Can’t say that’s true today any more. At work, I am stuck with MS. But Win10+Office 365 are excellent. And Excel is a must.
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Lucky! I have the 2019 16, fully spec’d out and boy are the fans loud. I think it has to do with the amd card. I hope to wait for the macbook 13” redesign. We’ll see if I can wait. It’s really a pain when the fans kick up during a zoom call or recording for my class.
What about macOS + iWork? Is Numbers no good?
Numbers is a toy. Or more diplomatically: targeted towards home users and/or small businesses. For serious stuff, it just doesn’t cut it.
Does that also apply to the rest of iWork? What about Google Workspace?
Why not?
Where do I start:
- no matrix operations
- very limited statistics
- not possible to implement new functions (in Excel via VBA)
- no linear solver
- no pivot tables (i know, you can do pivot-like stuff, but it’s not the real deal…)
- not possible to build analytical models (VBA)
- no ODBC (I use it to pull data from Oracle)
- …
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Uh, yikes… 
But, let’s be honest, most Excel users barely use more than ±/* and a graph, so Numbers would be OK.
A surprising number of people using Excel just use it to arrange numbers/text in a grid and aren’t even using formulas or charts. They’d probably be better off using the table tools in Word or Pages.
Then on the flip side, there are people for whom Excel is a hammer and everything looks like a nail, so they end up using it for problems that really call for a full-fledged relational database.
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I am always amazed by what excel is used for… address lists, create forms, to-do lists, etc.
But we started this debate because somebody posted something along the lines of “everything by MS is crap”. And that’s definitely not true. The days of Windows 98/ME are long gone…
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I agree. I still dislike Windows and barely tolerate Word and Outlook, but PowerPoint is acceptable and Excel is downright useful.
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That’s why I often work on my Mac in the office. My “official work laptop” is a Windows thing. And, sadly, Word is “the norm”.
Fun story: I sent a PDF to some colleagues. One of them asked for “the original”. I said, won’t be of any help. The answer was something like, try me. Then I sent the LaTeX files. Never replied. 
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One of my favorite forms of entertainment is finding inappropriate or over-enthusiastic uses of spreadsheets. A frequently-cited spreadsheet problem is entry of telephone numbers in an excel cell. Excel treats this as a number suitable for use in arithmetic calculations, but in reality a telephone number should be treated as a text entry. The creator of the spreadsheet must be attentive to create a work-around for this problem. Or even better, use a true database tool rather than a spreadsheet.
Howard Oakley’s elegant descriptions of spreadsheet, database and derived-calculation errors are instructive:
https://eclecticlight.co/2015/04/17/there-must-be-some-mistake/
https://eclecticlight.co/2020/10/11/last-week-on-my-mac-how-do-you-lose-16000-cases-of-covid-19/
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And ZIP codes!
That’s why I like ODBC when using Excel and no “text file/CSV imports”. The data stays in the Oracle database and I when accessing the DB, I get a SQL string type for the phones and not integer or whatever number format.
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At least my M1 was delivered ahead of time, and the lost package is only my new cable management tray.
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Weird…PhotoLab 4 was updated to 4.1 and “fully supports M1”, but shows as an Intel app…
I finally pulled the trigger on the MacBook Air w/8-core GPU, space grey, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD. Supposedly delivers Jan 11-18. 
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When the new device ships.
However, in my case, the trade-in box arrived in 2 days, and the MacBook took 16 days. (That is not the normal case, obviously.)
No.
Even in my situation where I’ve started to get emails asking me if I’m sending my trade-in or not, I just called Apple last night and they basically ‘reset the clock’ and told me not to worry about sending it in until I’m sure I have the data off of it.
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I think that usually happens when people want to make a change and they think PDFs can’t be edited.
Would have loved to seen the look on their face, though!
Re: Zip Codes in Excel
Yeah I ran into that one years ago entering zip codes from New Hampshire/Massachusetts which start with zero, which Excel happily just discarded because leading zeros aren’t important.
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