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Comment by crispinb | Hacker News Reader

Well except you're not allowed to run MacOS on a laptop with a real keyboard.

(To be quite honest I agree - but Apple doesn't make any hardware of interest to me to run MacOS on).

Yeah I will give you that. The apple keyboard that comes with the Macs is a cluster for sure. But... while Apple has done more for the industry in my opinion to force the other manufacturers to move their hardware to a higher build quality profile etc., the OS is still what I find the most compelling -- mostly because I am all in on Apple services (iMessage, iCloud, keychain, etc.) and things often look more appealing on the Mac (yeah I spend most of my time in the terminal but I do like things that look good -- high DPI on linux is almost there just not quite there yet imo). Basically it comes down to productivity and for me it's on a Mac, that keyboard be damned.*

I use an external Magic Keyboard 2 without the 10-key as it fits on top of the keyboard of my MacBook as if it should have been the keyboard all this time. But it was an expensive keyboard and not a suggestion I would give many people -- the keyboard should just work.

Fair enough. I didn't want to live with the loss of the Fn keys as much as anything. But my decision to jump the Apple ship was also partly economic, and if not for that additional pressure I'm not sure what I would have done.

So after a long time having been OS X-exclusive, for the past year I've used both Windows 10 and Linux. I've really been equally happy and frustrated with each - all 3 of the majors have their strengths and weaknesses. I think OS X overall has the balance I prefer, but it's by a far smaller margin than I would have thought, say, 5 years ago.

And there I agree with you, too. Laptops really have come a long way in build quality and usability.

I want a new MacBook but will likely wait until my late model top-of-the-line 2013 MacBook Pro dies and buy the Arm based ones they're rumored to release because I simply can't afford a 3k+ laptop now.

Even if some folks do not care about absolute monetary price, there can be other hurdles. For example, for corporate purchases, there are countries where you have per item limit, up until which you can expense your purchases into given year, or above which you must depreciate the item.

In my country, Apple computers moved into the must depreciate for 4 years territory, which is simply unacceptable to corporate buyers there (as depreciated asset, it the paperwork is more involved, and therefore needs additional time and expenses). Meanwhile, Lenovo or Dell sales know how to make the price right, so everybody is satisfied.

My 2015 rMBP was 1 EUR below this limit. I don't know what to replace it with, if needed.

Amortisation burocracy is not that complicated. 4 book records and one additional document per year, well under £1 in labour and paper. Source:my dad is a former accountant

Here, it is 2 records at purchase (purchase+asset creation) per item, 1 every month (depreciation) per item, plus 1 yearly (accounting for deferred tax assets). Then some at the end of the period (reconciliation of the deferred tax, asset retirement). The period has to be tracked per each item. Each asset has to have its asset card and a tag.

For machinery and buildings, OK. But for a laptop, that maybe barely survives it's depreciation period? Well, no. Folks have other things to do than paperwork for laptops.

The entire point of the asset depreciation is, that the state wants the tax money as soon as possible, and shift your deductibles into future. What you want, is to shift as much as possible of your deductibles into the current year (and it is cash out in this year, after all). I and many others don't see why small, relatively quickly consumable items like laptops should be handled the way big assets are, and the sales at other vendors understand that very well.

If you are a small company with external accountant, it will be significantly more than 1 EUR in labor and paper.

>Well except you're not allowed to run MacOS on a laptop with a real keyboard.

I use the keyboard that came with my 2001 Mac Cube. You can't get a more real keyboard than that.

I read that for a moment as you claiming the Cube as your laptop (cool: definitely, but laptop: no). But I see what you mean now.

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