I [redacted] hate Apple

If you know me in real life, you know that it's no secret that I am not a fan of Apple's mobile products. They are disgusting:

• They won't let you install apps not from the App Store without jailbreaking the device, and the criteria for getting apps into the App Store is not well-defined and rather arbitrary
• They won't let you experiment with custom firmware
• They push DRM
• They're relatively tied to iTunes (which doesn't work on GNU/Linux)
• You can't do anything real with them due to the highly restrictive security model (and the fact that guidelines for getting into the App Store are draconian)
• They don't have an equivalent of Android Intents (so you can't e.g. change the default browser from Safari)

Those last two are obviously just my personal taste talking. However, the rest still stands. I hate Apple mobile products, and I would never buy one these days.
That all being said, I used to say that Apple computers aren't really all that bad. Yes, they do have problems:

• OS X is the buggiest Unix on the block (see also)
• Even though Darwin is open-source, the vast majority of Apple's desktop stack is closed-source (to name just one example: Quartz, the display server, is closed-source).
• It's impossible to properly customize them (this is in large part due to the fact that the stack is closed, but Apple at its core doesn't really like users to customize all that much, IMHO).

 Those days are done. I can now say with certainty that I hate Apple computers, too. The first reason is obvious: the OS is annoying; I've just covered this above. However, it's not annoying enough that I can't use it on a daily basis (like Windows is). If I wasn't using GNU/Linux and didn't want to try a BSD, I'd be using OS X. It's has problems, but overall, it's a pretty dang good operating system. So let's talk about all the other reasons I now hate Apple computing products.

The wireless
I can't tell you why. I bet no one but Apple could tell you why. But it seems like every bloody Mac has a Broadcom chip. And, well, Broadcom is not known for excellent GNU/Linux support. It could be worse, but the Broadcom drivers are of the class of drivers that require firmware to operate. I dislike firmware in general, because it's non-free and I don't trust anything but free software, but to make matters even worse, Broadcom's licensing terms disallows redistributing their firmware. That means that on most Macs, in order to get on the internet using something other than OS X, you need to get on the internet. Think about that for a minute. Sucks, right?
I'm lucky enough to own a MacBook Pro that has a built-in ethernet port. People who have bought newer MacBook Pros don't have this luxury. In fact, probably the only way that I can think of to get an internet connection for these poor souls (besides screwing around with USB tethering or something) is to mount a live ISO, find the firmware directory (which may be quite hard depending on how the ISO is built, ahem Ubuntu), and put the Broadcom firmware in their. It's a nightmare.

The EFI firmware
Now, EFI in general is kind of weird. To name just one example, EFI drivers often remain loaded after the kernel is booted. And while Secure Boot is undoubtedly a good thing in the right circumstances, Restricted Boot is not. But overall, I don't have a problem with EFI or UEFI (EFI 2.0, the version that's widely deployed). I do have a problem with Apple's EFI, though. Here;'s the reason:
It is screwed up in every imaginable way.
Let's start with the basics: what it's supposed to be. The answer? No one knows. Apple's EFI is a weird mix between EFI and UEFI; it is both and neither at the same time. Well, that's a great start.
The second thing that annoys me about Apple EFI is the fact that it has no EFI shell. Now, obviously shells are kind of ugly, and Apple (being Apple) needs to make its firmware pretty. I have no problem with this, but it would have been nice if they could have included a shell behind a keyboard shortcut or something. But no, you won't find a EFI shell in Macs. Now that I think about it, it's probably for the better. The Frankenstein-esque mess that you'd find there, given the mix of EFI and UEFI, would probably be horrifying.
And that brings us neatly to the last part of the mess that is EFI on Macs: bless. How can I phrase this? What the hell, Apple. I can't even fathom what moon-man black magic bless does. Basically, you have to mount your EFI partition, then use bless to "bless" a file, a directory, a mountpoint (probably your EFI partition) or... something else. But I have no idea which one of these you do. I've done it a couple times, and it's awful. There's absolutely no documentation on exactly how the options affect the firmware. The manpage is lacking. It's dismal, because without properly "blessing" your chosen bootloader, the firmware won't boot it. It's so weird, I can't even fathom how it's supposed to work.


The graphics configuration
This one, I suppose, is not really Apple's fault. But it's still bloody annoying. Basically, Macs nowadays have two GPUs: one is an integrated Intel (which sucks, because it is Intel and it is integrated) and the other is a discrete AMD (which is relatively good, because it's AMD and it's descrete). The way that OS X handles this is to use the Intel GPU normally, but turn on the AMD GPU if you're using something like OpenGL or OpenCL. Clever, right?
Well, the GNU/Linux community hasn't quite caught up. Support for hybrid graphics, as this setup is called, is still early. And on an unrelated note, when I booted my brand-new Arch setup on my MacBook, the kernel hung due to KMS not working properly. And because I have to turn off KMS to boot, I can't get graphics. I've wasted about 8 hours trying to get this to work. It's a bloody nightmare.

The touchpad
This one I will again admit is not really Apple's fault. Only a little.
I'll keep this section short, but basically, the trackpads in Mac computers are (presumably) very complex in order to support the kinds of things that Apple does with them in OS X-land (think: natural scrolling, multitouch gestures, right-click can be either left-click or right-click, there isn't really a clear separation between left and right-click - it feels as though the trackpad is physically all one button - etc.). This unfortunately means that there really isn't a good trackpad driver for Macs. Back when I was using Debian, I came across a decent one, but even that one was sub-par - I never got right-click to work. It was a real problem, trust me.

AGH, I HATE APPLE! Anyway...