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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Remember when you didn't need any fucking online account to use your computer?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Come join us in the free world of Linux (and related systems)... even if the wheel do pop off for like no reason some times.

It’s so nice when you can leave your computer alone for half a year, come back. And find that nothing has changed.

Nooo, then what will HN do with the multiple-times-a-week and hundreds of comments a month complaints about proprietary systems run by mega tech corps? Seriously I think there were FOUR different "fix"-win11 tools on the frontpage in the last 6 days.

I will take the wheels popping off occasionally over whatever that 8-dimentional abyss of hell that is Windows 11.

I use both Mac and Windows with no Apple account or Microsoft account. I lose some features, but gain privacy. Once I lost access to a Windows machine.

There is zero privacy both on Windows or Mac.

Linux is still here.

Problem is hardware. I don’t like macos nor Apple, but their laptops are the best hardware out there.

I see this repeated over and over, but there's no proof that "apple hardware" is better than any combination of every possible hardware out there, it's just fanboyism.

Anecdotes of bad hardware are everywhere, given that the majority of hardware are cheaper thus more prevalent. But a comparison of all possible hardware with the same price points? Not feasible, so it's all just feels.

I'll preface this by saying that this is not a defence of Apple's SSO issues as outlined in this article; but I think I can bring some quantifiable points to this discussion.

Anecdotally, after over a decade of professional computer use:

- No laptop as light as an MBP that I've been exposed to comes close to the weight-to-stiffness ratio of that case

- No laptop out there has a trackpad that feels anywhere close to the MBP, that I've seen. It's a combination of palm rejection, latency, fineness of controls, and correct handling of multi-fingered gestures, with the actual glass of the trackpad being nice too.

- Most other laptops out there don't ship with as good a display. Granted, the MBP displays aren't P3 calibrated or anything, but the colour reproduction is great, and the HiDPI clarity is excellent. Font rendering in particular is outstanding.

That's just to name a few headline features. Is it possible to buy/build a laptop with those similar qualities? Hard to say. Trackpad drivers in particular tend to be tricky, and Windows precision drivers are the closest I've seen to Apple's trackpad feel, but those will typically fall apart on material feel.

I doubt that you'd be able to make or buy a daily driver that feels as good while spending a reasonable amount of money, and you'd likely spend a good amount of time sourcing parts.

I've had the opportunity to use three other laptop types during my career: two reasonably recent (at the time I had them) Lenovo Thinkpads, a Framework (briefly), and a recentish Dell Latitude.

The Thinkpads stand out, but fall short on the display and trackpad points; otherwise they had a reasonably rigid keyboard compared to the MBP. The Framework was fine, honestly. The modularity is excellent, but the deck flex on the first-gen model was way more than I'm used to, and the display colours were deeply meh. The Latitude was bulky, but I mitigated that and other issues by just running it closed-lid and plugging it into a display, mouse, and keyboard.

I've been using Thinkpads since 2006, including fancy high-end ones such as X1 Carbon. I'm typing this on a newly purchased MacBook Air, and I do have to say: it really is very good in terms of hardware. And I don't mean specs, but ergonomics. Trackpad is truly as awesome as they say, keyboard is surprisingly good (kinda expected to hate it and amazed at how fast I can type on it), and overall it is just very comfortable. The battery life is unbelievable coming from Intel.

The software, now, that's a very different story. I really wish I could run Linux on this thing.

That ceased when your computer became their computer.

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