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Comment by tyleo | Hacker News Reader

It’s surprising to me MacBooks have such low market share. I got my first Mac after using Windows all my life and I’m stunned. The laptop: 1. Lasts all day on battery 2. Doesn’t get hot 3. Compiles code twice as fast as my new Windows desktop

I really don’t like macOS but I’ve shifted to recommending Mac to all my friends and family given the battery, portability and, and speed.

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I won't buy or recommend one just on principle. I've spent way too much of my life advocating for open firmware and user-customizable systems to throw it all in the trash for a few hours of battery. I absolutely tell everyone they're the best, and why, but my daily driver has been a Linux box of some form (OK fine I have a windows rig for gaming too) for decades, and that's not changing.

Also, again, most folks just don't care. And of the remainder:

> Compiles code twice as fast as my new Windows desktop

That's because MS's filesystem layer has been garbage since NT was launched decades ago and they've never managed to catch up. Also if you're not apples/applesing and are measuring native C/C++ builds: VS is an OK optimizer but lags clang badly in build speed. The actual CPU is faster, but not by nearly 2x.

>> Compiles code twice as fast as my new Windows desktop

>That's because MS's filesystem layer has been garbage since NT was launched decades ago [...]

I confess that this kind of excuse drives me batty. End users don't buy CPUs and buy filesystems. They buy entire systems. "Well, it's not really that much faster, it's just that part of the system is junk. The rest is comparable!" That may be, but the end result for the person you're talking to is that their Windows PC compiles code at half the speed of their Mac. It's not like they bought it and selected the glacial filesystem, or even had a choice in the matter.

That's right up there with "my Intel integrated graphics gets lower FPS than my Nvidia card." "But the CPU is faster!" Possibly true, but still totally irrelevant if the rest of the system can't keep up.

> End users don't buy CPUs and buy filesystems. They buy entire systems. [...] Possibly true, but still totally irrelevant if the rest of the system can't keep up.

At least historically for hardware components of PCs, this was not irrelevant, but the state of things:

You basically bought some PC as a starting basis. Because of the high speed of improvements, everybody knew that you would soon replace parts as you deemed feasible. If some component was not suitable anymore, you swapped it (upgrade the PC). You bought a new PC if things got insanely outdated, and updating was not worth the money anymore. With this new PC, the cycle of updating components started back from the beginning.

But that still doesn't save away, "oh, it's only slow because the filesystem is so slow". Assuming that's true, that's a very integral part of the system that can't readily be swapped out by most people. You can't say "the system is actually really fast, it's just the OS that's slow", because the end result is just plain "the system is slow."

> You can't say "the system is actually really fast, it's just the OS that's slow", because the end result is just plain "the system is slow."

If performance is so critical, people do find ways around this. Just to give an arbitrary example since you mention file systems:

Oracle implemented their own filesystem (ASM Cluster File System (ACFS)):

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oracle_Cloud_File...

"ACFS provides direct I/O for Oracle database I/O workloads. ACFS implements indirect I/O however for general purpose files that typically perform small I/O for better response time."

> I confess that this kind of excuse drives me batty.

The use case was "compiling code". My assumption was that anyone buying hardware for that application would understand stuff like filesystem performance, system tuning, also stuff like "how to use a ramdisk" or "how to install Linux".

Yes, if you want to flame about the whole system experience: Apple's is the best, period. But not because they're twice as fast, that's ridiculous.

It definitely depends on what circles you run in. When someone I know or is a degree of separation away from me pulls out a PC, it is always a little bit of a surprise.

Regarding market share and your friends and family recommendations, you’re thinking first world. Rest of the world wants and can only afford sub-$500 laptops.

I’ve found that the $1000 Mac laptop is worth about $500 after 3 years and the $500 laptop is worth $50. The price difference over time really isn’t that big and the Mac is going to have a better trackpad and display and longer battery life.

Yeah but in the longer term the price trends to $0 either way, and Windows will get software support for longer.

My mom is happily using a Lenovo from 2013 and looking to upgrade because it doesn't support Windows 11 and Win10 is running out of support. A contemporary Mac would have been the 2012 Mac Mini which would have received its final OS update with 10.15 Catalina in 2019, and would have received its final security update in 2022. (Desktop, so no difference in peripherals, etc.)

Incidentally, I actually purchased both the Lenovo and a 2012 Mac Mini (refurb) so I have the pricing data - the Lenovo was $540 and the Mac Mini was $730 - and then both took aftermarket memory and SSD upgrades.

That just means that the not-Mac is way more accessible. The high resale value makes Macs more expensive overall for everybody.

Also a lot of people prefer windows. It’s got a lot more applications than Mac. It has way more historical enterprise support and management capability as well. If you had a Mac at a big company 20 years ago the IT tooling was trash compared to windows. It’s probably still inferior to this day.

> It’s got a lot more applications than Mac.

The Mac can (legally) run more software than any other computer. Aside from macOS software, there's a bunch of iOS and iPadOS software that you can run, and you can run a Windows, Linux, and Android software via VMs.

Yeah…I don’t think so. Moving the goalposts to include Parallels/VMs and iOS/iPadOS apps that lack a touch screen on on Mac and are frequently blocked from being run on Mac by developers doesn’t count.

Let’s not forget that you’re now talking about buying a $100/year license; in just a few years you could buy a whole Windows computer with a permanent license for that money.

And if you’re going to talk about how great VMs are on Mac we can’t leave out how it’s the worst Docker/podman platform available.

If your $1000 MacBook breaks after a year you need $1000 to repair it.

A 500 laptop is probably more repairable and worst case you pay $500 to get a new one. Not to mention battery replacement etc.

The expected total cost of ownership is very high for a Mac. It’s like owning a Mercedes. Maybe you can afford to buy one, but you cannot afford maintenance.

As a sibling comment said, what maintenance? The only problem I’ve ever had with any Mac was a bad keyboard on my M4 MBP, and that showed itself so quickly that even without AppleCare it would have been covered.

Between work and personal, I’ve had an Intel Air, 2x Intel Pros, M1 Air, 2x M3 Pros, and an M4 Pro. My wife has an M1 Air. My in-laws have an M3 iMac. My mom has… some version of an Apple Silicon laptop.

That is a decent amount of computers stretching over many years. The only maintenance required has been the aforementioned keyboard.

My shift button popped off my M1 MacBook. Apple judged it was my fault. Guess the repair price. Yes almost full laptop price.

If that had happened to any other laptop I would be able either replace just the broken keycap, or just the keyboard.

And no, apple care+ that covers accidents is not cheap either at $150/year.

Oh, come on. Laptops are mobile devices that live in bags and backpacks and they break all the time. I've had more laptop failures than cracked phones, even. You absolutely need an answer for "what happens if my screen gets cracked", just ask any college student. Windows junk is cheaper, it just is.

In pre-college education, the answer is often "use any other junky Chromebook from anywhere in the world", which is cheaper still.

Maybe you need a better backpack? I’ve had zero cracked screens. I’ve also never cracked my phone screen, though, so there’s that.

I did drop my watch last week, and the second hand fell off, though.

The very existence of the Genius Bar falsifies your point, though. The fact that you, personally, are exceedingly careful about your devices isn't an argument against the clear truth that (1) the rest of us yahoos clearly aren't and (2) macs are expensive to repair.

What maintenance? AppleCare also exists if you worry about such things.

larger initial purchases are harder on the lower income earners regardless of the long term value they offer; that's one of the hard parts about being poor, it also makes positive economic decisions harder to accomplish.

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