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We Need a Better PC

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Re: We Need a Better PC

#411

Post by rjsw »

perlgeek wrote: post #323
habosa wrote: post #113

Not disagreeing with the premise, but just want to plug a machine I am very happy with. I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not…

... and god help you if you ever need the Asus customer support for repairing that thing. A truely horrible experience. I can provide details of my "experience" with them, but the Internet is already full of horror stories that cover everything that is to say about that topic. And no, buying a new laptop after a year and a half simply isn't acceptable to me, even if it makes sense in your economic situation.

I have had good service from Asus in the UK.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#412

Post by kba »

I still feel like a MacBook Pro would be a good choice for the author. He starts out by talking about being able to replace parts, but later doesn't make that as a requirement when he asks for:

- Decent build quality

- Decent performance and battery life

- A decent website

- A clean OS without crapware or malware factory installed

If you want a laptop that's somewhat thin, light and with decent battery life, you often do have to sacrifice being able to replace anything. By soldering on the RAM and storage, you get more room for batteries. This also especially becomes evident by his System76 Galago that can last 3 hours.

So in conclusion: Just get a MacBook, it has decent build quality, performance, battery life and website. A good OS? I'm not going to be the judge of that, but installing Ubuntu or Windows on a Mac is luckily very easy.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#413

Post by lmm »

chjohasbrouck wrote: post #285
habosa wrote: post #113

Not disagreeing with the premise, but just want to plug a machine I am very happy with. I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not…

I have both, and I find the things that Macs have that everything else is missing just aren't articulated on a spec sheet. The display on the Macbook Pro Retina is just flawless. The colors, the anti-glare, and the picture quality from all angles, it's just really well done. The brushed aluminum chassis makes it very cool and lightweight, great to travel with and keep on your lap. Excellent battery life. It's just a…

> Macbooks are great, and I wish I could find something as good to install Linux on.

You can install Linux on a Macbook if that's what you want. Despite the marketing a Macbook these days is just an expensive, well-designed PC with particular software.

> Most of the PC options are steel and plastic, so they're hot and heavy. They'll burn your legs, they have comparably poor battery life. The screen looks terrible if your viewing angle isn't perpendicular. The hardware I've had has tended to die faster, too.

Not my experience for machines from the last couple of years, particularly if you look at similar price points.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#414

Post by jensen123 »

touristtam wrote: post #300
jmspring wrote: post #125

Post didn't address - buy apple hardware, run something other than OS X on it. Seems simple. Sure you are locked to apple hardware issues/resolutions, but Apple today is what the Thinkpad was for years (pre-Lenovo), hardware mostly just works. Insert arguments of customization, configurability, etc... Most people don't care. Lenovo doesn't deliver as well as IBM did on the Thinkpad line. What's the alternative beside…

I have used five (5) post IBM Thinkpad and the build quality has been absolutely fine and they mostly just work as you put it. And all of them have been reinstalled with Ubuntu at some point.

I recently bought a third generation Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It had a very annoying fan, which made it unusable for me. It wasn't very loud, but it was a high-frequency sound which made it annoying.

Eventually, I got myself a Lenovo Thinkpad T450 instead. So far this T450 has been very good. The fan almost never comes on. However, it should probably be noted that I got the T450 model with the slowest CPU.

For those of us who are sensitive to noise, I suppose it's a good idea to always choose the slowest CPU, if several options are available. I didn't think about that when buying the X1, and bought one of the faster models.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#415

Post by k_bx »

One very strong point which not that many discuss here is how awful websites of non-Apple manufacturers are. They are a strong indication of how bad things are organized and developed at those companies, if they can't make a nice website answering all your questions in an attractive manner – how can they expect you to buy stuff from them? Always impressed me.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#416

Post by trymas »

icebraining wrote: post #403
jahnu wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree. It's always the small details that aren't obvious at first blush. Here's another one that always gets me about PC laptops: Air vents on the bottoms so I can't safely rest it on anything soft that would block them. On my MBP I only have to worry about the very back.

YMMV; my Thinkpad and my HP DV2 before that both had side vents.

Side vents are better than bottom vents, though macs have vents from top border of the keyboard. That's pretty ingenious design.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#417

Post by ryan-allen »

TLDR: he didn't do much research.

It is true that there is a lot of crap out there for PCs but there are some decent laptops, it's just harder to find them.

Dell XPS' are good. Surface Book is totally equivalent to a Macbook Pro in terms of build quality.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#418

Post by bitL »

perlgeek wrote: post #323
habosa wrote: post #113

Not disagreeing with the premise, but just want to plug a machine I am very happy with. I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not…

... and god help you if you ever need the Asus customer support for repairing that thing. A truely horrible experience. I can provide details of my "experience" with them, but the Internet is already full of horror stories that cover everything that is to say about that topic. And no, buying a new laptop after a year and a half simply isn't acceptable to me, even if it makes sense in your economic situation.

Can confirm - ASUS declined my warranty on a keyboard problem people complained about (basically sending thrash instead of pressed keystrokes); I had to order a new one from Asusparts and replace it myself; all within 3 months of purchase of their most expensive Zenbook. They even attempted to sell me a "repair" of motherboard that would cost almost the same as a brand new Zenbook (yet the mobo works fine since I replaced keyboard). Horrible, horrible experience.

Re: We Need a Better PC

#419

Post by creshal »

k_bx wrote: post #415

One very strong point which not that many discuss here is how awful websites of non-Apple manufacturers are. They are a strong indication of how bad things are organized and developed at those companies, if they can't make a nice website answering all your questions in an attractive manner – how can they expect you to buy stuff from them? Always impressed me.

HP's website should be discussed in UX curricula as best example how to never, ever, under any circumstances including death threats to design a website. From crazy URLs to crazy design to absurd uptime issues to random slowdowns, the inability to use it for anything made me go away from procuring HP products.

Lenovo's is not quite as bad, but the article already highlighted the worst offences. At least I've memorized what to augment my google searches with to find the specific page I need. (I know, I know.)

From the "enterprise" vendors, Dell is the best, because you only need to navigate through a single poorly worded drop-down menu to find somewhere to enter your service tag. Their shop, on the other hand, is absurd (clunky interface and zero configuration options) and seems to solely exist to make you bother a Dell reseller instead (who have better prices, more options, and are, despite email ping-pong, faster).

Re: We Need a Better PC

#420

Post by lmm »

emerongi wrote: post #288
ekianjo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the Asus Zenbook UX305LA, how flexible is it ? Can you open and change the battery by yourself, for example ? You mentioned the battery life is not great, can you share some numbers on Ubuntu ? How much time do you get on a full charge?

I have the UX305LA. I had a clicky trackpad[1], so I opened it up and fixed it. It was too good in other aspects, so I couldn't bother sending it back. Battery is replaceable. Still though, with Asus you never know whether your laptop will be perfect out of the box or not. That's what sucks about PCs in general - if you want a hassle-free laptop, you either have to pay extra or invest a lot of time into research. I h…

One thing Apple does very well is simply not shipping crap products. It's forgivable from Asus since they started out as a budget brand, but the premium PC brands like Sony have really dropped the ball.
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