Comment by heipei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heipei | Hacker News Reader

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That's exactly what I have been telling folks about Apple vs. other laptops. Apple only has a handful of laptop models for sale and they don't even change that much across generations. Furthermore they seem to exhibit hardly any manufacturing variations within each generation. That means that if there is a problem (and yes, there were a few big ones), everyone is affected the same, everyone is screaming about it, the majority of customers are not corporate customers, and eventually a class action lawsuit is set up and Apple will often (grudgingly) offer to fix/replace broken units for free, like what happened with Staingate or the Butterfly switches.

Now compare that to buying a model from Dell or Lenovo, where the current product lineup is already 2-3x the size, the models are sometimes discontinued, sometimes changed significantly between refreshes, often refreshed annually, oftentimes configurable in a meaningful way (1080p non-glossy vs. 1080p privacy screen vs. 4k glossy vs. 4k touch screen), sometimes just available in certain geographical locations and they exhibit more intra-generation manufacturing differences. The chances of finding other folks with your exact same permutation (and same day of the week it was manufactured) of these options are much smaller, so you stand less of a chance of getting something recognized as a fundamental manufacturing issue which should be covered for free by the vendor. Plus, even if you can get repair/replacement for free, you still fear that your specific model has a flaw, so you might only get lucky after having it replaced 2-3 times.

I've seen it happen with Dell and Lenovo where folks sent back brand-new units repeatedly because the first one had overheating issues with the SSD, the second one had really noisy capacitors and the third one had a display cable that wasn't seated correctly. At least with Apple I know that if I'm getting screwed, I'm in the same boat with everyone else ;)

That last paragraph is indicative of terribly quality and quality control.

Fortunately that hasn't been my experience with the recent Dell, Asus, Lenovo and HP laptops I've purchased. Each have been without any issues at all.

But my point here is that... it sounds like you're arguing against consumer choice. You can have your Model T in any color as long as it is black. And this is Apple's model. You can have your product in any configuration as long as it's the one configuration Apple offers. Apple tried this, actually, for a long time. The iPhone started out with extremely limited configurations and only more recently branched out beyond 2. In a way, I agree with the confusion, because I know now I can't just say "Macbook" because there is at least one Macbook without suffix, at least one Air, and the Macbook Pro has a myriad of configurations - different sizes, with or without touch bar, etc.

Why did Apple start offering more options? Because that's what consumers want. Dell exists exactly because they were the first big PC manufacturer to accept configuration orders, and then (relatively) quickly manufacturer and deliver those custom configurations to users. Consumers want this. As Apple's share of the market grows, they will have to meet the consumers where they are - or their market share will be limited by the limitations they place upon themselves.

Now, I agree that, for example, the variety of models between different geographic locations is - if nothing else - annoying. Especially when nicer options aren't offered in your location! But I don't agree with the offered example of getting bad replacements. Maybe buying one laptop a year isn't enough to experience these issues.

Consumer choice only means anything if the consumers can choose something they know about.

If the choice is between "you can know about it" xor "you can buy it", there's no real choice.

Actually from what I've heard from Linux distro maintainers (mainly from Fedora) it seems like Apple actually does quite substantial hardware revisions internally without telling anyone as users report that their MacBook 20XX does not work with a Linux distro while another users report that on the paper the same device of the same model year works fine. IIRC the estimate was about 4 hardware revisions per year.

This really complicates the already limited attempts to run Linux distros on the Mac hardware as users simply can't reliably tell if their hardware will be compatible beforehand.

On the MacOS side they likely paper over the differences, quirks and bugs in firmware and drivers, so the user does not native anything and they can change the hardware underneath as needed.

Apple has it's fair share of issues, and it's often a pain to diagnose them remotely without the user looking up the specific model code which isn't all to easy to identify. They often don't change any visual appearance and certainly don't distinguish between different models in their marketing. It's easy for me to look up what common issues Lenovo's had with a specific T series model, but if I'm buying a used MacBook, it's hard to know what I should be searching for until the seller has told me the exact model number. And even still, there's variance between machines of the same model because sometimes different panels and SSDs are used for the same model number.

> without the user looking up the specific model code which isn't all to easy to identify

My 7 year old macbook has "A1465" written in perfectly legible text on the bottom. "About this mac" has the serial number two clicks away, which is convertable online to exact specifications.

My old laptop from 2006 had nc8430 written close to the screen hinges. The new one from 2014 has ZBook at the bottom left of the keyboard. Maybe it's one of the differences between $300 laptops and $1000+ ones.

Except what you said is not at all true. Dell, hp, and Lenovo have a whole bunch of different models for different laptops. They're also very customizable, so the model may be slightly different if you want different hardware. But you're arguing for less consumer choice. Dell, hp, and Lenovo do not swap models around to try to fool consumers. Quite the contrary; you can search a very old model number and find exactly what you're looking for on their site.

They all cater a different need. I donated few laptops to a school in India. These were some of the cheapest models Lenovo had to offer. Lenovo Dell etc. cater to a much wider range of market that apple does not even bother to target. You are basically comparing Tesla with Camry and upset that Camry is not as good.

On other hand Lenovo X1 carbon is a pretty solid high end laptop along with LG gram. Former specifically is far more customizable, repairable, upgradable and also around 30% cheap while being more powerful.

You think that’s bad, just wait till Apple starts selling cars.

And scooters.

and revamping the US highway system with assisted driving beacons/lines etc - because they're the only ones with enough money to do so.

That raises a very interesting point: The highway system. Who owns it? Who can “attach” to it? What you said made me think about line access and comcast using its mass to keep out Google Fiber etc. I really, REALLY do not want that battle to take place over roads.

Apple had a lot of problems with overheating. The i9 version of MacBook especially, it throttles under slight load.

And you have said literally nothing against the deeper point the parent is making.

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