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Comment by lev99 | Hacker News Reader

The air starts at $1000 and is equipped with an i5. That's your $1000 laptop.

That's a thousand dollar for hardware that's years out of date. It's a terrible deal. You're going to be far better off buying a decent Windows laptop.

At risk of being a broken record here, that is why I got an XPS. Sub 1k for the 13" model I chose (not due to price, but form factor) and subjectively far better than my 2015 MBP for my use cases.

You might have been a bit lucky there. As we've discovered after making the mistake of buying one to try ourselves, the XPS series has also had plenty of problems.

We bought the Developer Edition, which is the official Linux model. The supposedly supported Linux has been throwing up error messages from moments after we first turned it on that have survived all software updates so far. The machine itself had some sort of battery failure after just a few months of occasional use, then an SSD that was corrupted to the point of being unbootable even when we had apparently recovered from those battery issues. More generally, the over-sensitive trackpad that has been widely criticised was an irritation for us as well, and the keyboard doesn't feel particularly good.

For a supposedly professional-grade laptop from a big name, that's obviously a long way short of the quality standards we'd expect. But then recent Macbooks have had their issues with both hardware and macOS, and we won't go near Windows 10 until Microsoft fixes the same complaints about updates and privacy that everyone keeps raising. Where's a business supposed to get professional-quality laptops that just work any more? :-(

Apple of recent has a habit of selling old Macs that you should not buy. For example, they sold the 2012 non-retina, DVD equipped, 13" Macbook Pro for four years(!) after it came out, for $1100.

And here I was thinking their $1000 laptop was an iPad Pro with keyboard.

That’s not saying it’s what I want in a $1k laptop, but what Apple thinks it is.

No, it's not. The screen is not even full HD.

I prefer it that way. Much less power consumption.

That's not how Apple designs their computers–they grow battery size proportionally with power consumption.

New MBP have smaller batteries in relation to power consumption than the generation before. My new MBP also has shorter battery life than my Air and it runs much hotter. It has a dedicated gfx that is almost completely offset by its screen resolution compared to my Air in game benchmarks.

Also, notice that I wasn't complaining about battery life, so your response doesn't not address it.

Hows the screen quality on that?

It was great when the Air line was introduced. Not so much in 2018.

Yes I know I have one and its quiet dated now. i was just teasing him because he conveniently ignored that.

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