Hacker News Reader

Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

- Starts at $999 for the base laptop version. You can get much cheaper still good Windows laptops.

You lost me at "good Windows laptops".

macOS has plenty of warts, but my experience with high quality equipment (Thinkpad, XPS, Alienware) has left me ultimately disappointed with Windows in many day to day situations compared to Mac.

Windows is still clunky, despite many improvements. And aside from a Thinkpad Carbon X1, I haven't used any laptop with the performance and build quality (for the size/money) as a Macbook Air.

I bought a thinkpad hoping to avoid quality issues that I’ve experienced with other machines. The hardware is great (except for the wimpy cooling), but I have had various annoying issues with drivers, bios updates, and the behavior of their system update tool.

It's been a couple of generations since I used the Thinkpad, but wiping and carefully reinstalling only the useful drivers/apps was how to did it. Perhaps it's locked down now such that you can't do that (and if so, I wouldn't buy it!)

Maybe that's Windows or Windows pre installed bloatware specific ? The high end thinkpads (t/x/p/w/carbon) are generally well supported by Linux distros, partially thanks to many kernel and distro developers using them.

As for bios (well EFI these days) that should be handled very seamlessly via fwupd on all major Linux distros: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/

(Frankly seems much more robust to how it is handled on Windows - not at oll or via half broken OEM bloatware.)

You can also buy some ThinkPads with Linux preinstalled now if you don't want to worry about hardware compatibility issues.

In my experience, the Thinkpads are indeed the only real competition, hardware-wise.

When my current Mac dies, that's where I'm headed, but running Linux; Microsoft is less of a danger, so I don't outright boycott anymore, but I still find Windows super annoying to use.

If Lenovo could for once figure out why the speakers on these Thinkpads are SO BAD, I wouldn't be reading this thread because I wouldn't care about Macs. I know there are headphones, but many times when I'm alone, I just want to watch a video and actually hear the people talk, can't do with the Thinkpad.

The windows market is all over the place. All the way from leftover bin junk from 5 years ago sold as new to high end cutting edge. When you get bellow 900 dollars the market decidedly on the crap side with respect to windows. There are some exceptions but usually you have to get 1200-1800 before you start get quality items. Not saying you can not find good stuff near the bottom. But you get what you pay for. Usually they skimp on the screen, memory, and disk. I am currently using an MSI stealth gaming laptop. other than the keyboard layout being slightly odd i am liking it a lot. i replaced my previous hp of 8 years. that will find a new home doing something else once I do a full teardown and repasting. luckily it is one of the last hp laptops where taking it apart is not a total nightmare. finding a decent laptop takes a lot of work. going with apple has a lot of advantages as the hassle of 'picking' is cut down to a few models, and you have a good shot of it being decent. I personally would not buy an apple but that is because of other 'petty' reasons and not quality.

If you need a computer for serious (long hours) use, I would always go for desktop, as you can get a vastly superior machine to any laptop, with massive amounts of disk space, memory, tons of cores, screens, etc. If you want a Mac, I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do.

For travelling, I don't think anything beats a Macbook due to how light, thin, and resilient they are. But my 2016 MBP is a pretty shit machine for its price. It's also loud (like every other laptop I've had). I avoid using it. Sure, if you take size/design/mechanical quality into account, it is probably unmatched. But for 95% of my computer usage, those are irrelevant, as I just sit at my desk. I had a company provided HP laptop (not sure if stock or upgraded by our IT staff) at my previous job which was far more performant than my Macbook, so I don't really agree that Windows laptops are necessarily bad, but it was even louder than the Macbook, and of course clunky and ugly.

For me personally, the new Macbooks are disqualified as viable work machines if it's really true that you can't use more than 1 external screen. That's just not a viable computer for me (for work). I will always have a Macbook though just because of how much I love them for travel. But a Macbook is more of a toy than a serious computer, especially if the 1 screen limit is true.

" I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do."

Unfortunately they will also blow your wallet.

Wow, I just checked and yeah those prices are pretty insane, especially if you want a better-than-base model. I guess then in the desktop arena, Macs are at a disadvantage, because you can build a similarly powerful PC for a much more reasonable amount.

Certainly the Pro Desktops must be intended for Pro people that can quantify the number of billable hours they will save in Final Cut or Logic and come up with a "return of investment" figure.

The iMacs are a mistery to me, but guess I'm not the target market anyway. (I have a 2018 MBP)

> you can build a similarly powerful PC for a much more reasonable amount

It's not even a contest or similarly powerful, spend $3000 on an AMD + Nvidia PC and its significantly more powerful than the $5000 Mac Pro in both CPU and GPU compute.

I'm in the market for a new work machine myself, and have been eying a final-generation loaded Intel MBP16. I'm sure the AS models will catch up on graphics capability by the end of their transition time, though I'm certainly wondering what the first AS MBP16 will do for graphics. I certainly wouldn't buy less capability than the 5600M myself.

In my experience, Microsoft and PC laptop manufacturers still haven't figured out how to make a trackpad that works as well as a 2008 era Macbook.

Yep, though sadly, in my view, the current line up of Macbooks trackpads aren't as good as the 2008 era Macbooks either....

I disagree, my razer blade 15 has been amazing.

I have both platforms at the office for years, still haven't discovered what is so magic about the trackpad.

Edge to edge uniformity, physical feel, virtual feel of the scroll and motion, gestures. Other than that, sure, same.

The biggest difference between Macbook trackpads vs the best for Windows is the super low hysteresis of pointer motion vs finger motion. I recently bought and returned a Microsoft Surface Book with "precision touchpad". The main reason for returing it was that pointer control feels sluggish compared to the Macbook and its pointer speed was too slow even at its fastest. The best Dell touchpads are no better and Lenovo trackpads are even worse.

I understand that this may be because PC touchpad hardware reports jitter, sometimes higher than it really is, and this causes the Precision Touchpad software to increase the hysteresis. Macbook touchpads have low jitter and the driver is tuned to benefit from it.

If anyone Microsoft with input into the Precision Touchpad reads this, why don't you fix it or work with your licensees to fix it?

Sounds like exactly the kind of thing you can optimize much easier when you control both the hardware and the software.

Like Surface laptops?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com