That's why I specified that it's widely available in plenty of metropolitan areas, not a large part of the country. Internet service absolutely is abysmal in the US as a whole, but many large cities do have affordable access to fiber.
My point was that 1 Gbps+ internet is available in enough select metropolitan areas that saying "almost no one has it" is inaccurate, not that it's widely available everywhere to the average user.
Obviously the subset of users with multi-gig fiber is relatively small, but not practically zero like the comment suggested. Anecdotally, 3 Gbps fiber is widely available in my medium sized US city of about ~500k for as low as $110. I paid the same for asymmetrical gigabit cable internet in the last city I lived. It just depends.
macOS isn't without its sins, but I feel like "ad-ridden” is a stretch compared to the baseline of Windows 11 injecting promotions into the Start menu, OEM Android flavors full of carrier crap, etc. There's iCloud+ nags here and there, but it’s still by far the least noisy consumer OS right now aside from Linux.
Of course, if you consider iCloud's deep integration into Finder and the rest of the operating system a form of advertising, macOS is infested with ads. But then you’ve basically redefined “ad” to mean “any tightly integrated first-party service,” i.e. the core value proposition people are buying into with Apple's ecosystem at all.
(I still agree with your points about the lost potential of macOS, though)
Even as a diehard Linux user, I totally agree. If you can look past macOS's weak support for gaming, mediocre window management, and hostility towards unsigned binaries, the stability and experience it provides is second to none.
... Even then, you can still get around many pain points with third-party tools. AltTab + Raycast covers window management well enough for me and compatibility layers like Crossover/Wine are already great for gaming (which is hopefully only going to get better with Valve now working on x86 -> ARM translation layers)
It's more so the fact that 2.5 GbE NICs are really cheap and already fairly common in consumer devices. And game downloads aren't the only use case, file transfers could benefit from the extra headroom
That's an exaggeration. Affordable multi-gigabit fiber is widely available in plenty of metropolitan areas in the US and Europe and mid-range motherboards have included 2.5 GbE for years now and the NICs themselves are dirt cheap. I don't think it's irrational to be disappointed.