7 ms·

I’d say it’s barely 3 things : - The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it) - The screen : at a

by pjerem 1y ago

I’d say it’s barely 3 things : - The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it) - The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs. - The audio : Apple truly did some sorcery to get such an awesome sound from machines that are flat as sheet. It’s so good that you can watch a movie on your MacBook without earbuds and don’t be bothered. Everything else like build quality is overall better than most other alternatives but a few other manufacturers are also good at it. I say this as someone who uses a MacBook for work despite loving Linux and who hates what macOS have become. The hardware is really that good.

sudosysgen 1y ago
The screen point is just not true anymore. There are quite a few laptops at the ~1000$ price point with significantly better screens, such as the Zenbooks with OLED screens.
lostlogin 1y ago
Some of the Apple integrations are so great. Copy and paste between devices, airdrop, call handling and messaging, the notes app, preview app. PDF handling (my god is the windows default hot garbage in comparison). Yes, other apps and companies do this, but out the box there are some pretty great options from Apple.
- gigatexal 1y ago
  All very true! Seamless integration with my AirPods is really nice.
- blakblakarak 1y ago
  Using my IPad as a second monitor still feels like sorcery. I can have a dual monitor setup wherever I work without cables or fuss.
gigatexal 1y ago
This. My 2013 MacBook Pro lasted just shy of 10 years no issues. My m3 max mbpro I only wish was the larger screen one and not the 13 inch one … oh well. But I suspect it will last me — and be passed down as well — 8-10 years as well. The trackpads are second to none. So are the speakers. The screen are pretty good. I wish mine got even brighter but the m4s do. The keyboard is finally awesome. The OS just works. In fact I moved from Linux to MacOS. I thought I’d miss i3 and sway but with Magnet and a launcher I don’t. I live in a terminal and can split that as much as I like. And gui apps Magnet does a decent job. There are projects to go even further and you don’t have to leave MacOS for all the tiling love. https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst But I get basically everything I need with Magnet. So TLDR I used to be a huge Linux head (I still am…) but I’m practical now and tired and macOS is a small price to pay for such amazing hardware. More on why I left Linux as my main platform: https://gigatexal.blog/pages/no-perfect-workstation/no-perfect-workstation.html https://gigatexal.blog/pages/no-perfect-workstation/no-perfe...
- Doohickey-d 1y ago
  It's possible to increase the brightness in software on M1, by faking HDR (desktop capture -> scale brightness to HDR -> display). One example: https://www.brightintosh.de/ https://www.brightintosh.de/ but there's many others.
  - gigatexal 1y ago
    you just made my day I am so happy with this I could kiss you!* just saved me a bunch of coin cuz I was considering trading up for a m4 or otherwise to get better brightness amazing! * more a turn of phrase, a hug, a handshake, a thank you thank you thank you all suffice ;-) I insta bought the suggested app
    - sersi 1y ago
      Check out https://github.com/alin23/Lunar https://github.com/alin23/Lunar it's the most advanced app on mac when it comes to controlling screens
ozgrakkurt 1y ago
Screens are not really that good. My 600$ lenovo has a way better screen than my m1 pro 16”
- apfsx 1y ago
  What Lenovo model + screen option do you have that is better than the M1 Pro 16 inch screen? I've yet to see anything better.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    He doesn’t have nano texture, I can guarantee that. His screen probably has fingerprints and glare and all sorts of issues like visible pixels. I’ve owned a hell of a lot of laptops and MacBooks are the best, not because of Mac, but because of the build quality. The touchpad is perfect, the aluminum body is rugged, the screen is amazing, and the audio truly is sorcery thanks to Apple acquiring Beat’s audionet. The worst laptop for build quality were those HP Chromebooks. ThinkPad’s are mid tier but still made of plastic. Yoga foldable or a MS Surface is better. MSI or Razor if you don’t feel like ever touching your laptop (:fire:)
    - ezst 1y ago
      > He doesn’t have nano texture© […] His screen probably has fingerprints and glare and all sorts of issues like visible pixels. Thanks Tim, but I prefer my day without bullshit propaganda.
      - 7thpower 1y ago
        I didn’t think the M1s had that anyway.
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      "Visible pixels" are a total non-issue already on a 1080p screen, and a near-non issue on 768p. There's just no ambiguity about this, it's a matter of simple physics. Maybe you'll need to go up to a 1200p screen or thereabouts to cope with crappy rendering on the software side (allowing for a 0.7x factor or so in image spatial bandwidth/resolution due to lack of proper anti-aliasing), but anything above that is just plain overkill. Unless you like to look at tiny portions of your screen with a frickin' magnifying glass, of course.
ant6n 1y ago
> The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs. The screen is a mirrowy mess. PC Laptop with matte screens cost 500, MacBook 1500.
me551ah 1y ago
Also durability. I’m shocked that something that looks so good can withstand by downright abuse. I hold my MacBook Pro with one hand and fling it around and I’ve lost track of the number of times it has fallen down. But except for some chips at random places, it works perfectly fine
- goyagoji 1y ago
  I'm not really sure that's remarkable, maybe compared to the netbook level machines. Now that HDs are gone the only cause of failure I see from my coworkers is extended vacations and remote work in tropical climates.
  - goyagoji 1y ago
    Ah, I guess the point of the thread was to share only data points consistent with the distortion.
  - Brybry 1y ago
    I threw a 15" Dell laptop from the early aughts into a wall (for reasons I am not proud of), hard enough to put a hole in the sheet rock, and the laptop still worked fine. Cracked the plastic case a bit but that was it. The most amazing part to me was not the HDD surviving but the LCD backlight. This back was when they still used those super fragile thin CCFLs.
- pixxel 1y ago
  [dead]
Sayrus 1y ago
As a mostly Dell user I'd add the camera and microphone: the difference in quality on a standalone laptop is just mind blowing. Audio output can be tuned with the right equalizer profile but microphone filtering and camera quality just doesn't come anywhere close to a Macbook.
romanovcode 1y ago
> - The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it) It is my understanding that Apple did lock their trackpad tech behind a patent and that is why all the others suck. So it's really not their fault and it is very unfortunate if that's the case.
- garbagepatch 1y ago
  I'd like to see the others go for the tech behind the Steamdeck touchpads. That's way better.
wolvesechoes 1y ago
Guy is talking about laptop lasting for 5 years as not something that is special, and you respond with awesome sound quality. Apple threads are always so funny.
- pxc 1y ago
  The sound on MacBooks is impressively loud and clear, but it's also not actually good sound. Because it couldn't be, in that form factor. So for things where you actually care about good sound (i.e., music, movies, TV), you probably still want headphones or speakers anyway.
  - breakfastduck 1y ago
    it does actually sound good
    - pxc 1y ago
      If you bought even a small bluetooth speaker that sounded the same as an MBP, you'd think "this thing kinda sucks... no bass, but at least it's small; what do you expect". Either that or you aren't someone who cares about sound (which is fine)
      - blep-arsh 1y ago
        I have a stereo system with a DSP which I've spent quite a bit of time adjusting with tools like REW. I do care. I'm obviously adjusting my expectations because the laptop is indeed small but it really does sound great and I prefer it to typically boomy resonating bass-heavy tuning of small speakers. It's also very good at stereo separation, can even do behind-the-listener flyby from a Dolby Atmos test file.
      - KerrAvon 1y ago
        I’ll wager you have not listened to high-quality music or movies on a recent MacBook Pro. I’ve never heard a BT speaker of any size sound that good. (The HomePod Mini sounds quality really sucks by comparison, FWIW.)
realusername 1y ago
I agree for the screen and the audio but the trackpad on the mac is significantly different from any other laptop so you either love it or hate it. Personally I hate it and would rate it similarly as a cheap laptop. My brother loves it though.
- imcritic 1y ago
  What's there to hate in it?
  - realusername 1y ago
    It's hard to describe, when you never used a mac in your life, it feels weird with plenty of ghost inputs. To each their own but I really don't want my laptop to imitate that.
goosedragons 1y ago
The MBA screen is /alright/. It's better than a lot of Windows machines but you can get better for the price for sure. I'd argue the screens in the Surface line are comparable and arguably better, 3:2, brighter, 120Hz at basically the same price. And there's loads of 4K OLED Windows laptops if you're willing to pay for them. Apple screens also tend to have pretty bad response times too. They are sharp and color accurate but fall down in places.
- kelipso 1y ago
  Even the Air has a great builtin webcam, so I don’t have to carry around a webcam like I used to do with my old laptop (which is more than 8 years old and I still use because it has replaceable batteries and ssd lol).
  - goosedragons 1y ago
    Somewhat unfair since it's technically a tablet, but the Surface Pro webcam is very very good.
- blep-arsh 1y ago
  Laptop OLEDs aren't usually the best wrt color accuracy and uniformity. I've tried two. One had green splotches across the screen, the other just displays a certain range of gray shades with a green tint (so e.g. a black-to-white gradient test image has a green band in the middle). And there's always a static noise pattern of sorts due to non-uniform pixel brightness.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
baq 1y ago
Also add a very important feature of ‘lid is closed - the computer is asleep and it wakes up when lid opens’. Both windows and Linux are simply broken in that regard. What I need is Apple MacBook hardware with a 100% supported Linux OS. This combination simply doesn’t exist and there’s no amount of money to make it happen (yes I know about asahi.)
- rjzzleep 1y ago
  It's not really Linux' fault. Most It's Microsoft that forced this, and most vendors don't know how to deal with this and work proper firmware. I think Framework and Valve fixed theirs. I have a GPD and just found out that the reason I kept getting it wake from sleep was some MS related option triggering an ACPI IRQ 9 sleep wake. On another note, I actually think that the most important things that work better on the Apple devices is the mic and camera, the rest is somewhat unimportant on the go if you work at a desk.
  - baq 1y ago
    As a user I don't care whose fault is it. I want my laptop to go to sleep when I close the lid; I want it to stay asleep while the lid is closed; I want it to wake when I open the lid. Only macs seem to be able to do that consistently; I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but over the past decade I haven't found a counterexample yet.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - mrj 1y ago
      I’ve never had a problem with a system76 or tuxedo computers laptop using suspend correctly. If you want it to just work, you may need to buy from a manufacturer who you pay to make it just work. Otherwise you’re comparing a dyi setup to Apple.
    - commandersaki 1y ago
      I don't think that's even true with my m3 mbp16. I haven't tweaked with the power settings but I'm pretty sure it is in a connected sleep state when I close the lid; at least when I'm hotspotting my phone will register it as a connected device.
kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
Interestingly, I really don't like MacBook trackpads. The actuation force is too high for my taste. Maybe this has changed.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  It's adjustable
- proee 1y ago
  I always just enable tap to click and also adjust the speed to max. Once your brain gets use to this it works great (for me).
- KerrAvon 1y ago
  That’s controlled entirely by software, and you can lower it or raise it if you so desire.
  - kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
    Oh! Well, either way, I'm not interested in Apple products because of their stances on repairability.
- manaskarekar 1y ago
  And they're too large. I know, super unpopular opinion. I prefer the middle of the road size on trackpads with the physical buttons form the dell latitudes of 2010s. They work remarkably well with linux too. The clickpads are pretty imprecise and poor, and compared to this the Macbook is much nicer.
rangestransform 1y ago
The audio is magic because Apple overdrives their speakers by analyzing the signal to stay under the sustained power limit of the speaker, instead of clipping everything at the sustained power limit. https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-better-and-louder-than-most/98323 https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-...
- woleium 1y ago
  so someone could write an app for windows to do the same thing?
  - LorenDB 1y ago
    Asahi Linux already is doing it for Linux: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio
- elcritch 1y ago
  I'd argue they're technically not over-driving them if the speakers survive and work well. Rather it's that other vendors are under driving their speakers by using a simplistic algorithm. Apple is actually driving their speakers closer to their actual physical limits which are driven by average power not peak momentary power.
  - pjerem 1y ago
    Actually they do over drive them. I think it is explained in the asahi sound driver GitHub which reverse engineered the Apple driver. IIRC, there is an algorithm which overdrives the speakers in physically dangerous zones only on some frequencies and only in short bursts of time with a throttle until the next over drive if necessary. For the user it’s transparent because we are talking about timings in milliseconds so except if you play a static frequency you can’t notice anything. Asahi explained that they had to reverse engineer this because they didn’t understand why the sound was so bad on Linux.
winrid 1y ago
Apple screens are terrible. They use PWM at all brightness levels just to save a couple bucks and burn my eyes.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zackify 1y ago
The trackpad still cannot be beaten. Please someone show me one that can compare haha
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  If we're going into those details, are touchscreens beaten ?

by pjerem 1y ago

sudosysgen 1y ago

The screen point is just not true anymore. There are quite a few laptops at the ~1000$ price point with significantly better screens, such as the Zenbooks with OLED screens.

lostlogin 1y ago

Some of the Apple integrations are so great. Copy and paste between devices, airdrop, call handling and messaging, the notes app, preview app. PDF handling (my god is the windows default hot garbage in comparison). Yes, other apps and companies do this, but out the box there are some pretty great options from Apple.

gigatexal 1y ago
All very true! Seamless integration with my AirPods is really nice.
blakblakarak 1y ago
Using my IPad as a second monitor still feels like sorcery. I can have a dual monitor setup wherever I work without cables or fuss.

gigatexal 1y ago

This. My 2013 MacBook Pro lasted just shy of 10 years no issues. My m3 max mbpro I only wish was the larger screen one and not the 13 inch one … oh well. But I suspect it will last me — and be passed down as well — 8-10 years as well. The trackpads are second to none. So are the speakers. The screen are pretty good. I wish mine got even brighter but the m4s do. The keyboard is finally awesome. The OS just works. In fact I moved from Linux to MacOS. I thought I’d miss i3 and sway but with Magnet and a launcher I don’t. I live in a terminal and can split that as much as I like. And gui apps Magnet does a decent job. There are projects to go even further and you don’t have to leave MacOS for all the tiling love. https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst But I get basically everything I need with Magnet. So TLDR I used to be a huge Linux head (I still am…) but I’m practical now and tired and macOS is a small price to pay for such amazing hardware. More on why I left Linux as my main platform: https://gigatexal.blog/pages/no-perfect-workstation/no-perfect-workstation.html https://gigatexal.blog/pages/no-perfect-workstation/no-perfe...

Doohickey-d 1y ago
It's possible to increase the brightness in software on M1, by faking HDR (desktop capture -> scale brightness to HDR -> display). One example: https://www.brightintosh.de/ https://www.brightintosh.de/ but there's many others.
- gigatexal 1y ago
  you just made my day I am so happy with this I could kiss you!* just saved me a bunch of coin cuz I was considering trading up for a m4 or otherwise to get better brightness amazing! * more a turn of phrase, a hug, a handshake, a thank you thank you thank you all suffice ;-) I insta bought the suggested app
  - sersi 1y ago
    Check out https://github.com/alin23/Lunar https://github.com/alin23/Lunar it's the most advanced app on mac when it comes to controlling screens

ozgrakkurt 1y ago

Screens are not really that good. My 600$ lenovo has a way better screen than my m1 pro 16”

apfsx 1y ago
What Lenovo model + screen option do you have that is better than the M1 Pro 16 inch screen? I've yet to see anything better.
- reactordev 1y ago
  He doesn’t have nano texture, I can guarantee that. His screen probably has fingerprints and glare and all sorts of issues like visible pixels. I’ve owned a hell of a lot of laptops and MacBooks are the best, not because of Mac, but because of the build quality. The touchpad is perfect, the aluminum body is rugged, the screen is amazing, and the audio truly is sorcery thanks to Apple acquiring Beat’s audionet. The worst laptop for build quality were those HP Chromebooks. ThinkPad’s are mid tier but still made of plastic. Yoga foldable or a MS Surface is better. MSI or Razor if you don’t feel like ever touching your laptop (:fire:)
  - ezst 1y ago
    > He doesn’t have nano texture© […] His screen probably has fingerprints and glare and all sorts of issues like visible pixels. Thanks Tim, but I prefer my day without bullshit propaganda.
    - 7thpower 1y ago
      I didn’t think the M1s had that anyway.
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    "Visible pixels" are a total non-issue already on a 1080p screen, and a near-non issue on 768p. There's just no ambiguity about this, it's a matter of simple physics. Maybe you'll need to go up to a 1200p screen or thereabouts to cope with crappy rendering on the software side (allowing for a 0.7x factor or so in image spatial bandwidth/resolution due to lack of proper anti-aliasing), but anything above that is just plain overkill. Unless you like to look at tiny portions of your screen with a frickin' magnifying glass, of course.

ant6n 1y ago

> The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs. The screen is a mirrowy mess. PC Laptop with matte screens cost 500, MacBook 1500.

me551ah 1y ago

Also durability. I’m shocked that something that looks so good can withstand by downright abuse. I hold my MacBook Pro with one hand and fling it around and I’ve lost track of the number of times it has fallen down. But except for some chips at random places, it works perfectly fine

goyagoji 1y ago
I'm not really sure that's remarkable, maybe compared to the netbook level machines. Now that HDs are gone the only cause of failure I see from my coworkers is extended vacations and remote work in tropical climates.
- goyagoji 1y ago
  Ah, I guess the point of the thread was to share only data points consistent with the distortion.
- Brybry 1y ago
  I threw a 15" Dell laptop from the early aughts into a wall (for reasons I am not proud of), hard enough to put a hole in the sheet rock, and the laptop still worked fine. Cracked the plastic case a bit but that was it. The most amazing part to me was not the HDD surviving but the LCD backlight. This back was when they still used those super fragile thin CCFLs.
pixxel 1y ago
[dead]

Sayrus 1y ago

As a mostly Dell user I'd add the camera and microphone: the difference in quality on a standalone laptop is just mind blowing. Audio output can be tuned with the right equalizer profile but microphone filtering and camera quality just doesn't come anywhere close to a Macbook.

romanovcode 1y ago

> - The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it) It is my understanding that Apple did lock their trackpad tech behind a patent and that is why all the others suck. So it's really not their fault and it is very unfortunate if that's the case.

garbagepatch 1y ago
I'd like to see the others go for the tech behind the Steamdeck touchpads. That's way better.

wolvesechoes 1y ago

Guy is talking about laptop lasting for 5 years as not something that is special, and you respond with awesome sound quality. Apple threads are always so funny.

pxc 1y ago
The sound on MacBooks is impressively loud and clear, but it's also not actually good sound. Because it couldn't be, in that form factor. So for things where you actually care about good sound (i.e., music, movies, TV), you probably still want headphones or speakers anyway.
- breakfastduck 1y ago
  it does actually sound good
  - pxc 1y ago
    If you bought even a small bluetooth speaker that sounded the same as an MBP, you'd think "this thing kinda sucks... no bass, but at least it's small; what do you expect". Either that or you aren't someone who cares about sound (which is fine)
    - blep-arsh 1y ago
      I have a stereo system with a DSP which I've spent quite a bit of time adjusting with tools like REW. I do care. I'm obviously adjusting my expectations because the laptop is indeed small but it really does sound great and I prefer it to typically boomy resonating bass-heavy tuning of small speakers. It's also very good at stereo separation, can even do behind-the-listener flyby from a Dolby Atmos test file.
    - KerrAvon 1y ago
      I’ll wager you have not listened to high-quality music or movies on a recent MacBook Pro. I’ve never heard a BT speaker of any size sound that good. (The HomePod Mini sounds quality really sucks by comparison, FWIW.)

realusername 1y ago

I agree for the screen and the audio but the trackpad on the mac is significantly different from any other laptop so you either love it or hate it. Personally I hate it and would rate it similarly as a cheap laptop. My brother loves it though.

imcritic 1y ago
What's there to hate in it?
- realusername 1y ago
  It's hard to describe, when you never used a mac in your life, it feels weird with plenty of ghost inputs. To each their own but I really don't want my laptop to imitate that.

goosedragons 1y ago

The MBA screen is /alright/. It's better than a lot of Windows machines but you can get better for the price for sure. I'd argue the screens in the Surface line are comparable and arguably better, 3:2, brighter, 120Hz at basically the same price. And there's loads of 4K OLED Windows laptops if you're willing to pay for them. Apple screens also tend to have pretty bad response times too. They are sharp and color accurate but fall down in places.

kelipso 1y ago
Even the Air has a great builtin webcam, so I don’t have to carry around a webcam like I used to do with my old laptop (which is more than 8 years old and I still use because it has replaceable batteries and ssd lol).
- goosedragons 1y ago
  Somewhat unfair since it's technically a tablet, but the Surface Pro webcam is very very good.
blep-arsh 1y ago
Laptop OLEDs aren't usually the best wrt color accuracy and uniformity. I've tried two. One had green splotches across the screen, the other just displays a certain range of gray shades with a green tint (so e.g. a black-to-white gradient test image has a green band in the middle). And there's always a static noise pattern of sorts due to non-uniform pixel brightness.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

baq 1y ago

Also add a very important feature of ‘lid is closed - the computer is asleep and it wakes up when lid opens’. Both windows and Linux are simply broken in that regard. What I need is Apple MacBook hardware with a 100% supported Linux OS. This combination simply doesn’t exist and there’s no amount of money to make it happen (yes I know about asahi.)

rjzzleep 1y ago
It's not really Linux' fault. Most It's Microsoft that forced this, and most vendors don't know how to deal with this and work proper firmware. I think Framework and Valve fixed theirs. I have a GPD and just found out that the reason I kept getting it wake from sleep was some MS related option triggering an ACPI IRQ 9 sleep wake. On another note, I actually think that the most important things that work better on the Apple devices is the mic and camera, the rest is somewhat unimportant on the go if you work at a desk.
- baq 1y ago
  As a user I don't care whose fault is it. I want my laptop to go to sleep when I close the lid; I want it to stay asleep while the lid is closed; I want it to wake when I open the lid. Only macs seem to be able to do that consistently; I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but over the past decade I haven't found a counterexample yet.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrj 1y ago
    I’ve never had a problem with a system76 or tuxedo computers laptop using suspend correctly. If you want it to just work, you may need to buy from a manufacturer who you pay to make it just work. Otherwise you’re comparing a dyi setup to Apple.
  - commandersaki 1y ago
    I don't think that's even true with my m3 mbp16. I haven't tweaked with the power settings but I'm pretty sure it is in a connected sleep state when I close the lid; at least when I'm hotspotting my phone will register it as a connected device.

kaladin-jasnah 1y ago

Interestingly, I really don't like MacBook trackpads. The actuation force is too high for my taste. Maybe this has changed.

chrisweekly 1y ago
It's adjustable
proee 1y ago
I always just enable tap to click and also adjust the speed to max. Once your brain gets use to this it works great (for me).
KerrAvon 1y ago
That’s controlled entirely by software, and you can lower it or raise it if you so desire.
- kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
  Oh! Well, either way, I'm not interested in Apple products because of their stances on repairability.
manaskarekar 1y ago
And they're too large. I know, super unpopular opinion. I prefer the middle of the road size on trackpads with the physical buttons form the dell latitudes of 2010s. They work remarkably well with linux too. The clickpads are pretty imprecise and poor, and compared to this the Macbook is much nicer.

rangestransform 1y ago

The audio is magic because Apple overdrives their speakers by analyzing the signal to stay under the sustained power limit of the speaker, instead of clipping everything at the sustained power limit. https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-better-and-louder-than-most/98323 https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-...

woleium 1y ago
so someone could write an app for windows to do the same thing?
- LorenDB 1y ago
  Asahi Linux already is doing it for Linux: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio
elcritch 1y ago
I'd argue they're technically not over-driving them if the speakers survive and work well. Rather it's that other vendors are under driving their speakers by using a simplistic algorithm. Apple is actually driving their speakers closer to their actual physical limits which are driven by average power not peak momentary power.
- pjerem 1y ago
  Actually they do over drive them. I think it is explained in the asahi sound driver GitHub which reverse engineered the Apple driver. IIRC, there is an algorithm which overdrives the speakers in physically dangerous zones only on some frequencies and only in short bursts of time with a throttle until the next over drive if necessary. For the user it’s transparent because we are talking about timings in milliseconds so except if you play a static frequency you can’t notice anything. Asahi explained that they had to reverse engineer this because they didn’t understand why the sound was so bad on Linux.

winrid 1y ago

Apple screens are terrible. They use PWM at all brightness levels just to save a couple bucks and burn my eyes.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

zackify 1y ago

The trackpad still cannot be beaten. Please someone show me one that can compare haha

makeitdouble 1y ago
If we're going into those details, are touchscreens beaten ?