7 ms·

I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds. Trouble is... I don't use it. In fact I just bo

I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds. Trouble is... I don't use it. In fact I just bought a used Thinkpad off ebay to replace it for 99% of my work. People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac

corobo 2y ago
Dibs
copperx 2y ago
Old laptops are great, but it's hard to find a non-Apple laptop with a >= 220 PPI display. I can't stand seeing pixels; it feels like I'm in 1995.
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  Not really? HP, Dell, and Lenovo all offer QHD or even 4K screens on the premium business models I usually buy and have done so for awhile. They’re just less common on the used market since they’re not the default spec, 1080p is practically good enough for Windows/Linux, and QHD incurs a minor battery penalty. but an aftermarket QHD panel can go for as low as a hundred. You can even find panels on new computers that smoke Apples like the 3k 120hz OLED on the Zephyrus g14. Apple’s screens typically lag behind the competition which is natural given they don’t make their own screens, don’t want to sole source, they are anal about QA, and it’s logistically faster & easier to ship a bleeding edge screen on some premium computer that sees a few hundred thousand in sales than the MacBook that sells millions.
rowanG077 2y ago
I have never gotten this mindset. A macbook is meant to be used, no matter what you paid for it. It's not some piece of jewelry you have to do touch with velvet gloves. At least from my experience with (modern) thinkpads, the mac last way longer anyway.
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  Maybe Apple oughta try an ad campaign with people's used machines to disabuse that mindset, then. But their whole brand is about creating spotless luxury icons, almost like collectibles that belong in a museum.
  - hnbear 2y ago
    Something like: https://www.bikeperfect.com/features/bespoken-word-computer-says-no https://www.bikeperfect.com/features/bespoken-word-computer-... I agree, some campaign around being actually build for real use would be interesting. A whole series of well loved and heavily used machines. Suitably worn and sticker coated.
  - geoffpado 2y ago
    They had this one a decade ago, but I agree it's not common: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFcwE1L4GHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFcwE1L4GHk
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tzs 2y ago
> I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds. How have you managed to have so many laptops? Are you a collector? A reviewer who is given a lot of free review units? Laptops have only been around since about 1980, so even someone who started then and has bought 4 laptops a year on average ever since then would still be a little shy of hundreds, so I'm guessing you must have an interesting story.
- underlogic 2y ago
  Afraid not. I got a job in Uni at a store that refurbished laptops and as a perk we could take a handful to learn about / disassemble every week, on the condition they came back. Later I would provision units for medium sized companies and also developed an expensive habit of buying up every other model on ebay. It's great to have had experience with so many designs but in retrospect I should've just bought one every 3-4 years and stuck with it. I just never could be satisfied with a design but to be fair back then most had serious shortcomings I guess today I tend to over focus on the laptop as an end where others see it more as a means. Probably won't ever be satisfied until I sit down and design my own. But the MBA 15 is very nice. Too nice. "manufactured with precision to the micron and delivered to your door straight from the factory in Shenzhen"
  - SwiftyBug 2y ago
    So, after trying every laptop possible you chose the Thinkpad as your go-to for work? Why is that? I ask because I've been considering moving off from a Mac and I'm shopping for the best replacement.
    - mingus88 2y ago
      Not OP but old thinkpads are usually at the top of the list for good cheap Linux machines They are durable and ubiquitous no-nonsense work machines. I just picked one up for $300 and can do all the dev work I need
      - 2y ago
paulmd 2y ago
> People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac you have discovered the reason applecare sells well. and frankly the higher the tier of laptop, the more sense it makes - no sense insuring the base-tier model, it's basically disposable, since a non-covered "any other repair" (other than screen) is $700 on (eg) MBP, or $350 (iirc) on a MBA you're basically over halfway to a new unit with a new battery/faster processor/etc. But on a loaded out 64GB/4TB M1 Max MBP ($3k at b+h for a good long while there) then it's worth having it repaired. arguably on the high-end apple laptops, if you intend to carry them around and actually use them, it's just part of the lifecycle. like, if you have one screen repair in 3 years you break even, if you have one "any other repair" you come out ahead. this is actually constant across all the model lines (MBA screen repairs are cheaper, applecare is still 1/2 of a screen repair). having insurance on desktops is certainly dumb, but it makes a lot of sense in movable items. people carry around phones and laptops, and they drop them. it happens to wintel PCs too, believe it or not. for the price of prepaying half a screen upfront you basically don't have to worry about your laptop and you also get a 512b memory bus with best-in-class battery life and performance etc. and I know applecare triggers a lot of haters, "that's a scam, I'm too smart for that!!!", "I won't buy something that I can't repair myself!!!" but like, that generally just speaks to the degree of hostility with which a lot of people approach the apple lifecycle. It's very much designed as a first-party service model, yes of course, but it actually works, and apple laptops actually do achieve long service life with this model. You're not the first person to realize that dropping a $3-4k laptop is gonna feel pretty bad etc, but people tend to systematically dismiss the solutions that have been provided to fix that, because they're not the solutions that the wintel world provides. And frankly, not having to worry about dropping my laptop is a benefit above and beyond what x86 would provide with the kinds of solutions that are generally quoted, and paying for a premium on-demand business grade warranty on a wintel laptop would probably be roughly as expensive even if it existed on the hardware I'd want (can't get a dell/lenovo/hp business-tier warranty on a redmibook I bought off amazon, right?). I'm out here carrying my laptop around on a stone patio every evening as I watch the puppy play outside. I'm using it on the toilet above a tile floor. I'm picking it up and moving it every day, and using it on a blanket on the couch. Yesterday I downloaded dolphin-llama3:70b and ran it locally at interactive speeds, I've been doing dolphin-mixtral:8x7b for months now (not full offload so it's not quite as fast). It's a nice laptop and I bought it to use it, $350 up front to simply never worry about it is more than worth it. The same wintel people who told me to get a framework 16 (with no speedstep) are now telling me to wait for strix halo, and I'm out here living the future for almost a full year now, and strix is probably at least a full year from actual real availability (strix halo is coming later than strix point, and AMD paper-launches all their laptop products badly). The $500 I save (maybe) by waiting 2+ years for a comparable x86 solution in 2025 isn't worth it, and I'd still have an expensive laptop with no warranty even if I went PC. (and that's assuming strix halo is a drop-in replacement - I think people are going to be more disappointed by cost+ battery life than they realize, socketed quad-channel memory with a big stacked cache to improve performance is not cheap in either dollars or watts, those are going to be $3k+ laptops too.) similarly to how people whine about drop risk and then just ignore the mechanism provided to solve that problem... people do the same thing with turning the parts program into a negative too. Literally apple will sell you the part and the first-party tooling to fix your screen, or even just rent you the tooling... and that's bad because "it comes in three pelican cases!!!" or something. Like people literally insist it's "all for show" or something and it's actually just part of the secret plan to undermine right-to-repair, because Apple will sell you the tools if you want. there is nothing that people can't spin into a negative somehow. There are very few companies with a more real "hater" phenomenon than Apple, and it just colors every discussion on the topic. People forget that there's two sides to every transaction, there is no forced anything, I am making my choices about my own risks and benefits, just not the ones they make. There are scenarios where it makes sense - and probably not as few as the haters want there to be. They just get shouted down by a fairly dedicated/active hater crowd. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

corobo 2y ago

Dibs

copperx 2y ago

Old laptops are great, but it's hard to find a non-Apple laptop with a >= 220 PPI display. I can't stand seeing pixels; it feels like I'm in 1995.

faeriechangling 2y ago
Not really? HP, Dell, and Lenovo all offer QHD or even 4K screens on the premium business models I usually buy and have done so for awhile. They’re just less common on the used market since they’re not the default spec, 1080p is practically good enough for Windows/Linux, and QHD incurs a minor battery penalty. but an aftermarket QHD panel can go for as low as a hundred. You can even find panels on new computers that smoke Apples like the 3k 120hz OLED on the Zephyrus g14. Apple’s screens typically lag behind the competition which is natural given they don’t make their own screens, don’t want to sole source, they are anal about QA, and it’s logistically faster & easier to ship a bleeding edge screen on some premium computer that sees a few hundred thousand in sales than the MacBook that sells millions.

rowanG077 2y ago

I have never gotten this mindset. A macbook is meant to be used, no matter what you paid for it. It's not some piece of jewelry you have to do touch with velvet gloves. At least from my experience with (modern) thinkpads, the mac last way longer anyway.

Apocryphon 2y ago
Maybe Apple oughta try an ad campaign with people's used machines to disabuse that mindset, then. But their whole brand is about creating spotless luxury icons, almost like collectibles that belong in a museum.
- hnbear 2y ago
  Something like: https://www.bikeperfect.com/features/bespoken-word-computer-says-no https://www.bikeperfect.com/features/bespoken-word-computer-... I agree, some campaign around being actually build for real use would be interesting. A whole series of well loved and heavily used machines. Suitably worn and sticker coated.
- geoffpado 2y ago
  They had this one a decade ago, but I agree it's not common: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFcwE1L4GHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFcwE1L4GHk

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tzs 2y ago

> I have the 15 inch Macbook Air M2 and would agree it may in fact be the perfect laptop, and I have had hundreds. How have you managed to have so many laptops? Are you a collector? A reviewer who is given a lot of free review units? Laptops have only been around since about 1980, so even someone who started then and has bought 4 laptops a year on average ever since then would still be a little shy of hundreds, so I'm guessing you must have an interesting story.

underlogic 2y ago
Afraid not. I got a job in Uni at a store that refurbished laptops and as a perk we could take a handful to learn about / disassemble every week, on the condition they came back. Later I would provision units for medium sized companies and also developed an expensive habit of buying up every other model on ebay. It's great to have had experience with so many designs but in retrospect I should've just bought one every 3-4 years and stuck with it. I just never could be satisfied with a design but to be fair back then most had serious shortcomings I guess today I tend to over focus on the laptop as an end where others see it more as a means. Probably won't ever be satisfied until I sit down and design my own. But the MBA 15 is very nice. Too nice. "manufactured with precision to the micron and delivered to your door straight from the factory in Shenzhen"
- SwiftyBug 2y ago
  So, after trying every laptop possible you chose the Thinkpad as your go-to for work? Why is that? I ask because I've been considering moving off from a Mac and I'm shopping for the best replacement.
  - mingus88 2y ago
    Not OP but old thinkpads are usually at the top of the list for good cheap Linux machines They are durable and ubiquitous no-nonsense work machines. I just picked one up for $300 and can do all the dev work I need
    - 2y ago

paulmd 2y ago

> People generally don't think cheap and expendable are features but I would argue that they are. I need a product I'm not concerned to drop or scratch or have stolen or spill a drink on. I need something I can replace without tears that I can sleep next to and use while in the bathroom. That's not an $1800 Mac you have discovered the reason applecare sells well. and frankly the higher the tier of laptop, the more sense it makes - no sense insuring the base-tier model, it's basically disposable, since a non-covered "any other repair" (other than screen) is $700 on (eg) MBP, or $350 (iirc) on a MBA you're basically over halfway to a new unit with a new battery/faster processor/etc. But on a loaded out 64GB/4TB M1 Max MBP ($3k at b+h for a good long while there) then it's worth having it repaired. arguably on the high-end apple laptops, if you intend to carry them around and actually use them, it's just part of the lifecycle. like, if you have one screen repair in 3 years you break even, if you have one "any other repair" you come out ahead. this is actually constant across all the model lines (MBA screen repairs are cheaper, applecare is still 1/2 of a screen repair). having insurance on desktops is certainly dumb, but it makes a lot of sense in movable items. people carry around phones and laptops, and they drop them. it happens to wintel PCs too, believe it or not. for the price of prepaying half a screen upfront you basically don't have to worry about your laptop and you also get a 512b memory bus with best-in-class battery life and performance etc. and I know applecare triggers a lot of haters, "that's a scam, I'm too smart for that!!!", "I won't buy something that I can't repair myself!!!" but like, that generally just speaks to the degree of hostility with which a lot of people approach the apple lifecycle. It's very much designed as a first-party service model, yes of course, but it actually works, and apple laptops actually do achieve long service life with this model. You're not the first person to realize that dropping a $3-4k laptop is gonna feel pretty bad etc, but people tend to systematically dismiss the solutions that have been provided to fix that, because they're not the solutions that the wintel world provides. And frankly, not having to worry about dropping my laptop is a benefit above and beyond what x86 would provide with the kinds of solutions that are generally quoted, and paying for a premium on-demand business grade warranty on a wintel laptop would probably be roughly as expensive even if it existed on the hardware I'd want (can't get a dell/lenovo/hp business-tier warranty on a redmibook I bought off amazon, right?). I'm out here carrying my laptop around on a stone patio every evening as I watch the puppy play outside. I'm using it on the toilet above a tile floor. I'm picking it up and moving it every day, and using it on a blanket on the couch. Yesterday I downloaded dolphin-llama3:70b and ran it locally at interactive speeds, I've been doing dolphin-mixtral:8x7b for months now (not full offload so it's not quite as fast). It's a nice laptop and I bought it to use it, $350 up front to simply never worry about it is more than worth it. The same wintel people who told me to get a framework 16 (with no speedstep) are now telling me to wait for strix halo, and I'm out here living the future for almost a full year now, and strix is probably at least a full year from actual real availability (strix halo is coming later than strix point, and AMD paper-launches all their laptop products badly). The $500 I save (maybe) by waiting 2+ years for a comparable x86 solution in 2025 isn't worth it, and I'd still have an expensive laptop with no warranty even if I went PC. (and that's assuming strix halo is a drop-in replacement - I think people are going to be more disappointed by cost+ battery life than they realize, socketed quad-channel memory with a big stacked cache to improve performance is not cheap in either dollars or watts, those are going to be $3k+ laptops too.) similarly to how people whine about drop risk and then just ignore the mechanism provided to solve that problem... people do the same thing with turning the parts program into a negative too. Literally apple will sell you the part and the first-party tooling to fix your screen, or even just rent you the tooling... and that's bad because "it comes in three pelican cases!!!" or something. Like people literally insist it's "all for show" or something and it's actually just part of the secret plan to undermine right-to-repair, because Apple will sell you the tools if you want. there is nothing that people can't spin into a negative somehow. There are very few companies with a more real "hater" phenomenon than Apple, and it just colors every discussion on the topic. People forget that there's two sides to every transaction, there is no forced anything, I am making my choices about my own risks and benefits, just not the ones they make. There are scenarios where it makes sense - and probably not as few as the haters want there to be. They just get shouted down by a fairly dedicated/active hater crowd. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html https://paulgraham.com/fh.html