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Comment by urza | Hacker News Reader

I would worry that something breaks after warranty expires and the whole computer can go out of the window. With regular good old desktops you can just replace the broken part. With such special custom made hardware it is sometimes impossible. For example the macbook airs have non standard ssd that is not replaceable, so when the disk dies, whole notebook is done...

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>For example the macbook airs have non standard ssd that is not replaceable, so when the disk dies, whole notebook is done...

Or you can go and get either a warranty extension (before it runs out) or an aftermarket SSD, like millions (including me) have done.

I am talking about models that have ssd as chips soldered to the motherboard. You cant buy aftermarket replacement for that.

True, was reffering to the models with merely "non standard" SSDs that vendors like OWC sell. There are warranty extensions to 3 years though.

But you can't do that with the latest MacBooks, which have their SSDs soldered directly onto the logic boards. And you can't do that with memory for any Apple notebook from the last several years for the same reason.

My 7 year old MacBook Pro is running okay thanks to some memory and storage upgrades. I would not be able to get the same life extension with one of the new models, which makes me hesitate to get a new Mac.

To be fair, most new laptops like the Surface Pro or Dell's XPS 13 make it pretty darn hard to upgrade the memory or hard drive.

XPS laptops use standard nvme m.2 SSDs. Source: have one that I've opened up

> most new laptops

_some_ new laptops

Most new laptops are still fully serviceable.

Most is really ambiguous here. By units sold? Probably not (mass quantity low end laptops aren't upgradable). By dollar amount sold? Definitely not (Apple has an outsized share of the market based on revenue). By new models? Probably.

”Apple has an outsized share of the market based on revenue”

On profit, I can believe, but on revenue? Even at 10% market share, Macs would have to be five times the price of PCs to bring in equal revenue.

Sure. It isn't just the macs that you need to count, but the PCs as well. Non upgrade-able ultra lights dominate the post $1000 market even for pcs.

Apple has about 7% of pc market world-wide. It's average sales price is around $1,200 to $1,400 (haven't checked lately). Average PC maker ASP is $500-$600, so Apple likely has 15-20% of market by revenues, and more than 50% of market profits, given it's 15-20% margins vs. 2% PC maker margins.

This is all PCs. In laptops it's likely that Apple's share is even higher.

I upgraded my Dell XPS 13 recently. Only tricky part was buying the special screwdriver bits which cost me 10 dollars on amazon. It was probably the easiest laptop upgrade I've ever done in the last 17 years.

I swapped out my XPS 13's broadcom flaming piece of shit radio for a intel chipset, AU$25. The disk is a swappable M.2 . They retail for ~AU$600 for a 500G. Dropped a mail to Dell Australia for a quote to upgrade the 8G MB to 16G, took them 5 working days to quote: 2 week job, AU$2300, I paid AU$2100 for the machine new.

Fuck you Dell.

I bought a Macbook Air recently and love it, almost want a Macbook Pro but I don't want a laptop where I can't replace the Hard Drive or RAM two things which sometimes just need a replacement. I guess I'm going for a Dell with Ubuntu next instead.

In which case you'll find a small but annoying set of new problems. Dell can make some great stuff, and Ubuntu can be great. Dell+Ubuntu can be great, or fine, or ok, or a disaster. Unfortunately, and inexplicably, you can't ever really be sure which case you'll get until after you've plunged in. Ask me how I know this :).

With laptops, such as the Air, based on the great sales figures, consumers are willing to forego being able to repair versus having something compact. It also probably helps apple in the warranty department if their manufacturing quality is so high that people opening it up themselves causes more problems than the product is expected to have by itself.

I used to repair my laptop and desktop, but nowadays I'd rather just go to the Apple store and have it swapped out and not waste time for parts. The share of the market that wants repair-ability is probably just not high enough to care about, at least for Apple.

Edit: if this is for business or professionals, then I don't understand why they would make something like this either though. I assume their highly paid staff has market data and whatnot, but I share your opinion that it's ridiculous if this is supposed to be for business use.

My friend in film production tells me that his shop does a ton of editing on iMacs despite the premium on hardware. He is an enthusiast and has built his own editing PC, but he tells me the iMacs are rock-solid and never give them any trouble, despite the specs being worse on paper than some other editing machines.

I think that the consistency, quality, and software integration are worth a lot to businesses, especially mid-size businesses that don't have an entire IT department to fix issues that come up, and in these contexts, having a reliable computing monoculture means you can just focus on business.

I won't be surprised if iMac Pros do make it into plenty of business contexts.

so Editing PC gave him trouble ?

Why i am the only one around using PC with zero problems and much much better than any apple product?

I'm going to be honest: I never had any PC problems really until Windows 10 came around. Occasionally windows update would get bonked or I'd hose the machine myself but it was pretty reliable. That's going back to Windows NT 3.51 for me. Since Windows 10, screw it. QA is gone. So many little papercuts it's not worth it any more. I use my two Macs and rarely touch the PC, an HP z620 which has just been a total pile of crap to me really. Nothing but problem after problem.

Have you considered the possibility that you just had a bad machine?

I have clearly had three bad machines. I've got an X201 and a T440 as well. The Z620 was especially bad, but the X201 and T440 are perfect hardware-wise and existed before the whole windows 10 thing. The software is the main problem.

I'm using an X201 with Win 10 right now. The driver support was significantly better on Linux. With TLP and a lightweight window manager like i3, the battery consumption was miles better than windows. Without Wifi I was able to reduce the consumption to 8-9 W an hour, with wifi it was around 11-12W.

When I first switched back to windows, I was shocked to see the battery consumption being around 22 W. Lenovo's own battery management driver helped a lot. If I'm using firefox nightly I can reduce it to 16-18W an hour.

From my observation it seems to me that windows draws a lot of power when the system under low load, even on battery saver mode. With linux you can tune the battery consumption far better.

Performance-wise, due to Windows background services I experience occasional lags. The anti-malware engine, indexes etc. consume a lot of CPU cycles. The real bottleneck on X201 is the CPU. Due to heavy CPU usage, my laptop sometimes overheats and closes itself. I have only experienced this on Chakra Linux with an unstable version of KDE. Other linux distros and FreeBSD were absolutely fine.

Wifi connectivity was also very problematic. First couple of weeks wifi adapter stopped working everytime after I woke the laptop from sleep.

Now I don't have much to complain besides lags and the mediocre power consumption. Firefox nightly has helped immensely for a fluid browsing experience.

The bottomline is, for x201, if you want stability and performance but a more conservative experience go for linux. If you want a hassle-free cohesive but slower system go for Windows.

PS: Bugs on Windows might stem from X201 being an old machine.

I've had many PCs and macs, about one every couple of years since 1987 (4 macs and probably ~ a dozen PCs).

Without fail the PCs always break in at lease some minor but still annoying way even tho I buy high end hardware where as the macs do not.

Macs fail often. It's just annoying to hear this myth perpetuated that they never fail. They might fail less than other vendors' laptops, but 'macs never fail' is clearly not true - one simple example is 'staingate'.

They do fail. But when they do it doesn’t disappear into some independent repairers hole for six months and you get a messed up pile of tainted shit back (Acer, Sony, Asus I’m looking at you). I’ve never had a mac or thinkpad break where I haven’t killed it physically and I’ve fixed them myself then.

Obviously not never - nothing lives forever. But in the timespans relevant to computers (3-6 years) I've had PCs fail a lot more.

I never had any issues until I got a hiDPI screen. 4k5k screens @2x still seem really half baked on windows.

A little. I think it's been mostly fine. But my point is that he has spent a bunch of time building and optimizing a PC that he would not have had to invest into a pre-built, pre-configured machine. He does it because he finds it fun. His company doesn't want to spend time with that stuff, and they seem to be very happy with the consistency they are getting out of their Macs.

Similar situation here. I've got a 2013 MacBook Pro, a 2016 iMac and a 2015 HP z620. The z620 has been nothing but a pain in my ass since I bought it. It's noisy and shuts down all by itself at least once a week. The Macs, rock solid.

Buying a Mac for business is simply outsourcing IT support to a different vendor (Apple vs. local support options) and paying for some of the support upfront vs. on demand.

Getting good support from a vendor or hiring in house implicates a lot of overhead.

The choice to go with Apple is very understandable to me, based on my experience with how much time it takes to find and supervise IT support personnel/vendors. They are about as hard to manage as office cleaning staff, where when you look away for 5 minutes the carpet doesn't get vacuumed because it's hard to detect at first.

It's also pre-paying to avoid downtime and less efficient work. Given that I can't predict when hardware will have issues, I think this case gets stronger as well.

Yes I can understand it with compactness of mabook aris (I also have one), but with such expensive desktop, I would want to keep the possibility to repair and upgrade. When motherboard, display or any non standard soldered component dies, you have to replace the whole thing probably..

Or abandoning such a nice big, hi-res screen. I sort of like the screen and computer separate. Even the highest end smart tv's are starting to diverge into the screen, that lasts a decade or more, and the controller computer that can be replaced.

Do you mean that even Apple can't repair it? I had problems with my Macbook Pro and they specifically ordered an item from Apple and shipped it to repair the machine.

Something like the iMac, if the video card goes out on it (common problem) the only replacement part is from Apple and costs $600 so you might as well just throw the whole thing out (or sell it for parts)

600-800 is probably where I draw the line but if your configuration costs $4,000 then you might think it is worth it. Also Apple offered to "buy the damaged part" in my case (though I'll need to ship/reship) so if you are US based it might be cheaper.

This also means that iMac and Macbooks depreciate quite heavily in price after the warranty expires.

I'm thinking of selling my Macbook Pro while I can get a decent price for it as I've now had it around 3 years. I'm better of investing that money in new parts for my PC.

MacBooks are known to have the best resell prices in the industry.

iMacs, at least the 5k, is user serviceable for RAM upgrades.

I don't consider these steps and the required tools approachable by most iMac users: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+Retina+...

The 27" has a door: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191

The 21.5" is only 4K, I probably should have been more explicit about that.

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