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> This honestly seems like a terrible machine.

It does, doesn't it?

My company has thousands of Macbooks. I've never heard of anything remotely similar.

My current laptop is a 2016 model. No repairs needed, ever. Only now the battery is complaining. Not even the butterfly keyboard gave me any issues. It's likely the only repair it will ever need is the battery. Or maybe not even that, it's overdue for a replacement due to age. But works just fine.

I also have a 2015 model. Also fine. Dropped it in concrete. A small dent. Totally fine.

Unless quality has significantly degraded, this sounds like a bad unit/batch.

I think Apple are coasting on the brand perception that they built from back in the day. 10 years ago, Apple was genuinely ahead of competition in terms of reliability but today other software and hardware manufacturers have caught up or surpassed them.

At this point, the OS is the only thing I'm really hooked on.

And ElementaryOS has been coming along fairly well, so I'm hopeful than in ~5 years they'll have something I can fully switch over to for my work computer. Right now, I just use it for my gaming/media pc.

Not just surpassed them, but when you compare Apples to apples, their professional hardware today is utter dogshit.

The most glaring example I can think of is that the Mac Pro isn't built seemingly for anyone. For $6000 you can build a VFX workstation with an overpriced(!) top-of-the-line threadripper and RTX 3090 and 1TB Samsung SSD which performs more than 4 times faster than their $13,000 highest-end CPU configuration. So what has ended up happening? A lot of studios are simply buying high-end PC prebuilts or the studios are building their own systems now for desktop-side compute.

For that price you get 256 GB and some AMD $150 equivalent graphics card, which is worse than what you'd get off some random laptop today.

You're right, it wasn't built for everyone. and the kind of people it WAS designed for don't even blink at $10k

Even studios have budgets. I don't care about spending $6-15k for business hardware per inventory unit, plus you're not purchasing it frequently or in mass orders.

The problem I and a lot of other firms have is the value you're getting for it. It's utter garbage, and has been all over the press for years now, so it's not exactly news.

When big studios and little firms alike are complaining and asking, "Who exactly is this for?" It's clear they don't care about mass professional market consumption. And I'm talking about businesses that are going to spend over $6000 per desktop-compute unit.

The organizations that I have seen are the only relevant customers are the ones who have deep Apple-centric workflows, and they're not buying a lot of the hardware. They might have under 10 units in the office at most.

If the prices were more inline with what the rest of the hardware market looked like, I'd provide Mac Pros to each staff member because it would be a no-brainer.

I'm not really disagreeing with you on the value here.

Just saying the target market is the kind of people who can just drop 10k+ and not care. 6k isn't realistically in the same price category.

For our business, there isn't a difference in between $6 or $15k, but most businesses aren't spending more than $15k per desktop-side compute station even when we max out specs from our partner suppliers, because for that type of budget you can work with very large amounts of data that hit RAM limits on workstation motherboards, versus just large amounts of RAM on consumer motherboards.

Apple's software quality has absolutely tanked over the past 4 years or so. I've gone from 100% Apple devices (starting with a G3 in 1997) to zero as of about 2019 as I got sick of dealing with all the bugs.

Well FWIW, I have a Retina MBP that's close to ten years old. It's been on 24 hours a day, almost everyday since the day I bought it. It's travelled with me to different countries, endured extreme humidity in some areas of the world, and is still running reasonably well today. I've had a lot of computers over the past few decades and it's IMO the best computer I've owned. I skipped out a few generations of MBP's because I didn't feel the need to upgrade.

A few years ago, I bought an XPS because I wanted a PC and it was underwhelming considering I treated it with a lot of extra care. I experienced various bugs running simple games. The fans would go into overdrive despite keeping the drivers up-to-date, raising the laptop to give good airflow, and no graphic intensive program running.

Ultimately, I think it's a bit of a luck of the draw. I don't doubt there are people who have horrible experiences with any brand.

> A few days later

A few days?! Is this not a major problem for you? The author is right - a great thing about Apple is I can pop into a store in many cities around the world and just get things sorted. In some random city in another country with a conference the next day? No problem.

I had Apple replace the battery in my Macbook about 6 months ago and it took two days. There was a minimum 24 hour time frame for them to just diagnose that in fact, they needed to replace the battery.

I went to an Apple authorised service centre in India to repair an iPad screen that was not broken but was not displaying properly. I was told that Apple in India doesn't repair iPad at all. If it is under warranty, they just replace it. Otherwise you are out of luck as no replacement parts are available! Obviously, I wasn't impressed at all.

On the other hand, Intel once replaced a CPU for me (out of warranty) for free (they shipped it from Singapore to India). It was an old CPU (5+ years) and I never thought they would respond to my complain about it.

When one of my Western Digital HDD conked out under warranty, Western Digital asked me if I wanted the replacement drive shipped from the US (as I had purchased it there, and they had a newer model which they offered) or from India (where I was at that time, and had the same model in stock).

Dell, as well as the other OEMs, do offer better warranty SLAs for replacement hardware. I've had techs show up with replacement hardware within 18 hours of contacting support.

I had a US keyboard fixed in London same day (3 hours), no charge. I didn't even have AppleCare. I was a bit surprised, although... London ... big international city - having US keyboards probably isn't out of the realm of possibility. This was... 2009(?) - things may have changed a bit over the years, but that was one of those things that stuck with me.

No, I can just use an external keyboard. The service was normally the next day but they didn't have a keyboard for my machine available, so it needed to be shipped. No problem for me.

When I had to have my MBP fixed under warranty, I brought it into a genius bar and they took nearly a week as they had to order in a part.

YMMV

I had to wait for parts as well. For example, Taiwan and Japan didn't have a Swedish top-case so they had to order one. It took about a week. But I could keep the laptop while they were waiting for the part to arrive. Once it arrived I went back and they fixed it within 24 hours.

I mean any manufacturer will have some unlucky streaks. i've had a few macbooks and all of them are going strong still. some are 15 years old. slower than they were but hopefully they last a while longer.

Funny you write that because OP had a bad experience with their Dell XPS and is thankful for Apple’s service

I thought it was funny that being unable to replace Dell battery while traveling in Japan is seen worse than having crashing and overheating macbook for 2.5 months + all the other problems.

Honestly the swollen battery made me fear for my life any time I used it. On planes it would swell so much (even when turned off) that the keyboard almost popped out.

This is…unwise.

I would never use a machine with a swollen battery, much less fly with one.

Indeed. But I had to take it back to Sweden somehow to get it repaired lol

I know, which is why I felt compelled to comment. Most business class dell machines and XPS can be purchased with next day in-home service. This beats going to a apple store for me.

Like I said in the post, Dell refused to offer any sort of service while I wasn't in the country I had purchased my laptop. I don't know if that's changed, but that was a complete deal breaker for me back then.

same experience in India FYI. Dell XPS support is unparalleled.

> I miss the old days of online nerds before "marketing" teams realized they can really advertise through social media and now you can't even tell what is real.

Yeah, true. When I was new to HN, I had a minor altercation with some mod here because I posted a reply to a particular comment that the poster seemed to be doing paid marketing / shilling for Apple. My comment was deleted and I was reminded that as per HN community rules, I cannot accuse anyone of such things. Annoyed, I replied to the mod that it seemed obvious that the post was paid social media marketing. Someone (I don't remember if it was the mod or another fellow member of HN) pointed out that if the same logic was applied to my critical and negative posts about Apple, someone could make an argument that too was paid social media marketing by Apple's competitors. I was honestly stumped for a moment because negative campaigns are a fact too (e.g. politicians do a lot of negative campaigning through social media; the Chinese are aggressively known to do such kind of negative campaigning by posting negative reviews of their competitors product on Amazon).

That said, it does happen on HN too. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise - the kind of high net worth / IT influential crowd that comes to HN is the very market that Apple (and others) target.