Are MacBooks Just Trendy? | Hacker News Reader

Are MacBooks Just Trendy?

markevanstech.com

10 pointsbuckpost49 comments

The author is insane. Why on earth would you want to settle on a old and rusty Windows-based tool? Just because you're an "average" user you should not be settling on junk, otherwise an argument can be made for buying a 5 year old used PCs for $100 on ebay.

For starters, Windows is barely usable on high-DPI screens. Their UIs don't scale, the graphics does not scale, the font rendering is still tuned for 72dpi.

Second, Windows users automatically get sacks of junkware pre-installed from "friends from Dell". My Lenovo T60p came with a crippled wireless because of trial versions of some "protective" software that I had to remove (online forums were full of cries).

My friend has cut a finger once by touching an edge of a Dell laptop. It happened 3 years ago and new Inspirons are better. Now he is getting "A Message from Logitech!" bubble in the corner of his screen every couple of weeks.

And finally, Windows with is antiquated window management is simply no match for Mac as far as productivity is concerned.

if you need a macbook, or it makes you work better or more efficient, by all means, buy one. but buying one just because it has more bells and whistles and looks pretty while you surf the net and you write your school papers is ridiculous.

the argument that you should always buy top quality of whatever your purchasing, also, is a pretty insane argument to make.

Noodle, no pun intended, but did you read what I wrote? What bells and whistles are you referring to? Besides, MacBook is the opposite of "top of the line" - it's a bare minimum of a computer one needs to care for these days.

Disclaimer: I work on ThinkPads with Linux on them. They're more costly than MacBooks, this is why I recommend Macbooks: they're well-built, inexpensive, modern machines that will make you more productive.

Top of the line are MBPs and ThinkPads "P"-series, $1,700+.

macbooks might be a standard for web design/development, but its overkill for grandma down the street who still uses the AOL dialup.

for a niche profession, they can be considered bare minimum, but for population-at-large, they're pretty fancy.

bare minimum to have wireless-N networking? built-in bluetooth 2.0? scalable trackpad? I wouldn't call OSX 10.5 a bare minimum OS either, and the bundled apps Apple gives you when you buy a new machine rivals any PC laptop on the market hands down no discussion. Love my Macbook, I didn't buy it to be cool, I bought it because I'm a diehard Mac user and my old Powerbook G4 was getting long in the tooth. I didn't see a reason to spend $500 more for the Pro 15" monster either, but I did get the black Macbook because I wouldn't ever own a white laptop, I needed more hard drive space, and the faster chip was icing on the cake.

For a lot of things, it is insane to buy the top of the line product. A computer, however, is a fairly major purchase. Not only are they a hunk of change, but you're going to be spending hours and hours on it, even if you are a teenage girl and not a hacker. It makes sense to buy the highest quality computer that hits the right price point, and the macbook makes a very compelling point for both.

i don't disagree with that argument, however, it comes down to value for the price point, and we as web designers/developers need a higher level computer to do our work. the things that make macbooks better are worth the money for us, by far.

however, as someone who has tried to convert people to macs, the main argument is something along the lines of "XYZ is a great feature but i don't and won't ever need it, so why should i pay for it".

ARGH. this is SUCH a tiring thing to read, over and over again. as if all us mac users were all buying computers with the same criteria that a clotheshorse uses when buying a pair of jeans.

But a lot of mac users ARE buying computers with the same criteria that a clotheshorse uses when buying a pair of jeans.

I think that there are two groups of mac users, the above mentioned and the crowd that use it because it is a nice gui on top of a unix based opereating system, allowing for a lot of control.

The latter, of which you are probably a member, is a minority though. This is why you have to read about it time and again. For the larger part of the mac base it is true.

It also happens to be a pretty stable, fast and usable OS for people who don't care or even know about the underlying BSD OS.

which is incidentally really great if you're a teenage girl.

No blue screen of death or "no axc45 module available please refer to section 56b of the msdn manual for further analysis" dialog boxes.

You're being downvoted, but it's true. Going to the Apple Store here in Columbia MD makes me kind of ashamed to be a Mac user right now. There are literally crowds of teenage girls flocking in to dote over how "cute" the hardware is... and not a whole lot else; both in terms of clients or the merits they see in Apple products.

It seems like 90% of the Mac user base right now is as clueless as trolls say they are. This was not the case 5 years ago.

Isn't that a good thing?

There are always going to be teenagers who know (and care) nothing about computers. If they happen to like Macs because they think it's cute, what's wrong with that? They get a stable, usable system. What would you prefer they get?

"No, you can't play with it; you won't enjoy it on as many levels as I do... Mm-hai bw-ha whoa-hoa. The colors, children! Mwa-ha-lee!" --Professor Frink

I agree that most non-tech people are much more concerned about form factor. I recently tried to explain to a colleague why a MacBook Pro is faster than a MacBook with the same topline specs - his eyes glazed over after about four seconds, and he said he just 'liked the look' of the black MacBook better. You have to hand it to their marketing guys - the greatest illustration of their success is that they've persuaded teenage girls to care at all.

Very accurate comment - and for Apple this is not a bad thing. They have managed to create brilliant products, and even more brilliant marketing. Their greatest insight is that for a lot of users a computer is just another gadget, and they realise that consmuer electronics are sold on looks and lifestyle - not on technical spec. The real genius, of course, is to tie everything together so that the teenage girls will have to own both the iphone, the ipod, the macbook, and whatever else they come up with.

The market is huge - there are a lot more teenage girls out there than there are hackers...

> You're being downvoted,

How do you downvote? I've not seen that option.

You can downvote when you reach a certain level of karma. I think it's 200.

I believe the majority of OS X hackers fall into the latter category. I know I sure like my nice GUI ontop of this unix 3.0 OS... not to mention quality hardware build, nice screen resolution, ports galore, decent battery life, web cam, and nice keyboard buttons...

Are they trendy? Yes.

Are they just trendy? No.

Next question please :)

Attacking anything from Apple is a great way to generate traffic. The site seems to have done that, since I can't get there to read the story.

I think there are a lot of people who bought macs because they are trendy, but for me (and probably a lot of other people here) the appeal is that they run unix with a nice gui.

Allow me to give my opinion as somebody who always buys the minimum hardware necessary to barely get by (that is: web browsing, MS Office, maybe running Cygwin and/or compiling a Java program now and then).

I bought my Macbook last year when Vista was just coming out. Had it been 3 months before, I would have bought an XP machine, no doubt about it. You can run XP fine on 1/2 GB RAM, which is what I have on my home desktop PC. And, for me, it was a known quantity. What the heck, I ran Windows ME on my desktop PC for like 6 years before I upgraded to an XP machine. And that was because I got the idea of playing with MIDI and audio sequencing.

However, at the time of the Vista release, the consensus seemed to be that 1/2 GB RAM wasn't going to cut it. And at that time, the price difference between a Mac and a PC with 1 GB RAM was more like $200-$300. And with a Vista machine you would then have to buy an antivirus, firewall, etc, maybe even a program for playing DVD's. And who knows if Vista wasn't going to need 2GB anyway. So I went with the Mac.

Today's situation looks quite different. The $500 Dell has 1GB RAM, which seems to be enough to run Vista tolerably. So, today I would probably have a hard time justifying buying the Mac. I could try (Unix underneath, no viruses, dev tools included) but I don't know if the wife would buy it :-)

Yes, I am ignoring details such as CPU and front bus speeds, web cam, etc. But as I said, my position is to buy the minimum HW to get by.

(BTW I haven't used Vista yet, and to be honest I'm not looking forward to it.)

After several years of using ThinkPads running Linux and BSD for mobile work, both my X24 and T30 died within a few weeks of each other. I thought about it for a couple of weeks, then bought a mid-spec MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo, LED backlight, okay RAM/HD specs).

It cost about five times as much as I'd ever paid for a laptop, but I haven't regretted the decision for moment, even though functionally, I don't use it for much more than I did my old Linux systems. (The only exception for me is Adobe Lightroom, which by itself had previously been reason enough for me to keep one Windows desktop machine sitting around.)

Why, after gaining all my hard-earned knowledge and credibility shoving Linux and BSD onto poorly-supported machines, would I shell out the extra money for a "trendy" machine? Simple: I got sick and tired of wasting my time trying to make my f'ing machines work.

Instead of fiddling with xorg.conf lines, or downloading proprietary wireless card firmware, or manually twiddling the list of modules to be loaded and unloaded on suspend, I have spent the time in which I've owned the MBP actually doing work. That alone is more than worth the difference in price, especially since that difference actually wasn't very substantial.

In the middle of an adoption curve it is hard to tell "trendy" from "gaining in popularity", but for the reasons that others have already mentioned: unix roots, stability, ease of use, there are ample "non trendy" reasons for buying a Mac.

But the MacBook Air is f'ing trendy.

Ladies and gentlemen: you're arguing about buying a computer.

100 monks just died in protest of military crackdown in Tibet. The Feds just okayed 30 billion dollars of printed money to ensure a big bank stays alive. Women in Darfur are raped and killed.

Put all this in perspective. You're arguing about computers.

Buy what you need to use, pay the price if you think it's worth that price, and shop around to get the best value for your dollar. But at the end of the day: they're computers. Stop indulging in your mindless masturbation.

I don't like this argument. For one you're on "Hacker News," a forum for hackers who hack with (mostly) computers.

Keep in mind also that a lot of what we regard as essential today, say, the foundations of computer science (bits, formal language theory, algorithms) were once the trivial ejaculations of bearded professors in some ivory tower.

We need people dicking around in masturbatory enclaves solving puzzles, just as we need agitators and activists. I think it's unfair to say one group works at the expense of the other.

Real hackers can use tools at their disposal, they have preferences for a particular computer but really... does it really take all this effort, blog posts and commentary for a $1000 dollar computer?

How is this not in any way but masturbatory? Is there any arguments about the perceptions that exist in either market segment? Any explanation of user interaction differences? Is there anything relevant for a computer software developer to chew on and discuss? No. This is a blog post about whether or not a Macbook it too trendy for web browsing.

I'm not quite sure where you're venturing off to in your last paragraph so I'll just ignore it.

I just think it's unfair to say something is "masturbatory" when you're using human life as your measuring stick.

You can't expect everyone to devote themselves to your idea of worthwhile work, and you shouldn't begrudge their momentary diversions.

I don't begrudge you for closely following an internet comment thread when there are people suffering.

There aren't that many synonyms to masturbatory. And I find it adequate in using it.

And these posts aren't explaining my expectations, I've already expected people to focus on dorky and trivial things, but rather pushing my political agenda.

You're on a site that is dedicated to discussing computers, programming, business, and random niche "geek" news.

Clearly this isn't the site for you -- try reddit or anything mainstream like Fox News or CNN.

Got it, Metallica.

So... how can I free Tibet, end the Federal Reserve System, and save Darfur?

Eschew giving China money.

Buy gold.

Write to your congressman.

I like Macs and Thinkpads about equally. Both are expensive compared to the average Dell, but the difference in quality is obvious the moment you touch one. If you're replacing your computer yearly, it's probably not worth the extra cost, but if you carry your laptop around regularly and want it to last a few years, it's worth it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132056

Apple is just an example of a company agile enough reinvent or refresh a product line before it gets to the point that it is no longer "trendy". Apple's next answer to the laptop may not be called a Macbook, but I think it will definitely still be a hot item.

Yes. Being virus and spyware free is de rigeur.

well apple products are most of the time trendy .. for example ipods are just trendy - there are mp3 players out there in the market which has lot more features (such as radio, voice recording etc.) than ipod does... so there are users who look for value (by getting maximum features) and there are others who just go with the trend (i would call marketing trap). This is the reason why apple is having hard time in increasing ipod business in value driven markets like India.

I've seen other players that do more, but nothing I really need and they lack the iPod's killer feature: ubiquity. Seriously, it's great that any time I want to use my iPod with any high end electronic I can plug it in and the device's manufacturer has already provided an interface. My Xbox360, TV, stereo and car all came ready to work with the iPod - how many other players can say that?

this is another oft-repeated misguided statement. yes, you can buy a music player with more features than an ipod for less money. that's irrelevant. the reason ipods are popular is because they're fun and easy to use. they give their owners a warm fuzzy feeling you don't get from the junky pieces of plastic sold by creative, et al.

the same is true for apple's computers. it's not nearly as easy to switch computing platforms as it is to switch music players, or else macs would be even more popular than they are.

> they give their owners a warm fuzzy feeling you don't get from the junky pieces of plastic sold by creative, et al.

Warm fuzzy feelings turn into rage and hatred relatively quickly.

My girlfriend: "OMG, a cute engraved ipod! It's so pretty!"

Later: "I can't copy music from your macbook onto my ipod without nuking my music? But they are both apple! How come your cheap chinese knockoff ipod works better than the real thing?"

yet it's apple that owns something like 80 percent of the portable music player market, rather than chinese knock-offs. go figure!

macbook does have bells and whistles and stability worth buying ... but not the ipods but it is so funny that macbooks doesn't have 80% market and ipod does ....

design wise it is always a good product - but feature wise ipods just cant copy - if u look around there are many mp3 that have good design and tons of features .... u dont need to be blind folded by marketing.

The Sony Mp3 players are superior--and I wouldn't have any other--for one little feature: Built-in, active noise cancelling.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Well I only bought one to be in the "in" crowd. It's actually the worst computer I've ever used and takes me hours to get anything done. But I suffer just so that I can be trendy :/

Am I being downmodded because my sarcasm wasn't obvious enough?... Or just that it wasn't funny? :/

I disagree with what you said. If it was sarcasm, it was far too dry for me to pick up on it.

And, quite frankly, I usually downmod reddit and slashdot style jokes and puns because I want to help maintain the quality of comments here. I believe that if we "punish" people for behaving like that, they'll either leave or start submitting relevant and useful comments; either of which I fully support.

Point taken, although I think the original article with its title of "Are macbooks just trendy", was already so idiotic as to not really merit any serious response.

Shame there is no downmod for articles IMHO.

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