11 ms·

I wouldn't buy another Apple product either. Between a MacBook Pro which caught fire, an AirPort which melted, an iMac which the backlight went on and a MacBook

by meaty 14y ago

I wouldn't buy another Apple product either. Between a MacBook Pro which caught fire, an AirPort which melted, an iMac which the backlight went on and a MacBook which had to go back 4 times (!) due to logic board problems, it scares the shit out of me parting with that sort of cash and actually depending on it. The muppets at the "genius bar" (retard shelf as we call it now) aren't exactly helpful and usher you away so other people don't hear about it as well. I now buy OLD Lenovo machines (T61 series) and chuck Debian on them. I buy two at a time and stick a (Samsung) SSD in them for less than half the cost of an MBP. One lives in the cupboard as a backup. I have a few spare batteries (9-cell and Ultrabay) sitting around as well. Also, I find it objectionable purchasing anything that doesn't have a way of isolating the power either i.e. removing the battery. One short on a LiPoly pack and your tech gadget turns neatly into an incendiary device, which is what happened to my 2010 MBP. It nearly burned my house down. I genuinely don't get all these people who think they are soundly engineered. They are expensive trinkets with no engineering applied past appearance.

astrodust 14y ago
Although you might have requirements that aren't met by Apple's products, such as wanting a removable battery, to call them "expensive trinkets" with "no engineering" is absurd. Apple's work on the unibody case is but one example of how they're pushing manufacturing technology as far as it can go today. Other vendors are content to stamp out the same old plastic clamshell, to fit in the same old motherboard and optical drive, whatever's cheapest and quickest. With the exception of Sony and HP, few companies even try to do what Apple's doing.
- meaty 14y ago
  Ahh yes the unibody which is basically a fucking big short circuit, hence why mine caught fire. It's engineering, but it's not SOUND ENGINEERING. I stand by my expensive trinket comment. Buy a Lenovo T-series and you'll understand.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    You're essentially saying that any computer with a metal case, or extensive metal shielding inside could suffer the same problem. HP makes a number of metal laptops, for instance, in an effort to make them more recyclable, the same reasoning behind Apple's materials decision. Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. I hope they've improved the trackpad because those were nearly unusable before. I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing.
    - Breakthrough 14y ago
      "The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing." Maybe you should get your head out of the gutter and realize a laptop isn't deemed "good" because it's an alternative to "what Apple's doing". Edit: And to whoever downvoted this, thank you for proving my point.
      - meaty 14y ago
        You nailed it. The pretty factor is not at all important, neither is blindly copying a vendor.
        astrodust 14y ago
        I guess I should be wearing shoes made from truck tires and old seatbelts, shirts made from recycled canvas bags, and underpants made from old rags because who cares about appearances.
        meaty 14y ago
        No you should buy shirts made of cotton, not tinfoil is what I'm suggesting.
        14y ago
- karolist 14y ago
  I have Lenovo T420 as work laptop, it costs nearly as much as my unibody 13" MBP did in 2010, except it has a shitty trackpad, keyboard (which isn't backlit, instead they have this useless lamp at the top of the screen), the screen doesn't have auto-brightness which I consider a must now and it overall has this cheap, plastic feel to it. The top border of the display separated from it's backing after a couple months (and I'm usually gentle with my tech), the optical drive eject button is positioned in such a way that you always accidentally trigger the open action - everyone at my job has this problem, I think it's because the eject button is the right most object on the side and very easily pushed. If I paid that much of my own money I'd be very pissed. Given my experience, I will not be buying Lenovo machines. Dell however was quite a nice workhorse, still not in the same category as MBPs though.
michael_miller 14y ago
It sounds like you had some bad experiences, but do you really think that Apple makes products with "no engineering applied past experience"? Surely Apple's products have had faults, and it sounds like you've been bitten more than once. I don't blame you for not liking the company or its products. However, there are lots of satisfied customers, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believed that their build process and supply chain is not top notch. FWIW, whenever I've had any trouble with getting support for Apple products, an email to sjobs@apple.com (now tcook@) solved the problem promptly. In my experience, the company does screw up, but if you bring a problem to their attention, they'll make it right.
- meaty 14y ago
  Yes I do - they are shit, so is their engineering and I'm not afraid to go against the grain and say it. I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer i.e. most of the praise comes from new users with shiny toys. My father has just been screwed by his 1st gen iPad because some of the apps will no longer install and IOS6 is not available (to the trash it goes), his white iPhone 4S has proximity sensor issues to the point it's unusable and they refuse to repair it, my boss's MBP LCD inverter melted, we've got a cupboard full of 7 dead Mac Minis in the office, the old optical mice just didn't work (the one with the little ball) or the logic board fell out inside and lets not even mention the time capsule saga or the OSX update which fucked the filesystems on lots of machines (10.5.3). There is a whole million miles of these problems out there and so far it's usually kept covered by the reality distortion field. Build process fine. Supply chain fine. But the inputs to those is unadulterated crap. Fuck, I don't want to have to complain - I want something to just work with no problems. Screw sjobs@ / tcook@ pandering. Just make some shit that works.
  - eropple 14y ago
    > I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer Four MBPs, including a retina MBP. Couldn't be happier. Two iPads and two iPhones, switched to Android largely because of a new job and because I wanted a local environment for running vim. See? Other people have anecdotes too. But I get that contrariness and the application of your own pet anecdotes over evidence is really fun, so continue, by all means.
lgbr 14y ago
I've been doing the exact same thing for years. I now use a T61p. It's amazing that these things are around $200 on eBay. The Linux support is fantastic, and the laptop is powerful enough to even brand new games. The 1920x1200 resolution yields 147 PPI, which is as high as laptops go without getting Apple's retina display. I like having a fast laptop that I really don't have to fiddle with and costs a small fraction of what you buy an MBP for. And my warranty plan? If a laptop breaks (this has never happened, mind you), a replacement laptop is less than the cost of AppleCare itself.
marknutter 14y ago
As anecdotal as anecdotal evidence ever was.
- meaty 14y ago
  A fucking large pile of expensive broken shit that just packed in is not anecdotal - it's known as evidence.
  - Apocryphon 14y ago
    It is evidence for you, personally, yes. However, in aggregate, for all consumers, it is anecdata. There are people who swear by the opposite experience, of years of bad issues with non-Apple tech until they switched over. The ultimate problem with this discussion is that yours is only one data point, when a full survey would be required to determine which manufacturer is best. At the same time, sympathies for your bad experiences and best of luck with the new tech.
    - marknutter 14y ago
      surveys like this one: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20108336-17/apple-tops-in-customer-satisfaction-for-8th-year/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20108336-17/apple-tops-in-...
      - Apocryphon 14y ago
        The people have spoken. I wonder how often these studies are taken- annually? Quarterly? It'd be neat if they were done frequently, rather like polls during campaign season. Maybe a month or two after major product launches to gauge if satisfaction has changed.
      - Maascamp 14y ago
        To rebut his claim though you'd need a survey asking people how many times they've had faulty components/hardware. Not how good they feel about the supplier.
gnaffle 14y ago
They are soundly engineered, but quality control leaves something to be desired. If you don't think the engineering is applied past appearance, open one up and see for yourself.
Symmetry 14y ago
While Apple may tend to cut corners in reliability, they generally aren't doing it to out of laziness or to save money but rather to make their products smaller, lighter, and smoother. It takes a lot of effort on the part of designers to squeeze functionality into a size and weight budget, just as much as to make something reliable, and I think that saying that "no engineering was applied past appearance" is horribly unfair. Now, not everybody is OK with trading off reliability for those things. My friend who worked on an Apple product in some capacity[1] was horrified at what they were doing and warned me never to get the Apple product they worked on for this reason. But I did anyways because of the shiny, and despite the fact that it did end up breaking down in the way they warned about I don't actually regret it. [1] I'm being paranoidly vague here since they broke an NDA telling me this and Apple is renowned for being litigious about these things.
driverdan 14y ago
Don't act like the T6x series was perfect, they had plenty of issues too. They used cheap coils that would squeal when running on battery power. The heat sink fan is a cheap design and fails frequently. I had to replace mine 3 times with remaned ones because they don't sell them new anymore. The battery life is poor compared to MacBooks, even with the giant extended battery that sticks way off the back. Their weight (mid to upper 5 lbs) is heavy compared to rMBP and Airs. This isn't even factoring in their performance vs newer laptops.
beala 14y ago
You've had four different products that have either melted, caught fire, or suffered hardware failures? Are you sure it's not an issue with the power coming out of your outlets? Perhaps the Lenovos have better power filtering, but by the sound of it, you're pretty paranoid about those failing, too.
- meaty 14y ago
  The power is fine. Everything computer-wise comes off the back off a large APC UPS. Nothing but apple kit has ever failed on it. Regarding owning two, its because I don't put all my eggs in one basket. Why buy one when you can have two for twice the cost.
  - mturmon 14y ago
    Thus, apparently you should continue to use Lenovo T61s running off a UPS. Enjoy your path.

by meaty 14y ago

astrodust 14y ago

Although you might have requirements that aren't met by Apple's products, such as wanting a removable battery, to call them "expensive trinkets" with "no engineering" is absurd. Apple's work on the unibody case is but one example of how they're pushing manufacturing technology as far as it can go today. Other vendors are content to stamp out the same old plastic clamshell, to fit in the same old motherboard and optical drive, whatever's cheapest and quickest. With the exception of Sony and HP, few companies even try to do what Apple's doing.

meaty 14y ago
Ahh yes the unibody which is basically a fucking big short circuit, hence why mine caught fire. It's engineering, but it's not SOUND ENGINEERING. I stand by my expensive trinket comment. Buy a Lenovo T-series and you'll understand.
- astrodust 14y ago
  You're essentially saying that any computer with a metal case, or extensive metal shielding inside could suffer the same problem. HP makes a number of metal laptops, for instance, in an effort to make them more recyclable, the same reasoning behind Apple's materials decision. Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. I hope they've improved the trackpad because those were nearly unusable before. I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing.
  - Breakthrough 14y ago
    "The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing." Maybe you should get your head out of the gutter and realize a laptop isn't deemed "good" because it's an alternative to "what Apple's doing". Edit: And to whoever downvoted this, thank you for proving my point.
    - meaty 14y ago
      You nailed it. The pretty factor is not at all important, neither is blindly copying a vendor.
      - astrodust 14y ago
        I guess I should be wearing shoes made from truck tires and old seatbelts, shirts made from recycled canvas bags, and underpants made from old rags because who cares about appearances.
        meaty 14y ago
        No you should buy shirts made of cotton, not tinfoil is what I'm suggesting.
        14y ago
karolist 14y ago
I have Lenovo T420 as work laptop, it costs nearly as much as my unibody 13" MBP did in 2010, except it has a shitty trackpad, keyboard (which isn't backlit, instead they have this useless lamp at the top of the screen), the screen doesn't have auto-brightness which I consider a must now and it overall has this cheap, plastic feel to it. The top border of the display separated from it's backing after a couple months (and I'm usually gentle with my tech), the optical drive eject button is positioned in such a way that you always accidentally trigger the open action - everyone at my job has this problem, I think it's because the eject button is the right most object on the side and very easily pushed. If I paid that much of my own money I'd be very pissed. Given my experience, I will not be buying Lenovo machines. Dell however was quite a nice workhorse, still not in the same category as MBPs though.

michael_miller 14y ago

It sounds like you had some bad experiences, but do you really think that Apple makes products with "no engineering applied past experience"? Surely Apple's products have had faults, and it sounds like you've been bitten more than once. I don't blame you for not liking the company or its products. However, there are lots of satisfied customers, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believed that their build process and supply chain is not top notch. FWIW, whenever I've had any trouble with getting support for Apple products, an email to sjobs@apple.com (now tcook@) solved the problem promptly. In my experience, the company does screw up, but if you bring a problem to their attention, they'll make it right.

meaty 14y ago
Yes I do - they are shit, so is their engineering and I'm not afraid to go against the grain and say it. I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer i.e. most of the praise comes from new users with shiny toys. My father has just been screwed by his 1st gen iPad because some of the apps will no longer install and IOS6 is not available (to the trash it goes), his white iPhone 4S has proximity sensor issues to the point it's unusable and they refuse to repair it, my boss's MBP LCD inverter melted, we've got a cupboard full of 7 dead Mac Minis in the office, the old optical mice just didn't work (the one with the little ball) or the logic board fell out inside and lets not even mention the time capsule saga or the OSX update which fucked the filesystems on lots of machines (10.5.3). There is a whole million miles of these problems out there and so far it's usually kept covered by the reality distortion field. Build process fine. Supply chain fine. But the inputs to those is unadulterated crap. Fuck, I don't want to have to complain - I want something to just work with no problems. Screw sjobs@ / tcook@ pandering. Just make some shit that works.
- eropple 14y ago
  > I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer Four MBPs, including a retina MBP. Couldn't be happier. Two iPads and two iPhones, switched to Android largely because of a new job and because I wanted a local environment for running vim. See? Other people have anecdotes too. But I get that contrariness and the application of your own pet anecdotes over evidence is really fun, so continue, by all means.

lgbr 14y ago

I've been doing the exact same thing for years. I now use a T61p. It's amazing that these things are around $200 on eBay. The Linux support is fantastic, and the laptop is powerful enough to even brand new games. The 1920x1200 resolution yields 147 PPI, which is as high as laptops go without getting Apple's retina display. I like having a fast laptop that I really don't have to fiddle with and costs a small fraction of what you buy an MBP for. And my warranty plan? If a laptop breaks (this has never happened, mind you), a replacement laptop is less than the cost of AppleCare itself.

marknutter 14y ago

As anecdotal as anecdotal evidence ever was.

meaty 14y ago
A fucking large pile of expensive broken shit that just packed in is not anecdotal - it's known as evidence.
- Apocryphon 14y ago
  It is evidence for you, personally, yes. However, in aggregate, for all consumers, it is anecdata. There are people who swear by the opposite experience, of years of bad issues with non-Apple tech until they switched over. The ultimate problem with this discussion is that yours is only one data point, when a full survey would be required to determine which manufacturer is best. At the same time, sympathies for your bad experiences and best of luck with the new tech.
  - marknutter 14y ago
    surveys like this one: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20108336-17/apple-tops-in-customer-satisfaction-for-8th-year/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20108336-17/apple-tops-in-...
    - Apocryphon 14y ago
      The people have spoken. I wonder how often these studies are taken- annually? Quarterly? It'd be neat if they were done frequently, rather like polls during campaign season. Maybe a month or two after major product launches to gauge if satisfaction has changed.
    - Maascamp 14y ago
      To rebut his claim though you'd need a survey asking people how many times they've had faulty components/hardware. Not how good they feel about the supplier.

gnaffle 14y ago

They are soundly engineered, but quality control leaves something to be desired. If you don't think the engineering is applied past appearance, open one up and see for yourself.

Symmetry 14y ago

While Apple may tend to cut corners in reliability, they generally aren't doing it to out of laziness or to save money but rather to make their products smaller, lighter, and smoother. It takes a lot of effort on the part of designers to squeeze functionality into a size and weight budget, just as much as to make something reliable, and I think that saying that "no engineering was applied past appearance" is horribly unfair. Now, not everybody is OK with trading off reliability for those things. My friend who worked on an Apple product in some capacity[1] was horrified at what they were doing and warned me never to get the Apple product they worked on for this reason. But I did anyways because of the shiny, and despite the fact that it did end up breaking down in the way they warned about I don't actually regret it. [1] I'm being paranoidly vague here since they broke an NDA telling me this and Apple is renowned for being litigious about these things.

driverdan 14y ago

Don't act like the T6x series was perfect, they had plenty of issues too. They used cheap coils that would squeal when running on battery power. The heat sink fan is a cheap design and fails frequently. I had to replace mine 3 times with remaned ones because they don't sell them new anymore. The battery life is poor compared to MacBooks, even with the giant extended battery that sticks way off the back. Their weight (mid to upper 5 lbs) is heavy compared to rMBP and Airs. This isn't even factoring in their performance vs newer laptops.

beala 14y ago

You've had four different products that have either melted, caught fire, or suffered hardware failures? Are you sure it's not an issue with the power coming out of your outlets? Perhaps the Lenovos have better power filtering, but by the sound of it, you're pretty paranoid about those failing, too.

meaty 14y ago
The power is fine. Everything computer-wise comes off the back off a large APC UPS. Nothing but apple kit has ever failed on it. Regarding owning two, its because I don't put all my eggs in one basket. Why buy one when you can have two for twice the cost.
- mturmon 14y ago
  Thus, apparently you should continue to use Lenovo T61s running off a UPS. Enjoy your path.