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Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

>I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.

Yes, because being non repairable, being non upgradable, having early thermal throttling due to subar cooling, and having a mediocre keyboard is SO much better than anything else that is out there.

I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts. Whats next, you are going to tell me that your Macbook is great for local LLM usage because 10 tok/sec while your laptop gets too hot to use on your lap and makes your fingers hot is all that anyone needs?

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Sure, but I eat all these downsides and more, just for the battery life.

I was a (mostly) happy Asahi Fedora user for a while, but eventually went back to macos (for the battery life). I'm not sure how much better it is, but I actually trust that it will sleep and wake properly when I use its lid.

The prices and ram have been fucked though, long before the latest ram crisis. I have a macbook m1 air, which I bought second hand. I'm looking at maybe upgrading to a second hand m3 or m4 air (with more ram), but honestly the prices are just wrong. Whatever I buy will be too expensive and unable to run decent llm models.

In the very extreme case of not having access to charging for extended periods, I would understand the battery life argument, even though there are laptops you can buy with comparable battery life than are non mac, especially if you run a lightweight linux distro with i3wm that basically means your cpu sits fully idle when not in use (unlike Macs which constantly phone home to Apple)

But with fast charging and basically an outlet most everywhere you would actually use your laptop, that ship has sailed.

> even though there are laptops you can buy with comparable battery life than are non mac, especially if you run a lightweight linux distro with i3wm

I am totally a Linux person, but I have to say: I run Alpine with Sway, and my battery life is nothing compared to a Macbook. It's just another world, it doesn't remotely compare.

I am very much a Linux person, I have been running Linux on my personal computers (and mostly on my work machine) for 20 years. But in the last few years I changed company and had to work on an M-series Macbook, and the battery life is absolutely amazing.

For people who mostly use their browser and a few programs, I understand why they would want to use a Macbook. I mean, I can go for a full weekend without charging it, and I do programming stuff where I compile regularly.

Late intel macs are in fact crimes against thermal design, but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones (except the 14-inch M4 max, that one does throttle.). The keyboard is also no longer e-waste tier. The rest is true, but you may wish to update your talking points.

> but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones

It definitely is. Apple's mistake with the Intel Macs was refusing to throttle the chips before they hit their T junction temp (~95c). This is why a lot of Wintel machines will max out around 70-80c in sustained load while Macs will fly past those temps.

The same behavior is present in both Intel Macs and Apple Silicon chips - you can very nearly boil water on your Macbook if you push the GPU with sustained load like LLM prefill.

The Macs all throttle with heavy workload that raises the temps no matter what you do. The efficiency (and battery life) comes from the hardware being configured to do certain things very efficiently, like video decoding.

Compute is compute, Apple didn't circumvent physics. It just managed to take chunks of that compute that represents the most average use case, and make it more efficient, in the same way that ASIC mine bitcoins more efficiently than GPUS

As for keyboard, it still sucks. Impossible to clean without taking the thing apart, so if you get any dirt under the keys, its gonna be there for quite some time.

Isn't thermal throttling an issue for all laptops, really any computer?

Also the keyboards have improved a lot since the original butterfly design.

I don't get why you're so against Macs. I would invite you to show me a comparable laptop like a Macbook pro, with similar battery life, similar build quality, similar usability and functionality where you don't have to be a sysadmin every 2 days because [insert Linux driver] isn't compatible with [insert hardware].

Like honestly look into it and compare 1 to 1. Your talking points are outdated.

> I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts.

How ironic. There is no “blatant lie” in “their hardwares aren’t comparable to MacBook” if you don’t know what aspects they are comparing, but there are in your comment.

The hardware isn't identical to a Mac, but that's because of copyright.

You can absolutely compare various chips and laptops to a Mac and end up with a fair comparison.

Are you aware that “it’s not comparable to” / “it doesn’t compare to” doesn’t literally mean that it’s strictly impossible to attempt a comparison? It means that the comparison is not favourable.

I'm very aware of that. I own multiple Macs, and even though I like the hardware I can't bring myself to daily drive any of them.

Comparisons are very subjective, you've got to look at the big picture and not the solipsistic one if you're going to call other people blatant liars.

Ah, right, we agree then. That’s the point I was making.

Lets not play the dumb games please. Its obvious that the poster mean that Apple hardware is better than the rest, which is simply not true.

It absolutely can be true depending on what you value. Let’s indeed not play dumb.

I will clarify, at the same price, the MacBook is good at: display, instant performance and battery life, trackpad, webcam, sound and microphones, build quality.

My workload: web development, video call, running VM.

I basically could not find any laptop comaprable in those aspect AT THE SAME PRICE.

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