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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

#231

Post by chaostheory »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #229
chaostheory wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they made with the same quality of materials as older, more reliable versions? I would guess no. It's also a poor comparison because both are low tech products.

You many be surprised, but ball pens or even pencils are not really low-tech products. Their production needs precision equipment and cutting-edge supply chain. You can´t make a pencil in your basement. side note: "caran d'ache" actually means pencil in Russian which in turn borrowed the name from Turkic, where cara(n) means black and ache is stone. The company is Swiss, but it was set up by a Russian cartoonist that…

Sure, pen and pencil factories may need complicated factory equipment to manufacture, but they are still extremely low tech products compared to computer chips and other silicon related components which are still evolving relatively fast compared to pen and pencil products. The related manufacturing process for chips is also a lot more complex and advanced compared to the manufacturing process for pens and pencils. It's still a poor comparison.

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

#233

Post by nojs »

clint wrote: post #126
28304283409234 wrote: post #42

I'm on my 3rd(!) company supplied macbook in almost 2 years. Macbook Pro, 16'', 32GB. First Macbook: screen broke in the middle. Second Macbook: screen broke and MacOS is complaining that there's something wrong with the SSD. Third macbook I just received and can't tell what will break. But break it will. I only move them around the house, never on the road. When I move them, I place them in a Thule Gauntlet. I reall…

As an equally useless anecdote, I've probably owned ~10 mac laptops in my life and I've never had an issue. I literally have never used a laptop sleeve or anything I just throw it in a bag and go. Literally one of the most indestructible things I've ever owned.

How come you have owned 10, do you replace them regularly when they aren’t broken?

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

#235

Post by ProAm »

alphabettsy wrote: post #94
ProAm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF Apple sold very expensive laptops with shoddy faulty keyboards for YEARS. People idolize and idealize Apple but tend to ignore the faults and failures. I truly believe Apple does not respect their customers. They have some good product and some bad ones too.

I think the keyboard issue was overblown given what we saw at work with those machines. That said, the one person on my team with a failed keyboard was able to get it fixed very easily. One thing that makes me tend to prefer Apple is the stores and support. I recall support for HP and VAIO computers being extremely painful. PC manufacturers have so many models they don’t even have parts available for a computer that…

I think your experience was vastly different to the rest of the worlds [1][2][3]

[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-macbook-keyboard-fiasco-is-su...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/4/21246223/macbook-keyboard-...

[3] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/03/27/strn-kyboard

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/macbook-butterfly-keyboard-c...

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

#236

Post by cercatrova »

jedberg wrote: post #105
xnx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or materials that look grimy/grubby from use and wear (e.g. Thinkpad touchpads). My go-to has been to run Windows (best OS) on Mac laptops (best hardware), but with M1, it looks like this will no longer be an option. Hoping for some magic cross-architecture emulation.

> Windows (best OS) I'll admit, I haven't touched a Windows machine in over a decade, and it hasn't been my daily driver since 2002. The last version I used on a semi-regular basis was Win2K3 at work. I'm willing to give it another shot though. Why do you think it's the best now?

I have both Windows and macOS, macOS just has too many idiosyncracies and babies you into not allowing you to run whatever apps you want. Frequently I'll get stuff like, this app was not updated by the creator so you can't run it. At least with Windows I can turn off such annoyances.

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

#237

Post by nojs »

I think they are, and have been for many years, in a completely different league to all other laptops.

- Much better battery life (both when you buy it, and how slowly it degrades)

- Windows is just a mess. MacOS is way nicer, and has the advantage for developers of being Unix based. And compared to linux, things generally just work which is a major boost to overall productivity.

- Build quality is unmatched and always has been. Materials are nicer, things fit together properly, they’re light, etc

- Touchpad is amazing

- Performance is great. It feels like the parts work together rather than individually, and the machine is optimised for real tasks rather than isolated benchmarks.

There are many good reasons to use a freer linux laptop but productivity is not one of them, in my experience.

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

#238

Post by heavyset_go »

smeej wrote: post #199
heavyset_go wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What distro and kernel version are you using?

Ubuntu 21.04 (21.10 was reportedly full of even more bugs, so I'm anxiously awaiting 22.04 this week), 5.11 kernel.

Ubuntu is a bad choice for newer and esoteric hardware, a rolling release distro will have up-to-date kernels and userlands in comparison.

As an example, Ubuntu had issues with my newer Zen hardware despite the hardware being on the market for quite some time. Switching to the newest kernel fixed my issues with stand-by and sleep, along with weird issues like random freezing.

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

#239

Post by uoaei »

stonogo wrote: post #189
uoaei wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Latitude 7370 is hard-capped at 8GB RAM. Because they soldered it directly to the motherboard. Real "what the fuck" moment, and I am reminded every time of this constraint because opening a Slack call freezes my computer for about a minute if I commit the heinous crime of leaving my IDE open.

Soldered RAM is part of Microsoft's specification for Connected/Modern Standby, supposedly because it prevents some classes of cold reboot attack on disk encryption. The official line from the people who work on the standards (both at Intel and Microsoft) is "buy a laptop with the amount of RAM you need." I hate it too, but it's not like they're pointlessly screwing their customers.

> it's not like they're pointlessly screwing their customers

Rationalizing a reason into existence does not mean they have made a point, in my book.

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

#240

Post by neoromantique »

pathartl wrote: post #158
alphabettsy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not garbage. Just replace the motherboard.

"Just replace the motherboard" and lose all of your data on it. Yes, backups are important, but there's a loss of time when you have to restore from backup or provision a new machine/motherboard with your environment. Not to mention that "just replace the motherboard" can often mean costing half, if not more, the original price of the machine. What happens if my SSD wears out? I just have to replace the entire logic…

I get what you're saying, but you really should consider any portable hw(laptops/phones) as disposable. Or better yet -- assume that malicious actor cat get access to your device and configure it accordingly.
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