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Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

If that's not appealing, then Linux works great on Apple laptops.

Yep.

Also, as an aside (relevant because hardware quality is an important factor no matter what OS you have installed): After 15 years of wrestling with non-Apple hardware, I bought a MacBook Pro in 2008, and another one in 2011. I tried using a PC laptop from work a couple of months ago, and I was shocked at how terrible the build quality was. A brand new laptop should not squeak when you use the keyboard or trackpad. Nor should it crash randomly once a day.

After six years of pain-free living with the Mac, I have no sympathy for those that complain about PCs but won't switch.

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What is a "PC laptop"? There are numerous companies that make laptops; what sense does it make to write them all off because some of them make junk?

I see you haven't used a ThinkPad.

This is the same bullshit logical fallacy that keeps me firmly opposed to modern Macs. You think, that somehow, a $300 PC will be WORSE than a $1299 MacBook, and that ALL PCs are somehow terrible in build quality.

And then again more bullshit about Windows crashing twice a day. Yeah, maybe, if you have some crappy third-party wireless card with a driver written by some corporate intern in Pascal 18 years ago.

People like you are why my Air is sitting in my closet and why I'm still using a PowerBook G4 in 2013.

Ah ThinkPads. My almost 8 year old ThinkPad still chugging along. Replaced its keyboard (as kid tore off one of the keys and broke it). Had it in a backpack traveling all of the place. Beat up. Fan go too clogged with crap, had to replace that. Put an SSD drive in it. But I still like it.

Like the feel of the keyboard. Case is solid and lightweight as hell. Very impressed. It was my first ThinkPad.

Also like the little joystick mouse thingy (also called a nipple mouse). The matte screen. And the relatively good screen resolution for such an old machine (1400*1050). Even newest laptops 8 years later often have a lower resolution than that.

> People like you are why my Air is sitting in my closet and why I'm still using a PowerBook G4 in 2013.

How does that in any way follow from what you said, and what do you even mean?

Well, really, it doesn't. Sorry for not making my point as clear as it should have been.

Essentially, this whole point that Windows laptops have no good ideas to be gleaned from and that Apple is God is making computers worse. I don't use the Air because it represents everything I hate about Apple: locked-down, stripped-down, un-customizable, unconfigurable, and untenable. Yes, it's damn pretty, but I don't just want pretty. I want pretty, fast, and functional. The PowerBook, and later, the 2006/7/8-era MacBook Pros, represent everything I love about Apple: well-designed, comfortable, functional, easy to use, and post-purchase upgradable.

Apple used to produce machines that were like that, but ever since Ive's been at the omnipresent helm of hardware design, everything I used to love about Apple's machines has gone down the river, so to speak. Yes, the new Mac Pro is exceptionally beautiful on a desk next to a huge 30" 4K monitor, but it doesn't have the functionality necessary to be called a Mac Pro. Studios need the expandability provided by PCI-e. TB still has too much latency to be able to be considered against true internal slot expansion. The Retina MacBook Pro is gorgeous, but it doesn't have an optical drive, so putting your high-quality lossless media on it gets to be a pain. It also doesn't have upgradable memory, or even a user-replaceable battery, two things that would be easily engineered if this "0.02mm thinner is better" mentality would die.

But, hey, you can't please everyone. I bet I'm going to be that guy with a 20-year-old computer who's running nothing but a shell and complaining about how the transparent, glass-screened, ultra-thin tablets of the future don't have user-replaceable hard drives.

and that Apple is God

This is not my view at all. I would buy from any vendor that's willing to drop legacy features such as upgradability in favor of improving the device for people. Apple is the only company that currently does that, so that's why I think their stuff is so hot.

I was wishing for a 15" portable without optical storage for years before Apple delivered it with the current retina MacBook Pro model.

If you can think far enough to see this and formulate it in a sentence, as you have just done, then you don't have to become that guy. When you find yourself at odds with the world, you shouldn't instantly capitulate. But you should be ready to try to find out why people have a different view, and to change if what you find out necessitates it.

Back in the late 90s, I had a similar kind of animosity toward programming for the web. At the time, I thought Javascript was garbage, and traditional desktop apps would rule forever. Because I wasn't willing to actually look at the aspects of reality that were pertinent, the startup I did literally missed the web, which is one of the reasons it failed. (We used the browser as just a way to put up brochures about the software we were writing.) Now I write web apps for a living.

Don't get boxed in by your own stale, unchallenged assumptions about the outside world. Test them.

> I would buy from any vendor that's willing to drop legacy features such as upgradability in favor of improving the device for people

Except that most of these removals don't improve the device for people. If you weren't so blinded by the "Less is always better" dogma, you might have understood my previous point. The changes Apple made to their devices have continually made them harder to use on a daily basis for many people. Go on the forums, there's hundreds of complaints about the extremely small thermal envelope due to the thin chassis. There's even more about the removal of Ethernet, still a very, very viable technology, and yet more about the super-sharp palmrest bevel. There's tons more about the removal of Exposé and Spaces in post-Lion releases, and yet more about the "improved" document handling in OS X. The takeaway is that OEMs are running out of ideas, so more simplistic at the expense of function seems to be the only thing they can think of.

But hey, it's shiny, so it must be better.

You decry the removal of Exposé and Spaces, but not many customers missed those features anyway. The average consumer isn't fleeing the platform; in fact, simplifying things in OS X is an asset to most people. After a three decades behind PCs, my father got his first Mac last year. The last thing he wants to do is fiddle with multiple desktops, and the last thing I want is to get a phone call about it.

You're dismissing the new as merely "shiny," but there's a lot more to it than that. Complaining about the lack of wired ethernet ports is pretty much the same kind of thing as people complaining about the lack of the floppy drive and ADB on the original iMac. A bunch of people complained vociferously about it on the internet, mostly before they even had a chance to actually use one. Despite all that, that same machine turned out to be the first in a long string of products that literally saved the company from bankruptcy.

If what you say about building for the future were actually true (that it doesn't improve the device for people), then you'd see it in the company's financials. It can take a few quarters, but companies in this industry fail when they don't offer what their customers really want. (Just look at RIM.) And in order to do that, they have to design and build these things ahead of time, which means their target is at least 12-24 months in the future for refreshes, and a lot longer than that for new product categories.

That Wayne Gretzky quote - "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" - really describes a major driver of Apple's success over the past fifteen years. Listening to customer requests for ethernet ports (most people use Wi-Fi), optical drives (most people download movies), IrDA ports (most people never used it), etc. is a great way to direct the limited resources of the company into building more and more products that people aren't as willing to buy (i.e., less profitable) by the time the company is ready to sell them.

At this point, I have to ask: Why are we having this conversation? If you think it's such a great idea to keep building computers the way they did in 2008, but just with better speeds and feeds, why don't you try making a business out of it? If not, why? This is not just a rhetorical device - I'm completely serious.

---

As for the importance of what people have to say on forums, I submit the following:

Here's the way people reacted to the first iPod: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=500

"Sounds very revolutionary to me.

hey - heres an idea Apple - rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up? or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?"

"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"

"It's now at the online Apple Store!

$400 for an Mp3 Player!

I'd call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time...and it's not really functional.

Uuhh Steve, can I have a PDA now?"

"All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve's mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off."

http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/

I'm not going to keep digging, but you can find lots more of this same kind of crap thinking at the iPhone launch. I remember talking to a friend (an engineer at a major chipmaker) that said, "I don't understand what all the hype is about this Jesus phone."

And here similar things were said at the iPad launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1080840

Btw, fellas, Expose and Spaces is still around, just under a different name in the preferences called 'Mission Control'.

What does this post even mean? You bought an Air but won't use it, instead using 8+ year old computer, because random people on the internet talk trash about PC laptops? I don't get it.

"People like you are why my Air is sitting in my closet and why I'm still using a PowerBook G4 in 2013."

I'm all for recycled hardware, but what a strange thing to do to leave a newer machine with current vendor supported OS in the cupboard.

Some ThinkPads are nice, but they are pretty rare. No one at my workplace has one. Around here, people have really nice Macs or really crummy PC laptops. Every year, a few people switch, and this process has now reached the point where there are more Macs than PCs.

Aside from upgrades, most people don't ever install new operating systems onto their computers. (Heck, I've stopped doing that myself.) I don't blame people for choosing things they don't have to futz with just to get to a place where they can get things done. That's why they skip right over Lenovo nowadays.

Wait, you have both a MacBook Air and a PowerBook and you're using the PowerBook?

But that aside, I think the ThinkPad is great. I might try that for my next purchase, if the specs are comparable by the time my current laptop becomes obsolete.

People like him are why you are using a slow crappy computer all the while you have a $1200 fast, well built computer in your closet? What?

Why build quality of a laptop is important, for nothing but heat? It is not a car, or a house. It would be nice if it would be durable, but it shouldn't cost you so much extra cash. I have used many plastic body laptops and the only issue I had is that the painting on one of them got scratched easily. The build quality requirement is over-concerned. For mostly immoving use (unlike cell phones) I don't really understand why it matters so much.

Maybe you don't move your laptop around much, but most people do. People use laptops on the couch, in coffee shops, at work, in bed (maybe that's not advisable, but they do it anyway). If it squeaks every time you go somewhere new, and you're used to something that doesn't squeak, you'll notice.

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