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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

It is good experience to be able to buy Apple device and be sure that everything there is pretty good. Choosing among thousands of alternatives is pretty frustrating. What brand should I choose? HP, Dell, Lenovo, IBM, Acer, Asus, whatever? I need good display, fast CPU, good battery life, enough RAM. Pretty vague requirements. You are buying Macbook and it's just good, you don't have any regrets, because its CPU is one of the fastest, RAM is enough for most tasks, build is good, devices are just working with all drivers included, etc. I think that people love Apple because of that. They put their trust to this brand, they are paying astronomical margins and they expect to receive the best in return. It's hard to earn that trust.

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There are several Apple laptops buying once is still a decision to make based on cost. And it might not work out like mine where the space keeps on decreasing and on restart it comes back. If not for ios programming i would have preferred a windows/linux laptop.

>buy Apple device and be sure that everything there is pretty good.

The alternative is that you spend 30 minutes of research and get a superior product cheaper.

This isnt an opinion, this is reality.

You can find a computer with better specs than Apple, cheaper. I'm not sympathetic to the 'mom' who doesn't know what RAM is, they get penalized by Apple for being an uninformed consumer.

Is there any reason for a 'Nerd' to pick Apple?

> Is there any reason for a 'Nerd' to pick Apple?

You are making a typical nerd assumption, which is to equate "better product" with "better specs".

The rest is just marketing.

Apple is very good at Marketing.

EDIT: Will someone explain what this theoretical 'non spec' thing that matters is? The Apple logo?

It’s almost as if an Apple troll script broke free from alpha testing long before it was ready.

“But the replies are just canned crap you found on online forums from five years ago.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll fix it before it is public-facing.”

Oops, guess not.

> Will someone explain what this theoretical 'non spec' thing that matters is?

That's hard to do, since you're being vague about the meaning of "specs".

How about this: you find an example of a non-Apple laptop that you think has "the same specs" or better as a 15-inch MBP, and I'll point out how it's different.

> EDIT: Will someone explain what this theoretical 'non spec' thing that matters is? The Apple logo?

Mostly the OS. I don't cringe before plugging into an unfamiliar external display. The touchpad isn't so bad it makes me feel like I have to carry a mouse if I plan to use the device for any length of time. The built-in "office" suite of apps are my favorite I've used, anywhere. Preview is indispensable for working with PDFs—I've never even known PDFs to be more than barely tolerable to work with outside Apple's world. It's Unixy, so many of my preferred tools work natively on it. It has lots of built-in stuff that's less convenient or works less well on Linux (modifier key remapping, screen sharing, and more).

I've been around the block with Linux on the desktop. Around and around and around, in fact. I could tolerate Windows—not as a work OS, but for gaming, anyway—all the way from 3.1 to 8, but 10's aggressively unpleasant. Now MacOS is the only desktop OS that doesn't drive me to swear at it multiple times a day while using it. That's worth some money, when I have to use some OS just about 365 days a year.

Touchbar's beyond dumb and into "harms UX" territory, though. The keyboard two generations ago—on the fatter Macbooks that still had disc drives—is noticeably better than either since, and the butterfly keyboards are awful. Unfortunately every other option is so much worse that they can afford to screw up badly for years on end and I still can't bring myself to switch.

My answer would be pretty much the same. Although I prefer the fit and finish of Apple hardware, I could live with the hardware of a high-end laptop from another manufacturer. But I'm absolutely unwilling to give up MacOS in exchange for Windows or Linux (and I say that as someone who used Ubuntu for many years on the desktop).

> The alternative is that you spend 30 minutes of research and get a superior product cheaper.

Then it breaks and you have to send it back for warranty and wait months until they repair it. Plastic breaks, etc. It's not that simple.

“Specs” are a very minor piece of what most people, including nerds, care about in a laptop.

“Why would anyone ever buy a BMW, when you can get a Dodge Challenger with more horsepower for cheaper?”

Marketing?

EDIT: Specs are everything. Not just HP. Specs are how many USB ports the vehicle has. The colors of buttons. The comfort.

Also, I wasnt sure if you thought a BMW was actually better. They are lower rated, but BMW has a huge marketing presence in the US.

If you really think marketing is the only reason someone could prefer a more expensive but lower horsepower car, then this conversation is a waste of time.

In response to your edit: if you define "specs" broadly enough to include the comfort and the color of buttons, then sure, "specs are all that matters", tautologically.

On the other hand, with this broad of a definition, no, there is no other computer on the market with the same "specs" as a Macbook Pro.

Native iOS development (for almost a decade now, jesus), and I've yet to find a touchpad that feels as good (tell me another to go try and I promise I will, although I'm sure it'll be tough to overcome my own muscle memory/bias).

As for the touchpad, those of us with ThinkPads just use the TrackPoint, which is (IMO) better than any touchpad. Off-brand TrackPoint-esque pointing sticks (on Dells or HPs) are usually absolute junk and go to maximum speed no matter how lightly you push it.

The touchpad has the advantage of being immediately intuitive, but after a little work on an old ThinkPad (an X220 from eBay is about $130 shipped) you’ll probably be able to appreciate both sides. I like how I don’t have to leave home row to do a little clicking around.

If you end up getting a machine of that era, maybe try this guide for my favorite OS, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370327

> As for the touchpad, those of us with ThinkPads just use the TrackPoint

Our standard-issue work laptop is a thinkpad, and I find the trackpoint super annoying. It's good for quickly adjusting the cursor while typing (which you can do just fine using the keyboard), but awful for moving long distances or scrolling (lack of inertial scrolling).

Have you tried the MacBook Touchpad? All my windows and linux machines have been Thinkpads and while I prefer to use the trackpoint on them, the touchpad on a MacBook wins easily in my experience.

In my experience: it’s ”unix” on a laptop that just works.

Easy access to up-to-date tooling through brew: zsh, docker, bash, vim et al.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Linux only user since the 90’s and for many years used the dell xps developer edition.

But, the mac touchpad (I know, I’m doing it wrong) and screen coupled with superior battery time as well as solid sleep/wakeup makes for a great experience.

The new air, without the ridiculous touchbar and updated keyboard is actually pretty great.

One nerds ¢2.

What is "unixy" about brew or docker?

Well, it’s a different paragraph and sentence isn’t it? :)

Whether the tools are “unixy” is of course an interesting discussion. :p

I guess my line of thought was: kind of “unix” -> kind of “posix” -> kind of compatible with a lot of your familiar tooling.

All this equals pretty good platform for many nerds.

I could have made myself more clear.

I don't know much about brew (or MacOS at all) but docker is native linux technology. Docker for Mac runs linux in a VM in the background. The MacOS docker experience is similar to running anything in a VM: slower, memory limits, poor IOPS.

True, but the overhead is not that bad due to HW virtualization support.

Macos can use the xhyve hypervisor (bhyve port) which again points to “unixy” roots — it runs freebsd for example.

Through the years I spent quite some time hacking about to get bsd running on other hypervisors, and for the longest of time it was just a hassle with abysmal performance (vmware esx, xen/xenserver).

Docker on osx is by the way completely seamless from a UX perspective.

As a mobile/laptop dev experience I still think the new air is great. ;)

macOS is a BSD system. I think that was the point

I wish...

macOS is its own thing, where some functionality is provided by some very old versions of BSD tools. But using it feels pretty different from using a modern BSD variant.

Yes Linux does indeed just work on new Dell laptops now. I can personally testify that wasn't always the case. In years gone by it was a world of pain for the 1st 6 months while open source developed drivers for hardware they hadn't seen until the laptop was released.

That all changed when Dell started selling versions of their laptops with Linux pre-installed. And it didn't change a little bit either, in many cases it was a complete reversal. Drivers got released on Linux _before_ Windows - in particular Intel video drivers were repeatedly released on Linux before Windows in my case.

I presume that's developers are moving to Linux now. That was driven home to me just now when reading the Bling Fire post here, learning Bling Fire is an internal library used by MS's Bing search engine - then noticing all the instructions had a very nix'y feel, and the benchmark environment was Ubuntu.

The apple hardware: crap keyboard, any slight usage leads to blaring fans and immediate thermal throttling. Options mean end users could actually pick something that fits their needs and not have to live with what Apple thinks YOU need. There have been times when choices haven't been good on the non apple side but in recent years the apple's few top down dictated choices on the hardware side have led to clearly inferior products.

My non-negotiable requirements for a laptop are as follows. If there were a non-Apple model that fit these criteria, I would consider switching. Do you know of any?

(1) Unibody metal construction

(2) Extremely high-quality and high-resolution screen

(3) All-SSD storage

(4) High-quality trackpad with multi-touch gesture support (all gestures must work perfectly 100% of the time, and the acceleration/deceleration should feel physically natural)

(5) Unix-like operating system pre-installed out of the box (no having to set it up myself) and fully supported. (Doesn’t have to be macOS. Ubuntu or FreeBSD would be fine).

That kind of looks like throwing a darf, and then painting the bullseye after.

In any case, the Huawei Matebook pro x would seem to fit all but the default unix OS requirement.

I dont think any PC comes with any unix os by default, other than apple, but given the ease of setup I'm not inclined to view that requirement as anything other than a way to select what you wanted a first

I guess your definition of "ease of setup" is not the same as mine.

If I could be guaranteed that everything work perfectly out of the box with no weird driver issues when I burn and install an Ubuntu .ISO, I agree that the OS being default is not a necessity.

But I've only heard of this being the case on a small whitelist of "known to work well with Linux" devices, like Thinkpads, etc., which don't fulfill the other conditions.

Again, I'm not just arguing ideology, here: I'd be genuinely happy for you to show me a non-Apple laptop that meets my criteria, if one exists.

> any slight usage leads to blaring fans and immediate thermal throttling

This has been my experience with Windows machines, interestingly. On the other hand, if my Mac makes fan noise I know exactly what caused it and it's going to be a compile job I kicked off, not some random driver spinning out of control in the background…

Lots of reasons. I’m pretty comfortable with my nerd cred (was programming graphics algorithms in C in high school) but buying a windows laptop was a Byzantine experience for me. I need a good screen, good battery life, and good keyboard/touchpad. There are Windows laptops that have one or more, but it’s hard to find one that has all four, and even if you do, there is no guarantee that the same model will have the same qualities on the next iteration.

Because they are so cost sensitive, Windows laptop makers build SKUs based on the hardware that’s available and cheap. So maybe you get a great display, but there was a good deal on crappy touchpads. Or you get a lottery where the same laptop can come with screens of widely varying quality (Toms hardware just did a piece about this with respect to Lenovo).

My Windows laptop purchase recently went like this. I was looking for a replacement for my 2012 MacBook Pro Retina 15”. Dell was out because of coil whine (which has been a problem with Dell machines since I owned an XPS 15 17 years ago). I stare at text all day so a high-DPI display is clutch. But almost every PC vendor make you choose between 4K and 5 hours of battery life, or HD and 10 hours. No well balanced 3K display with 8-10 hours like Apple has. (Again, this is because they’re stuck with what the hardware manufacturers are offering, they don’t have the clout and margins to demand custom panels.) Same thing with Lenovo’s 15” laptop options (they do have a 3K 15” display but it’s quite dim). HP didn’t have Precision touchpads. The Surface machines I’ve owned have been a Q&A disaster (it took them how long to get connected standby working?) And the 15” Surface Book is too much fiddily convertible tablet shit I’d never use. I ended up with an X1 Carbon, which was a bit of a compromise because I wanted a 15” screen. But it ticked the boxes of good screen (WQHD), good battery life, etc. It took a lot more than 30 minutes, and in the end I didn’t get exactly what I was looking for.

Even then it wasn’t sunshine and rainbows. Lenovo has awful quality control. I had to reinstall the Os to get rid of Lenovo crap-ware (and gained 2 hours of battery life in the process). I got a few dead pixels within 6 months. They replaced the screen, but now the bezel is peeling (it is just a fucking sticker, on a laptop that’s $1,500 even heavily discounted). The fibocom WWAN module has never worked properly (like requires a reboot every day after getting disconnected). So the one paper advantage over an apple machine is a dud. (And again, it’s because Lenovo sources parts from whatever is on sale that day—the Sierra modules that come on other iterations of the X1C are great.)

> spend 30 minutes of research and get a superior product cheaper.

I'll humor you.

dell.com * Choose between home or work → I'll go with work since it's for development * Choose between Latitude, Vostro, Inspiron, Precision, XPS, G Series, Chromebook, and Deals → I'll go with Precision as I'm a professional creator (whatever that means). * Choose between 3000 Series, 5000, or 7000 → I'll take 5000 for the performance * Choose 5520, 5530, or 2-in-1 5530 → umm I'll guess at 5530 because it's a little cheaper * Now it lists 4 actual models I could buy

The comparable mac is 11% more, but if you buy an Office license for Windows and can use Pages/Numbers on a Mac then the price is the same.

The real difference in my opinion is that Apple does a good job of directing you to the right machine, and you know that your purchase will be good. Whereas Dell and others offer a myriad of confusing options (e.g. Inspiron vs Vostro?) and some of those options will be complete crap.

I'm sure I could repeat the process and get a better deal elsewhere but it will certainly take me more than 30 minutes to find it. So, yeh, for price sensitive consumers you can optimize for price. Not all of us 'nerds' prioritize for price however. I work in an office with Dells, Thinkpads, Asus, etc. Some of those machines are complete duds, as well we are starting to cycle out 2 year old laptops because their specs when purchased were crap, while my 2015 mac still outperforms those.

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