Ask HN: MacBooks seems to be the only viable option these days | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: MacBooks seems to be the only viable option these days

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I've used ThinkPads all the way from the IBM days and those good old solid Dell computers too.

Recently, I decided it was time for an update. I use Linux on the often so it was important for me to purchase a laptop that was compatible.

I bought 2 laptops, all of which I had to return in the last 2 months.

1. Dell XPS: I spent over 20+ hours with their support going back and forth. I also had a tech come to my house to replace my motherboard before I gave up and demanded a return

2. Lenovo Carbon X1: The laptop came with a faulty keyboard so I just returned it because I didn't want to wait 30 days for a mail-in repair or drive 2 hours to go to a "local" repair shop. They also made me order the laptop 3 times because their system kept cancelling it for whatever reason so it took an insane amount of time to just purchase the laptop (I spent ~6 hours to just purchase the laptop)

Maybe I'm just unlucky but the time I spent and energy I spent to just purchase these laptops shows you why people buy from Apple instead. I strongly dislike MacOS because they force the "apple way" of doing things. But it seems to be the only option these days to buy a computer with ease and get a computer "that just works". My Macbook was more expensive but the time I saved outweighs the price imo.

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I may be an outlier, but for me, the problem with non-mac machines is that they seem just careless.

Steve jobs famously said "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.", and this seems true to me for almost all hardware manufacturers, and to a larger degree still for software.

Why does nobody care about creaking plastic? About sticky-feeling texture? About uneven weight distribution? About the sound that materials make when handling them? About flickering in software? About inconsistent spacing? About janky color combinations?

There has been amazing workmanship for thousands of years. The Minoan culture made golden jewellery out of sub-milimeter spheres. Why should we now tolerate the insult that consumer computers are?

> Why does nobody care about creaking plastic? About sticky-feeling texture? About uneven weight distribution? About the sound that materials make when handling them? About flickering in software? About inconsistent spacing? About janky color combinations?

I think Microsoft's Surface lineup has been making good strides on that front, but they still have a long way to go.

> Surface lineup has been making good strides

Making laptops and tablets was anecdotally a business MSFT didn't particularly want to be in but the OEM options for business workplace were that embarrassing the bar had to be raised by someone.

That’s why I had heard they entered the market as well. But that basically proves the point of the original question doesn’t it.

And it seems even Microsoft’s “people should be aspiring to this, come on OEMs do better“ models have plenty of problems.

I was in love with my Surface, even after they took a month to repair it for warranty, but come on, having it die the day after the warranty expired, with no consideration for a replacement, has made that a one-and-done consideration. I sure did like fanless computing though.

As a lifelong non-Mac guy (mostly unix, and then linux, since the days AT&T were sharing their code around college campuses), I'm about to go to the dark side and embrace the fruit simply because I think the whole deal will be better.

I unfortunately can only affirm with my experiences: well engineered exterior feel, but plagued by unreliable hardware. My Surface Pro 4 managed to simultaneously experience flickergate and battery expansion, and the soft surface of its keyboard crumbled where my wrists touched it. Its refurbished warranty replacement then pulled off the signature die-a-month-out-of-warranty. The bottom half of a Surface Book in the family also died without any recourse (with no official replacements sold).

Naturally, the unsupported, glued-down screens also make them some of the least repairable devices on the market. At least they had the sense to make the SSD removable—aside from saving you if spontaneous failure catches you out of a backup (as Microsoft will wipe all devices sent in for repair), it's also the only part salvageable from a "PC" of such form factor.

That said, the Dells we've had seem to very reliably suffer from broken hinges.

I have only had bad experiences with the surface lineup and I really wanted to like them. I lost a lot of money to MS as they refused to repair saying it was my own fault that they broke. One came broken from the shop as in that I bought it in an Orlando MS shop, opened it up in front of the shop and it was broken. I thought I needed to charge it, so I went to the hotel; when it was still broken 48 hours later, I had to leave (fly back home) so I sent it in for warranty repair 4 days after I bought it. Got an email a few days later that ‘this damage is not covered by warranty’. The thing was broken straight out of the shop; sure my fault I did not walk back in and ask if this was a charging issue but how did they blame me for it? I had this 3 times in different warranty stages with Surface products; all 3 lost because they refused to honour the warranty. Never had any issues with Apple; they always replaced anything under warranty (even if it wasn’t covered officially).

I think Microsoft's been getting better in handling reliability and support. My Surface Laptop 3 has been rock solid after almost two years of use.

To me, these details are less desirable, but the operating system and the way in which I utilize the computer to work and get shit done matters more. The niceness of the design (and don't get me wrong, they are super nice and beautiful) seems like superficial details to me. It isn't jewelry to me, it is a tool that I use to work.

I get that you prefer Linux or Windows. That’s completely fair.

But that shouldn’t be a trade-off. You should be able to have your OS and a nicely constructed laptop.

I got the impression the original post was more about quality than aesthetics (which are always up to personal taste).

We're just coming out of a five year period of many, if not most Macbook keyboards failing after two years.

The Laguiole flatware is beautiful. It is a true mark of craftsmanship, and it is priced as such. As much as I appreciate their elegance, I don't need a $100 spoon to eat my cornflakes in the morning.

We tolerate less poor design, because spending time on money on something which in the end is not truly worth the time or money is focusing on something unimportant to most people....especially at a job they most likely hate.

That's the thing.

We spend a huge amount of time using computers. Considering not just the share of time but also the share of concentrated attention, they are an even more important object in our lives.

Why would you not desire the tool you use to be the absolute best you can have? And if eating cornflakes is important to you, the Laguioles may be worth it. After all, they will probably last ten years or twenty. Compared to many completely irrelevant, even burdensome objects we own, that's not that much.

Bruce Sterling once held a talk about minimalism and objects which stuck with me, long before Marie Condo commoditized the trend. He basically said: Spend a lot of money on things that you eat or put on your skin, on your bed, on your tools and beautiful objects. Get rid of the rest.

At the core, what I cherish about Apple objects is that they don't steal my attention and efforts for some inferior, fake promise. Looking at them and using them is the same, there is hardly any broken promise. It's that integrity which counts.

TBF Apple sold very expensive laptops with shoddy faulty keyboards for YEARS. People idolize and idealize Apple but tend to ignore the faults and failures. I truly believe Apple does not respect their customers. They have some good product and some bad ones too.

I think the keyboard issue was overblown given what we saw at work with those machines. That said, the one person on my team with a failed keyboard was able to get it fixed very easily.

One thing that makes me tend to prefer Apple is the stores and support. I recall support for HP and VAIO computers being extremely painful. PC manufacturers have so many models they don’t even have parts available for a computer that was being sold last year. That was my experience with a Samsung laptop.

I think your experience was vastly different to the rest of the worlds [1][2][3]

[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-macbook-keyboard-fiasco-is-su...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/4/21246223/macbook-keyboard-...

[3] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/03/27/strn-kyboard

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/macbook-butterfly-keyboard-c...

I think it was Ive who prioritised aesthetics over usability, an approach that I feel is inherently disrespectful to the paying users. The MacBooks have returned to form since he left. A post recommending Mac over Lenovo would have been untenable a year ago.

Though perhaps I’m being overly harsh on Ive … have they sorted out spellcheck yet? The way they’ve conducted that the last while is I think some of the most disrespectful product management ive (should be I've) seen since Cadbury replaced quality chocolate with a drumming gorilla.

Apple stacked like 3 fuck-ups at once (going no-USB-C to only-USB-C in a single jump; the Touch Bar; the bad keyboards) but when I went looking for alternatives it seemed like I'd be cutting off my nose to spite my face (that is, they were all still a lot worse in other ways, as they were back when I first started using a MacBook). I decided to just hold off a bit on new hardware rather than switching, and hope Apple came to their senses. After a little while, they mostly did.

Apple's far from perfect—the competition just doesn't seem interested in actually competing.

I have one of those macbook keyboards (2018 macbook pro) and it is easily the worst keyboard I have ever used. I do not understand how a keyboard like that could possibly have made it onto a $3000 laptop.

Which is funny because the touchpad is by far the best touchpad I've ever used, it's the first touchpad I'd ever used that made me think a touchpad could compete with a mouse. It even made me start donating to the linux touchpad improvement project that got posted on HN [1].

My thinkpad is the exact opposite. Decent keyboard for a laptop but terrible touchpad.

[1] https://www.gitclear.com/blog/linux_touchpad_update_december...

Great comment. I was agonising over whether I should buy a HHKB ($600 keyboard) and I came to a similar conclusion. I’m touching it and using it every single day for the next decade, it should be a joy to use. I can’t remember who said it, but: “An expensive tool upsets you once, when you purchase it. A cheap tool upsets you every single time you have to use it.” Computer people have to start seeing themselves as craftsman. You make a living using your tools (computer, screen, keyboard, desk, chair…), they should be the best you can afford!

Most people want cheap hardware and software. That's about the whole story right there.

Because, if apple is an indication, it takes an enormous amount of investment to make a limited line of products that have those details ironed out. Just like most products, computers are also messy.

>"Why does nobody care about creaking plastic? About sticky-feeling texture? About uneven weight distribution? About the sound that materials make when handling them? About flickering in software?"

I notice none of it on my ASUS and HP gaming laptops.

Or materials that look grimy/grubby from use and wear (e.g. Thinkpad touchpads). My go-to has been to run Windows (best OS) on Mac laptops (best hardware), but with M1, it looks like this will no longer be an option. Hoping for some magic cross-architecture emulation.

Extremely important, I forgot that.

I think we should ask for hardware to remain beautiful in use. Look around you: Except for things made out of wood, metal, paper, glass or ceramic, most things will fail that test.

> Windows (best OS)

I'll admit, I haven't touched a Windows machine in over a decade, and it hasn't been my daily driver since 2002. The last version I used on a semi-regular basis was Win2K3 at work.

I'm willing to give it another shot though. Why do you think it's the best now?

I have both Windows and macOS, macOS just has too many idiosyncracies and babies you into not allowing you to run whatever apps you want. Frequently I'll get stuff like, this app was not updated by the creator so you can't run it. At least with Windows I can turn off such annoyances.

With ARM adoption it might again be an option. I'm using Windows ARM in Parallels on M1 Mac and use Visual Studio perfectly.

Microsoft says "it might not work" yet it works flawlessly. YMMV though.

But isn’t a huge part of Windows the ecosystem of applications? That largely doesn’t exist on ARM though correct? Or does Windows have an emulation solution built in for that.

Yes, emulation.

Visual Studio 2022 is x64 and is running under emulation in an ARM environment (M1 Max) and is working perfectly.

While it's not native performance, it's close and the gap will even get narrower by time.

Because every other computer manufacturer realized they can save on the BOM cost by shoving the whole computer under plastic gingerbread. That weight distribution? It'd cost way too much to redesign the product correctly. Flickering redraws? We don't make the OS, we just sell Microsoft's.

Occasionally you do see PC OEMs that try for taste in the Windows ecosystem. Sony did that with their VAIO laptops, with the somewhat-inflated price tag to match. In fact, it impressed Jobs so much he literally just offered them an OSX license (which they didn't bite on).

All true, but why is the culture and aesthetic of computers inherently trashy?

Look at all the fields where superior quality is a completely natural criterion (whether it exists may be another question): Watches, cars, pens, paper notebooks, furniture, fashion, jewellery, architecture, bikes, coffee machines ...

What's more - if you look at the visual representations of computers - i.e. marketing material, art, illustrations, unix porn etc - all that highly values aesthetics and beauty. But the actual products are a disgrace to all of that!

> All true, but why is the culture and aesthetic of computers inherently trashy?

Because it needs to be affordable to the masses as a whole, and not just the upper middle class and up.

I find it very sad to think that masses cannot have style.

Some old Swiss everyday products are affordable yet beautiful; I am convinced both is possible.

Apple and companies in general need to make a profit.

Those same "old Swiss everyday products" are most likely no longer affordable based on the modern cost of labor and materials.

The price of, say, a basic victorinox Swiss Army knife or a simple Caran d‘ache ball pen is still around one hourly wage in Western Europe and perhaps 2 to 5 in Eastern Europe.

Are they made with the same quality of materials as older, more reliable versions? I would guess no. It's also a poor comparison because both are low tech products.

You many be surprised, but ball pens or even pencils are not really low-tech products. Their production needs precision equipment and cutting-edge supply chain. You can´t make a pencil in your basement.

side note: "caran d'ache" actually means pencil in Russian which in turn borrowed the name from Turkic, where cara(n) means black and ache is stone. The company is Swiss, but it was set up by a Russian cartoonist that fled the 1917 revolution, worked in Paris and settled in Switzerland inbetween the world wars.

Sure, pen and pencil factories may need complicated factory equipment to manufacture, but they are still extremely low tech products compared to computer chips and other silicon related components which are still evolving relatively fast compared to pen and pencil products. The related manufacturing process for chips is also a lot more complex and advanced compared to the manufacturing process for pens and pencils. It's still a poor comparison.

Actually, if I may, Caran d'Ache was the "nom de plume" of a French satirist, who died in 1909 (before the russian revolution), but the Swiss company was inspired by his name and his life, as he was one of the first to create what would become (sort of) newspaper comic strips.

I think you just answered the question: All of the categories you note have both high-end and, sadly, mostly low-end options. What is surprising is that, in the world of computing, there is very little at the high end (Apple -- from going by this original thread), and almost all of it is at the low end. I guess some company could make an amazing PC that ran Windows, but the, you'd have an amazing piece of hardware that... ran Windows.

But you only need Windows to run the real paragon of Microsoft software development, Excel.

I think you also answered your own question.

We buy computers by comparing sets of numbers. Your GHz and Mb are bigger than my GHz and Mb? And the $ are lower?

But luxury items are some times about the feel. And if you have a nice computer running Windows. Well, the primary way in which we interact with the machine is budget so why bother with the rest of it?

> We buy computers by comparing sets of numbers. Your GHz and Mb are bigger than my GHz and Mb? And the $ are lower?

Anytime "normies" ask me to help them buy a laptop, this is not at all what they ask. The only thing they want to know is "is it fine for my needs?" and the only thing I really need to do is check "min GHz, min Mb", and find the cheapest option in the bucket with a decent support contract and then pick the cheapest option.

And in my circle, the cheapest option is not really anyone's concern (they budget 1k, 2k, and are fairly agnostic within like +-$300); in near any other subject, it'd be preceded by look & feel, but they all look and feel the same (inoffensive, at best), so cost is all you've got.

No "normie" I know has high expectations of computers, both by their own failure but mostly by failure of the machine itself, and its largely because computers do not have high expectations of themselves.

The Carbon starts at 1400 USD. Is that low end for you?

Computer design aesthetics are a relatively new concept and not one that’s deeply explored or appreciated, and certainly not at the level of other physical designs (cars, watches, clothing, so on).

I think many of us here really appreciate the beauty of Cray Mainframes and Apple hardware, but computers are so associated with work and utilitarianism, I think they’ve often been overlooked for their value as design pieces. I mean, brutalist architecture is a thing, so it’s probably just a matter of time.

Aesthetics vs utility if a perfectly fine debate to have. Everyone is going to fall at different places.

The question is why you don’t seem to have a choice of quality. It’s basically seems to be quite high (Apple), or somewhere between crap and acceptable.

Where are the very high PCs? The nice PCs? The good PCs? There aren’t many, they’re basically niche.

I don’t have much experience with recent PCs. Most of it has been quite bad. Even the relatively well spec’ed Windows laptops at work are sad (despite decent reviews).

Trashy is paying extra for needless aesthetics. Function over fashion forever, in my earnest opinion.

Trashy aesthetics is what you get by default when you buy a PC.

Cheapest PC mech keyboard will get you blinking RGB.

Cheap PC case with front mesh airflow. Most likely will come with RGB fans. If it's real cheap you won't be able to even turn it off.

Same with cheapish mouse with decent sensor.

Needless aesthetics is almost unavoidable on the budget end. Unless you specifically go out of your way to pay extra to get models without RGB.

There definitely is a lot of pointless garbage in PC culture eh. Like touch bars, notches and aluminum unibodies, glass backs in devices that will definitely crack, single button mice, limited IO for devices... The list goes on and on.

As long as they're made to be disposable there's an upper limit. No one would buy a macbook for 50k knowing they'll be able to use it their whole life then resell it likely for a profit but they would a Rolex.

I mean, it's not unreasonable for a painter to not really give s** what her brushes look like, as long as they work?

No, on the contrary. In my experience, the professional artists and craftsmen that I know are rather choosy about their tools.

A bit of creakiness and flakiness is tolerable when you’re a home gamer and only have to deal with it for a couple of hours at a time during the weekend, but when it’s a full time job it gets old fast.

On the contrary of the contrary :)

That's why I said "look like." Sometimes good tools look good, and sometimes they don't.

For computers these days, especially true. It may have been true that the aesthetics of a Mac strongly correlated with quality, but that's far from certain now.

Because computers are supposed to be practical first. We're still making significant enough improvements in the performance of them that they outweigh things such as aesthetics. The things you mentioned have negligible improvements year after year and the way they differentiate between each other is the looks.

This is also why good computers are affordable by almost everybody, but things like good bicycles, furniture, watches, coffee machines etc are not.

You can buy a decent computer for the same money as one chair.

> Because computers are supposed to be practical first. We're still making significant enough improvements in the performance of them that they outweigh things such as aesthetics.

Sometimes aesthetics is part of practicality: how many doors does one run into with a "push" or "pull" sign because otherwise it's not possible to tell in which direction things work?

Also the treadmill of computer progress means that keeping devices for multiple years has significant costs in performance compared to replacing it regularly.

A good watch can be passed down through generations. A computer passed on from my father would likely just be a storage and disposal cost instead of any real use.

Outside of specialist enthusiasts and collectors, I suppose. But for every working Apple 1 there's thousands of c64s that no longer function quite right.

That's a very good point, thank you.

Conversely, nowadays that is less and true though. Currently, getting a latest Ryzen 5000 APU laptop can very easily last you 10 years or more -- until something physically breaks inside. The machines themselves are very energy-efficient and fast enough for everything except special work niches.

So I suspect we're witnessing a culture shock: what used to be the best strategy no longer is, and the players (the producers) haven't adapted yet.

> Currently, getting a latest Ryzen 5000 APU laptop can very easily last you 10 years or more

You never know. I have an AMD TR 1900X CPU (launched in August 2017) in a box, since Windows 11 doesn't run on it.

Ah. I definitely mean on Linux.

This sounds so wrong tbh, first that you would get a 1900X which was the smallest Threadripper, and that you would then use it in an application which doesn't use all of its PCIe lanes, which is what differentiated it from the 8-core Ryzens.

May I ask, why you need to run Windows 11?

I didn't need many cores; but I needed the PCIe lanes. 1900X was perfect for that. I don't follow, how did you figure that my application doesn't use all of its PCIe lanes?

Another thing was, that since there were less cores and the thermal capacity was the same as the bigger siblings, the cores were clocked slightly higher (3.8 GHz base frequency).

Eventually, I got one of last 2920X for a good price. I got more, but slower cores and it still works in the X399 board I used with 1900X.

---

I actually do not need to run 11 yet. But eventually, it will come.

Now is your chance to “I run arch btw”.

" Also the treadmill of computer progress means that keeping devices for multiple years has significant costs in performance compared to replacing it regularly."

The interval of replacement due to performance is getting longer through. A 10-year old high-end laptop is still pretty good for average user today, especially with an SSD. Most people need just something that can run web-apps and stream HD videos via browser. Buying a new laptop solely for performance is getting harder and harder to justify. I guess that's why Macbooks are attractive, they offer more than just performance.

Because the prevailing engineering culture is of maximum savings, and they even see it as a virtue ("Anyone can overengineer, it takes true master to design precisely to spec etc..").

Because computers are disposable. In a few years it's going to be obsolete or broken so I'll have to buy a new one. I'm not wealthy so it's hard to justify spending extra on style for something that won't last.

This is also true of several of the categories they named. Cars, bikes, kitchen appliances, notebooks: none of those are heirlooms, most won't last more than a few years of regular use. But all of those domains value aesthetics a lot more than computer hardware. Another explanation is necessary.

I usually keep my cars, bikes, and kitchen appliances significantly longer than my laptops. Nothing lasts forever, but computers are a lot closer to the disposable end of the spectrum.

> In fact, it impressed Jobs so much he literally just offered them an OSX license (which they didn't bite on).

I just googled this and it's based on an unsubstantiated boast by Sony's president in 2014, I'd be skeptical:

https://www.appleworld.today/2021/01/06/from-the-vault-did-s...

Although this article seems to think it holds water:

https://9to5mac.com/2014/02/05/sony-turned-down-offer-from-s...

I have no idea if the story is true but FWIW in the 80s and 90s Steve Jobs used to speak admiringly about Sony quite a bit.

Not sure if that survived his return to Apple.

80s and 90s Sony was unquestionably the world-leading company in cutting-edge and fashionable consumer electronics. Apple usurped their crown starting with the first iPod.

I suspect it did: one of the funniest things to come out of the Samsung/Apple trial were the "Jony"-branded (early) iPhone designs[1] with unmistakable Sony aesthetics.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone...

I remember the Apple Store using Bravia screens to demo Apple TV when they first made a section for it

In his "One more thing..." introduction of the Titanium PowerBook G4 in 2001 he explicitly compared it to the Sony Vaio:

https://youtu.be/AnrM4n6S3CU?t=5973

[Definitely worth a watch. Also Jobs makes a few mistakes such as calling the PowerBook a Power Mac and referring to iTunes as iMusic.]

Vaio laptop build quality is on the plasticky end of the spectrum. They're pretty but build quality leaves much to be desired. I've never viewed their pricing as particularly inflated. Have owned a few.

Depends on the Vaio. The old Z series: z13, z21 etc were pinnacles of engineering. Fast as hell and light.

> It'd cost way too much to redesign the product correctly.

No such thing as a "correct" design: it's all about market positioning and design trade-offs. I'm typing this on a sub-$300 laptop, it's made of plastic, it bends and flexes, but it is very light, and has a 1980x1024 display, a 9-hour battery, and again - it bears repeating - cost less than $300 brand new. These factors may not be important to you, but they were to me as I wanted something I could bike with, and wouldn't be too stressed if it broke in a fall[1]. I also have a MacBook, but it's heavy and expensive to repair.

1. It is also something I would have been my dream machine as a poor student in a place with unreliable electric service, yet still attainable, unlike the other "well-made" laptops that have a premium on aesthetics & build-quality.

Those are totally fair trade-offs. The problem is that often they seem to continue to exist at or above the thousand dollar plus price point.

Because usually when they do that you get better performance per dollar. I had a $1000 gaming laptop in 2016. The CPU was the same as the $2400 2016 15" MacBook Pro, it had a faster GPU, came with same amount of faster RAM too. Did it flex? Yes of course. It's still trade-offs even above $1000.

May I ask what computer it is?

It's an HP Chromebook 14.

It can seamlessly install and run Linux apps and compilers via virtualization (Crostini). I usually use vim, but I also have VS Code installed and it works pretty well. It won't win any CPU perf awards though: it has a dualcore Celeron.

Jobs ran NeXTStep on a Sony Vaio laptop for a while when he came back to Apple. That was before MacOS X was a thing, which is based on NeXTStep.

Why does nobody care about the janky Bluetooth mouse that's only janky on macOS?

Why does nobody care that my USB 2.0 ports on my external USB-C docks die in about 20 minutes necessitating a reboot--again, only on macOS (and only on newer macOS versions--old ones work fine).

How many years did it take Apple to (sort of) fix their shittastic keyboards?

How garbagey is Xcode relative to any other IDE nowadays?

I can go on ... and on.

Macbooks may look pretty, but the software has been becoming increasingly garbage. And I use software to get my job done--the hardware merely needs to be sufficient (I generally customize my laptops to use an i5 (including mac)--which ducks a lot of the idiotic thermal issues).

I'm sitting on a Lenovo Carbon X1 with Linux full-time now. I finally got tired of fighting craptastic software from Apple. If I'm gonna fight software, I might as well be on Linux.

And, surprisingly, my experience on Linux has been better than the last year or two on macOS.

> Why does nobody care about the janky Bluetooth mouse that's only janky on macOS?

Which mouse? I've always had bad experiences with Bluetooth mice, but have chalked it up to BT being a shit protocol for mice.

> Why does nobody care that my USB 2.0 ports on my external USB-C docks die in about 20 minutes necessitating a reboot--again, only on macOS (and only on newer macOS versions--old ones work fine).

Is it all USB 2.0 ports that die in that case, or just the ones on your external dock? Are you using an adapter of some sort as well?

> How many years did it take Apple to (sort of) fix their shittastic keyboards?

This seems a bit petty to me. I don't disagree, but if they fix it they fix it, and afaik they have. Lots of improvement to make, but I quite like the current ones as much as I can. Laptop keyboards across the board are only going to be barely passable imo, because the feedback to me is less important than scrunching my hands together in a way that fucks with my shoulders. This is true of full size mechanical keyboards as well. I think it's important, if you care, to re-evaluate every so often. If a restaurant I like makes a thing that sucks once or twice, I'll wait a bit and try it again a while later, and it's no longer that important that I didn't like it previously

I'm going to offer a dissenting opinion. I don't have the same issues you do with janky mice and USB 2.0 ports.

I owned a previous Macbook Air with a "shittastic" keyboard and never had an issue– although I'm glad I now have the new M1 with a better keyboard.

> Macbooks may look pretty, but the software has been becoming increasingly garbage.

I had the unfortunate displeasure of being issued a top of the line Windows 11 computer for work, and it was a horrible experience. Basic things that Mac OS gets right like search, recursively deleting files, and bash environments Windows either struggles with or requires workarounds.

> And, surprisingly, my experience on Linux has been better than the last year or two on macOS.

Linux is an incredible family of operating systems. Every few years I will try downloading and installing a few distros. I always run into issues with GPUs, sound cards, and WiFi. Once I get past those, I run into different sets of issues. One that sticks with me is the awful nested menus in XCFE.

Apple in some ways have allowed some behaviour in their MacOS to regress, but it is still the top choice for me. Mac OS is not garbage. I'm sorry to hear that you had an awful experience with it, but I am still very productive with it.

> Linux is an incredible family of operating systems. Every few years I will try downloading and installing a few distros. I always run into issues with GPUs, sound cards, and WiFi. Once I get past those, I run into different sets of issues. One that sticks with me is the awful nested menus in XCFE.

I was a linux-on-the-desktop user for about a decade before switching to Mac, and like you, I try Linux out again from time to time. My experience is similar: I hit stuff I just don't have the time or patience to deal with anymore, every single time. Looking back, it only ever seemed good because I was somehow blind to how much time I was losing, and I'd learned to work around or ignore a bunch of broken stuff on my systems.

> Looking back, it only ever seemed good because I was somehow blind to how much time I was losing, and I'd learned to work around or ignore a bunch of broken stuff on my systems.

I feel this way about macOS.

How much time have I lost because the Bluetooth was screwy? How much time have I lost because the WiFi did something strange? How much time have I lost trying to do USB development and the OS got in the way? How many times have I had to blow away and reinstall all my printers because macOS got confused. On macOS, I have to install special apps to keep my laptop awake or to set it to the native screen resolution. How much weirdness have I had to debug because of App Dislocation?

It finally got driven home when I was trying to configure someone else from scratch on macOS. After the sixth "Hey, how do you deal with misfeature <X>?" followed by "Well, you need to download an app that does <Y>." I realized that I'm diddling with my macOS system as much as I diddled with my Linux systems.

At that point, I might as well choose Linux so that my diddling actually helps the wider community rather than simply going into the black hole of Apple and adding to their profits.

Strangely enough I can also share this experience. Mac is absolutely less reliable to me than a linux laptop.

> and bash environments You mean zsh on mac, I think.

You may try Fedora, for me it just works (with an AMD graphic card), and Gnome is pretty usable, even ergonomics these days.

What device do you try to install linux on? Linux has perhaps the most expansive driver support but it doesn’t mean that every driver (or hardware!) is made equals. It is often unfair to compare the top-of-the line wifi/sound card hardware found in macs (with vertical integration) to some noname doesn’t even work properly with their own drivers hardware.

On a thinkpad with “standard” hardware, there is absolutely no driver problem of any kind.

> Macbooks may look pretty, but the software has been becoming increasingly garbage.

I consider most of their "free" add-on software best-in-class or at least best-for-my-use case, with only a couple exceptions (including, yes, Xcode). The software is a whole lot of what keeps me on Mac hardware.

I don’t know, I am a recent convert to Mac but OSX is much much more buggy than ios (I guess due to tech dept and backwards comp?)

The underlying UNIX often seeps through the layers and it is simply an objectively worse UNIX than linux. Sure, its user space has plenty of cool features but even those are half-assed and buggy. Like, how come switching desktops is not smooth? Sure, I don’t have an M1, but a goddamn last-intel MBP, it should simply never lag at such a user-facing interaction. Sometimes I feel my T480 is better with gnome on input latency..

> I don’t know, I am a recent convert to Mac but OSX is much much more buggy than ios (I guess due to tech dept and backwards comp?)

Agreed, but iOS is playing on easy mode: it sandboxes everything to a high degree, everything running on it went through some amount of checks to make sure they won't mess up the system, it routinely kills processes so apps must be written to resume properly from a cold start, and it (even today) has relatively limited multitasking. It both doesn't let programs do as much, and encourages or forces developers to employ practices that (I suspect) tend to improve program stability.

macOS for many years now has been inferior to Windows, IMO.

Not in the slightest.

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 on a crisp new Lenovo P1. Expensive but very nice laptop. The powerbrick did self-destruct, but I bought the fancy service plan and support shipped me a replacement after just a few questions with no issues.

I would echo your experience. macOS has gone significantly downhill overall, in terms of sheer ugliness and hassle to use as a developer box. I'm think about the continual prompts for running software and allowing access to folders etc., incredible difficulty in getting non-macOS frameworks like SDL etc., to run.

It's no longer worth the hassle.

My work Razer Blade 15 runs CentOS 7. My MBP M1 runs Asahi. And this Lenovo is running Ubuntu 20.04. Gnome on all of them, and by and large, much much better experience than either current Windows or macOS.

> Why does nobody care about creaking plastic? About sticky-feeling texture? About uneven weight distribution? About the sound that materials make when handling them?

Because the value of a laptop is the parts inside, not the presentation. Why would I care about those things? Or at least why would I care about them enough to make me spend more than I have to?

Well, because you'd be potentially looking at it and using it for hours almost every day for years as a professional?

For me something I spend my time that much should look nice. That combined with the parts inside is perfection, which is the M1 MBP for me.

How much are you actually looking at a laptop's aesthetics versus looking at the information displayed on a screen though?

Does it really matter to you to have something pretty sitting on your desk while you work? That seems really weird to me. Personally I couldn't care less. Especially in the context of a professional work laptop which is a machine that goes onto the corner of my desk and I plug a bunch of other things into and basically ignore forever past that point.

Of course I care if I have something pretty on my desk. I care about aesthetics of everything around me that I interact with/see/experience on my daily life, especially if it's something literally designed for me to look at for hours every day, like a computer.

Listen to this person, they're a professional

This is like asking why should you care about a creaky chair? It works as a chair regardless and you don’t even see it when you are sitting on it. Who cares about sticky castors when you are at your desk for hours at a time?

This. I don't care about ripped or dirty clothes since their function is to warm me and I don't see them when I wear them anyways.

Jewellery is a great analogy imo. Apple is a jewellery company imo. They sell expensive, shiny, conspicuous consumption items without practical use.

I was shocked when I found out that macs are popular among people who actually work with computers and even make software. It will never cease to shock me. The only explanation I can think of is that this is a USA social class thing. In the USA the upper classes have Apple stuff and the lower classes have something else. Most people in software come from an upper or upper-middle background so they grow up in an Apple house. Those who don't get Apple anyway to blend in.

My last MBP only lasted 10 years of almost daily use so yeah, no practical use at all...

>> I was shocked when I found out that macs are popular among people who actually work with computers and even make software. It will never cease to shock me.

Yeah, wtf. It's not like people that build software for a living know anything about computers right?!

Yea, a unix based system with a good Desktop manager in a powerhouse of a laptop. Horrible, right?

The combination of Unix, a polished user interface and a system that Just Works(TM) appeals to a lot of tech people. That combination at least used to be a kind of a holy grail.

I would like to see the polished user interface that doesn’t lag on desktop switch, or the just works system, because neither of it is true of a last-intel MBP I use.

> The only explanation I can think of...

Craftspeople appreciate good tools. Good tools don't make you better at craft, but bad tools can definitely make you worse.

There's also the thing where at the start of a model cycle from Apple, you generally cannot purchase an equipment with all those performance capabilities combined at any price from anyone else. This is true of phones and laptops alike.

In other words, at major new model cycles, the full combination of practical function and durable form is often not available anywhere else at any price.

When your livelihood depends on your machine, you do well to invest in good tools. And "invest" is the right word, because these hold value.

By the end of a model cycle, other vendors may catch up or pass the price perf curve, yet the Apple models are built in a way that holds value for double or quadruple the lifespan of a Windows laptop purchased around the same launch window. This means when you buy fresh and resell two years in, you can spend less for the top of the line functionality than when you stay in the shovel-wear class of machine. (You can even sometimes buy direct refurb and sell a year later for as much as you paid.)

> It will never cease to shock me.

How to say you're not open minded without saying you're not open minded? :-)

MBPs are amazing machines for people who work in technology. The advantages:

1. Unix-based OS

2. Outstanding battery life

3. Sturdy and long-lasting; a well-maintained Macbook will outlive any Windows laptop of equal price

4. No pre-loaded crapware

5. Best trackpad in existence

6. Secure, with patches and updates for years

This more than outweighs all the other minuses, such as the overly-obsessive focus on thinness, or the outrageous cost of dongles, adapters, memory/storage upgrades, and battery replacements.

Lmao I have had 2 MBPs die on me and the cost to fix them is like $800 and I can’t do it myself. Fuck them.

You're a statistical outlier. Out of the millions of units they sell, someone is bound to end up with 2 lemons in a row. Sucks for you but it's not the case for millions of satisfied customers.

Those are the ones I purchased. I have owned 5 and all 5 failed. I think Apple sucks as a result.

Fuck them indeed, but I can’t wait for a competitor to come out with something that checks all six boxes without the drawbacks of Apple, I need a computer that can do those things now.

I’m giving up on laptops and sticking to desktops. The desktop I built myself has never given me any problems and it can be repaired, upgraded, and serviced on my own. I really think laptops are just trash and people are delusional about their usefulness. That’s my opinion, damn it!!!

Yeah, how often do you work in different places? Like you need a lot of other gear that is not portable, Roof / walls / window / desk / chair / paper / pens / books etc. Basically a nice office you are comfortable in and used to working in.

Desktops last pretty much forever. Almost every desktop component I've had worked perfectly until it was extremely obsolete and sold or given away.

What's crazy is that although their performance remains the same over years, their prices depreciate like crazy for no reason. I am never gonna buy new computers again. I've gotten a few 2nd hand gaming desktops recently on buy and sell websites for around €300 each (often including monitor / peripherals) and they perform perfectly, they can run AAA games fine even.

> They sell expensive, shiny, conspicuous consumption items without practical use

Sorry, but I don‘t believe anyone who says this while looking at a modern day M1 macbook. I have the pleasure to own one for software development and graphical imagery work and frankly it‘s the single best computer I have ever used. No windows or linux machine comes close. It‘s a unix system where everything just works out of the box.

Apple's taste and the ways they do things makes you love / hate your experience and your judgement of whether you should buy their product. The company is position as "we know what's best for you" and you can see this along their product line. General PC makers have a carefree attitude where here is what you want and they will give you the specs and it works however you want. Which means sometimes you will have to deal with managing your own experience.

The design inconsistencies though are twofold. If we look at phones Samsung makes their own processor that they try to use with their phones and they are also not fabless but that processor continually either underperforms Apple's products. On the other hand the Apple tax is quite real. Also, Samsung's aesthetic at least at their phones is quite real although they might just abandon their standard flagships to foldable phones because the yearly update cycle for phones is stopping soon.

Also, many manufacturers seem to just blindly copy Apple up to even their marketing (which I don't think many would disagree that Apple does the best out of any of their competitors).

> General PC makers have a carefree attitude where here is what you want and they will give you the specs and it works however you want. Which means sometimes you will have to deal with managing your own experience.

You can't get whatever you want though. You can't get a machine with remotely the look and feel of a MBP. You have lots and lots of mediocre choices and no really good ones.

By whatever you want I meant is whatever you choose (like a cellular modem and touchscreen laptop) but I agree with you the look and feel is driven by Apple because they want to preserve margins by having a sense of taste that allows them to still have the Apple tax.

A MBP is one thing. Sometimes there are machines that are in the ballpark. _Nothing_ comes close to the value proposition of the M1 Air.

Obviously you can get PCs that are way cheaper. I found one for $150. Apple can’t touch that.

But for $1000 you get an amazing screen, fantastic performance, unbelievable battery life, and absolutely no moving parts. All in a very light and thin case. You can get some of those qualities but nowhere near all.

All the more amazing given Apple’s legendary margins. PC makers can’t get close despite making less money on each unit.

It feels like 90% of the products I use these days I find myself asking, “did they even try using their own thing?” All these steps, all these weird one-offs, for my dead-simple, totally average idiot use case?

Yes.

I own a very expensive 2021 gaming laptop / mobile workstation-ish laptop from Lenovo. A ton of people who have it have had issues with the touchpad getting unresponsive. I could fix for the most part by using a 300W brick over a 240W (don't ask me how, that must be a very interesting power delivery system, or maybe the battery controller is interrupt storming, what do I know).

Lenovo's response has been to say they're aware of the issue, and otherwise ignore it / replace entire top shells only for the problem to return 2 weeks later.

I also have a T495, a machine that absolutely should never have been released with the C-States it has. While AMD has issued a patch for them, Lenovo has not bothered to provide a BIOS revision that fixes it. Support for these products is essentially minimal to dead upon release.

It feels like every OEM has become MediaTek.

A great number of people care a great deal about creaking plastic and the other design atrocities you mentioned. Why do you think Apple is one of a handful of the most valuable brands in the world, while Dell laptops gather dust in Staples basements? "Developer experience"? Lol

It's the aesthetically stunted and clueless nerds on HN who don't know the name of their hairstyle and aren't aware of the length or color of their shorts who are the outliers, not you

Even though I generally agree with your point about the topic, calling people "autistic nerds" isn't cool.

Add “my Windows has ads for crapware even though I paid full price for it and bought direct from Microsoft” to the list.

You can buy metal PCs. There's loads of them. Microsoft themselves even make them. Pretty sure every big OEM has at least one laptop with a solid metal chassis at this point.

I prefer the plastic of my Thinkpad, it doesn't feel creaky, there's no "sticky-feeling texture". It doesn't boil on my lap the way metal MacBooks and PowerBooks have. It feels solid while also not denting from knocking it into a doorway by accident or worse yet deforming itself from it's own heat.

You can buy quality PCs. You just gotta pay more.

Pay more for the corporate class laptops from HP or Dell i.e Elitebook

Supported longer, better materials, better keyboards.

I'd buy a second hand elitebook over a new acer or whatever any day.

Yep, I use and deploy them at work. The only problem I have with them is the screen. That privacy filter could be a godsend for someone on an airplane, but for every day use at home or office, it really kills the image quality

Privacy filter means "HP Sure View Reflect" I guess?. There are 3 options for current HP Elitebook screens [1]. Only 1 of them has the privacy filter. I think the best option is to buy the middle one in that pic (low power, 400 nits).

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/News/_nc3/...

Source: https://www.notebookcheck.net/CES-2022-HP-announces-the-Elit...

Unfortunately at work they all ship with the sure view filter, I have no say on that.

typing this on a dell precision-class laptop and yeah, it's a dream. even between this and my latitude (which is still business class but one tier down) it's noticeable.

there are nice quality laptops to be had, they're just expensive enough that apple becomes competitive price-wise.

True, I tend to stick to business class and buy off lease equipment. It's usually pretty durable and repairable. You can even get parts.

Funny I wish my M1 MBP ran hotter. It’s uncomfortably cold in the mornings.

Schedule a cron job to run some program to heat up in the mornings.

I got HP Zbook Power G8 for work. It was fine on a table, until one day I tried to use it on my lap while cross legged sitting. The corners of the display lid (now pointed downwards and back), were so sharp I couldnt leave my PC in my lap. I took a metal file and lightly filed the corners the same day, fixing the issue. While I was at it, I also dropped a little glue under piece of paperthin metal cover that was already getting loose. On a less than a month old laptop, boasting Generation 8 in its name...

The fact that the trackpad comes without dedicated buttons is a tradeoff of size, but the amount of force needed to perform a click (even on the side where least amount of force is needed {yes, it varies}) is so high that the mouse WILL move a bit before click is registered, as your finger gets squished. Using anything but touch-tapping on it is impossible with single finger.

That same year I got my first ever macbook, M1 Air. I guess I dont even need to explain the difference in every aspect comming to mind between those two machines to illustrate my point.

Apple has the same problem. In college, we'd bring our own mice to the computer labs because it was better than the buttonless Apple mice they had there. Even today, the input devices have been IMO Apple's weak spot and the main reason I stayed away from MacBooks.

I had a MBP, 2019 I believe. It was riddled with problems. True Tone color was wrong. Flickering on the display. The weird internet connectivity which often required some hacky restart. The touch bar was a terrible idea; this was a time when other laptops had high quality touch screens that were actually useful. The touch bar was a half-hearted implementation with a fraction of the benefits of a touch screen, but taking up a whole row on the keyboard.

But then they make the best processors and have the most power in a compact space, so as OP said, there's really no other option. I gave it another chance and they've fixed all the problems from the 2019 model.

A key differentiator though is that when Apple gets something wrong it's usually a poor design decision, not careless craftsmanship. The Magic Mouse and the Apple TV remote from a couple years ago are two of the most beautifully-crafted examples of bad input devices that you can possibly find

> The Magic Mouse and the Apple TV remote from a couple years ago are two of the most beautifully-crafted examples of bad input devices that you can possibly find

I love this. Yes, those were horrible. The current Apple TV Remotes with the touch surface area is practically unusable by any but a twitch video gamer. Every time I watch my mom try to select anything I'd see her try to push the button and the touch surface would end up moving the selection. Eventually i bought her a 3rd party remote so she could stop being constantly frustrated.

It's really hard to believe apple actually tested this with real people.

The Touch Bar was a good idea. Replacing the F-keys with it was a _terrible_ idea.

If they would've just added the bar above the normal F-keys, everyone would've either embraced or ignored it. But taking away function keys was just too much for pretty much everyone - especially ESC (which they rectified in a later iteration).

I actually think normal users would be fine or even happy with it instead of the F keys.

But it was expensive. So it was only all the more expensive models, the ones that professionals and programmers used. And a lot of them hated it.

I don’t mind it that much personally. My work laptop has one and it can be nice on occasion. But when I switch to a laptop that doesn’t have one I don’t miss it at all.

(I have the hardware escape key. I think without that it would truly drive me nuts.)

I switched away from apple laptops because of the butterfly keyboard and removal of the F-keys in favor of the touch bar.

For a while there it was like someone inside Apple wanted to chase developers away from their laptops.

I dislike using touchpads very much. I go to great lengths to control everything with the keyboard, and fall back to a traditional mouse when I have to (I tried trackballs but I couldn't adapt). Whenever I'm forced to use a touchpad because I'm on the go or I don't have room to bring a mouse with me, I groan.

That said, the implementation of the touchpad in a Macbook vs a regular touchpad in even a high end laptop is night and day. The software and hardware work together to make sure the touch surface is centered, and your fingers glide through it, there are no accidental presses, and esentially never misinput. The haptic feedback is so good that you can't really tell that you're not pressing a button. In comparison, the touchpad in what I consider the best Windows laptop, the Lenovo X1 Carbon, is a steaming pile of shit, and fails every measure.

I don't know how much of it is Apple's attention to detail versus their ability to do vertical integration -- Lenovo likely has very little control over how Synaptics implements their drivers -- but I would pay a hefty premium for an experience like a Macbook.

I'm the same way and I'm mortified whenever I have the displeasure to use some PC or Chromebook laptop trackpad. PC manufacturers today still can't figure out how to make a trackpad as good as what Apple had 20 years ago.

Though part of it is thanks to apple themselves, for having a patent on that. Fortunately some company did find another way to reproduce this click feel through haptics and it will hopefully appear soon in other manufacturers’ laptops.

Even trackpads that were actually clicking were still miles ahead to what I have in my latest generation HP bullsh*t

But the most important thing with Apple trackpad is not the haptics imo. If Apple went back to regular buttons tomorrow I wouldn't care at all. The tracking itself is light years ahead of any competition. This is still one of the big things keeping me from using Linux (even on Macbooks). Tracking and scrolling is just unbearable. (Yes I tried that driver, the other library, the recommended macos like settings, custom settings... I spent a LONG time trying to have something decent. Nothing is even remotely close.)

Just for the record, may I ask you when did you try last? Libinput which wayland uses heavily improves on the previous drivers, but I agree it still won’t be as good as osx’s.

It was last summer. I bought one of the recommended laptops for running Linux just for the purpose of switching. It sucked hard.

(rant following so please don't read the rest if you don't like ranting about linux desktop)

I could probably live with trackpad not being great. But the sound stack, bluetooth stack, driving displays with different dpi (hidpi and non-hidpi) etc. are all terrible. Managing multiple displays (xrandr, xinerama etc.) even without the dpi difference is also just bad. If you like to tinker it's great but I just couldn't make the switch. It didn't give me the confidence that it will work when I need it. I tried all major distros and read almost the entirety of the arch wiki (it is so good). i3 is one of the things that would make me try again in the future. There is nothing like it on macos (some wms try but they always feel duct-taped). And systemd is good.

If you ever would give it another try, I highly recommend sway, which is almost completely compatible with i3’s config and basically a wayland clone of that. Wayland makes multiple displays with different DPIs possible and basically a huge, much needed revamp on all the technical debt that accumulated in a multi-decade old graphics stack.

Similarly, pipewire is pretty much stable now, which fixes both the sound and bluetooth stack singlehandedly.

Thank you. My day to day work involves sharing screen on calls a lot. While I know it's possible to some extent with pipewire, it is still too hacky and too much effort for a simple(from an end-user standpoint) task. Afaik it still doesn't work with Zoom at all. But I am in general excited about Wayland.

I believe it works well with the browser version now (as it uses the correct APIs) but afaik browser zoom doesn’t have feature parity with the desktop one?

So fair enough for not trying it out just yet, hopefully soon we can just easily say that it works splendidly!

Well said. The Macbook touchpad is almost good enough to get me to use it without being mad. And that's a hell of an accomplishment, because for any other laptop, I'd prefer to simply not use the computer if I didn't have a mouse on me.

This so much, the Mac touchpad is almost perfect, still no other manufacturer can compete, its really night and day. With all other systems I immediately switch to a mouse if possible.

It was actually perfect in my 2015 MBP, now its a tad too bad and its hard to find good resting positions for the fingers and palms.

too bad -> too big, typo

But there's one giant flaw on MacBook touchpads. After hearing everyone drool over them and finally getting to try one ( newly issued corporate laptop), I'm shocked that you can't independently control the scroll direction of the touchpad and mouse scroll button. There's an option in both submenus ( touchpad and mouse), but they change the same setting, resulting in a really unintuitive (for me) setup. Where's Apple's attention to detail here? Why do you have two different toggles in two different menus change each other? Why are you forced the same way on two completely different devices with different UX?

You can use third party tools and i believe command line to do this.

It's maddening how many third party apps with huge permissions one needs to get a macOS device to be customisable, like a keylogger for even basic keyboard shortcut customisations.

No amount of touch pad excellence erases the deficit of no tiling window manager and focus follows mouse in Linux. I recently upgraded to an M1 Macbook from an HP laptop running Ubuntu at work… and I’m having serious regrets.

I recall discussing focus follows mouse with a colleague on macOS years ago, did they really remove the feature?

Fingers crossed that the Asahi Linux project keeps advancing as good as they have.

> Why does nobody care about creaking plastic?

I care way more that my Dell laptop is trivial to disassemble than that making it that way (cheaply) involves plastic, panel gaps and creaking joints.

Surely it’s possible to make laptops that can be disassembled easily and don’t creak. Apple used to do it. Dell used to do it. Why not now?

For me the only Windows based laptops which do care about detail are the Lenovo ThinkPads.

These machines are simple, built well and in my 5+ year experience with all day use they're rock solid.

However for my personal use I use a Macbook.

Unfortunately newer thinkpads are prone to goddamn cpu throttles, though that is in part due to intel. Nonetheless, at work I had to replace a brand new thinkpad t14 because other than manually tweaking the CPU frequency (which is not allowed by company policy but I did anyway, otherwise I may have thrown the laptop out the window which is even less in line with company policy) it throttled like crazy at random times. I even have this problem on my thinkpad t480, though it is not as bad there. The T14 throttles down to goddamn 4-600 mhz, where it is practically unusable.

But I agree, for family members I always try to find a used <T480 laptop in good conditions, because these are faster than similarly priced low-end laptops (seriously, what they offer at the low-end is just criminal, they want to take advantage of the technically illiterate), and basically everything can be changed inside.

Given Windows' market dominance it stands to reason that most people believe them to have taste. It also remains unclear how these issues would impact your ability to do work.

Hmmm, are you conflating the hardware the runs Windows or do you mean something else?

That's personal taste, if Apple cares can they care to have a real keyboard, a bit of ports, and a camera shutter?

I am super filtered by the Mac keyboard and I don't think it is intended for professional use at all.

Also "it just werks" is not true at all, Macs have a super bad reparability. If you love Macs fine, but they are not that savoir of laptops as you claim, its a brand with its own loyal fans just like there is Thinkpads with loyal fans and people who say WHY NO ONE MAKE GOOD MUSIC TODAY EXCEPT TAYLOR SWIFT?????

ONLY GOOD PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE IS C# TODAY WTF???

As someone who had to sadly use one of the butterfly switch keyboards for a while at work, the new 14"/16" Macbooks both have the "old school" feeling keyboards, finally brought Magsafe back, and have ports for SD card and HDMI again. I feel like the thickness is so close to allowing an ethernet port that they should've just bumped it up a little more, but maybe they felt the average consumer wouldn't know what that is in 2022 (kidding, haha!). Sadly, still no camera shutter which is definitely a bummer, but I road my 2013 model into the ground hoping they'd bring back Magsafe because that's a must-have feature for me, hah.

I can't stand Mac OS infantile looks and intentionally slow UI just so it would look smooth.

Where do you find laptops with creaking plastic or weird textures like that? I get that there are more options to choose from in non-mac world but that doesn't mean you have to choose bad options. I go with Lenovo and never had any problems you are talking about. Macs, on the other hand, they have buggy UI and are extremely annoying if you want to use them in any other way than the "Mac way". Over the years they also had their share of hardware faults.

Feels good to vent. :)

Infantile? Which parts?

Rainbow-colored spinning loading wheel; jumping menu bar icons, trying to grab your precious attention for whatever reason; minimize button triggering "sucking" animation; app installation where you have to needlessly drag an icon onto Applications folder; pop-up windows which appear, then momentarily shrink and expand again. Sometimes it gives certain 1960's Batman TV series vibes.

> intentionally slow UI just so it would look smooth.

I get your anger, but it's not about trying to look 'cool'. For lots of folks it's more clear to see that (for example) a minimised window can be found in the dock by showing a transition. For people like you there's a preference (under accesibility - display - reduce motion) to turn it off.

Generally I stay away from Apple products or topics. The only reason I decided to comment was that I am forced to use Mac in my current work and after several stints I understood I was not going to get used to it. If people use it and like it, I don't mind. For me, it's just not intuitive; for instance, I wouldn't have thought of looking for this setting, let alone under accessibility options.

If you're going to have to use an unfamiliar device it helps to just check out what it can do (e.g. explore the settings) before concluding it sucks ;)

I don't really have the patience for silly stuff that annoys me and should/could be trivial to adjust. Just Google something (in this case 'macos disable animations') and you can remove a lot of friction from your daily life.

The problem is that there can be many such "small" things, sometimes with complex solutions ( remapping cmd+tab) or no solution at all ( having different scroll direction between trackpad and mouse. After some time you just get tired and accept the OS isn't for you and you stop fighting it.

Exactly how I feel, nice explanation.

It's not just silly stuff. There is stuff such as Apple Music which opens on the foreground every time I put on Bluetooth headphones and the two ways to stop it are either modify some internal system settings via shell or use another app which closes Apple Music immediately after it opens.

Another issue is the fact that whenever I turn on my headphones, if they were connected before laptop went to sleep, it will automatically wake up. Imagine if it was in your backpack and started working there.

At one point I had a list of Mac software issues but then I threw it away before I was forced using it again. As another commenter said, there is a threshold of small issues which once they add up is overstepped and then you search and find better options.

I guess you could also answer that with: because tastes are different. I actually prefer the feel of Lenovo's plastic to metal. I don't remember ever trying to balance a laptop, so not sure what uneven weight distribution would even mean. My x230 does creak a little when I press some point I am never touching while actually using it, only while holding it. On the other hand most keyboards on most laptops don't withstand the pressure I am using when typing.

Apparently I also hold my laptops differently because with the older MBPs the edge at the front hurt my wrist more than working on any other laptop ever had.

I would look to all mods and watercooling cooling rigs. When i enter an Apple I feel a lack of taste me too. Oh you were about laptop, well this is just opinionated remarks from fashionable wannabe geeks. Get a lenovo x1 carbon, you can even walk on it without worry as I did, wanna hard work ? get an eurocom with 128Gb Ram.

I'm off Lenovo X-s due to poor keyboards and poor warranty support. I was told (around the Gen5 era) that they often have slightly less powerful CPUs than similar competition though I have no idea if this is still true. They were also slower to offer better displays.

Onto Linux-on-Dell XPS 13 for a few years, though admittedly I didn't pay for it so I didn't really have a choice. Still, I'm happy and would easily recommend the product. A lot of firmware upgrades happen over `fwupdmgr` too.

The recently posted StarBook 14-inch looks interesting, but the screen isn't hi-res.

The reason most other companies don't worry about that is two-fold: culture, and costs. Apple has a culture, built top-down, that quality is paramount. While this seems to have started to decay a bit on the software side, mostly due to the size of the systems they are dealing with, and the need to support multiple software and hardware platforms (MacOS, iOS, iPad, Watch, iPhone, etc.), it is still going strong on the hardware side.

But the most demanding issue is cost. PCs are now a commodity. The margins in hardware are sustainable--barely. Therefore, every dollar (yen, yuan, etc.) invested in hardware design beyond the reference implementation provided by Arm, Intel, Nvidia, etc., is less money to the bottom line. And with lots of competition and rapidly iterating developments occurring at the chip and board level, the big gains in performance are driven by the chip manufacturers, not by the hardware platform providers like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.

Apple has managed to side-step that whole issue by providing an integrated platform that they completely control--more so now with the huge success of the Apple Silicon chips. This allows them to build compelling integrated solutions that don't run into the reliability problems posed by huge numbers of 3rd-party driver developers, support for add-in cards and other multi-provider issues. These are all things people complain about--the inability to upgrade or service their Apple hardware--but it provides a much more controlled environment, and allows Apple to spend more time working on all those attention-to-detail-items you mentioned, rather than testing, troubleshooting, and supporting an ever-growing plethora of hardware interopation issues.

Apple hardware costs a bit more (not a huge amount), and has a lot fewer upgrade or customization options, but what you get for that is a more bullet-proof solution overall. And it means Apple engineers and designers have more time to make sure that the devices are light, well balanced, quiet, and durable. It's a trade-off, to be sure, but so far the numbers are shifting in Apple's favor--something that seems shocking if you were around in the '90s when Apple's certain demise was commuted due to a huge investment by it's then arch-rival, Microsoft.

Why doesn't Apple care about software quality?

12.3 broke copying large files (200mb+) from the finder to network shares (files get corrupted, bad data). Copy from terminal with cp, no issue.

12.3 broke airplay

iOS 15.3 broke WebGL, tons of sites that rely on it are effed, (can't ask users to use a different browser on iOS)

All 3 issues, 6 weeks+ still unfixed.

etc....

PS: not saying that MS does better but "It just works" Apple is never actually true

Enterprise drives sales. Big companies don’t care about what some accountant thinks about her laptop.

A procurement officer at an insurance company will just do and RFQ and buy 50,000 laptops. The one the wins may be $2 cheaper than the loser.

I'm on my 3rd(!) company supplied macbook in almost 2 years. Macbook Pro, 16'', 32GB. First Macbook: screen broke in the middle. Second Macbook: screen broke and MacOS is complaining that there's something wrong with the SSD. Third macbook I just received and can't tell what will break. But break it will.

I only move them around the house, never on the road. When I move them, I place them in a Thule Gauntlet. I really take care of these babies as I find it wasteful not to.

So that is my anecdata on the 'stability' and 'care' of Apple.

My experience differs from yours. Both are wrong and true. You could just be unlucky, and so can I. No need to completely write off Dell or Lenovo over that though.

If that’s an Intel one you’re getting, I can understand it. However the M1 ones are a completely different computer. I am shocked at how good they are.

I've had a M1 Macbook pro (13-inch) display shatter on me within 10 months of purchase for no reason. The cost of repair is $800 which being around 80% of the cost of the laptop, was untenable. Since then it has been gathering dust in the storage closet for the past five months.

Looking online, it seems like there was a quality issue with their displays for the first few batches of production.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-facing-m1-macbook-cracked-s...

It is a shame. I did enjoy using the laptop very much.

Why did you not have insurance?

99% of the time I’ve seen this sort of stuff happen it’s because there was a screen protector or someone shut some crap in the lid.

Why should you need insurance on something that should be covered under the manufacturer warranty?

The manufacturer doesn’t know you didn’t leave half your rice lunch in the lid when you closed it.

I am confident that I treat my laptops very well. According to the article linked above, this issue has been occurring during normal use.

if only they could support 3 external monitors

M1 Max can. Needs more video (and therefore memory) bandwidth to do that.

Maybe I'm unlucky too. I have a work MacBook and a Lenovo ThinkPad manufactured the same year. The ThinkPad has aged extremely well and I'm really happy with it. The MacBook on the other hand struggles badly with tasks the ThinkPad does without a sweat. The battery life is also far worse on the MacBook. The MacBook has needed repairs whereas the ThinkPad has not. I'm sure both would have been fine brand new but it's interesting to see how they've aged over the years. It used to be that Apple hardware aged well, but I don't think that's the case anymore especially with their Intel hardware. YMMV as parent has pointed out.

There have definitely been some noteworthy problems with Apple's laptops in recent years...but I'm honestly not sure what it is you're doing to them to break screens on multiple machines in a row. You're the first person I've ever heard with that specific complaint, which suggests it may be something unusual about your usage pattern that's causing it.

Note that this isn't saying "you're being abusive to the computers": I can imagine daily-use patterns that are genuinely the best you can do that would result in much higher physical stress to a laptop than your typical office work. It's just saying that maybe, for your particular use case, you might need something more rugged than a stock MacBook of whatever type without a case on.

Yeah, maybe he's holding it wrong?

I’m on the same 2018 I got in 2018.

Every Dell or Lenovo I had before that was cracked, missing plastic bits, feet and screws after 4 years.

Last Lenovo had battery issues from the start. 2018 MacBook still lasts a day.

But my dual Xeon Dell Precision desktop from 2017 is still a beast, never had issues.

It’s a gradient in the aggregate but my personal experience says it’s just fine to write off any laptop that isn’t a Mac. The plastic housing alone makes me think they take a “Gillette razor” approach to portables; who cares if it cracks apart, just replace it! which I have a hard time looking passed given the industrial waste shitshow we already have.

As an equally useless anecdote, I've probably owned ~10 mac laptops in my life and I've never had an issue. I literally have never used a laptop sleeve or anything I just throw it in a bag and go. Literally one of the most indestructible things I've ever owned.

You're extremely lucky. Or maybe you change your laptops before Apple acknowledges the very real problems they have.

So many of their laptops have had issues necessitating recalls, but because they were able to delay those recalls until 5+ years after those devices were released (even if complaints started way earlier), they get away with it.

I've already had 2 Apple laptops where I took in a 4-5 year old device, and basically had them replace/refresh it for free. One was the gen 1 or gen 2 Macbook which had a ridiculous discoloration issue on the case palm rests, combined with the case peeling apart, and the other a Macbook Pro (2011?2012?) that had a graphics card issue.

The Core 2 Duo 17" MacBookPro is the most expensive and worst machine I ever owned.

The 13" MBP M1 has been the best, apart from the wretched touchbar.

Ironically, you can buy the 14-inch M1 MBP with no touchbar... and you can buy the M1 Air with no touchbar... it's only the 13-inch MBP with that god awful invention. I'm sticking with the M1 Air for now specifically for that reason.

I think there was also a period post 2015 MBP up until the new M1s now that the laptops were pretty bad and had a lot of points of failure. The current ones seem like a return to a more robust workhorse to me. I was lucky and and had a 2013 model that lasted me up until I replaced with an M1 recently.

On the personal front my 2012 MBP still works. An old 2004 PPC MacMini is still going strong though it runs OpenBSD rather than the last version of Mac OS X it supported.

My experience with Macs as work and personal laptops has been very good.

How come you have owned 10, do you replace them regularly when they aren’t broken?

Not the person you responded to, but it's not actually that odd - I've owned ~6 just due to career changes and company machines. There's totally valid reasons in our industry to change gear like that.

If we're doing anecdotes. I was hit by a car with my laptop and it has a 1/4 inch dent in the corner of the case. The screen on the bottom right is somewhat off color but it's been running fine for last 7 years. I've swapped out SSDs too for more room.

Another anecdote, writing this on a mid 2014 MBP that gets regular use. No issues.

I have a personal 2013 MacBook that has been left running in a box in the desert for a week straight and filled with dust, had sesame oil poured into the fans, dropped, hit, scratched and heavily dented, but still works beautifully. Then the butterfly keyboard ones were issued at work and it immediately become unusable because of dust, randomly double hitting e or the spacebar or failing to register hits to some keys. YMMV, 1 apple computer sadly != another apple computer anymore

Since you seem to have broken 2 screens: you are aware Apple is discouraging placing webcam covers on your MacBook screens? Since the screens are flat, those things can put a lot of pressure on a MacBook screen to the point they crack.

Here is some more anecdata: have had the same Macbook for 6 years with absolutely no issues, stellar reliability and battery life. Same at work. Only recently switched after 5 years at work because we had some new employee turnover and it made sense for me to get a slightly nicer machine for a new project.

I am on my thirst company supplied laptop. Thinkpad for 2 years. MacBook Pro for the next 5 and another MacBook Pro now on its third year. The next one will probably be a M1 based MacBook pro - though this one is working fine and I dont feel like going in to work just to replace it

It is extremely funny that people are able to come to conclusions like this from just 2 data points.

"Macbooks seem to be the only viable option these days", because I had bad experiences with two non-Macbook computers.

To be fair; I don't think that the author came to that conclusion only from those 2 anecdotes. But still, that is the way the argument is presented. And it really looks absurd.

Like he said, he was unlucky. I got a Lenovo Carbon X1 and it worked with Ubuntu without problems (well, the finger print reader didn't work which become a security problem with work as we realised the weakest point was our laptops which had all the IP on them). Other than that it was a joy!

It's just that there are endless pitfalls, especially running Linux on more recent hardware.

For instance, if you would be running Kernel 5.14+ but not 5.18-rc2+, you'd be crashing every time you try to wake from suspend right now.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/dfbba2518aac4204203...

Using fingerprints is insecure. Your fingerprints tend to be all over the laptop you are trying to protect and can especially be found on the fingerprint reader - unless it's one where you need to slowly move your finger across the sensor.

Standardfingerprint readers are not very good at detecting fakes. A German IT magazine (c't by Heise) discovered that you can fool almost all fingerprint sensors by making the fingerprint with wood glue on a plastic strip and hold that over your own finger. It's a 15 minute job if you know what to do.

These two computers are among the best windows computers though. So, you expect them to set the bar.

Indeed they should set the bar but it is irrelevant to my point. The point is that you can't make a generalized statement about a brand and base it only to a single anecdote about a single machine it manufactured.

Mistakes and problems are everywhere. What matters is the sample size. A single anecdote can't say anything about where the bar is set. It's basic statistics.

Yes I've owned all sorts of laptops from toshiba to lenovo to asus including a macbook air and the mac was the only laptop i sold on olx as i just didn't like it one bit.

So to each his own and definitely op is just unlucky and the conclusion drawn in this post is just absurd and flame-baity.

And then you get super long threads of people just sharing their opinion like it supports something. “I like Linux/Mac/Windows better”. “I don’t like my Dell”, “My Mac broke/never had an issue”. Ok what do I do with this info? Nothing, useless talk really, but we all love these threads and they always get super long

I feel like the only rational response is: "all computers have issues". When it comes to attention to detail on their machines (at least from a users perspective of interacting with one), Apple takes the crown and there's basically no one else doing it like they do.

But in terms of actually being a computer? No Apple has a failure rate probably on par with the industry standard. If you don't agree with me then I would implore you to go watch some of Louis Rossmann's content on Youtube.

I've worked in a software validation lab for the past 5 years where we have 100s of laptops in use. My bench has 8-10 laptops sitting on it at any given time, all of them running 24/7, though none of them doing anything particularly demanding. So I have what I believe to be some unique experience in this.

All of these laptops are higher end business models from major OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc...) I was an avid fan of Thinkpad T series laptops for quite a while, but in the last couple of years I've had a lot of problems with them and am no longer confident in that series. I've never been a fan of HP, and have had mixed results with their products. Their higher end business stuff is decent, but I've had issues here and there. Oddly, despite the many horror stories I've heard, the Dell Latitudes I've worked with have been the most rock-solid. No swollen batteries, no broken displays, no random bricking (happened to two different T460Ss I had), no BSODs.

I've personally not had great experiences with Macs in general, but have a lot less experience with them than PCs. I have not found Macs to be notably better than mid to high end PCs in terms of hardware quality.

not to sound like a curmudgeon but I for one will be in the cold cold ground before I ever declare macbook as the only viable option.

hackers are working hard on really cool daily driver laptops that respect your freedom and work to deliver an excellent computing experience.

system76 offers a good balance of performance and value: https://system76.com/laptops

pinebook offers a competitive and cheap arm daily driver: https://pine64.com/

and purism frankly rivals Apple levels of build quality and performance: https://puri.sm/

The new Tensorbook also looks like it has a high build quality.

https://lambdalabs.com/deep-learning/laptops/tensorbook

I got to play with a Purism Librem 14 machine last week, and the first thing I noticed was how heavy it was. The build quality seemed fine, but compared to a nearby M1, there's no contest about which one had the better build quality. When giving the machine back to its owner, one of the rubber feet on the Librem 14 simply fell off in my hand.

Thinking maybe it was a fluke, the owner of the machine fiddled with one of the other rubber feet, and was able to get it to pop off just by flicking it with his finger.

The security features are nice on the Librem, but as configured, this particular laptop cost more than the M1 Macbook Air. Same amount of storage, same amount of ram. Different CPU's, obviously.

When asked about battery life of the Librem 14, the owner said he hadn't really seen how long it'd typically last on the Librem. I can say though that the M1 Macbook Air, during my normal use (writing and compiling code, slack, email, zoom, etc), is having a bad day if it doesn't last at least 6 hours. I've used the M1 on a trip recently that took 38 hours, door to door. I didn't charge the M1 once, and used it quite a bit during various flights and while waiting for flights. I worked, watched a couple of movies, had a couple of Facetime calls. I still had 25% battery when I finally arrived.

While I admit that it's probably not fair to make a judgment after holding the Librem 14 for about five minutes, I can't really say that the quality of the Librem 14 rivals that of Apple.

Edit: forgot to add. I've rarely felt my M1 get even warm, let alone turn on a fan. My Macbook Air doesn't even have fans. I used to be able to count on the Intel based Macbooks to warm my fingers during winter, but not any more. The M1's run very cool. The Librem 14 was loud. And hot. Not warm, but hot. My fingers were sweating when trying out the keyboard.

Been very happy with my system76 galago pro 4 for a few years now, would recommend and will buy from them again.

Definitely look very seriously at Framework. Bought one last year and it's easily been the best computer purchase I've ever made. Solved every problem I experienced with Dell and Lenovo. I run Manjaro Linux on it.

https://frame.work

Mine still won't even wake from sleep, and will freeze all inputs if it sits even slightly unevenly.

The Framework is a beta product, at best. If you know that and are up for the challenge, go for it, but if you want something you're not going to have to fiddle with every time you want to do anything on it, pick something else.

What distro and kernel version are you using?

Ubuntu 21.04 (21.10 was reportedly full of even more bugs, so I'm anxiously awaiting 22.04 this week), 5.11 kernel.

Ubuntu is a bad choice for newer and esoteric hardware, a rolling release distro will have up-to-date kernels and userlands in comparison.

As an example, Ubuntu had issues with my newer Zen hardware despite the hardware being on the market for quite some time. Switching to the newest kernel fixed my issues with stand-by and sleep, along with weird issues like random freezing.

I think in this thread it's worth pointing out that it doesn't work well with even a very common Linux distro.

For someone who's considering a MacBook the primary viable alternative, I'm just trying to point out that it's a long way from a smooth experience on a refined product.

Sure, at the same time it's worth pointing out that anyone who wants to buy a laptop to run Linux on it full time should be using a Linux distro which provides up to date packages.

Can you provide a short list of those distros you recommend with up to date packages?

OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Arch and Arch-based distros like EndeavorOS, maybe Debian Sid (it's been a while since I've used it, don't know how up-to-date the packages actually are), maybe Fedora Rawhide. There's also Manjaro, but I can't really recommend it when there are better options. Then there are some other rolling release distributions that I can't speak for, some of them new and some of them old like Gentoo.

I've used Ubuntu and Debian stable and testing for decades, but have migrated over to rolling releases for desktop use because of better hardware support.

This, 100%. Running opensuse 15.3 but with a bleeding edge kernerl (via repo) to fix sleep and other issues. Works almost perfectly.

Framework still aren't shipping to a lot of countries, which is extremely frustrating.

i seriously considered a framework laptop instead of a 14" mbpro but the battery life seems to be terrible on them, maybe in a few years if intel or amd catch up on power consumption of their chips

I'm a Dell XPS 13 user here (with Linux) and I'm very happy I actually bought it twice (2014 and 2021). 0 problems, the laptop is always cold, no noise, everything works fine.

At work I had several MBP in the meantime. All of them with several problems. Docker extremely slow, Bluetooth not working, ports not working, noise like a nuclear reactor, extremely hot like you can actually make a pizza on top also the OS is very strict and hard to tell any other MBP user how to install things or how to configure it feels like a roulette and some of them if you open more than 6 apps it may reboot so good luck if MBP is your only option because you will be screw.

I had the reverse problem. Had several Dell XPS's both of the 13" and 15" variety. All had issues the made them unusable. Meanwhiles the Mac's I've had have never had a SINGLE issue.

Dells QC has gone down for nearly a decade, I bought one of the new XPS last year, fantastic screen but it had throttling issues and SSD corruptions within two weeks of using it on Windows 11.

I just got my first thinkpad in 9 years, after having spent two years on a dell xps from hell. I have to say, this is the first time in a long while I'm back in love with hardware. Got a second-hand L14 AMD G1, upped the ram and SSD (yes you can do that!) and apparently there's even an option to add another m2 ssd since the ryzen in this thing has some spare PCIe lanes that are hooked up to the WWAN slot I'm not using.

My whole family and most of my colleagues use macs/iOS all over, and interacting with these things is plain infuriating to me. Plus, somehow Apple pulls an amazing PR stunt where somehow everything is purported to be easy, but really they rely on untold hours of non-volunteer work from family & friends who feel bound to help out with Mac handling, because they feel "it's apple, it has to be easy... right?"

Anyhow, these are my two cents.

ThinkPads are definitely nice but +1 to getting a Ryzen one. Work supplied a T15p Gen 1 with Comet Lake (GTX 1050 so GPU isn't a heatmaker) and it's basically "factory-throttling". Every single one we have just turbos to 100C (not even max clock rate) and self-throttles. There's also some critical Thunderbolt PnP bugs but I 100% blame Intel for that, it's their chipset after all.

I had to make a custom power plan and send it to everyone to keep it at sane temperatures and prevent throttling (at which point it's decent). If you look at it & the T15p Gen 2 you'll see Lenovo realized their mistake and then overcompensated on cooling by doubling thickness (blech), even on non-Quadro models.

But the keyboard is definitely nice and it's one of the sturdier Windows laptops I've seen, even has a neat hardware switch for the webcam.

I experienced factory throttling on my Thinkpad as well, its a T470p (intel) and I was able to reduce temperature by ~7-10 degrees by undervolting the cpu a teensy bit (and cpu cache as well I think). People recommended re-applying thermal paste but I got enough gains out of undervolting.

Work just upgraded me to an HP EliteBook 835 G8. It's got a Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U and 24GB of RAM. I do mostly .NET/ASP.NET development and it's seriously fantastic. Form factor is good, repairability is good (granted our company is also an HP authorized service center), I/O is good (really only missing eth), and it has a matte display with a touchscreen.

I really think that Apple devices get so much clout mostly due to advertising.

My issues with my iPhone 7 radio made me switch to Android after they told me it was Qualcomm's fault that it wasn't bonded to the PCB properly.

My 2009 MacBook Pro 13" had some sort of issue where the SATA III part of the controller died and I was forced to either pay $800 for a new logic board because I had upgraded the RAM or use an optical drive HDD caddy which ran at SATA I(?) speeds. I had also had the logic board replaced once and the screen replaced twice less than a year after I got it as the screen had stopped working. Don't remember the actual cause of the issue, but seeing as it was covered I have a feeling there was a known issue with that line.

My girlfriend's 2011 13" MacBook Pro ended up with non-functioning USB ports due to a known but never recalled, even silently, issue with a chip on the logic board. Again, would have been a $500+ logic board replacement "fix".

My 2016 MacBook Air 13" started to develop a crack on the black plastic piece covering the hinge because of heat stress. I paid for the most "performant" SKU and after one major macOS update it was practically unusable.

My mom's 2017 MacBook Air 13" worked fine until this past year where the trackpad and keyboard died. Sure, got 5 years out of it, but this is also a very common issue as far as I can tell from research. Also, who the hell routes the keyboard through the trackpad? That's madness.

This is all anecdotal for sure, but I am staying away from Apple products from now on based on my experience. Especially these days with the machines having non-user-serviceable parts, I just can't take the risk anymore. What happens when my logic board inevitably dies? All of my data on that device is toast with no way to recover it. Ultimately you have to purchase something that's going to work and is serviceable... either by yourself or a service center.

"What happens when my logic board inevitably dies? All of my data on that device is toast with no way to recover it."

Backups are your friend. Backblaze, Arq, etc etc etc. Tons of cheap options out there.

Backups are important, but what I also think is important is that an entire laptop shouldn't become garbage just because a soldered component on it fails.

It’s not garbage. Just replace the motherboard.

"Just replace the motherboard" and lose all of your data on it. Yes, backups are important, but there's a loss of time when you have to restore from backup or provision a new machine/motherboard with your environment.

Not to mention that "just replace the motherboard" can often mean costing half, if not more, the original price of the machine. What happens if my SSD wears out? I just have to replace the entire logic board for one wear component?

Say it's not the SSD and it's something else like a voltage regulator. Now this motherboard is complete scrap. There's no harvesting of the RAM or SSD, so the part is probably $300 more expensive than it needs to be. And all those useful parts that are already scarce in a chip shortage will just be ground down and "recycled". These laptops suck.

I get what you're saying, but you really should consider any portable hw(laptops/phones) as disposable. Or better yet -- assume that malicious actor cat get access to your device and configure it accordingly.

No, we really shouldn't. Enterprise generally does hardware refreshes every 3 years. The average consumer can take one of those machines and extend at least another 2 years out of it. Being able to securely wipe or remove storage modules out of the machines for repurposing should be a pretty easy target to hit.

Additionally, some industries like K12 or non-profits a lot of times have to try to squeeze as much life out of their systems as possible. These organizations would benefit insanely from better repairability and cheaper access to parts.

Of course motherboards are a bit harder to repair and usually means replacing the whole board, but it doesn't have to if we had a skilled workforce that could easily refurbish boards. Apple has taken great measures to make sure this never happens.

There's also the argument to be made for historic preservation. The retro computer community has been doing nothing but growing and I can already see in 20+ years time that these machines will be absolutely unusable without some sort of software hack. Even then, your onboard storage is shot and you have to boot externally.

You can make repairable, cost effective, well built, and top of the line machines. Apple just doesn't do it.

I agree with you and I'm all in for right to repair, but I was referring to the specific point mentioned above -- "restoring from backup is a hassle".

If it is a hassle then you're doing it wrong and you'll be in all sorts of trouble if you lose your laptop / it gets stolen.

I’m not going to argue against repairability, but a replaceable failed SSD has exactly the same problem RE data loss.

Right, but the chances of a failed soldered SSD is the chance of any important component on the motherboard or the SSD, not just the SSD. Which doesn't mean you can forgo backups, but it does mean the chances of you needing them may be slimmer (and the cost of the repair smaller).

Then again "ship your entire Mac back to repair the webcam" was always a meme, so maybe Apple gonna Apple.

I think Framework and System76 are largely replacing the best options from the traditional PC manufacturers for Linux users (and maybe many Windows users as well?)

If System76 can get their own laptop chassis designed and fabricated I think a lot of people will be all over that.

Maybe when System76 starts manufacturing their own systems I'll be interested. I don't want a rebranded Clevo.

Framework doesn't even support Linux and they only have one model, which is not enough to meet everyones needs.

> Framework doesn't even support Linux

Yet. I am pretty sure you could spin up Archlinux / Ubuntu on it. I'd give it a shot if I had the need to replace my Thinkpad.

Yes, they do.

https://community.frame.work/c/framework-laptop/linux/91

That isn't official support. If there is, for example, a driver bug that prevents your audio from working it isn't cause for a warranty claim.

While with Windows it would be.

Everybody blames Linux DEs for looking inconsistent, but every time I have to use Windows 10, I see an OS with more than 5 different UI styles. There's no consistency among the OS anymore eversince Windows 7.

Pardon me, but I think Microsoft should get their shit together if they want to stop losing users and devs to MacOS.

Having a new UI style on the Desktop and every single click on it leads to a completely unpredictable UI doesn't have anything to do with "center".

When people ask me what to get I always answer "just get a macbook" because even when I would love to give them a shiny Linux laptop, the amount of maintenance work on there is insanely high. Macbooks compared to my Linux systems are basically maintenance free once they are setup.

Of course that depends on whether you want to develop software on it...but let's not kid ourselves here: most users are not developers. And most users don't want to use i3wm or the Terminal.

Huh? Who ever blamed Linux DEs for looking inconsistent, except the dedicated Linux users?

Consistency is not that big of a deal. It is usually poor hardware support, installation/update issues, and lack of software where Linux falls flat on its face.

> I strongly dislike MacOS because they force the "apple way" of doing things.

Complaining about this is like complaining that cats don’t behave like dogs.

macOS has its own idiosyncrasies. It may not be for everyone, but maybe this is the reason why things “just work” for the general public (and more).

I’m not aware of Windows working on Apple Silicon, but there is Asahi Linux which, I hear, has done a good job with their M1 support, although it likely comes with compromises (again, this is second hand information).

It doesn't boot directly on it, but you can at least run Windows 10 ARM64 VMs on Apple Silicon. With Parallels you also get some decent GPU virtualization.

I dream of a device that's basically a laptop without a screen, keyboard, trackpad, etc. Just plug it into a usb-c hub it restores everything from where I left off last time. Then once I'm done put it in my pocket and go.

Then if I do want a laptop I could buy a chassis with a battery, keyboard, trackpad, screen, etc, etc to dock my device above in to.

Edit: Seriously considering taking the motherboard out of a steam deck and making a custom aluminum enclosure for it that only exposes the usb-c port.

Sounds like Samsung dex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX

> Then if I do want a laptop I could buy a chassis with a battery, keyboard, trackpad, screen, etc, etc to dock my device above in to.

https://nexdock.com/samsung-dex-laptop/

I've never used either (but I'd like to)

Kinda like that but I want a machine I'm free to install windows/linux/whatever on to.

The NexDocks are the shell you asked for, not the computer. Although they're marketing as being for smartphones, they should work with anything that supports USB 3.2 with DisplayPort.

This does seem to exist. https://www.magicstickone.com/

Specs aren’t great though.

Sounds like the Librem 5 would fit your bill. Or some single-board computer with USB-C.

The librem might work but what can I install on it besides their OS? It also has very limited ram/etc.

I've been looking for a single board computer with usb-c that's still a reasonable good desktop and haven't found anything. The only contender right now is the motherboard from a steam deck but im not sure that can be taken out and work on it's own.

I think Mobian is available there. Once it gets towboot support, it'll be able to run way more UEFI OS.

That is actually, genuinely an amazing idea.

I'd steal it, but I doubt I'd have time to seriously work on it. So... either make it and sell it to me, or have someone else do it.

It doesn't exactly exist in market as a product yet but the Intel NUC Laptop Element may promise to do this. From the marketing material I have seen it's basically like a cartridge that presumably you can slide into any kind of chassis. On the go it could be a 15" or 17" laptop chassis being sold along side with a Desktop chassis for at home.

I'm also considering the same albeit a bit different - a standard NUC or even a Chromebox that I bring to work and use at home - all over USBc. And for in-person meetings where I need a device I have a thin and light Chromebook in my bag.

You could get a GPD Micro PC. It does have a screen, keyboard and trackpad, but it's probably about as small as the device you were envisioning anyway (certainly smaller than a Steam Deck), and in any case I suspect it's a lot more practical to have some sort of built-in interface to such a thing, even if it's compromised. You could easily remove the screen and/or extract the motherboard, but you'd have a much less useful device for only a small win in portability. It must also be said that it's a deeply fun device.

A USB-C laptop shell that was nothing but a nice screen, a good keyboard+trackpad, and a generous battery would indeed be an interesting product, and a fantastic companion to either a GPD Micro PC or a powerful smartphone. (edit: someone posted about the "NexDock" products which appear to be exactly this. Hooray!)

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2022/03/18134137/Steam...

The motherboard to the steam deck near the top middle in the picture above. If that can run on its own with usb power then it would just need a nice enclosure that provides some cooling. Was thinking about having someone CNC cut me something.

The GPD Micro PC looks interesting but is still a bit of the big side. Don't need the screen, battery, keyboard, or most of the ports.

A high end phone has the HW resources to do this already. It 'just' needs the software.

I suspect that cloud + browser covers many of the use cases for this setup, and perhaps most of the uses people would pay for, while being cheaper to deliver.

Respectfully I disagree. In fact MacBooks are slowly become the LEAST viable option, at least for me personally.

It's all about personal requirements and I suppose, taste.

Don't get me wrong, the MacBook is a fantastic laptop, especially for the creative professional and laypeople.

For me, as a Linux user and enthusiast, MacBooks have slowly become less and less viable each year.

I bought my first MacBook in 2007, in college, and have used MacBooks as my primary choice of device until 2018. I still use a MacBook professionally, as it is what my company distributes for development machines.

They are beautifully crafted, well integrated, and optimized for a good amount of use cases.

What they are no longer good for is openness. They are slowly migrating away from being able to access low level things, and when you can it's highly limited. Each year, I feel like the OS and hardware creep toward iPad levels of openness.

A lot of open source software will stop being supported for M1 (MX moving forward) chipsets if they choose to ditch backwards compatibility with current architectures. Powerful tiling window managers are all but extinct on macOS, with the exception of yabai, which you need to disable a lot of security features just to use.

I bought my wife a MacBook for Christmas in 2020 and I was very jealous. The hardware and the OS are simply beautiful. However it simply doesn't work for me anymore.

I bought an XPS developer edition in 2018, slapped Arch Linux on it and never had any serious issues.

My next laptop will be another XPS, ThinkPad, Systemic, or a Star book, but I will continue to look at MacBooks with envy.

That being said, if MacBooks meet your requirements, it's hard not to argue that it's a good machine, if not the best, possibly lending to your feeling that it's the "only choice".

Genuine question -- what low level things can't you access on a MacBook? I've been using them for years and have never run into anything I needed that I outright couldn't access. It could well just be that I'm not digging into that level of detail though.

My family and I avoid this entire problem by simply not buying laptops. Our desktop computers--assembled for a fraction of the cost of buying a retail laptop and much more powerful--are more than serviceable. If you need mobility, then prepare for extreme tradeoffs, relatively speaking.

I think it is the factors in the world today that has drastically reduced quality of all system, including macs, I'll grand to a far less degree, but I use to be able to buy apple hardware and I just didn't worry about returns or manufacturing faults.

But in the last 3 years, we've seen endless failings, across all brands, Dells and their shit batteries and docks, Lenovo and their cheap build quality, faulty keyboards, screens with ghosting and dead pixels, cases cracking, Apples big issues we've seen is motherboards, and power circuitry.

It is just so frustrating to have to go through the read tape, and headaches only to be told that a new unit won't be available for a weeks.

I wish, there was a reliable vendor, but like so much else it just seems that quality is the lowest concern.

I miss the pre-2016 macs

The Wintel alliance is to blame for the bad state of laptops.

First, Windows shit the bed with Windows 8 and the material design and tiles and two desktops. It still ... REALLY ... sucks. And they didn't care, why would they? The money STILL came in.

Secondly, Intel sat on its laurels, and even worse, accepted a supplicative role to Microsoft in the Wintel "alliace". Intel absolutely should have pushed Linux on the desktop with some of their spare billions, if only to keep Microsoft honest, and to push hardware vendors. Even if it was under the guise of keeping compatibility high, or due diligence.

Linux has, for at least two decades, been the opportunity to showcase hardware features in Intel without waiting for Microsoft to scratch its butt and crap out another service pack about two years after the hardware feature was available. But Intel never got it.

It's not surprising they don't understand software, because from what I can tell of their management, they don't even understand hardware.

Sorry man, I really don't think this has anything to do with the reduction of the quality of hardware.

Until Linux gets a multi billion dollar company backing it as a desktop OS and willing to pay what Microsoft is for their backing, it would make no sense for them to do otherwise.

I run a Dell XPS Developer Edition with Ubuntu preinstalled. I have had 0 problems with it. The only additional thing I did was disable the touchscreen because I never used it, but it did work.

I think you're likely going to encounter some faulty equipment from any vendor. I have enough family who swear by macbooks to know that the grass isn't much greener from their side and their hardware breaks too. I would be hesitant to switch ecosystems over 2 bad experiences.

Meh. The small company I work at has seen its fair share of weird macbook failures, I don't think that - among high end machines - they stand much above the crowd.

Funny screens, overheating, broken trackpads, the infamous keyboard.

They are definitely more annoying that you can't swap the disks if they need sending off for repair though.

Apple is not any better.

At 10th of this month I bought MacBook M1 that has 16 GB RAM and 512 GB disk. I did dual boot macOS Monterey and Asahi Linux. I could not find a way to turn off boot sound, selecting that menu option at macOS did not work. When I was away from keyboard, macOS did go to sleep mode, even when I tried make it not to at power settings. Asahi Linux did keep running, so my HexChat IRC etc did not stop when away from computer. Linux is still best work OS. I did like MacBook M1 is silent.

At 14th of this month I had to return MacBook M1 to warranty repair, because it does not boot anymore. It does charge to full, but does not boot.

Good luck finding working laptop.

I've used both of those laptops with Linux and had zero issues. We use Dell at work and it came with Linux installed though I did a clean install afterwards with no issues. If you are talking about just general reliability of the hardware rather than compatibility, I've personally suffered more issues from mackbooks in the past than Dell but that's just my personal experience. Maybe you just had a bad run of luck on that side?

Also, I have been wanting to try https://system76.com/ for quite a while but I can't get my work to approve one.

I cannot really accept a MacBook because it's a rental product where Apple has complete control over your machine.

Used a Dell XPS for a while, it's a fairly good experience with Linux (Ubuntu and Manjaro), but the build quality is pretty bad. Once it fell backwards from a coffee table and shorted the main board from the hit. I had to resolder a few SMD parts, was not fun. I also hit the corner or the "metal" lid which cracked and bent from an impact what wouldn't even scratch a MacBook. Needless to say, Dell's support was not helpful.

Now I've got a new 2022 ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16, and so far the experience is much better. It's a sturdy machine, without any Dell's creaking and bending, the keyboard is much better as well. ASUS Linux community at https://asus-linux.org/ is helpful and most of the features worked either out of the box, or with reasonable amount of tinkering. The price for it here in Shanghai is also reasonable, 12700h w/ nvidia 3060, 2T SSD, and 40GB DDR5 RAM is ~US$2250.

> I cannot really accept a MacBook because it's a rental product where Apple has complete control over your machine.

What are the specific things that you cannot do with your MacBook that are a deal breaker for you?

I'm curious because I was previously a "hard-core" i3wm/Ubuntu user, but after switching to Mac/MacOS, the limitations (not running i3wm, pretty much) were not deal breakers for me, especially in light of the quality of the battery/microphone/speaker/bluetooth as a remote worker.

Without going into too much detail, I think my biggest gripes are:

- outdated utilities, like `make` v3, that bite you in the ass every now and then,

- Docker support is bad, it's slow and quirky, and I use it a lot for development,

- hard to trust homebrew's security model,

- necessity to bind a phone number and email, deanonymizing your machine,

- recent security blunders like root login without a password,

- ridiculous amount of telemetry that's hard or impossible to disable.

Thanks for replying!

> Docker support is bad, it's slow and quirky, and I use it a lot for development.

That would probably be a deal breaker for me too if I used it for development.

> hard to trust homebrew's security model

Hmm, how is it different from, say, `apt`'s security model?

> necessity to bind a phone number and email, deanonymizing your machine

I'm not with you on this one. I log into Chrome/my phone anyways.

> recent security blunders like root login without a password

I had no impression that MacOS has root exploits at faster frequency than linux distros. Do you think that's the case?

> ridiculous amount of telemetry that's hard or impossible to disable.

I don't care too much about this one either.

I do care about those things ;)

> Hmm, how is it different from, say, `apt`'s security model?

Core Debian packages are handled by Debian Security Team, Homebrew packages are more like npm, where anyone can upload anything at any time. Also Homebrew's PATH fiddling is very insecure (check https://infotoast.org/site/index.php/2021/05/30/homebrew-is-...). MacPorts come with their own problems. It's just an all-around hacky, insecure software supply chain that is anything but trustworthy.

I'd say just unlucky. My Thinkpad Carbon X1 is rock solid, no issues the last 1.5 years even though my large cat frequently sleeps on it.

I want to like the carbon but the lack of AMD options and a hard cap of 16 GB of RAM keep me away.

Not sure where you get that RAM cap from. I have 32GB in my X1.

Vendor limitation maybe? Some manufacturers just don't want to certify configurations above X GB but if you install the DIMMs they will boot.

You may check X13 AMD Gen 2 which has 32GB soldered RAM option. Although I am not sure how much it differs from X1 Carbon. Anyway I prefer a bit more screen real estate so went with T14 which is still very portable too and gets up to 48GB RAM. What I miss is lack of TB4/USB4 support to plug in eGPU. Some rumors say AMD Ryzen 6000 line should have it.

Really happy with my X1 as well. I prefer my X1 over my work supplied MacBook. The difference is like night and day for me. YMMV of course.

X1 Carbon feels a lot nicer to me than a Macbook. It's also lighter than a Macbook air and has a bigger screen and better keyboard.

Macbooks are better than about 95% of PC laptops, but that's because Macbooks are only in the lower/mid upper end of laptops. PC laptops range from absolute garbage to being significantly better than Macbooks.

When people complain about how terrible PC laptops are, it's very rare that they've spent a meaningful amount of time (read: enough to get used to the trackpoint) with a high end PC laptop.

Ubuntu has run well on all laptops I have owned so far. I am amazed of high quality software that Linux distributions offer for free.

I am not going to use a closed source black box OS from Apple, with the possibility of remote surveillance of my device whenever the company or governments want.

Two options to consider, no personal experience with one of them though:

https://frame.work/nl/en

https://nl.starlabs.systems/

I despise Macs but I think you are right.

ALL modern windows laptops are broken inherently due to Microsoft's forcing of Modern standby on manufacturers, this means that pretty much every manufacturer has removed S3 sleep from their laptops, this means that laptops cannot and will not deep sleep.

You can't quickly shut the lid on any of the new Dell or Lenovo laptop, the fans stay on cooking itself if you put it into a bag (not covered under warranty btw) or just draining the battery.

Microsoft Modern / Connected standby is so broken that many people are returning their laptops (just hit Reddit to see how widespread this is)

I have just moved my company away from Dell as a primary provider because our $8K XPS 9710's are basically useless as laptops.

We even tried to set "Hibernate on Lid close" and "Auto Power on Lid Open" - Hibernate fails about 1/3rd of the time basically causing a hard reset and loss of anything that was open.

Our company is now a Mac only company and unfortunately for Dell its not likely going to change in the future.

> 1. Dell XPS: I spent over 20+ hours with their support going back and forth. I also had a tech come to my house to replace my motherboard before I gave up and demanded a return

Yeah, I've had a few of these and all of them have had issues. On one, the speaker blew. On another the battery died. On another the wi-fi died.

I was thinking recently about tech reviews, because they're usually all glowing for the Dell XPS series. But these reviewers probably get brand-new units, play with them for a week, and then send them back. I wish they'd focus on things like build quality (not just the materials), longevity, customer support, defect rate etc.

My wife has some cheap Acer laptop, it's all plastic, the thing gets thrown in her work bag like lunch, but it never dies. It's like a Toyota, and my laptop is like a Mercedes needing special care with cotton gloves.

My work laptop is a Macbook, and it feels way "sturdier" than my XPS. It certainly sees rougher treatment, and never misses a beat.

My last Lenovo Thinkpad was an utter disaster. Despite being a mid to mid-top of the line notebook for performance it was stuck with a critical flaw that frequently throttled the CPU down to .39 GHz. Apparently it was a well known bug with the thermal control software and the ultimate solution was just to replace it with another model from corporate IT.

Edit: The throttling would happen despite the CPU temperature being normal for average workloads. It certainly wasn't running at full power near 95°C and then slowing down to protect itself. We even tried providing increased airflow and a laptop cooling stand. It didn't help or make a difference on when it would drop down to throttling range. We tried all sorts of Windows power management settings, a few Lenovo power management apps, updating the firmware, and yet nothing helped.

I had a similar issues with my previous client Dell or HP, really a disaster...And everyone was hit by that bug, we are talking thousand of employees.

The T series went to shit around the T480. They’re just crap now.

My recently (ish) purchased System76 box "just worked" right out of the gate. More so than even I expected, as I had thought I would probably replace their PopOS distro with something else. But I gave it a whirl, found that it works just fine, and stuck with it.

I love that it is just Ubuntu underneath, so I just install `lubuntu-desktop` and I've got my preferred desktop environment, while not losing the benefits of their kernel tuning and such.

I'm considering System76 as well. Mind sharing your experience with "bloatness"?

I switched from Ubuntu to Arch some years ago because it was getting too bloated for my taste.

How is PopOS on this regard?

I'm afraid I don't know exactly how to quantify that. I also don't have much to compare to, as the only other distro I've used on a regular basis the last few years was Fedora. I've never used Arch, for example.

I recently was in the market for a laptop for personal use, and wanted to spend around $1200-1400 USD for a Windows based machine. All I wanted was a decently powerful CPU, higher resolution screen, and a thin and light body. I simply couldn't get past the fact that most laptops in that price range are gaming focused, and have non-user replaceable components. They also tend to have plastic bodies and most I saw were running Windows 11. I got turned off by the PC market pretty quick.

I ultimately decided to get a new Macbook Pro 14in (on sale for $1750) and have 0 regrets so far.

Entry level Durabooks go for $1500. It’s a little heavy, but it’s serviceable and not made of cheap plastic.

Something doesn't add up in your story. You ended buying a machine that was 350$ over your stated max budget. I am also not sure what you include in "user replaceable components" but Macbooks are, from experience, generally harder to service than PCs. Maybe you just wanted a Mac and were looking for reasons to indulge yourself?

Sometimes you go over budget.

I decided that if I was stuck with a machine that wasn't going to have user replaceable components, I'd rather have a Macbook that I know will last longer than most PC based laptops. Pretty simple logic.

FWIW I bought a new Framework laptop and it's worked perfectly with Ubuntu since day 1 YMMV - a major advantage of Framework over other brands is down the road if a component breaks I have a higher probability of being able to replace it as compared to most anything else (think: like an old thinkpad)

I'm shocked the LG Gram doesn't get more attention. It's a dream come true laptop for a non-Apple developer. It took me months to actually find it after needing to replace my Vaio, but going 2 years strong with no issues whatsoever.

It has it all. Lightweight, great battery life, big screen, full backlit keyboard, numpad, latest processors, USB-C charging and display, the only PC trackpad that beats the Mac. And with PowerToys, you can lay out the keyboard however you need.

Unless you need a dedicated GPU, it's the complete PC laptop in my opinion.

I didn't even realise LG did a laptop, it looks like a nice machine tbf

Absolutely shocking. With that weight of about a Kg you can actually have it on your lap long times (I'm now lying on bed writing), but the screen is big (17''), and undoes something the 16:9 aspect ratio mania (it's 16:10). And advertises as having passed some military-sounding duress tests (mine has fallen one or two times without consequences). Only con is later models have a physical num-pad, so keyboard G-H middle point is deviated from trackpad center.

Seems a bit coincidental and funny that the two comments on this are from "jesuslop" and "sirsinsalot" :)

Dell XPS are absolute garbage. I had one and it had thermal problems galore and was clearly made of any old shit that was the lowest bidder frankensteined into whatever config they could ship. We had a few of the same spec and model and they had different RAM and SSDs in them.

The really annoying thing is that they tried so hard to replicate the MacBook packaging experience. This failed miserably when it wouldn’t come out of the box because the vacuum forming was wrong.

Shows how much QA goes into a product if they can’t actually not fuck up the box.

I have had enough faulty Macbook Pros back in 2015-17 to say that, probably, no company is immune.

I'm typing this from an old Thinkpad T470, which is still pretty adequate for development work, with an M.2 SSD and 32 GB RAM, running Linux. I don't feel constrained.

My Anecdotal Laptop History:

2006 HP Pavillion - dragged around the world. Felt a bit cheap/plasticy but never had any major issues.

2013 Macbook Pro Retina was a champ, a bit dated now. Saved me from massive back-injury when I fell on some ice and acted as a shield. Put a huge dent in the corner. Speakers rumbled a bit after. Unusable now due to MacOS limit.

2015 Asus Zenbook Pro still quite usable. Windows 10 still happy. Keys felt a bit plastic/motile but still decent to type on.

2022 Dell Latitude 7520 just arrived, extremely light and peppy. Overall has a very utilitarian feel with a backspace key and function row. Nice big trackpad. Hope it lasts a while.

Now the only funny thing is if you add up the cost of all the non Apple laptops it equated to the same cost as all the others combined.

Pavillion ~$800, Zenbook Pro ~$1299, Dell ~$1699, Macbook Pro Retina: ~$3700

Definitely got my eye on a https://frame.work/ soon for personal.

I've bought hundreds of Dell desktops, laptops, servers, etc., over the last 15 years. Rarely have I had any issues.

I bought 30 Lenovo and Dell laptops for new starters at our business and have definitely found that, over the last two years, both present more issues than I would have expected from either. We've stopped buying Lenovo because of the problems our users were having, sticking with Dell and trying to weather the issues.

I've had great experience with Dell as well.

But I'm reconsidering them from now on. One of my current laptops have a weird issue and I tried to purchase extended warranty for them to fix it. Only to discover they now only service machines up to 3-years old.

I had bad luck with the top spec 13" DELL XPS (2021) - Fan was loud, and audio jack randomly failed to detect headphones. Webcam was mediocre, audio quality was really really poor. It was ok for a machine that was only used for coding, but wasn't great for remote work / conferencing. Replaced with the M1 equipped 13" macbook which was about £400 cheaper (although also lower spec) and I'm very happy since. Despite the lower spec it does almost everything much faster. The only nuisance I had was a few Terraform providers not being released for ARM, and the occasional Docker woes with a few obscure images. The Macbook's overall quality and versatility beats the XPS by a good margin for my purposes.

I think they are, and have been for many years, in a completely different league to all other laptops.

- Much better battery life (both when you buy it, and how slowly it degrades)

- Windows is just a mess. MacOS is way nicer, and has the advantage for developers of being Unix based. And compared to linux, things generally just work which is a major boost to overall productivity.

- Build quality is unmatched and always has been. Materials are nicer, things fit together properly, they’re light, etc

- Touchpad is amazing

- Performance is great. It feels like the parts work together rather than individually, and the machine is optimised for real tasks rather than isolated benchmarks.

There are many good reasons to use a freer linux laptop but productivity is not one of them, in my experience.

I have an Asus ROG 14 2020 model with AMD Ryzen 5 that I'm very happy with - runs cool, battery life is great (easily lasts a day if I'm not gaming), has survived a few drops, and cost me half what a MacBook would have. Most of all I can easily dual boot Linux on it. The only thing missing is a webcam, but that's something I can live with as I use an external one most of the time anyway.

I would add that the quality of Asus laptops in general seems to be pretty great. I have another 9-year old Asus that was used extensively by my kid for her online classes the last couple of years. It still runs as well as it did when I bought it, and I've never had it repaired.

"I strongly dislike MacOS because they force the "apple way" of doing things."

What does that mean exactly? I'm genuinely curious about what Apple forces a user to do. I would think cost is a concrete example ... But does Apple restrict you from using some software? or executing some work related function? some other functionality? or is that "Apple way" with regard to Apple's user experiences?

I wish there was a "Vent HN:" for posts like this. I'm not saying there isn't a legitimate argument in the original post; but there's a lot of hyperbole & vague statements too. And venting can be healthy.

Certain things like Gatekeeper are a non-starter for some people. I certainly won't buy a macOS-based machine in the future because of it. Back in November 2020 there was an outage in Apple's cloud that handles Gatekeeper verification. Users were not able to launch any non-Apple-Inc. signed binary for an hour or two. I imagine because OP says they main Linux issues like that are completely unacceptable. Imagine not being able to open Chrome on Windows because Microsoft's servers can't respond to verify the integrity of the binary. Absolutely insane.

Macbooks are abysmal for window management, for example. There are some lightweight tools that can manage some placement but they are neutered in one way or another. Deeper integration requires disabling BIOS-related security which I am personally uncomfortable doing, and still doesn't offer full control like you'd get on other Unix systems. Most of the OS is similarly untouchable.

Another example is Safari and its extensions ecosystem: an Apple license is required for publishing and as such even basic tools (stylus etc.) can require the user to purchase with no guarantee of developer support in the medium to long term.

OOTB the biggest example is the Mac-style hotkeys, its a persistent and extremely annoying problem for new Mac users and is, from the outset, unfixable via any sort of configuration, BIOS or not. Concretely: CTRL + T for new tab is now command + T, however switching tabs is still CTRL + Tab (Mac control is more like alt, in this case).

It's an eternal reminder that you are now stuck doing things the Apple way even if it's just relearning all of your hotkeys.

There are a handful of windows management apps that don't require changing or disabling BIOS security features. Moom & Divvy are both really good.

Safari's extensions shouldn't hold you back too much; if you're willing to use Chrome or Brave or Firefox.

Hotkeys seem like something that would change from platform to platform, but learning how they work does take time.

Vent? I recently had an issue where my Internet connection went down, I was left with my phone and a tiny data cap.

The work I was doing required an Internet connection, but when I tethered my mac, it kept trying to download gigabytes of updates.

It ended in a stalemate with seeming no way to pause, cancel or cap the download.

Both windows and Linux will set you set download cap, flag connections as metered, pause downloads or kill update processes.

I find that a lot of other Apple stuff grating too, not limited to:

- iOS development hoops with certs, provisioning profiles, beta reviews. It doesn't help that AppStoreConnect is bad.

- Apple Developer account 2FA - which is either "trusted device" or SMS. SMS is unreliable and insecure, trusted device ties me to a laptop I don't want to always have with me.

- I had to sign into the AppStore on my mac to get XCode, and now it insists on me using iCloud and iMessage.

You can cancel a download, but if you've enabled automatic updates macOS might not be aware that you have data limits. And that's terrible. Maybe file a bug or support ticket with Apple.

But the rest of your post is puzzling. The original post was about buying a MacBook & how awful that might be. You're describing developing Apple apps for Apple's platform (and 2FA for a dev account). How would you do those things without an Apple device? And why? If you don't like the forced Apple way, why develop for their platform? But also how does that relate to the choice between the 3 devices in the original post?

Okay, that little rant about iOS may have been a little off target, but the picture I was trying to paint about the "Apple way" is that is desires absolute commitment to their ecosystem, anything less and you find yourself with shoddy compromise.

XPS is prosumer grade at best. You need a Precision or Latitude product (preferably a Latitude 7xxx) to get a quality product.

My Latitude 7370 is hard-capped at 8GB RAM. Because they soldered it directly to the motherboard. Real "what the fuck" moment, and I am reminded every time of this constraint because opening a Slack call freezes my computer for about a minute if I commit the heinous crime of leaving my IDE open.

Soldered RAM is part of Microsoft's specification for Connected/Modern Standby, supposedly because it prevents some classes of cold reboot attack on disk encryption. The official line from the people who work on the standards (both at Intel and Microsoft) is "buy a laptop with the amount of RAM you need." I hate it too, but it's not like they're pointlessly screwing their customers.

Which conveniently leads to earlier upgrades (everybody but the consumer and the environment wins!), and more profit to the OEMs in the form of RAM upgrades. Maybe I'm just too cynical.

Does anyone even care about connected standby?

> it's not like they're pointlessly screwing their customers

Rationalizing a reason into existence does not mean they have made a point, in my book.

If you are planning to buy macbook, I have a bad news for you. Some laptops have both soldered RAM plus a slot, so 8 is soldered and you can get additional 8 or 16.

I was never able to find a non-gaming PC laptop with: 1. AMD processor 2. 16:10 120hz high refresh display 3. 9+ Hour battery life 4. 32gb ram 5. Less than 5lbs 6. Powerbrick that didn't weigh more than an Atari 5200

For what it's worth, when I purchased a desktop PC last year, I had to return 3 before I got one which wasn't problematic. Two of one model both shut off randomly, the first of the 2nd model had a bad hard drive (write failures while installing arch).

On the other hand, I had two 2018 Intel MBPs fail in the span of 4 days last month. Just my personal work computer. I set up 2 new MBPs in 1 week. Don't know the cause but after a while they would stop starting up properly. I ended up with an M1.

I speculate it's all related to covid shortages somehow but who knows.

I've also been a ThinkPad user since the IBM days, but my most recent work laptop was a Dell XPS15. It has been working fine for me.

For my home laptop, I had been using, for around the last 4 years, an HP Chrome 13 g1 Chromebook (6Y75), which I really loved. Got one for my son for last Christmas for $120 landed. 16GB RAM, 32GB SSD, 2560x1440 display. The original one I got for $550, it was refurbed on woot. List price was more over a grand, but I wasn't prepared to spend that on the experiment.

For the longest time it didn't support the Linux containers, but that got remedied last year. I was mostly using it for the browser and using a Chrome extension to SSH into my work machines. With the Linux containers, it's a full Linux environment, though with some restrictions.

However, over it's life it lived very well up to the "just works" idea that I got it initially to try out. OS updates are super fast (they just show up and when you reboot next they are there, <30 seconds).

If you need a full laptop running Linux, you're going to just need to get a laptop. I'd probably consider another Dell, it has worked fine. My last Thinkpad had some weird battery issues, and because of it's slim config it had two small batteries and I wasn't quite ready to have work buy $300+ of batteries for a problem I couldn't reliably reproduce.

But, I'd definitely consider a Chromebook with Linux containers for lighter duty work.

I had a very bad experience with a mid-range Dell. And so did many other people I know.

Ditched that and switched to a low-range HP. All my work was on the cloud anyway. Worked really nice and exceeded all expectations. Linux worked just out-of-the-box.

Then I owned a high-range Asus, and it was the best laptop I have ever seen or used. Loved the product.

I use high-range Asus from that point in my life. Great experience. Linux works, has NVIDIA GPU w/ CUDA, everything just works great! Couldn't complain.

Made two friends switch to high-range Asus for life, as well.

You've tried two models of two non-Mac brands and one Mac laptop, and have concluded that all laptops except Macs "seem" to be problematic...

What a ridiculous post.

I'm probably old by HN standards, and I've been fortunate enough to have and use a personal computer since the mid/late-80s. Throughout that entire time frame I have consistently seen the market be a race to the bottom. While that has been detrimental to my engineer's mind and my artist's soul, I also understand it completely. Without that race to the bottom, computers would never have seen as widespread of adoption as they have. There's a democratization to moving downmarket.

The unfortunate effect, though, is that even many brands that were upmarket at one point have moved downmarket to build their business model around volume as economies of scale and commoditization have taken over the industry. I remember in the mid-90s when IBM stopped supplying mechanical keyboards with PC desktops, where other manufacturers had stopped long ago, thus removing another reason to pay the premium for an IBM. I can tell you as well that the current generation of Thinkpads are a far cry from the T60 and X30 of yesteryear.

As it happens, I too have come to the same conclusion. I've been using Macbooks and old refurbished Thinkpads for personal computing devices for several years now. Luckily if you build your own desktop, you still have many high quality options to choose from in assembling it, but for laptops Macbooks are the name of the game, everything else is just grossly inferior from a craftsmanship, aesthetic, and build quality perspective. Frankly, I think companies stopped moving downmarket and started staying in place while cutting costs as much as possible, and somewhere along they way they just stopped caring. Apple is the only laptop-producing company left that seems to care about it's products, and I hope they stick to it.

I also used to always run ThinkPads (and Precision workstations with pointing sticks). I these days run a System76 Lemur Pro with a USB thinkpad keyboard I stick on top. The built-in keyboard is good, but trackpads and I have never gotten along. They've come a long way. Another option that friend got was the Frame Work. I helped him assemble it, and it also is a great GNU/Linux machine. Everything just works.

The current state of general pc (x86) machines has been awful for some time but a Mac is infinitely worse IMO, awful keyboards, fragile design, useless OS for anything except basics but there are a number of reasonable machines out there just overpriced (because the market is dominated by idiot consumers) or not quite right.

For me personally the keyboard is one of the most important things and nobody gets it right anymore however I recently got a cheap Acer (usually use Asus but their keyboards took a horrible turn) which doesn't have the most awful keyboard and common keys do not require a 3 finger contortionist exercise.

It works reasonably well on either windows or Linux, despite being an AMD disaster - I got the AMD variant of the swift 3 and aside from being typical modern ultrabook filmsy crap (like appple, too), it's actually ok (but depending on WiFi environment may want to replace the mediatek, although it's only caused me issues on garbage consumer AP's like isp provided).

As for the buying experience well that's locality dependent, I ordered online and picked it up from a robot machine a few hours later (alza cz)

> they force the "apple way" of doing things. But it seems to be the only option these days to buy a computer with ease and get a computer "that just works".

Replace "computer" with "laptop" and the above statement might be true. I use desktop computers because I've worked remotely for almost my entire career, and I haven't had a problem with a desktop since the 90s.

I've used a variety of Mac laptops, from the 1.25Ghz PowerBook G4, to a later model Intel based PowerBook. In each instance, I found the OS experience to be clunky, and equivalent programs that were available for Windows hard to find. The former point has probably since changed, as it seems everyone has a Mac laptop for work and study. I also found that the machines slowed down after a few years of usage, with no discernible reason. Hardware wise the laptops always felt well built.

Fast forward to 2015, the first gen Surface Book feels similar. The build quality surpassed the PowerBooks I was used to, Windows was pretty decent for getting things done. I've used it for 7 years now without any problems, although I know that when the battery comes to the end of its life, a replacement will be difficult to arrange. The whole thing feels proprietary which means I haven't bothered to install Linux on here, but I don't require it in daily life/work. The OS still feels fast, and it's easy to troubleshoot what could potentially slow it down with Windows.

The author doesn't say what the intended purpose/use of the laptop is; it's interesting to me that in the Dell and Lenovo lines the author isn't going for the Precision or whatever the current version of the Lenovo P50 is (I bought my P50 in August 2016 and it's 4-core CPU, 1TB SSD, and 64GB of RAM still gets the job done and the hardware just won't quit). The tradeoff of the units I mentioned compared to what the author mentioned is weight... I get that if you're constantly on the move with your machine it's nicer to have a 3 point laptop versus an 8 pound laptop but personal preferences being what they are I would rather have the more robust hardware and heavier duty system than something lighter.

Oh -- and my P50 could apparently withstand waterboarding... though I'll just take Louis Rossmann's word for it (and video) rather than trying to duplicate the experiment myself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig3xI8dUdm0

> Recently, I decided it was time for an update.

I recently bought a refurbished x270 from an IT supplier outlet:

- 1TB SSD

- 16GB RAM

- IPS display

- A keyboard you can _actually_ use

- for about 500$

I still have a desktop at home for heavy duty lifting, but for light tasks or doing some work sitting in the garden or at a cafe, it is the perfect form factor. It is running Debian 11 + KDE plasma 5 with no issues.

Don't underestimate the upgrade-ability of old thinkpads, they are sort of modern Theseus ships.

> I use Linux on the often so it was important for me to purchase a laptop that was compatible.

Instead of a laptop, have you considered purchasing a VR computer?[1]

[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/why-vrcs-are-better-than-pcs-and-l...

I disagree. I have used Windows for work, and then moved to a MacBook Pro 2018. Granted, the M1 has better performance but I am someone who uses two external monitors at the very least. Paying as much for a device that supports only one ext3rnal display is ludicrous to me.

I convinced my current CTO to let me use a Linux machine, and I bought a ThinkPad P14S with Ryzen 7 5800H. I will definitely prefer companies which allow me to use a ThinkPad. I'm on Ubuntu running qtile, with custom tooling for myself that I wrote in Rust. I blaze through my work because of how comfortable I've gotten with the experience. If someone offers me a buttload of money to work with a Mac, I will ask them to give me a cloud machine and use mosh to do all my work. But yes, for the same money, the company that gives me a ThinkPad and tells me to install my own OS gets my yes anyday. It's a far better developer experience.

I don't get it — there is a market for a high quality robust laptop — and yet it does not exist.

Why our choice is an ancient refurbished pre-shit ThinkPad or Mac? You can't throw a rock without hitting a random developer — but they all type on self-destructing shittops… And they type emails to customer support instead of coding.

> there is a market for a high quality robust laptop — and yet it does not exist

Because that market segment is not large enough to easily justify RnDing your own laptop platform, nailing down the finer details, upscale that into mass production and then fight existing competition, all while keeping the price competitive.

And the rest of the world will do fine with the rest of the laptops. Or build desktops for specific tasks :shrug:

Let me answer with a question: do you really need a laptop? In the past and not for a little timeslice I've always favored laptops because well docked are essentially equivalent and can be easily moved if/when needed. Few years ago seen the involution of them I go for a desktop.

Essentially modern laptops, mobile workstation included, to my eyes are more and more craptops more and more similar to mobile "smart-crap". Some still need them, students for instance, hybrid workers, people who work out of an office etc. But others can accept the loss in portability to gain in quality, upgradability and comfort. A classic, self assembled, desktop with eventually caddy and 2.5" classic ssds to being able to move data, if not the entire OS, around as needed. Not as free as a laptop, but doable under certain circumstances.

Wow. So if this is universally true - that all non-macs are garbage - why is it that review sites like Notebookcheck rate some non-macs machines close to (albeit not matching) a Macbook?

For instance:

2021 Macbook Pro 16" gets a rating of 93 (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-16-2021-M1-P...)

Lenovo ThinkPad P1 G4 has a 90 rating (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-P1-G4-laptop-r...)

Are the reviewers just not evaluating machines on any real world basis? Grading on some ridiculous curve?

Apple's service network, via physical stores can not be beat!

I had an issue with my Samsung smart phone at one point. However, I couldn't part with the phone for x number of weeks, to send it in, for an assessment.

After that, I realized ease of support on iPhone was the biggest differentiator between Apple and other brands

This kind of crap happens with Apple as well.

Where Apple shines is in providing an Arm laptop - that's unrivalled as of now. They still have some issues with those laptop but maybe the next generation will be good.

On my side, I'll just switch to desktop pc I can assemble and get an Arm Macbook if I need to travel.

I can recommend the HP ZBook (or any other mobile workstations), it's built to last. It's not cheap but still cheaper than a spec'd out MacBook. I have the x360 version so you can even have a touchscreen and pen - that's definitely not possible on MacBook :)

I'm on thinkpad P53 since 2019, beefed up with 128Gb of RAM, running Arch on it. Had no problems with this laptop and overall good experience (though, my expectations are not high when it comes to OS, I don't mind scripting it or fixing it on my own when something does not work). It's more a mobile workstation than laptop, mainly because of Nvidia GPU for CUDA. Before making this purchase I was considering a few Dell models as I had good experience with multiple Dell laptops, but 128Gb capable motherboard won and I don't regret it. I have never used MackBook before, so I'm not judging if it would be better or not (I guess maybe more expensive? And maybe it's more of a hassle to run Arch on it?)

Definitely not as much of a fan of the T580 as much as I was of the T440s it replaced (still going, I only changed so I could give the T440s to someone else to replace their consumer ultrabook that predictably shat the bed and wasn't fixable).

The T580 is much more plasticky, and it's also the last one since they ditched the 2.5 inch bay, and they still don't give you two drive slots (unless you get the 15p) except for sourcing one of about 2 models of SSD that fit the WLAN slot, which is getting harder and harder. And the suspend battery life is maybe 20% of what it used to be, but I could probably fix that if I wanted to.

Anyway, it doesn't quite feel as amazing to me as the T440s was, and I know some people hate the '40 machines.

Stay with the "Mac way". It's far better than Windows. Take disk imaging, for example. As far as I'm aware you need special software to image a Windows system but with Mac OS X it's a feature. OS X is also BSD Unix so you have far superior cli.

Windows has a MUCH superior cli these days because of WSL.

That's just like your opinion, man.

BSD.ude

its certainly superior to previous windows but its ultimately a hosted vm in windows.

OSX is a native unix. Yes there are limitations such as needing a vm to run docker but the core system is posix and the filesystems are all laid out in in teh unix way. on of this damn C/D drive nonsense.

I like named volumes to be honest. They just should be able to have more than one letter, like Netware and Amiga had.

It feels a lot more like a dual os system than just running a vm inside of windows. The integration between the two is pretty seamless and powerful. e.g. this is in my wsl .bashrc file, it writes to my windows clipboard by running the powershell.exe windows executeable:

  function cb () {
     powershell.exe -command "\$input | set-clipboard"
  }

Mac is unix sure, but they have diverged from the popular main stream linux distributions and you still need to learn various gotchas and different ways of doing things. At least for me, our deployment environment is amazon linux 2 and I use amazon linux 2 for wsl. I am also an sre, so maybe that matters to me more than most and unix is good enough for most.

I think you have that backwards: it's Linux that has diverged from the Unix way of doing things. All the various gotchas and different ways are Linux-isms. After all, which came first, and which came later, then changed?

macOS is more consistent with the BSDs than Linux is with older Linux or one distro is with another.

Celebrating Unix certification feels dated to me.

Once upon a time our production servers might have also been Unix. And developing from a Unix system was therefore desirable.

But these days our production services are almost certainly running on Linux (and probably Docker). Mac/Unix will have incompatibilities with this.

But you can get away with a non-Linux local environment because: * most server software doesn't use APIs that differ between environments * most OSes are well supported by Docker- which may work using a seamless Linux VM.

Ok sure, macOS has stood still and most main stream linux oses diverged from it. I don't think that makes it being unix any more preferable when stated that way.

You can install GNU coreutils if that’s what you think “Linux” is

This is useful info for trivia quiz but if no practical value. As the server is now all Linux, that is the right way.

BSD Unix predates Linux.

No it has a decent CLI half baked in with a number of weird ass exceptions that punch you in the face regularly.

Better to scrap it and run a proper Debian box inside a hyper-v VM I found.

Or do what I did and drop kick the steaming Dell turd out of a window and buy a mac.

> it has a decent CLI half baked in with a number of weird ass exceptions that punch you in the face regularly.

Tell me you haven't used WSL without telling me you haven't used WSL.

Try running background processes and services or routing reliably over a VPN with working DNS and you will see what I mean. Also there’s the whole hyper-v bridge switch mess which tends to break all the other hyper-v stuff once every 6 months including WSL. Unbinding IPv4 from your wifi interface is also bloody annoying because you can’t Google how to fix it. Again.

So lose the infernal meme snark. I used this more than most people did. And no, works for me is not a suitable retort because we have 200 people with the same issues day in day out.

It’s a fucking shit show.

How is it superior? Honest question.

Powershell is a verbose OOP monstrosity typical of the Microsoft Way.

I'll stick to Arch Linux way for now, thanks.

There is a third option :)

We provide Macbooks for every developers that wants one at our company. For the past 8 years, with NO exeception, every single one of them had to go change something (screen, keyboard, the whole logic board and etc).

For me, without a shadow of doubt, macbooks has been the least reliable peace of technology that I've used for the past years. I can't deny that their support is awesome and they will change anything without questions if you have the money to pay for the repair or you are still under warranty. However, I would really appreciate if I didn't have to use the service.

I haven't used the new M1's, I really hope that they are more reliable.

The big difference to me is that Apple only makes business grade laptops while everyone has consumer and business grades. Consumer grades you can't really trust IMO. The business grade DELLs were okay, but doesn't stand out. I did use a Lenovo X240 for years and was very happy with it but I surrendered it when I left that company.

I'm surprised about the Carbon X1 but I've not heard positive things about the newer models so not completely surprised.

These days I'm using gaming-level laptops based on OEM from Clevo and Tongfang and I've been really happy with them. However, I do up-spec my machines.

You experienced a 6 sigma event of two laptops from top tier manufacturers in a row turning up defective. I believe, most people never bought a defective laptop in their life time. I haven't.

I actually bought 5 Macbooks M1 for friends and family last year, because it's a trendy gift. I tried one for myself. I liked screen brightness. I didn't like that many programs weren't available without creating an Apple account, very expensive memory and SSD, and lack of games. So I went with a Gigabyte gaming laptop. 4k oled display, 3080 GPU, 32GB RAM and 1.5TB SSD for $4k - much better bang for money imho.

I went from a 2013 Macbook Pro (died and haven't had time to fix it) to an HP elite x2 g4 Tablet running Linux and it's mostly what I wanted - https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/s6k1qr... . It's felt more repairable than a surface pro, and haven't really encountered any linux issues.

I say this while having pretty meh experiences with earlier generation (~2019 and earlier) HP elite models used for work.

You are unlucky - Macbooks are fine options, but the only viable laptop based on anecdotal experience? The M1s even have serious issues and limitations with external displays that are well-documented.

Try the HP “z” devices. They aren’t Macs, but are way better than Dell stuff at most price points. Metal, decent build quality, many are upgradable. They are mobile workstations, but have some lighter options.

Usually if you go for the workstations, they have a longer lifecycle and get some engineering TLC, the CAD/GIS/high end audience usually has its own budget and doesn’t skinflint as much as normal corporate IT.

Lenovo is overrated and Dell sells so many models that you need to do alot of homework to figure out what is good and what is junk.

I actually agree with you. Anything other than a MacBook is indeed just a crapshoot. Chances are, if I buy non-Apple, I’ll get some half-baked hardware with no customer support beyond the bare minimum. If my MacBook fucks up (rare), I can take it to the guys at the Apple store and know it’ll be sorted out. This is really important. They’re expensive computers if you’re only looking at a spec sheet. If you look at:

+ Build quality

+ Screen quality

+ Software cohesiveness

+ Customer support

+ Longevity

+ Resale value

A MacBook is basically a no-brainer today. Even a MB Air is good now. Apple is killing the laptop game right now.

For a personal non-AAA-gaming machine, especially one for learning and exploring, I'll probably fetch one from Dell refurbished when there is a 20% or more discount and install Linux.

Are you buying from them directly? I think it might ne bad luck since I never encountered those issues. However I haven't made any purchase this year so could be wrong.

Coming to this discussion late, but at my last job they had to ban employees from using Macbooks outside of the office because they were too fragile compared to their (heavier but) sturdier PC counterparts running Windows or Linux.

The Macbooks generally spent more time being shipped to and from Apple warranty centers for repairs then they did being used for work.

Maybe we were just unlucky, but it says something when more than 4 dozen Macbooks were utter pieces of crap.

What about thinkpads again? I think they have the better keyboard anyway compared to other lenovos (or at least used to). personally on 2020 m1 here though.

The keyboards are still good, but getting worse. They're already a significant downgrade from the IBM editions, but still better than pretty much any other laptop. They're clearly ready to sacrifice a lot in the name of size though. Both the cooling solution and battery life are also pretty poor.

Or you could opt for a T-series ThinkPad, but they come with their own host of issues. And you're still missing out on everything a MacBook does better.

The Thinkpad range has become very broad. You have to buy a really high-end one to get good quality.

But the other problem we've seen over the last few years is that you can order one and have no idea when it will actually arrive. Apple, on the other hand, has been rock solid with their delivery estimates (current China lockdown situation may change that - too early to tell).

I am still using a 2011 macbook pro I got for free ~7 years ago. It had a bad GPU and Apple replaced the internals for free in 2016? I think. Only problem now is some newer software doesn't like that I am stuck on an older version of IOS. Everything else is perfect (at least for the fact that it needs a new battery every 1.5 years or so, only garbage quality ones available for this model aftermarket now).

Dell and Lenovo (laptops) have been so bad lately, my company has stopped supplying them. HP seems solid for enterprise and Asus is decent for SMB.

Wow! Why suffer the slings and arrows of such garbage? Thinkpads were last good in 2000.

MacOS - mini or macbook - is just a life-changer. It's like having your own Tesla instead of walking or taking the bus. Don't be so put off by the marketing and fandom that you actually make yourself suffer. Just get one.

Years from now you'll still be accelerating, and your former troubles will be laughable.

I gave up on PCs because of all the crap-ware that always comes loaded on these machines. Yes, Apple more or less forces you to do things a specific way but that's better than spending 2 days uninstalling bloatware on a brand new machine and then still having to fight with "management engines" that slow down the laptop while also being impossible to remove.

Most people are fine with "just works". I want more

BTW got a huawei matebook as of late. Pretty decent - tries to look like a macbook too

I've bought laptops from XMG for the last 10 years (last one was an older version of https://www.xmg.gg/en/xmg-neo-15/). They last forever, have user replaceable parts, and while they are game oriented (I don't game), they even have mechanical keyboards (!). Plus having a strong GPU has advantages.

None of the machine/platform is perfect. Some have more issues than others. My mac(s) have had issues occasionally, both hardware and of course software related. But I still prefer a Mac to a Thinkpad (my second choice). In my opinion Macbooks tend to last longer and have proved to be a lot more value for money over a long time.

Why are people using laptops? It's a form factor that compromises functionality and performance for mobility. Not sure if you've noticed but there's been a global pandemic going on for the last 2 years and we don't need to lug computers around anymore. Build yourself a nice desktop and forget about laptops.

Same story here. I was a ThinkPad user and bought my first Mac when the M1 was released. It just felt dumb to get anything else even when compared on paper.

I'm happy with my purchase but I'm still not a fan of Apple and their philosophy in any way. If there was a real competitor to the M1, I would switch in a heartbeat.

I’ve ended up buying multiple machines the last several years.

One thing I’ve noticed is that nearly every damn laptop I’ve had the past few years has power management issues.

Usually it’s some issue waking from a sleep state, but I had a modern Thinkpad just give up and die recently after months of continuing getting stuck in sleep states.

Rocking a Asus vivobook flip tm420. Ryzen 5700u, nvme storage, 16gb memory. Enough grunt to run a VM win11 ontop of base win11 install. Cost me 1300 bucks, battery lasts 6-8 hours running VM and main os both with your average admin workloads (browsers with 50x tabs and a few office apps).

It also has a 360 hinge so it can become a tablet. Love it. Great for work, any workloads that are heavier and I'm on a desktop. Only downer is no usb-c charging but eh that's barely the end of the world. Rig gets treated rough like the tool it is. Cops a thrashing. People overthink laptops imo.

I advise my clients against any major vendor lock in or bs high priced gear. Also having worked fixing Dells and lenovos under big corp contracts I advise against those too. Their support/diag is terrible. The money you save not buying their overpriced bs you can use for a few hot spares and still have coin leftover to spend on your local IT guy.

Deadset go do it on a desktop if you need more grunt than 1500 bucks can buy you. If your doing long haul sessions of work 8+ hours go use a desktop with a real keyboard and mouse too your ergo w/ a laptop is probably terrible. I'm not a fan of having laptops used as desktops, short runs sure but if your leaving it plugged in at a desk 8 hours a day get a desktop. Less ruined batteries, less headaches for me as your IT lol.

Tldr dell are AVG, Lenovo are AVG, apple are also AVG. Buy something cheap that gets the job done you'll replace it in 36 months anyways.

Dell XPS is (or was) their high end gaming line. For features and quality you want the Dell Precision line.

You're right, nothing is made to last.

But Macbooks aren't any better.. You'll be paying for a new logic board exactly 1-2 years later out of warranty.

Lenovo has firmware issues which makes an extreme amount of laptops go black screen on resume suspend.

Dell XPS has had coilwhine for ages.

All laptops suck nowadays.

i've got a refurbed evoo with a Ryzen 5, it cost 225$ from walmart, it'll run anything, linux, win11 - you name it. I use every port on the laptop when i'm at my desk, its super lightweight and the battery life is admirable. my point here is that its all about the users preference, if you want something totally plug and play, you're going to have to pay for it and then you will still probably have issues. i've got an old gaming rig that i've transformed into a proxmox host, between the laptop and being able to connect to any of the VMs, I find that I have everything i need to stay productive, keep my data safe and not be limited by hardware or cloud costs.

Been using an HP Envy for the past 4 years. Works great and has a lot of the craftmanship that I think is lacking with a lot of other laptop models. Only downside is the touchpad is too small, but they remedied that with their latest model.

Funny enough, I have both XPS 13 and X1 Carbon, one bought by myself, another by my previous company. Have no complains about any за them, both are solid high quality machines. Like the X1 keyboard more because of longer key travel.

Well from the comments here Mac sucks or windows sucks or it’s the year of the Linux desktop.

Seriously my win 10 laptop is always installing updates.. mostly kid plays Roblox on it.

I used centos for years then Ubuntu and still have Ubuntu on a machine or 3.

M1 is amazing tho.

When it comes to laptops:

"This my laptop, there are many like it, but this one is mine."

I look at apple's website, put the sliders to the right, and do it again in 5-6y.

I can't be bothered to figure out who has xyz feature or whatever. I don't care.

Have you tried Slimbook? Neat design and full Linux compatibility.

It looks like you just have been unlucky. I have seen failing brand new Macs for colleagues. I personally never had a serious hardware problem with new computers.

I was in the same boat in December. My 2013 MBP was starting to show its age and I was hesitant to go with a new MBP because of the new processors. I ty

Assuming you’re in US and there’s a Costco nearby just go and buy a Thinkpad at Costco. I believe they also have a nice return policy.

This is becoming even more the case given that Asahi Linux is maturing and you can already run Linux (somewhat stable) on an ARM MBP.

For me it is the build quality, obscene 18hrs+ battery(+standby) life & unplugged performance which is the same as plugged in.

I've been using Asus laptops since 2012 (3) and never had a problem. The one from 2012 is still working.

Razer makes some nice PC laptops these days. They're even moving away from purely gaming focused machines.

I have been happy with Lenovo ThinkPad (e14) and works reliably. Good luck with Mac (and overpaying too).

Chromebook with keyboard-only applications (like Vimium) have done wonders to my productivity

Haven't tried Linux on it but I love my ASUS so far after a few months. G513IE-PH74

Agreed. I’m back in the market and for a MacBook myself. They simply work far better.

I've never owned a Mac of any type and never had to return a PC or PC laptop.

I have few laptops by Asus and HP. All work like a charm and were cheap for what they offer. The oldest ASUS still in use after some 10 years. Runs some specialized control applications. Should I create a post and title it "ASUS laptops seems to be the only viable option these days"

I don't know about its longevity but I am quite happy with the OLED Asus ZenBook. Pretty screen, fast, etc. If they made one in a machined aluminum case instead of sheet aluminum it would feel more rigid, that's my only real complaint.

Clearly

I'm keeping an eye on the PowerPC chromebook project.

“But it seems to be the only option these days to buy a computer with ease and get a computer ‘that just works’.”

Some people will disagree, but IMHO: Yes.

Why not buy a System76 machine?

My Surface machines are great. Using a Surface Book Pro right now, and I have two other lower-end ones.

What's your question?

frame.work

yes i agree

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