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I finally made the switch to Apple after being thoroughly frustrated with Windows laptops. It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead

by spaceman_2020 3y ago

I finally made the switch to Apple after being thoroughly frustrated with Windows laptops. It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024. Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.

jb1991 3y ago
I'm still using an original M1 Air and the thing is used nearly all day for light casual web usage, and I only plug it in about two times per week -- the energy efficiency is no joke. This kind of battery life really spoils you and when you see other laptops that nearly require the plug charging all the time, tethered, you realize what a big deal these M chips are for true portability.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I end up forgetting my charger when I go on trips because 99% of the time when I unplug my laptop at home (to use in a different room), I never need the charge cable. It used to be 50% of the time I'd take the cable with me, so I could be somewhere else for 2+ hours. Now I so rarely bring the charger that it just doesn't even occur to me when I'm unplugging the thing to pack. It's night-and-day compared to the Intel MBPs.
  - nicoburns 3y ago
    Now that laptops (including but not limited to macbooks) can charge via USB C I just have one charger that I take for both my phone and laptop. Sometimes I take two cables so I can charge both at once. Sometimes I don't bother.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      My problem was that I brought a USB-C to lightning cable to charge my phone off my computer, but I forgot a USB-C brick (and magsafe or USB-C cable) so that my computer had power. Fortunately there were Apple employees at the conference and they let me borrow a charger while we were hanging out at the bar!
      - nicoburns 3y ago
        Ah yes, my phone is also USB-C which leaves less room for this kind of issue to occur.
- CadmiumYellow 3y ago
  I've been out of the house all day (6+ hours) with my M1 Pro and it's only just starting to get close to needing to be plugged in. What have I been doing all day? Just running the 23 different docker containers required for my local dev environment. This thing is an absolute beast.
  - deskamess 3y ago
    Do you think the new M3 Air w/16 GB could be comparable CPU wise to the M1 Pro? I am guessing GPU wise (for inference like apps) it probably falls behind.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      CPU was never the problem with the Air it's the thermal system. Depending on what you're doing the device simply can't soak up enough heat and so it ends up throttling the CPU. It takes a long operation e.g. compilation for 10-20 mins before it really starts to fall behind the Pro models.
      - deskamess 3y ago
        Thanks.
anakaine 3y ago
I'm one of those industry long timers who can and will use just about anything, and has occasionally over the years owned macs of various form factors. For the past decade thanks to corporate work I've been entirely Windows and Linux based. I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery life, a screen that didn't upset my eyes, and importantly the OS just got out of the way during general usage. I wound up buying myself an m1 air about 6 months later. My only gripe is that I wish it had more RAM, but even then the unified memory approach has made my expected ram usage vs actual ram usage a bit of an odd thing. It consistently uses less ram than I'd normally anticipate. That said, more ram by default would help fill in those times when I do load it up.
- ksec 3y ago
  I really wish Apple would put 12GB RAM by default instead of 8GB. We now have high resolution that uses more memory and sharing Memory with GPU. In reality this is less than 8GB with Graphics Memory.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast. I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating. I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery. Completely changed the way I work
  - danpmurray 3y ago
    How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?
    - internetter 3y ago
      I can answer this. I have a very similar workload to OP. I've found myself with resolve, affinity photo, chrome, vscode, spotify, ect open simultaneously, and have had absolutely zero struggle on my 8gb air. If you become "enlightened" you can notice that sometimes when you, say, open your spotify window after a long time elsewhere, the spotify is briefly unresponsive. Not in a way you notice, more in the sense that if you are looking for it, you can see hints it is swapping. The only time I wish I had more is when I got into iOS development and began running VMs on my mac.
exe34 3y ago
> Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could find in shops at the time cost the same, and felt like cheap rubbish. And this laptop just refuses to die, and handles my workload just fine after all these years. I'm dreading the day I have to replace it.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >nicest keyboard When have MacBooks ever had the nicest keyboard? They have pretty good keyboards, but I have 10 year old ThinkPads with keyboards that I prefer.
  - aembleton 3y ago
    Keyboard feel is very subjective. Different people like different things about keyboards.
  - exe34 3y ago
    Are thinkpads considered "ultra mobile" (or whatever the buzzword is nowadays)? I thought they were more hefty? The thin/lightweight laptops from back then had crappy clickety keyboards.
    - mhb 3y ago
      Of course they were heftier, but "nicest keyboard" and "nicest keyboard given ridiculous thickness constraints" are a world apart. No idea what you mean about crappy Thinkpad keyboards. The old Thinkpad keyboards are widely acknowledged to have been great.
      - exe34 3y ago
        > Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could find in shops at the time cost the same, and felt like cheap rubbish. It seems like you've changed my requirements and then decided the thinkpads were a great fit.
itsoktocry 3y ago
>Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. They are awesome, but not perfect. Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Lordy does that multiple monitor thing grind my gears. I just want to display on 3 screens. But the base model is the only one that corporate IT will buy. So I have to buy a DisplayLink adapter to do what the Intel macbooks did with zero problem.
  - dangus 3y ago
    It’s not on Apple to make sure their cheapest consumer-targeted computer is good enough for enterprise use. To me it’s not really relevant what the old computer models used to do. You have to evaluate what is available today and choose accordingly. Like it or not Intel chips had different strengths and weaknesses. It’s a different design entirely. I’m split on whether this is a dirty price segmentation trick or a legitimate design limitation where adding more display support is expensive in terms of die size. Doesn’t matter though, because companies doing serious work are supposed to know to buy the business versions of laptops. They don’t buy Dell Vostro consumer grade PCs, they buy Dell Precision/Latitude/XPS business systems. Apple tells you right in the name of their system: Pro. If you’re a professional you buy the Pro model. If it’s too expensive then buy something else.
    - wubrr 3y ago
      I work on a m2 pro and the external monitor issues don't end.
    - organsnyder 3y ago
      Only the M2 & M3 Max chips support more than two external monitors[1]. Those start at $3200, and are overkill for the vast majority of use-cases. There's no excuse for a $2000+ machine to not support more than two external monitors. DisplayLink on MacOS is far from ideal, either: it works alright, but it has to use the screen recording functionality in the OS, which causes anything with protected content to freak out. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/101571 https://support.apple.com/en-us/101571
qwertox 3y ago
> And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024. I am in the group of people who go for Full HD. It's enough for me, my eyesight is relatively bad. Then again, I use 3 monitors.
- nacs 3y ago
  You'll like the way Apple does their screens even more then. They're 3-5k screens but they essentially scale up their UI 3X so it still looks like a 1080p except 3x sharper. They are what Apple calls "Retina" displays.
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    If you can't see the extra sharpness it's not really a pro... A 13"-15" 1080p screen is pretty similar PPI to a 27" 4K display. This is pretty nice because if you have both at the scaling level elements are the same size on both.
    - kruxigt 3y ago
      [dead]
- overstay8930 3y ago
  meanwhile Mac Studio users waiting for 5k monitors @ 144hz
makeitdouble 3y ago
There's a volume zones of people who want "a laptop and nothing more", will pay for better materials and Apple has perfected that segment with a few caveats [0]. To your point, then comes the lower end ("just give me something cheap"), the corporate middle ("the same laptop as at work"), and the super high end (gaming, CAD, anything needing special software or a discrete GPU), with the outliers (linux etc) IMHO windows laptop nowadays are for people who either don't really care, or have already a very specific target or limitation. For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple. [0] resistance to abuse isn't there. A macbook's screen will be dead pretty quick if not handled with appropriate care. A Lenovo Flex for instance will take it a lot longer.
- dividedbyzero 3y ago
  > For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple. It's a bit more nuanced. Lenovo/Asus seem to be experimenting a lot more, but more like by throwing (relatively) easy-to-build variations at the wall to see what sticks, then release a few more polished SKUs. Apple doesn't really do that, but they do attack those limits and design aspects they care about very aggressively and with a ton of resources (e.g. battery life pre-M1, manufacturing tolerances).
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    One of the issue is laptops aren't a growth angle to Apple. For instance the efforts they made towards the CPU and processing architecture wouldn't have made sense without the other products benefiting from it. We've seen that with the touchbar: it got a first release, and basically no improvements, no bug fixes, no better support from there. A laptop only feature gets no love from today's Apple. Even the iPad saw little to no progress in recent years, outside of sharing specs with the mac. I posit we'd see a foldable/bendable phone from Apple before we ever see something significant form factor change in laptops.
    - datavirtue 3y ago
wubrr 3y ago
[flagged]
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >What 'innovation' has Apple introduced in the last 10 years other than their M chips? Computers that Just Fucking Work(tm) if you stay on the One Apple Way(tm), which 99% of people are perfectly content to be on because shit Just Fucking Works(tm). Seriously, Just Fucking Works(tm) is a virtue.
  - wubrr 3y ago
    Every single PC I've had in the last 15 years just fucking works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .... (except some things mostly on apple products).
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      Windows 10 and 11 take some seriously wrangling (and paying for a Pro license) before it behaves. As for Linux, my kill ratio is practically infinity with a mountain of dead installs in my wake. MacOS? So long as I stay on the One Apple Way(tm) it Just Fucking Works(tm).
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  > What 'innovation' has Apple introduced in the last 10 years other than their M chips? Most of their 'innovation' is just marketing for people who don't know what they're buying I mean, that’s massive innovation by itself…
  - wubrr 3y ago
    And apparently the only thing you can point to...
bluecalm 3y ago
I think ThinkPads are better than MacBooks. You can get P14 with 32gb of RAM, 1TB SSD, very fast and quiet CPU (AMD U series), decent battery, 2.8k OLED screen and it weights 1.34kg (weight between 13 inch and 15inch new Airs). It also has imo better ports and a track point. The problem is that Windows sucks more and more with every iteration and there is nothing Lenovo or other manufacturers can do about it. Lenovo also keeps shipping hot and loud Intel CPUs which hurt reputation of the ThinkPad line and may confuse new buyers. Still if you know what to choose you will get more for your money with P14 than Macbook air imo.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Offer and support desktop Linux? Windows keeps dropping the ball and Linux just stands there looking at it on the ground.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    I think that Canonical is doing an excellent job. It's been at least a decade that you could easily install Kubuntu on most computers and things would just work with no configuration. It's easy to use for the vast majority of use cases and reasonably secure.
    - paulryanrogers 3y ago
      IME battery life will suffer significantly. But otherwise I agree.
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      Canonical: Gnome was stable Let's water two years making unity Now let's go back to gnome, two more years of instability Now let's force everyone onto snaps Canonical has done a lot to help Linux, but their recent dogma and churn is a huge missed opportunity.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Fortunately there's Linux which is has a great number of fans on Thinkpads. It's not for everybody, but Thinkpads are great for it.
ponector 3y ago
>>Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. It is not correct, unless you select minimal amount of ram and SSD. Select versions with proper amount of memory and MacBook becomes much more expensive than comparable windows machine.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. I've been positively delighted by my two Intel Alder Lake laptops I use during travel for play (ASUS Vivobook S 14X OLED, 12700H CPU) and work (Lenovo V14 G3, 1255U CPU) respectively. I can get 4 to 8 hours off of them depending on use with the charge limited to 80% for longer overall life, and as I just mentioned the hardware are quite powerful in their own right. >The trackpads are downright unusable. Both of my laptops I just mentioned have wonderful touchpads. Frankly though, this absolutely will vary by several country miles depending on manufacturer and even model. I suppose I got lucky here. >And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024. I'm gonna be honest: I fucking hate screens bigger than 1920x1080 (or x1200 for 16:10 screen ratios). My laptop for play has a 2880x1800 screen, but I've got it rendering at 1920x1200 because so many programs just assume pixel densities around that area and either can't or won't handle scaling. I also have to still do some scaling up even at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 at laptop screen sizes anyway because everything is so small, but it's still less compatibility headaches compared to physically denser pixels.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  4 hours isn't exactly good... To me 4h sounds kinda bad For trackpads it depends, there are some windows laptops with good ones, like dell xps or the carbon line, but mostly these are worse compared to macbooks, if you haven't tried mac trackpad - you should definitely try one
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    That's 4 hours of running the screen (by far the biggest power drain) and doing stuff, it ain't no M*-powered Macbook but to me that's impressive and in the realm of practicality. My prior experiences with older hardware have been barely an hour or two, which is impractically retarded. I also have an M2 Macbook Air and find its battery life even more impressive (literally days between charging), but I don't really use it because it doesn't satisfy my requirements which include games (for play) and clean interoperability with other Windows machines at home (for both play and work).
_ugfj 3y ago
The problem is the storage is not removable in the Apple Macbooks. It is disturbing it didn't sink the Macbooks. It speaks volumes of how little people care about their own data. About their own privacy. There should've been zero sold. It truly is dismal and a very large systemic problem a laptop like this is sold. Because when it breaks, are you going to wipe it and restore from backup? No. You will just hand it over to a repair person and even an ethical shop much less Apple doesn't even have a chance to hand the disk back before handling it. An unknown amount of complete strangers will access your everything. Your medical records, your banking, your private photos, everything. And people pay real world money for this, money they worked hard for. It's unfathomable to me.
- robbie-c 3y ago
  Won’t it be encrypted with FileVault?
- mgdev 3y ago
  Turn on FileVault. Don't give anyone your password. Pretty fathomable.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  Nobody has access to anything unless you give them your password. Macs have full disk encryption built in. If you aren't using FileVault, you are doing it wrong.
- ecwilson 3y ago
  Non-removable storage isn't the problem. You have identified one actual problem: privacy. But even this isn't a real problem if you turn on system-level drive encryption: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/volume-encryption-with-filevault-sec4c6dc1b6e/web https://support.apple.com/guide/security/volume-encryption-w... Soldered-in components make for higher quality, lower cost production. Anecdotally, every Windows machine I've had has failed. Every MacBook machine I have replaced after 4-5 years when I wanted to upgrade to the latest technology.
- angst_ridden 3y ago
  As others have said: encryption. Even before they supported full-disk encryption, I made it a habit of making yearly encrypted disk image files where I store all my financial and medical data. I open them when working on the info, close them afterwards. Even some attack that somehow bypassed disk encryption (like a browser hack or something) won't get anywhere.
Asmod4n 3y ago
I’ve been an Apple only user the last 20 years, but they simply lost me with the garbage they sold since 2016. The M series was too little too late. It also didn’t help that macOS didn’t get better anymore and the yearly release cycle only made it more buggier. I’m happy with AMD finally catching up to intel and nvidia with a performance to price ratio Apple will never deliver.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  I’ve been an Apple only user the last 20 years, but they simply lost me with the garbage they sold since 2016. If they lost you eight years ago, then you haven't been an Apple user for the last 20 years. Also, 2016 was eight years ago. Get over it. Or at least find an axe to grind from this decade.
hollandheese 3y ago
>Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. Until you want more memory or a larger SSD then the Macbook is all of a sudden double the price of the equivalent PC laptop. >Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple. That's basically true, but with Apple becoming more and more expensive that does leave a very large low-end market for them to play in.
- pquki4 3y ago
  Recently got a ThinkPad T14s gen 4 with top-of-the-line AMD 7840U, 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD, for just a bit over $1k. It has very good build quality, is powerful yet quiet, and has decent battery life. It supports up to 4 displays. That's basically one of the best Windows laptops you can get. Of course, it does not have high-DPI mini LED screen, great speakers or 18 hours of battery life, but none of that really matters, and I'd choose this any day over a similarly speced Macbook Pro 14 that would cost me $2,399.
  - Moldoteck 3y ago
    pls define decent battery life because for different people decent means different things. My biggest problem with windows laptops is battery life. My dell work laptop is spec't higher compared to my home m1 air but the ~4h battery life, worse trackpad and worse audio make it a worse experience overall...
    - asyx 3y ago
      You will not find a x86 machine that beats an Arm machine on battery life. 4h is bad for a windows laptop though. But if track pad and battery life is your thing, a Mac it is.
datavirtue 3y ago
Yeah, whoever managed (or didn't manage) the Surface trackpad project needs fired. Can't count how many times I have belted out obscenities while working on my Surface Pro. Garbage. I forgot it had a touch screen and I never flip the screen. All that caused the trackpad to be ignored, I guess. Again, hot garbage. I have a MacBook Pro M1, which is pure fluid bliss. It cost less, it's faster, and the battery lasts for days.
EasyMark 3y ago
Similar stories. I usually had a windows laptop and linux and VNC'd into the linux box and with win 10 and 11 I just got tired of fighting all the garbage that microsoft tries to push on you in the OS. I really just want to get to work, so I bought a top of the line M2 macbook air and couldn't be happier with my decision. Apple has their apps on there but I don't get pop ups and ads and have to go through a bazillion privacy settings to turn of MS spying on every little thing.
pandaman 3y ago
Tastes differ. My work MacBook unlocks with a fingerprint (with random sensitivity, if my hands are too dry, for example, it does not register) even in 2024. My Windows laptops had been unlocking with face recognition for 10 years or so. I find the latter much more convenient, especially when I have the laptop on a stand and use an external monitor and keyboard/mouse. Does not look like Apple is ahead of anything here. Hardware wise Apple is actually okay for the price in the low end, but you can only add memory/SSD/CPU (at ridiculous $/{GB,GHz} ratio) for the higher end, you can't get an OLED display, or a good keyboard, or bigger battery at any price.
ricardobayes 3y ago
What keeps me from Mac is some people report some weird incompatibility issues with third-party things. Like external mouse, keyboard, monitors. All of my mac user friends complained about this to some extent. Plus, on my laptop I just simply upgraded the RAM with another 16GB of RAM which will give me some breathing room for at least another year. For me, a windows computer "just works". Everything I connect I know will work as expected. Not looking forward to learn some new quirks. Even the top left action buttons just irk me to death.
indrora 3y ago
> Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The plateau of 6 hours is less Microsoft's fault here and more a combination of stinginess by OEMs and their willingness to reduce cost by taking money to have extra installed software out of the gate. > The trackpads are downright unusable. This varies wildly by OEM and price point. Below some weird gulf, this is the truth. Above some arbitrary shore, there is a plateau of goodness, of which some rival the historic best from macs. > The keyboards are a hit or a miss. Again this comes down to the choices made by the OEM during their costing. I recently picked up a Chromebook from Acer just to have something that was not "very Computer" when I found myself needing An Computer to look something up with. It had surprisingly little flex to the chassis, and I found myself quite enjoying the deck, minus... well > And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024. Or 1366x768, the Devil's Resolution. The reasons for this are weird and varied but the short form is that economies of scale have yet to make it more profitable for companies to standardize on higher density panels. It actually makes me insanely mad that the laptop I started college with (a dell c600 hand-me-down I'd been tinkering with since high school) had a better resolution at 1400x1050 and that the 2560x1600 beast that I carried after that... that in 2012 would define the lower side of "retina".

jb1991 3y ago

I'm still using an original M1 Air and the thing is used nearly all day for light casual web usage, and I only plug it in about two times per week -- the energy efficiency is no joke. This kind of battery life really spoils you and when you see other laptops that nearly require the plug charging all the time, tethered, you realize what a big deal these M chips are for true portability.

gnicholas 3y ago
I end up forgetting my charger when I go on trips because 99% of the time when I unplug my laptop at home (to use in a different room), I never need the charge cable. It used to be 50% of the time I'd take the cable with me, so I could be somewhere else for 2+ hours. Now I so rarely bring the charger that it just doesn't even occur to me when I'm unplugging the thing to pack. It's night-and-day compared to the Intel MBPs.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  Now that laptops (including but not limited to macbooks) can charge via USB C I just have one charger that I take for both my phone and laptop. Sometimes I take two cables so I can charge both at once. Sometimes I don't bother.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    My problem was that I brought a USB-C to lightning cable to charge my phone off my computer, but I forgot a USB-C brick (and magsafe or USB-C cable) so that my computer had power. Fortunately there were Apple employees at the conference and they let me borrow a charger while we were hanging out at the bar!
    - nicoburns 3y ago
      Ah yes, my phone is also USB-C which leaves less room for this kind of issue to occur.
CadmiumYellow 3y ago
I've been out of the house all day (6+ hours) with my M1 Pro and it's only just starting to get close to needing to be plugged in. What have I been doing all day? Just running the 23 different docker containers required for my local dev environment. This thing is an absolute beast.
- deskamess 3y ago
  Do you think the new M3 Air w/16 GB could be comparable CPU wise to the M1 Pro? I am guessing GPU wise (for inference like apps) it probably falls behind.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    CPU was never the problem with the Air it's the thermal system. Depending on what you're doing the device simply can't soak up enough heat and so it ends up throttling the CPU. It takes a long operation e.g. compilation for 10-20 mins before it really starts to fall behind the Pro models.
    - deskamess 3y ago
      Thanks.

anakaine 3y ago

I'm one of those industry long timers who can and will use just about anything, and has occasionally over the years owned macs of various form factors. For the past decade thanks to corporate work I've been entirely Windows and Linux based. I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery life, a screen that didn't upset my eyes, and importantly the OS just got out of the way during general usage. I wound up buying myself an m1 air about 6 months later. My only gripe is that I wish it had more RAM, but even then the unified memory approach has made my expected ram usage vs actual ram usage a bit of an odd thing. It consistently uses less ram than I'd normally anticipate. That said, more ram by default would help fill in those times when I do load it up.

ksec 3y ago
I really wish Apple would put 12GB RAM by default instead of 8GB. We now have high resolution that uses more memory and sharing Memory with GPU. In reality this is less than 8GB with Graphics Memory.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
I picked up a M3 Macbook Pro and this thing works like an absolute beast. I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating. I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery. Completely changed the way I work
- danpmurray 3y ago
  How much RAM does it have, and have you ever wished you had more?
  - internetter 3y ago
    I can answer this. I have a very similar workload to OP. I've found myself with resolve, affinity photo, chrome, vscode, spotify, ect open simultaneously, and have had absolutely zero struggle on my 8gb air. If you become "enlightened" you can notice that sometimes when you, say, open your spotify window after a long time elsewhere, the spotify is briefly unresponsive. Not in a way you notice, more in the sense that if you are looking for it, you can see hints it is swapping. The only time I wish I had more is when I got into iOS development and began running VMs on my mac.

exe34 3y ago

> Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could find in shops at the time cost the same, and felt like cheap rubbish. And this laptop just refuses to die, and handles my workload just fine after all these years. I'm dreading the day I have to replace it.

itsoktocry 3y ago
>nicest keyboard When have MacBooks ever had the nicest keyboard? They have pretty good keyboards, but I have 10 year old ThinkPads with keyboards that I prefer.
- aembleton 3y ago
  Keyboard feel is very subjective. Different people like different things about keyboards.
- exe34 3y ago
  Are thinkpads considered "ultra mobile" (or whatever the buzzword is nowadays)? I thought they were more hefty? The thin/lightweight laptops from back then had crappy clickety keyboards.
  - mhb 3y ago
    Of course they were heftier, but "nicest keyboard" and "nicest keyboard given ridiculous thickness constraints" are a world apart. No idea what you mean about crappy Thinkpad keyboards. The old Thinkpad keyboards are widely acknowledged to have been great.
    - exe34 3y ago
      > Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could find in shops at the time cost the same, and felt like cheap rubbish. It seems like you've changed my requirements and then decided the thinkpads were a great fit.

itsoktocry 3y ago

>Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them. They are awesome, but not perfect. Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.

bloopernova 3y ago
Lordy does that multiple monitor thing grind my gears. I just want to display on 3 screens. But the base model is the only one that corporate IT will buy. So I have to buy a DisplayLink adapter to do what the Intel macbooks did with zero problem.
- dangus 3y ago
  It’s not on Apple to make sure their cheapest consumer-targeted computer is good enough for enterprise use. To me it’s not really relevant what the old computer models used to do. You have to evaluate what is available today and choose accordingly. Like it or not Intel chips had different strengths and weaknesses. It’s a different design entirely. I’m split on whether this is a dirty price segmentation trick or a legitimate design limitation where adding more display support is expensive in terms of die size. Doesn’t matter though, because companies doing serious work are supposed to know to buy the business versions of laptops. They don’t buy Dell Vostro consumer grade PCs, they buy Dell Precision/Latitude/XPS business systems. Apple tells you right in the name of their system: Pro. If you’re a professional you buy the Pro model. If it’s too expensive then buy something else.
  - wubrr 3y ago
    I work on a m2 pro and the external monitor issues don't end.
  - organsnyder 3y ago
    Only the M2 & M3 Max chips support more than two external monitors[1]. Those start at $3200, and are overkill for the vast majority of use-cases. There's no excuse for a $2000+ machine to not support more than two external monitors. DisplayLink on MacOS is far from ideal, either: it works alright, but it has to use the screen recording functionality in the OS, which causes anything with protected content to freak out. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/101571 https://support.apple.com/en-us/101571

qwertox 3y ago

> And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024. I am in the group of people who go for Full HD. It's enough for me, my eyesight is relatively bad. Then again, I use 3 monitors.

nacs 3y ago
You'll like the way Apple does their screens even more then. They're 3-5k screens but they essentially scale up their UI 3X so it still looks like a 1080p except 3x sharper. They are what Apple calls "Retina" displays.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  If you can't see the extra sharpness it's not really a pro... A 13"-15" 1080p screen is pretty similar PPI to a 27" 4K display. This is pretty nice because if you have both at the scaling level elements are the same size on both.
  - kruxigt 3y ago
    [dead]
overstay8930 3y ago
meanwhile Mac Studio users waiting for 5k monitors @ 144hz

makeitdouble 3y ago

There's a volume zones of people who want "a laptop and nothing more", will pay for better materials and Apple has perfected that segment with a few caveats [0]. To your point, then comes the lower end ("just give me something cheap"), the corporate middle ("the same laptop as at work"), and the super high end (gaming, CAD, anything needing special software or a discrete GPU), with the outliers (linux etc) IMHO windows laptop nowadays are for people who either don't really care, or have already a very specific target or limitation. For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple. [0] resistance to abuse isn't there. A macbook's screen will be dead pretty quick if not handled with appropriate care. A Lenovo Flex for instance will take it a lot longer.

dividedbyzero 3y ago
> For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple. It's a bit more nuanced. Lenovo/Asus seem to be experimenting a lot more, but more like by throwing (relatively) easy-to-build variations at the wall to see what sticks, then release a few more polished SKUs. Apple doesn't really do that, but they do attack those limits and design aspects they care about very aggressively and with a ton of resources (e.g. battery life pre-M1, manufacturing tolerances).
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  One of the issue is laptops aren't a growth angle to Apple. For instance the efforts they made towards the CPU and processing architecture wouldn't have made sense without the other products benefiting from it. We've seen that with the touchbar: it got a first release, and basically no improvements, no bug fixes, no better support from there. A laptop only feature gets no love from today's Apple. Even the iPad saw little to no progress in recent years, outside of sharing specs with the mac. I posit we'd see a foldable/bendable phone from Apple before we ever see something significant form factor change in laptops.
  - datavirtue 3y ago

wubrr 3y ago

[flagged]

Dalewyn 3y ago
>What 'innovation' has Apple introduced in the last 10 years other than their M chips? Computers that Just Fucking Work(tm) if you stay on the One Apple Way(tm), which 99% of people are perfectly content to be on because shit Just Fucking Works(tm). Seriously, Just Fucking Works(tm) is a virtue.
- wubrr 3y ago
  Every single PC I've had in the last 15 years just fucking works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .... (except some things mostly on apple products).
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Windows 10 and 11 take some seriously wrangling (and paying for a Pro license) before it behaves. As for Linux, my kill ratio is practically infinity with a mountain of dead installs in my wake. MacOS? So long as I stay on the One Apple Way(tm) it Just Fucking Works(tm).
spaceman_2020 3y ago
> What 'innovation' has Apple introduced in the last 10 years other than their M chips? Most of their 'innovation' is just marketing for people who don't know what they're buying I mean, that’s massive innovation by itself…
- wubrr 3y ago
  And apparently the only thing you can point to...

bluecalm 3y ago

I think ThinkPads are better than MacBooks. You can get P14 with 32gb of RAM, 1TB SSD, very fast and quiet CPU (AMD U series), decent battery, 2.8k OLED screen and it weights 1.34kg (weight between 13 inch and 15inch new Airs). It also has imo better ports and a track point. The problem is that Windows sucks more and more with every iteration and there is nothing Lenovo or other manufacturers can do about it. Lenovo also keeps shipping hot and loud Intel CPUs which hurt reputation of the ThinkPad line and may confuse new buyers. Still if you know what to choose you will get more for your money with P14 than Macbook air imo.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Offer and support desktop Linux? Windows keeps dropping the ball and Linux just stands there looking at it on the ground.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  I think that Canonical is doing an excellent job. It's been at least a decade that you could easily install Kubuntu on most computers and things would just work with no configuration. It's easy to use for the vast majority of use cases and reasonably secure.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    IME battery life will suffer significantly. But otherwise I agree.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    Canonical: Gnome was stable Let's water two years making unity Now let's go back to gnome, two more years of instability Now let's force everyone onto snaps Canonical has done a lot to help Linux, but their recent dogma and churn is a huge missed opportunity.
fragmede 3y ago
Fortunately there's Linux which is has a great number of fans on Thinkpads. It's not for everybody, but Thinkpads are great for it.

ponector 3y ago

>>Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. It is not correct, unless you select minimal amount of ram and SSD. Select versions with proper amount of memory and MacBook becomes much more expensive than comparable windows machine.

Dalewyn 3y ago

>Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. I've been positively delighted by my two Intel Alder Lake laptops I use during travel for play (ASUS Vivobook S 14X OLED, 12700H CPU) and work (Lenovo V14 G3, 1255U CPU) respectively. I can get 4 to 8 hours off of them depending on use with the charge limited to 80% for longer overall life, and as I just mentioned the hardware are quite powerful in their own right. >The trackpads are downright unusable. Both of my laptops I just mentioned have wonderful touchpads. Frankly though, this absolutely will vary by several country miles depending on manufacturer and even model. I suppose I got lucky here. >And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024. I'm gonna be honest: I fucking hate screens bigger than 1920x1080 (or x1200 for 16:10 screen ratios). My laptop for play has a 2880x1800 screen, but I've got it rendering at 1920x1200 because so many programs just assume pixel densities around that area and either can't or won't handle scaling. I also have to still do some scaling up even at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 at laptop screen sizes anyway because everything is so small, but it's still less compatibility headaches compared to physically denser pixels.

Moldoteck 3y ago
4 hours isn't exactly good... To me 4h sounds kinda bad For trackpads it depends, there are some windows laptops with good ones, like dell xps or the carbon line, but mostly these are worse compared to macbooks, if you haven't tried mac trackpad - you should definitely try one
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  That's 4 hours of running the screen (by far the biggest power drain) and doing stuff, it ain't no M*-powered Macbook but to me that's impressive and in the realm of practicality. My prior experiences with older hardware have been barely an hour or two, which is impractically retarded. I also have an M2 Macbook Air and find its battery life even more impressive (literally days between charging), but I don't really use it because it doesn't satisfy my requirements which include games (for play) and clean interoperability with other Windows machines at home (for both play and work).

_ugfj 3y ago

The problem is the storage is not removable in the Apple Macbooks. It is disturbing it didn't sink the Macbooks. It speaks volumes of how little people care about their own data. About their own privacy. There should've been zero sold. It truly is dismal and a very large systemic problem a laptop like this is sold. Because when it breaks, are you going to wipe it and restore from backup? No. You will just hand it over to a repair person and even an ethical shop much less Apple doesn't even have a chance to hand the disk back before handling it. An unknown amount of complete strangers will access your everything. Your medical records, your banking, your private photos, everything. And people pay real world money for this, money they worked hard for. It's unfathomable to me.

robbie-c 3y ago
Won’t it be encrypted with FileVault?
mgdev 3y ago
Turn on FileVault. Don't give anyone your password. Pretty fathomable.
newaccount74 3y ago
Nobody has access to anything unless you give them your password. Macs have full disk encryption built in. If you aren't using FileVault, you are doing it wrong.
ecwilson 3y ago
Non-removable storage isn't the problem. You have identified one actual problem: privacy. But even this isn't a real problem if you turn on system-level drive encryption: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/volume-encryption-with-filevault-sec4c6dc1b6e/web https://support.apple.com/guide/security/volume-encryption-w... Soldered-in components make for higher quality, lower cost production. Anecdotally, every Windows machine I've had has failed. Every MacBook machine I have replaced after 4-5 years when I wanted to upgrade to the latest technology.
angst_ridden 3y ago
As others have said: encryption. Even before they supported full-disk encryption, I made it a habit of making yearly encrypted disk image files where I store all my financial and medical data. I open them when working on the info, close them afterwards. Even some attack that somehow bypassed disk encryption (like a browser hack or something) won't get anywhere.

Asmod4n 3y ago

I’ve been an Apple only user the last 20 years, but they simply lost me with the garbage they sold since 2016. The M series was too little too late. It also didn’t help that macOS didn’t get better anymore and the yearly release cycle only made it more buggier. I’m happy with AMD finally catching up to intel and nvidia with a performance to price ratio Apple will never deliver.

reaperducer 3y ago
I’ve been an Apple only user the last 20 years, but they simply lost me with the garbage they sold since 2016. If they lost you eight years ago, then you haven't been an Apple user for the last 20 years. Also, 2016 was eight years ago. Get over it. Or at least find an axe to grind from this decade.

hollandheese 3y ago

>Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway. Until you want more memory or a larger SSD then the Macbook is all of a sudden double the price of the equivalent PC laptop. >Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple. That's basically true, but with Apple becoming more and more expensive that does leave a very large low-end market for them to play in.

pquki4 3y ago
Recently got a ThinkPad T14s gen 4 with top-of-the-line AMD 7840U, 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD, for just a bit over $1k. It has very good build quality, is powerful yet quiet, and has decent battery life. It supports up to 4 displays. That's basically one of the best Windows laptops you can get. Of course, it does not have high-DPI mini LED screen, great speakers or 18 hours of battery life, but none of that really matters, and I'd choose this any day over a similarly speced Macbook Pro 14 that would cost me $2,399.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  pls define decent battery life because for different people decent means different things. My biggest problem with windows laptops is battery life. My dell work laptop is spec't higher compared to my home m1 air but the ~4h battery life, worse trackpad and worse audio make it a worse experience overall...
  - asyx 3y ago
    You will not find a x86 machine that beats an Arm machine on battery life. 4h is bad for a windows laptop though. But if track pad and battery life is your thing, a Mac it is.

datavirtue 3y ago

Yeah, whoever managed (or didn't manage) the Surface trackpad project needs fired. Can't count how many times I have belted out obscenities while working on my Surface Pro. Garbage. I forgot it had a touch screen and I never flip the screen. All that caused the trackpad to be ignored, I guess. Again, hot garbage. I have a MacBook Pro M1, which is pure fluid bliss. It cost less, it's faster, and the battery lasts for days.

EasyMark 3y ago

Similar stories. I usually had a windows laptop and linux and VNC'd into the linux box and with win 10 and 11 I just got tired of fighting all the garbage that microsoft tries to push on you in the OS. I really just want to get to work, so I bought a top of the line M2 macbook air and couldn't be happier with my decision. Apple has their apps on there but I don't get pop ups and ads and have to go through a bazillion privacy settings to turn of MS spying on every little thing.

pandaman 3y ago

Tastes differ. My work MacBook unlocks with a fingerprint (with random sensitivity, if my hands are too dry, for example, it does not register) even in 2024. My Windows laptops had been unlocking with face recognition for 10 years or so. I find the latter much more convenient, especially when I have the laptop on a stand and use an external monitor and keyboard/mouse. Does not look like Apple is ahead of anything here. Hardware wise Apple is actually okay for the price in the low end, but you can only add memory/SSD/CPU (at ridiculous $/{GB,GHz} ratio) for the higher end, you can't get an OLED display, or a good keyboard, or bigger battery at any price.

ricardobayes 3y ago

What keeps me from Mac is some people report some weird incompatibility issues with third-party things. Like external mouse, keyboard, monitors. All of my mac user friends complained about this to some extent. Plus, on my laptop I just simply upgraded the RAM with another 16GB of RAM which will give me some breathing room for at least another year. For me, a windows computer "just works". Everything I connect I know will work as expected. Not looking forward to learn some new quirks. Even the top left action buttons just irk me to death.

indrora 3y ago

> Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The plateau of 6 hours is less Microsoft's fault here and more a combination of stinginess by OEMs and their willingness to reduce cost by taking money to have extra installed software out of the gate. > The trackpads are downright unusable. This varies wildly by OEM and price point. Below some weird gulf, this is the truth. Above some arbitrary shore, there is a plateau of goodness, of which some rival the historic best from macs. > The keyboards are a hit or a miss. Again this comes down to the choices made by the OEM during their costing. I recently picked up a Chromebook from Acer just to have something that was not "very Computer" when I found myself needing An Computer to look something up with. It had surprisingly little flex to the chassis, and I found myself quite enjoying the deck, minus... well > And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024. Or 1366x768, the Devil's Resolution. The reasons for this are weird and varied but the short form is that economies of scale have yet to make it more profitable for companies to standardize on higher density panels. It actually makes me insanely mad that the laptop I started college with (a dell c600 hand-me-down I'd been tinkering with since high school) had a better resolution at 1400x1050 and that the 2560x1600 beast that I carried after that... that in 2012 would define the lower side of "retina".