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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

Gruber is smoking something. Comparing Apple to PC laptops has never been common in these "best laptop" articles.

To be fair, the original author of the quoted article is probably doing most of the smoking of things. All Gruber did is restate it and add the obnoxious political snipe at the end.

Windows people, how much faster would a non-Windows machine have to be before you'd start to consider using something other than Windows? I know if the question were flipped and given to me as a Mac user, the answer would have to be something like "fast enough that the muscle memory and system knowledge I've gained from three decades of Mac use could be overcome by sheer system speed of the Windows machine," and that would have to be pretty damned fast. Given that it's pretty irrelevant to me to compare the two.

If the reason it doesn’t make sense to include the (faster, more power efficient) MacBooks in reviews is that windows users would have to see way higher value before they’d even consider switching… then shouldn’t that just be stated in the review? That the purpose of the review is to compare x86 laptops?

If a review is looking at hardware, and MacBooks are out there, shouldn’t they be included for the benefit of people who are actually trying to understand their purchase options?

Let me try restating my point: Windows users know how to be productive in Windows. How many of these people will be willing to give up that knowledge for a Mac that may be faster in terms of brute speed but with which they will, at least initially, have no idea how to be productive with?

Sit a person who's only ever used Windows their whole life in front of a Mac and ask them to find and launch a certain application. Once they realize there's no Start button they'll probably be completely lost.

Thanks, that’s helpful- and I agree with you that the time and energy required to learn a new OS is a big investment for users who are comfortable with what they have.

But, it sounds like you and I land on two different sides of this. Your point seems to be that other OS machines shouldn’t be included because of that significant entry barrier, and my point is that if the review is being presented as a comparison of the best hardware options, then it’s not accurate to eliminate MacOS machines on the basis of software. I’d sooner see reviews either (a) compare exclusively same-OS machines and say so, or (b) disclaim that users might face that bigger entry barrier, but show the comparison and leave the decision of whether learning a new OS would be worth it to the reader

I would rather use a Linux machine but I have generally been using Windows due to the general lack of support for Linux. There are a variety of things Windows and Apple simply don't support, and the list of things Apple doesn't support is longer.

There are some old games I enjoy playing with friend and they simply don't run on a Mac, for example. So it doesn't matter how fast the Mac is, I can't alt-tab over to the game then alt-tab back to my terminal and do something real quick, I need an entirely separate Apple machine if I want the terminal to be "fast."

Speed is just not that useful to me, I want a general-purpose computer and it's fine if some features perform at 1/5th the speed, the computer is mostly idle anyway and while instant is obviously better versatility is the primary virtue I'm looking for.

> how much faster would a non-Windows machine have to be

Until Macs run games, it's a pointless comparison. If Steam did for Macs what they did for Linux, then we'd have something interesting to talk about. But a PC without games is about as attractive as... a Ferrari, I guess. If somebody handed me a free 200K$ sports car, I'd just sell it. It's useless for my lifestyle. A PC that can't play games is equally useless to me.

Steam exists on Mac, and while there are plenty of games that don't have Mac ports that I wish I could play (Stray being the most recent), there are still enough to keep me perpetually backlogged, and the limits are probably best for my wallet and productivity anyway.

Steam exists on the mac and steam exists on linux. The need for linux ports is dwindling now that Steam has developed proton, a sort of rosetta that converts directx api calls into vulkan api calls, on linux

Steam exists on macOS, but honestly it feels like a second class citizen to me. Lots of the games that used to work fine no longer work because they are 32-bit and are no longer supported on current macOS releases, which only support 64-bit binaries. We can argue back and forth all day about whether this is Apple’s fault or the developers’ fault, but a key giveaway to me is that Portal and Portal 2, which are (arguably at least) flagship games for Valve, have not have 64-but releases. I get that it’s not as simple as a recompile & release, but to my mind it’s a bit of a giveaway that macOS doesn’t seem to have enough gaming market share to force a re-release on 64-bit for all these games.

As a huge fan of the Portal games, I feel your pain. I really miss them. Unfortunately Valve doesn't really seem to be in the market of making actual games anymore, so we'll probably never see a 64-bit upgrade.

But like I said, I've still got other games to play. I've long ago made peace with the idea that I just can't play every game I want to play at any time on my Mac, and that's fine. Others will have a different opinion and that's fine too.

Valve released a cutting edge VR game two years ago.

Steam isn't the problem. Steam is just a portal through with you run games. And on Mac, that portal is mostly empty.

Exactly. It is rare, not the norm. But Gruber rarely goes outside of Apple circle so he doesn't know any of these. I cant count how many times he got things factually wrong. ( And rarely correct himself )

I mean when certain things on PC were actually better, did Gruber ever mentions it as an inconvenient truth?

Those rare reviews included MacBook when it could run Bootcamp ( Windows ). From a comparative point of view at least that make sense. Buyer aren't looking for Hardware differences, if nerds want to pinpoint that with GB5 they would have known.

And it is not like these site completely ignore Apple products either. They are just done in a separate article.

> I mean when certain things on PC were actually better, did Gruber ever mentions it as an inconvenient truth?

...Why would he? There are hundreds of tech publications and bloggers who will cheerfully talk about why Windows computers are better than Macs, and have been basically since the release of Windows 1.0.

He's calling this "an inconvenient truth" because he's seeing a trend among supposedly cross-platform reviews that say the Apple Silicon-based computers are faster than any of the Intel computers being reviewed......and then just say "but the Intel one is the best!" without justifying that with any explanation about how obviously anyone who's looking to do real work needs a Windows computer or something.

Except MacBooks and PC laptops are being compared in the linked Ars article:

"They're going head to head with Apple's MacBook Pros—at the event announcing the systems, Microsoft even made this comparison explicitly."

Edit: Here's various tech outfits directly comparing Apple MacBooks to traditional PCs for "best laptop:

The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/21250695/best-laptops

CNET: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/best-laptop/

PCMAG: https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-laptops

Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/best-laptops-120008636.html

He is not smoking something but remembering a time of Apple just right after Jobs left the first time when after macs got expansion slots they started comparing macs to PCs.

Yes, old enough to remember that and expanding Performa macs for more performance.

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