Oh, I don't know about that. Admittedly there were some awful choices made between 2015 and the emergence of M1 architecture, but Apple's reputation for making well engineered hardware goes at least as far back as to when they started milling Macs out of aluminum. I'm thinking back specifically to the PowerMac G5 in 2006. It was designed well, felt solid, and when you opened it up, it continued to look well made. I recently popped open my 2015 Macbook Pro because I'm finally having hard drive issues, and for as much as I have railed against Apple fanboyism over the decades, it looked so nice inside I wanted to take a picture. (Why?! Who cares!? What would I even do with that picture?)

I got tons of mileage out of various Dell desktops and self-built machines over the last couple of decades. It was better bang for the buck, I didn't have to fuss over proprietary connectors and a locked down operating system. When the company I worked for made a big shift away from (it's okay to chuckle) Coldfusion and MS SQL Server to Ruby on Rails and MongoDB in 2013, though they offered to let me continue running on Windows, I asked for a Macbook because that's what everyone else was using. Might as well learn. Didn't much like OSX but the hardware was better than any Windows laptop I'd used. Later I bumped up to a 2015 MBP, which I only just retired this year.

While I was Windows at home and MacOS at work, last month I snagged a Macbook Pro w/ 64gb of RAM from B&H for $2400 - the first Apple computer I've ever paid for myself - and it's replaced my Dell desktop and that 2015 Macbook that my old job let me keep.

I effectively skipped the bad Macbooks, so my perspective is tinted by that. But even during the bad years, even my friends who continued to operate in the MS domain were buying Macbooks and dual booting them into Windows.

I had access to a Surface tablet through work early on. It was really nice! Just like a Zune. The Surface Pros looked pretty great too, but anecdotally, I never saw them outside the context of visiting a business that was a strictly MS shop.

I still like Windows as an OS better. But Apple's new architecture (which importantly doesn't have me carrying dongles around, or even needing them at home) was compelling enough for me to take the plunge.

With the latest MacBook Pro it feels like they're back on the right track. Heck they dropped the magic bar.

The issue with replaceable components is that they're often at odds with performance. If MacBook had user-replaceable batteries we simply would have less battery OR a thicker and heavier and more expensive computer. Literally you cannot have all.

Memory/SSD sticks take more space and cost more than a soldered chip (and they earn Apple more money, shhh)

It's a compromise though, I get it.

There's this weird idea that the quality of Apple products has just always steadily increased over time until this most recent MacBook Pro.

If you've been using Macs long enough, you'll remember various iBook debacles, the horrific 2006 MacBook, the utterly bizarre 3rd gen iPod, and other past missteps.

They'll bounce back (even though I actually love the current MBPs).

I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly keyboard. It was shit.

How many USB ports do the new MacBook air have? The old ones had two. And shipped with 8GB of RAM? These are shit-tier specs.

But the are shiny. I guess that counts as quality.

Out of curiosity, what parts of the hardware do you find rubbish?

The hardware seems fantastic to me. The M1/M2 chips, trackpad, keyboard, fingerprint reader, Liquid Retina screens, audio, etc. are all great compared to other laptops I've had. Wifi and Bluetooth are also more reliable on my MBP than any other laptop I've owned. The only thing I can think of is that it's not upgradable like a Framework laptop or the old butterfly keyboards.

Be glad you're not like me and are stuck with a lemon like the 2011 Macbook Pro. It's a well built (chassis-wise, at least) and solid brick with a well known design defect that Apple refuses to acknowledge exists.

I have since left Apple, mainly the unibody Macbook Pros that I love so much have been discontinued in favor of models with soldered on RAM, expensive to replace SSDs. I'm not a fan of how Apple is "closing up" the expandability of their hardware.

With the current Macbooks, I wouldn't have been able to upgrade from 4GB to 8GB to 16GB of RAM as the prices came down (and without paying Apple's exorbitant prices for RAM), or upgrade their hard drive to a hybrid drive, and to growing sizes of SSDs as the prices came down. Damn, I miss those unibodies.

If you think people buy MacBook Pros because of their tech specs, you are missing the point. MacBooks are by far the best general purpose, well-rounded laptops on the market from a build quality perspective. Everything from the screen to the touchpad to sleep/hibernate (and, until recently, the keyboard) is finely tuned to the point that you can't find another laptop on the market that just feels anywhere as nice as a whole. The tight integration between the hardware and the software doesn't hurt, either.

If all you need is a powerful laptop, or if you don't care about any of those details, you are probably better off getting a more cost effective machine, but you will always sacrifice some combination of things for it. (For me personally, the biggest one is the touchpad.)

I say this as someone who doesn't own any other Apple products, but I will likely never buy a laptop other than a MacBook Pro.

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.

I've purchased the second generation (new) Macbook this year, and must say, I'm delighted. I honestly don't get what all the fuss is about. It just works.

Why would I change something that works really well with something that might work well?

Apple's history of design issues and ignoring them goes all the way back to the Powerbook G3 and G4 Cube. This isn't some sudden drop in quality. People just have short memories.

I really don't get this either. Every laptop I've looked at has some wart somewhere - battery life, webcam, structural integrity, display, CPU, temperatures, speakers, IO, repairability (not that Macbooks are good here either).

Some of these things aren't even hard to get right. It's like laptop manufacturers just don't care.

I’m an avid Mac user, but the short lifespan of Macs is an anomaly in the world of computers.

I use my old MacBook Pros as Windows and Linux machines now. They’re plenty fast and, honestly, feel much faster with Windows than they did with macOS.

I can understand why Apple deprecates old hardware, but cutting expensive machines after only 7-8 years is really disappointing. There are a lot of these machines in great condition out there.

My parents and in-laws all got burned by Apple’s early deprecation. When you’re not a hardcore daily computer user, these machines can easily last over a decade and do just fine for web browsing and other common tasks.

I do, latest macs have terrible linux compatibility for now, with apple not doing much to help in providing support for it (M1)

They keep fixing and breaking their keyboards, the latest macs are better in this aspect but until even 2 yrs ago, they used to break quite frequently

Apple making it so hard to develop ios apps on a non apple device, definitely brings additional pain, I don’t want to use apple for my computer.

Saying it as someone who really enjoys using the iphone.

I get why people like macbooks so much, but saying “You never blame yourself for buying Apple” is untrue

For me, that would stand for thinkpads and even then primarily for the older ones.

> My 8 year old iMac

There's no PC manufacturer that comes close to Apple build quality. My dad is on a 2009 MBP that runs great. Well worth the extra dollars up front. Swapped out the HD for an SSD and that thing is so fast. I'm still on a late 2010 MBA. It could be faster, but I use the cloud for compiling software (a preemptible 1CPU/7.5GB instance on GCE is $0.01/hr, for an extra cent you can get another core).

So I don't really understand why people (a) serious people keep buying new computers when old Macs are great and (b) say that Apple products are expensive.

I see comments like this in various reviews. Are there really people out there who would replace a Macbook Pro M1 or M2 with a M3 just to get something a bit faster? What are they doing that is so performance critical?

My last Macbook Pro is a 2014. I still find it usable for development work, and I'm only replacing it because of other hardware failures.

...if you only care about the things that Apple laptops are good at. Almost nobody needs a top-of-the-line laptop to do their tasks. Most things that people want to do with computers can be done on a machine that is five to ten years old without any trouble at all. For example I use a ThinkPad T460p, and while the geekbench scores for its processor are maybe half of what Apple achieves here (even worse for multicore!), it does everything I need faster than I need it.

Battery life, screen quality, and ergonomics are the only thing most consumers need to care about. And while Macs are certainly doing well in those categories, there are much cheaper options available that are also good enough.

And play another lottery with potential faults in the keyboard or display cable or some other random component, with Apple refusing to do anything for years until after a class action lawsuit they decide to fix a specific batch of laptops from the year 2016. Or maybe it actually does work, but then the cooling is insufficient to actually get the computing power suggested by the spec sheet.

Apple makes good devices, but the combination of those prices with this attitude towards the customer is a dealbreaker for me.

I'm glad the Framework laptop is a thing, it's the only good example in an industry going towards unfixable devices, broken by design.

I have a Mid-2010 MBP that is a large and ugly paperweight.

Due to shonky quality control, it hard-locks every 5 minutes when using the GPU. This only started when Mountain Lion was released, but good luck rolling back if you want to actually use XCode.

Given that it was such a piece of garbage, and that (at the time) workers were jumping to their deaths rather than keep building Apple products, and more recently the crap with sneaky performance reductions on iPhone, I have sworn completely off Apple products.

Beats me. You will often see comments in these threads about people (like me) using nearly decade-old Macbook Pros to this day.

I stopped replacing laptops every 3 (or less) years after I stopped buying budget non-Apple laptops.