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Comment by jblow | Hacker News Reader

I have owned 4 or 5 Optimus laptops and have never gotten a practical benefit from Optimus. At best I leave it switched to the fast GPU permanently. At worst, something goes wrong.

The state of Windows laptops these days is really kind of embarrassing. Nobody knows how to build something of quality. Everything appears to be driven by bullet-point features with a goal of providing USPs, but nobody really cares if the features work or if the overall product is good.

This extends to everything (keyboard and trackpad design, screen, preloaded software, function key mappings, etc).

I buy 2 or 3 laptops a year; traditionally the case has been that most laptops were kind of bad but if you looked hard you could find something good. Now it has gotten to the point that the something good no longer seems to exist at all.

I dread the idea of buying a new laptop now. This can't be the high-level result that these OEMs really want.

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  > I buy 2 or 3 laptops a year; traditionally the case has
  > been that most laptops were kind of bad but if you looked
  > hard you could find something good. Now it has gotten to
  > the point that the something good no longer seems to exist
  > at all.

Have you looked at MacBooks? There is a significant difference between a $300-$500 box of crap and a $1,000 MacBook. It seems like they would address most of your concerns - great trackpad, screen, no crapware (you bring your own Windows if that's your thing), map your own function keys, reasonable quality keyboard (at least a constant layout), and extremely solid build quality.

I am genuinely surprised that no good Windows laptop seems to exist. I've been using Apple for the last 4 years and I hoped that finally one of the Windows OEMs had managed to cobble together something that can get cloes to the Macbook Pro in build quality and interface. Apparently not?

I don't think you've been looking hard enough. Thinkpads are amazing, you also have high end sony vaios, and the Microsoft surface pro 2 is also a really great portable device.

Serious question: Is there anything resembling the Macbook Pro on the PC front with regards to build quality, overall design, lack of clunkiness, weight, size, lack of annoying half-assed internationalized keyboards, trackpad and wake-from-sleep functionality?

I've owned a high-end Thinkpad, and it was a good laptop. But it didn't come close. That's what I'm asking here. I don't care if it costs > $2,000. Quality doesn't come cheap, but it's embarrassing if Apple is the only player that can do this.

Take a look at the Asus UX301LA and Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus with i7 (just came out in October, upgrade of the original model by the same name). They are both well-built and very attractive, all-metal/glass with no moving parts, thin-and-light, big ceramic-coated trackpads, and wake from sleep faster than you can fully open the lid with Win8.1. 3200x1800 or 2560x1440 touchscreens. I don't know about their internationalized keyboards, though.

Nope. But you can run Windows (or Linux, if you're a masochist) on a Macbook Pro.

Bootcamp can even install Windows to your macbook pro from an ISO. Works great.

ThinkPad Carbon X1

> Thinkpads are amazing

You mean were amazing, until they started removing the TrackPoint buttons and messing with the keyboard.

Thinkpads (T series) are great if you want to drop $2,000 on a laptop and wait a month for it to arive from China. Personally I just spent £700 ($1,150) on an Edge series... hasn't arrived yet so I can't determine if it was a foolish buy.

Samsung Series 9. Not cheap though.

No good laptop is cheap. Thinkpads were not cheap (they now have cheap lines, they're crap). Toughbooks are not cheap. Macbooks are not cheap. Design, components and assembly quality come at a price, that's all there's to it.

Indeed, but fat margins are welcome too. It's 2014 and doesn't the MacBook Air ship a TN display?

So many things are broken here. The crapware crumpled to OEM versions of Windows (or the Unity defect if you're using Ubuntu), the lack of trust in the PC hardware, the lack of class when going through the experience of buying a PC, the antivirus-update-adobe-will-restart popup world... 35 years after Bill Gates, the industry is still fighting like phone companies.

There's room for a new brand. A leadership brand.

And double the price of every other PC laptop out there with the same specs. Hell no.

Not everything is about those few "specs" you measure (I'd guess CPU, graphics card and memory). This is like judging a house on size and rent price alone -- and thinking that a $200,000 Malibu house is not really worth it compared to a $100,000 Fargo house.

Do you get ALL of the items below for the half price PC laptop?

• More battery life (up to 50% more than most Windows laptops, and topping the best of them by 10-20%) • Less weight. • A retina screen, with apps that fully support it (unlike the Windows Hi-DPI situation), and that is shown (on test and measurements) to be the best in laptops for brightness, color rendition etc. • OS X (and iWork / iLife apps for free as of Mavericks!). • solid, sturdy alimunium enclosure, machined from a single piece of metal (something that costs), and an industrial design that someone has toiled over, and not a quickly churned out plasticky mess of a case and parts placement. • Cheap SSD options (compared to buying one yourself or Wintel laptop SSD prices, the pre-configured Mac options are cheaper). • a multitouch trackpad (of the same quality as Mac's one)? • NO DVD drive (yes, I'd pay to remove that piece of obsolete crap and have no moving parts on my laptop). • thunderbolt ports, mag safe adapter, illuminated keyboard, etc etc.

If you don't get all of the above, then you don't really get "the same specs". Just the same memory/CPU/GPU. Especially people who buy laptops but don't seem to value portability (weight/size) and battery life are strange to me...

Not for half the price, but if you're willing to spend just as much on a PC as the MacBook, you can definitely get the same specs and quality. None of those aspects you listed are unique to Apple anymore, from the machined aluminum chassis to magnetic power connectors or superior battery tech (the Sony Vaio Pro 13 gets significantly more minutes-per-watt-hour than a new MBA for example). The quality definitely isn't there if you don't spend the money, though. Most PCs on the shelf in stores are junk.

>Not for half the price, but if you're willing to spend just as much on a PC as the MacBook, you can definitely get the same specs and quality.

The Vaio Pro 13 is an exception though.

For most PC laptops, even if you configure them the same price as the Mac laptop, you still don't get a lot of stuff that makes the Mac better. E.g you get some stuff there but in a not-so-good implementation (like most high-end PC touchpads) and others lacking (like battery life).

For raw power though (if that's what counts for you, like if you do scientific calculations and such) you can get a PC with better CPU/GPU for similar money as the Mac would have. Though in most cases, the machines you get for that are no laptopy-enough anymore, coming closer to 3-4 kg and bulky.

But then there's always OS X, and the pain of using Windows. I always had to have Cygwin when I used Windows laptops, as I had to have a UNIX shell available.

At the same prices as the MacBooks, you actually get way better specs and extremely solid build as well. And let's not forget the Macbooks come with drawbacks, such as non-replacable batteries and stuff like that. And I don't like their trackpad either, but that's a matter of taste.

> At the same prices as the MacBooks, you actually get way better specs and extremely solid build as well

You keep saying that without providing any examples. Care to enlighten all of the people who have apparently been buying the wrong laptops?

OK, I'm sure you will nitpick about what I'm going to say, but the following are pretty decent alternatives: ASUS Zenbook UX301, Dell XPS 15, HP Spectre 13t-3000 Ultrabook, Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus, Toshiba Kirabook. They are all not perfect, but credible alternatives. Feel free to discuss.

ASUS Zenbook UX301: $1,999 (Amazon.com) Apple MacBook Pro 13: $1,799 (Apple.com list)

Both with the Intel Core i7 2.8GHz / 3.3GHz TurboBoost, 8GB RAM, 256GB flash storage, etc.

The main difference is that the Mac display is 2560x1600 and the ASUS is 2560x1440 and the ASUS has a touchscreen.

This is a realistic competitor – I can't speak to build quality never having touched one but this is hardly the “way better specs” you've been claiming.

The same holds true for the Dell XPS 15. Comparing the only Dell XPS 15 which uses SSD primary storage[2] to the MacBook Pro 15" leaves us at $2,349 vs. $2,499. Again, I can't speak to build quality but unless you find a touchscreen a killer feature versus Apple's modern trackpad this boils down to how you feel about Windows 8 versus OS X or whether you've had a bad experience with one of the two vendors.

You've proven that your earlier “double the price of every other PC laptop out there with the same specs” claim was simply untrue.

1. Only the top-end model has an SSD as primary storage if you don't want the weight + power + size hit of an extra HDD: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-9530/pd?oc=dncwx1249h&model_... 2. http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=ME293L...

> And double the price of every other PC laptop out there with the same specs. Hell no.

You should pay more attention to the specs: since the switch to Intel, Mac laptops have been very competitive on price when you compare them to something which is actually equivalent hardware – there are tons of laptops which are half the cost but they got there by cutting corners. The usual trick is to match on one feature (CPU, GPU, screen resolution, etc.) and hope you won't notice that e.g. the display is much lower quality, there's a hard-drive instead of an SSD (or either is slower), the CPU is an older generation, etc.

If you do find something which is equivalent, it's as common for the cost to be higher as it is lower depending on when you buy in that particular manufacturer's product lifecycle.

…if you ignore every "spec" other than CPU, RAM, storage and screen size.

jblow seems to find that no OEM laptop is worth using, isn't twice the price kinda worth it for a laptop you can actually use?

If you're a cheap fuck, don't be surprised you can only find cheap shit.

except that there's no real reason for Apple to sell their laptops at that price - they are all made in China with the same cheap parts that everyone else uses, and cheap workers to assemble them. You pay extra for the shiny logo on the top, that's all. I haven't seen anything you could do on a Mac that you couldn't do on the PC, and there are very decent PC laptops out there, way, way cheaper than the Mac alternatives.

> they are all made in China with the same cheap parts that everyone else uses

Yeah… no. Unless you think the parts of a laptop are the CPU and GPU.

> I haven't seen anything you could do on a Mac that you couldn't do on the PC

Thus missing the point entirely.

> and there are very decent PC laptops out there, way, way cheaper than the Mac alternatives.

Care to enlighten everybody in this thread about them? There are definitely decent non-Apple laptops out there, but they're not "way, way cheaper" than the Apple version (usually the opposite).

Those 500 bucks are quickly saved in time when you're not spending 10 hours debugging Windows driver issues

Debugging?!!

Ha!

Try 10 hours doing security updates!

Read the article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Yes it is the result they want.

You can custom order a nice laptop if your willing to spend 800+ and not have to worry about getting a macbook

http://www.powernotebooks.com/ASUS-Custom-Built-Gaming-Lapto...

But at the same time I just looked up optimus and most of the new GPUs are listed as having it

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/optimus/supported...

I would generally avoid Nvidia until this optimus stuff gets enough press until they are forced to retire this or at least make it optional.

Or just wait until someone decides to start a class action lawsuit against them like how HP knowingly sold and entire family of defective Elite desktops

I thought the situation improved a bit with the appearance of ultrabooks; however I haven't had a chance to test one of them thoroughly.

Did they bring higher quality or they are just thinner with slightly better specs/battery?

If you're willing to spend at least $1500, you can find some ultrabooks with decent build quality from Lenovo/Asus/Samsung/Sony. None of them get every detail right; keyboard layout is always a challenge, and I had to remap home/end/pageup/pagedown to make this one usable for programming. Vendor-specific apps for the trackpad and power management suck and they'll be installed on even the most expensive systems.

One problem seems to be that we're such a tiny addressable market at this point that the best PCs never make it into stores. You won't find any Haswell i7's in ultrabooks at Best Buy / Staples / etc; just the lower-end i5 and HD5000 graphics clones each brand made. This one was only available from Amazon, which seems to pick up something like 30 units a month from ASUS. Samsung makes a very nice configuration of their Ativ Book 9 Plus that's both beautiful and powerful, but when I checked my local stores they only stocked cheaper models.

Apple has economies of scale to their advantage, the macbook air is really competitively priced compared to their windows alternative.

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