6 ms·
After I experienced ARM chips in macbooks x86 laptops are no more for me.
by ArtemZ 3y ago
After I experienced ARM chips in macbooks x86 laptops are no more for me.
- ekianjo 3y agoHappy paying 3x more?
- fourstepper 3y agoI don't think price is the main issue for most people in tech
- spookie 3y agoDepends where you were born ig
- ponector 3y agoFor many people in tech price of the new MacBook is greater than monthly net salary.
- moooo99 3y ago+ 1. to get a usable MBP spec (i.e. at least 1TB disk and 24GB RAM) you’re looking at a 2,689€ price tag here in Germany. Not an issue if it’s company provided, but outside, this is more than two months worth of rent and a substantial part of a post tax income of a software engineer in Germany.
- xcv123 3y agoThe equivalent Dell Precision laptop is about the same price. A laptop lasts for several years so thats only a few hundred euros per year.
- ekianjo 3y agoThis comment only applies to tech people working in the US, and mostly California.
- xcv123 3y agoYes
- jeffparsons 3y agoNot the person you're replying to, but I'm afraid so. MacBooks are just so far ahead of their "competition" that it's not funny. The M2 MacBook Pros are about as close as you can get to a perfect laptop. Really, I wish it wasn't so. It would arguably be better for everyone (except Apple) if there was some serious competition at the top end of the market. But there just isn't. I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management. (A lot of this is an OS integration problem, so Apple is playing on easy mode here.) I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad. (Again, OS integration, plus a stupid amount of heuristics built into the hardware itself to interpret what you actually meant when you touched the trackpad in an awkward way.) I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks. (The first generation of M1 MacBook laptops was awful, but they fixed it. Also this point isn't really fair because I haven't really seriously looked.) I've still yet to see a laptop with as slick of a chassis and display. I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time, and not simultaneously sounds like a jet engine and throttle itself to a near halt. But really, just give me proper power management and a decent trackpad and I'll call it a serious competitor.
- jwells89 3y agoThat combination of decent performance (even while unplugged), battery life, and silence is hard to come by in x86 laptops, even in ultraportables built with efficiency-focused laptop CPUs where one would expect at least battery life and fan noise to not be issues. Apple’s silicon helps here but I wonder if part of the problem isn’t x86 laptop manufacturers trying too hard to juice perf numbers at the cost of all else, as well as penny pinching on heatsink and fan.
- jeffparsons 3y agoEver opened up the average laptop? They look like someone threw the list of component dimensions at a bin packing algorithm, let it run for a couple of minutes, then added some extra plastic struts to fill the dead space. It feels like nobody* else is even _trying_. (*Except Framework. Those guys are awesome.)
- Klonoar 3y agoIt is a literal drop in the bucket. It's like a mattress: you spend enough time on it that it's worth paying the money and moving on.
- ekianjo 3y ago> It is a literal drop in the bucket. That's a very first world comment
- Darmody 3y agoAnd in some first world countries that still means the 10% of your annual income.
- xcv123 3y agoA $2000 USD laptop would depreciate to nothing over five years so that is an expense of only $400 USD per year. At a moderate $80k USD developer salary, the laptop costs only 0.5% of that. And this is the main tool you depend on to earn an income. For an underpaid junior developer earning $40k it's still only 1% of their income. 10% of an average developer salary is something like $8k per year. What laptop costs $8k per year? That's $40k after five years. Are you confusing a laptop with a new Mercedes or what? Laptops are a business expense for a developer. This is how you need to think about it.
- Darmody 3y agoBut the US is not the only first world country. I live in one and my salary is a little less than 30k and I'm not a junior. My junior colleagues are at around 20k, so for them it's actually 10%.
- xcv123 3y agoI never expected a first world country to pay that little. I live in New Zealand. Your colleagues are earning less than our minimum wage. So apparently first world is not the same as "high income". In that case I would buy something from Taiwan.
- alphanullmeric 3y agoCompared to what? An equivalent framework costs more in Canada when you factor in a student discount.
- qwytw 3y agoYou're are more than right about memory/storage upgrades but otherwise Macs seem to be priced very competitively considering what they offer.
- latentcall 3y agoI wouldn’t be able to do it until Asahi Linux is totally done. Paying 1.5k for a laptop that doesn’t respect you is quite a big ask. They’d have to pay me to use Mac OS, as someone would have to pay me to use Windows. I’m glad these options exist such as Tuxedo.
- lopis 3y ago> They’d have to pay me to use Mac OS And for many HN users, they do get paid to use Mac OS and offered a Macbook for work. I personally still use Linux for work but I have to admit it hinders my work in certain ways (e.g. no easy access to testing Safari and no way to test VoiceOver). But I couldn't trade my setup for whatever Apple decides is best for me. So I appreciate companies still pushing for more solid Linux-first laptops.
- tormeh 3y agoGot a Mac for work. I’m sure I’m holding it wrong, but to me it just doesn’t measure up to Linux/Gnome. Of particular annoyance is that Mac will just ignore my scroll wheel input sometimes. I suspect it’s a heuristics thing aimed at trackpads. Lots of other small things where Mac doesn’t measure up. And Homebrew is inferior to most Linux package managers. Mac is very focused on the use-case of GUI-only, trackpad-only, no external monitor, unplugged usage. That’s fine, but it’s really not how I use computers.
- qwqetyr 3y ago> will just ignore my scroll wheel input sometimes. The other day I was trying to set the scroll speed (and have it consistent for all apps) on KDE and it was quite a struggle. AFAIK it just works on Gnome/Wayland but having to chose between something as basic as this and using a DE the UX of which I personally find slightly repulsive (at least in default config) doesn't seem ideal.
- maxhille 3y agoThose ARM chips seem really nice but there is not yet much choice if you want a usable OS and more hardware variants.