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Comment by vander_elst | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware? Context: I use a MacBook at work and a Lenovo with Linux at home and now I might need to change my personal laptop, but I struggle to find (hardware) reasons why not to buy a MacBook, a MacBook Air is actually cheaper than another laptops with similar specs. There's still the ideology of repairability and openness which still plays a big role for me, but from a hardware perspective I see a clear winner. How is it possible that no other manufacturer can come close to the apple offering? There are big players (Lenovo, Dell, HP etc...) that I would have thought they would have the capabilities for producing similar products, why do they lag so far behind?

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I think one factor is that other companies (rightfully or not) think they have to offer a range of products that uses lots of different hardware.

Looking for a laptop at dell.com, for example, they seem to offer a choice of 7 different CPUs in 5 product lines (Latitude, Inspiron, Dell Pro, Dell Plus, Dell Pro Plus) with at least 3 different graphics cards (Intel Iris Xe, Intel Arc, and HawkPoint - UMA. I also spot a generic “Intel” that may indicate a fourth one)

Their desktops use different hardware, again, with, for example, Intel® UHD Graphics or Nvidia cards.

To me, that suggests they internally somewhat act as multiple smaller companies with smaller budgets to tune products.

Also, if they ask one of their suppliers about a performance issue, chances are the answer is “get out newest product”, not “let’s help you fix that”.

Apple doesn’t have that problem anymore for most of their hardware.

I HATE this. I regularly look at really high end products I'll never buy for the fun of it in a "What's the best X that money can buy?" sort of way. And it took me half an hour to find what's the "best" Lenovo laptop money-no-object . Not even ChatGPT could figure it out easily (as far as I can tell it's the P16s). Apple? Well they sell 2 laptops: the MacBook Air and Pro. Select the Pro, spec it out to the max, done. Even the 13/16-inch choice is part of the spec process, and not a separate product.

PC manufacturers, please, for the love of all that is holy, make FIVE laptops: the thin, the tablet-laptop, the "pro", the gaming (the "pro" with RGB) and the workstation (as in Xeon/Quadro). Keep the name you give each of them year-after-year-after-year. And just offer me a lot of CONFIGURATION options to each of these, not a lot of different products.

Dell seams quite reasonable by comparison with Lenovo.

Huge barrier of entry. It requires a lot of integration and investment. Getting another supplier to move usually involves handing over big bills. Even then it is not guaranteed that the change is (fast) enough. I see it all the time, nobody gets their ass up unless it’s on fire. Still some companies will claim „at least it’s warm now“. „This is fine“-meme is real. Resist change at all costs.

I’ve seen companies losing their by far biggest customer because they refuse to hire real engineers instead of juniors to fix their software. The customer tried YEARS of complaining before.

Another customer: different suppliers use different barcode patterns for deliveries, some including nasty stuff like NULL as separators (but only sometimes, can be space, tab, whatever) or non-unique IDs. They rather spent the effort to fix everything else with workarounds than change the contract and demand proper barcodes/delivery data.

CPUs are the main reason.

They’re about 1-1.5 generations ahead of AMDs mobile offering, and OEMs have sweetheart deals with Intel, which is more like 4-5 generations behind.

So flagship business laptops (which are the only comparable laptops in terms of build quality to Macbooks) are hamstrung, and everything else is built like a matchbox even with AMD cpus.

It's everything else where MacBooks excel too. The build quality is insane, I've never seen a laptop with as little flex as a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The keyboards are now finally great, and the display is amazing as well. Trackpad is best in class too.

Another thing: the displays are glossy, but still not very reflective. The Windows laptops glossy displays are so much more reflective, they are unusable outside. Also something worth mentioning, the MacBook displays get really bright. A high-end OLED display hardly goes above 400 nits. A MacBook Pro can go to 600 nits and outside it goes to 1600 nits. This is the difference between being able to use a laptop outside, and not.

Durability: if you're not doing anything crazy the MacBook will look brand new even after years of usage. Notable exception is the cheap plastic key caps which degrade very quickly, a bummer.

So the MacBooks beat the competition easily from a hardware quality perspective, and we haven't even talked about the elephant in the room yet: CPU performance, battery life and fan noise, obviously Apple is even further ahead in this area.

And then price, as strange as it sounds, both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are cheaper than the competition.

Disclaimer: I don't own a MacBook personally because I think macOS is not great, but that's probably the only reason why I'm not buying a MacBook. I would happily pay same the price of a MacBook Pro for a similar Windows laptop if it existed. It does not. There are always compromises.

Doesn't Intel still win out for single thread?

no, and even if they did, the way they operate is “thermal and power headroom is free performance gains!” - which is a sucky philosophy with laptops, as they get hot and lose battery much quicker than they need to by constantly boosting.

That’s a factor, but I’d still rather have an M1 MacBook Air than any other laptop with a comparable form factor. Surely AMD and Intel can offer something that’s at least able to compete with an M1 in terms of performance per Watt. But Apple’s competitors are just nowhere near offering a comparable product.

>how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware?

Mac are premium hardware, and they earn higher margin. Apple use that to reinvest into their own hardware. And has been doing so for 30+ years.

Better quality PC generally dont sell as well. They have less incentive to do so. The whole PC business is also cut throat, in the old days you could have most of the margin on PC going to Intel. While others are fighting for what is left.

Recent example speakers. PC Laptop have had appalling speakers for years if not decades. It wasn't until Youtuber start pointing out some of these flaws which became competitive advantage for certain brands did PC marker start paying attention and R&D to it.

Is your theory that PC's bad reputation is from people only having experience with cheap ones? If so I'm not sure if I buy it.

At my work, all non-developers are given Microsoft Surfaces. They're not cheap machines by any means, but they have nothing but problems with them. Overheating, battery drain, lag, full-on lockups, requiring regular daily reboots, needing replacement after a year, etc.

I'm guessing they just give everyone PCs because it's what most people are familiar with, but I have to assume they're spending more on those units than a base-spec MacBook Air that would get way better mileage and cause less tickets for IT.

> the ideology of repairability

The best kind of repairability is not having to repair something.

I think that also macs suffer of the repairability disease, keyboards issues are relatively common and to change the keyboard they whole thing needs to be torn apart. Additionally, even the best component are also not immune to gravity and other physics laws, if something falls it will likely get damaged and it needs to be repaired.

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