I don't particularly like Apple, but I use a Macbook Pro. I've been keeping an eye out for a non-Apple alternative to a Macbook, but nothing seems to come close in terms of hardware. I don't mean technical specs. I mean a beautiful screen, reasonable dimensions & weight, a really good touchpad, great battery life, etc.
A big foldable screen looks cool, but doesn't feel at all pragmatic. Could someone please compete with Apple?
Quality is the feature that apple sell. I don't think anyone else gets near them.
Every manufacturer has these blops. Yet very few (more like none) have such fanatical crowd of followers who uncritically accept everything and keep peddling the same 'apple is quality, above others, better than google on privacy' and similar wishful thinking/lies. They just have better PR department is all I see, the rest is just another HW/SW company who charge premium.
Its nothing new, other businesses figured this long ago. You can have a normal decent handbag, or have louis vuitton / hermes one. It will cost you 10x (or 100x) more. Its often hand-made quality. Many women love them. Most guys are looking on this in same way we would look on... mentally underdeveloped. Yet the market exists and its booming. And nobody is arguing Hermes doesn't bring higher quality than regular brand.
Coming back to your claims, apple rarely truly innovates these days and technologically its behind most manufacturers (low res cameras producing pleasing but over-processed pics that have colors far from reality, battery charging on level of basic 2016 phones, screen is OK but definitely not top of the market, bluetooth implementation is beyond pathetic for such a manufacturer, literally everybody on the market has it better). They take over others ideas that work and improve them. Which is fine but not the stellar behavior I would expect from 3TN company having 1 centerpiece product.
Apple is incredibly inconsistent. The iphone cable quality was complete dogshit: https://i.imgur.com/t7Oajul.jpeg
On the other hand, the new macbook pro magsafe cable is probably the best quality cable I've ever owned.
... then my kids got older, and my wife move to Apple and started borrowing my cables. They all kill Apple cables in like 6 months flat. It's incredible.
[EDIT] As for how they do that, I'm not sure, but they constantly use them stretched too far from the outlet, so there's a ton of tension on the cable, and frequently arrange them such that they're bent a sharp 90+ degrees right next to the connector, often while also under tension. I never do either of those things. I assume those are the things that cause it.
It's really good.
The old cables were made of weird extremely low quality rubber? I don't think I've seen worse quality of rubber on any other cable.
But generally Apple has a history of laptops that have design defects, which Apple does not acknowledge either for years after they stop selling the laptop, and/or are forced to by a lawsuit (which will usually complete years after they stop selling the laptop), at which point most people won't even be aware that Apple has instituted a replacement program and/or discarded their brick for parts on eBay.
Whether those people are right or not, Apple is extremely good at positioning itself as the quality option.
Although I have precisely zero complaints with my 14" MBP.
I have a late 2013 MBP whose screen developed visible loss of coating in 2014, and cleaning the screen even made an annoying always-on bright pixel due to a tiny chip in the surface. I was sad at that at the time and looked into getting a new display, even paying for it, but there was no way to do it. You couldn't even go to an Apple store and pay for this repair.
That said, this 2013 MBP has been a lovely and excellent machine in almost every respect, and it's still my daily driver (as a software dev), which is great value and longevity for a laptop. I was skeptical of Apple before I got one, but now it's almost a no-brainer to get another when the time is right.
This tan cloud is dust rolling in:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nPCnELCVMsvn5W0lOHlPxC2Ycq...
Another dust squall:
https://www-cdn.eumetsat.int/files/2020-04/img_il_10_07_05_b...
Or Linux, at this stage. Apple silicon support is not good enough yet to be a pleasant experience. Sure, an x86 laptop doesn't compete with power efficiency of the M1/M2 - might be useful if you regularly need to go multiple days without power, but my x86 laptop already gets more than 8 hours battery which is "good enough", and is just as fast for development usage (I have an M1 MBP too, I have tested this side by side).
As a bonus I have full control of the hardware and the software that I want to run on it. I almost never reach for the Macbook unless I need to test something OSX specific.
I work in the microsoft stack but I use parallels on a MBP.
Because it has dedicated hardware to make photo & video editing good. Which is great, if that's your jam. It's dead silicon if it isn't, though. M1/M2 strike a great balance for performance & battery life, absolutely. But it's very narrow in what it can achieve desktop-comparable speeds on when it comes to heavy workloads, and other laptops are drastically faster at rather large areas of consumer computing like gaming.
> Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now
Or if you're just a casual / lite user but want something other than 13.3", which is the only size Apple offers an economical model. Or if you really like having a touch screen, which Apple refuses to do for some reason. That second point is basically the entire reason my SO is hunting for alternatives to the Air.
I do use mine for dev work/etc though (M1) and it's completely fine, even with only 8gb. I've never had any slowdowns or felt like it was holding me back.
Very generally, Java is one of those things. CPU performance is really, really good for non-rosetta workloads.
I agree though that despite Apple's wild claims the general GPU performance isn't that good - not that it's bad for very quiet laptop.
Single-threaded (or "lightly threaded") absolutely. But if we're saying "desktop-comparable" and "heavy workloads" I'm gonna assume a multi-core workload and go throw things like the 5950X or 12900K into the ring at a minimum, and the 5995WX at the extreme. M1 ultra starts at $4k after all, it's absolutely fair to include Xeon-W & Threadripper Pros against that. M1's big cores punch above their weight, but they still can't make up that much of a core count deficit.
Including, for a while, Apple. How quickly people have forgotten the touchbar!
Quality and performance are where Apple just shines. Most PC manufacturer's seem to mainly compete on how bad of a screen & touchpad combination they can find. There are some truly awful things on the market of manufacturers that just stopped even trying a long time ago. Touchpads are universally awful in the laptop market, with the exception of Apple. I found this out by connecting my magic touchpad 2 to my Linux laptop. Works great! As good as with a mac. The software support in Linux is fine. Precise, responsive, smooth, just like it should be. It's the hardware that is the problem. Even brands that are supposedly premium keep opting for these cheep plastic touchpads with poor sensitivity, awkward button mechanics, etc. Apple nailed this decades ago. On this front they have no competition.
That, the screen, and the stellar performance of the M1 is making the difference right now. I connected an external drive with x-plane on it a few days ago to see how far I could push it. Turns out, I can max out all the sliders and it runs at about 30-40fps at the normal screen resolution. That's with lots of add ons, some of which are really demanding and using the rosetta emulator. Very impressive. For work, this thing runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2-3x.
If your job requires you to run AutoCAD or VSC++ or something, you're just going to use windows. The average user isn't going to figure out how to use KVM or Wine or something. If your job requires some linux/unix tool, is the average user going to fidget with it until it works in MacOS or just use Ubuntu or something? MacOS is the worst of both worlds: it is both closed-source AND a minority OS.
It worked when I first installed it, until quite recently, when a new version hit. Upgrading every package at the same time is obviously destabilizing, something has changed in the plumbing and under certain circumstances some gtk programs require a 30 second timeout to occur before they start, and there's the whole snap firefox debacle. Longing for the stability of rolling release, oddly enough.
Anyway, I haven't used MacOS, but I've generally been surprised to find that my current system is hovering around near-Windows level usability, other than the familiar terminal which is nice. Probably time to try out tumbleweed...
The XPS doesn't make much noise and I notice no difference in speed while developing. Some tasks are even faster, because native Docker instead of running via Docker for Mac. The battery doesn't last as long I guess, but it will still last for 8 hours, which is far longer than I need.
Individuals may not but companies buy (or lease) truckloads of them.
Will probably upgrade in the next year or two primarily because replacing the battery and increasing the ram is pricey enough that I may as well buy a new machine.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-15-9510-fails-to-slee...
Now, I'm not sure I'd recommend it for other reasons and I haven't tried the latest gen, but it sure fits your requirements.
I used a MacBook Pro for work a few years ago, 2014-18, and really liked the hardware.
Never got the vaunted "It's So Intuitive!" UI hype, though. And from OS "upgrade" experience -- felt more like downgrades, with the ever more limited configurability -- during that time and from everything I've heard since about the constantly shrinking "walled garden" of their ecosystem, I've pretty much come to detest their software side.
Soo... Give Asahi Linux a couple years more to mature, and if in that time they release a fanless (M2, M3?) laptop with a larger (16-17", or, heck, why not even more?) screen, I might be really tempted.
Some even have great graphics cards, or touchscreens with pen support, or mechanical keyboards, etc... ASUS even makes a few laptops in this category (some of them are branded as gaming laptops but really do everything you want).
The issue with PC laptops isn't that there is no competition for the MBP. It's just that it's very confusing and that there are literally hundreds of options and only 5-6 models that will do what you want.
There are a lot of
The "great battery life" is part hardware, but largely software. See also: iOS devices with "worse" specs and smaller batteries that perform way better than "better" Android counterparts, while also having longer battery life. Some of it's hardware voodoo, but a lot of it's iOS and MacOS and various pieces of Apple software (notably Safari and Mobile Safari) being very respectful of system resources and protective of the battery.
It's a bit like how you used to be able to put BeOS on a Windows or Linux desktop and it'd feel like all the hardware was 4x higher clock / bigger memory size than it had been.
The competition on the other side is on specs. It's hard to stick hardware with bigger numbers in a thin case. Look at Intel's NUCs vs the Mac Mini... they come with a power brick larger than the computer to win in specs, while Apple has an elegant built in PSU.
And... a working touchpad that can actually replace a mouse for 95% of use cases? How are you going to market that?
You want the largest numbers, you have to go with the others. If you can stomach windows. You want a less annoying experience, Apple unfortunately has about zero competition there. Which is bad even for Apple users because then you get masterpieces like the butterfly keyboard...
How does this follow? If the implication is that collectivist societies frown upon excelling relative to one’s peers (which is not true, BTW), then wouldn’t the exact same logic apply to novelty or cuteness?
No, this is the result of corporate bean counters thinking they should maximize short term profit with a splashy product, rather than maximize long term profit with high quality and reliability, which take more time for the market to recognize.
The idea that all innovation happens in the United States and Europe is fairly ridiculous, innovation happens on all levels of product development, both deep in the guts of products as well further up as well as sometimes entirely new classes of products.
I find it hard to believe that this is an exclusively an east asian thing. Apple spent a decade chasing thinness over all else.