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

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

#391
post #361
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike using touchpads very much. I go to great lengths to control everything with the keyboard, and fall back to a traditional mouse when I have to (I tried trackballs but I couldn't adapt). Whenever I'm forced to use a touchpad because I'm on the go or I don't have room to bring a mouse with me, I groan. That said, the implementation of the touchpad in a Macbook vs a regular touchpad in even a high end laptop is…

But there's one giant flaw on MacBook touchpads. After hearing everyone drool over them and finally getting to try one ( newly issued corporate laptop), I'm shocked that you can't independently control the scroll direction of the touchpad and mouse scroll button. There's an option in both submenus ( touchpad and mouse), but they change the same setting, resulting in a really unintuitive (for me) setup. Where's Apple'…

You can use third party tools and i believe command line to do this.

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

#392
I disagree. I have used Windows for work, and then moved to a MacBook Pro 2018. Granted, the M1 has better performance but I am someone who uses two external monitors at the very least. Paying as much for a device that supports only one ext3rnal display is ludicrous to me.

I convinced my current CTO to let me use a Linux machine, and I bought a ThinkPad P14S with Ryzen 7 5800H. I will definitely prefer companies which allow me to use a ThinkPad. I'm on Ubuntu running qtile, with custom tooling for myself that I wrote in Rust. I blaze through my work because of how comfortable I've gotten with the experience. If someone offers me a buttload of money to work with a Mac, I will ask them to give me a cloud machine and use mosh to do all my work. But yes, for the same money, the company that gives me a ThinkPad and tells me to install my own OS gets my yes anyday. It's a far better developer experience.

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

#393
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever would give it another try, I highly recommend sway, which is almost completely compatible with i3’s config and basically a wayland clone of that. Wayland makes multiple displays with different DPIs possible and basically a huge, much needed revamp on all the technical debt that accumulated in a multi-decade old graphics stack. Similarly, pipewire is pretty much stable now, which fixes both the sound and b…

Thank you. My day to day work involves sharing screen on calls a lot. While I know it's possible to some extent with pipewire, it is still too hacky and too much effort for a simple(from an end-user standpoint) task. Afaik it still doesn't work with Zoom at all. But I am in general excited about Wayland.

I believe it works well with the browser version now (as it uses the correct APIs) but afaik browser zoom doesn’t have feature parity with the desktop one?

So fair enough for not trying it out just yet, hopefully soon we can just easily say that it works splendidly!

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

#394
post #62

It is extremely funny that people are able to come to conclusions like this from just 2 data points. "Macbooks seem to be the only viable option these days", because I had bad experiences with two non-Macbook computers. To be fair; I don't think that the author came to that conclusion only from those 2 anecdotes. But still, that is the way the argument is presented. And it really looks absurd.

And then you get super long threads of people just sharing their opinion like it supports something. “I like Linux/Mac/Windows better”. “I don’t like my Dell”, “My Mac broke/never had an issue”. Ok what do I do with this info? Nothing, useless talk really, but we all love these threads and they always get super long

I feel like the only rational response is: "all computers have issues". When it comes to attention to detail on their machines (at least from a users perspective of interacting with one), Apple takes the crown and there's basically no one else doing it like they do.

But in terms of actually being a computer? No Apple has a failure rate probably on par with the industry standard. If you don't agree with me then I would implore you to go watch some of Louis Rossmann's content on Youtube.

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

#395

I may be an outlier, but for me, the problem with non-mac machines is that they seem just careless. Steve jobs famously said "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.", and this seems true to me for almost all hardware manufacturers, and to a larger degree still for software. Why does nobody care about creaking plastic? About sticky-feeling texture? About uneven weight distribution? About the sound…

The reason most other companies don't worry about that is two-fold: culture, and costs. Apple has a culture, built top-down, that quality is paramount. While this seems to have started to decay a bit on the software side, mostly due to the size of the systems they are dealing with, and the need to support multiple software and hardware platforms (MacOS, iOS, iPad, Watch, iPhone, etc.), it is still going strong on the hardware side.

But the most demanding issue is cost. PCs are now a commodity. The margins in hardware are sustainable--barely. Therefore, every dollar (yen, yuan, etc.) invested in hardware design beyond the reference implementation provided by Arm, Intel, Nvidia, etc., is less money to the bottom line. And with lots of competition and rapidly iterating developments occurring at the chip and board level, the big gains in performance are driven by the chip manufacturers, not by the hardware platform providers like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.

Apple has managed to side-step that whole issue by providing an integrated platform that they completely control--more so now with the huge success of the Apple Silicon chips. This allows them to build compelling integrated solutions that don't run into the reliability problems posed by huge numbers of 3rd-party driver developers, support for add-in cards and other multi-provider issues. These are all things people complain about--the inability to upgrade or service their Apple hardware--but it provides a much more controlled environment, and allows Apple to spend more time working on all those attention-to-detail-items you mentioned, rather than testing, troubleshooting, and supporting an ever-growing plethora of hardware interopation issues.

Apple hardware costs a bit more (not a huge amount), and has a lot fewer upgrade or customization options, but what you get for that is a more bullet-proof solution overall. And it means Apple engineers and designers have more time to make sure that the devices are light, well balanced, quiet, and durable. It's a trade-off, to be sure, but so far the numbers are shifting in Apple's favor--something that seems shocking if you were around in the '90s when Apple's certain demise was commuted due to a huge investment by it's then arch-rival, Microsoft.

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

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBPs are amazing machines for people who work in technology. The advantages: 1. Unix-based OS 2. Outstanding battery life 3. Sturdy and long-lasting; a well-maintained Macbook will outlive any Windows laptop of equal price 4. No pre-loaded crapware 5. Best trackpad in existence 6. Secure, with patches and updates for years This more than outweighs all the other minuses, such as the overly-obsessive focus on thinness,…

Lmao I have had 2 MBPs die on me and the cost to fix them is like $800 and I can’t do it myself. Fuck them.

You're a statistical outlier. Out of the millions of units they sell, someone is bound to end up with 2 lemons in a row. Sucks for you but it's not the case for millions of satisfied customers.

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

#397
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Macbooks may look pretty, but the software has been becoming increasingly garbage. I consider most of their "free" add-on software best-in-class or at least best-for-my-use case, with only a couple exceptions (including, yes, Xcode). The software is a whole lot of what keeps me on Mac hardware.

I don’t know, I am a recent convert to Mac but OSX is much much more buggy than ios (I guess due to tech dept and backwards comp?) The underlying UNIX often seeps through the layers and it is simply an objectively worse UNIX than linux. Sure, its user space has plenty of cool features but even those are half-assed and buggy. Like, how come switching desktops is not smooth? Sure, I don’t have an M1, but a goddamn last…

> I don’t know, I am a recent convert to Mac but OSX is much much more buggy than ios (I guess due to tech dept and backwards comp?)

Agreed, but iOS is playing on easy mode: it sandboxes everything to a high degree, everything running on it went through some amount of checks to make sure they won't mess up the system, it routinely kills processes so apps must be written to resume properly from a cold start, and it (even today) has relatively limited multitasking. It both doesn't let programs do as much, and encourages or forces developers to employ practices that (I suspect) tend to improve program stability.

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao I have had 2 MBPs die on me and the cost to fix them is like $800 and I can’t do it myself. Fuck them.

You're a statistical outlier. Out of the millions of units they sell, someone is bound to end up with 2 lemons in a row. Sucks for you but it's not the case for millions of satisfied customers.

Those are the ones I purchased. I have owned 5 and all 5 failed. I think Apple sucks as a result.

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because every other computer manufacturer realized they can save on the BOM cost by shoving the whole computer under plastic gingerbread. That weight distribution? It'd cost way too much to redesign the product correctly. Flickering redraws? We don't make the OS, we just sell Microsoft's. Occasionally you do see PC OEMs that try for taste in the Windows ecosystem. Sony did that with their VAIO laptops, with the somew…

All true, but why is the culture and aesthetic of computers inherently trashy? Look at all the fields where superior quality is a completely natural criterion (whether it exists may be another question): Watches, cars, pens, paper notebooks, furniture, fashion, jewellery, architecture, bikes, coffee machines ... What's more - if you look at the visual representations of computers - i.e. marketing material, art, illus…

Because computers are disposable. In a few years it's going to be obsolete or broken so I'll have to buy a new one. I'm not wealthy so it's hard to justify spending extra on style for something that won't last.

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

#400
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but why is the culture and aesthetic of computers inherently trashy? Look at all the fields where superior quality is a completely natural criterion (whether it exists may be another question): Watches, cars, pens, paper notebooks, furniture, fashion, jewellery, architecture, bikes, coffee machines ... What's more - if you look at the visual representations of computers - i.e. marketing material, art, illus…

Because computers are disposable. In a few years it's going to be obsolete or broken so I'll have to buy a new one. I'm not wealthy so it's hard to justify spending extra on style for something that won't last.

This is also true of several of the categories they named. Cars, bikes, kitchen appliances, notebooks: none of those are heirlooms, most won't last more than a few years of regular use. But all of those domains value aesthetics a lot more than computer hardware. Another explanation is necessary.
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