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Comment by symlinkk | Hacker News Reader

You’re giving Dell / HP / etc too much credit. They’ve tried over and over again to build a machine with Macbook level quality. They have laptops that cost just as much, if not more, than a Macbook. And every one of them has some glaring issue.

It’s not some purposeful design decision. They just don’t have the same caliber of engineers or management that Apple has.

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This is it. Apple is willing to spend money on actual R&D for user experience. Dell and hp and friends essentially just assemble off the shelf parts into a styled chassis. It took dell years to bother developing a thin camera module instead of having a nose cam. It does come at a cost and until recently windows machines were not able to recoup it (probably chicken and egg scenario)

Until Microsoft forced precision touch pads windows touch pads were awful since the oems just slapped in garbage vendor drivers.

Screen aspect ratio is another thing. Everyone but apple moved to 16:9 since it's cheaper but 16:10 is better for productivity and not bad for media. But even the business windows laptops pinch pennies and do 16:9. Only apple was willing to buy 16:10 panels.

To be fair, apple hardware also has some catastrophic issues. The ongoing keyboard disasters and overheating/throttling are two that come to mind.

Fixed in the 2019 model.

for the 16". fixed in the air last month, and fixed in the 13" this week.

I honestly think a lot of it is just (bad) prioritization. An analogous situation; remember when Mac laptops had far, far better battery life than PC laptops? Like ridiculously better. People usually thought it was some magic property of the PowerPC; then Intel Mac laptops came out and they were still ridiculously better. Then Intel started taking it seriously, and a few Centrino revisions later the gap had narrowed dramatically.

I remember reading at the time that, when idle, the chipset in many PC laptops used more power than the CPU...

All Apple stuff's that way, it seems. A lot of it's the software. Just compare the effect of Safari versus Firefox or Chrome on MacBook battery life. One of these projects clearly gives a quite a large damn about power use—the other two... not so much.

I worked on software for phones and tablets right around the 2/3 split for Android, up through Android 5 or so. We had lots of testing devices of all quality levels. The joke-but-actually-100%-true around the office was that an Android tablet left unplugged on a desk over the weekend was always dead when you got back on Monday, while an iPad forgotten in a drawer for a month would have a useful amount of charge left on it (and come to life instantly, of course, as if it had never been asleep). Didn't seem to matter how much the Android device cost.

Totally. I own Android phones and tablets. But when I pick up a friend's iPhone or iPad, it's clear that the user experience is more polished. Is that because Google has a lower caliber engineers than Apple? I doubt it. Certainly the people I know at both companies are equally smart.

it's simply what is P1 and thus gets engineering bandwidth to fix. looks like UX is P1 at apple and just isn't at other companies ('isn't perfect but works', 'takes one click more than it could', etc.)

I’d argue that Google has lower caliber designers than Apple.

I'd be surprised if that was the case; they should be in a similar hiring position to Apple. They just seem... less interested in it.

And it's not just designers; it's everything around user experience. For instance, both Terminal.app and the Apple bluetooth keyboard (when plugged into USB) have class-leading latency. That wasn't designers, but it probably also wasn't accidental.

Mind you, the Apple today arguably isn't as good at this stuff as the Apple of a decade or so, and they really fall down in some areas (Apple Music grumble mutter).

Fair, from the outside it’s hard to tell the difference between low quality, poor management, or under staffing. What I can say is that Google’s design is somewhere between bad and inconsistent.

You're right, it's not a design decision. That degree of optimization is not something that happens at the product design level -- it is organization-wide optimization.

When Apple leverages iPhone R&D for their MacBook, they get it for free. If it takes Dell 50 million dollars to develop the tech, and Dell expects to sell 100,000 laptops, then if we assume everything else is equal, an equivalent Dell laptop would carry a premium of $500 over a MacBook. In which case, they probably wouldn't sell 100,000 laptops, and it would be a failure and a waste of 50 million bucks.

Horizontal integration is powerful.

I would bet cash money that Dell, etc, could do just as poorly with equally good engineers. With differences that persist this long and are this far-reaching, I think you have to look at culture, process, and values.

For all Jobs' flaws, he built an amazing culture around valuing user experience and putting that first. That's extremely hard to do, especially with a dominant business culture that instead values things like individual performance metrics, quarterly profit numbers, and low labor costs. The average piece of consumer electronics gets 3-7 physical prototypes before launch; the iPod had over 100. That's not down to the caliber of engineers or line managers.

I think “culture” and “management” kind of bleed into each other, because at the end of the day you’re going to do whatever the manager tells you to do. If they tell you to make 100 more prototypes until you perfect the iPod, you’ll do it. If they tell you what we have isn’t perfect but it’s good enough, then you’ll go with that.

I think doing only what managers say is a fine example of bad culture. People who have been trained to not care can make a hundred prototypes and still not make anything great. People who believe that the organization will support them in making something great for the users will push to do more prototypes until they get it really right.

My new-this-spring HP EliteBook (ordered custom with FreeDOS) running Ubuntu 20.04 seems flawless to me, although YMMV. This coming from someone who has only ever owned Macs and uses Macs at work.

Wow what a mac clone! I thought these facsimile designs died out, but I guess they must sell.

I agree there's nothing original about the basic design, but that's true of a lot of mature products. With USB ports on both sides (in additional to Thunderbolt 3) and an HDMI port, it's a lot like the 2015 MacBook Pro aka the "best laptop ever made"¹. But mine has a great matte touchscreen, so there are some new ideas.

1: https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever

>They have laptops that cost just as much, if not more, than a Macbook. And every one of them has some glaring issue.

You can go to many laptop review sites and find that Apple are not dominating every category. What do you know that they don't?

The older I get the more I realize raw performance matters far less than the experience of using the machine every day. Macos is comfortable, so that's what I go with. Heavy lifting is better done with something permanently plugged into a wall.

Every MacBook Pro these days has the glaring issues of

* not having a top row of physical keys

* not being able to run Linux natively

* not integrating with any phones except the ones it makes

Apple just doesn't have the caliber of engineering or management to compete with PC manufacturers.

These are not glaring issues to most mac buyers, with the possible exception of the touchbar.

Most Mac buyers both want OSX, and use iPhones. If you want Linux, don't buy a Macbook Pro, you'll save a ton of money on features you don't need, and get better hardware support.

I love the Touch Bar and the fact that the new Macbooks have a physical escape key should pretty much silence any devs that were screaming about losing one.

I hate the lack of function keys. I hate the lack of touch typing support. It's a huge, glaring issue.

Unfortunately for you, you're in the minority. The Touch Bar is infinitely more useful than unlabelled function keys.

All laptop keyboards are awful, and they encourage horrible posture. If you’re going to do extended typing in a fixed position, get an external keyboard monitor. The laptop keyboard should be for short term, mobile use only.

Buy the i5 air, it's a great little dev machine if you have access to some remote horsepower.

What I'm saying is that — while the fact that all PC laptops have glaring issues is true, Macs just have a different set of glaring issues.

Doing my bit to counteract the rampant sycophancy here.

You don’t have to like Macs, but calling everyone else sycophants is out of line.

>not having a top row of physical keys

They instead get an adaptable keybed, that can be used as sliders, piano keys, timeline managers, and other controls, plus a fast and secure fingerprint sensor (PC ones are laughable), and a physical escape key again.

>not being able to run Linux natively

On exchange they get stronger security from the T2 controller handgling they keyboard, etc. Besides, most dodn't buy Macbooks to run Linux on them (though Linus used to love them for that purpose).

That said, if they're willing to turn it off, there's ongoing work from the Linux side to let it boot, talk to the SSD, keyboard, etc.

>not integrating with any phones except the ones it makes

I'm pretty sure it integrates just fine with my Android phone. Do you know something I don't know?

I downvoted you before you added your second and third bullet points, because you were taking a cheap shot. Even with the additional points, you're comparing apples to oranges.

Apple chose to remove physical function keys. No other manufacturer has previously had a smooth trackpad and chosen to remove it.

I genuinely don’t get what the big deal about function keys are. I never used them heavily, even on external keyboards. I actually transitioned to external keyboards that don’t have them, to save space.

The only key that’s useful on that top row is escape, IMHO. They should make that a key. Everything else is low utility.

Maybe your particular development environment(s) don't use function keys, but I find function keys indispensable when debugging. Most debuggers I use have the function keys mapped for step-over, step-out, and step-into.

The editors and IDEs I use also generally use the function keys for code-search, goto-defintion, and symbol-rename.

For me (and I suspect many others), the lack of tactile function keys is a productivity hit.

My two development environments have been Emacs and IntelliJ. The latter does depend on function keys for the actions you’re describing, but I’ve found it utterly impossible to memorize them. There’s no mnemonic available for F keys; so remember which is step over and which is step in just does not stick. I ended up rebinding those long before the touchbar arrived.

This is also why I miss my f keys.

"Low" is the right idea for me.

When I buy (or build) a kb, I have the expectation to be able to tell it how to operate; that's why I needed it, after all. I find it tedious to remap lots of keybindings (was super+... global? shit.) when I can simply assign 24-48 non-conflicting commands to function keys.

Some map to scripts, others to specific actions in the tools I use, some are used to turn on cameras, switch users, chance resolutions, pull all logs, push commands to restart devices in VMs or bring up or take down containers, start or stop services, reset PCI or storage devices, or semi-automate git. It's really whatever I want to press a button and make happen. It was much worse when I first got clever with udev and dbus years and years ago.

I've always hated clicking and menu-hunting. If I know what I want to do, I don't want to wade through someone else's idea of UX to get to it.

Abjure the cruft. Embrace Function.

> I have the expectation to be able to tell it how to operate

This isn’t a reasonable expectation! Use the product as it’s designed! Work with it not against it!

> I find it tedious to remap lots of keybindings

Well don’t do this then. Why make things so complicated and custom?

I mean, you can add your own things to the Touch Bar for such tasks, but you’re already pushing the limits of any laptop keyboard. At that point you’re better off using something with programmable firmware, not the built in.

"Everything else is low utility." - says who? I can't imagine working without function keys.

Says me. This is a personal observation about how I use my keyboards.

Yes, and it's a glaring issue with management that they "chose" to do that. New shiny thing that compromises on fundamentals like touch typing support.

None of these things even remotely matter to me. They aren't issues when I'm looking at what to buy.

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