Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't recommended getting a Framework to anyone who isn't interested specifically in repairability, as it has its quirks and doesn't feel like something which should cost this much. I've broken something in every laptop I've ever owned (+the butterfly keyboard in a company 2019 MBP), so to me it's an important feature.

That being said my previous device - a "gaming" laptop - was essentially e-waste two years after purchase because firmware updates stopped despite there being unresolved issues and the official parts store didn't even have basic items like fans, which I had to get from AliExpress instead. Eventually it was the cheapo Intel SSD which did it in, as it slowed to a crawl from being 80% full for too long.

I think there's a problem with my 1yo FW16's keyboard as during intense gaming the "D" key temporarily just stops responding, but if it ever fails completely I can order a new keyboard and once it arrives replace it literally within a minute.

Other parts take longer, but the general idea is that any sort of malfunction is manageable.

> This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't sitting in the bottom right corner of your eye when you look at the display.

This is about the power LED and it makes me wonder how dark is the author's environment? Is that healthy?

The thing about macbooks is:

- dead silence

- unbelievably good battery life

- tank sturdiness

- great performance

- amazing screen

- amazing speakers

- god-tier trackpad

- repairability in a sense you’ll always find parts (albeit not cheap) and someone to service it

—

It is basically uncontested in a laptop space.

I would only consider windows / linux on a desktop pc

The only downside is that you have to run macOS

It’s ok.

I’m even very content with Windows in desktop using komorebi tiling manager. And macos compared to windows is still far ahead regardless of recent constant shittification.

The thing about Macbooks is people tend to compare them with all of the regular laptops, of which 95% are in entirely another market segment. Even worse, some regular laptops can vary from "cheap shit" to "good machine" under one name, depending on the options selection (looking at you Lenovo). Hats off to Apple, having very narrow selection of models with very limited customization options helps them greatly.

There are models from Dell, Lenovo, and ASUS which have better screens than Macs, better design and build quality (subjectively), on-par performance and just slightly worse battery life. It just takes time and effort to find them.

(also, am I the only one who finds Apple trackpads _uncomfortable_ to touch?)

Name me premium one, I dare you.

Take screens for example. Sure OLED is nice (if it won’t burn in or have terrible PWM on low brightness), but most of them in past years couldn’t afford custom resolution with great DPI: 220-250.

No, those fuckers will install you either full hd or 4k resolution which is only good for movies.

In every other case you’ll need to use fractional scaling that will make your UI, fonts, what have you look like blurry shit.

—

The list goes on for battery life (google how many milliwatts apple consume during sleep), performance (full regardless whether they are plugged-in), etc.

Mind you, I would love to see apple-quality hardware with linux on it.

It just doesn’t exist yet. Geohot lamented this recently: https://youtu.be/M96O0Sn1LXA

> repairability in a sense you’ll always find parts (albeit not cheap) and someone to service it

I'm sorry but that is just false. Various organisations assessing repairability consistently give MacBooks poor scores for having soldered components, glue everywhere and complicated assembly.

Meanwhile I have one screwdriver for my Framework, which came with the laptop and I can use it to replace any part, including those which are soldered on the MacBook.

That’s why I specifically told what I meant: it is not about being able to swap SSD, but that for at least 5-7 years you will be able to repair it (expensively).

Moreover in basically every corner of the earth there will be either authorised service or local one that will help you if soak your laptop in thailand or what have you.

You can't swap the SSD on a macbook?

Only with a heat gun and some lead :-)

You forgot:

- inadequate cooling

- fried NAND chips

- screens spontaneously cracking

- flexgate (not to be confused with bendgate)

And that’s only a subset of the engineering failures with MacBooks. You even bring it up in your post: the only reason they have “dead silence” is because Apple is literally baking your laptop and leaving you to pay the bill.

I’ll give Apple that their custom chips are pretty great for power and efficiency, but their actual product design is bad. I mean, who designs a laptop with the fan pointing the wrong way?[0] Or a power bus alongside a data bus?[1] These are literally basic errors that go into production for a company that is far too big for this to be happening.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCBYAP_Sgg [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cNg_ifibCQ

The things you are pointing out are 6+ years old.

Cooling is the reason intel was ditched: intel promised for years new nodes, and apple designed for new power consumption that never came.

You don’t fuck with apple this way unpunished. That’s why nvidia was ditched circa 2013 to never come back.

—

As for something-gate: engineering is hard, especially on this scale. Still they were (and are) the best option overall.

= to be good doesn’t mean to be perfect; you just need to be better than competition.

And they are crushing it even in low-cost space. I mean m1 air for $800-900 is uncontested even today for what kind of solid machine you get.

They’re not. The MacBook Air can easily thermal throttle under any sustained load because they went with a fanless design. It may work for casual usage, but it also negates at least half of your claims.

Screen cracking was ~4 years ago for M1 laptops, which also included Apple making screen repairs far more difficult, exacerbating the problems they’re currently being sued over.

They did separate NAND from the rest of the board in recent models, but NAND on the board was only a problem because A) bad engineering & B) greed. Thay’s not even getting into MacOS overwriting to NAND and wearing it out.

“Engineering is hard” is not an excuse for a company that’s worth $4 trillion. With flexgate they cheaped out on shorter flex cables. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of flex cables knows that’s a recipe for disaster. And while Flexgate itself is an older case, it’s a clear example of their profits-at-all-costs approach.

For that ~$900 M1 Macbook Air, you’d get:

- an old laptop, nearing its end-of-life, with:

- a fragile, expensive-to-repair screen, plus:

- thermal throttling on any decent load

All for $1,000, which by the way is not “low-cost”. That same $1,000 can buy you far better machines. Genuinely, it doesn’t fit any realistic use case. Casual users? A Chromebook or cheaper Windows laptop suffices. Productivity? It can’t sustain loads, so heavy workloads are out of the picture (and can be handled more effectively by newer hardware). Its only clear benefit is the battery life, but that’s not enough to spend $900 on a 5yo laptop with known issues.

I don’t know what “fragile” things you are talking about.

I have both air m1 and 16 m1 pro.

Neither me nor anyone I know have issues with these laptops.

Of course air is for your average Joe. And even then I transcode videos on air.

M1 macbooks are known to have fragile screens, there are multiple class action lawsuits over it. Just because you, anecdotally, have not had issues does not mean they don’t exist.

And the average Joe is far better off with a newer laptop with the same performance for 1/3rd the price. The M1 Air will be out of updates in 2 years, requiring whoever’s listening to your advice to either suffer with an insecure laptop or to spend another grand or more on a new laptop.

Apple has no unique benefits for the average person, and in fact a Chromebook fulfills the average user’s needs perfectly fine.

You should stop watching youtube channels.

Consider the number of m1 laptops manufactured and then the number of claims.

Regarding, the “fragile screens” — find me one that ended at least with a settlement and not dismissed.

> You should stop watching youtube channels.

Why? Because they say things you don’t like?

> Consider the number of m1 laptops manufactured and then the number of claims.

Consider the fact that most consumers wouldn‘t file a claim even if they were eligible—the FTC finds that only about 5-10% of affected consumers actually participate in class actions. And considering there‘s multiple class actions over different models of the laptops, that signifies a decent chunk of users.

> Regarding, the “fragile screens” — find me one that ended at least with a settlement and not dismissed.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/apple-ordered-to-pa...

This is not class-action. It’s a single case.

> the FTC finds that only about 5-10% of affected consumers actually participate in class actions

So if ballpark is at least 15-20 million macbooks per year, what is your estimate of defected units per year? :-)

“Find me one case”

“No not that case!”

Man quit moving the goal posts and just take the L

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