Bingo. So many decisions made perfect sense once I realized Apple is basically a lifestyle brand that makes electronics, and Microsoft is a massive bureaucratic B2B conglomerate. Totally explained Microsoft’s ineptitude with consumer facing products (remember Windows Phone? Zune?), yet they have a stranglehold on the business world. This is the opposite: Apple is designed for locking individuals into its lifestyle (or ecosystem, if you prefer), and has mostly given up on enterprise facing products.
TBH it's still possible to use a macbook air as basically a fancy unix-like workstation that has great battery life, and not buy into any of the apple ecosystem. No icloud account, no icloud backup, no iphone, no use of itunes or appletv, no apple synchronization of anything. The day that stops being viable is the day I stop buying them.
The extent of my 'cloud' involvement with apple is the operating system software update mechanism and having an account to download Xcode, so that I can install compiler + macports on a new machine.
Heh, it sure would be nice if they made a computer that was explicitly for getting work done (hell, they could call it a "workstation"). I miss the days when big tech still saw a market for this ...
They do - that’s the point of the Mac Pro. The problem is software. Lots of expensive pcie ports won’t help much when you can’t put a GPU in any of them to use cuda and such.
There’s also so much inefficient, bloated crap that ships with modern macOS that I would never pick it for a proper workstation these days. I have CPU meters in the system tray, and there’s always some stupid process gobbling up all my spare cycles. The other day it was some automatic iPhone backup process. (Why was that using so much cpu, Apple?). Sometimes it’s indexing my hard drive, or looking for faces in photos, or who knows what stupid thing. It’s always something, and its almost always first party software.
In comparison, the cores on my Linux workstation are whisper quiet, and usually idle at 0%. The computer waits for me to give it work.
There is no reason to care about this. There's two or three different mechanisms that stop background processes from having any effect on actual work you're doing.
(Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.)
If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby.
As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.
You say that - and then I looked up and saw AMPDevicesAgent sitting at 95% CPU for the past - well, who knows how long. What even is that? Oh, some iphone sync thing. Why is it running while my laptop is on battery? I don't want my battery going flat in order to background sync my phone. In fact, I turned background phone sync off in finder a few days ago. Why is it even running?
Are these processes behaving properly or is it in some stupid infinite loop? I can't tell. Is it considered acceptable by apple for background processes to make my efficiency cores sit at 100% utilisation more or less all the time - even when I'm on battery power? How much will that reduce my laptop's battery life?
I can't tell. I have no way to tell. Its all an opaque jungle of processes running processes. Half of them are buggy half the time, and I don't know which half. It gets more complex and stupid every year.
I swear, macos seemed to run better 10 years ago when I had a computer that was many times slower. Strangely, at the time, there were no constant background processes chewing up CPU all the time like this. Tell me, how is any of this stuff making my computing experience better?
I think my preferred computer has a fast, modern CPU and software from a decade or two ago. Off the top of my head, I can't name a single feature added in macos in the last decade that I actually care about. (Excluding support for modern hardware.)
Huh? I don't find battery life to be that easy to notice. Most of the time I use my laptop, I'm at home - and I'm only on battery power because I sat on the couch and I'm too lazy to reach over and plug my laptop in. The battery goes flat sometimes on zoom calls, or when streaming. But I don't know how many hours I should expect the battery to last while on a zoom call.
The only way I could tell that my battery life has gone down would be by doing actual tests - but those are notoriously difficult - because I can't use my laptop at the same time. (Or, I guess I can - but I'd need to use it the same way across tests). It sounds like days of work to test my battery life with and without transient background tasks. I don't even know how I'd test that - because I don't know how to turn all that stuff off for the control.
I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.
I hear you that complaining online probably won't help. But can't see how complaining about battery life in feedback assistant would help either. The situation is crappy.
> I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.
Don't worry, I am literally telling you to do this. Apple is made entirely out of bug reports. It's their job to handle them.
I would say that you shouldn't put too much effort into it, simply because of burnout.
"System activity" isn't a valuable user metric because not all CPU %s are equal and CPU % isn't a consumable resource. Fans, battery life, case temperature, some others are.
System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
This might be a bit autistic of me, but I don’t trust that random processes sitting on 100% cpu are serving me in any way. I don’t think I want this sort of background process to run on my computer at all.
Are those programs written well, or are they using so many cycles because they’re inefficient and slow? And when did I ever opt in to this? Spotlight has slowly gotten more and more horrible over time. Half the time I use it to invoke system preferences it can’t find it. Or it can’t find the applications folder. If Spotlight is this terrible, why is the hard disk indexer so busy? Is it any better engineered than spotlight? I doubt it. Likewise, I don’t want photoanalysisd looking at my photos. I don’t use that “photos by person” feature. Why does it use hour upon hour of cpu time to make this feature available - just in case I use it later I guess? Get lost.
I really wish Apple stopped adding random crappy features to macOS that I don’t use - but which burn cpu cycles. Instead, fix your shit. Indexing is fine if you make spotlight actually be good again. Photo analysis is useful if I decide it’s useful and turn it on. And maybe if Xcode and SwiftUI weren’t such a buggy, crash ridden, undocumented mess, then maybe, maybe, I’d trust you more to run random background processes.
As it stands, I don’t trust Apple - particularly their application teams - to be good custodians of my cpu.
What are you referring to? Microsoft’s developer tools are top notch. I’d pick visual studio over Xcode any day of the week - Xcode is so crazy buggy that I don’t know how anyone at Apple gets work done on it. And VSCode is probably the most popular ide on the planet.
They own GitHub, they make Visual Studio Code, they made C#/.NET open-source and cross-platform, they added Linux support to Windows (twice), and they created WinGet, just off the top of my head.
I use a MacBook not because it's the best software for development, but because it's the hardest to virtualize.
Our project supports the three major desktop operating systems. I have Windows and Linux VMs that I can switch to when I need to test something on those OS. No serious corporation is going to risks Hackintosh.
They use Oracle mail servers for their corporate e-mail. Ironically, the direct descendant of the Sun Internet Mail Service software I wrestled with back in the early 2000s.
As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs.
Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.
