] must be awful, but that's generally a selection bias: the folks who are satisfied usually don't have much else to say. I'm not saying 'yes' or 'no' either way here, just that 'Apple computers all break a lot and cannot be fixed' is an overbroad generalization (and I'd say that if you replaced 'Apple' with 'System76' or 'Dell' or 'ZaReason' too).


From Apple's own site for AppleCare (https://www.apple.com/support/products/mac/) the service both itself is an additional purchase at purchase-time on the machine (as an extended warranty), and will incur service charges whenever claimed ($99 or $299 depending on the claim).

My 2015 MacBook Pro is like new.

Well, we have a lot of MACs at work, and apart from the dodgy keybd they had a few years ago (& Apple have replaced), I haven't noticed any generic issues...