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Comment by alphadevx | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the latest computer I buy is always "the best computer I've ever owned". They get better every year, why is this still surprising?

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You must be new to Macs. I'm still on the MBP 2015 and it's "the best computer I've ever owned". Everything since then has technically upgraded parts, but the regressions (touchbar, butterfly keyboard mishaps, etc.) are not worth the upgrade.

That's why this is surprising.

My 2015 MBP is better than my 2018 MBP by a country mile.

My 2010 MBP 15" is still my favorite.

Yep, I have the 13". Oh how I miss Snow Leopard...

2011 MBP for me. Everything since has felt like a downgrade.

I just switched from a 2015 MBP to the current 16" MBP and it is an amazing computer and a significant upgrade towards the 2015 one. The keyboard is nice, the screen much better, great sound and speed. I also like the touchbar. So the 16" is an easy buy. Though of course, you now might want to wait for an ARM based one.

I LOVE my 13" 2015 MBP and only stopped using it because of keyboard errors. With that said, I believe the new Macbook Air and Macbook Pro have the Magic Keyboard which I think is essentially the same as the 2015 Macbook Pro keyboard and more up-to-date (though maybe not upgradeable).

I recently bought a Zephyrus G14 which I think is one of the closer equivalents to a 13" MBP for Windows with a powerful GPU.

I bought an M1 as my 2015’s keyboard had died over the past year, and I got tired of being chained to my desk with my Bluetooth keyboard.

The M1 is close but the keys aren’t as deep. It’s good, but the 2015 still felt better to type on.

Scissors Keys has 1.3mm Travel Distance. The new Magic Keyboard is 1mm, the difference with 0.3mm is gigantic.

I still dont understand why they try to shave off 0.3mm. As Battery improves the 16 MBP has plenty of space of a maximum 100Whr size battery.

So the title should be "Apple actually improved their product with their latest computer, and I am surprised" ?

You adapt to those changes with time.

My 15" 2015 MBP was the best bang-for-the-buck Mac I've owned. Got it used (to avoid getting a butterfly keyboard MBP), almost max CPU, max RAM, swapped in an NVMe SSD and a semi-permanent microSD card.

I love my 16" MBP but wasn't blown away by the upgrade. Touchbar is meh and mostly in my way. Speakers are a big win. Keyboard is a tossup but at least I avoided the butterfly era. Everything else is just noticeably better but not a "wow" better. My biggest annoyance is fan noise when attached to a monitor. Running at native panel resolution seems to help.

I'm looking forward to the 16" class M1.

The latest computer is usually not "the best you've ever owned" when you "downgrade" from last-year top-shelf to entry-level.

This isn't going to be as common. Either way it's not surprising.

Why is it not surprising when it has never been true before now?

Generally this is surprising because the user bought the "Air" model instead of his usual "pro" model which is much more expensive. The impressive part here is that the air outperforms last years pro (according to the author) which is 3x the price.

this is what people meant prior to the m1 coming out with "macs are a horrible deal"

they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market. they finally fixed their co-dependency with intel and suddenly wow the price gouging goes out the door because gasp the macbook air could have always been the pro it was just never possible with using old chips.

ANYTHING using arm absolutely FLIES

open your eyes people

yeah and then those are poor devs like me whose work notebook is a U series intel on an enterprise HP/DELL body which probably cost $800.

some older intel chips are good and faithful (apple wasnt the ones passing the savings on to you like HP) they prefered to both give you outdated intel chips but also ask you $3500 for the honor

I have tried arm computers such as raspberry pi and they are slow. The linux arm projects seem to target just the cheapest price, m1 seems more like bang for buck. I hope linux hardware develops towards that.

raspberry pi's werent even 64bit until the latest revision and are meant to be dirt cheap <$25 computers

the arm chromebooks like the lenovo duet absolutely murder the iPad pro or even the new iPad Air in terms of actually being a useful OS for devs

I don’t know whether that’s true, but that’s quite a change of subject from “macs are priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market”.

the duet, the laptop I actually use is $300 which apple does not have a competing product with, its fair to claim in my head that even now its 3x more than what I am paying.

as an ex macbook pro main, I bought 3 of them over the course of last decade and a half and they have always had older intel brains than any xps or razer stealth I would try to cross shop with. after m1 apples price to performance ratio is at unreal levels

Mac MacBooks have generally lasted 10ish years. Sometimes more sometimes less. That’s awfully close in price to 3x $300 laptops in 10 years.

> they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market

Were they though? With comparable displays and build quality, I think their laptops have been competitive with the upper end of the market for a while now, with maybe a 10-20% markup on that.

fair, if you wanted good build good luck finding one outside of apple

I was more mad at the general markup relative to similar intel chips in say a Dell or HP ultralight

With their price I buy instead Thinkpad graphical workstations, no laptop CPU/GPU combo on Apple's side can match them.

Those ARM Chromebooks are/were the slowest computers on the market. There is nothing with an ARM CPU that "flies" except the new Macs. Using the same benchmark (Geekbench 5) the M1 has a single-core score of ~1700 and contemporaneous ARM competitors like the Lenovo Yoga 5C and the Surface Pro X get 700-750. The other ARM CPUs have equivalent performance to bottom-of-the-line mobile Intel processors from 2012. Apple M1 has the equivalent of Intel processors from some point in the future.

false.

I daily drive a lenovo duet and its absolutely the closest thing to perfection in the modern computing realm. Its a surface go but running arm and chromeos and it flies thru all of my webapps like Framer, Figma, Plectica, Notion, Photopea, Visual Studio Code, Blender etc

m1 is scary fast, but also x64 is dead and needs to be transitioned to the new age. Apple or not this is a major shift in the dev market

and not only in $800+ price

the duet is $300

It's clear that you don't have enough experience with computers other than that one to support the statements you are making. I'm glad it is adequate for your purposes but to say that "it flies" is absurd. The Chromebook Duet scores 27 in the javascript benchmark Speedometer 2, while the MacBook Air scores 234. It is nine times faster. Looking at the single-thread geekbench 5 score, the Duet gets a score of 263, about half the performance of the dual-core Pentium CPU from 2008, a part which AnandTech once reviewed as part of a joke article. There's a supportable argument that the Chromebook Duet is the slowest laptop on the market today, without exception.

Not always. I'm somewhat disappointed with my 2020 16" MBP that I bought after owning a 2015 MBP for 5 years. This one is faster for sure, but also noisier, gets hot often for no good reason (even with the lid closed for the whole day!), takes 7-8 seconds to wake my Eizo monitor, while the previous one would take only a second to do the same.

To be honest and quite unexpectedly the 16" MBP is not the best Mac I ever owned, despite the hype. The display is amazing, the speakers are incredible for a laptop, I'm also glad the T arrow keys are back, but everything else is a disappointment.

Strange, I did exactly the same switch recently and consider the 16" MBP a significant upgrade from my old machine. It even stays completely silent most of the day while the old one would constantly spin the fans.

It is a an upgrade in some ways, no doubt. When Apple said the 16" MBP has the best ever laptop display they were right - it's hard to go back to the previous models after this one.

Something just feels a bit wrong about this machine. Running trivial Swift code in Playground can get it so hot that it becomes uncomfortable to rest it on the lap for example.

Do I need a processor that powerful? I'm not so sure if the price is the unsettling fan noise and being practically constantly warm. And no, there's no 3rd party software that could cause it, it's all Apple apps.

That was true 10 or 20 years ago for sure. These years it’s more of a meh, “hey look the keyboard works well again.”

I went from a 2017 MBP 15" to a 16" 2019 MBP late last year and the keyboard is clearly a big selling point but lets not forget how much better the audio is either. It's under played in most reviews but it's a night and day difference. I feel like I'm in a home theater every time I use it.

Ya, but before improvements were much more noticeable, and now they are much more incremental. They might be nice to have if you even notice them, but they don't really change the experience that much. And that isn't really surprising, when a technology is immature it will grow quickly, and when it matures, it will grow much more slowly.

The recent MacBook Pro's are IMO not superior to the experience of using the first Retina MBP's. I'd rather have that model of MBP's, only with performance increases and without the Touch Bar.

This is the predictable HN response I envisioned after reading the title.

You'd start to have a point if they were only talking about raw performance. But they aren't.

Also, raw performance alone doesn't make things better. My Windows PC almost has the best parts on the market yet things don't always feel faster. The UI even feels slower than my previous one. It's my latest PC, but it's not the best computer I've owned.

I would "start to have a point", really? I will try harder next time.

I don't know what your experience buying computers has been, but my 2012 MBA was the best I'd ever owned. The 2015 MBP was worse, the 2018 MBP I owned was worse than that. The Thinkpad X1 carbon I bought after that was the best I've ever owned, and every time I see my wife struggling with her Macbook I'm glad I finally ditched that rubbish.

Why was the 2015 MBA worse than the 2012 for you? They're basically the same design, and of course the 2015 would be more powerful in absolute terms.

(My primary laptop is a 2014 MBA, and I previously owned ones from 2012 and 2015.)

Sorry I wrote MBA, I meant MBP - it had the terrible keyboard, I also went for a low end CPU and it really felt worse than my 2011 where I max'd out the CPU.

> The 2015 MBA was worse, the 2018 MBP I owned was worse than that.

Was it just the butterfly keys, or some other things too?

> They get better every year, why is this still surprising?

If my pre-butterfly keys MacBook stopped working some time between 2015 and 2019, and I had to get a replacement, I wouldn't consider the MacBooks produced during that era to be "better".

Uh the dell xps 13 I bought in 2016 definitely refutes this experience. That machines touchpad singularly ruined the experience. It’d ghost swipe in strange ways. It was very user hostile. Also there’s the long stagnation of performance during the previous decade.

But generally I agree with you. I just think it’s important to remember it’s not all been a monotonic function of good.

Your experience apparently doesn't include the first paragraph of the article.

I specifically remember the year laptops went from 16:10 displays to 16:9 because ... reasons. Laptops did not get better that year.

Now moving from 16:9 to 16:10 (or 3:2) is called an innovation ...

> They get better every year

For us Apple users, this stopped being true about 4 years back.

people don't remember good

also people have been absolutely IGNORING the massive speed gains and battery life of say an ARM chromebook or surface pro X

apparently only apple does good when they modify the ISA for x64 memory instructions to not have to be emulated so they can pretend rosetta is miles ahead of other virtualization when its hw based...

A chromebook is a toy and a surface pro X is a terrible computer. Apple wasn't the first to transition to ARM, but they were the first to do it right. If they added things to the hardware to enable this, so what?

they ended up shipping the m1 macs running essentially SafariOS so... I guess they wanted to join the ranks of "toys" people can actually use to have all their modern apps run well on (webapps)

idk if you've noticed the transitions going basically as well as it went for other brands minus being able to... point to higher geekbench scores when emulating x64???

never did I think I'd see the day when apple is trying its best to rush literally chromeos but based on bsd out the door at the last second because catalyst barely runs any apps in a useful way

> they ended up shipping the m1 macs running essentially SafariOS

What on earth are you talking about

idk if you are at all familiar with arm computers but they have been out for a while, mainly running things like ChromeOS or for microsoft EdgeOS or "Windows 10 S"

the strategy revolves around using web performance on arm to overshadown the general lack of optimized arm apps. as apples release of the M1 has shown, no apps are really optimized yet even 1 month after launch for an APPLE product...

thats where the SafariOS explanations makes more sense, they essentially just have safari, and a similar but equally broken app store ported from the iPad but with most devs chosing to opt out of supporting safariOS... weird how they mocked google and then pulled a google

Except the M1 Macs with Big Sur ship with Rosetta2, which mitigates a _lot_ of the issues associated with the architectural transition. Most consumers will not notice a difference.

You can't just ignore that and then make the disingenuous claim that it's anything like the Windows ARM situation, especially given the fact that Apple is throwing their entire weight behind the transition which will (eventually) result in most major applications being natively compatible. I'd be curious if anyone thinks that this transition is going to fail somehow

Note that macOS does NOT ship with Rosetta 2. You have to install it afterwards. What's worse, upgrading macOS removes it, so you have to install it after each upgrade (same as with Command Line Tools)

No, the version of macOS on M1 Macs is the exact same version as on Intel Macs. They don't run absolutely every piece of software that Intel Macs do, but it's pretty damn close. It's certainly not even in the same category as something like ChromeOS and ARM Windows.

It sounds like you may be pre-judging the M1 Macs based on your past experiences with ARM desktops/laptops. I strongly suggest that you put those experiences aside when looking at these, because Apple has gone to a great deal of effort to ensure that the experience is as close to the previous iteration as possible, with the benefit of the extra performance and battery life the M1 gives. It's really nothing whatsoever like the comparison between Intel and ARM Windows, or Windows and ChromeOS.

apparently only apple does good when they modify the ISA for x64 memory instructions to not have to be emulated so they can pretend rosetta is miles ahead of other virtualization when its hw based...

Those sneaky bastards – making their products perform better by introducing new features*! Whatever next?

"new features" ah yes I love hw tweaks for benchmark juicers mmmmmmmm shows me so much about what matters in the real world

> shows me so much about what matters in the real world

Assuming you're a developer, how about compile time + battery life remaining? From nearly 2 months ago, this isn't news anymore: https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1328700636926332928

EDIT: Or assuming you like to watch media on a range of devices at home, and share your media with your family and friends, maybe the ability to transcode h264 or h265 content also matters to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK3xVXAd6_o

TL;DW: Plex Transcoder running through Rosetta2 doesn't even break a sweat.

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