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Comment by madoublet | Hacker News Reader

I think most people (not devs/designers) view a laptop as something that costs around $750. That is why Windows still has a huge marketshare. Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, Microsoft all have laptops that have solid build quality, OLED screens, touchscreens, etc. at $1,500-2,200 price range but no one buys those. If you are in that price range, you are probably in one of those niche industries (design, development, graphics) and you are probably buying an Apple.

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That view is so myopic - loads of people buy high end non-apple laptops. I would anecdotally guess many many more than apple overall. Just seems you're lacking in awareness of it. Probably a particular social bubble you are in, combined with myopia to the rest of the world.

> $1,500-2,200 price range but no one buys those.

Individuals may not but companies buy (or lease) truckloads of them.

I disagree. Buying Dell and Samsung laptop in that price range I'd say it is an overpriced rubbish if you compare to current Apple produce. There is really no comparison when it comes to build quality and performance.

I have an XPS and I personally find it better than the M1 MBP in almost everything except power efficiency, so I have much difference experiences compared to your other review in this thread.

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.

This is not my experience with XPS 15 (2019). It is substantially slower, it is loud and battery used to last less than an hour. Then constantly dying chargers, I had a box of Dell chargers that worked for a month and then laptop stopped recognising them. For the tasks I do (I use Docker heavily) M1 is more than twice as fast in low power mode and never heard fans going off or felt any slowdowns. On XPS if I opened a heavier webpage, it was possible for the entire laptop to slow down and not even refreshing the screen timely, so you witnessed a slideshow and usually only way out was to perform a hard reset. Also random power off or if it goes to sleep it won't wake up. I have to then leave it for an hour and then maybe it will power on (sometimes I have to try a couple of times). This is actually the same experience I had with earlier XPS 13. Google XPS won't power on - plenty of people have this problem.

Also I think MacOS is still much better than Windows in terms of design and usability

I think Linux is still much better than MacOS in terms of design and usability, but that doesn't really mean much when operating systems compete on compatibility with programs (which themselves compete on compatibility with operating systems). It is a vicious cycle.

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.

I used a rolling release distro for a while on desktop and a NUC, it was really nice and convenient. But I switched over to Ubuntu for a laptop ("they'll sort out the touchscreen drivers and onscreen keyboard situation" I told myself), now and I kinda regret telling people to "just use Ubuntu or something" in the past.

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...

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