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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

I am glad that you like your macbook, but your experience has been very different from mine. It has the worst WIFI radio in a laptop that i have used; one area of my house is basically off-limits to it despite every other Wi-Fi enabled device i own working there (phones and several laptop brands).

The fancy metal case isnt properly grounded- I get occasionally a slight tingling /shock from it when I have it plugged in.

Battery life is on par, at best, with my other laptops.

Macos doesn't let me configure or change the things I want to configure or change. Some programs are usability / discoverability nightmares.

Performance of most programs is, at best, similar to linux or Win10, and is frequently worse against other machines with similar hardware.

I have used several models of MacBook and an Air, and personally will not purchase another again... I am tired of paying top dollar for a mediocre experience.

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> It has the worst WIFI radio in a laptop that i have used

This is an extremely disputable claim. Wifi chipset used by Apple is by far the best in class in my experience. I have 4 laptops - ASUS, Thinkpad, HP laptop from work and MBP 16". All of them get a visit to the special room once a week at least. If we use my commode as a benchmark of wifi radio performance, when I am sitting on it and watching Monty Python, I can get every single joke with MacBookPro 16 streaming smoothly at 320p resolution. Not so much with other products of similar class.

My MacBook Pro has a Broadcom BCM43xx chip in it.

What's so "best in class" about that? I don't regard Broadcom as being particularly great.

Maybe your MacBook just has a better antenna. Or it just happens to be configured in just such a way that it works better in that one room in your house.

YMMV, I guess. We have a lot of wood paneling, plus the furnace is in between me and the router, so it would be understandable if the issue was universal.

My HP Spectre x360 has not had a problem with the reception once, but I can barely attend video calls or load Jira with the macbook. Likewise, my wife's chromebook and my previous surface book 2 were all perfectly happy.

That said, the Dell XPS 13 was pretty close to equally bad as the macbook, though I haven't had it in a long enough time that I've since re-arranged my sitting area- whether it actually was worse or not I'm not sure.

I've had Mac wifi adapters that didn't like certain access points in the past (a specific Ubiquiti AP firmware revision circa 2014 comes to mind). Not sure that's still an issue nowadays, but you might want to make sure your AP firmware is up to date.

> > It has the worst WIFI radio in a laptop that i have used

> This is an extremely disputable claim

I don't think it is; GP couched their assertion pretty clearly as only referring to laptops that they have used. Your personal experience doesn't really change that.

If you use the charger extension that had the third prong, I’ve found that tingling to go away.

Or if you plug the Apple power adapter into a power strip with a circuit breaker.

Now, if only grounded cable outside UK plugs was available more than speaking magical white crows...

The radio must be faulty. You should have it looked at or replaced by Apple. They are best in class or at least better than mid-ranged laptops, if you’re only comparing to specialty PC hardware.

I have used a few, and the other most recent one- a MacBook air- had the exact same issue. I wouldn't call anything I use specialty hardware, though both the go spectre and surface book 2 were, at the very least, on the high end of midrange. The Dell xps I honestly don't have much good at all to say about.

Or an aftermarket sticker is interfering with the wifi antenna?

I definitely do not put any stickers on my laptops, and especially not ones that are not owned by me (i.e. company issued, which are the only macs I will use).

Is that a real issue? A sticker is enough to impact a wifi antenna enough that people would notice?

I'm not sure about the impact being noticed. I thought the wifi antenna hid behind the Apple logo on some machines, but I don't remember which machines.

>It has the worst WIFI radio in a laptop that i have used;

I can confirm. I have 2019 Macbook Pro and I have problems with the wifi + overheating and occasional restarts of the mac. I had to do multiple SMC restart. I'll switch to XPS 15 with linux dual boot.

> I get occasionally a slight tingling /shock from it when I have it plugged in.

I always noticed it when the device was plugged in.

> The fancy metal case isnt properly grounded- I get occasionally a slight tingling /shock from it when I have it plugged in.

There have been other comments about this, but to make it clear: It's the charger that's not grounded. You will see this effect with every other laptop / charger on the market which has no ground connection in the wall socket. It comes from y capacitors [1] in the switch-mode-power-supply.

[1] http://www.vicorpower.com/resource-library/articles/back-to-...

>> The fancy metal case isnt properly grounded- I get occasionally a slight tingling /shock from it when I have it plugged in.

Can confirm the issue with the latest 2 versions of MBA

I’ve experienced the grounding thing, but almost always only in houses with dodgy wiring. It never happens in office buildings or newer apartments. I’m not sure that is actually the MacBook’s doing.

USB-C and proprietary laptop chargers are double insulated Class II devices. This means that the metal chassis is essentially floating and can charge up if there is some leakage in the charger circuit. I don't see any way how the wiring of the building can influence this behavior.

Just grabbed my multimeter -- my MagSafe MacBook has continuity from the metal chassis to the grounding lug of the power adapter. It stands to reason that a properly grounded outlet used in conjunction with the 3-prong cable would dissipate such a charge -- and potentially, a live ground could introduce a charge.

I actually only notice it about 5% of the time I use it, and it is almost always plugged in at the same outlet, with the same charger (in this case, the two prong adapter). I seem to recall having tested all of the outlets in the house with an outlet tester, but it was two years ago so I'm not 100% sure.

Here in Europe the clip on plugs (duckheads) are not grounded. The extension cord you get with the MacBook too, is. So use that.

Not sure about US. But I think it's the same as the duckheads are only 2-prong iirc so they can't possibly be grounded.

They don't even include the extension cord anymore.

I don't know why Apple thinks it's okay for my computer to run a current through my body. I would love to know what happened at Apple that caused this situation. It's just patently insane.

Oh I didn't know that, I haven't bought a Mac recently.

It's been like this since the earliest days of the metal PowerBooks. Though the un-grounded duckheads appeared only with the later models (the "hockey puck" power supply always had grounding and in fact always had an extension cord). In my house the living room sockets didn't have grounding (at that time it was only mandatory in "wet areas") so I noticed it even then.

It's mainly an issue because of the metal enclosure. On a plastic one you wouldn't notice. And it's not serious current, it's just some induction of the power transformer on the internal shielding.

But yeah I agree, even the duckheads should have proper grounding! The grounding is done through the ground 'pin' that the duckhead clips on to, so technically it should be able to get a third-party duckhead with all three pins. Though I never looked to see if they were available.

Yes, it's the same in the US.

My anecdotal experience: I’ve never noticed this with my 2014 MBP until I was at my parents’ recently, plugged into an extension cord from their garage.

With my feet on the ground, the metal body of my MacBook was “tingly” all over. Feet off the ground, no more tingling.

I’d love to better understand what was going on (and whether it’s potentially dangerous).

FWIW, I was using the Mac power cord with the ground pin. Does this just mean that the wiring in their garage isn’t properly grounded?

Electrical devices should be properly grounded to protect the user from faulty wiring though. I assume this is probably not life threatening but it could under some conditions be a fire hazard.

>Electrical devices should be properly grounded to protect the user from faulty wiring though. I assume this is probably not life threatening but it could under some conditions be a fire hazard.

Not if they are double insulation/class II:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appliance_classes#Class_II

that is the whole point.

yea I mostly only get that in places like Thailand where older houses do not have a grounded plug

Can I get some laptop recommendations with similar specs (and most importantly battery time) as the MBP from you? I've been looking around for a new one.

I had a dell xps 13, and was not at all impressed. It ran arch alright, at least.

I had a surface book 2 which was actually really nice, but broke down within 2 years, and best buy couldnt get parts to repair it anymore and just refunded the money (laptops are one of tge few things I will always pay for an extended warranty).

Currently, i use an hp spectre x360- a windows partition for gaming, and pop_os for everything else. I was very unimpressed trying to get a few different linux distros to run well on it, though i was trying some strange combinations. Pop_os just works. Literally no tweaking needed whatsoever.

Lenovo's 6th gen carbon x1 got rave reviews, but there was a lot of mixed messaging about newer models and arch, so I never really bothered when i was last looking.

Currently I run the cheapest ThinkPad T495 (AMD hardware) on Arch Linux (but maxed the RAM on my own). Everything works great, except it doesn't remember the screen brightness level after a reboot, which is not a big deal at all for me - I don't reboot very often.

I have a Psomething (the one with Xeon) from work and a T480 for personal stuff, but as I have been getting rid of Intel in my life, the T480 will be the first to go.

How is the T495 with kernel 5.8? How does the GPU handle day to day life, and video acceleration? And more importantly, does the T495 have soldered RAM?

The awesome thing about the T480 is how I could upgrade a bunch of things, from Wi-Fi card, to RAM, to NVMe drive, and I would not like losing that.

The new T14, unfortunately, will take forever to show up in Brazil, so the T495 seems to be the logical option.

As I said, everything works, except for remembering the screen brightness level.

It has 8GB soldered and you can put additional 16GB on the second slot. For me this is good enough.

Hardware video acceleration works out-of-the box with kernel 5.8.

I am not sure if the nvme slot is soldered, but as far as I remember, it's not. It has an additional slot for a standard 2.5 inch drive which you can use to increase capacity.

Here's a fix! https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/blob/master/lenovo/t....

I know about this, but it's not that big of a deal to me, and I prefer to stick to the out-of-the-box experience on Arch and wait for a fix to arrive.

Dell XPS 15

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