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.
I mean I want to believe Macs are skookum devices but they're really not the best.
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.
Why would I care? If it breaks, I tell my company to pay the repair bill or buy me a new one.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong?
An extra $150 external backup HDD is worth any crash at work, get your company to get it for every dev.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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, 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I am using my unibody ASUS from 2013 with upgraded SATA SSD.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
(0) Same goes for ThinkPads, not every ThinkPad is equal, even if it's the same one.
Which is totally fair, everything is fair. I'm not a negative person. (I think.)
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)