@ned the biggest one being that it won't run on my Linux system because it isn't CentOS or Fedora. next big showstopper is the lack of support for compressed video in the free Linux edition. it's very stripped down compared to the free Windows/Mac edition.
this is still sitting in my house. and it actually powers up just fine. the batteries appear to have fluffed up slowly over time. i have no idea how long they've been that way. the reason i haven't thrown it out is because i need it to extract files from an APFS drive. you don't usually have extra Macs sitting around just for fun, unless you're obscenely rich.
i'm wondering how much it would cost to pay for a battery replacement. the iFixIt guide for DIYing it was very long and full of warnings, so i'm thinking "expensive" and not worth it.
why do they have to make it so complicated? the user shouldn't have to think about this. it should just work, like it does on every other platform that normal humans use.
the limit for "this isn't as good as it could be" was kind of already exceeded for me when the Linux desktop environments i have tried so far failed to simply default to 200% scaling initially when they saw that a 3840x2160 monitor was plugged in, and it just got worse after that.
now i have this one GTK app (alsa-scarlett-gui) that looks gigantic because it scales twice as much as it needs to. meanwhile, GIMP (which is also a GTK app) has normal menus but tiny icons and controls.
if i was in charge of making a commercial OS based on Linux, i probably wouldn't call it Linux. i'd also throw out most of the GUI stuff and make my own. which is essentially what Android is, and ordinary people actually want to use it. macOS and iOS are similar except they did it with BSD instead of Linux.