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Comment by LilBytes | Hacker News Reader

That's the thing. Even when you consider the hardware benefits. Let's say they're 10% better (I feel but happy to be corrected, that feels understated).

There isn't a single machine out there that's even moderately close in terms of build quality. Either at the dollar cost for an entry series MacBook Pro or Air with 36GB (38?) memory.

I don't think there's an OEM Linux or Windows laptop with Linux as a first class citizen laptop out there even moderately close for value, performance and build quality.

Shit I'm not sure if there's even one out there if you spent considerably more than on a MacBook. MacBook Pro's are pretty good value now.

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From personal experience, laptops that cost $30000+ (yes, USD) still come nowhere close to even a macbook air in terms of build quality. They have much better specs, but if you run Windows on it, the effects are much less pronounced. I have moved from a new Dell to a macbook with half the cpu and ram and for me t least it "feels" like the macbook is twice as fast and as responsive. I don't know if it is just better architecture or fine tuned software, but that's my experience.

Apple used the whole "economy of scale" effect to invest in specialized tooling/machining that would be too costly to recover the ROI for other OEMs. Keep in mind that consumer laptop makers to the most part don't make a profit (or have a low profit margin - last i checked at least) on laptops and printers. No one else has made the economics of using quality material, top of the line design, and specialized machining/tooling work like Apple.

I think for generic OEMs that may hold , however for manufactures like Huawei with their matebookX line the build quality is pretty much on-par while the components and options being offthe shelf standard means it should be easier to upgrade/support and port Linux to than MacBooks.Also the price is pretty much competititve for the kit that one gets. The blocking isseu would be getting one as the whole US attack on the company means their kit is pretty much limited edition within China at the moment currently.Maybe in a year or two they should be available at previous volumes.

I had a Huawei Magicbook for years that finally died last year. It was as close to Apple quality as I'd ever seen in hardware (except for the damn touchpad again - although the Huawei one was head and shoulders above any other non-Apple one).

For hardware quality, Huawei is solidly in second place, with the rest trailing pretty far behind.

My 2000 euro Thinkpad has better specs, I run Windows 11 on it, get to do CUDA and Vulkan natively, and there is DirectX 12 Ultimate as well.

Macs are great as an OS with UNIX infrastructure, aa graphical laptops relevant for workloads besides Photoshop and Sketch, not so much.

And then there’s battery life and sleep drain. Only a handful of competitors come close, and those have caveats like significantly reduced peak performance and the usual papercuts so common in the x86 laptop world.

It’s such a problem that if I were to switch away from Apple, I’d try to find a way to go desktop-exclusive and not use a laptop at all, because everything else on the market is so compromise-ridden as to not be worth the trouble. And I say this as the owner of an X series ThinkPad, which are among the better options in that world.

It’s as if most laptop manufacturers can’t be arsed to take their products seriously. So frustrating.

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