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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, I feel other laptops at the same price point as Apple Macbooks do this too, sometimes even better. I bought a HP 8530w in 2009 or so and it still works. Replacing the DVD drive for a SSD required just a common Philips screwdriver and battery replacements are sold by HP themselves or many others.

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Exactly. Too many people compare a $400 cheap Windows laptop to a $1200 Macbook. Compare like for like, and the thing is likely to last until it's absolutely obsolete. And, while I don't really support this, some might find it an advantage to replace the computer three times for the same price. But people should be comparing to a well built, upgradable laptop (especially those that support not just RAM and disk but also display upgrades and adequate ports), running an operating system that has no arbitrary end of life.

Lenovo or Dell displays are much worse than Apple displays even though the machine costs the same.

Sure, but my macbook pro has cooked it's display /twice/ now. Didn't go to sleep properly, and it overheated in my laptop bag.

No good way to check for it, because no LEDs on the outside. Only way to check is to see if the fans switched on after five minutes in the bag.

You don't want to know what the Dells are capable of doing. My XPS 15 2020 literally got on fire somewhere on the motherboard - not even a battery thing. Then I decided to go Apple only.

I would believe that, because Dell XPS laptops are bad. (I'm in group full of laptop needs who check these things. Anecdotal and "scientifically".)

You are better of with a business or workstation laptop.

I’d love to see an actual serious comparison between an M1 Mac and a $400 laptop. That would be hilarious. Since there are so many of them, can you direct me to one, or even a few?

The point is that with mid-2010s apple laptops, >5 year lifespans are the norm. With the majority of other, even comparably priced laptops, that is the exception.

There are other laptops that are similar or superior build quality to those from Apple (N.B. - older MacBooks, not the newer ones) but those are also easy to spot. They’ll usually be ThinkPads or some XPS models from dell.

> With the majority of other, even comparably priced laptops, that is the exception.

Consumer grade PC hardware has terrible build quality, and regardless of the price of your unit, the consumer build spec is just inferior to the business/professional lines. Asus, MSI, Sony, Acer, etc laptops all have consumer grade build quality and they just aren't designed to last a decade.

> They’ll usually be ThinkPads or some XPS models from dell.

Precision/XPS and Thinkpad models (with the exception of the L and E series) are almost always in the same price range as a MacBook. Any business-class machine (Thinkpad, Precision/Latitude, Elitebook) should easily last >5 years. These are vendors which will sell you 3-5 year on-site warranties for their laptops.

This is why you can find so many off-lease corporate laptops on eBay from any model year in the last 10 years or so. The hardware doesn't break, it just becomes obsolete.

For Dell, at least the business class desktops, they're trash, and are barely useable after 2-3 years and usually have some kind of problem long before that. I'm pretty sure Dell expects most businesses to buy new ones in that time frame.

I really want to like Dell's XPS line. I really do. But their technical support is atrocious. My XPS trackpad stopped working months after purchase, and getting them to repair it was an utter nightmare. Their tech support seemingly hasn't improved at all in the past decade (which is when I last vowed to never buy a Dell again due to their horrible tech support). They may fool me twice, but never again.

(I do hear that their business support is pretty good though)

> and getting them to repair it was an utter nightmare

~8 years ago; within 48h of the laptop breaking - had a Dell repair tech sitting at my kitchen table replacing mainboard on an XPS laptop. Has turnaround when you have the proper support contracts gotten that much worse?

(admittedly, we did pay for the top support tier for a personal device as it was expensed for work. I wouldn't do anything else from any manufacturer though unless I had on-site tech support/replacement.)

Not sure about consumer side, but as a business we have 24h turnaround service with Dell.

Oh that's baloney. There's nothing special about Apple laptops besides the metal case. Arguably they have worse cooling than most PC laptops. My 2018 MBP runs like it's trying cook an egg and has since day one. My Brother's 2012 MBP suffered complete logic board failure after 4 or 5 years.

If it wasn't for the replacement keyboard warranty offered by Apple a good chunk of butterfly keyboard Macs would be useless junk due to the fact it's so hard to replace them. Frayed MagSafe adapters were a regular occurrence. And swollen batteries pushing up the top case not that rare either.

I think maybe people keep MacBooks longer, but it probably has more to do with the fact they spent so much on them that they feel it's worthwhile to repair/pay for AppleCare than them actually being magically more durable.

Except that Apple considers these devices ’vintage' and will not provide OS updates or repairs.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201624

I was using my Dad's old ThinkPad 385XD from 1998 in 2009. Battery was unsurprisingly dead but every other piece was stock and worked although at some point I swapped the worn down trackpoint nub with one of the included spares we still had.

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