Overpriced? Yes, garbage? No. The MacBooks are far beyond the close competition in both quality and performance. Apple Silicon is a game changer for the industry and it's making Intel and AMD look very bad.
A MacBook is very good at what it does. If you tried to spec out a laptop/portable computer for similar tasks, the Mac would be pretty competitive and have longer battery life.
Once you try to do anything that apple didn't intend for it to do (play games, for example) or if we turn to desktops then the value proposition goes away pretty quickly
Your computer always has been limited by the intentions of the system designer. It’s not malice, it’s market-fit and optimization.
Look at those x3d variants that amd has been putting out. Fantastic for gamers, but relatively niche for general computing tasks. If I were an OEM, would I pick those parts for my workstation prebuilts? Fuck no, they’re overpriced for someone using office and a web browser. But for my gaming line, maybe, if I could get a deal.
All computers have many of these price/performance/size/power draw/availability decisions to make, and portables even more so. Apple knows that most of their users need xyz, and they build for that. Everyone else’s needs go into the pile of lower priority, some of which will be supported if they feel like it.
If all you need is office and a web browser there's plenty of suitable ARM systems. Handful of A72 cores, generally come with more than enough of a GPU to drive 2d, important: At least a couple of PCIe lanes for an SSD. I'm sure by now there's more suitable systems but an RK3399 is sufficient, originally a chipset for set-top boxes (hence why it has a beast of a VPU (for its price and age) which can decode 4k h265). Bought the board for about 100 bucks back in the days, what, three or four years ago. Actually I should hook it up to a monitor and check out those fancy new GPU drivers that have been coming along, the thing is vulkan-capable (back in the days I was stuck with a gles blob, and using the VPU meant using an overlay).
That’s not apples to apples. If you spec a windows laptop, good luck getting the same performance and the same battery life and portability at the same price. Also build quality, screen, speaker and trackpad quality will likely not be at apples level from the windows machine. If that’s what you’re in the market for Apple machines are not bad. For instance a photographer/videographer working on location, truly amazing for them. Should everyone buy one? No. Are there a 100 better ways to spend the money if you don’t have that specific Apple favoured use case. Sure, e.g. your mum doesn’t need a MacBook Pro for Facebook / Amazon browsing and your cousin shouldn’t buy a Mac Studio for gaming. But use cases do exist, and for those people Macs are genuinely a good proposition.
I'm willing to bet you could find a laptop with a really nice track pad, screen and camera if you really wanted to for half the price. Everything "quality" about Mac is double the price just for having an apple logo on it.
The issue I have with non-Apple laptops is that comparable performance requires an active cooling system that is often distractingly loud. I am willing and able to pay extra for a platform that lets me focus, and lets me watch some Netflix without having to crank the volume to drown out the fans. Then the all-metal exterior is also quite durable, the trackpad and speakers are top-notch, the Pro comes with that XDR screen, and the battery life is hard to beat. Plus I can take it to a nearby Apple store if I'm having a problem with it, instead of having to mail it to a regional support shop and wait potentially for weeks without the device. It's more than the sum of its parts--and that is reflected in the resale value as well. Some Windows laptops will do specific things better (chiefly game support), but I didn't find anything that was as good overall as an M1 Macbook Pro, and I say that as someone who had never owned a Mac of any kind, despite using PCs since the early 1980s and building them for the last 25 years.
I would have preferred a laptop that could run Windows or Linux, but I just couldn't find anything that was a complete package like the M1 MBP.
I'm in exactly the same camp as you. I haven't bought an M1/2 Mac for personal use yet since Linux support is not there yet, but that may change once Asahi + Fedora comes out
The features you talk about seem pretty easy to put in any laptop. Battery life? Laptop speakers? Screens? Metal case? But sure you get to go pay twice the price for an Apple tech to charge you to replace the entire internals for minor problems. Seems like y'all bought the Kool aid and didn't try to find alternatives because you don't mind throwing some extra money at it. If you throw enough money at anything, generally, you can make it good lol
Nothing will come close with similar build quality. The XPS 13+ is probably the closest competitor to the 13" pro/air. But it has a 12th gen Intel CPU which will get awful battery life in anything but the most ideal scenarios.
With an Apple silicon Mac you have to try to get bad battery life, with an Intel Machine I can't get it to have good battery life and do anything other than sit idle. AMD will come close, but few manufactures make a premium AMD laptop.
A beefy ass desktop that weights about 15kg and eats as much energy as a microwave when gaming. For performance per watt nothing beats the Apple Silicon.
What you using all that power for? Gaming? Not likely on Mac, Machine learning? Also not likely with that GPU... Maybe a Photoshop machine? Enjoy that non expandable ram.
For a nice dev machine I get it, nice battery life and watch Netflix on a screen, but it's not like you can't get a same performance machine for the same/lesser price with Dell/Thinkpad and use Linux...
That’s a rather narrow set of use cases. For example, they are audio and video editing powerhouses. Audio in particular is exceptional because of core audio in MacOS.
And upgradable components aren’t something 95% of the population is worried about. Max out what you need when you buy it. My last Mac lasted 8 years with no trouble. And by the time I was ready to upgrade, the bottleneck was mainly the cpu, which in a case of 8 years, that means a new motherboard, and at that point you might as well upgrade the whole computer, as standards have changed and updated.
I have a colleague that spends 90% of their time out of the office on trains and on airplanes. They need to connect to an RDP server, answer emails, and do some InDesign work. Our IT dept manager has the same attitude as you and will only issue them a beefy laptop that weighs twice as much as a macbook and has half the battery. My colleague has tried to explain that compute power is not their primary concern but the IT manager won't listen because he doesn't have the perspective to imagine what it's like to do someone else's job.
As an IT worker, it is more likely that they don't want to deal with the headache of enterprise management of a Mac for just one person.
Just buying a Mac is easy, setting that Mac up to be monitored, managed, and secured centrally is a whole other issue. Especially when none of their current infrastructure supports Mac, because why would it when no one current uses one.
The user is worried about what type of device works best for their specific use. The IT manager is worried about what type of device do I have a licences for anti virus, what device can I audit security settings remotely, what device can I centrally manage updates, etc..
That being said, for personal use there is definitely a niche for Apple products. It just isn't so clear cut when it comes to using those devices in an enterprise setting. And speaking from experience just one person never stays at one person. Once someone gets one, everyone will be saying "well, why can't I get one too?".
Had to smile at your last sentence because there's so much truth to office envy. I was issued a cell phone by my last employer because my position required weekly travel in an area with a diameter of >150 miles, and the people who thought it unfair only worked from the office. Same with a disabled person getting some sort of accommodation, the chicken coop was cackling about unfairness, constantly.
There's nothing more toxic than a group of office workers.
I never said that no one else uses Macs in our office. Our entire marketing department and half the executives use Macs. For whatever reason our IT guy just has a 'sales guys don't get macs' personal policy it seems.
If you think that's too stupid to believe, join the club.
In that case, yeah give the guy a Mac lol. Just had to stand up for poor misunderstood IT guys, but sounds like he is in the wrong. Unfortunately there are quite a few of us that seem to just like telling users no.
Apple silicon has a pretty decent on-board ML subsystem, you can get LLMs to output a respectable number of tokens per second off of it if you have the memory for them. I’m honesty shocked that they haven’t built a little LLM to power Siri
A beefy PC that you’re going to be itching to upgrade in 2 years.
I will say though, if you’re planning on gaming then Mac is still a no go. It’s best for design and audio professionals. Average joes should just be getting a Chromebook or something.
What about all the forced apple junk? Itunes, App Store, Books, Chess, DVD Player, Facetime, GarageBand, Home, Imovie, Keynote, Podcasts, Photo Booth, Pages, Quicktime Player, Safari (which doesn't allow you to install a decent browser), ...
The Adobe suite. Even big Figma files would give a cheap ass laptop trouble. Obviously if you’re planning on coding iOS Apps then you need Xcode unless you want disgusting performance.
Also the build quality on a cheap laptop is a joke these days. They try to make their laptops Apple-like but use the cheapest components even in the $1000 price range.
For the average power user who doesn’t game or have some design or audio job, then it’s better to go with Linux, but either way MacOS is way more solid and reliable than you’re giving it credit for.
You really don't get any of those things. Be a Mac fan if that's your thing, but don't try to pretend they're actually any better because all the PCs you've used have been trash.
And I prefer touchpads and find using a mouse on Mac a terrible experience. Touchpad gestures are a constant part of my workflow on a laptop due to the nature of only having one screen.
Like I said though, Mac touchpads are miles ahead of windows touchpads and it’s not even close to a competition.
Yeah that's probably true. Every laptop I've ever used that I cared about gestures on just had a touch screen. Not that I've ever really liked that either.
Yeah those laptops from Framework seems very interesting. They don't ship here yet, but I'm indeed keeping an eye on them. I know Framework project thanks to LTT, which is one of the few things right they've been doing these latest months: introducing people to easy to repair projects.
far beyond the close competition in both quality and performance
It’s true that Apple continues to be the king of build quality. And while they do currently hold the performance per watt crown, there are plenty of laptops that beat the M2 when it comes to raw performance, especially if you throw in a dGPU. And of course, none of this matters if the device doesn’t run the software you want, which is what I suspect most people on Lemmy have issue with.
When I say performance I include the package as a whole. Battery-wise is top in the competition lasting more hours than the average Windows competitor, also the productivity software most times work a lot better on Mac than on Windows, so even if the Windows laptop has more raw power, while even consuming a lot more energy, Windows itself will for sure cripple the computer's performance.
If I was working on ASUS or any other OEM, I'd be pushing for usage of Linux distros like hell (I'd be pushing those based on Debian, like Ubuntu, Pop_OS, etc...).
I switched to MacOS last year and it’s so much better. Considering a full Linux switch when this iMac is too old unless the VisionPros turn out to be as good as advertised
I'm using Windows 10 at home and 11 at work. I've already turned an old gaming laptop into a Linux machine, and I don't think I'll ever switch to Windows 11. The straw that broke the camel's back was the moment I read an article about Microsoft's vision to make Windows entirely cloud based.
They’re great for productivity but not so much for gaming.
Yet, since they've been pushing to that sector for quite a while, they even released tools to help developers porting their games to Mac, which apparently some people are now using to actually play games on a MacBook.
keep in mind he's running most of the games on a <1000$ Mac Mini.
Edit: The games in the video are being emulated, both Windows to MacOS and DirectX to Metal. So about 50% of the performance is being lost for emulation only.
Eventually everyone's going to reach a breaking point where they feel subscriptioned out. I've already reached that point, but it appears the threshold for most people is much greater than mine, unfortunately.
Yeah, the pricing of the hardware is quite steep, but the OS is quite good. To be fair, some of the parts of a MacBook have an astonishing quality, like the speakers, the keyboard, mousepad, screen. Stuff that you must search pretty hard to find in the competition in the same package.
Probably would be better off getting a MacBook Pro 14" with 16 gb of ram and the base M2 Pro with 512gb SSD. Half that hardware of the Dell would get eaten up by Windows garbage and I can't really use Linux to work.
Its kinda why chrome os works. Majority of people only need the browser, and if you need basic office suite, google has their own cloud options.
Its when you have specific use cases when you HAVE to use a certain os over another (e.g gaming with anti cheat, AI/ML and engineering software is usually windows foward, adobe stability on OSX. A lot of backend and server applications on linux)
Unless you make it a point to procure an LTSC version, which Microsoft won't even sell to you unless you have a site license.
LTSC is the only version of Windows that behaves like it's still your computer, and I have uptime measured in months on a computer who serves Plex all day long.
They are not “impossible” to repair they are very expensive to repair. For example, if you break a screen on a MacBook usually Apple solution is to replace the entire fucking lid. So because of a broken screen you throw the metal, camera, microfones and all other bullshit that comes in a MacBook lid just to fix a fucking screen.