Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

One thing I noticed in the M4 macbook announcement comments was how many people were happy with their M1 laptop, and second, how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community.

Second, since it's open source, Apple themselves are probably paying attention; I didn't read the whole thing because it's going over my head, but she discussed missing features in the chip that are being worked around.

View on HN

I have the opposite experience. Apple is incredibly difficult and expensive to repair. But I have been pleasantly surprised by the longevity and repairability of ThinkPads. I like those Apple M processors, but I know where I'm spending my money.

I agree on modern Mac's being difficult to repair. I also will say that back a decade or two ago, it was likely you'd need to repair your computer after four years. Now, a four year old Macbook Air still feels brand new to me.

Yes, MacBooks are generally more expensive to repair, but they also tend to not need repairs. It’s quite normal to hear from people who are using their 7+ year old MacBook without any issues and are still perfectly happy with it. I myself still use my 2018 MacBook Pro as my main device.

When considering longevity, I will agree that Thinkpads are probably the only device that can compete with MacBooks. But there are trade-offs.

MacBooks are going to be lighter, better battery life, and have better displays. Not to mention MacOS, which is my preferred OS.

Thinkpads usually have great Linux support and swappable hardware for those who like to tinker with their devices. They also tend to be more durable, but this adds more weight.

I still use a 2014 macbook air as my home server. It was my daily driver for 7 years. No complaints, still works perfectly. Haven't been careful with it either.

> MacBooks are going to be lighter

Not going let Macs have this one, my X1 carbon is considerably lighter than a MBA.

But generally agreeing. My last X1C lasted 8 years and still works perfectly, I just wanted an upgrade. My new one is even lighter than my old one. I opt for the FHD w/o touch screen and the second best processor to balance battery life and performance. Definitely not getting 18hrs battery life but 8-10 isn't something to laugh at.

I admit I was assuming they would be heavier, I didn't consider the X1 Carbon. When I think of Thinkpads I still picture the traditional IBM-style Thinkpad. A quick look at the specs shows the 14" X1 Carbon at 2.42lbs, 13" MacBook Air at 2.7 lbs, and a 14" Thinkpad E series at 3.17 lbs.

The 12-inch macbook was probably the best computer I've ever used in my life. I don't think anyone has come close to its weight. Apparently it weighs in at 2.03 pounds.

Sadly, I don't think we'll ever get a computer that good from apple (or anyone) again.

MacBooks are some of the heaviest laptps on the market.

The Air is the "light" one at 2.7 lbs 13" and 3.3 lbs for the 15"

For reference, there are several 13" laptops on the market that are around 2 - 2.5 lbs and 15"+ that are less than 3 lbs

Do any of those lighter laptops match the battery life and performance of the MacBook Air, while also being completely silent? I suppose I should have been more specific and stated I don't believe there are any laptops that can match the MacBook in all categories while being lighter.

>MacBooks are going to be lighter

That sounds like an Apple sound bite, and it is wrong, compared to pretty much any MacBook competitor out there...

I haven't gotten a new Thinkpad since the 25th anniversary one but that was the last I bought while using a few as daily drivers for a decade since 2008.

The ultimate issue was that the batteries degraded on them on incredibly fast. I don't know if that's been fixed, but the ease of replacing (at least one of) the batteries was more than canceled out by the short life compared to a Mac.

It's also hard to beat the global network of on-site warranty service. One colleague had their broken TP keyboard replaced over an hour right next to us and got a fresh battery replacement >2y in.

Another one managed to sort out their dead TP motherboard while remoting from a small town in SEA.

All covered under warranty, no questions asked.

Please mention the trackpad. Apple’s ones are hard to beat.

Yes, modern macs are stupidly hard to repair. But I am never using any Lenovo product again since the whole rootkit incident.

How about Purism and System76?

So the choice is now mediocre and high quality?

Mediocre hardware and high-quality software or vice versa.

Agreed, hard to repair (which is a problem), but my experience is owning one for 8 years, and another for 4 years now (with hopes to keep it another 6), which never once needed a repair.

The only Mac hardware failure I’ve experienced in over 25 years of ownership (My first Mac was black and had a G3 in it and ran OS 8), I’ve experienced a grand total of one hardware failure, and that was 15+ years ago.

Oh you know what, I realized I wans't accurate. The 8-year MacBook I had _did_ have a failure at one point. They replaced the entire keyboard/trackpad for me for free when it did.

Indeed. However once you need the repair it's so daunting. Now factor in non-developed nations (prices are usually same or more there as well for both parts and service) and it's just insane. I had a 7-8 year old macbook air that I had bought for ~60K INR and I had to replace its SSD. Just because it was do be done for an Apple device even the outside repairperson charged ~16K (Apple "authorised" service centre quoted 28K + taxes with a straight face). That outside repair was way too costly in late 2022 for a 128GB SSD. Same goes for their other devices.

So what's to be done? Buy their insanely costly "limited" extended warranty for "2 more" years? And let's say we do that, then? I am sure there is an argument for that.

I am typing this from a M1 MacBook Pro and if it dies I am really not sure whether I will even be able to get it repaired without "feeling" fleeced, or might as well move back to the normal laptop + Linux world and know that a laptop repair will never be a "minor bankruptcy" event ;-)

No, "but Apple devices last long" doesn't cut it. So do non-Apple devices, yes they do. And if they need repair you don't at all fret w/ or w/o warranty.

I am not sure how many here on HN will be able to connect with this but that hanging Damocles' sword is not a nice thing to have around when you use a costly Apple device.

Making it easy and cheap/affordable for their devices to be repaired should not be an option left for OEMs.

I found the thinkpads were too easily warped.

> ...how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last...

This is no longer true for me. I've been an Apple fan since the Apple ][ days, and reluctantly left the ecosystem last year. The hardware walled garden with soldered-on components and components tied down to specific units for ostensible privacy and security reasons (I don't buy those reasons), combined with the steadily degrading OS polish in fine attention to detail, for me personally, meant I could no longer justify the cognitive load to continue with a Mac laptop as my daily driver. While others might point to a cost or/or value differential, I'm in the highly privileged position to be insensitive to those factors.

Last straw was an board-soldered SSD that quit well before I was willing to upgrade, and even Louis Rossman's shop said it would cost way more to desolder and solder a new one on than the entire laptop is worth. Bought a Framework the same day, when it arrived I restored my data files to it and been running it as my daily driver ever since. The Mac laptop is still sitting here, as I keep hoping to figure out when to find time to develop my wave soldering skills to try my hand at saving it from the landfill, or break down and unsustainably pay for the repair (I do what I can to avoid perpetuating dark patterns, but it is a Sisyphean effort).

I found myself in a position of having to think increasingly more about working around the Mac ecosystem instead of working invisibly within it (like a fish in water not having to think about water), that it no longer made sense to stick with it. It has definitively lost the "It Just Works" polish that bound me so tightly to the ecosystem in the past. I see no functional difference in my daily work patterns using a Mac laptop versus a Framework running Fedora.

To be sure, there are a lot of areas I have to work around on the Framework-Fedora daily driver, but for my personal work patterns, in my personal needs, I evaluated them to be roughly the same amount of time and cognitive load I spent on the Mac. Maybe Framework-Fedora is slightly worse, but close enough that I'd rather throw my hat into the more open ring than the increasingly closed walled garden Apple's direction definitely is taking us, that does not align with my vision for our computing future. It does not hurt that experimenting with local LLM's and various DevOps tooling for my work's Linux-based infrastructure is way easier and frictionless on Fedora for me, though YMMV for certain. It has already been and will be an interesting journey, it has been fun so far and brought back some fond memories of my early Apple ][, Macintosh 128K, and Mac OS X days.

Underrated point, maybe it's aluminum unibody or more stable OS, but in my experience average MBP lifetime is meaningfully higher compared to a windows machine. My longest lasting windows machine was T400 Thinkpad which lasted 5 years before Core 2 Duo architecture stopped being able to keep up. It got replaced with HP Envy with great specs but made out of plastic which barely lasted 1.5 years before screen fell off (literally). Replaced with 17" 2014 MBP which is still alive after SSD replacement.

If you replaced the T400 because it felt slow, maybe it’s just a software/OS issue.

The hardware on Thinkpad T-models should last longer than just 5 years in general.

My daily-driver laptop at home is a T420 from 2011 with a Core 2 Duo, SSD and 8GB RAM. Works fine still.

I run Linux + OpenBox, so it is a somewhat lightweight setup to be fair.

My daughter just asked me for the 'tiny' laptop. She has taken my Thinkpad X60 which runs linux mint. It's getting on for 20 years old soon!

> My daily-driver laptop at home is a T420 from 2011 with a Core 2 Duo, SSD and 8GB RAM. Works fine still.

I am not sure I would be productive with that. Any Core 2 Duo is 10x slower single core and 20x slower multi-core than a current generation laptop CPU at this point.

Eg: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/8588187?baselin...

I think it would mostly be good as an SSH terminal, but doing any real work locally on it seems frankly unfeasible.

The problem is software, though. I have a X200s with 4 GiB RAM from 2009. It was interesting to see how Firefox got slower and slower over the years. Granted, it not only is Firefox but also retard websites which use loads and loads of JS to display static content in the end. In return, it is not like JS didn't exist back then: The XhtmlRequest thingy for dynamic website updates or whatever the name for that was has been added years prior to that.

So, yes, a lot of this comes down to software and a massive waste of cycles. I remember one bug in Electron/Atom where a blinking cursor caused like 10% CPU load or something along that line. They fixed it, but it tells you way more about how broken the entire software stack was at that time and it didn't get better since then.

I mean, think about this: I used 1280x1024 on a 20" screen back in the mid 90ies on (Unix!) machines that are insanely less powerful than even this X200s. The biggest difference: Now you can move windows around visually, back then you moved the outer frame of it to the new place and then it got redrawn. And the formatting options in browsers are better, i.e. it is easier to design the layout you want. Plus there is no need for palette changes when switching windows anymore ("true color"). The overall productivity hasn't kept up with the increase in computing power, though. Do you think a machine 100x the performance will give you 100x the productivity? With some exceptions, the weak link in the chain were, are, and will always be humans, and if there are delays, we are talking almost always about badly "optimized" software (aka bloat). That was an issue back then already and, unfortunately, it didn't get better.

This depends on the workflow heavily. For working with text, listening to music, or even doing some light paint work my museum 75mhz K5 running windows 2000 is enough. For building a multi-platform python package embedding a compiler you really want lots of cores. At this point we are talking about 20x+ difference between Core 2 Duo and a modern part. For modern day web experience you want something in between.

Horses for courses ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do development and DevOps on it. Sure there are some intense workloads that I probably couldn’t run, but it works just fine as my daily driver.

I also have a corporate/work laptop from Dell with 32GB RAM, 16 cores @ 4.x GHz etc. - a beast - but it runs Windows (+ antivirus, group policy crap etc.) and is slower in many aspects.

Sure I can compile a single file faster and spin up more pods/containers etc. on the Dell laptop, but I am usually not constrained on my T420.

I generally don’t spend much time waiting for my machine to finish things, compared to the time I spend e.g. writing text/code/whatever.

There's also the fact that the quality is all-round higher, making them more enjoyable to use. The current HP Elitebooks have much crappier screens than my 2013 MBP. Touchpads have improved, but they're still leagues behind that 11-year-old machine.

I'm usually fairly careful with my things, so my gen8 hp elitebook still has all its bits together, but I've never really enjoyed using it. The screen, in particular, has ridiculous viewing angles, to the point it's impossible to not have any color cast on some region.

ThinkPad X220 here. From late 2012 until late 2023 in service with Linux. It is still usable but finally replaced it by an X13 Gen3 AMD with Linux. The magnesium body is a bless and feels a lot better to the skin than aluminium. The HiDPI display is the biggest upgrade. The six row keyboard is sturdy but a downgrade from the seven row keyboard. I miss the notch to open the lid.

It got worse with Gen4/5 which now have an awful hump (reverse notch) like a smartphone.

The long usage of the X220 depends on the built quality but also on the five year replacement part support. New batteries and a new palm rest (cracked during a journey). It not just quality you pay for, it is this support level. And of course more memory. Apple still fails in this regard and barely does something when forced by the European Union. Anyway - Apple doesn’t officially support Linux therefore I cannot buy them for work.

This is the part wich saddens me, they do good work and the next MacBook will also not run fully with Linux. This kind of catchup things by hackers cannot be won - until the vendor decides you’re a valuable customer. Therefore, don’t buy them that you can run Linux. You maybe can. But these devices are made for macOS only.

But if you want to run Linux on a MacBook? Talk your politicians! And send „messages“ with your money to Apple. Like buying ThinkPads, Dells Developer Edition, Purism, System 76 and so on :)

> The magnesium body is a bless and feels a lot better to the skin than aluminium.

Just curious, how does it feel better? My framework apparently has an aluminium lid and a magnesium base, and the mg feels “smoother” than the slightly more textured al… however my iPad is apparently aluminium too and is smooth to the touch.

It is not about smoothness.

Actually the magnesium bottom feels like some high quality polymer/plastic. And it is leightweight. Therefore it doesn’t feel like metal and doesn’t transport heat/cold. Aluminum is a nice material for planes, cars or bikes but I avoid skin contact because it is uncomfortable.

I guess like often it depends on how the magnesium made. Lenovo also uses for other parts high quality plastics (keyboard of course and probably the palm rest).

I never kept my ThinkPads around long because of the screens (which they have fixed, somewhere around the T450 timeframe.

The X220/230 had that godawful 1366x768 panel. A shame when the 13" Air at the time had a 1440x900 panel, which while it wasn't amazing with the viewing angles and colors, it was light years ahead of the screen in something like a T430.

ThinkPads come usually with two panel options: The cheap one and the good one. Often even a third or fourth.

Lenovo should only ship the good ones! If I buy a ThinkPad I want the good one.

I struggled to get the HiDPI panel for the X13 and ordered it from the replacement parts. Same for the X220, I replaced the TN panel by drumroll IPS panel.

Apple takes ridiculous amounts for memory or disk but you always get the good stuff with the base model. This makes it simple and reliable for customers.

Except keyboards

The ThinkPads always win, convex key caps, better switches and pressure/release point, travel way, better layout and a TrackPoint. In some models you can still replace it within 30 seconds (T14). With the X13 or MacBook it is a horror, requires removal of the mainboard. Not mentioning Apples failure with the TouchBar, which “feels” like the tried to save money on expensive switches by replacing them with a cheap touchscreen and selling this horrible downgrade as feature. And the infamous butterfly switches are the reason to avoid any used older MacBook (often defective).

The Carbon X1 2560x1440 screen was _fantastic_.

I have a T420 with a Core i5 2500 in great condition which still runs great on Windows 11. Core 2 Duo just didn't have the performance to have longevity. Sandy Bridge and later really do. Windows devices last for ages and it's really weird pretending this is an Apple only thing.

Wouldn't an equivalent Core 2 Duo Mac be just as bad if not worse in the same time frame due to Apple's constant OS updates?

I have quad core W520 from 2011, it's still VERY serviceable for modern usage. Not the fastest, but it even has USB 3 and a 1080p screen which an equivalentish MBP from the time would have not.

People talk about Apple prices being higher but the longevity of their devices really erases that price difference for me.

I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well, I’ve had numerous Android devices die in that timeframe, slow to a crawl, or at best their performance is erratic.

my mid 2012 MacBook air refuses to die.

I am not so sure. I had a Pentium4 eMachine that made it all the way to around 2012. The same kind of life for my first Athlon64 machine from the same company. In both cases, the machines ran Linux, and they still work today. They were only retired because no meaningful software could run on them any longer. My PowerBook G4 got no where near that longevity, and owners of late era Intel MacBooks are probably going to have similar issues.

Those machines should have been retired long ago because modern machines use much less power. (the Pentium4 was really bad) Of course there is a difference between a machine that you turn on for an hour once a week and a machine you leave on 24x7. The later use would pay for a new computer in just a few years just from savings on the electric bill (assuming same workload, if you then load the new computer with more things to do you can't see that)

The non-trivial environmental damage of building the new computer AND disposing of the old one should not be ignored. There are plenty of us who would rather pay a few extra bucks on our power bill rather than send e-waste to the landfill before it needs to be.

You are instead sending CO2 into the atmosphere. (depending on how your get your power, but for most of us burning things is how we get our power. Renewables are coming online fast though)

Ewaste will create CO2 and physical environmental pollution. Much of it is just dumped on the third world where some parts will be burnt, some melted down, and some subjected to chemical baths for metals extraction. Those chemicals will then be dumped.

Longevity (and certainly not performance over time) is not something I've ever herd associated with an eMachine. I think that machine might be a outlier.

I also point people to the Mac mini line whenever they talk about price. The new M4 at ~$700 is a steal, but they have been affordable since the m1 refresh. Real “bang for your buck” computer IMO

With soldered RAM and storage it seems quite risky to get the lowest spec version of any new Mac, so I don't see much point in discussing the entry-level price point. Do they still start at 8GB? I recall hearing that negatively impacted the SSD's performance significantly and people were recommending 16GB minimum for M1 stuff.

I have an 8GB M1 MacBook Pro and it’s the perfect computer. I always have lots of tabs and Docker open etc. It works great. I want to upgrade at some point but probably don’t need to anytime soon.

8GB is fine (on macos anyways) for what you're doing, but like it or not more and more AI is being (unnecessarily) shoved into applications and it needs memory for the GPU.

Memory (both system and GPU) is usually best thing to future proof a computer at buy time, especially as it's not user-replaceable anymore.

You can get a 512g/24gb for $1104.00 USD. Still seems pretty great to me. If you’re disciplined with your internal/external storage you could also stay at a 256gb SSD and get 32gb of ram.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/30/apple-8gb-16gb-ram-mac/

Base model is 16gb as of the M4 release.

You also don’t have to get the base model. You can stay under $1000 while increasing to 24gb of ram.

I still manage PC that are about 15 years old, working happily for what their users care about.

I still have an old iPhone 8 that I test with that runs well

I have an iPhone 3G from 2008 that is currently playing music as I work.

After 16 years, it still syncs perfectly with Apple Music on the current version of macOS.

Unfortunately, since it can't handle modern encryption, I can't get it to connect to any wifi access point.

> how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade; these devices are built to last, and I applaud long-term support from Apple itself and the Linux community.

Anecdotal but I have a White Macbook from 2010. It's sitting on a shelf not because it doesn't work (minus the battery), but because it's too outdated to be of much use. And there's a small crack in the case.

I have a Macbook Pro from 2016. I still whip it out from time to time when I don't want to use my latest one for whatever reason (say, network troubleshooting). It works fine. Even the battery still holds charge. If those two had USB-C (and charging over that port) I'd probably use them more often. Their keyboards is also pleasant (since they are before the scissor key nonsense).

My company has thousands of Macbooks. It's rare that I see anyone at all with issues. They aren't perfect, but the build quality is far better than most PC laptops and so is the attention to detail. The price premium kinda blows, but the M line made them way better.

I power up my Titanium Powerbook at least once a year or so. 23 years old and works just fine. I last opened it July 4, 2023, and there was a software update waiting for me.

I still have an M1 Air. I love it.

I considered upgrading but it’s hard to care to cause my M1 is just so good for what I need it for.

Using a laptop with 8gb RAM for a decade is an exercise in frustration

Only if you insist on running software that needs more RAM, in which case you shouldn't have bought it.

Apple should not have sold devices with 8GB or less back in 2018. Them doing it in 2024 is a sign that they think their users are idiots.

I just bought the original M1 Air 8GB for my spouse from walmart for $650, to replace an aging intel Air 8GB. The difference is stark. The M1 Air is a pleasure to use, even with the inevitable library's worth of browser tabs.

Plenty of people have no need for more than 8GB. My spouse. My mom. My english-major son. Meanwhile, my M2 is saying I have 72GB in use, with IntelliJ #1 at 6.05GB. I would not be happy with 8GB. Sounds like you wouldnt be either. So don't buy one.

>how many people kept their Macbooks for nearly a decade

Are your laptops not lasting 10 years? (battery swaps are a must though)

The only reason I switched laptops was that I wanted to do AI Art and local LLMs.

I have so many old laptops and desktops that each of my 5 kids have their own. They are even playing half-modern games on them.

I have a personal M1 13" Air, and a work M3 16" Pro, and other than the silly 8GB limitation, I don't notice much of a difference in what I do when using the Air.

There's three buckets of performance in interactive software: so fast it doesn't matter to the user, slow enough the user notices but doesn't lose focus, and slow enough the user has time to lose focus. The lines are obviously different for each person, which is why some people feel that software is "fast enough" well before others do.

The jump from an i9 to an M1 moved a lot of tasks from group 3 into 2, some tasks from group 2 into group 1, and was the biggest perceived single-machine performance leap for me in my professional career. I have an M1 Max or Ultra on my work machine and an M3 Ultra in my personal machine - after two years of the work machine being so visibly faster, I caved and upgraded my personal. The M3 Ultra moves a handful of things from group 2 to group 1 but it's not enough to move anything out of group 3.

I'm always surprised when people speak highly of Apple devices here. While they do have certain advantages, there are some issues that should be dealbreakers for tech literate people. (in my own, possibly biased opinion at least)

In case of Macbooks, it's the fact that they refuse to provide an official GPU driver for Linux and general poor support for things outside the walled garden. The Asahi stuff is cool and all, but come on, is a 3.4 trillion dollar company really going to just stand there and watch some volunteers struggling to provide support for their undocumented hardware without doing anything substantial to help? That sounds straight up insulting to me, especially for such a premium product.

For iphones, it's the fact that you are not allowed to run your own code on YOUR OWN DEVICE without paying the Apple troll toll and passing the honestly ridiculous Apple Store requirements.

And of course, in both cases, they actively sabotage third party repairs of their devices.

> there are some issues that should be dealbreakers for tech literate people. (in my own, possibly biased opinion at least)

I know you admit right after that your opinion is biased, but it's almost ludicrous to assert that all the programmers and engineers using Macs and iPhones by choice must just not be tech literate.

> In case of Macbooks, it's the fact that they refuse to provide an official GPU driver for Linux

MBPs are so much better than any other laptop that, with a few caveats[1], running Linux in a VM on a top-of-the-line MBP is a much nicer experience than using Linux natively on any other laptop. So while it'd be nice if there were more first-party support for Linux, it's certainly not a deal-breaker for "tech-literate" people. (Not to mention the fact that there are "tech-literate" people who use macOS and not Linux, so it wouldn't matter to them at all).

> general poor support for things outside the walled garden

macOS isn't a walled garden, so I don't know what you mean. You can download any software you want from anywhere you want and run it on your laptop, and Apple doesn't do anything to try to prevent this.

> The Asahi stuff is cool and all, but come on, is a 3.4 trillion dollar company really going to just stand there and watch some volunteers struggling to provide support for their undocumented hardware without doing anything substantial to help? That sounds straight up insulting to me, especially for such a premium product.

Now it's unclear whether your point is "I don't understand why people use Macs because there are objective drawbacks" or "I don't think people should use Macs because Apple does stuff that I find annoying". You're blending the two here but they are meaningfully separate points. I've discussed the practical point already above, but as for the stuff you subjectively find annoying: surely the only real answer is that lots of other people just subjectively don't care as much as you.

> For iphones, it's the fact that you are not allowed to run your own code on YOUR OWN DEVICE without paying the Apple troll toll and passing the honestly ridiculous Apple Store requirements.

I don't care about this at all. I've never wanted to run my own code on my own iOS device except when I was working on iOS apps and had an Apple developer account through work. I, like the vast majority of people, use my phone as a browsing/messaging/media consumption device, not as a general-purpose computer.

If Apple tried to prevent me from running my own code on my own MacBook, it would be a deal-breaker, but as I already said above, they don't.

In conclusion I think you've confused "tech-literate person" and "geek who wants to be able to tweak/configure everything". Indeed there is a large overlap between those sets, but they're not quite the same thing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41997107

I agree, "tech-literate" was a poor choice of words on my part. Tech enthusiast or tinkerer would have been much better options to convey my opinion.

I feel like there used to be a higher concentration of those people here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com