> Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great.
Last time I looked at second hand laptops. Most of those the +5y old macbooks in the market had huge issues / defects (and also looked like shit) while you could find a lot of decent refurbished thinkpads and HP elitebook from the same era with no advertized defects (and those I bought didn't have any). I am excluding battery life as regarldess of the brand all needed a brand new one.
So they seem to be the gold standard when new. But they certainly don't age so well.
These are not comparable. There are wildly different quality of laptops under the Lenovo brand. A ton of them are complete crap. Apple simply doesn't sell anything like that. The author is comparing to a Thinkpad specifically.
Additionally, the 10 years old Apple that made your macbook is a very different company from today. Although they are still a premium brand, the reliability and replaceability of parts is completely different. I have one of the first unibody MBPs from 2009, and ran it for almost 10 years (although I had to switch to freebsd and linux by the end because of Apple). That laptop was incredibly sturdy, and parts were reasonably replaceable, keyboard lasted 10 years before getting squishy. Battery was a terrible hot pocket but replaceable without screws! back then it was all SATA so I upgraded to an intel SSD from before they sold their controllers to samsung - also in a user serviceable compartment next to the battery.
None of these things are true of Apple laptops today.
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.
>> In general Apple's laptops are just well built and feel solid. Some PCs are like that, many aren't due to cost. If I'm going to use a machine every day for 4 years I want to know it's well built and holds up well.
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.
> Macbooks are solid laptops. Every other laptop I've owned hasn't stood the test of time as well as my Mac.
If we go with anecdotes, in the last 2 decades, I used a mix of laptops from bargain bin to thinkpads. I used macs only the last 3 years (2 different mbp models) and those are the only ones that ever needed servicing.
1. Key caps falling off (replace the top),
2. Weird memory corruption on boot (out of warranty, get a new model),
3. Charging issues (replace the inside),
4. (kind of mac issue due to lack of ports) Their usbc-hdmi dongle started failing. (not serviced, get a new one)
I had a 2012 Macbook Air. Used it until 2016 when I spilled coffee on it and frantically replaced it with a 2015 macbook pro within a few days.
A year later I still missed my Air, and figured I could just open it up and try to clean it out with alcohol. Figured although I could take it to someone for them to try to fix it, I could learn something new if I did it myself and if it didn’t work again nbd.
There was sticky coffee on the motherboard and on the case and at the power button, but I took my time to clean it all out, dried it out, and reconnected the battery and it came back to life!!! I was so happy. And when I started using the Air again I noticed how much I preferred the form factor. I immediately made my 2015 rmbp the backup and went back to using the 2012 Air as my main.
They both had similar GHz and the same storage. Ran the same OS. I could write production code just fine on either of them. They ran the same IDE’s and crunched the same numbers. However the Pro did have the better screen. Still I preferred the Air to the Pro because of the form factor.
Every time I let someone borrow my air for a second when we were together they’d complement on how thin and light it was and they liked that. I think Apple figured out a market segment and there’s more of us than you’d think. And unless you’re editing videos for a living the Air is a capable machine.
> I have a bias against bad products like the 2016-2019 era macbooks which were dreadful.
Your biased opinion. My biased opinion? I can’t stand the pre-2016 MBPs anymore, and the keyboard is a major reason. Yes, I love the 2016 and later keyboards (newest ones being the best, but I never had issues with the 2016-2018 ones that others reported).
> Do I have to believe Apple has made the best laptops from a hardware perspective every single year to not be bias against them with no regard to what their competition is doing?
Nobody has said or implied that but you, so?
> There is not a single product in their lineup I do not consider arguably the best on the market these days
> The main reason I buy Apple laptops is the physical reliability...
My impression is that they've had several years of poor quality and bad design decisions with their laptops. Some models were banned from flights due to battery fire issues [1]. They had keyboard problems for many years [2]. And they've had a lot of recalls [3].
Fortunately the quality seems to have improved with the M1/M2 macbooks.
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
I agree with you, but that doesn’t change the fact outside the US, many Apple products are 15+% more expensive than they were a few years ago. In the UK we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis—my bills have shot up and I simply don’t have the extra disposable income.
I mean shit, I’m a decently paid developer (for the north of the UK, so not London) and until my most recent rise a base 16” MacBook Pro cost almost an entire month’s take-home salary.
> justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet
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.
> Either way I think these are still the best notebooks you can buy.
Five years ago you could make that statement and not have to think twice about it. However now there is too much competition.
1. Dell XPS
2. Matebook X Pro
3. Asus Zenbook Pro
These are just 3 laptops off the top of my head that can compete with the latest and greatest Macbook Pro and come out arguably better. The keyboard, thermal issues and touchbar have really hurt the latest macbook pro. Apple needs to admit they are wrong, ditch the shitty butterfly keyboard and fix the random issues that have started plaguing the Macbook in Apple's quest for thinness.
> Also, the build quality is the best. I have a macbook that has lasted 10 years and still works great
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.
> It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I daisy-chain multiple adapters to get Firewire. Fuck that, as long as possible.
To be fair, with the new Macs you still get to daisy chain adapters...
Here's the thing, nobody can take away how great the Macs we have now were when they came out. The fact that it was so well built and so powerful that you're still using it after 5 years speaks exactly to what we loved about them.
But the new MBPs aren't the same. They're just as expensive as they always were, but they don't have forward-looking specs. Unlike the old ones, we don't see the new ones being machines we can keep around for the next 5 years.
I've got a 2013 MBP and it's got virtually identical specs as the new 2016s. (Used similarly upgraded from base units both times -- with Apple care this cost ~$3,300 then and would cost ~$3,300 now.)
> a lot of Windows laptops that are of similar quality to MacBooks were nearly the same price, go figure
Those exist? I’m not being facetious. Are there really examples of non-Apple laptops that are as nice of hardware? (I primarily care about screen and trackpad.)
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.
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