6 ms·

The reason that there is no non-Apple alternatives to the MacBook Pro is because everyone is too focused on blue sky innovation rather than actually doing the b

by iasay 4y ago

The reason that there is no non-Apple alternatives to the MacBook Pro is because everyone is too focused on blue sky innovation rather than actually doing the best job of stuff that already exists. Quality is the feature that apple sell. I don't think anyone else gets near them.

saiya-jin 4y ago
Selective quality. There were most-expensive-on-the-market-yet-worst-quality fraying cables that my 1$ usb cables from aliexpress could run circles around long after those were discarded (or not, my mother-in-law still carries one around, I guess to remind everyone how crappy engineering looks like). Bending phones (was it 6?). Also some nefarious moves like slowing down older phones. Every manufacturer has these blops. Yet very few (more like none) have such fanatical crowd of followers who uncritically accept everything and keep peddling the same 'apple is quality, above others, better than google on privacy' and similar wishful thinking/lies. They just have better PR department is all I see, the rest is just another HW/SW company who charge premium. Its nothing new, other businesses figured this long ago. You can have a normal decent handbag, or have louis vuitton / hermes one. It will cost you 10x (or 100x) more. Its often hand-made quality. Many women love them. Most guys are looking on this in same way we would look on... mentally underdeveloped. Yet the market exists and its booming. And nobody is arguing Hermes doesn't bring higher quality than regular brand. Coming back to your claims, apple rarely truly innovates these days and technologically its behind most manufacturers (low res cameras producing pleasing but over-processed pics that have colors far from reality, battery charging on level of basic 2016 phones, screen is OK but definitely not top of the market, bluetooth implementation is beyond pathetic for such a manufacturer, literally everybody on the market has it better). They take over others ideas that work and improve them. Which is fine but not the stellar behavior I would expect from 3TN company having 1 centerpiece product.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    You may want to read the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  >There were most-expensive-on-the-market-yet-worst-quality fraying cables that my 1$ usb cables Apple is incredibly inconsistent. The iphone cable quality was complete dogshit: https://i.imgur.com/t7Oajul.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/t7Oajul.jpeg On the other hand, the new macbook pro magsafe cable is probably the best quality cable I've ever owned.
  - trebbble 4y ago
    I never understood WTF people were talking about with the cables. I'd go 5+ years with various Apple cables without a single sign of fraying. Not even careful with them, would just wad them up in bags when moving around, that kind of thing. ... then my kids got older, and my wife move to Apple and started borrowing my cables. They all kill Apple cables in like 6 months flat. It's incredible. [EDIT] As for how they do that, I'm not sure, but they constantly use them stretched too far from the outlet, so there's a ton of tension on the cable, and frequently arrange them such that they're bent a sharp 90+ degrees right next to the connector, often while also under tension. I never do either of those things. I assume those are the things that cause it.
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      This cable can do all of those things easily without breaking: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLYV3AM/A/usb-c-to-magsafe-3-cable-2-m-silver https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLYV3AM/A/usb-c-to-magsaf... It's really good. The old cables were made of weird extremely low quality rubber? I don't think I've seen worse quality of rubber on any other cable.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
Apple's built up an incredible lead right now (in quality and specs), but as the son of a of a macbook from a few years ago, the idea that Apple sells "quality" is mistaken, with the most obvious example being the butterfly keyboard, which would make your device unusable if you happened to say the wrong combination of words at the wrong time. But generally Apple has a history of laptops that have design defects, which Apple does not acknowledge either for years after they stop selling the laptop, and/or are forced to by a lawsuit (which will usually complete years after they stop selling the laptop), at which point most people won't even be aware that Apple has instituted a replacement program and/or discarded their brick for parts on eBay.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  Actual defects aside, a lot of people buy Apple for the quality. Whether those people are right or not, Apple is extremely good at positioning itself as the quality option.
- iasay 4y ago
  Please note that my point is that they sell better quality laptops than the competitors, not the best quality they could be. Although I have precisely zero complaints with my 14" MBP.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- achow 4y ago
  100%. I take this opportunity to make people NOT forget 'Staingate' [1]. My colleague had horrible time getting his daughter's Macbook fixed by Apple, as officially they did not acknowledge that the problem exists for months (maybe close to year+). [1] https://www.makeuseof.com/macbook-staingate-fixes/ https://www.makeuseof.com/macbook-staingate-fixes/
  - jlokier 4y ago
    Ouch. Looking at that link, today I discover my late 2013 MBP had that fault and is in the list of machines that was eligible for repair, but of course the time limit has passed. I have a late 2013 MBP whose screen developed visible loss of coating in 2014, and cleaning the screen even made an annoying always-on bright pixel due to a tiny chip in the surface. I was sad at that at the time and looked into getting a new display, even paying for it, but there was no way to do it. You couldn't even go to an Apple store and pay for this repair. That said, this 2013 MBP has been a lovely and excellent machine in almost every respect, and it's still my daily driver (as a software dev), which is great value and longevity for a laptop. I was skeptical of Apple before I got one, but now it's almost a no-brainer to get another when the time is right.
pookha 4y ago
I took my quality Macbook to a dogbark. My quality macbooks' fancy screen broke because of a thin layer of dust at said dogpark. Opening up my quality macbook was like difussing a bomb. I learned from that experience and won't ever buy another Macbook again for as long as I live. the Macbook replacement has made several trips to a dogpark. I did have a good experience at the mac store though. Dude was honest about the situation and could relate to my pain and rage.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Interesting! In our experience, travel and residence in central African dust the likes of which doesn’t exist in EU or NA didn’t do anything to Macbook Air or Macbook Pro. What kind of dust was the dog park? How did it affect the screen in particular? This tan cloud is dust rolling in: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nPCnELCVMsvn5W0lOHlPxC2YcqeLGd1St9GRGJrDHL5cc-HC0kF_1lGaXpId8ZqriID341t1dVeEjVtI_kbRftKAWDDN=s1000 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nPCnELCVMsvn5W0lOHlPxC2Ycq... Another dust squall: https://www-cdn.eumetsat.int/files/2020-04/img_il_10_07_05_b_lrg.jpg https://www-cdn.eumetsat.int/files/2020-04/img_il_10_07_05_b...
KptMarchewa 4y ago
Which is funny because while current 14' and 16' MBPs are very ahead of competition, previous generation was dogshit in terms of quality, and had a lot of this "blue sky innovation" that decreased usability - like the touch bar.
- sovnade 4y ago
  The M1 and M2 (and the benefits from them, like ridiculous battery life, low heat (enough so that you can run it totally fanless unless you're outside in the direct sun or something), and more importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good. Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now, especially if you have other ios devices.
  - eertami 4y ago
    > Honestly unless you're required to run windows Or Linux, at this stage. Apple silicon support is not good enough yet to be a pleasant experience. Sure, an x86 laptop doesn't compete with power efficiency of the M1/M2 - might be useful if you regularly need to go multiple days without power, but my x86 laptop already gets more than 8 hours battery which is "good enough", and is just as fast for development usage (I have an M1 MBP too, I have tested this side by side). As a bonus I have full control of the hardware and the software that I want to run on it. I almost never reach for the Macbook unless I need to test something OSX specific.
    - sovnade 4y ago
      I made a similar comment down below..there are many good laptops out there and it's insane what we take for granted now. High PPI super-bright screens, 8+ hour battery life, < 1" thick, < 2lbs, 2tb+ nvme ssd, etc. I work in the microsoft stack but I use parallels on a MBP.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    > importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good Because it has dedicated hardware to make photo & video editing good. Which is great, if that's your jam. It's dead silicon if it isn't, though. M1/M2 strike a great balance for performance & battery life, absolutely. But it's very narrow in what it can achieve desktop-comparable speeds on when it comes to heavy workloads, and other laptops are drastically faster at rather large areas of consumer computing like gaming. > Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now Or if you're just a casual / lite user but want something other than 13.3", which is the only size Apple offers an economical model. Or if you really like having a touch screen, which Apple refuses to do for some reason. That second point is basically the entire reason my SO is hunting for alternatives to the Air.
rsynnott 4y ago
> because everyone is too focused on blue sky innovation rather than actually doing the best job of stuff that already exists. Including, for a while, Apple. How quickly people have forgotten the touchbar!
- iasay 4y ago
  We haven’t forgotten or forgiven. We will eternally sleep with one eye open.
sovnade 4y ago
There's plenty of good laptops out there not made by apple. Dell XPS 13 is excellent, asus has several zenbook models that are on par, etc. They don't get much media coverage because the standards we expect from laptops are so high now that we take it for granted (0.75" thick or less, all day battery, insanely high pixel density (enough to require scaling), fast enough cpu/memory for any day to day task, great screen brightness, 512gb-2tb+ nvme ssds, generic charger ports (usb-c), etc. You can get all of that for under $1k from several makers now.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Shout out to the XPS line. I have one as my development machine and it's wonderful.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I don't know what other manufacturers are focusing on, but it sure looks unimpressive. I just received my shiny new macbook pro 14 inch. I spent the last few months using a Linux laptop. Overall a good experience and it works. But I'm glad to be back on a mac. Quality and performance are where Apple just shines. Most PC manufacturer's seem to mainly compete on how bad of a screen & touchpad combination they can find. There are some truly awful things on the market of manufacturers that just stopped even trying a long time ago. Touchpads are universally awful in the laptop market, with the exception of Apple. I found this out by connecting my magic touchpad 2 to my Linux laptop. Works great! As good as with a mac. The software support in Linux is fine. Precise, responsive, smooth, just like it should be. It's the hardware that is the problem. Even brands that are supposedly premium keep opting for these cheep plastic touchpads with poor sensitivity, awkward button mechanics, etc. Apple nailed this decades ago. On this front they have no competition. That, the screen, and the stellar performance of the M1 is making the difference right now. I connected an external drive with x-plane on it a few days ago to see how far I could push it. Turns out, I can max out all the sliders and it runs at about 30-40fps at the normal screen resolution. That's with lots of add ons, some of which are really demanding and using the rosetta emulator. Very impressive. For work, this thing runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2-3x.

by iasay 4y ago

saiya-jin 4y ago

Selective quality. There were most-expensive-on-the-market-yet-worst-quality fraying cables that my 1$ usb cables from aliexpress could run circles around long after those were discarded (or not, my mother-in-law still carries one around, I guess to remind everyone how crappy engineering looks like). Bending phones (was it 6?). Also some nefarious moves like slowing down older phones. Every manufacturer has these blops. Yet very few (more like none) have such fanatical crowd of followers who uncritically accept everything and keep peddling the same 'apple is quality, above others, better than google on privacy' and similar wishful thinking/lies. They just have better PR department is all I see, the rest is just another HW/SW company who charge premium. Its nothing new, other businesses figured this long ago. You can have a normal decent handbag, or have louis vuitton / hermes one. It will cost you 10x (or 100x) more. Its often hand-made quality. Many women love them. Most guys are looking on this in same way we would look on... mentally underdeveloped. Yet the market exists and its booming. And nobody is arguing Hermes doesn't bring higher quality than regular brand. Coming back to your claims, apple rarely truly innovates these days and technologically its behind most manufacturers (low res cameras producing pleasing but over-processed pics that have colors far from reality, battery charging on level of basic 2016 phones, screen is OK but definitely not top of the market, bluetooth implementation is beyond pathetic for such a manufacturer, literally everybody on the market has it better). They take over others ideas that work and improve them. Which is fine but not the stellar behavior I would expect from 3TN company having 1 centerpiece product.

Ensorceled 4y ago
- jacquesm 4y ago
  You may want to read the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .
KptMarchewa 4y ago
>There were most-expensive-on-the-market-yet-worst-quality fraying cables that my 1$ usb cables Apple is incredibly inconsistent. The iphone cable quality was complete dogshit: https://i.imgur.com/t7Oajul.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/t7Oajul.jpeg On the other hand, the new macbook pro magsafe cable is probably the best quality cable I've ever owned.
- trebbble 4y ago
  I never understood WTF people were talking about with the cables. I'd go 5+ years with various Apple cables without a single sign of fraying. Not even careful with them, would just wad them up in bags when moving around, that kind of thing. ... then my kids got older, and my wife move to Apple and started borrowing my cables. They all kill Apple cables in like 6 months flat. It's incredible. [EDIT] As for how they do that, I'm not sure, but they constantly use them stretched too far from the outlet, so there's a ton of tension on the cable, and frequently arrange them such that they're bent a sharp 90+ degrees right next to the connector, often while also under tension. I never do either of those things. I assume those are the things that cause it.
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    This cable can do all of those things easily without breaking: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLYV3AM/A/usb-c-to-magsafe-3-cable-2-m-silver https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLYV3AM/A/usb-c-to-magsaf... It's really good. The old cables were made of weird extremely low quality rubber? I don't think I've seen worse quality of rubber on any other cable.

asdajksah2123 4y ago

Apple's built up an incredible lead right now (in quality and specs), but as the son of a of a macbook from a few years ago, the idea that Apple sells "quality" is mistaken, with the most obvious example being the butterfly keyboard, which would make your device unusable if you happened to say the wrong combination of words at the wrong time. But generally Apple has a history of laptops that have design defects, which Apple does not acknowledge either for years after they stop selling the laptop, and/or are forced to by a lawsuit (which will usually complete years after they stop selling the laptop), at which point most people won't even be aware that Apple has instituted a replacement program and/or discarded their brick for parts on eBay.

joshspankit 4y ago
Actual defects aside, a lot of people buy Apple for the quality. Whether those people are right or not, Apple is extremely good at positioning itself as the quality option.
iasay 4y ago
Please note that my point is that they sell better quality laptops than the competitors, not the best quality they could be. Although I have precisely zero complaints with my 14" MBP.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
achow 4y ago
100%. I take this opportunity to make people NOT forget 'Staingate' [1]. My colleague had horrible time getting his daughter's Macbook fixed by Apple, as officially they did not acknowledge that the problem exists for months (maybe close to year+). [1] https://www.makeuseof.com/macbook-staingate-fixes/ https://www.makeuseof.com/macbook-staingate-fixes/
- jlokier 4y ago
  Ouch. Looking at that link, today I discover my late 2013 MBP had that fault and is in the list of machines that was eligible for repair, but of course the time limit has passed. I have a late 2013 MBP whose screen developed visible loss of coating in 2014, and cleaning the screen even made an annoying always-on bright pixel due to a tiny chip in the surface. I was sad at that at the time and looked into getting a new display, even paying for it, but there was no way to do it. You couldn't even go to an Apple store and pay for this repair. That said, this 2013 MBP has been a lovely and excellent machine in almost every respect, and it's still my daily driver (as a software dev), which is great value and longevity for a laptop. I was skeptical of Apple before I got one, but now it's almost a no-brainer to get another when the time is right.

pookha 4y ago

I took my quality Macbook to a dogbark. My quality macbooks' fancy screen broke because of a thin layer of dust at said dogpark. Opening up my quality macbook was like difussing a bomb. I learned from that experience and won't ever buy another Macbook again for as long as I live. the Macbook replacement has made several trips to a dogpark. I did have a good experience at the mac store though. Dude was honest about the situation and could relate to my pain and rage.

Terretta 4y ago
Interesting! In our experience, travel and residence in central African dust the likes of which doesn’t exist in EU or NA didn’t do anything to Macbook Air or Macbook Pro. What kind of dust was the dog park? How did it affect the screen in particular? This tan cloud is dust rolling in: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nPCnELCVMsvn5W0lOHlPxC2YcqeLGd1St9GRGJrDHL5cc-HC0kF_1lGaXpId8ZqriID341t1dVeEjVtI_kbRftKAWDDN=s1000 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/nPCnELCVMsvn5W0lOHlPxC2Ycq... Another dust squall: https://www-cdn.eumetsat.int/files/2020-04/img_il_10_07_05_b_lrg.jpg https://www-cdn.eumetsat.int/files/2020-04/img_il_10_07_05_b...

KptMarchewa 4y ago

Which is funny because while current 14' and 16' MBPs are very ahead of competition, previous generation was dogshit in terms of quality, and had a lot of this "blue sky innovation" that decreased usability - like the touch bar.

sovnade 4y ago
The M1 and M2 (and the benefits from them, like ridiculous battery life, low heat (enough so that you can run it totally fanless unless you're outside in the direct sun or something), and more importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good. Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now, especially if you have other ios devices.
- eertami 4y ago
  > Honestly unless you're required to run windows Or Linux, at this stage. Apple silicon support is not good enough yet to be a pleasant experience. Sure, an x86 laptop doesn't compete with power efficiency of the M1/M2 - might be useful if you regularly need to go multiple days without power, but my x86 laptop already gets more than 8 hours battery which is "good enough", and is just as fast for development usage (I have an M1 MBP too, I have tested this side by side). As a bonus I have full control of the hardware and the software that I want to run on it. I almost never reach for the Macbook unless I need to test something OSX specific.
  - sovnade 4y ago
    I made a similar comment down below..there are many good laptops out there and it's insane what we take for granted now. High PPI super-bright screens, 8+ hour battery life, < 1" thick, < 2lbs, 2tb+ nvme ssd, etc. I work in the microsoft stack but I use parallels on a MBP.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  > importantly desktop-comparable speed for even heavy tasks like photo/video editing are really, really good Because it has dedicated hardware to make photo & video editing good. Which is great, if that's your jam. It's dead silicon if it isn't, though. M1/M2 strike a great balance for performance & battery life, absolutely. But it's very narrow in what it can achieve desktop-comparable speeds on when it comes to heavy workloads, and other laptops are drastically faster at rather large areas of consumer computing like gaming. > Honestly unless you're required to run windows, it makes a macbook kind of a no brainer right now Or if you're just a casual / lite user but want something other than 13.3", which is the only size Apple offers an economical model. Or if you really like having a touch screen, which Apple refuses to do for some reason. That second point is basically the entire reason my SO is hunting for alternatives to the Air.

rsynnott 4y ago

> because everyone is too focused on blue sky innovation rather than actually doing the best job of stuff that already exists. Including, for a while, Apple. How quickly people have forgotten the touchbar!

iasay 4y ago
We haven’t forgotten or forgiven. We will eternally sleep with one eye open.

sovnade 4y ago

There's plenty of good laptops out there not made by apple. Dell XPS 13 is excellent, asus has several zenbook models that are on par, etc. They don't get much media coverage because the standards we expect from laptops are so high now that we take it for granted (0.75" thick or less, all day battery, insanely high pixel density (enough to require scaling), fast enough cpu/memory for any day to day task, great screen brightness, 512gb-2tb+ nvme ssds, generic charger ports (usb-c), etc. You can get all of that for under $1k from several makers now.

xeromal 4y ago
Shout out to the XPS line. I have one as my development machine and it's wonderful.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I don't know what other manufacturers are focusing on, but it sure looks unimpressive. I just received my shiny new macbook pro 14 inch. I spent the last few months using a Linux laptop. Overall a good experience and it works. But I'm glad to be back on a mac. Quality and performance are where Apple just shines. Most PC manufacturer's seem to mainly compete on how bad of a screen & touchpad combination they can find. There are some truly awful things on the market of manufacturers that just stopped even trying a long time ago. Touchpads are universally awful in the laptop market, with the exception of Apple. I found this out by connecting my magic touchpad 2 to my Linux laptop. Works great! As good as with a mac. The software support in Linux is fine. Precise, responsive, smooth, just like it should be. It's the hardware that is the problem. Even brands that are supposedly premium keep opting for these cheep plastic touchpads with poor sensitivity, awkward button mechanics, etc. Apple nailed this decades ago. On this front they have no competition. That, the screen, and the stellar performance of the M1 is making the difference right now. I connected an external drive with x-plane on it a few days ago to see how far I could push it. Turns out, I can max out all the sliders and it runs at about 30-40fps at the normal screen resolution. That's with lots of add ons, some of which are really demanding and using the rosetta emulator. Very impressive. For work, this thing runs circles around my Linux laptop. Build speeds are about 2-3x.