Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttfkam | Hacker News Reader

Two things I've been waiting on for years:

• MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor.

• Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail. SSDs only have so many write cycles.

• BIOS on a separate chip. To make matters worse, with the introduction of the T2 chip, the BIOS is stored on the SSD as well. This means if the SSD fails, you don't just lose your data; you have an expensive brick. You can't even boot to external drive anymore if one of the two SSD chips fails.

• Safer SSD chips. If a cheap capacitor fails on newer Macs, 13V gets shorted straight to the SSD. The SSD commonly doesn't survive this. And since the BIOS is on the SSD now… Literal ten cent part blows up your multi-thousand dollar laptop with zero warning.

https://youtu.be/RYG4VMqatEY

View on HN

The lack of MST support caught me by surprise. Six years ago, I intentionally bought an expensive monitor with USB-C and daisy-chaining support as the second screen so that the monitor itself would be able to function as my dock. Lo and behold, it worked fine on Windows but not on MacOS. Had to buy a dock separately and now have one more thing cluttering my desk.

I spent so long troubleshooting and trying to figure out why it didn't work before I stumbled on this article[1].

[1]: https://sebvance.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-abou...

It’s so surprising that it doesn’t I too only found out when I bought the monitors plugged them in and it did nothing.

It's such a frustrating missing feature.

I'm in an org with tens of thousands of Macs deployed. We've got through butterfly keyboard failures, screen ribbon issues, bloated batteries, and dead logic boards.

We've had some SSDs fail, but it's virtually unheard of. It's so rare, I can't recall a specific instance. I submit that failure rates within a Mac's usable lifetime is so rare that it's a non-issue.

That said, I'm always going to strongly want user-replaceable, modular components everywhere I possibly can. Barring that, I want cheap repair options (buying stuff like logic boards from Apple is obscenely priced.)

I also factor AppleCare+ into device cost, because forget buying a $2,000-3,000 Apple device without it.

>Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail. SSDs only have so many write cycles.

One thing to note is the quality of Apple’s storage is above and beyond anything else you can buy. They have teams at every level of the storage stack and have an amazing focus on quality. From individual chips all the way up to the filesystem, all of the software is customized to extend the lifespan of the device. They do wear-leveling so the larger the drive you buy with your device the longer the device will last, but honestly the drives they come with will last much longer than 99.9 of people will ever actually use a Mac.

> One thing to note is the quality of Apple’s storage is above and beyond anything else you can buy.

Average good experience of other users doesn't make a guy having a failing SSD feel any better. The absence of easy repair/replacement just adds an insult to injury.

> They do wear-leveling so the larger the drive you buy with your device the longer the device will last

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like a description of an average modern SSD. Heck, I was reading similar things about wear leveling regarding USB drives, like, a decade and a half ago.

Where is the evidence of failing Mac SSDs?

I think you're being overly creative in your interpretation of average, like you're imagining a bunch of people people that have it fail after a year of regular use and then others that have it fail after 30 to 'average it out' and mask a bad experience for many people.

>all of the software is customized to extend the lifespan of the device

It is widely known macOS paging out a lot more than Windows. On a multiTab Safari you could easily have 100GB write or higher per day. Kernel_Task lock up are extremely common on google search.

Thank god I'm not the only one to know that. Peoples keep talking about the awesome efficiency of Apple software but this happened to me and I trashed quite a few SSDs. Supposedly macOS is more efficient with the hardware but having built hackintoshs I know it is the reverse. Apple fanboys are so confident in their bullshit that it is hard to trust your own experience. For clarity I am still a macOS and Apple user. Not for long though, I won't buy new Apple hardware until they change their ways. Got the iPhone 12 mini and deeply regret it, even though the physical format is pretty nice.

Watch the video I linked. Modern Macs are a single capacitor failure away from shorting 13v straight to those "amazing focus on quality" SSD chips. Either one of the two chips dies, you have a brick. No booting from external drive. Nothing. A brick. All because one capacitor fails.

If it were just a matter of replacing a capacitor, I'd agree with you. But the wiring decisions from their "amazing focus" defaults to a 13v short to storage chips—all your files AND the BIOS up in a puff of literal smoke.

And finally, Apple doesn't design and manufacture solid state storage devices. They contract out to other companies. Those other companies also sell NVMe storage devices with substantially similar chip designs.

Don't believe the hype. A ten cent capacitor taking out a $3K laptop isn't "above and beyond"; it's penny pinching at the expense of reliability with no concessions made to either repairability or resilience.

You guys who are rossmann-pilled should put that as a disclaimer in your comments.

Guilt by association and/or ad hominem are weak sauce. What part was factually inaccurate?

• That storage is soldered unlike the vast majority of laptops on the market, which use standard NVMe sticks?

• That the BIOS is stored in those soldered SSD chips making a single point of failure?

• That if even one of the chips fails, you lose all the data including the BIOS boot logic and brick the device?

• That the board layout sends 13v down the rail directly to the aforementioned SSD chips on capacitor failure?

• That they cannot be repaired anymore, even by experienced professionals?

• That replacement parts that aren't severely compromised (unknown number of write cycles for SSD chips) simply aren't available?

Which part is false and requires a disclaimer? And I ask this as someone who has personally used Macs exclusively on the client since 2003 and professionally since 2011. Owned nothing but iPhones since the original was released in 2007. 5 iPads in total.

I'm no blind Apple hater.

It's not a question of guilt! It's about making it easier to skim the comments.

Rossmann-based answers look like interesting "original thought" comments till you're a few sentences in, and realize you're reading a Rossmann rehash.

Perhaps it would help to know that I upgraded the RAM and hard drive on my 2005 Santa Rosa MBP. Really easy due to standard DDR2 SODIMMs and SATA connectors.

Did the same to my 2009 unibody, put a 500GB hybrid solid state hard drive in it and bumped the RAM first to 6GB and then to 8GB.

Not only did I bump the RAM in my 2012 unibody to 16GB—which wasn't even a build option when initially released—but replaced the DVD drive with a second 2.5" drive, ran two SSDs in RAID-0, and got 1GB/sec r/w transfer rates, which for that vintage was unheard of, especially since it started with a 240GB HDD. That one lasted me quite a while where the only real drawback from a new one was the screen resolution. I was able to upgrade the screen to a slightly higher res when I broke the screen, so at least a minor improvement there.

Then the Retinas started. Stuck on 16GB RAM on my 2015 MBP, but I loved the new screen, and I eventually replaced the stock 512GB SSD with a 1TB NVMe stick, then a 2TB NVMe stick. This is still my personal laptop, and I'm eyeing a 4TB upgrade for it now, 8 years after initial release.

Got a 2022 M1 Max for work, and it was great, but it did have a boot hiccup six months back. (SSD issues.) Got it "repaired" (really just a replacement since the whole mainboard was useless) and luckily I made regular backups, but became wary once I learned this wasn't an isolated issue and why the problem probably popped up in the first place.

Most of those laptops still work! The parts that died first almost without exception were the storage devices. The CPUs generally kept plugging along well after their usefulness had expired. Screens still light up. RAM still plugging away. The drives have clearly been the weakest link, but when storage is replaceable, we can keep the rest of the laptop out of the trash for many more years. (Assuming you keep them plugged in due to the battery being shot, but even batteries are replaceable or the laptop is usable as a desktop alternative for a loved one.)

Therefore now I'm far more reluctant to purchase a new Mac for personal use precisely because of the design issues found in recent Macs.

Sufficiently original and non-rehashed?

Most people don't write terabytes per day and the ones who do can just double their storage.

But they do, specially in low RAM systems, as the SSD becomes like a backup ram to juggle extra information.

I remember modding osx Yosemite to run the swap in the ram when I had an SSD since I was so worried about it, not sure if it still does this but with the infrequently of negative problems and the fact that one of my friends used a 2gb MacBook air 2009 until 2017 made me realize it probably doesn't matter.

A 2009 MBA can still be used if the SSD dies. You can get a replacement or you can plug in an external drive to install on and boot off of. You can upgrade the storage space on that model if you want to.

Since 2018 and the T2 chip, the BIOS is stored on the soldered storage chip pair. Either one of those two chips or a capacitor adjacent to them dies, you've not only lost your files and OS. You can't replace them. You can't even plug in an external drive to boot off of since the BIOS is now stored on the SSD chips as well instead of a separate ROM as before.

2016-2017 soldered the storage, but you could at least work around it. 2018+, there are no more workarounds. If any part of your SSD fails now, you've got an expensive useless brick.

Swapping wear your SSD out faster? SOL. Capacitor fails and shunts 13V through your SSD? SOL. Anything at all happens to either one of your SSD chips? SOL.

Either pay for that AppleCare in perpetuity or buy a whole new laptop. There are no more workarounds.

If you're swapping a dwpd.

That's user error

More so when the RAM remains limited on Macs as it too is integrated with the CPU and hence is non-upgradable. This is even worse than soldered SSD, as we can still make an attempt to replace the SSD chips with new ones with careful soldering, but nothing can be done about the RAM. These deliberately irreparable new Macs are just shitty products.

All my old laptops since 2003 still have functional CPUs and RAM. I'm not overly concerned about the CPU/RAM situation, especially have seen the advantages to a shared CPU/GPU/RAM Arm architecture. Would I prefer upgradeable RAM, sure, but it's not the weak link. Know what's actually failed me over the years?

Storage. Hard drives and SSDs.

You know you can buy other products, right? There’re plenty of computer manufacturers that use discrete modules.

To be fair not that many if you want alternative to the Air and size/weight is a priority. Also.. I’m not sure what are you trying to say? That there is something wrong about criticizing Apple’s design choices?

* Just use TB monitors and daisy chaining works fine

* Nothing to add.

* Hardware enclave is a requirement for most corporate/government computers so you're just comparing two different classes of computer. All the enterprise Windows machines also do this.

* Same as above

> * Just use TB monitors and daisy chaining works fine

Not everybody has a zillion dollars to spend on expensive thunderbolt displays and they shouldn't have to when the Displayport standard (and other operating systems) support daisy chaining.

> when the Displayport standard (and other operating systems) support daisy chaining

It doesn't support it, exactly, it supports a compressed image in each of the multiple streams transported, which can introduce quality problems when doing the production work people use higher end Macs for.

"the combined data rate requirements of all the displays cannot exceed the limits of a single DP port" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Multi-Stream_Trans...

Arguably, compared to TB ports transmitting a full quality image to each screen, this could be "unexpected behavior".

I'm not a gamer. I'd be fine with a single cable that served two 4K monitors at 30Hz from the Mac if it meant I never needed another dock ever again.

That said, TB3/TB4 should be able to handle dual 4K at 60Hz from a single DisplayPort connection to the laptop.

I have dual 4k right now daisy chained from a Mac at 60Hz. Works totally fine and it was a 2019 MBP (and now a 2021 M1 Pro MBP). This is already a solved problem if you just stick with TB3+ gear.

With a large 4K screen, I'm not seeing any benefit for MST, and studies have shown it decreases productivity after 2 screens. The other problems are simply fixed with using iCloud and treating your laptop as a disposable, which many laptops have been designed as. If you use the MacBook add intended and invest in apple care it's unbeatable.

“Studies show” cannot possibly account for all workflows. The most extreme monitor users I saw were security personnel who used them to… monitor things. Their office looked very cyberpunk being utterly littered with corporate desktops and cheap TVs and LCD monitors.

Any source for said studies? As an engineer I often find my current 2 external monitors limiting and wish I had four.

It never ends. I have 4 monitors and sometimes wish I had 5 or 6. If I could physically fit more monitors on my desk, I would.

NYT in 2014, (personal experience too). https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/technology/personaltech/s... this advocates for one monitor https://hackernoon.com/why-i-stopped-using-multiple-monitors... the tl;dr is that mutiple screens mean more distractions, and some tasks are better with 2 monitors but the studies don't indicate it's universal.

These aren't studies, just anecdotes, and the actual study quoted in the NYT shows the opposite:

> One study commissioned by NEC and conducted by researchers at the University of Utah showed that people using a dual-display machine to do a text-editing task were 44 percent more productive than those who used a single monitor.

I think it's fair to say that any research from 2014 isn't the most relevant now. Both screen size and (importantly) software has changed to better support both multiple screen usage as well as large screens.

The argument for single screens in the NYT is mostly that it reduces distractions:

> But for most people, the time spent juggling two windows or scrolling across large documents isn’t the biggest bottleneck in getting work done. Instead, there’s a more basic, pernicious reason you feel constantly behind — you’re getting distracted.

This seems to indicate they were comparing a maximized window on a single screen vs non-maximized windows on multiple screens, and probably in the days before modern notifications on desktop OSs.

Based on this it is fair to say more research is needed, but it is inaccurate to claim that studies support the idea that one monitor is better.

Realistically where would you position these monitors? Ergonomically there aren't many great solutions for any extended use especially once you go up to mutiple large monitors. Tilt your head in those directions and see how long you maintain them comfortably. If you think modern notifications are less distracting I'll respectfully disagree.

Respectfully disagree all you want but don’t come here claiming studies that don’t exist.

Three monitors along a curve on a curved desk with a rotating office chair (or just one on wheels) is perfect. It might be OCD but I don’t like two monitors because there is a gap between screens in the middle. I can physically rotate to face one side monitor or the other. I am never tilting my head for more than an occasional glance and this setup provides sone kind of task repartition in space, which helps me with switching contexts.

From an ergonomic point of view this is no different than using a single monitor. They are at the right height and the right angle and with a good chair. The trick is to rotate the chair rather than your head. And it does take a bit of space.

> Realistically where would you position these monitors?

I have a 34" main monitor positioned directly in front of me, a 24" in vertical orientation I use mostly for multiple terminals and my MPB screen below the 34".

I don't think this is an unusual setup.

> Tilt your head in those directions

This applies to large single monitors too. I think (hope?!) most people have a setup where their main work is right in front of them.

> If you think modern notifications are less distracting I'll respectfully disagree.

No I'm saying they are more distracting, so reduce the relevance of old articles claiming a single monitor reduced those.

Are they all in front of you? They sound like they are. Do you find that the positions are comfortable? I cannot see a single article that claims mutiple monitors are ergonomic beyond 2, and most only try to suggest one. https://ergo.human.cornell.edu/ergoguide.html this article might not like the positions you use, but they're just suggestions that I read and found useful.

I had two 4K monitors in portrait mode. Meant less vertical scrolling. I generally put different contexts on different screens, eg. code/terminals on one monitor and browsers with results on the other. Laptop screen left open as well for email, Slack, etc.

Come on, those are not “studies” - they are just the opinions of some random people, and they carry no more or less weight than, for example, my opinion, which is “you can pry my 4 x 27” screens out of my cold, dead, hands.”

The NYTimes article is actually explicit about that:

> Unlike monitor makers with their multidisplay studies, I have no research proving you’ll find as much benefit from a single monitor as I did.

In other words “there are actual studies proving multimonitor setups enhance productivity, but Big Screen(tm) paid for them so they must be wrong” which has no basis in science at all.

Also:

> “Two monitors are a double-edged sword,” said Gloria Mark, a professor who studies workplace distractions at the University of California, Irvine. Ms. Mark hasn’t specifically researched how second monitors might affect focus, and when she recently had a chance to work at a two-monitor machine, she felt that it did make some of her tasks easier. “But most people have their email up on the second screen, and of course, when anything comes in, it’s a great source of distraction,” she said.

So the only actual scientist in all of this actually said “hey, this is making me more productive, unless I fill the screens with distractions”

The tl;dr is that people need to set up their workspace to enhance their flow and focus, and reduce distraction to be productive. The amount of screens is about as relevant to that as the weather outside. (“Hey, the sun is shining and the birds are singing, it is a beautiful day outside, let’s go out!”). As per your own conclusion (“the studies don’t indicate it’s universal” - setting aside the fact that there _are_ no studies) It is not universal.

Trying to whitewash Apple’s lack of DP Daisychaining support as “You don’t need this anyway, Apple simply cares about your productivity!” Is silly.

My point was that Apple probably don't care to cater to these use cases, and see them as niche. I know 0 people who use more than two monitors on any OS.

> I know 0 people who use more than two monitors on any OS.

Three in this thread alone, and shifting the goalposts from “studies show it is bad” to “I don’t know anyone with multiple monitors” or “It is tiring to move your head around all the time” indicate you are not debating this in good faith, so I am done with this chat.

Have a great day!

Every person in my company has a laptop screen and two monitors on their desk, including devs, product, managers, infra, admin... Literally everyone. The only people who don't use them are senior leadership because they're rarely at their desks.

The productivity after the second screen decrease because the software sucks at support those configurations.

With specialized software ( multi track AV) and/or ad hoc setup ( e.g. deeply tuned Linux) the more the screens you throw at it, the better.

Virtually perhaps, physically there's a limit. https://www.viewsonic.com/library/business/monitor-ergonomic... ViewSonic doesn't account for more than one monitor for an ergonomic workstation, and I've never seen it done well myself.

There’s a paragraph under the title “Account for Dual or Single Monitor Arrangements” on that web page. They just say that you have to be particularly mindful of ergonomics if you have more than one. How is that not accounting for more than one?

iCloud is simply not a replacement for onboard storage

> Storage is the most likely component to fail.

Got any sources for that? I find that hard to believe.

> MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here.

This is indeed annoying, but with USB4/Thunderbolt support becoming more common in monitors, I believe this is going to be less of an issue going forward.

The only reason I was able to use my 2012 MacBook Pro 15 as my daily driver for 11 years, is because I was able to replace 2 failed non-soldered SSDs.

Those were old SSDs with I presume much lower capacity than modern drives

The first one was 512GB. The ones after that 1TB.

No write intensive usage. Just normal office use with occasionally compiling code.

SSDs and batteries are the only components (as far as I remember) that have a "guaranteed" cycle lifetime. Or in another words, a "very likely after this point" failure threshold.

I completely agree on batteries (and I believe this is in fact why most devices are being replaced was what I was getting at!), but where is that point practically for SSDs?

With typical usage, it should hopefully be out many more years than the laptop gets security updates.

> With typical usage, it should hopefully be out many more years than the laptop gets security updates.

Well, that's a good question, isn't it? Especially when you're selling memory-limited hardware and shoving the swap in your SSD

(And using it past the availability of security updates should be the user's prerogative, not Apple - you can run Linux on the ARM laptops)

Data point of one. Last 20 years storage has not failed on me across close to a dozen laptops I’ve owned across various brands.

So even I get puzzled whenever I see “storage is the most likely component to fail”. Maybe I just got lucky?

I think it's more about ssd's with limited cycles+ the fact that with smaller RAM, swap can nuke those ssd's pretty fast if you go beyond ram capacity

If you're replacing your laptop every 1.5 years then you're probably not likely to encounter any part failing.

That’s a fair point, if I recall correctly I had three laptops for about 5 years each. And about 7 over 5 years period as I switched jobs and laptops frequently.

And if a man mates with nine women he'll be holding one baby this time next month? With both electronic devices and gestating females concurrency is common.

No, you don't understand. SSDs begin to encounter problems over time after some number of read/write cycles. This is entirely expected and when one sector has issues it gets remapped to one of some spares that are built into the drive. Once those are exhausted it's a matter of time before you have an unusable SSD and, if it's soldered to the motherboard, an unusable laptop.

A sister comment to mine referred to this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38066645

But where did they say they only used each device for 1.5 years? That seemed like your assumption based on the quoted dozen laptops across twenty years; I certainly have a number of devices concurrently, with the oldest now being 14 years (still working though only on a power supply as the battery is badly degraded). That said I also strongly prefer a replaceable drive, but more because I don't want to buy the capacity at today's price that I'll only truly need in a few years time, if ever.

It’s a pretty fair assumption, I think. It’d be a really unusual if they kept buying laptops and somehow continued using all or some of them at the same rate.

Apple devices aren't engineered to last; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them.

Also, NVIDIA cards in eGPUs and Thunderbolt (arm64) aren't supported.

The best solution is either don't use Apple, or have a machine under warranty and very good backups.

Complaints aside, the Anker 777 dock does 5K-8K DP over USB-C, 1 GbE, 100w charging, 4 USB-A and more and works with m1 and m2 MBPs. Add a quality magnetic USB-C connector, and it's "MagSafe" docking to a monitor, power, and accessories with one cable. I'm in the camp of 1 giant 49" monitor, with occasional AirPlay to a nearby Apple TV 4K on an 85" TV.

I have had many Apple devices since the 2nd gen iPod, and they have all lasted a very long time compared to my other devices. All my laptops back to my 15” PowerBook is still working. They have fixed a faulty GPU on a 4 year old laptop for free, even though I had opened the laptop and changed thermal paste. (Known manufacturing issue with that GPU, but still impressive)

They have made mistakes. Like the battery in my current 2015 MBP is too hard to replace. And I avoided upgrading for a long time due to the known issues with the keyboards. But it seems like they generally correct when making mistakes like that.

I do agree that SSDs shouldn’t be soldered on though. Hopefully it’s one of the mistakes they’ll eventually fix. I kind of understand the motivation.. you can make it impossible to effectively steal a device, or access its contents. The device becomes very simple and robust in some ways. But they could come up with a good compromise.

Like, sure, keep the concept of not having an SSD controller on the drive, and firmware on the SSD. But sell replacement SSDs with the firmware and a recover OS preloaded. One that lets you provision the new drive with the SOC through your iCloud account. Depending on the on-chip storage and whether it’s fuse/EPROM-based or flash, the number of possible drive replacements might be limited. But that’s an OK compromise.

Yeah, but equivalently priced hardware is just as good if not better. I put as much money in a PC build as I would have in a Mac Pro, and I got a 1000w PSU replaced for free because it had 7-year warranty. So, it is not something special about Apple. If you are willing to put the price you will get pretty good hardware. If anything, you are more likely to be left hanging the short stick with Apple because they are unwilling to warrant their stuff for a long time no matter what price you buy it. Not without reason, because realistically, most of their hardware post 2015 really is not any good.

> They have fixed a faulty GPU on a 4 year old laptop for free

I have to laugh at this.

Apple had a well known strategy of denying that obvious problems with their devices were not actually problems with their devices until 5-10 years later when no one would be using those devices anymore, at which point they would announce a recall, which involved a tedious process of proving it's the right device, and shipping it to Apple for days or taking it to an Apple Store for repairs.

In the meanwhile they would deny that it was ever a problem. The good thing was that a lot of Apple Geniuses were absolutely decent people and would probably give you a repair for free although they were supposed to try to get you to pay for the repairs.

I mean, just consider how long Apple denied the following, highly public recall worthy issues (and then extrapolate that to how they would behave with something that was less publicized and had a failure rate of about 10% as opposed to the much higher failure rates exhibited in these situations):

1. You're holding it wrong, iPhone 4. 2. No, your battery is not degraded...you're just imagining that your battery life is low 3. We fixed the degraded battery....no your phone hasn't slowed down...you're just imagining it. 4. Butterfly keyboards.

> Apple devices aren't engineered to last

This doesn't match either my experience, the experience of others I know or the good resale value Apple devices continue to have.

All of my apple devices have lasted multiple (4+) years. The only time an apple device hasn’t is because I broke it.

I suppose the interesting question is whether this is true of the newest devices or not. My wife's MacBook Pro lasted 11 years. It finally died this year. Can I expect the MacBook Pro that's replacing it to last 11 years too? Only time will tell. Hope so.

Some of us remember our 2008 MacBook pros GPUs dying and apple refusing to fix it. Their electronics have, however never let me down.

Didn’t they end up recalling those and changing the main boards for free (of course, those replacements were also having the same issues as the original boards). AFAICT they still refuse to touch a nVidia GPU over this. It is not a common occurrence.

It was a 2008 laptop and they decided it was a real problem by 2014 or so, so 'yeah' after 6 years and wet know what happened after. My iPod was replaced within an hour when it broke.

That's just wrong - Apple devices are much more hearty than the competition (Lenovo as a possible exception).

>Apple devices aren't engineered to last; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them.

I guess you should say include "Modern" Apple Mac. Macbook Post 2015 are pretty bad compare to older MacBook. Those who are EE or interested in Hardware should watch a few of Louis Rossmann video.

But then because the rest of the industry are so poor in reliability they still get to say they are once of the most reliable notebook. May be apart from Lenovo.

>Apple devices aren't engineered to last; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them.

I have a 2007 iPod nano that I still use pretty regularly. It still works, and I can load new music to it from my Mac.

I would say it was engineered to last.

If you're an Apple engineer then thanks for your forward thinking. Please keep it up, people do appreciate it, even if you don't hear it that often.

Can you explain why Apple devices in general maintain a higher percentage of their resale value for longer than their competitors’ counterparts?

only laptop I know carved from a single piece of aluminum. not the only reason but for sure that one is a good one. No other laptop feels as solid and I don't understand why nobody else does it.

I haven't had any of the recent MBPs, but my 2020 HP EliteBook's main body looks similar to my 2013 retina mbp, which already had the "unibody" construction. If also feels quite solid when I hold it by one corner while open. The lid does feel somewhat flimsier, though, especially the hinge.

I have a Dell that looks the part when it’s sitting on a desk, but is actually quite flimsy (the underside is actually plastic, and the hinge does not look strong at all, the screen shifts colour when a slight pressure is applied on the lid). And it is a middle of the road Latitude, not a €1000 MacBook Air.

This particular HP is full metal. I was able to confirm it when using a random belkin charger with no ground: I got the familiar "vibrating" feeling in my fingers when moving them along the case.

This specific model is a 840/845 G8 (I have both, they're the same, one Intel and the other AMD). I haven't seen the current G10, but I've seen the supposedly higher-end 1040 G10 and, like the Dell, it looks the part, but it's clearly all plastic. Complete with creaking noises if you look at it wrong. And the one I'm talking about was brand new, maybe 5 hours old.

> the screen shifts colour when a slight pressure is applied on the lid

Heh. Must be nice to have a screen whose color is consistent if you leave it alone. My HP changes colors if I shift my head. No, these are not cheap 2003 models. Yes, they cost as much as a similar MBP.

Milling a case from a block must be far more expensive that folding a few sheets, right?

One (but certainly not the only) reason is that Apple rarely discounts their products and even if they do it’s not by that much.

It’s not that hard to find a high-end/$2000+ PC laptop for 40% or so off 1-2 years after its release, not so much a macbook. Apple is still selling refurbished M1 airs for $849.00 from 2020 ($999 was the price on introduction)

I've got a 14 year old imac that says otherwise

> Apple devices aren't engineered to last

This is just patently false.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com