Apple is the only hardware company where you can buy a product and it is good hardware wise. Sure other companies have flagship offerings but with apple you get a really good base model.
And that is where it breaks down for me. Pay 20% more for freedom? Yes, absolutely. But pay more for much worse? Yeah, not many people are going to be so idealistic.
I don't know why no one else can produce a laptop with decent battery life with an near silent fan and good display and overall great production quality. Yes, it is much easier when you are as big as apple and can rely on economics of scale but that doesn't totally explain the lack of quality when it comes to the competition.
The screen blows apple out completely. It's clearly, obviously better. The fan noise and battery life are worse than Apple. The keyboard feels better to type on, the trackpad is slightly worse, but not enough to annoy me.
The new Pop OS cosmic is a very fun OS concept for laptops with the autotiling workspaces as a fundamental primitive.
That's the main issue for me. I am on M1 Max 32GB RAM. Except for local LLMs, there is absolutely nothing that gets even close to the performance limits of this device. As a result, all the work I do is performed in perfect silence. Very occasionally the device would get warm, never hot. Based on my usage, I could probably go for an Air model, except for how many external screens it supports.
Zero-noise is non-negotiable for me. It's lamentable how absolutely no-one comes even close.
From my research on Macbook alternatives only the Zenbooks looked like almost-an-even-match to me. Curious what's your experience with day-to-day fan noise and heat.
The MBP will compile faster however.
Screen brightness is not something I will compromise on after having a taste of greatness.
I personally wouldn't mind spending 30-40% more for a Linux laptop with similar qualities + repairability. But I will not settle for something much more expensive and worst in some aspects.
There are also arguments agains repairability in Framework's laptop. I did the calculations and for the Framework 16, it would be cheaper to buy a gaming Asus laptop and throw it out in a couple years to replace it versus buying a framework and upgrading it. Utter insanity.
Looks like the Framework laptops depend on model/screen, between 4-500 but with the new 13 pro hitting 700 nits. For a user replaceable screen, and backwards compatibility (I think), that's pretty solid.
Them not having to support 30+ year old software means that they can be more nimble and make better hardware choices.
Look at the mess that Microsoft has made for itself by setting the requirement that software made in the 90s must still run on modern OSs and hardware. It's bonkers and is slowly killing the company.
It will be very surprising if we see any benefits from cutting Rosetta 2, especially worth gutting all the games and software this has empowered via Steam/WINE/CrossOver.
Forcing people to create a MS account to log in their Windows computer, that's because of backward compatibility?
Pushing Copilot absolutely everywhere, that's because of backward compatibility?
GitHub being down almost daily, that's because of backward compatibility?
Windows still owns the corporate drone desktop, but, oddly enough, that’s now being served as a VDI through a Linux thin client.
And that's also entirely orthogonal to hardware - the hardware battle between ARM Mac and ARM PC is really a battle between Apple and Qualcomm (Apple won).
In hindsight, rather than relying on Snapdragon, Microsoft should have started designing their own high-efficiency ARM SoCs 15 years ago like Apple did. But I mean, everything is clear in hindsight isn't it.
Why does it matter to _you_ in particular that the base model is good ?
For a decade buying macs I never got the base model, I switched to the Asus ROG series and a Surface Pro, and again I'mm not on the base model of either.
I get that MacBooks are very good volume purchases and excellent value for those right in the target, but IMHO that's not the people writing in this thread.
I'm also not a fan of the "winner takes it all" view, customers should care about their very specific needs and do their research, it shouldn't matter that some product matches 80% of other people's needs if it doesn't fit them.
As a remote work terminal / casual computing system, the compromises are IMHO almost entirely psychological.
> remote work terminal / casual computing
I'm having a hard time grasping the difference
Apple's phones and laptop are 100 % the best in the market, but Apple is a terrible evil company - the walled garden stuff, the "you don't really own your device" stuff, the normalization of enshittification (removing headphone jack, nonreplaceable glued batteries, not giving charger with $1000 laptop, ...) that other manufacturers followed, the gold statue Cook gave Trump as a bribe.
But not just Apple. Teslas are the best electric cars on the market - but Musk got Trump elected, literally killed millions of people with his DOGE and did Sieg Heil on stage (twice, so we don't miss it). Or Garmin - objectively the best sport and adventure watches on the market, but evil anti-consumer planned obsolescence policies. You could go on.
I guess the choice is, am I willing to "suffer" (as much as using inferior product is suffering anyway) to not support these people? Or is my comfort mire important than doing the right thing?
And I'm not just being preachy - I have aging M1 macbook, aging Garmin watch and an aging ICE car and I spend few last months pondering. It's easy to prioritize comfort. Or I'm just being a whiny bitch.
(Funnily enough, for phones the dilemma really isn't there - you have just choice of Apple or Google having all your data and no matter how bad Apple is, Google is orders of magnitude worse.)
I wish it were a real alternative, but it is not the world we live in.
The only complain is bad battery life. With several VMs running mostly idle it doesn’t lasts even two hours. But then I used beefy MacBook M2 at my previous work and with VMs it lasted only 4 hours.
Isn't that the whole reason why Apple is the company it is? Steve Jobs wanted to control the software AND the hardware. That hasn't changed, they're still the only one really. That does get you some benefits
Apple hardware is only perfect when looked at through rose tinted glasses. The whole butterfly keyboard issue should be enough to indight them from being seen as perfect with hardware. There's a reason Applecare exists, and it's not just because of accidental spills.
