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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

Dishwashers are another example. You could buy a commercial one but it will come with no roll-out trays (you load up different plastic racks for different things and you can load a rack while the dishwasher is running) and it’s designed for an environment with lots of ventilation (you just open it when it is done and let the steam get ventilated away) which people are unlikely to have in their own kitchens.

Other items tend to be designed for people who can put more work in regular cleaning and maintenance. You could buy a commercial espresso machine and coffee grinder to make yourself coffee every morning but the machine is designed to warm up at the start of the day, pull a lot of shots, and get thoroughly cleaned later. You will still need to warm it up and make sure it is behaving well before your coffee and you’ll still need to properly clean it afterwards.

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Maintenance is huge.

A lot of products even in the supposedly "disposable" everyday category people buy for lower prices have maintenance instructions that would significantly increase their lifespan if actually followed. Misuse resistance means consumer products generally still work if you skip maintenance the manufacturer told you was necessary (which industrial products might not), but it may shorten the product's lifespan, increase operating costs or reduce performance.

My friend owns a dishwasher. Recently little specks of dirt were left on plates sometimes after the wash completed. Guess what, there's no salt in the softener re-charge. So that dishwasher is soldiering on with hard water instead of soft, and it no longer gets things clean. Fill the salt back up, and sure enough the machine's performance quickly improves. I'm sure lots of people are shouting "That's not maintenance". Well, it probably depends how you look at the problem. From his point of view he purchased "all in one" dishwasher tablets which said he didn't need salt. If he'd examined them very carefully they admit that actually you might still need to add salt periodically, but that wouldn't be very "all in one" so it's not emphasised.

TIL I should read the all in one tab packaging and probably buy salt.

Watch this video: Detergent packs are kinda wishy-washy (Dishwashers Explained)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04

TIL dishwashers have a compartment you're supposed to add salt to? Is this the rinse-aid thing?

Salt helps against hard water, AFAIK.

Yeah, I grew up in a house with well water and we had a water softener for the whole house. I've just never seen a place to add salt in a dishwasher, unless it's the rinse aid.

The salt compartment is usually on the floor of the dishwasher. The salt is used to soften the water. Not directly, but as the source of sodium ions for an ion-exchange resin. [1]

It’s not the same as the rinse-aid, which reduces the surface tension of the water so droplets won’t stay on the dishes (i.e. a surfactant).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_resin#Water_softe...

Not all dishwashers have it. I found that most dishwashers in the US don't have it, so you have to work to find one that does.

If they do, it's usually a compartment at the bottom of the thing with a sealed screw-cap.

Oh, and don't bother buying "dishwasher salt", just buy medium-grain table salt, it's 10x cheaper.

>Oh, and don't bother buying "dishwasher salt", just buy medium-grain table salt, it's 10x cheaper.

Is it the same thing?

Pretty much, the only difference is that dishwasher salt might dissolve easier in water, but it doesn't matter much, it's still just table salt.

In one sense, "Yes". A water softener using this principle just needs a source of Sodium ions, and Sodium Chloride aka salt is exactly what's called for in this application. They do literally just need salt.

But in another sense, "No". The people selling you table salt know it's for cooking and eating not to run a water softener, so they may tweak the product for these purposes. The product should be labelled, but we saw earlier that people don't read the fine print.

For example isn't it annoying when the little grains of salt stick together in a salt shaker? In some environments it's difficult to prevent plain salt from doing that, especially if it sits in the shaker for a few weeks because you (sensibly) don't use extra salt in most food. But an anti-caking agent reduces this problem while not making any difference (in a tiny quantity) to the taste or dietary effects of the salt. A water softener does not need anti-caking agents, so the manufacturer recommends using dishwasher salt.

Another example: Humans are supposed to have the element iodine in their diet. Some countries historically had a big problem with insufficient iodine, and so the "ordinary" table salt in those countries is laced with (a tiny amount of) iodine. Result: Fewer children with mental development problems. A water softener has no need for iodine, maybe it makes no difference, it clearly can't help, hence, the recommendation specifically for dishwasher salt.

Did you also watch: Detergent packs are kinda wishy-washy (Dishwashers Explained)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04

That video (and channel) are truly great.

> Dishwashers are another example.

Commercial dishwashers, esp. the fast cycle ones beat the living light of any mugs/plates/etc. unless they're plain white.

They use way more pressure and heat, and resulting clean is much more aggressive, shortening life of everything inside them. Only plain glass and plain porcelain came out relatively unaffected. All decorations doesn't stand a chance.

This is why some mugs denote "Safe for normal dishwasher use".

I stayed at an art school that was housed in an old military barracks. They had a massive steel dishwasher that used hot water and pressurized air to just blast the dirt off. It was extremely loud, and only needed about 10 seconds.

I want one.

I wondered why dinnerware said “for domestic use only”, but I now have an ex-commercial set and it’s an entirely different kind of china to domestic.

To reiterate for people thinking they might get a commercial kitchen dishwasher for their dream kitchen build: They're not the same thing.

Presuming you have enough workspace to place one of the plastic racks down beside your prewash sink, loading the trays is way more ergonomic than loading+unloading a regular dishwasher. They don't just do it for throughput. Personally, I'd love to have a residential-class dishwasher that has that kind of modular load system. Would be wonderful on my back.

> and it’s designed for an environment with lots of ventilation

Speaking of, you know what the #1 thing I would design into a residential kitchen if I were building one from the ground up? A fume hood. Just a literal chemistry-lab fume hood box, but where the shroud folds away and the base of it is an induction cooktop. (In other words, it's just a really fancy above-the-range ventilation system.)

Imagine what you could do with that:

• No fear of burning your food setting off your smoke alarm — just drop/shut the shroud around the cooktop, and all the smoke would definitely be going out the vent, not into your house.

* You can grill indoors (with e.g. a Hibachi) with no fear of CO / CO2 poisoning. (Just shut the shroud while the food cooks, and only open it at the end. As a bonus, the extra airflow will make the grill into a convection grill!)

* You can vent your kitchen (and through it, the rest of your house) really quickly, if you're e.g. clearing something rotten out of your fridge.

* You can do real chemistry to make stuff, if you like. For example, given a fume hood, it'd be safe to make a CO2 generator to refill your soda-carbonator gas canister.

* Landlords would no longer have to worry about their tenants turning a house into a meth lab, because even if they did, the house would in some sense be safe to use as a meth lab, with much lower risk of volatile chemical explosions.

There is a lot I want to appropriate from chemistry labs for my kitchen besides fume hoods, which kind of makes sense because they both overlap in many similar activities for my use case (meal prep once a week to once a month when I have sufficient freezer space). I'm willing to pay the premium for repairability, maintainability and time efficiency to optimize that use case.

Laboratory-grade flooring: epoxy resin. Durable protection, withstand frequent pedestrian traffic. Slip resistance. Impermeable, non-absorbent surface, resists chemical exposure. Low maintenance, easy and economical cleaning and sanitizing properties.

Floor drains and gullies with oil/water separator.

Compressed air supply.

Chilled water supply.

Overhead service carriers for power, chilled water, hot water, natural gas, and air.

Lab-grade furniture, especially countertops.

All packaged in a proven layout taken from modern submarine galley designs.

This isn't from a lab (but from a sushi restaurant), to indicate I don't have a "kitchen as lab" fetish: circulating water Teflon-lined raceway behind all counter runs catches debris that is diverted to a auto-turned compost pile, and the excess moisture of the pile drained off to crops, which in turn drain off to an aquaculture pond.

I could go on, but my ideal dream kitchen would at first glance would probably look like a very cramped lab. "Modern" residential kitchens cause me all kinds of unnecessary movement and labor for my specific use case.

> Laboratory-grade flooring: epoxy resin. Durable protection, withstand frequent pedestrian traffic. Slip resistance.

This can't be overstated. There's a lot of overlap between safety in labs, and safety in (especially professional) kitchens. Heck, there's more danger in kitchens with how familiar people are with processes, causing them to lower their guard.

The biggest parallels are probably the slip resistance, and the protective clothing. If you weren't aware, most chefwear is super easy to remove, has a hydrophobic coating, is not tight-fitting, usually layers over itself where it fastens, and often uses fasteners that are completely separate from the garment. (all of these examples are a result of me thinking about the dangers of scalding-hot fryer oil as in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI)

I think lab coats and chef jackets are similar, but one targets corrosive liquids, and the other targets dangerously hot liquids.

TL;DR: get some labcoats, teflon pants, protective shoes, and eye protection for your kitchen.

This is the same for laptops, but most of the people (I assume?) buy Macbooks for programming which is... kinda weird, since it's difficult to repair. Than business laptops like the Z-book, ThinkPad or insert Dell business laptop eg; Latitude 7000 series (Dell XPS isn't a business laptop from my perspective.)

I agree, the Z-book are really amazing, but HP still has a bad reputation so it is hard to make people realize how far they went with this serie (from the old modela to the recent ones).

I agree that the Dell XPS line does not reaaly fit the "business" look-and-feel like a Latitude or Thinkpad. But after several years of doing heavy sofware dev on one, it is has earned my respect. It is nice to have a machine with a non-brick-like form that still does not compromise in performance (and you can bring to a businesses meeting and not look too RBG....). IMHO the XPS line is designed to compete with MBPs as high-end work-capable machines and it does a darn good job of it...

Except my $3500 XPS 9500 (64GB RAM 2TB, 8 core CPU, Nvidia 1650Ti, 4K Touch Display) that thermal throttles so much that a 3 years older MBP gives much much better performance and I continued using that machine for work. Fortunately by switching teams at work I was then able to get a new Mac and I'm thrilled with my M1!

I spoke with a very nice person from Dell via Twitter who out of personal interest went above and beyond to help me calibrate that XPS, but no luck. Booting Windows is enough for fans to reach max speeds and thermal throttling to begin.

Yeah, I will concede that one to you. I have heard that the thermal paste on some of those XPS models was complete trash. Know some folks that had some luck re-applying new paste, but that does not really absolve Dell....

My friend had a Toshiba Satellite that was running the fans at 100% all the time. The fins on the radiator we’re blocked with dust. Easy to fix - unscrew the bottom plate and unscrew the fan and make the airflow path clean again. Low risk fix as they were about to throw it out it was so annoying. Sometimes it is unobvious how to remove the bottom plate - usually there will be a video on YouTube for the model.

Yeah, the Dell is not that problem, but just saying for others that other brand/model laptops with the same symptom might be easy to fix.

Mine, this goes away if I restore windows factory image or boot to linux.

The windows refresh joy typically lasts about two weeks and then the jet engine starts again, laggy, some long waits - something in some windows apps/drivers it really does not seem to like and I havent tracked it down yet.

I had an XPS M1330 about 10 years ago, and if I could figure out the apparent thermal issue I might still use it sometimes. At the time I found it incredibly portable (compared to my iBook and ThinkPad) without being slow, and the design was striking yet professional. Dell still isn't my favorite brand, but they've come a long way from the crappy Dimensions I had in the early 2000s.

Dell ca. 2000 had some great stuff. Optiplex desktops were good, Latitude laptops were good. Anything that they sold out of an insert in the Sunday paper was junk.

See, there's my problem. I had a handful of Dells in the mid-2000s that all came out of the cheap end of the catalog, and I skimped on some of the specs to fit them in the budget. I did definitely get my $20 worth out of the optional floppy drive, though.

> it's difficult to repair.

we don't care really, they are still great. Besides, they don't break much (typing this on mbp 2015 while waiting for m1 16" to happen)

> Latitude 7000 series (Dell XPS isn't a business laptop from my perspective.)

I'm writing from a Dell Latitude 7390.

If this had the trackpoint, ThinkPads would be dead to me.

It's 99% perfect. So much so that I'm thinking of gettin an exact replica as a personal laptop.

Macs are not generally repairable, but some models are incredibly reliable.

I’ve been using a 2012 MBPr that still works great/is pristine, other than losing some rubber feet.

Having a user friendly OS with *nix-ish tooling in a high build quality package is (debatably) only available from Apple. I will happily upgrade to an M1 MBP once the next gen is released.

2012 model MBP is the most repairable macbook I owned.

Emphasis on some though. My previous Macbook (2013 or 2014?) had a screen delamination issue. My current one (2016) had an issue with the speakers that required the whole top to be replaced - known issue, recall program, etc but still, and currently has another known issue with the ribbon cable to the screen being broken so the colors go all weird. It's impractical and too expensive to fix, but it's the kinda thing that shouldn't need to be fixed. And of course there's the issue some models have with the cruddy keyboard, etc.

I mean I want to believe Macs are skookum devices but they're really not the best.

Yeah, there was a bad spell in the mid/late 2010s with the butterfly keyboard failures and the "stage light" display issues. I skipped these on my 2012 personal mac, and somehow work issued devices never ran into them.

Assuming Apple has figured out recent design issues, I'll be interested to see the longevity of the current generation. It seems like the thermals on the M1 are fantastic, which should minimize non-mechanical failures. Time will tell I guess.

> kinda weird, since it's difficult to repair.

Why would I care? If it breaks, I tell my company to pay the repair bill or buy me a new one.

Because it's annoying and will interrupt your work much longer, especially if it's something that could have been easily fixed in e.g. a Thinkpad. Even more so, if it's your own device.

I have to disagree. One of the reasons I've used Macbooks for work for ages now is if something goes wrong, I can just pop over to the apple store and have a replacement within about 30 minutes. Don't even have to restore, can just target boot my backup and be back working immediately, and can save the restore until the evening. I've had one instance where this saved me 5 figures easily (wasn't even the macbook's fault, I fell on my bike going over rail road tracks).

Yeah, you pay a premium in terms of price for that, but it's a no brainer imo.

That said, I have a lot of Dell hardware I like too. I still use two 2407wfp wide gamut monitors on my gaming PC and don't see any reason to change them until there's a 4k monitor I really want. They're bulletproof, and I even bought them used off Dell's outlet site.

That's you, but a lot of people don't live next to the Apple store and with business laptops, people come to you, to replace the device , repair or anything else.

Yup. I have coworkers in central America where getting a new apple is both a huge PITA and far more expensive than in the US.

One of my other friends had a Dell service business for a couple years, so I'm definitely familiar with how it all works. He uses macbooks these days too.

Working with smaller / early stage startups I've never had an IT dept that I could pass it off onto.

With Apple Business leasing-program laptops, Apple Store employees come to you to replace/repair the device. Of course, that only exists in the places that Apple Stores do.

This didn't work out for me in spite of going to the apple store: I was told to drop off my laptop. They then proceeded to 'lose track' of the machine and I eventually got it back after nearly 5 weeks and multiple escalations with 'customer support'. This is a 6 month old mbp pro 16" from work with applecare.

Exactly this. You make yourself and your ability to work depend on applecare. If everything works fine, lucky for you, if not well that is when the problem starts.

When you repair the device yourself you are independent from such a service. You could get hardware parts from any store you like and you might have some replacement parts at home.

Don't get me wrong I don't think that applecare is bad, but I do think it is better to have more options. Therefore I think it is best to have something like applecare plus the ability to repair the device yourself if necessary.

Because it’s wasteful and pollutes.

Migrating to a new machine is a PITA that inflicts misery for quite a long time.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong?

Migration Assistant on a Mac has pretty painless for me for years. If you attach a thunderbolt cable between the two computers, it can migrate a 2TB SSD in usually under a couple hours.

Yes - have a backup of your dev machine to restore from. Apple’s TimeMachine is a godsend. I’ve never had a windows backup program work w/o a lot of fuss.

An extra $150 external backup HDD is worth any crash at work, get your company to get it for every dev.

Activia True image can do the job on Windows. Making a whole image on everything in your computer.

Because when it breaks, your company won't want to use 3rd party repair, so they will send it straight to Apple. That means that it will take at least a month to get back and all your data getting erased is pretty much a guarantee, even if all that was broken was one resistor in the power supply circuit.

Even if they buy a new one, how long will it take you to set it up from scratch?

Meanwhile, any other vendor will have competent technicians available almost anywhere (with a support package maybe even 24/7/365), who will be able to at worst transplant your storage media into a working machine while they refurb your old one. The downtime can be shorter than a big Windows update.

A modern Mac laptop uses a motherboard where everything is soldered on, everything is tiny, and it's basically impossible to repair. Leaving aside whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact that you should know up front.

Consequently, most failures are "repaired" by swapping the motherboard, and so your flash drive contents are gone.

Happily, you are using Time Machine (right?) and so you plug your backup drive into a spare machine, do the restore, and you're back to where you were an hour before the disaster. You do the same again when your newly repaired machine comes back from the store.

Yeah, it sucks more than swapping an SSD. But hey, you knew that before you bought a shiny, thin, light Macbook.

Board-Level repair isn't that difficult with the right tools. Plenty of 3rd party repair, as well as Apple's refurbishment do it just fine. The only real reason it's impossible to repair is an artificial lack of parts/documentation.

Ok, sure -- I was lazy. It's sometimes possible, but it doesn't make economic sense.

Paying for people and equipment to can safely swap a motherboard and reassemble the laptop is not cheap, but it's not expensive.

Paying people who can diagnose a fault in a modern motherboard, do the board-level repair, test it, and turn it around to the customer doesn't make sense. Do a quick board swap and be done with it. Maybe forward the faulty board to some central facility for refurb or at least analysis to find out what's breaking in the field.

This isn't unique to Apple -- very little consumer electronics is repaired because it isn't worth the cost.

Now Apple makes the choice to solder everything on the motherboard (both for size & weight, and likely reliability reasons too). That means even peripheral failures junk the whole motherboard. But that's a trade-off they, and their customers, make.

> ...and it's basically impossible to repair.

While Louis Rossmann [1] is well-known in the US for basing an entire, profitable small business around boards' component-level repair in one of the most unforgiving retail service markets in the US (NYC midtown Manhattan) [2], there are hundreds of shanzhai and tens of thousands of more generalized repair shops in China [3] who also demonstrate that with sufficient specifications and parts availability, what appears "basically impossible to repair" becomes the start of a journey towards a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem.

Apple has led the industry in the past, and is hopefully leading the way towards such a cradle-to-cradle future. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their recent designs that are perceived by Rossmann and others as anti-RTR (Right To Repair) are more unintentional side effects of their rapid vertical integration design strategy (the A* and M1 processors being only the most visible part of the strategy).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann

[2] https://www.rossmanngroup.com/

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-broke-my-phones-screen-awes...

> This is the same for laptops, but most of the people (I assume?) buy Macbooks for programming which is... kinda weird, since it's difficult to repair.

Personally, I don't think I've found anything that beats Apple's laptop trackpads, and I think that my UX matters more than repairability.

Then again, I'm still using a 2013 MacBook Pro with an upgraded NVMe SSD.

Idk, not being able to get it fixed without data loss in the case of even a minor hw failure seems like pretty bad UX to me...

…and all the time you’re not having your MacBook in for repair, its trackpad is still night & day better than its competitors. This was true in 2009 and somehow remains true in 2021 (though it would be a very pleasant surprise to be proven wrong)

I've heard the latest Surface lineup and the XPS 13 have trackpads that seriously rival Apple's. Up until a few years ago, however, it was true that nothing came close to Apple.

Although personally, the lack of a touchscreen on any of Apple's laptops is much more of a dealbreaker for me and despite working remotely, I really don't use a trackpad for work all that often. I imagine RSI would be unavoidable if you used it constantly, wouldn't it?

I’ll have to test those out the next time I’m in a store with an electronics department. I don’t have any desire to re-learn Windows as my main OS, but having some hand-on demo would still be more than the approximately zero Windows usage I’ve had in the past 5 years.

I never considered the RSI angle about the attraction of touch screens. I still have exactly zero desire to do serious work on a touchscreen where I’d have my fingerprints overlapping the display. Plus, I imagine touchscreens would be less ergonomic than a trackpad in a normal laptop form factor.

Regarding RSI, I was thinking more trackpad vs mouse, not trackpad vs touchscreen - I want a touchscreen (with a stylus) for other reasons like photo editing and taking notes. In theory, a trackpad looks to me like a device perfectly designed to cause RSI, so I always carry a mouse with me, but I know many people use them a lot without any issues.

And yeah, I totally get not wanting to use Windows on a daily basis - win10 is a mess and I really only keep it installed for Adobe software and a few games. But the hardware of "Windows" laptops is quite competitive with Apple's these days.

If you don’t have a (preferably bootable) backup that you can use any time your machine explodes / gets dropped / gets soaked in coffee / gets a random hardware failure / gets hit by a ransomware / is stolen - then you have a serious redundancy problem no matter what OS you are running.

On any OS you use it’s possible to have both a long-term backup and a bootable drive clone that is synced from your internal drive and updated on a schedule. I haven’t needed to use it often, but when I did it was priceless to be back up and running 30 minutes later without having to waste two days setting up a new machine or losing any data.

meh, acumulating state is bad. You're much better off with automations That can recreate your environment than bootable backups.

Of yeah, definitely, and Apple makes it far easier than other OS vendors. But I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of people don't actually do that - even programmers, sysadmins, etc.

> Of yeah, definitely, and Apple makes it far easier than other OS vendors.

Unfortunately, it seems like the Apple Fabric storage system on the M1 laptops broke bootable backups, and it's possible that Apple has no plans to fix this:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/05/24/apples-moves-poin...

> Personally, I don't think I've found anything that beats Apple's laptop trackpads,

Trackoads are one of those items that I don't know of a good way to compare them, because most differences become unnoticeable habits over time. Sure, there's an obvious difference between a 20-year old copier whose buttons require a small hammer to activate and modern capacitative touchscreens, but beyond that I can't tell much difference.

Definitely if I use the trackpad on a new computer or on somebody else's computer, it feels wrong. The mouse moves to quickly or too slowly. The mouse continues moving after I thought I lifted my finger up, or stops slightly too soon. But those feel more like acclimatizing to a particular set of device parameters, rather than there being anything actually better or worse with the device.

You're totally right.

I am using my unibody ASUS from 2013 with upgraded SATA SSD.

Repairability is a red herring. As a professional, I care about “time in service” and “maintenance cost”.

A completely unrepairable tool that is in service a lot longer for way less maintenance? I take that any day of the week.

And here’s the thing, I don’t really care that you can repair your Dell. I wouldn’t be able to do so without putting in a lot of time and it would be a little stressful. Reducing that time requires a significant investment.

I find it less stressful when I know that I could easily swap out a broken RAM module and continue to work, than to wait for the repair of my device.

How does RAM break? How often does it fail?

RAM is just an example. In my Thinkpad (T430) I'm able to swap out the CPU, mainboard, keyboard or screen if necessary, like in an ordinary PC. The question is, how likely is it that some component will break. From my experience it's not very unlikely over a lifespan of a few years. I mean sure you can have luck with all your computers and you never have any hardware failures, but I wouldn't count on that.

The failure mode I've seen most often is that one bit of each byte will fail to store or retrieve correctly. Memtest86 will store an FF and read back an EF, for example. Computers with this problem may boot, but crash often.

The other failure mode I've seen is that a RAM module will fail to be recognized or cause a POST error, and the computer will not boot until it is replaced.

Neither happens often, but I've seen each of these more than I'd like. I could imagine both issues might possibly be less likely with a solid soldered connection vs. a port which can become damaged or dusty, but I don't have enough experience with soldered RAM modules to be able to say anything about its reliability.

Presuming a centralized corporate IT department that has 100+ of the same laptop in service, one advantage of repairability over time-in-service is that two half-broken laptops can be made into one working laptop. Very-repairable products are essentially just bags of parts that happen to come assembled; you can buy a few extra, take them apart, and now you have a couple of full sets of parts to use to repair any problem that comes up in the rest of the "fleet."

If you have a centralized corporate IT department you probably also have a maintenance contract with eg Dell. It's much faster and easier to just keep a stock of ready-to-go spare machines so you can immediately swap out any broken ones, then send those broken ones back to Dell to be repaired or replaced and returned to you to replenish your ready-to-go stock.

This is how it works on most industrial job sites - your drill breaks, you go to the locker and check out another one. When the Hilti guy comes around, he collects the broken ones and they get serviced or replaced.

Interesting. I've been buying thinkpads throughout most of my career. However, my latest laptop is a XPS 13. I really enjoy it, I use it to develop and it works very well both in docked mode as well as on the go. It's lightweight and super powerful yet quiet.

Meanwhile, my business laptop, the one the company provides me, has been macbooks for the most part, recently I've got a dell latitude. The latitude is one of the worst laptops I've had, bulky, heavy, noise. Yet, in terms of performance, I can't say I really see any differences in my day to day usage. On top of it all, the bluetooth is constantly causing issues, which I've never had with any of my previous laptops.

What do you like about the dell latitude line?

There are differences between Laptop lines from the same manufacturer. (0) I especially mentioned Latitude 7000 series. Anything else may be worse.

(0) Same goes for ThinkPads, not every ThinkPad is equal, even if it's the same one.

My work laptop is a dell 7420, my personal one is a dell xps 13. I can't come up with one thing that's better in the latitude laptop. Maybe it has a usb port? But that's irrelevant while docking and on the go, everything is either bluetooth or usb-c these days.

> I can't come up with one thing that's better in the latitude laptop.

Which is totally fair, everything is fair. I'm not a negative person. (I think.)

That's nice. I just wanted to know what makes it a better machine. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Those easily repairable laptops are also significantly thicker than my 11" Macbook Air.

> You could buy a commercial espresso machine and coffee grinder to make yourself coffee every morning but the machine is designed to warm up at the start of the day, pull a lot of shots, and get thoroughly cleaned later.

It is. But with home use you don’t pull 300+ shots, it can be cleaned less. I have a 20 something year old Cimbali and it’s just great. It’s on a smart plug to turn on early and warm up.

It had a load of leaks and I decided to upgrade, but first talked to the local agent. He gave 4 washers and said try them.

20 mins later it’s completely fixed at a cost of $0. That’s the only repair it’s had in the years I have owned it. I thoroughly clean it every few weeks.

Tangentially related: if you do want an amazing electric coffee grinder, feel free to piggy back on my countless hours of research and go with this: Baratza Virtuoso+

It is excellent.

I’m suspicious.

How much static electricity does it generate? That is my biggest complaint on burr grinders, they act like Van de Graaff generators and then the grounds get stuck all over the machine.

In my two days of usage so far…. not much. I read about other grinders having issues with grounds being stuck in the container but this one doesn’t appear to have that problem.

I think I read that the + model has a redesigned ground container to tackle the static issue - had seen some mention that static was more of an issue with the older “non +” model

Add a miniscule amount of water to your beans before grinding

This is the way. The best way is to run the handle of a teaspoon under the tap and stir it through the grinds before grinding.

It doesn't matter if "burr grinders suffer from static build up" when they're categorically far better than anything else when it comes to grinding.

OMG. I have battled the grinder static thing for… years, decades, and did not know this. Thank you

I assume distilled water?

Depends a lot on the roast for me. Darker ones seem to lace less flaky floaty bits after grinding

In the spirit of OP, the main navbar on Baratza’s website links to an article titled:

STOP! Don’t Dump It – Fix It!

https://baratza.com/stop-dont-dump-it-fix-it/

Impressive. Next time my Breville strips its gears, I'll try to remember to give these guys a try. It probably won't be long.

Concur. Nice to see my own conclusions validated, I really like mine.

Just bought one two days ago. Reviews were good, and I’m not disappointed.

(Paired with a Moccamaster)

Can I ask: What grind do you use for your Moccamaster?

Currently using grind setting 18, 68g beans (darker roast) for a full brew on the Moccamaster

What's the main difference between Virtuoso+ and Encore? From just a quick glance, Virtuoso+ has a number of features that aren't very useful (like a timer, or LEDs/display) while having seemingly identical burr system?

I have one of these, the LED is dumb but the digital timer is really nice for repeatability in how much you grind.

Wasn’t willing to pay even more for one with a scale

I have a Macap M5D. This has a timer with three presets. It’s perfect and while expensive, even second hand, I wouldn’t say it’s overkill for home use. The timer means I don’t get the grind wrong. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want one. I suppose I’m quite good at ‘eyeballing’ the quantity now, but the timer means consistency.

Generally, I'd advise against storing coffee in the bean loader. They aren't really hermetically sealed, so your beans will go stale.

I always grind to measure, in which case I don't need timer.

I believe the Virtuoso also comes with a better M2 burr set. The Encore can be upgraded to it.

I bought an encore after much research myself and had to return it after just a few weeks. It started grinding my beans to an ultra fine espresso type consistency no matter what setting I used. After much troubleshooting, they sent me a new unit (in transit now), but not a great experience from the device perspective (customer service was great).

On the other hand: if you drink 1-2 cups of coffee a day, and don't mind putting in some elbow grease — a manual grinder like a Comandante or Kinu often produces much better grinds for the same price, since money can be allocated towards a better burr set instead of a motor.

I've had a few friends whose only experience with a manual grinder was a Hario Skerton or its clones, and get turned off manual grinding because of how bad the experience is. The pricier hand grinders have much better UX.

Absolutely. Much prefer a small hand-operated device that I can easily store in a cupboard to a big heavy device with a cord that needs to be near an outlet and takes up counter space all the time.

I have come to really, really resist buying plug-in kitchen gadgets. I have a few, such as a toaster and a kettle, that I actually use. For anything else I've found that they just end up living in the back of a base cabinet and I forget that I have them.

I was ready to go all-in on manual grinders. But their supply chain completely evaporated in the pandemic, and I could not find one I wanted anywhere. For months. That ended that.

What brands were those?

It looks like 1zpresso and Timemore are readily available, at least, and the 1zpresso JX Pro is top-of-the-line.

Kinu was the worst offender, and Comadante nearly as bad.

Life hack: link your manual grinder to a drill. Now you have a automatic grinder that’s reasonably priced and have a superb burr.

Have not tried this myself but I was told by a professional this is way cheaper and better than any automatic grinder below USD$1000, if you’re spending around $200 for a top end hand grinder

I hear an electric screwdriver works too. :)

Grinding coffee beans manually helps me get that little bit of arm exercise though.

The main issue with doing this is the potential to damage your grinder. Your arm has a built in torque limiter, has a feedback loop and only operates at a low speed. If you want to do this with a drill I would recommend one with a torque limiter and a variable speed so you can use it at a low speed.

There are also other niceties that proper electric grinders give you.

I have a Vario, that has struggled with a fine espresso grind. The burrs are ceramic but the carriage is plastic and it affects the tolerance. I gave up repairing/troubleshooting it and bought a beat to hell SuperJolly off EBay for $170.

Dropped in a new set of burrs and have an unstoppable overkill grinder with a huge motor and all metal parts

If you want espresso you probably want steel burrs mounted in steel with good bearings.

If you are on a budget and don't want to spend £500 ($700 + tax and shipping) on a niche then you can usually find used smaller commercial machines. Research the burrs they use and see if you can find new burrs, this way you can spend probably somewhere around $200 on what would function like a brand new high quality burr grinder.

Yes, that’s what I did. The Super Jolly I bought is a commercial machine (by Mazzer) and I put new OEM steel burrs in it.

This is oversimplifying it a little.

Yes Baratzas are great grinders but they are not one-size-fits-all depending on what kind of coffee you make. For example Baratza Encore is everyone’s darling with good reason (I have one and I use it for espresso every day!) but it’s not a great espresso grinder because fundamentally speaking its tiny motor just doesn’t have enough torque to drive big burrs, so it has small ones. Which means when you grind at espresso sizes it’s going to lose its tight spread and it’ll output some grains that are too big for espresso, some are too small and some are just right. Since espresso is very dense coffee, this is something that is very clearly tastable even to a skeptical non-expert like me.

This spread of grain sizes is something to some degree any grinder does, but grinders designed for espresso have tighter spreads, so they provide much more of the size you want (so your water can actually pass through) and much less of what you don’t want.

Incidentally this is something I like about specialty coffee industry compared to other connoisseur stuff like wine. Wine experts walk around talking about the earthy aromas, if some coffee ‘expert’ tries to do the same, someone in the audience busts out a refractometer and says ‘aight, let’s see’.

It’s still a money pit, but it’s at least on a much more scientifically solid ground.

Thanks.

I’ll add a pointer towards Mazzer grinders too.

The key is to buy them when they are described as broken, then they are very cheap. As far as I can tell they are almost never broken as such. Either something inside needs plugging back in, or the on/off switch needs replacing (it’s got spades on it, so just plug a new one in).

They are nearly entirely metal, with the few plastic components readily available.

The are quite easy to sand and repaint too, so you can match them to other bits of equipment or decor. The correct colour choice is a 1970s orange.

And if you want an overkill coffee grinder, get a Kafatek Monolith, or a Weber Workshops model.

You are right, but there are some exceptions. For example, I own a commercial Miele dishwasher and it's exactly like their consumer version but even more robust and simple. Furthermore, it's equipped with gigantic blades to destroy food leftovers.

Other examples of overkill objects I like are some commercial vacuums for clean room environments with spectacularly good filtration and seals, therefore no itching if you are allergic to dust (e.g. some Nilfisk made in Denmark). Or industrial fanless PCs which are sealed and have fantastic copper coolers (e.g. Compulab, Tranquil and many others).

A commercial dishwasher is like an entirely different appliance. It is designed to be fast. It achieves this by requiring rinsing, being hotter (and staying hot) and more aggressive, and by not having a dry cycle (you just open the door and let the steam out).

Time is important in cleaning, and home dishwashers take advantage of that by running for several hours at low power, it is not like you are going to need these plates immediately after you have finished eating.

About commercial espresso machines, another thing to consider is that these machines usually require plumbing. There are high end home espresso machines that are also built like tanks and will serve you better unless you are planning to pull hundreds of shots a day. Commercial machines have an advantage when it comes to temperature stability because they are so big and heavy but smaller machines are still able to do an impressive job.

You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee.

The reason those big £3000+ machines are impractical for the home is not the cleaning or even the warm-up time (as both of those factors are the same for any espresso machine even the home ones) but rather with the fact that the bar grade espresso machines expect to be plumbed into a reverse osmosis filter and take up a shitload of space.

Commercial machines may need a little bit more time to warm up but I still let my gaggia warm up for around 15 minutes before I use it otherwise I find consistency falls and I just get frustration.

Regarding cleaning, the process is the same for home machines and just needs to be performed less often (I do this around once every week depending on use. I pour 1-4 shots a day every day). There are powdered detergents which are used to backflush the group head and solenoid valve to clear out coffee oils, this process takes about 5 minutes to perform and doesn't require much manual effort except for clearing out the drip tray and wiping things down a bit.

When it comes to cleaning the boiler, this isn't done by disassembling the machine or anything crazy like that. An acidic solution of usually some combination of primarily citric acid and/or potassium bitartrate is added to the water reservoir, the boiler is then flushed to get the solution in the boiler, I will then usually leave it in for 15 minutes with the boiler turned off to prevent water from boiling (to make sure all areas of the boiler are in contact with water at all times). Then this gets flushed with clean filtered water to get rid of the acid.

This process takes longer but also doesn't require much work.

Anything under £600 will give you mediocre espresso (due to grind inconsistency and temperature stability problems) or fauxpresso (any pod machine or bean to cup machine basically maxes fauxpresso, there are very expensive commercial grade true-espresso bean to cup machines but these, even when dialled in correctly, still usually make a mediocre espresso).

Any machine (even the fauxpresso ones) will likely require almost as much cleaning effort. Any manufacturer which claims otherwise (especially for bean-to-cup machines) is just trying to reduce the lifetime of your machine so it fails out of warranty and you buy another one.

A commercial bean grinder is amazing but expensive.

> You need to spend at least £600 to get a decent home espresso set up but it will get you something pretty close to good cafe grade coffee.

There are also the lever espresso makers like the Flair or Cafelat Robot, which are cheaper, more robust (no fancy heating elements), but also a bit more troublesome.

I was including the cost of a hand-grinder. I guess you could say with a manual machine you could get down to somewhere around £300.

I am a big fan of my first espresso machine - the Rancilio Silvia. It’s got many commercial components in a small form factor. It’s easily repairable too, but probably doesn’t need it.

Mine did approximately 15,000 coffees in the 20 years of use it had, and had one service for about $US75. It’s still around as an emergency backup.

It’s shown in the wiki. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancilio

Rancilio Silvia also warms up very quickly - faster than boiling a kettle. I've had one for > 20 years, it's had a few repairs but still going strong.

You can extend the lifetime of your espresso machine quite a lot by using calibrated water.

Certainly london water would kill any espreso machine in no time flat but would also kill the flavour of any espresso it makes. Most people who lived in areas with terrible water would be filtering it somehow at least through a brita filter.

I distill brita filtered water and then re-mineralise it by adding solutions of various minerals in specific quantities. Although not everyone has the time for that. I think brita filtered water and a good regular descaling cycle should be more than enough to make any machine last a very long time.

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