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Comment by uniqueuid | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

> 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.

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.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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?

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

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

>"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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