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Comment by chipdart | Hacker News Reader

> Engineers use MacBook pros because it’s the best built laptop, the best screen, arguably the best OS and most importantly - they’re not the ones paying for them.

I know engineers from a FANG that picked MacBook pros in spite of the specs and only because of the bling/price tag. Them they spent their whole time using it as a remote terminal for Linux servers, and they still complained about the thing being extremely short on RAM and HD.

One of them even tried to convince their managers to give the vision pro a try, even though there was zero use cases for it.

Granted, they drive multiple monitors well with a single USB-C plug, at least with specific combinations of monitors and hubs.

It's high time that the "Apple sells high end gear" shtick is put to rest. Even their macOS treadmill is becoming tiring.

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The build quality of Apple laptops is still pretty unmatched in every price category.

Yes, there are 2k+ laptops from Dell/Lenovo that match and exceed a similarly priced MacBook in pure power, but usually lack battery life and/or build quality.

the more the deviate from the BSD core the worse it gets.

But I can still fire up a terminal and use all of my *nix skills to operate.

I can't do that on Windows without either wrestling with PowerShell or WSL2

Apple devices also work quite seamless together. IPads for example work great as a second screen wirelessly with the MBPs. I'd immediately buy a 14 inch ipad just for that, since that is so useful when not on your standard desk. Also copy paste between devices or headphones just work...

in case Apple would come up with the idea to take an ipad as external compute unit that would be amazing... just double your ram, compute and screen with it in such a lightweight form factor... should be possible if they want

You can use the iPad as a second monitor on Windows too and it works nicely. I also use my airpod pro's with my Dell Windows XPS and it's perfect.

is there now a low latency solution for windows 2nd monitor? I was only aware of some software where latency is quite bad or one company that provided a wireless HDMI / Displayport dongle...

Also the nice thing for headphones within apple is, that the airpods automatically switch to where the attention is... meaning e.g., in case I watch something on the laptop and pick up an iphone call (no matter if via phone or any app) the airpod automatically switches

> The build quality of Apple laptops is still pretty unmatched in every price category.

I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly keyboard. It was shit.

How many USB ports do the new MacBook air have? The old ones had two. And shipped with 8GB of RAM? These are shit-tier specs.

The 2020 MacBook pros had a nice thing: USB-C charging, and you could charge the from either side. Current models went back to MagSafe, only on one side. The number of USB ports is still very low.

But the are shiny. I guess that counts as quality.

USB-C charging still works with the Pros (driving a M3 Max), and 3 ports seems reasonable to me.

I guess we can agree to disagree, but I find the 2020 rev Macbook pros have a good number of USB-C ports (2 on the left, 1 on the right -- all can do PD), a magsafe charger, headphone jack, HDMI port and SD card slot. How many USB-C ports do you need? Sometimes I wish there was ethernet but I get why it's not there.

I agree, the butterfly keyboard was shitty but I absolutely love the keyboard on the 2020 rev. It's still not as great as my mechanical desktop keyboard, but for a laptop keyboard it's serious chef's kiss. Also, I have yet to find a trackpad that is anywhere as good as the Macbook. Precision trackpads are still way way worse.

Finally, the thing that always beings me back to MBPs (vs Surfacebooks or Razers) is battery life. I typically get a good 10+ hours on my MBP. Battery life on my old Razer Blade and Surfacebooks were absolutely comically horrible.

I'm absolutely not an Apple person. Privately own zero Apple hardware.

However there are two awesome things about my work MBP I would really want from my ThinkPad:

Magsafe charger - too many close calls!

And the track pad.

I can't work properly without an external mouse on my ThinkPad. But on the MBP everything just has the right size, location, proportions and handling on the track pad. I had a mouse for the MBP too but I stopped using it!

> I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly keyboard. It was shit.

Yea, the butterfly was utter shit. And they fucked up the touchbar by not just putting it on TOP of the existing F-keys.

But the rest of the laptop was still well machined :D

My 15 inch macbook which fried its display twice (didn't go to sleep properly and then put in a bagpack and overheated. There is no way to see that the sleep didn't kick in), and then had the broken display cable problem (widespread and Apple wanted $900 for a new display..) would disagree. For comparison: The 4k touch display on my xps15 that didn't survive a diet coke bath was <$300 including labor for a guy to show up in my office and repair it while I was watching....

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