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Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

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Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#81

Post by secstate »

tlrobinson wrote: post #80

Tangential rant ahead: I've been pretty disappointed in the latest MacBooks as well (mostly just the keyboard and mediocre performance improvements over previous generations), so as a hedge I thought I should give Linux another try, hoping in the ~5 years since I last attempted it one of the more user-friendly distributions would have figured out how to make installation painless. Nope. It's easy enough to get a basi…

I grew up messing with GNU/Linux, so I know what it means to tweak kernel parameters and not have working wifi. But in the past five years of using Ubuntu full-time I haven't had a single issue with out of the box stuff working on any of a number of Lenovo machines.

Hell, I even have 16.10 running on a Macbook Pro from 2013. Curiously, the baked on RAM chip has a bad patch on it somewhere and macOS chokes when doing a full re-install, yet Ubuntu seems more fault-tolerant about memory and runs mostly fine (there are display corruptions when first booting, but putting it to sleep and waking it up causes them to go away until the next reboot).

Meanwhile I would argue macOS has become much worse given the closed-nature of the software and the price premium to use it. It's hard to complain about having to tweak things when the OS is free/libre.

Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#82

Post by tlrobinson »

secstate wrote: post #81
tlrobinson wrote: post #80

Tangential rant ahead: I've been pretty disappointed in the latest MacBooks as well (mostly just the keyboard and mediocre performance improvements over previous generations), so as a hedge I thought I should give Linux another try, hoping in the ~5 years since I last attempted it one of the more user-friendly distributions would have figured out how to make installation painless. Nope. It's easy enough to get a basi…

I grew up messing with GNU/Linux, so I know what it means to tweak kernel parameters and not have working wifi. But in the past five years of using Ubuntu full-time I haven't had a single issue with out of the box stuff working on any of a number of Lenovo machines. Hell, I even have 16.10 running on a Macbook Pro from 2013. Curiously, the baked on RAM chip has a bad patch on it somewhere and macOS chokes when doing…

> But in the past five years of using Ubuntu full-time I haven't had a single issue with out of the box stuff working on any of a number of Lenovo machines.

Yeah, my only experience is with Apple hardware. Obviously Apple doesn't work with Ubuntu to certify their hardware like Lenovo does (https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/), nor would I expect them to, but MacBooks are one of the most popular laptops so I sort of expected it to just work.

> It's hard to complain about having to tweak things when the OS is free/libre.

I agree, and I'm definitely willing to tweak things here and there, but it's a non-starter for most people. I guess they can still buy Ubuntu certified hardware or whatever, though.

Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#84

Post by williamstein »

tomduncalf wrote: post #7

Posting this from my six month old Macbook Pro 15" on which the spacebar has just started doing double spaces. Going to try and clean it with compressed air, but even if that works, it's unacceptable in my opinion that such a key piece of hardware on such an expensive machine should be so fragile. The fact that at some point I'll have to take it back to Apple and probably be without it for several days due to the com…

My wife's MBP 15" has exactly the same problem. All of my modern Macbook keyboards have stopped working, and I've completely given up on Apple laptops, switching two a Pixelbook with Crouton, which is excellent. I use browserstack for cross platform browser testing.

Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#85

Post by kakwa_ »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #77
ballenf wrote: post #22

Louis Rossmann has examined these issues in detail on his electronics repair YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KuVvb9DTaU (I disagree with the level of his vitriol against Apple, but I appreciate his deep teardowns and clear explanations. He just doesn't seem to understand how valuable the Apple software is vs. Windows to those who need or appreciate osx.)

It's not Apple's great software. Most of Apple's software is shit (as opposed to 3rd parties who write OSX apps). It's the fact that it's mostly-decent hardware running a mostly-compliant POSIX OS that looks enough like GNU to make it usable (and compatible with web servers). If someone, ffs anyone, made a decent, reliable Linux laptop, Apple would lose the dev market in a month.

This is called a Thinkpad.

I'm running Debian on a Thinkpad at work, this work great... except for a few points.

It's always a bit harder to integrate with the rest of the internal infrastructure: * AD integration in your favorite email client to have auto-completion on emails is a bit tedious * Exchange calendars are also annoying * Mounting (and, first, finding) the windows shares can a bit tedious * Password renewal is not integrated that well

It works, but it takes a few hours to figure out and configure.

And sometimes you are just stuck with Windows/OS X because of a specific piece of software (for example in my case, the video conferencing tool we are using). I never used a truly Linux only environment in professional context, I always had a Windows VM also.

Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#86

Post by kahlonel »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #79
kahlonel wrote: post #62

I'm honestly thinking of switching to Thinkpad X1 Carbon now, but I HATE windows. And from what I've heard, Linux doesn't bode well with it. Anybody here Linux running on X1 Carbon?

I am, it's awesome with Fedora 28. There a couple of things to twiddle, mainly regarding sleep, but after that it's flawless. I can detail it a bit more if you like once I'm not on a phone.

Would love to hear it. I'm mainly concerned about the trackpad, wifi performance and power consumption.

Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#87

Post by nathanaldensr »

heavymark wrote: post #50

Keyboard working here without issue. Noticed a couple issues earlier on, but discovered was from a couple crumbs. If there were a major issue affecting nearly everyone there would have been a recall or constantly news cycle about it. So I don't think the answer is for others to not buy a MBP because 'you' and some others are experiencing issues. Instead, I'd recommend you and others affected bring it into get fixed.…

I think you need to reconsider the things you're saying. "A couple crumbs" rendering a key useless is a problem, not something to hand-wave. And yes, the issue is widespread enough that I've read several blog articles, stories, and comments on several websites about how terrible the keyboard is. This isn't some cheap $20 keyboard part that is expected to fail; this is Apple hardware, frequently claimed to be the best in the business.

Why "you" in scare quotes? Do you think people are lying about their problems with the keyboard? People don't want to bring in their workhorse machines (MacBook Pro) for repair because of a couple of crumbs. They don't want to be faced with repairs into the hundreds of dollars. They expect the newer MacBook Pros to be as reliable as the old ones, and this isn't happening.

Why are you so sure the keyboards will "continue to improve" with each generation? They haven't. The current trend is that they're getting worse. Have you tried typing on a hard, flat surface for a lengthy period of time? It hurts. Fingers were not designed to bang against unyielding surfaces for hours on end.

Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#88

Post by tomxor »

This appears to have been aggressively flagged since it's suddenly dropped from the front page to the 6th page in a matter of minutes and has a better point to age ratio than most all above it...

Could anyone explain why? it looks highly suspicious to me. I understand that many are protective over Apple products but putting that asside, this an objective and valid warning to people looking to buy this otherwise popular computer.

Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#89

Post by madeofpalk »

tomxor wrote: post #88

This appears to have been aggressively flagged since it's suddenly dropped from the front page to the 6th page in a matter of minutes and has a better point to age ratio than most all above it... Could anyone explain why? it looks highly suspicious to me. I understand that many are protective over Apple products but putting that asside, this an objective and valid warning to people looking to buy this otherwise popul…

Apple (among others) posts are automatically “downmodded”. They require a much higher score to remain on the front page

Re: Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion

#90

Post by tomxor »

madeofpalk wrote: post #89
tomxor wrote: post #88

This appears to have been aggressively flagged since it's suddenly dropped from the front page to the 6th page in a matter of minutes and has a better point to age ratio than most all above it... Could anyone explain why? it looks highly suspicious to me. I understand that many are protective over Apple products but putting that asside, this an objective and valid warning to people looking to buy this otherwise popul…

Apple (among others) posts are automatically “downmodded”. They require a much higher score to remain on the front page

Are you suggesting that Apple have automated bots attempt to censor hacker news? or is this more of an official thing where any posts regarding Apple are weighted down due to being considered too mainstream? or is it just a sensitive topic to many people?

I can easily imagine any but I don't know which is more likely.

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