You can't really name a list of features that cursor has that copilot doesn't. It's more like: Cursor appears to heavily dogfood their features, VSCode's copilot seems to check the feature boxes, but each one sucks to use. The autocomplete popups are jarring. The copilot agent doesn't seem to gather the correct context. They still haven't figured out tool calling. It's really something you have to try rather than look at a checklist of features.
I think your knowledge is a bit outdated? Cursor definetley still has an edge, but VSCode Github Copilot UI has come a long way and using the same underlying models for both the results are fairly similar and change only in ux niceties
I tried copilot agent like 3 weeks ago. If that much has changed since then, props to Microsoft.
Zed is very nice, it’s just a totally different workflow. I think people who work in a domain where AI is not particularly strong would be better off with Zed, since Cursor’s way of reviewing edits is a little clumsy.
What about on the speed front? VS Code's biggest problem is with how slow it is. I'd already be done and on to the next (and maybe the next thing after that) by the time it finally gets around to things. I like the concept, but I only have so much time in a day.
I'm not sure that's really the same thing. Apple doesn't own ARM and the main issue here seems to be the GPU no? Is this much different from how things work with Nvidia? I guess the difference is that Nvidia provides drivers for Linux while Apple does not. As far as I know Nvidia Linux drivers aren't open source either though.
Nvidia is not much better, but they do only make one component and generally ensure compatibility. If Nvidia went full Apple, their cards would have a special power connector for the Nvidia PSU, a custom PCIe express lane that only works with Nvidia motherboards, which also requires Nvidia RAM sticks and only boots NvidiaOS. And also most of the software that would run on it would be blocked from running on other OSes because fuck you that's why. Also if you tried running NvidiaOS in a VM, they would sue you.
It's still profoundly weird to me that nobody can run Safari outside MacOS, even for testing. At least the EU has strong armed them into dropping thunderbolt ports now, so we have that minor interoperability going for us, which is nice.
You left out that they would also cost ~double per unit of performance. And that when Nvidia claims to be better for graphics and video, they can back those claims (albeit unfairly, some might say), whereas Apple marketing appears to avoid any price/value comparisons. So, I guess, even when you're dressing Nvidia up to sound ugly for a hypothetical, they still sound better than Apple.
Yeah the big difference is that Nvidia really is the top dog, in any way you look at it, they simply make better hardware.
And even if you add value/cost into the mix, they still do very well, even their highest performing products.
Apple is better at some stuff but it's really not total domination and you really need to look at things in a very particular way to think they are indisputably better.
If you add value/cost, everything falls apart and it really becomes: if you have cash, you can buy that stuff that is going to be much better at this very specific use case.
It's even true for their headphones where the only thing they are better at is integration in their own system, everything else is passably competitive but if you look for value it's just plain bad.
I had AirPods, I find it amazing how much better the Nothing Ears are for the cost, if you don't care about the Apple ecosystem (the "magic" gimmicks never worked that well for me anyway).
Are we living in the same world? Nvidia only recently started caring about Linux (due to profit obviously, it turns out servers don't run anything else nowadays).
May I remind you of the famous `--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia` flag in Linux compositor? Meanwhile, apple literally went out of their way to make secure boot for third-party OSs possible.
Conversely, Nvidia provides first-party Linux support for most of the hardware they sell, and Apple goes out of their way to make booting third-party OSes on the majority of hardware they sell (read: all non-Mac devices) all but impossible.
The point is that apple acts as both the source of hardware and software. Your analogy is not applicable because you can't run apple's OS on generic third-party ARM hardware.
But isn’t this whole thread about running Linux on Apple hardware? I haven’t seen anyone in this thread complaining that they can’t run macOS on non Apple hardware.
This makes no sense to me. Apple does nothing to prevent AAA games on the App Store also being released on Steam. I think it’s more likely that the GPTK license is to encourage developers to make high quality native ports rather than devs checking a box to make their game available on Mac.
It's because Apple told Steam users to fuck off like 3 times in 5 years (nuking 32-bit support; no Vulkan/OpenGL support; switching to ARM). Users and game devs got the message Apple was sending loud & clear.
The funny thing is most games in my library say they won't run on macOS because they're 32-bit applications, and they won't show up in my library when filtering by "Mac". But they all run perfectly fine, so they're obviously 64-bit. I think I heard once that they all default to 32-bit unless the developer says otherwise...
I'm sure it doesn't make a big difference but the issue with this is it doesn't count Mac users using CrossOver/Whisky because they get detected as Windows users, while Linux users with Proton are reported as using Linux.
From what I’ve seen, for some reason, the people who buy a Mac are not the people who game. College students buying for schoolwork, business people buying for (I assume?) excellent battery life and resulting portability, and graphics/video/music creators. The two Venn circles just don’t overlap.
I play games on my Mac, but I don't use Steam. I just play World of Warcraft which is a native Apple Silicon game, and a few other games that don't require Steam.
You want to leverage AI to automate the cycle of creating low quality games to display in low quality ads that leverage gambling mechanics to entice clicks?
Doesn’t seem like Apple shutting down this old, likely unpopular feature is evidence of Apple turning the Mac into an “Apple Chromebook”.
There is no “hard stop” on the life time of a Mac. Yeah Apple will eventually stop updating the software but this has always been true. If anything this situation is much better that it ever has been with free OS updates.
Finally even if there was a hard stop Apple will gladly recycle your product. No need for it to go to a landfill.
And what Mac has ever stopped getting security updates after 6-7 years?
The 2016 (first TouchBar year) is one of the shorter ones for newest-OS-support, only running up to macOS 12 (Monterey). That was released in 2021 and got its latest security update on 2023-06-21.
Going back further, the 2014 Macbook Pro supports macOS 11 (Big Sur), which was released in 2020 and also got a security update on 2023-06-21.
You have to go back to macOS 10.15 (Catalina) released in 2020 to find a version that hasn't had a security update this year. Which MBP models are stuck at Catalina? Mid 2012 to early 2013. That's 7-8 years with the newest OS, then another 2ish years of security updates.
10 years is far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than 6.
It’s been well documented that security support for versions of macOS less than the absolute latest is really lacking.
When you don’t patch out every serious known zero-day, there’s really no point patching any of them. The device is already compromised.
That means the updates are really only 6-7 years, with an arbitrary cessation.
There’s no reason that Apple should be stopping OS support for older devices unless there’s a compelling reason to do so.
Next year they’ll argue that macOS Whatever only supports Macs with secure enclaves to keep users safe, so that gives them a pass for 2024, but really it’s just continued forced obsolescence as they’ll carry on axing machines for no reason in 2025.
I don’t think it’s fair to count security updates as continued support, as soon as the software/applications you are using drops support for your old version, you can’t use it anymore, forcing you to buy new hardware. It doesn’t matter that you have security updates when you can’t run the software you need.
Windows is much better in that there aren’t yearly releases obsoleting machines every year. You can run the latest version of Windows 10 on hardware older than 10 years.
Grandparent comment said "You're really buying a transferable lease for 6-7 years on a device that has a hard stop to go to landfill after that time due to software obsolescence by way of unpatched vulnerabilities" and I was mostly looking at the second part of that
But for the first part, for a huge number of people all you need is a web browser and Microsoft office, which is supported on the 3 latest macOS versions, about the same window as the macOS security updates
Like I said it's not perfect but it's much better than 6 years
Past macOS versions get some security fixes for undocumented time. There were vulnerabilities not patched in past versions. I don't remember examples unfortunately.
[ISL@home:~]$ lscpu | grep -i intel
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3330 CPU @ 3.00GHz
[ISL@home:~]$ uname -a
Linux home 6.1.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.15-1 (2023-03-05) x86_64 GNU/Linux
[ISL@home:~]$
The i5-3330 went EOL in 2014, released in 2012. An up-to-date first-class Debian system on decade-old hardware is just a sudo apt update; sudo apt dist-upgrade away.
It is a real bummer that the major hardware vendors choose not to open up their devices when they reach end of life. Phones and old hardware are frequently viable for double their enforced service-lives or longer.
I do kind of wonder if Linux’ real problem is just that the Venn diagram of things people care about is all over the place and Linux just fails at the edge cases.
I’ve used Linux for a bunch of projects, and use it every day in a VM for work, but I wouldn’t dare to use it for my daily driver and I don’t think my niche needs are ever likely to be something that gets picked up. Shame for me, but the nature of open-source.
macOS and Windows have a lot of features to lock user directories away from rogue software, and Macs have notarization and certificate revocation (which I believe is coming to Windows too unless I’m mistaken).
Notarization/revocation isn’t really philosophically FOSS compatible so I don’t ever see things like this making it’s way to Linux either.
replaced my MacBook Pro after 10 years, not having the latest OS didn't bother me at all with it. Only had to spend $100 on a new battery for it after 5 years. in total, came out to $10.83 a month for the life of my MBP and it still works i just finally needed the ARM version for something.
My experience has been similar. I'm still using my early 2013 MPB with original battery (it has been saying replace battery for last 2 years but I have not bothered). It still gets security updates and works perfectly fine for everyday personal use. I used iPhone 5 for 5 years, then iPhone 7 Plus for another 5 years, now on iPhone 12 which will easily last 5 years. Btw, at each upgrade the phone was perfectly fine and traded in for good value and I decided to upgrade because they genuinely had better and more useful hardware to go with upgraded software. For data backups and cloud services, I use different things for photos vs files vs music etc. I'm not locked into iCloud and I don't find apple is coercing either.
I know it's possible, and I have a janky solution myself, but it really seems like iCloud is the only way to go without going through lots of hoops and still having a solution that's imperfect at best.
Depends on use case. You can probably get by just fine on unsupported software depending on what you’re doing.
If you’re really careful not to enter any bank/credit card/personal information it’s probably fine to use an unsupported laptop, but then you’re having to consider how much you trust your own computer which you didn’t before.
This isn’t quite true or at least doesn’t tell the whole story. This tool can do things that Wine can’t today. Namely supporting DX12 games. That support was added by Apple.
Wine generally doesn't really bother with any recent DirectX API's. However, vkd3d has been available as a means to play DirectX 12 games on Linux for a while now.
Of course Apple has split off their graphics API so they had to do the translation work for Metal themselves, but playing DX12 games on Wine isn't all that special.
What is in this gap? Do you know of any good resources that outline the features that Cursor provides over VSCode with Copilot?