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.
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.
I upgraded from a 2015 MBP with 16gb of ram to a M3 Pro with 36gb. It’s a night and day difference, the machine is much more responsive and I mainly use it 30 min a day, or sometimes for a few hours in a row. And charge about once per week, getting about 14hr battery life.
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.
Modern SSDs are resilient enough that most people will never wear them out with anything resembling a normal workload. Unless you're constantly swapping for several hours a day, it just isn't going to matter.
That's a conservative estimation of the lifespan (how hard you can hit it while maintaining a very low probability of SSD failure). The more interesting question is "How likely after n years is the SSD to be the first non-replaceable component to fail on this laptop?" I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm guessing it's a good long while before the answer to it goes above 0.5.
Apple have been shipping laptops with non-replaceable SSDs since around 2017. Anecdotally, we hear so much worrying about potential future SSD failure, and yet so few people saying things like "I bought an M1 Air two years ago and now the SSD has died".
SLC makes sense for almost zero use cases, even in a data center. It's simply the wrong tradeoff between capacity and performance. It's not enshittification that you can now have a cheap multi-TB SSD to hold a large collection of movies and games and still have an SLC cache for the small portion of your data that isn't mostly static.
My current and previous MacBooks have had 16GB and I've been fine with it, but given local LLMs I think I'm going to have to go to whatever will be the maximum RAM available for the next model.
Similarly, I am for the first time going to care about how much RAM is in my next iPhone. My iPhone 13's 4GB is suddenly inadequate.
My MacBook Pro M3 has 36GiB RAM and does all of the comment above + music producing (dozens of VSTs on some 1-2 dozens tracks) + projection mapping and can run some LLM models locally like the Mistral ones.
I've only managed to hear the fan when chatting with a LLM, for anything else it's been an absolutely silent beast.
I have M2 Pro 16GB from a client. It's comfortable for typical dev work - tons of tabs open, Docker, VS Code etc. Though the swap is about 20GB now and sometimes it lags. Still it beats any Intel or AMD laptop I ever had in terms of performance. This machine is on a whole another level.
My own machines are M1 Max 32GB and they fare slightly better.
I have an M2 Air with 24gb and it has no problems running Brave with 800-ish tabs, development workloads (a bunch of VSCode projects, several docker containers, lots of iTerm terminals), low-end CAD and 3D printing apps, CaptureOne and a bunch of Electron apps in parallel with room to spare. I've found I can fit more into those 24gb than into the 32gb of the Intel Mac I had before that (however that's possible).
Almost all of them have already been read and are waiting for me to build something to pull the links out of Brave and download/archive/index them somehow. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but haven't yet.
It would be quicker to manually move the URLs to a text file, then supply that as input to a tool like wget. However, you will almost certainly end up with either un-necessarily bloated files, or saved sites that don't quite work.
I still stand by the spirit of my original comment - there probably isn't enough information content in your 800 tabs to make this endeavour worthwhile.
Why am I not surprised that an apple fan uses Brave - a browser that offers literally nothing but 100% false claims of improved privacy and performance?
I have to use macbooks at work, and they do bother me. The mirror-finish screen always reflects bright lights into my eyes, be it a window or a ceiling light at a distance. The OS is thankfully a certified Unix, but the GUI, while having a few brilliant features, also has warts like no way to align or snap windows, apps running without a window, with only a menu bar, with a window from a different app showing, etc. This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle.
Of course, Windows is even worse in the GUI department, there's no comparison.
So, sadly, a Macbook remains the most sane computer for non-technical people :(
> This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle.
I read that Apple follows a document model, where the application is kinda a background thing a window is supposed to be for a specific task. Not like Windows where the main windows is the hub of interaction. So you use CMD + <backquote> to switch between these tasks and CMD + TAB for switching between applications. The menu bar is part of the application, but windows can modify it to suit the focused tasks.
I've used Rectangle for quick window management, but in time I've come to understand the philosophy so it does not bother me as much. It's more leaned into the desktop analogy than other OS.
My earliest exposure to computers was a Mac (though Windows, Linux, and BeOS also came into the picture fairly early on) and I don’t find the Mac model the least bit problematic. On the contrary, I find the Win9X model overly simplistic and unmanageable past a small handful of windows.
I agree with your misgivings about window management in MacOS. The way Windows does it is so much more intuitive.
For window snapping, there are countless apps that will easy solve your problem. But I get why you would struggle - I still get frustrated at times with the way MacOS works.
Just download Rectangle for free. I recently switched from Dell XPS to M3 Pro and that was my gripe to. One install and it's much better, moving windows with ctrl+opt+arrows is also close to Windows and makes it fairly usable.
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.
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.
You can technically get "more technical specs" for the money but the actual experience of using a TP will never be even close to a MBA. This is coming from someone who's used a T14, T14, a few yogas, and currently use a P14 for work.
The last point of TPs using loud and hot Intel CPUs cannot be understated. The P14 throttles so hard when I'm trying to do any work because it's using some sh*t Comet Lake U-series, that I literally breathe a sigh of relief when I can use my desktop computer that doesn't hang up every time I load up IntelliJ. MBs are so efficient for the power profile it runs circles around any x86 mobile CPU when on battery.
Obviously I've had 10x better experience with a trusty Ryzen 5600U over that Intel CPU. But still nothing close to a MB. Also the TP trackpads are sand paper garbage.
The Ryzen Thinkpads are the thing to beat for the 2020s. I don't want a $1,800 glass art installation that requires a warranty to reliably fix. I want a good laptop, and you can "fix" the majority of a Thinkpad's problems by simply selecting good internals from the start. In a reductive sense, it's no different than ensuring that you avoid the 12" or 16" Intel Macbook.
And I mean... maybe I'm crazy, but I'd skip on a Mac chassis any day. I've have Thinkpads handle drops at waist-height, my Macbook probably would break in too many places to count if it made the same journey.
> MBs are so efficient for the power profile it runs circles around any x86 mobile CPU when on battery.
You're right, but having seen what Docker does to a Mac I still choose to run native x86 anyways. The battery differential usually ends up moot anyways.
Macs are rather hardy computers and I used to see Thinkpad vs MacBook showdowns back in the day where people would run over both and other various things. The Mac’s would actually win a fair amount of the time because they’re less brittle.
Unlike iPhones, Macs are actually fairly hardy against physical damage. It’s a huge part of why I’ve been keen to buy them. Surviving a waist high drop is what I’d expect. The problem is the repair prices are FAR higher if something goes wrong.
One of my ThinkPads had a debilitating thermal throttling issue. On occasion it would inexplicably limit the CPU to .39 GHz and the fans would spin at max RPM. Yet, it wasn't hot to the touch and it hadn't been doing anything to build up any significant heat. I tried several things, but to no avail. I simply had to be issued a new ThinkPad.
I distinctly remember running a firmware update and the utility had several typos in it: "Updating fimiware". Sure it's just a status message on an installer, but I lost a lot of confidence in Lenovo's quality control that day. I have no proof but I'm sure that thermal control code was outsourced.
I've experienced that myself, and from that point on I told myself I would never buy another TP ever again. The issue confuses me because I've used the low-tier IdeaPads with an AMD H-series CPU and honestly I've had similar battery life but without the unlivable throttling. The IdeaPad is thicker but I prefer it over my work ThinkPad for everything.
I have a Thinkpad P1 with 64gb. I love that it has a trackpoint. I hate that it had a fan. I guess not so much that it had the fan but that the fan constantly sounds like it is impersonating a helicopter. Not sure where it wants to take the laptop. Also the battery life is horrible, 1 hour or so. And Windows is sluggish. Otherwise, it is a great machine (I occasionally RDP into it when demoing thing for my Windows clients.)
My MacBook on the otherhand lacks a trackpoint (that will never be fixed) but is otherwise snappy and quiet. Sure it had some software/OS issues, but overall it is miles ahead of the Thinkpad.
To be fair it’s not exactly fair to be comparing this to a MacBook. Dell XPS, Lenovo X1/Z/? series would be closer equivalents, of course AFAIK while the battery life is much better fans/temperature are still an issue.
It’s possible to buy an external keyboard with a trackpoint: not as convenient as having it builtin, but it’s great if you’re mostly using the laptop at your desk anyway
Imagine buying a MBP but using it at a desk 90% of the time... I'm perfectly fine using the machine while traveling but mostly use split keyboards with a non-QWERTY layout at my desk. I've been around enough computer users to realize that there is no "one-true device" that will be ergonomic and RSI-proof for 100% of users. Folks should listen to their body and take action when it complains.
My biggest complaint about the MBP was the lack of Trackpoint. I've survived. My work forces me to have both MacOS and Windows machines, and I'm very happy with my MBP. The P1 and sluggishness of Windows are huge letdowns.
I like the modern MacBook keyboards just fine. I still use my mechanical keyboard when I’m using my laptop with an external monitor. In part because my desk setup makes using the builtin keyboard awkward
> I think ThinkPads are better than MacBooks. You can get P14 with 32gb of RAM...
> The problem is that Windows sucks more and more...
Not to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like the ThinkPads have been technical specs, but the overall experience is worse due to the software.
If so, I might challenge your final comment, which is "you get more for your money". Ultimately, I think people want a great experience, not a bunch of specs.
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.
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.
I'll take a good trackpad over the trackpoint any day.
I also find something weirdly repulsive about the plastics they use on ThinkPads. A true Macbook alternative shouldn't be using much plastic at all, though.
Maybe I'm odd, but I much prefer the Thinkpad's body to the Macbook (I have both). I don't like the coldness of the metal chassis, either on my palms or on my legs if using it away from a desk. Thinkpad plastic does not feel cheap or weak to me, so that's not an issue.
I also can't stand the Mac keyboard, especially compared to the Thinkpad.
They just had a p14s for sale with 64GB ram for 1000 USD.... I just couldn't bring myself to buy a laptop with 4 hours battery life with typical usage... Will probably pick up an M3 Air.
Intel or AMD one? In my experience you get way more than 4 hours with an AMD one. I had an Intel one before and I agree: hot, loud, eats battery like crazy.
I just got a T14S to replace my macbook m2 (because I wanted to use NixOS). It's a bit disappointing: the laptop is ok, but the macbook feels so much better.
I got P14s with 64GB of RAM, 1TB SSD and other specs maxed out for $1050 (patiently waited for a sale from Lenovo). Other than the battery life, the P14s is roughly equivalent to a Macbook Pro M2 Pro for $3500.
Windows sucks in the default install, but if you know what you're doing you can remove all the junk from it and make Windows almost as efficient as, say, Linux (and way more efficient than macOS).
In my opinion, Macbooks are for people who'd rather pay more than take care of and optimize their laptops. I could have paid 3 times as much for a similarly spec'ed Macbook, but then I'd have to put up with a silly notch, not having a right Ctrl key, a keyboard getting shiny after a couple of months and other annoyances. So why even bother with Macbooks?
> Windows sucks in the default install, but if you know what you're doing you can remove all the junk from it and make Windows almost as efficient as, say, Linux (and way more efficient than macOS).
I can answer this as someone who, throughout last 6 months of his new job, used a Dell XPS 9570 with Windows, then PopOS, then Windows again, and just switched to an M3 Pro a week or two ago. No - you will never get close. That Dell could run fps games like CS:GO or Valorant with 100+ fps, had custom tweaks incl. thermalpads connecting to the chasis, exchanged thermal paste, was undervolted and with a custom fan curve. It still throttled from time to time. Granted - it was 8th gen i7, but it was on paper good enough to handle everything I do. Only on paper.
It also choke on my day to day work, which is WebStorm, Docker and Typescript web development. Indexing, autocomplete, builds(even with swc) took a really long time. I switched to PopOS for a while, but overal user experience was even worse to me, with constant issues ranging from monitors behaving weirdly, stuff crashing, requiring weird driver installations, even Docker didn't 'just work', I had to fight it half a day to get it to actually run.
Went back to Windows until I got frustrated enough and just bought a 36gb M3 Pro, and I'm never going back. This just works, builds take 1/6th of what they did, I can run full swc build in 100ms, full tsc build takes 10 seconds(down from around 60), nothing ever stutters, nothing slows down, didn't hear fans yet. It does have some annoyances, mostly with window management, new keyboard layout and a ton of shortcuts needed to do basic stuff but once I learned those - it's really nice.
> roughly equivalent to a Macbook Pro M2 Pro for $3500.
Besides the horrible touchpad, screen (did you really get > 1080p for $1050?) and the plastic body
> I could have paid 3 times as much for a similarly spec'ed Macbook
I could get a desktop with even better specs for as much. Not exactly a fair comparison of course since different people have different needs (how much is never hearing the dans fans and a proper touchpad worth? Supposedly a lot to some people).
> and way more efficient than macOS).
Can you explain what do you even mean by that? Do you get better battery life than with an M series macbook after these “optimizations”?
>Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them.
They are awesome, but not perfect.
Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.
Lordy does that multiple monitor thing grind my gears.
I just want to display on 3 screens. But the base model is the only one that corporate IT will buy. So I have to buy a DisplayLink adapter to do what the Intel macbooks did with zero problem.
Few years back I had a MacBook pro 2019 and an old ultra wide LG screen with resolution 25:9 and HDMI only input. Apparently, official Apple's USB to HDMI connector cannot handle screen resolution 2560*1080 at that time.
Thing that was possible at 300$ windows laptop cannot be done on 2500$ machine with 60$ connector.
I had a 2019 MBP, and it worked fine with my LG 5K ultrawide at full resolution (5120x2160).
I would check your HDMI cable (not all hdmi cables support the resolutions you want), but mine worked perfectly fine using a USB-C thunderbolt 3 cable, as well as an USB-C to DisplayPort cable.
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.
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.
Sure, but most people don’t use more than two external monitors. Most people don’t use more than one.
The people who complain about specs per dollar were never Apple’s customers. “Why buy an Audi when a Dodge Neon SRT4 costs half as much and goes faster?” It has been this way for 40 years now. This just isn’t how they operate. When they design a product they don’t start from the specs, they start from how people use the product.
There are much cheaper ways to own a Max system if that specific spec is something you’re desperate for. For one thing, Apple themselves is selling the current model for $2700 refurbished. $500 off and it’s the exact same system with a brand new battery and full warranty.
Also, you should never buy a Mac without the student discount at the very least. Anyone can get it.
Finally, a used M1 Max system will cost you under $2000 and is barely 3 years old.
Keep in mind that if you were buying a MacBook Air in 2010 you were paying over $1800 in today’s money.
If we’re talking about support for external displays this all seems entirely tangential.
> When they design a product they don’t start from the specs, they start from how people use the product.
So they impose arbitrary limitations that have basically nothing to do with the specs just so that people who are supposed to use more expensive machines wouldn’t buy the cheaper models? Sounds about right.
Apple is trying to maximize their revenue because they can. There is nothing wrong about a for profit company doing that. Trying to find any other explanation is a bit silly though..
>Sure, but most people don’t use more than two external monitors. Most people don’t use more than one.
Most people don't buy Macs. So why even sell them then?
They literally took away a feature that their cheapest Intel Macs could do, and restricted it to their most expensive Apple Silicon Macs. They should be lambasted for this.
>Finally, a used M1 Max system will cost you under $2000 and is barely 3 years old.
A Raspberry Pi can do this for under $100. Come on.
Well, what PC people do is they hyper-focus on one specific spec like number of displays supported or price per GB of RAM but can’t see the forest for the trees beyond that.
If I just do the same thing with Macs I can win arguments just as easily. Find me a laptop with the kind of performance per watt specs as the M3 systems. Find another laptop of the same size/weight/power draw that can match the M3 Max’s performance at anything close to the same battery life. Find me a completely fanless Intel/AMD PC that performs as well as the MacBook Air and gets the same or better battery life. Find me a PC laptop where you can feed a RTX 40X0 mobile GPU with over 100GB of RAM. Find me another laptop that uses TSMC’s most advanced chip lithography.
PC spec monkeys will basically say it’s not a real laptop because it can’t support 800 external monitors and there’s no print screen key and it doesn’t have a parallel port etc etc. These are all specs that don’t matter to 99% of users.
Hell, if you’re the kind of person who has a triple or quad external monitor setup, that means you’ve spent around $1000 on just displays. That probably means you can afford $3,000 for a MacBook Pro with a Max chip or maybe pay $2,000 for a used one. And if you didn’t spend $1000+ on those displays, that means those four displays are probably so bad that you’re better off looking at one 4K display or two decent quality ultrawide displays.
> Well, what PC people do is they hyper-focus on one specific spec like number of displays supported or price per GB of RAM but can’t see the forest for the trees beyond that.
Not at all, there are many examples of various types of specs in this thread, where apple fanboys suddenly go mute :)
> If I just do the same thing I can win arguments just as easily. Find me a laptop with the kind of performance per watt specs as the M3 systems. Find another laptop of the same size/weight/power draw that can match the M3 Max’s performance at anything close to the same battery life.
So the only example you can come up with is performance per watt? (Your second question is basically the same as your first). M3 very good in that category, I don't disagree, it's apple's latest/best processor, and it does slightly outperform AMD Ryzens in that category[0]. Of course, when you take price into account, apple M processors are not even close to best :).
> Find me a PC laptop where you can feed an RTX 4080 mobile with over 100GB of RAM
Hilarious that you bring this up when macs don't even support CUDA and basically useless when it comes to the the most important aspects of having a GPU today... gaming and deep learning...
> Those laptops don’t exist, unless it’s a Mac.
Yeah, nothing but apple exists in an apple fanboy's mind.
So what you’re saying is you can’t find a better performance per watt, AMD “comes close.”
You are doing the spec monkey thing again. You changed the spec. I chose performance per watt and now you’ve changed it to performance per dollar.
Under a performance per dollar logic AMD makes the best PC graphics card on the market, which they obviously don’t in terms of total performance. Nvidia charges a huge price/performance premium on the RTX4090 because you can’t buy that performance elsewhere. Sound familiar?
> So the only example you can come up with is performance per watt
I’ve got another one: media encoding. Apple’s systems obliterate the rest.
If your argument is that CUDA is important I hate to say it but you’re actually reverting to that whole “product ecosystem and experience” angle that you were deriding in the same breath. Nvidia users have to buy Nvidia because it’s the only way to use Nvidia software. Kind of like how iOS developers and Final Cut Pro users must buy a Mac? “Yeah, nothing but apple exists in an apple fanboy's mind.” You could replace that statement with “Nvidia” under your own preferences.
Under the spec monkey argument someone buying a graphics card should ignore Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem and buy an AMD graphics card that offers better performance per dollar. But you’re saying that the lack of CUDA on a Mac is a major downside. Which is it? Performance per dollar or user experience and ecosystem?
This is why doing the spec monkey thing turns us around and around in circles. I’m not being an Apple fanboy I’m just pointing out how it’s completely reasonable for an expensive computer to not prioritize supporting a zillion monitors.
I never claimed that any particular single spec makes macbooks bad, that was entirely your own strawman :). There are maaaaany reasons why I think they're bad.
> I’m not being an Apple fanboy I’m just pointing out how it’s completely reasonable for an expensive computer to not prioritize supporting a zillion monitors.
My 9 year old asus laptop has better external monitor support than my m2 macbook pro... these problems were basically solved 10 ago... how hard can it be? How much do you have to 'prioritize' this? How hard is it to solve the many years-old annoying, well-known macos bugs? I don't see innovation or engineering quality coming out of apple (the only exception being (the very recent) M line of CPUs)... everything else is meh - buggy, fragile, locked-in, overpriced, non-standard, lack of support for important stuff like CUDA, etc.
Also note that 'support multiple external monitors' here actually means 'kinda support some monitors sometimes'. Just google and read the hundreds of threads about external monitor issues on M2 pros.
The only issue I have with external monitors on my M2 Pro – and it’s admittedly annoying – is that unless I turn everything on in a specific sequence, the primary monitor’s energy saving kicks in and turns off the screen before the Mac has synced video. It essentially bootloops.
This only happens on my Acer Predator, and only if I’m using DP —> USB-C. The secondary LG doesn’t care, nor does the Acer if it’s over HDMI.
The fix I’ve found is to wake up the Mac first with the external keyboard, then turn the Acer on and wait for sync, login, then turn the LG on.
While I’d obviously rather not have to deal with this, I feel like it’s at least partially on the incredibly aggressive power saving of the Acer, which I can’t find any way to disable or extend the timeout of.
The excuse is that this is Apple, and the solution to problems with them is to buy more things. In this case, get a $1,500 ultra wide curved monitor which is better than dual head.
For $1500 it's better to get one of the 43" 4K displays. I've used one for over half a decade now, and the ability to comfortably tile a browser plus four terminals side-by-side is unmatched. Or if you will, display 10 A4 pages of a document simultaneously.
there are AMD chips being sold right now that don't even support HDMI Org VRR let alone AV1 decode.
and those skylake laptops are stuck on HDMI 1.4b, so they top out at effectively 1080p60, but sure, you get three of them. And the DP/thunderbolt tops out at 4K60 non-HDR with crappy decode support, and you get at most like 2 ports per laptop.
the grass isn't always greener, there's lots of pain points with x86 hardware too. heck, those celerons you're so fond of are down to literally a single memory channel by this point. is a single stick going to be enough raw bandwidth for a developer that wants to be compiling code etc?
HDMI 1.4b does 1440p75 or 4k30 and HDMI 2.0 was brand new at the time.
> the grass isn't always greener, there's lots of pain points with x86 hardware too. heck, those celerons you're so fond of are down to literally a single memory channel by this point. is a single stick going to be enough raw bandwidth for a developer that wants to be compiling code etc?
What a weird argument; no shit a bargain bin CPU from 10 years ago is worse than a brand new mid-range chip. That's the exact point I'm making. That Celeron was bad 10 years ago. 10 years of progress, billions of dollars of investment and you get the same maximum RAM capacity, less external monitors at a much higher price.
And you’re ignoring all the things that the apple will do that your chip won’t, or the things it’s massively better at.
It has 2x the bandwidth of a Radeon 780M and runs at 35w, it has as much bandwidth as a PS5. there are pluses and minuses to doing it both ways, but, detractors only want to look at the handful of areas where traditional chips have an edge.
"Cheapest" but not cheap. A $400 Steam Deck can do 3 external monitors with an inexpensive MST hub and has a single USB C port.
The MBA is an extremely close competitor to the Dell XPS line too. And "Pro" doesn't even guarantee you more monitors. The $1600 M3 MBP is just as limited as the "consumer" Air.
Only if you ignore the shitty finger trackpad tracking on dell, windows (shit UX) or Linux (shit battery life and shit sleep/wake), and in general the real life battery duration in real life use cases.
We really don’t know. Personally I’m not surprised that a chip that came from a smartphone has difficulty with multiple monitors. I’m guessing that the Pro and Max chips need a much larger die area dedicated to that functionality.
I was amazed to see the new Air models support dual external displays!
> Apple unveils the new 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with the powerful M3 chip
The world’s most popular laptop is better than ever with even more performance, faster Wi-Fi, and support for up to two external displays — all in its strikingly thin and light design with up to 18 hours of battery life
EDIT:
mmmm... no.
>Support for up to two external displays: MacBook Air with M3 now supports up to two external displays when the laptop lid is closed
FFS Apple.
I guess it's something of an improvement at least :-/
Price: if that’s the major qualm that’s not really a product flaw. The best product usually commands the highest price.
Stuck with macOS: technically not true, Asahi Linux exists.
Connecting multiple monitors: a legitimate negative limitation unusual at the MacBook Air price point, but still something that only a small fraction of consumer laptop buyers care about.
Asahi Linux is still missing features a lot of people consider key. M1 even STILL doesn't support DP alt mode for example. That's a pretty serious shortcoming on something like a MBA where the only video out is through DP alt mode.
I agree 100% with what you've said, but this sentence:
> Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS.
Basically boils down to "Apple is selling a much better product, and they know it." I.e. your first bullets (over priced storage, RAM, charging for multi monitor support) all just boil down to "Apple charges more because they can". The "you're stuck with MacOS" is obviously true but just highlights that Apple has always been about optimizing hardware and software together.
If anything, I think the "dark times" for Apple laptops was the late teens during the era of stuff like the butterfly keyboard, the touchbar, and too few ports. I think Apple consumers have consigned themselves to paying more for a much better product. What they're not willing to do (as much anyway) is to pay a premium for a crappier product. The butterfly keyboard especially was such a disaster ("We shaved .2 mm off the width, all at the minor expense of any key randomly stopping to work at any time!") Admitting mistakes in big corporations is hard so I'm glad they just jettisoned all that stuff.
These days I want Apple's hardware (the M chips specifically, but the trackpads/screens/cases are nice too) but can't stand their software. While I'm not a big fan of Windows either, it at least provides basic window management features by default.
> thread making absurd claims about 'apple is way better than everyone' based on nothing but anecdotal experiences...
I'm not sure why you think "anecdotal experiences" are invalid when people are talking about a personal choice. I.e. I don't need some sort of double blinded study to "prove" Mac laptops are better. I've used other laptops, and I have a strong preference for Macs for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with marketing (to be honest I can't even remember the last time I saw an actual ad for a Mac). You may disagree, that's fine, but it's silly to pretend the personal preferences of others are somehow invalid or less than.
I didn't say anecdotal experiences are invalid. I said anecdotal experiences aren't a valid basis for the vast generalizations about 'macbooks are just much better than everything else' type fanboy comments.
No, the product is simply much better. If you pay $2000 for an Apple laptop vs. a PC running Windows or Linux, the Apple laptop will have twice the battery life and be in better physical condition after 3 years of equivalent use.
Have you ever used a Apple computer for long, like 1-3 months?
I ask because I used to be like you, calling Apple users "fanboys", throwing hard data from benchmarks in discussions, being proud of my true h4ck0rz Linux installation on a IBM ThinkPad for work that was a pain in the ass to maintain in working state, had to stop updating after too many hours spent troubleshooting. Or relegate myself to working in Windows on ThinkPads.
Until one day I begrudgingly accepted a Intel MBP at a new job some 15 years ago, I was going to install Linux on it anyway so didn't care. Started using macOS in the meantime, it had the shell utilities I needed so I kept using it while checking how you install some Linux on it, the UI worked flawlessly, the OS was a breeze to learn, after a few months I had barely had to troubleshoot anything, I'd just turn it on and work.
I never went back, I want my tools to work well and found a tool that worked much better than anything else I had used before.
When something better shows up I'll be very excited to try, unfortunately nothing in the past 15 years has changed my mind.
Not everyone likes it, and that's ok, but calling satisfied customers "fanboys" is a tad bit immature. The product works, and works well.
> Have you ever used a Apple computer for long, like 1-3 months?
I've used many apple computers for the last ~10 years. I work on them daily.
> I ask because I used to be like you, calling Apple users "fanboys"
I'm not calling 'apple users' fanboys, I'm calling people who are literally fanboying in the comments fanboys.
> Started using macOS in the meantime, it had the shell utilities I needed so I kept using it while checking how you install some Linux on it, the UI worked flawlessly,
Ahahaha, there are soooooo many bugs in the macos UI and macos in general, many of these are well known and have existed for years.
> the OS was a breeze to learn,
What kind of point is this? You said you've used Windows and Linux before... what else is there to learn for macos? A few new shortcuts?
> I'd just turn it on and work.
I turn my windows and linux laptops on and they just work! Magic!
So again, you didn't make a single rational argument for why macbooks and macos are actually better... literally a fanboy.
> Ahahaha, there are soooooo many bugs in the macos UI and macos in general, many of these are well known and have existed for years.
What's the point of this? I didn't say it was perfect and bugless...
The point about turning it on and working is that I never had an issue where my soundcard simply stopped working (many times on Linux), nor issues with sleep mode not working and draining the battery (many, many times on Linux), nor my graphics configuration randomly going out of whack and KDE/Gnome getting stuck in a bizarre resolution.
Maybe I should just disengage, you sound a bit deranged in your quest, best of luck!
Depends. To me, software is the thing that will keep me from Apple products. IMO Linux and Android are light-years ahead and are becoming even further ahead every year.
My daily driver before this was Linux and anyone who says "Linux is light years ahead" is kidding themselves
You have to set up a bash script to do something as basic as change the scrollwheel speed. Bluetooth is extremely spotty. Installing most software is still a pain unless you know all sorts of terminal-fu
You have to install software like UnnaturalScrollWheels or Smooze to get sensible mouse scrolling behavior out of MacOS (unless you use the horrific monstrosity of that Apple mouse that you can't use and charge at the same time). You have to install software like Rectangle to get actual window tiling + shortcuts for window tiling. You have to install Raycast/Butler to have a non-shit Finder alternative. There's dozens of basic UI/UX things Apple gets wrong that can only be fixed via either building your own hacks or paying for some ludicrously priced proprietary software (for example Smooze Pro).
I could go on, there's many basic features MacOS has been missing for going on a decade, let's not pretend they get it all right either.
How do you fix the keybindings on linux short of changing hundreds of separate software packages? Spoiler, I've and you can't. Why are there about eighteen million packages implementing each component on linux, each subtly broken and offering a different set of features? Because the community can't agree on anything (except keybindings adopted from the IBM PC, apparently) or commit to providing any single package that actually addresses all user needs.
Of course I don't expect everyone to share my opinions on what sane keybindings are, let alone what good software is in general, I'm just trying to illustrate how ridiculous you sound if you're trying to come off as engaging in the topic in good faith. I think it's pretty obvious why people prefer macos, personally, even if I don't agree with all the decisions apple makes for you.
Even if we say we agree (which we don't) how is this worse? Is a 25 gigabyte Windows 11 install better? I'd take this (IMO unrealistic comparison) over Microsofts and Apples way to do things any day.
I've used Linux on and off as both daily driver, dual boot and in my homelab. I'm definitely not kidding myself when I say I feel that for me, Linux is far ahead. Nothing you wrote changes that, even though I don't really agree with it. I won't add a long list of why as others have already done that, but saying “agree with me or you are wrong” as you basically did is just.... yeah. You are wrong, and it is a bit strange you think you know better than me what is best for me just because you like Apple better.
Can any OS? I've got an (apparently) HDR-capable monitor but genuinely can't tell much of a difference on Win10/11, any Linux distro I've ever tried and my Macbooks provided by my work.
The whole HDR thing seems more like a meme or weird flex type of thing to me, I've never noticed it ever really making a difference for me.
Also a weird hill to die on when talking about relative strengths of each platform, but you do you.
I use HDR all the time in Windows. Most newer AAA games support it, all my 4k movies, and being able to make true HDR photos and video is nice.
You won't notice a difference most of the time in normal desktop use because most desktop apps and the web are all SRGB, and get tone mapped accordingly when HDR is enabled. To really notice a difference with HDR content though, you need a good HDR monitor and not just one with basic DisplayHDR 400 certification, and either an OLED panel or mini LED full array local dimming.
Windows' HDR implementation is far from perfect (the gamma tracking on SRGB content is incorrect, for example), but it's a far cry from Linux where HDR support just doesn't even exist. I can't even realistically use Linux as an OS for a home theater PC anymore.
macOS is probably the gold standard when it comes to polished HDR support, especially with mixed mode use (HDR and SDR content on screen at the same time)
It has always been there and it has always been better for some people. Nothing has changed. The day Linux on the desktop arrive, for the masses as meant in the meme, is the day Linux dies.
Good lord no, the hardware is the actual good part of these machines, the OS is a piece of crap hobbled by catering to the lowest common denominator. I wish I could just wipe it off my work M3 pro, cause it drives me insane on the daily
Yes? Windows and Linux are by far the majority for most software work according to the SO Developer Survey[0]. Going by the survey, MacOS is 3rd after Win/Linux (of the 3 possible options).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
FileVault encryption is on by default. The encryption key is derived from the login password and the login screen has delays to avoid brute-forcing the password.
Additionally, data in the flash chips are always encrypted by the unique key burned in the M chip (previously T2 secure enclave).
> 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.
> Overpriced would be "costs more than it should for what it is," not "costs what it should but is more product than I can afford."
But it's also that, because their bottom configurations are weird/crippled.
It's hard to find a PC laptop with a 4k screen for much less than $1000, but then the $1000 machine has 12 cores and 32GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Apple's $1000 laptop has 8 cores and 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, i.e. overpriced.
Okay, but DDR5 is ~$3/GB and NVMe SSDs are ~$0.10/GB, so really that's only a value difference of like $100 and you could just upgrade it. Except that Apple charges $25/GB for DDR5 and $1.28/GB for storage and then solders everything, so you'd actually have to pay an extra $800. Except that the Macbook Air isn't available with 32GB of RAM, or more than 8 cores, so then you need the Pro, which is even more.
The bad part of Apple DRAM is that it's not upgradable or replaceable unless you can figure out how to open up the M3 multi-chip-module and nanosolder a new RAM module.
The good part is that the DRAM is connected to the GPU as well as the CPU.
Nothing stops them from doing both together. Put 8GB or 16GB on the APU package and then have a couple of SODIMM slots for more. The more wouldn't have the same bandwidth but it doesn't need to, because you're using it for browser tabs and filesystem cache, to keep that stuff out of the fast memory and preserve it for what needs it.
Moreover, they could put the APU in a socket and then if you wanted more of the integrated memory you could replace the APU without having to replace the entire machine.
I probably can't justify the expense myself anymore - last time I had a hefty student discount. But this doesn't make them overpriced, it just makes me poor.
No, it's I need a 2 TB SSD in my machine. That costs $100 for a PC laptop, and $600 for the Mac. I need at least 16GB of memory, that's $300 for the Mac, and $60 for the PC.
It's the fact that Apple is grifting everyone who needs more than the base specs.
> Apple does partially cover that market, but only via refurbished.
That's not the same thing. If you're budget conscious then you presumably need to keep it for a long time, but now you've got a used battery and a machine that will fall out of support sooner.
> The thing that's really sad is that the build quality on sub $1k laptops is just such shite
The secret to this one might be refurbished Framework laptops. Sure, you've got a used battery, but now it's easy to replace and costs $50 instead of $250.
Refurbished devices from Apple generally come with new batteries, and sometimes other parts will be replaced as well if needed. I’ve bought several devices refurbished and they’ve been excellent. With iOS devices they even replace the outer shell as standard.
Refurbished iOS devices from Apple generally come with new batteries. They replace the batteries in Macbooks if the existing battery is already defective. That doesn't mean it can't have 3 years of use on it already, and then fails 3 years sooner, it just means it's not already below the threshold for immediate replacement when you buy it.
Apparently many of them are replaced. I found a thread on Reddit where a few people were saying they've bought refurbs and they often have 0 or 1 charge cycles on the batteries, indicating they were replacements.
So you, what, keep buying them and sending them back until you get one with a new battery? Even if that works for one person, it obviously doesn't work at scale because soon the ones they'd have left in inventory would be the ones without new batteries.
Is a brand new battery really the minimum acceptable standard for a refurb? If got a refurb and it had 6 months usage on the battery for example, I think I’d be fine with that.
3 years no, but given brand new batteries is reportedly a common experience for refurb buyers of laptops a lot younger than that it seems unlikely that actually ever happens.
> Is a brand new battery really the minimum acceptable standard for a refurb?
Of course not, it's a refurb, but that's the point. You know it's a refurb and you know it's not going to last as long as a new one. That's why the refurb sells at a discount.
> If got a refurb and it had 6 months usage on the battery for example, I think I’d be fine with that.
That's the other issue though. You can see the number of charge cycles but not e.g. how many times it was left in a car in the summer sun.
People typically choose low-paying careers because higher-paying ones are inaccessible to them or they value something else more than money. They buy the less expensive product because they don't make a lot of money and then keep it until it dies because they don't make a lot of money.
I'm not sure those people are the intended Macbook audience, though. How many of those people wouldn't be roughly as productive using an iPad or something? I've found myself doing almost all my non-development, non-media stuff on an iPad Air as of late and the environmental constraints have been really helpful for focus.
(My iPad Air was $599 new, and I use a shockingly pleasant $30 case-and-keyboard combination for typing--no, it's not a mechanical keyboard, but c'mon.)
I have tried several different iPads over the years and I have never found them to be useful in any way. A laptop is superior in every situation for me.
Also the M1 MacBook Air was on sale many times for $700. That's less than $100 more than your iPad Air + keyboard.
Macs are better for me for a lot of things, too, sure. When I'm not doing computer-toucher things, though, I find it isn't materially different. And a lot of people want the affordances without the need to do those kinds of things.
Apple's presentation has mostly been the Mac is a work truck, and most people have light-duty needs.
As far as screen size goes, my iPad is about the same size as my 11" Air was, though not widescreen. And the keyboard's small, but Apple has prior art there too and you can get a bigger iPad if you really want to (though, sure, it costs more).
It's not a laptop, no--but that's also not inherently a bad thing. If you need what a laptop can do, sure. I have a 32GB M1 Max for a reason. But more and more it seems obvious to me that the median computer user doesn't need that, and the affordances from overlap with their more accustomed part of the ecosystem (their phone) are strong and pretty valuable.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not at all. Maybe what you intended to write was "nicest keyboard given my other constraints". But that's not what you wrote. And it's not what "superlatives" suggest either.
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.
> 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).
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.
The touchbar got shit on and it was probably expensive at the same time. Worthy innovation perhaps, but the customers didn't value it. I think that was the reason it faded out. I actually used it for audio adjustments, but I didn't need it.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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).
> 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
>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).
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.