Ask HN: Is There a MacBook Equivalent? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is There a MacBook Equivalent?

13 pointscsomar37 comments

I am looking to renew my piece (Dell XPS) and I am thinking about an M4 Max maxed out. My budget is $4-5k.

I'd rather buy a non-apple hardware but after only 3 years of use for this Dell: The charger broke and it was hard finding replacement because it is a specific model, the battery barely last for an hour now, the touch screen went crazy just after one year and is useless now, the "carbon fibre" casing ridiculously aged as if it is 10+yo, microphone still not supported although that's a minor issue.

Also I don't have any proof but I think its overall performance degraded although not significantly.

I've used Apple Macbooks before and they had issues but when they worked , they worked great. I'd rather buy a Linux laptop but I couldn't find anything that can match the M4 Max or come close.

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If I were buying a non Mac laptop today it’d likely be a Framework. Their laptops don’t feel as premium, imo, but the fact you can repair nearly every single thing on the laptop yourself makes up for a lot of it. I don’t think they’re very directly comparable to a MacBook, they’re two products with fairly different ideologies behind them. Other than that I’ve been largely unimpressed by non-Apple laptop offerings.

> Their laptops don’t feel as premium, imo

Agreed. I've been using a Framework 13 AMD since they came out (almost two years?) and it's an excellent machine, but some of the hardware just isn't as good. The display, trackpad, and build quality aren't as good.

That said, there's still not a single machine on the market that I'd rather use. I actually own and control my laptop hardware, and while I'd get better battery life on a MacBook, I like that this machine is _actually_ mine.

No, nothing really comes close to the M4 Max right now. Intel and AMD have really dropped the ball in the last few years. I'm considering replacing my Dell with an M5 when they (probably) release in October.

Anecdotal but I have all of my Apple laptops going back to the late 90s all still in working order. The only machines I can think of with a similar build quality was the IBM era ThinkPad range. I’ve never used a Dell laptop that didn’t have something off about it.

The non ibm era thinkpads are great too. Screens are mostly hd on most models and speakers are average but otherwise perfect.

The keyboards are way worse now and they all have a trackpad now instead of just the traditional trackpoint that was common to the ThinkPad.

The trackpad can be turned off and there's still a Trackpoint on every Thinkpad that I've seen. Unfortunately the keyboards have become more Apple-like in the name if thinness, but I found that a good external keyboard like TEX[0] paired with a Thinkpad 2-in-1 (Yoga) gets me the the best of both worlds.

[0]https://tex.com.tw

so true. the keyboard on Lenovo flagships are barely C tier. and the keyboards on things like E series makes me want to type on my phone instead!

I love ThinkPads, but some models have horribly intrusive fans, whereas others are great.

It's necessary to do a bit of research ahead of buying. The new x13 looks really promising.

problem after ibm is they are garbage firmware. a few versions after Lenovo took over now you cannot upgrade parts because the bios/firmware have hardcore ids and will refuse non allow listed devices.

I have an m1 which is now old and not as awesome as I imagine a maxed out m4 would be. Things just work and I love it. Came from old rubbish laptops running windows and some I ran Ubuntu on. I can’t think I’d go back. I don’t do major dev so don’t need a k8s but it’s running some containers, php homebrew ollama so I’m stoked and will get another hopefully maxed out when I replace

Unless your MacBook m1 was speced with low amount of Ram, a m4 won’t offer much real world improvement on a like for like spec.

Nowadays having minimum 32gb and ideally 64gb is more important than the cpu

I did upgrade ram and disk, but only to 16gb. It’s an amazing little machine.

You have not provided enough information for anyone to say.

What screen size do you need?

What will it be used for?

Will you be using it at a desk? with a monitor? or always travelling.

What battery life do you need

Etc

I have a Dell XPS that I bought in 2020 and still use daily, the only issue I've had was the rubber feet/lines needing to be replaced. I still have my previous laptops (only two, because I don't need to buy many when they last forever when you take care of them) and they all work perfectly (just outdated specs, so I use them when I just need to do a presentation or something).

I do notice that most people tend to abuse their laptops; I believe my laptops are outliers because I don't abuse them.

Your laptop performance should not be degrading if you don't allow it to overheat.

In addition to physical treatment, the software that you allow to run on it, makes a difference. (Software maxing out the CPU constantly is going to cause it to overheat and degrade.)

Its not what you asked, but on the off chance you use local LLM’s for anything, getting a macbook with unified memory is a great price/performance ratio without spending tons on graphics cards.

Personally if I was in the market for a new laptop I would be upgrading my 16gb M1 macbook pro, to whatever the latest MBP is with as much RAM as I could afford.

16gb can run 14b models slowly and they are semi usable, good for small tasks.

24gb or 32gb can get you into 27b models that start getting pretty usable.

The tokens per seconds are not great and fans can start to run (I have a M1 Max 64gb and tried 32b on ollama, then went down to 14b for speed)

If I were getting a PC laptop today, I'd get one with an AMD APU which has great performance/battery. Whether you want a discrete GPU or use the integrated graphics is up to you. The integrated graphics is also pretty good. I'd opt for a system using the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 'Strix Halo' APU with integrated 9060S GPU and up to 128GB of quad-channel LPDDR5x memory (soldered so decide once).

I'm really enjoying Thinkpad X1 Yoga as a Linux laptop. I have the Gen 6 that's a few years old by now but it still feels and looks as good as new.

Caveats: 32 GB RAM is enough for me and I don't need a powerful GPU. Also battery life is average, but there's a way to optimize the system for minimum power draw which I never did.

What is important for you?

Web surfing and watching Netflix? They are all pretty much equivalent.

Running Linux? I don’t think the M chips are well supported, and last I looked it appeared the M3 and 4 are not supported at all…though, I did not look at Arch.

Equivalent in price, aesthetics, or brand identity?

For Gaming? Programming? Training LLM’s? Editing Video?

Battery Life?

> “Web surfing and watching Netflix? They are all pretty much equivalent.”

Not really. Many laptops still come with 1080 hd screens and $1 speakers. You would want an upgraded screen, ideally oled along with multiple speaker drivers.

Someone who takes audio and video seriously, probably won’t be using a laptop as the goto experience..

Mostly compiling Rust. It is a quite battery draining process. Also the main reason I want to avoid a mac is to be able to run Linux. Battery life is not a deal breaker but it'll be really nice to take my laptop to places without a bulky charger and not having to worry about usage.

Why not cloud resources to compile?

I am not saying it is what you want, but a few grand saved on a laptop could buy some compute. And a laptop that doesn’t need to compile Rust can be optimized for other ergonomics.

Workstation laptops never have great battery life and other than Thinkpads, laptop Linux tends to be a bit painful.

Have you considered getting a MacBook and running a Linux VM on it? I do this using UTM, which is an excellent macOS front end for Qemu and Apple’s own Virtualization framework.

https://mac.getutm.app/

what’s the performance of the vm? can you use it for medium heavy tasks?

Obviously it depends on the task you’re trying to accomplish, but for my needs, Linux and Windows 11 have very good performance under UTM on my M3 Pro MacBook Pro. It should be even better with a maxed out M4 Max.

Also, depending upon your needs, a lot of software that you would typically run on Linux has a native port to macOS.

https://frame.work

Looks rather competitve: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-...

Their website improved significantly. I remember I interacted with one of them 3 or 4 years ago and they were rather bulky. I wonder how much they have improved since then?

They are nice, but a bit more noisy than MacBooks in terms of cooling.

However, you can tweak some kernel params to keep them mostly silent.

Plus, some of their AMD offerings are really good for running local LLMs.

A Framework that runs Nix and some tiling WM is a very nice experience TBH.

Huawei M series laptops are the best pcs I've ever owned. Best in class security and privacy, amazing processors for the money, and whip apple hardware in every metric. Plus repairable in every way. Never going back to mac.

> Best in class security and privacy

That is a phrase I would expect an ad to say. Can you quantify those things?

Do they have physical switches for the camera, microphone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth? Do they have tamper-evident features?

I'm not sure what about CPU performance but if you want a good windows laptop buy an ASUS. I find it easier to find models in Amazon Europe. They have some lines that aren't flashy with added crap.

Alternatively, how about a base model Macbook as a thin-client (running MacOS) + a powerful Linux desktop/server to remote into?

doing the same here, Mac usb-c to ethernet to pc. works great for gui apps in windows too with vnc.

System76 makes good quality Linux laptops.

The 18" looks interesting, although quite heavy. What is the battery performance after 2-3 years?

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