- dead silence
- unbelievably good battery life
- tank sturdiness
- great performance
- amazing screen
- amazing speakers
- god-tier trackpad
- repairability in a sense you’ll always find parts (albeit not cheap) and someone to service it
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It is basically uncontested in a laptop space.
I would only consider windows / linux on a desktop pc
I’m even very content with Windows in desktop using komorebi tiling manager. And macos compared to windows is still far ahead regardless of recent constant shittification.
There are models from Dell, Lenovo, and ASUS which have better screens than Macs, better design and build quality (subjectively), on-par performance and just slightly worse battery life. It just takes time and effort to find them.
(also, am I the only one who finds Apple trackpads _uncomfortable_ to touch?)
Take screens for example. Sure OLED is nice (if it won’t burn in or have terrible PWM on low brightness), but most of them in past years couldn’t afford custom resolution with great DPI: 220-250.
No, those fuckers will install you either full hd or 4k resolution which is only good for movies.
In every other case you’ll need to use fractional scaling that will make your UI, fonts, what have you look like blurry shit.
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The list goes on for battery life (google how many milliwatts apple consume during sleep), performance (full regardless whether they are plugged-in), etc.
Mind you, I would love to see apple-quality hardware with linux on it.
It just doesn’t exist yet. Geohot lamented this recently: https://youtu.be/M96O0Sn1LXA
I'm sorry but that is just false. Various organisations assessing repairability consistently give MacBooks poor scores for having soldered components, glue everywhere and complicated assembly.
Meanwhile I have one screwdriver for my Framework, which came with the laptop and I can use it to replace any part, including those which are soldered on the MacBook.
Moreover in basically every corner of the earth there will be either authorised service or local one that will help you if soak your laptop in thailand or what have you.
- inadequate cooling
- fried NAND chips
- screens spontaneously cracking
- flexgate (not to be confused with bendgate)
And that’s only a subset of the engineering failures with MacBooks. You even bring it up in your post: the only reason they have “dead silence” is because Apple is literally baking your laptop and leaving you to pay the bill.
I’ll give Apple that their custom chips are pretty great for power and efficiency, but their actual product design is bad. I mean, who designs a laptop with the fan pointing the wrong way?[0] Or a power bus alongside a data bus?[1] These are literally basic errors that go into production for a company that is far too big for this to be happening.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCBYAP_Sgg [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cNg_ifibCQ
Cooling is the reason intel was ditched: intel promised for years new nodes, and apple designed for new power consumption that never came.
You don’t fuck with apple this way unpunished. That’s why nvidia was ditched circa 2013 to never come back.
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As for something-gate: engineering is hard, especially on this scale. Still they were (and are) the best option overall.
= to be good doesn’t mean to be perfect; you just need to be better than competition.
And they are crushing it even in low-cost space. I mean m1 air for $800-900 is uncontested even today for what kind of solid machine you get.
Screen cracking was ~4 years ago for M1 laptops, which also included Apple making screen repairs far more difficult, exacerbating the problems they’re currently being sued over.
They did separate NAND from the rest of the board in recent models, but NAND on the board was only a problem because A) bad engineering & B) greed. Thay’s not even getting into MacOS overwriting to NAND and wearing it out.
“Engineering is hard” is not an excuse for a company that’s worth $4 trillion. With flexgate they cheaped out on shorter flex cables. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of flex cables knows that’s a recipe for disaster. And while Flexgate itself is an older case, it’s a clear example of their profits-at-all-costs approach.
For that ~$900 M1 Macbook Air, you’d get:
- an old laptop, nearing its end-of-life, with:
- a fragile, expensive-to-repair screen, plus:
- thermal throttling on any decent load
All for $1,000, which by the way is not “low-cost”. That same $1,000 can buy you far better machines. Genuinely, it doesn’t fit any realistic use case. Casual users? A Chromebook or cheaper Windows laptop suffices. Productivity? It can’t sustain loads, so heavy workloads are out of the picture (and can be handled more effectively by newer hardware). Its only clear benefit is the battery life, but that’s not enough to spend $900 on a 5yo laptop with known issues.
