Ask HN: MacBooks seems to be the only viable option these days

> The only explanation I can think of...

Craftspeople appreciate good tools. Good tools don't make you better at craft, but bad tools can definitely make you worse.

There's also the thing where at the start of a model cycle from Apple, you generally cannot purchase an equipment with all those performance capabilities combined at any price from anyone else. This is true of phones and laptops alike.

In other words, at major new model cycles, the full combination of practical function and durable form is often not available anywhere else at any price.

When your livelihood depends on your machine, you do well to invest in good tools. And "invest" is the right word, because these hold value.

By the end of a model cycle, other vendors may catch up or pass the price perf curve, yet the Apple models are built in a way that holds value for double or quadruple the lifespan of a Windows laptop purchased around the same launch window. This means when you buy fresh and resell two years in, you can spend less for the top of the line functionality than when you stay in the shovel-wear class of machine. (You can even sometimes buy direct refurb and sell a year later for as much as you paid.)

> It will never cease to shock me.

How to say you're not open minded without saying you're not open minded? :-)

I'm probably old by HN standards, and I've been fortunate enough to have and use a personal computer since the mid/late-80s. Throughout that entire time frame I have consistently seen the market be a race to the bottom. While that has been detrimental to my engineer's mind and my artist's soul, I also understand it completely. Without that race to the bottom, computers would never have seen as widespread of adoption as they have. There's a democratization to moving downmarket.

The unfortunate effect, though, is that even many brands that were upmarket at one point have moved downmarket to build their business model around volume as economies of scale and commoditization have taken over the industry. I remember in the mid-90s when IBM stopped supplying mechanical keyboards with PC desktops, where other manufacturers had stopped long ago, thus removing another reason to pay the premium for an IBM. I can tell you as well that the current generation of Thinkpads are a far cry from the T60 and X30 of yesteryear.

As it happens, I too have come to the same conclusion. I've been using Macbooks and old refurbished Thinkpads for personal computing devices for several years now. Luckily if you build your own desktop, you still have many high quality options to choose from in assembling it, but for laptops Macbooks are the name of the game, everything else is just grossly inferior from a craftsmanship, aesthetic, and build quality perspective. Frankly, I think companies stopped moving downmarket and started staying in place while cutting costs as much as possible, and somewhere along they way they just stopped caring. Apple is the only laptop-producing company left that seems to care about it's products, and I hope they stick to it.

My Anecdotal Laptop History:

2006 HP Pavillion - dragged around the world. Felt a bit cheap/plasticy but never had any major issues.

2013 Macbook Pro Retina was a champ, a bit dated now. Saved me from massive back-injury when I fell on some ice and acted as a shield. Put a huge dent in the corner. Speakers rumbled a bit after. Unusable now due to MacOS limit.

2015 Asus Zenbook Pro still quite usable. Windows 10 still happy. Keys felt a bit plastic/motile but still decent to type on.

2022 Dell Latitude 7520 just arrived, extremely light and peppy. Overall has a very utilitarian feel with a backspace key and function row. Nice big trackpad. Hope it lasts a while.

Now the only funny thing is if you add up the cost of all the non Apple laptops it equated to the same cost as all the others combined.

Pavillion ~$800, Zenbook Pro ~$1299, Dell ~$1699, Macbook Pro Retina: ~$3700

Definitely got my eye on a https://frame.work/ soon for personal.

Pay more for the corporate class laptops from HP or Dell i.e Elitebook

Supported longer, better materials, better keyboards.

I'd buy a second hand elitebook over a new acer or whatever any day.

> We buy computers by comparing sets of numbers. Your GHz and Mb are bigger than my GHz and Mb? And the $ are lower?

Anytime "normies" ask me to help them buy a laptop, this is not at all what they ask. The only thing they want to know is "is it fine for my needs?" and the only thing I really need to do is check "min GHz, min Mb", and find the cheapest option in the bucket with a decent support contract and then pick the cheapest option.

And in my circle, the cheapest option is not really anyone's concern (they budget 1k, 2k, and are fairly agnostic within like +-$300); in near any other subject, it'd be preceded by look & feel, but they all look and feel the same (inoffensive, at best), so cost is all you've got.

No "normie" I know has high expectations of computers, both by their own failure but mostly by failure of the machine itself, and its largely because computers do not have high expectations of themselves.