Comment by twawaaay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twawaaay | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think the answer isn't that simple. It depends.

For me my M1 Macbook Pro has the following pros:

* It just works. I detest Windows. I love Linux but lately I started spending too much time maintaining it, I have busy life and decided that taking care of my OS is a luxury and I would rather use something that is acceptable than spend a lot of time getting to perfect.

* It is viable powerful workstation. I just connect it to a good docking station and have a nice setup with two 60Hz 4k monitors. It is silent and usually cold while in this setup. And it is surprisingly (and I mean it) powerful.

* It has gorgeous display. For hugging together and watching movies with my kids and wife.

* It is a status symbol. All people at my company who mean anything have one and it is easier for me to just fit in and pick other, more meaningful battles.

* It is durable. It will last me a long time, hopefully. It is true that it is fragile, but it is mostly fragile in certain ways that I can manage around. I am generally gentle and caring about my gadgets. If I don't kill it in a stupid way there is good chance it will be perfectly good working laptop for many, many years to come. I can hand it down to one of my family while I get a newer machine.

> It has gorgeous display.

This is a huge factor for me. I have linux on my desktop but my laptops are Mac - I do a lot of graphics and video editing and the color reproduction of Mac displays is reliably faithful at both the hardware and software level. And the M1 is a champ, its performance seems like a miracle for such a quiet cool machine

My $0.02: in my world nobody gives a #### about status, but while I agree with your list, I feel it misses the single biggest feature:

* the power efficiency of the M1 means you can _actually_ use it an entire day on a charge _without_ having to compromise on performance. That is a huge issue.

I'd amend your last point with: at least in North America, getting service for the Apple products is very streamlined and that has enabled me to keep even a 2008 MBP alive until today. For me that is a huge deal as I hate donating to the landfill.

> It is a status symbol. All people at my company who mean anything have one

Watching all this unfold as the DevOps guy was funny. "Don't go buy the new Macbooks, it breaks our build pipeline and you can no longer run production locall- wait, what's that? We ordered 20 last week before anyone even tested it? Sigh..."

It doesn't matter to them. They're content spending 5 hours tweaking their Mac setup for every 60 minutes they spend improving production. Do I envy that naivete? I'm not sure anymore.

Macs don't have that much to tweak. What are people spending 5 hours tweaking? If it's building the perfect CLI, welcome to programmers and any computer set in front of them regardless of OS.

It was mostly Lima/Docker/Rancher/Podman related, iirc. Our architecture was all over the place, and people were in disagreement on the best way to fill-in-the-gaps for MacOS. Not sure what it looks like now, but I spent a lot of time doing Mac stuff for software that was only ever used internally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com