Comment by brozaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brozaman | Hacker News Reader

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I have a mac m1 pro at work and it's hands down the best laptop in terms of hardware I've ever had if you forget extensability. By a far margin.

It makes no noise at all, to the extent that I even checked a dissasembly video to check if they had fans or just passive refrigeration. The display is the best I've ever seen in any laptop. The trackpad is excellent, the keyboard think is very good, the speakers, microphone and webcam are also very good.

I've owned before a lenovo T530, T460s and T580 and quite frankly if we're talking about just hardware this is even better and my last experience with the T580 was just bad. My perception of the lenovo brand was that they made the best laptops until then. In fact I asked to get a macbook because the T580 was so so problematic and not just for me.

I have to say I personally dislike macOS. In fact because now I'm working on 100% FOSS software I'm only using the laptop for corporate calls or situations where I have to deal with customer data, but the rest I do on my personal computer with ubuntu.

I can never understand how other people stand glossy displays but to each his own

I bought two monitors which are matte: 4K 27", IPS, sRGB. Biggest complaint is how hazy/non-clear they look. I personally started to think glossy displays are superior, but I understand others have their own preferences.

I typically work on a 30" Ultrasharp 2560x1600. It's pretty great for media at a distance and physical screen space, but it's so refreshing when I sit down with any of my MacBooks and use theirs for a smaller task. I'd really like a good 5k 30"+ IPS (not 27) but that's just a dream

I'm the complete opposite. I hate how hazy and dull "anti-reflective" displays look. I understand being opposed to reflection, but I'd much rather have a display that's as sharp as humanly possible.

To me it's kind of like washing your windows. Sure, it's fine if you don't do it. You can still see outside. The window works. You may even prefer that less light comes in if you're opposed to light for some reason. But once it's clean, you're really getting the full effect.

Matte or glossy, the sharpness of the display (all other things being equal) will be exactly the same. Glossy displays just look "nicer" because we associate glossy surfaces with higher value: glossy magazines, brochures, photos etc.

Sharpness is but glossy screens provide wider color range aka gamut, just like glossy photo paper.

this isn't quite right, because the coding used on matte displays definitely makes them a little bit less sharp as you can see comparing the close up: https://youtu.be/jFdtJzAgPtA?t=228

Matte surfaces prevent reflections by diffusing the light rays that hit them. They have the same effect on light rays that pass through them.

There is a reason your house and car windows are polished to a reflective surface. It provides more acuity.

I wonder if there's a way we could engineer a nanotech materical that passes light through a screen in one direction without diffusion, but in the opposite direction diffuses the light to prevent reflections.

Matte ends up with lower contrast because it defuses light and washes things out, especially in bright light. I think LTT did a video a while ago showing that it was actually worse in bright light than a glossy screen.

It’s worth mentioning that MacBook glossy displays are noticeably better than many (not all, presumably) glossy displays out there, probably because of a decent anti-reflective coating. Some of them on the market look about as reflective as a pane of glass placed over the panel even when on, while in contrast I rarely if ever notice any reflections on my MBP and still have the advantages in image quality.

I far prefer this anti-reflective glossy setup to my previous ThinkPad which of course had a matte display.

Yeah the Apple displays are almost like a black hole. I stuck a glass protector over my ipad and noticed the screen became massively more reflective.

> while in contrast I rarely if ever notice any reflections on my MBP

Really? I see my own reflection even in indirect sunlight and it's causing significant eye strain.

It might also depend on the model. The one in question is a 2021 14” MBP with the Mini LED display, and the only other MBP I owned had a matte display.

Are you exclusively working with the sun to your back?

It depends but I'd really hate to be limited by using my laptop depending on the lighting of the room I'm in

Why, do you often work at random unfamiliar rooms, or cafes that impose a specific seat to the patrons?

Let’s not act like most of the other matte displays on the market get bright enough to be useful with the sun hitting your screen anyway. Most aren’t enough to even be sitting out at noon.

My Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from 2005 was great in the sun.

The backlight obviously couldn't compete with sunlight, but the LCD behaved transflectively under enough light, so my Emacs session out in a meadow on a bright, sunny day was perfectly readable. That was unexpected. It wasn't an advertised feature. I don't even know if it was deliberate, but it worked great.

Perhaps they've mastered the skill of not pointing the display at a light source...

I'd take a glossy display anytime of day, and have so, since 2005 or so, including external displays. Better color saturation, no artificial fuzziness (which is exactly what the "matte" is in the matte displays, they literally reduce glare through a mesh that also kills contrast and clarity).

For me the secret has been in managing the level of the backlight. If the screen is at least as bright as the ambient light level, reflections will not be noticeable. Kind of like how house windows seem so much more reflective at night.

In very bright conditions (like bright sunlight), the backlight can’t be bright enough. But in those conditions, matte screens suck too: they look super washed out, like there is a thick fog n front of the screen. (Optically it is the same phenomenon: diffused light rays start to overpower direct light rays.)

> best display.

Well, 6th place

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Best-Notebooks-with-the-Be...

But yeah it is pretty good.

I said it's the best *I've* ever seen. I never claimed it was the best in the market or that I had seen every other laptop in the market.

I don't know the criteria for rating the display quality, but scoring less than 2% from the best one is still arguably a very good rating.

The latest m1 MacBooks frankly felt like iPads with permanently attached keyboard. It offers none of the convenience of a typical Wintel laptop, namely getting software running out of the box, and the mouse and touchpad lag is atrocious. I don’t know how mac users put up with it.

Though the only experience I’ve had with macs are at apple stores.

Parallels runs Windows 11 & Debian wonderfully in my experience for running anything I can't in MacOS. If someone could just get a good port of Android running well on an M1 it would be the ideal solution for me.

> Android running

sounds like you’re consumer type of user.

i dabble in embedded development and more often than not oem release drivers and tool chain for Linux and Windows, and those drivers are too low level to be emulated properly if at all.

It depends on the domain. Most scientific software, on the other hand, works out of the box on Linux and Mac, and if you want to get it to build and run on Windows, well, you're most likely going to be the first one so good luck if there are any issues as the authors won't bother with non-unixy compatibility.

You could try running Waydroid in Asahi - that's theoretically possible, at least.

> namely getting software running out of the box

Why do you mean? The lack of a package manager?

> and the mouse and touchpad lag is atrocious.

I don't know which timeline you're commenting from, but as someone that works with both Lenovo and Apple laptops, there is simply no comparison. The Lenovo's trackpad borders on unusable. In fact it is unusable when booting/waking from 'sleep'. It literally has to warm up! I use an MX Master 3S with both, and it works fantastically well connected via Bluetooth on both platforms - surprising so for the Lenovo.

None of this comment makes any sense at all. MacBooks can be bought with tons of software preinstalled (or did you mean it's missing apt-get? Try brew). And the mouse/touchpad are as good as it gets.

MacPorts is a better alternative to Homebrew. More packages, better design, and created by an ex-Apple engineer who was also behind FreeBSD’s ports system.

This would be great arguments against Macbooks, if any of these were slightly true. Like "touchpad lag is atrocious" wtf? This is utterly false. And "getting software running out of the box", what are you even talking about?

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