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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

For reasons unknown online technology forums have always had some kind of "underdog" that they cheer for. When the iPhone came out it was Nokia (which had a capacitive touch screen that Apple were just copying), with the Macbook it was the Thinkpad (Apple weren't making devices for real engineers because they didn't have the mousenubbin thing), Nvidia's Linux drivers were garbage (AMD is so much better because it's open source). Some kind of tech hipsterism drives this. But a lot of these proponents were just suffering under inferior tech. I know because I made the mistake of trusting them far too often and then switching to the mainstream thing and finding out that it was really freaking good.

The iPhone is pretty awesome, my Nvidia cards work way better under proprietary drivers on Linux than my AMD cards worked under either OSS or proprietary drivers, and the Macbooks are fantastic hardware. I got scammed by these tech hipsters.

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> Macbook

For most of their history Macbooks were good looking, but overheating and throttling devices with some specifically unlucky generations being pure garbage due to design problems like butterfly keyboard and flexgate. Apple also have a long history of not admitting these design flaws.

Macbooks only became a really good option in last 5 years after switch to ARM and overall industry degradation towards not upgradable and not repairable hardware.

Also even though more than decade under Lenovo thinkapds became much more fragile, but they are still much better suited to survive water, dust and physical damage. This doesn't matter if you work in comfy home, cafe, office or co-working, but there are many people who have to use their laptops in moist or dusty environments.

PS: Written from M1 Air that I bought back in 2020.

I have the same machine and it still holds up great. The only (huge) downside is that you can't upgrade neither SSD nor RAM.

Non-upgradable RAM is the downside of "unified" RAM inside the Apple Silicon SiP (upside is good memory bandwidth and eliminating data copies between CPU and GPU.)

Non-upgradable SSD is the downside of Apple using raw flash modules (which macOS manages directly I believe) and soldering them to the board (upside may be more flexible and efficient flash management and possibly thinner with more reliable connections.)

Business upside is Apple getting more money out of us as we are upsold to the next RAM and storage tiers. ;-/

My strategy with Apple laptops to get the max RAM and flash storage you can afford, and a low-profile SD card for offload if necessary (wish Apple supported MicroSD Express like Nintendo does with Switch 2.)

The 2012 "Retina" MacBook Pro design was great.

The 2016 redesign stumbled with the terrible "butterfly" keyboard, the unpopular touchbar (which removed a physical esc key), etc., but it also had 4 thunderbolt ports and could drive an external 5K monitor (same panel as 27" "Retina" iMac), and it was significantly thinner than its successor design, the M1 MacBook Pro. Although the ARM models run very cool, the x86 models still had good thermals, better than ThinkPads I am familiar with.

Nokia devices never had capacitive touchscreens prior to the release of the iPhone; it took them two years to produce a response. In contrast, the LG Prada (the first phone-esque device to have a capacitive touchscreen) was announced four weeks before the iPhone.

I think there's a fair amount of variability in experiences. I switched to AMD after getting fed up with multiple Nvidia cards having odd issues (though I'd use Nvidia if I were doing ML work). Mac hardware as a general rule has always been at least decent (if not good or better), but Mac software has generally been going downhill, so if for whatever reason Mac OSX/MacOS was not appropriate, it's easier to set up what you need on a non-Apple machine (of sufficient quality) than install a different OS on the Mac.

Your first two examples are more proof of the hype around the fruit factory and Jobs' "reality distortion field" than of what you mentioned. Nokia had been producing "smart phones" (Symbian devices with user-installable applications, cameras and other such "smart" features) for years when he first presented the mentioned device, IBM had been producing utilitarian box-like laptops for years before that other device you mentioned was presented. All examples show that fanboyism is rife in the world of technology, not just information technology but any such: tractors, cars, tools, audio equipment, musical instruments, look into any field and you'll quickly find camps around certain technologies and brands. Much of this is centered around the fact that those who have invested resources into acquiring and learning a given implementation wish for their choice to become or remain leading so as to defend their choice. This goes especially for those who invested time and money into "premium" brands and even more so when those brands have created "ecosystems" around their products which make it harder to escape should the choice turn out to have been the "wrong" one.

I choose the underdog because it yeilds a better experience when it works. And when it doesn't work, it's my fault. I vastly prefer a thing to be broken because I didn't use it right over a thing being broken because some meaningless and unremembered executive vice under-assistant needed a number to go up in their corporate employee records.

"Inferior" might vary more than you think. Especially when OSS/repairability/etc. is involved - it becomes a matter of what your personal weights are on values such as performance, UX, durability, "aesthetic choice", etc...

My personal preference is mouse > trackpoint / nub + 3 physical buttons > trackpad, but I know people who swear by an Apple "slab" trackpad even at their desktop computer.

> Some kind of tech hipsterism drives this. But a lot of these proponents were just suffering under inferior tech.

Well put. futuraperdita put it well in his reply, too.

According to said hipsters, the underdog is always superior, and *THEY* who use the "popular" tech are just too corrupt/stupid to realize it. No, the superior technology doesn't always win. But *every single time*?!?

I have been 100% Microsoft-free at home for 30 years. I write this on a MacBook connected via mosh and tmux to several Linux boxes. But I do not believe, and have never believed, that the teeming masses that use Windows are being deprived, are stupid or deluded, or were swindled, bamboozled, conned, misled, fooled, or deceived into choosing such over Linux or MacOS.

> it was Nokia

(Pre-Elop) Nokia fan here. The S40 devices were awesome, sturdy, trusty tools.

Smartphones today are light-years more capable, but the constant churn, treating users like idiots, and the incidental complexity of modern phones leave much to be desired.

There are also proponents of Chinese phones who are trying to convince everyone that ZTE/Xiomi/Honor/younameit phones are in no way inferior to iPhone/Pixel while cost 50-80% less. I honestly tried give them a chance - not even close.

Agreed. I used to own a ZTE Blade. It was an incredibly cheap smartphone and you could CyanogenMod it. Great phone in the performance per $ category. It was honestly the top tier phone in that category in 2010 or whatever. And I suspect these Chinese makes are likewise the top tier in that category. But that's not the category of the iPhone Pro.

I've been using one of those Chinese devices - a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro - for the last 8 years. The combination of good-enough hardware and AOSP-derived Android distributions do make some of these devices capable of lasting for a long time. This does not make them "better" than their more expensive counterparts but it does mean they're a much better value proposition. This is not limited to "Chinese" phones, it is also true for some devices by brands like Motorola. It also does not hold true for all devices produced by those 'Chinese" brands since it stands or falls with the device being supported by AOSP-derived distributions. Many of these devices become obsolete long before their time due to lackluster or missing software support by the vendor.

No one reasonable is comparing budget model that cost 80% less is equivalent to a flagship model. The typical comparison is flagship to flagship where a PRC flagship cost 80% and generally has objectively superior hardware if you can live with the software, and tbf many people can't. Or a PRC midentry/flagship cost as much as an Apple/Pixel midentry/budget where the hardware difference is even more noticable. If you're not locked into the ecosystem, iPhone/Pixels are outright inferior, especially in regions where PRC brands have support.

I had a Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro and picked it over the contemporary Pixel 4. At the time, I was extremely unimpressed with the offerings from Google or Samsung (I've always been on Android so didn't consider the iPhone) and started looking to Chinese OEMs. They had a wide variety of features and build quality. Some were cheap but some, like the one I chose, felt quite premium, had all the latest features (in some cases better than the Pixel), etc. It eventually got replaced by a Pixel 8 Pro but I would try it again.

I don't think I'm saying every Chinese OEM makes phones on par with iPhone or Pixel, but as with any market with multiple options, some are good, some are not so good. There also seems to be this weird anti-China sentiment that appears whenever these phones come up and I think it'd be a more interesting discussion if we focused on the hardware/software instead of country of origin (not saying that that's the case here, it's just been my experience in the past).

Had a few Xiaomis and a few Pixels (9a now). Pixels are better, but more expensive.

Xiaomi bangs/buck was pretty good. Lately they've been upping the price so nowadays they're not clearly the budget option, but a few years ago they were (at least in my part of the world) the best in their price segments.

I believe there is a kernel of truth here, but having used both the mainstream products and their "underdog" alternatives, this is completely counter to my experience.

Nokia is a bit before my time, but I've used both iPhones and Androids and simply cannot suffer iPhones anymore. There are so many features of Android that are impossible to replicate on Apple products. Even something as simple as blocking ads is a fool's errand on iOS. I make extensive use of third-party app stores, patching .apk files, and my device's filesystem. I laugh when iOS introduces a new features that's been included in Android for half a decade.

I've had to suffer many work Macbooks and vastly prefer both the hardware and (Linux) software stack on non-Apple laptops. The history of Apple hardware and OS X (sorry, macOS) is littered with blunders such as the touchbar, keyboard issues, and now Liquid Glass. Is a ThinkPad the holy grail of PCs? Probably not, but they've been a lot more reliable in my experience.

NVIDIA's Linux drivers are especially laughable. After years of wrangling their drivers, struggling to make sleep work, and getting X/Wayland rendering working reliably, at this point I can't bother. I simply disable any discrete NVIDIA laptop GPUs entirely and use the integrated graphics. It just works better and doesn't drain my battery. On a desktop I'm with AMD all the way.

I promise you, I have plenty of experience with both sides and I am most definitely not "suffering under inferior tech", at least not anymore.

Hipster contrarians wannabe "edgy influencers". They're critics who make nothing and do nothing, so everything "sucks".

> For reasons unknown online technology forums have always had some kind of "underdog" that they cheer for.

I've found it's usually a relation in sorts to the underdogs, in some way or another: a vengeance against the status quo, a sort of angsty reactance against it, or a desire to simply do the usual thing and signal yourself as "alternative". That's all the hipsterism is: a kind of counterculture. The author of this post is basically saying in the subtext "You're simply living off the scavenged technology of corporations and these computers aren't built for what you see in them. You are a stupid 20-something with false nostalgia," which I could argue is just a different sort of social signaling.

There is some truth in both sides of the Thinkpad culture argument. Thinkpads have excellent Linux support, ludicrously bad color gamut, questionable build quality generation-to-generation, but are always serviceable if not attractive. If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.

> If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.

You can get parts to customise an AR-15 to the hilt, field-strip and assemble it in minutes, replace any worn-out parts at will and if so desired assemble one from scratch using parts from many vendors. This sounds far more like working with ThinkPads than with those other machines you mentioned. I recently replaced a keyboard in one of the latter, it was a close approximation of one of the punishments Dante describes in the Divine Comedy. On a ThinkPad the same repair takes a few minutes and you get a better keyboard. Nope, this comparison does not make sense.

Pretty sure Apple copied the Palm Pre

The Pre came out two years after the iphone and the allegations were that Palm copied Apple.

Iphone X borrowed almost all its UI from the Pre

Could you clarify/source that?

macs are the hipster variant of lenovo.

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