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Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

> Until you need to repair something or change some hardware

How often does this happen, though? I have a 2013 MBP that still works perfectly. And I'm not even talking about the screen, which is ridiculously better than most new pc laptops. And then, of course, there's the touchpad, which, for some reason, is still unmatched in pc land.

It has 512 GB of SSD and 16 of RAM. This is basically what the new "upgraded" PCs people get at my office. In 2026, 13 years later.

Yeah, I'd use my decade-old mac any day rather than the crappy HPs at work.

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in my day job doing enterprise web apps at a mac shop 16G became unusable for the engineers 3-5 yeas ago. i managed to weasel into them getting me a 64G M1 Pro in 2022 (now they won't buy us any higher than 32G). i'll probably still be using this thing in six years!

to be fair, given the choice between a decade-old macbook and basically any current windows box with same specs, i'd take the macbook every time. but, if i could put linux on it...

What web stuff are you guys working on that 16GB didn’t cut it a few years ago? I’m not questioning your statement, it’s just completely different world from my day-to-day and I’m curious.

In my case, the corporate MDM solution consumed so much resources that a 16GB MacBook was basically unusable for dev work (my personal Mac, also with 16GB in those days, was fine)

I find it hard to believe that it was due to the MDM? The Apple MDM protocol is embedded in MacOS. Were you using some sort of agent software?

(Many) Windows admins have no idea what to do with Macs. It’s very easy for overzealous agent antivirus and firewall software to suck up CPU resources. Particularly when it is written by a company with no idea how to write Mac software, bought and installed by admins that don’t use Macs.

I had one set of “enterprise” software destroy the battery in my work Mac because of how it worked (and crashed). Meanwhile, my personal Mac was completely fine. Apple moving MDM related security software out of the kernel was the best thing they could have done for stability.

Both FireEye and Microsoft Defender make my MBP run super fucking hot and drain the battery from 100% -> 0% in <2 hours of just basic web browsing.

> Were you using some sort of agent software?

Of course, corporate almost always does. I don't recall which vendor, but one of those security + policy + logging frameworks

Likely third-party "security" software.

I can't believe CrowdStrike still exists after they vaporized billions of customer dollars and stranded people for days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...

Probably building web stuff. This is how you end up with software that needs buckets of RAM. Because the dev never felt the pain. The classic “works on my machine”. Every dev I know works on the beefiest machines they can get their hands on.

Building web stuff doesn't require crazy hardware. Working on React and Vue apps, 16GB on a 6th gen Intel processor is fine today. Google Docs or Meet are more likely to cause issues.

Indeed. I have an M1 Pro from work, but I honestly can't stand macOS anymore. The machine itself is great, especially the touchpad. And I love the aluminum body. But I hate that empty window chrome eats up half the screen.

But now I'm typing this on a Lenovo P14 something-or-other, under Linux (I run Arch, by the way), and it's an all-around nicer experience than the Mac. The touchpad is somewhat inferior, but good enough. And the screen is actually better: it has a slightly higher resolution, but, most importantly, it's matte. It's not as bright as the Mac, but it's bright enough that I rarely set it above 20-30%. The machine is overall very snappy and quiet, but this is probably more due to my DE not going crazy with animations.

Thanks for mentioning you use Arch. I would have had to ask otherwise. I’m jk of course

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