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> Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life, stability etc. is concerned. I have a
by cfiggers 3y ago
> Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life, stability etc. is concerned.
I have a Surface Laptop 4 with an AMD processor and 16GB of RAM. I'm extremely happy with it, though I'll concede that the build quality is a click lower than a M1 MacBook Air (two of the rubber feet have fallen off of mine, being my main ding against it) and nobody can touch Apple Silicon's battery life. But aside from that, it's definitely in the same arena for build quality as an M1 MacBook Air (my wife's daily driver, so I'm not just saying that out of ignorance) with, IMHO, a better keyboard and a touch screen if you're into that sort of thing. Oh, and the facial recognition unlock is the best. I've had zero issues with stability—Microsoft pays more attention to squashing Windows bugs on their own hardware, it seems like.
Surface Laptop 5 has been out for about a year, but it was a totally microscopic incremental refresh. That means the Laptop 4's have dropped in price a lot, even though it's still 95% the same laptop.
My exact model of Laptop 4 can be had on periodic sale, refurbished on Woot.com for ~$700 or less, which is a screaming good deal IMHO for what you get. You could almost get two of these things for the price of one new M1 MacBook Air once you factor in the (IMHO mandatory) RAM upgrade.
- vuln 3y ago> Oh, and the facial recognition unlock is the best. This is scary as fuck. Combined with all the telemetry and tracking M$ is now doing without care from within its operating system. Windows and Android are subsidized data collection applications which run on subsidized hardware. Simple as.
- blackoil 3y agoLOL, How would you unlock iPhone?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- astrange 3y agoThere's nothing valuable about your Windows telemetry. It just means if you hit a crash it's possible it'll get fixed.
- cfiggers 3y agoAcross every consumer-facing device where it has ever been deployed—which is probably in the billions at this point thanks to iPhone alone—consumer-grade biometric face unlock technology has a body count of precisely zero. If I turn out to be the world's first facial recognition casualty, that would be SUCH a hilariously unlikely way to go that I almost couldn't even be mad about it.
- qwytw 3y ago> Windows [...] are subsidized data collection applications which run on subsidized hardware. Simple as. How does Microsoft monetize (or even could)? Are you just saying random things? Also you could just install Linux, of course battery life would likely be even worse then.
- europeanNyan 3y agoA refurbished Macbook Air M1 with 8GB of RAM (which works wonderfully for day to day stuff, even development with VS Code) is $849 directly from Apple. I never felt any slowdowns. The thing is chugging along nicely and I don't feel a need for an alternative any more. Apple Silicone has turned the industry upside down IMHO.
- scns 3y agoDoes anyone have experience how IntelliJ runs on this machine?
- qwytw 3y agoYes, none of the Jetbrains IDE's seem to be usable on a 8GB Mac. It invariably starts throwing errors about running out of memory after a while and then everything starts to lag (including typing). Also you can't really run any other process alongside as long as it uses above ~5000-1000mb (so no Node for instance). Having a browser with more than a few tabs open alongside is also an issue. Maybe a ~5+ year old version might work better.
- scns 3y agoThank you very much.
- acomjean 3y agoI have an AMD 5700U linux notebook for work. I'll second that they're really quite great on battery and speed.