https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/CsEy9bLivK

My C++ projects have a python heavy build system attached where the main script that runs to prepare everything and kick off the build, takes significantly longer to run on Windows than Linux on the same hardware.

Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.

Windows is also slow enough at forking, that clang has "in-process CC1" mode because of it.

This was definitely the case in the Intel era, but I can't say I've had this problem since the move to Apple silicon

My body is the heatsink

Yep. I miss my plastic phones too.

- Was there a lab where they tested beating people to death with IBM hardware?

- Where did they find subjects? Volunteers, interns, exit-interviews from layoff rounds?

- Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

Modular as hell - trivial to swap out batteries, cd-rom bay with an extra SSD, RAM upgrades, keyboard itself.

Something I miss from the Windows side is sub-kg machines, at least since Apple discontinued the 12" Macbook. It makes a surprisingly big difference when traveling, especially with Asian carriers that have hard carry-on limits. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a fantastic form factor, though the older Intel chips run incredibly hot. I repurposed that as a garage/workshop Linux machine. Unfortunately, the price differences between Mac/Windows also disappear when you start looking at those higher-end machines.

But even in 2018, you could get an X1 Carbon at 1.13kg and 323mm x 217mm x 15.5mm.

- VMs, I'm leaning on them more and more for sandboxing stuff I'm working on, both because of the rise in software supply chain threats, and to put guardrails around AI agents.

- Local LLMs experimentation, even pretty big MoE models (GPT OSS 120b) run pretty usably (~10 tokens/sec) with the latest tooling on a 16GB GPU and a lot of system memory.

- Even compared to a fast NvME drive, it's super nice to load a big dataset into memory and just process it right there, compared to working off of the disk.

Fusion + blender + slicers.

Virt machines / docker + dev env

iOS Android web development

16 copies of Claude code, cursor or kiro

Any of that while running arc raiders and watching twitch or YouTube or plex

My gaming PC is usually at 50-70 gb use

My mbp for work is often at 90 and starting to swap.

My personal mbp is only 48gb and often swapping

I have 128 in everything except my smaller mbp personal.

if your work is around data | software engineering (web backends etc) like me - a MacBook Air tends to be sufficient

The constant, annoying reminder to sign up for One Drive is enough to drive me crazy and want to throw my device out the window (I am writing this from a windows 11 laptop that I use for experimentation).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000098

Microsoft hardware was in the premium tier for sure (and continues to be: relative to others), but these days nearly all the OEMs have pretty bad warts across the line-up, even the surface books, even the new ARM ones (which are quite good).

For work I have a Thinkpad T14S (ARM also) and it is a better quality notebook than the Surface book others in my organisation have (those feel like a 95%-ish imitation of Macbooks, the only variations being strict downgrades in their respective areas).

So I'd push back on the idea that nobody is making good Windows computers, but it seems to be fewer and fewer, and the big brands like Dell Latitude and HP Elitebook are also dropping the ball for a long time now.

You have to step up to their enterprise line (and pay enterprise prices) to get something decent.

If finishes and gaps are tight, all around bodies and across examples, the build quality is GOOD. If every units looked slightly different and some were outright broken straight out of the box, then the build quality is BAD. Even if they were worthy of included in the MoMA collection.

Both Microsoft and Apple(or their paid Chinese outsources) are top notch. Every units looks the same and flats on the bodies are really flat. Industrial design and usability, like sharp corners and fugly aesthetics, are different issues entirely.

Doing what? I've used one of those laptops for years, and it still looks and acts fine, hardware-wise. Windows though...

If apple products are even a tiny bit more durable I wouldn't be surprise if it's more cost effective to switch to the neo for a lot of institutions

Of course, it does. The price difference is small enough now that the Neo is in the running. There's no doubt the build quality is going to be much better than a Chromebook.

I worked in education for 20+ years; that $499 is just the starting price; a school or school district that buys them in quantity is going to get an even better price.

Sure, a Chromebook is better than nothing, and if you’re an impoverished school district, you may have no choice but to go with Chromebooks. But if there's an opportunity to get Macs at this price point, most school districts are going to take it.

Don't underestimate Apple's sales and support infrastructure. Many of the schools in the US are in areas with Apple retail stores, where sales and support work out of.

It's hard to imagine a school committee going with Chromebooks instead of Mac Neos for a little more money and likely better support. The parents aren't IT experts, but they know Apple is a trusted brand, and Macs are "better".

Some schools will gladly pay more.

> The Neo costs $499 per unit for schools.

We don't actually know this. It does at the level individual student purchasing themselves, but I'd imagine there is a substantial bulk discount for educational establishments. That is not a new trend for Apple, it dates back to the Apple II.

I reckon even an iPhone pro is better value than an average android phone. Same with iPad vs Android tablet.

Because they last 3 possibly 4 times longer. A decent Apple laptop purchased 4 years ago is still basically a top notch laptop. Build quality is amazing. Resale value is still very high.

I would argue that Apple has a better MDM ecosystem if there are any kind of policy constraints beyond one laptop per child.

My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.

Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.

This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).

You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.

Where is exactly the premium quality?

If you think getting more and more RAM solves every performance problem, I've got news for you: People are having beachballs on machines with 32GB and more.

They might not care but they do call us saying "Oh you are good with computers, why is my computer so slow?"

On Windows, the window will adapt as you move its center of gravity across the edge of the screens. Sure, could be better than at the moment where the window is the wrong size, but it would always be blurry.

13-inch Surface Resolution: 1920 x 1280 (178 PPI)

15-inch Surface Resolution: 2496 x 1664 (201 PPI)

See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...

Compare that to my Lenovo Yoga 14-inch: 2944 x 1840 (239 PPI)

Only P-series are workstations.

I meant for build quality.

Weekend project.

Last time I dealt with Apple MDM was integrating it with on-prem AD and it was a pain. I know it’s better now because last few “gigs” have used it and it’s been pretty seamless with Microsoft Authenticator for Teams. (Ugh!)

I see you haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet!

All the touch screen does is make it top heavy and the hinge less effective at damping the movement.

Not everyone has the same use case. For me, Apple has never made a product that comes close to my use case.

For the most part, non-ancient renderers (3D but also to a large degree 2D renderers), do not care about physical pixels, and when they do, they care the same amount no matter what the DPI is.

Raster data has a fixed number of pixels, but is generally not meant to be displayed at a specific DPI. There are some rare applications where that might be true, and those are designed to work with a specific display of a given size and number of pixels.

It's especially older applications (like from the 90s and 00s) that work in units of physical pixels, where lines are drawn at "1 pixel width" or something like that. That was ok in an age where targetted displays were all in the range of 70-100 DPI. But that's not true anymore, today the range is more like 100 to 250 or 300 DPI.

One way to "fix" these older applications to work with higher DPIs, is to just scale them up by 2 -- each pixel written by the app results in 2x2 pixels set on the HiDpi screen. Of course, a "200%" display i.e. a display with 192 DPI should be a good display to do exactly that, but you can just as well use a 160 DPI or a 220 DPI screen and do the same thing.

It's true that a modern OS run with a "scaling" setting of 150% generally scales up older applications using some heuristics. Important thing to notice here is that the old application never considered the DPI value itself. It's up to the OS (or a renderer) how it's doing scaling. It could do the 2x2 thing, or it could do the 1.5x thing but increase font sizes internally, to get sharp pixel-blitted fonts when it has control over typesetting. And yeah, some things can come out blurry if the app sends final raster data to the OS, and the OS just does the 1.5x blur thing. But remember, this is an unhappy situation just for old applications, and only where the OS receives raster data from the App, instead of drawing commands. Everything else is up to the OS (old apps) or the app itself (newer, DPI-aware apps).

For newer applications, e.g. on Windows, the scaling value influences nothing but the DPI value (e.g. 150% or 144 DPI) reported to the application, everything else is up to the app.

It is also actually 800 euro if you want a proper SSD storage in 2026.

And as mentioed, get out of German economy, into the southern and eastern countries, or over the Mediterrean to see who gets a Neo outside the well in life families, or maybe bundled with a cable TV contract bound to five years.

Part of it historically was a sort of Visual Studio induced Stockholm Syndrome, where for a long time if you were doing C++ work that was the only sane way to go.

There are some companies that even filter potential employees on this basis.

[1]: https://github.com/apple/container

Just run MacOS.