[yhersk0vitz]

I feel like this may the first time that Macbooks might actually be worth their premium from a purely hardware perspective.

Before people jump on this, I mean that for example the previous Intel MB Pro with i5 would cost like $1,500, which is far more than almost any windows laptop running the same specs.

[jstummbillig]

What you are looking at, tho, is not the pure hardware perspective, but the pure hardware numbers perspective, which excludes ergonomics, design, build quality and hardware/software integration as well as stuff like speakers and screens which might not be comparable because no other vendor does them exactly alike.

I always found this strange, when looking at personal computers – or, in fact, most anything in life. As if what can not be checked or compared on a feature list has no meaning. Do people really feel this way about the world or is it just a way to deal with insecurity about what is important?

The most confusing thing about this is, that, to me, the human experience is pretty much the opposite: The soft parts beat the feature list every time. The better design wins.

[neogodless]

First, I appreciate the experience differential between macOS, Windows and Linux. I've enjoyed each, and have no major complaints about any.

With the right hardware, I've really enjoyed installing and using Linux, while I struggle when drivers for networking have to be procured - I'm not experienced enough in that area to figure it out (or rather, I'm not motivated enough.)

For me, Windows and macOS alike just work and while I've had more issues with Windows, it's because I've used it 100x more often and thoroughly; a price I pay for the ease of getting into games. (I am not speaking about right now, a moment in time, but the decades through which I gamed.)

In my career, I was largely a developer of Microsoft-focused technologies, and the support for tools was always sufficient or better.

Anyway, to my point, the parts of the software and experience that would pain me would be the things I couldn't control, and the things that were meddled with. I avoided pre-configured laptops if I could, and if I couldn't, I would do a clean install of the OS immediately. With desktops, I could select the best performance/experience/price (including reliability, features, etc) compromise for each compatible component, assemble it myself, and have not only a perfectly customized kit suited to my personal tastes and needs, but also the experience of learning and building on my own.

Now all of that is irrelevant if your preference is either just very strongly what comes from Apple, or you're only looking at complete systems and comparing them. Since I can be ambivalent about OS, except for gaming, and the experience was quite good (for me, not for everyone, obviously), I could pick a Windows-compatible laptop that gave me the best "features for the price", or rather, great hardware for the price without too much software meddling (or meddling I could remove.)

Now, does it sound like I don't consider the experience, or that I'm buying hardware because of insecurity? It certainly does not seem so from my perspective. To say a "feature list has no meaning" is to claim that the features do not contribute to the experience, but that isn't accurate. Of course you have to understand how an experience is derived from a feature, or that feature list can't be used to aid in your decision-making process.

[Joeri]

What was likely meant by experience is things like the display (P3 retina 3K in the macbook air), the trackpad (still unmatched in any other device), the metal housing that is very refined and doesn’t flex at all, ...

In my experience if you want the level of physical build quality of a macbook, you end up in the price range of a macbook.

Windows vs macos vs linux, that is personal preference. I use all three and they all serve their roles well. I do find that windows and linux require more configuration and maintenance, but YMMV.

[proverbialbunny]

Some linux distros have gotten so polished these days that I find they require less maintenance than OSX on my MBP does. Though, most people who use linux want power not it-just-works, so I think there is going to be a preference towards the higher maintenance distros.

[reader_mode]

I have a 2018 core i9 5000$ MBP 15, it is by far the worst experience from a premium device I've ever had - when I turn on docker and an IDE people in the office start turning their heads towards me, the fan noise is insane - I need to power limit the device using third party software to make it usable it's ridiculous.

Apple sold the old MacBook air (2015 one?) untill 2018 ? And charged like 1000$ for it ? Have you used that crap ? My wife has it and I was laughing my ass off at how terrible the device was - the viewing angles on the screen were better on 400$ HP devices.

Apple keyboards have long been subpar, they have no touchscreen or 2in1 offering which is a perfect form factor for my mobile computing (iPad pro is nice but iOS only that's a deal breaker for almost any professional).

And the beloved macos was super rough in Catalina.

I need to develop for iOS occasionally so I'm forced to use a Mac or swap arround, but I'm sorry - Apple laptops were a bad deal for a long time from most perspectives - I would personally get an X1 over any previous MBP.

M1 and pricing change that for the first time in a long long time - I would recommend this laptop to anyone buying a device in this category.

[Droobfest]

If we’re talking about hardware ergonomics the lack of a del key and placement of the fn key alone make me never buy a macbook again. I also hate the difference in cmd, alt and ctrl keys from other keyboards.

[pdpi]

> I also hate the difference in cmd, alt and ctrl keys from other keyboards.

It's a matter of habit, and super easy to configure from the keyboard preferences in macOs. The trade-off is that ctrl is almost exclusively used for unix-y thing, and all the usual GUI-y things use Cmd. Using a shell is just painful for me in anything other than macOS for that reason alone.

Incidentally, because of the pervasive support for readline shortcuts in all text inputs, del is just ctrl-D.

[Lio]

> Using a shell is just painful for me in anything other than macOS for that reason alone.

On Linux at least you can use Ctrl-Shift-x, Ctrl-Shift-c and Ctrl-Shift-v for cut, copy and paste in the terminal. So again it's just a case of getting use to the shortcut differences.

On macOS Del can also be found on fn-Backspace and I often remap the right Alt key to Ctrl.

It's pretty easy to adapt to either with a little time.

[pdpi]

The point is that it’s just annoying that the terminal is a special application that has its own shortcuts for everything. I could use shift-ins or ctrl-ins too — but I don’t want to. I want the terminal to behave like any other application.

[mixmastamyk]

Some terminals have the feature called "smart copy." You may like it.

[jstummbillig]

To be clear, my comment did not relate to either Apple or MacBooks in particular.

Also, the value of each soft factor will differ from person to person. Good design highly relates to personal needs.

[nightski]

I guess if you redefine every feature someone cares about to be a "soft feature" then you are right. Kind of a pointless distinction though. Listing features matters because everyone cares about different features.

[Droobfest]

Yes I understand that and I guess I’m a bit salty. But part of my point is that you can make really great hardware and software of great quality, but one or two unfortunate choices can soil the whole thing for someone.

And Apple especially can sometimes be too stubborn to acknowledge people’s personal differences or an established industry standard.

[keyb0ardninja]

Sometimes? Don't you mean always?

[mcphage]

> the lack of a del key and placement of the fn key alone make me never buy a macbook again

What do you mean by these?

[Droobfest]

Macbooks and Apple keyboards in general lack a physical del key (in ibm keyboard terms). They only have a backspace, which they label delete.

Fn+backspace works as a shortcut, but they’re on completely different ends of the keyboard so you need 2 hands. Ctrl+D also sometimes works but is inconsistent across applications.

Also, unlike all other vendors, Apple places the fn key on the far end of the keyboard, instead of the much more used ctrl which is now in the middle. When typing I find it much easier to quickly hit the furthest key than the middle one so I often hit the wrong one.

[spacedcowboy]

Two things:

- Portables in the Mac world do lack a delete key (the delete-forwards key, that is) on the built-in keyboard, but that's more of a space-constraint than anything else. Mac keyboards in general do not lack the delete key; he usual full-size keyboard certainly has a delete key.

- Keyboards are a personal thing, and it's very easy to plug in any normal USB keyboard, and then get all the benefits of the [delete] key as usual. There's nothing else to do, just plug in your favourite keyboard..

[Mine came this morning: https://i.imgur.com/at1mGiT.jpg]

[tpush]

Any Windows laptop with comparable display quality, SSD speeds, battery life etc. cost similar or more. And they still have trackpads that suck.

[_the_inflator]

I have both, MacBook Air 2019 and Dell XPS 13 2018.

MacBook is stunningly smooth, while under heavy CPU load you hit CMD+Space and Spotlight is there. Under my Dell with no CPU load at all, I hit the windows key - and nothing happens.

What really keeps me at Apple is this overall smoothness. Under Windows/Intel you can pick one spec that is impressive, but as you said, it is the overall experience.

[ActorNightly]

Now this is the case. Before, Dell XPSs were VERY good laptops with same performance for a cheaper price.

And thats not including thermal throttling, the bullshit Apple pulls with background OS stuff like checking executable hashes online, being restricted to what software you can run, and so on.

[Lio]

Are you sure?

A Dell XPS13 with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,349[1].

An Apple MacBook Air with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,249[2].

The XPS13 is great, I have one myself with Linux on. They're definitely in the same price range as the Apple laptops though.

I think the other points you've raised have been addressed else where.

There's no restriction on what software you run. You can even replace the OS with Linux if you like by configuring the security.

The hash key transmission seems to be used for malware detection, is optional and Apple have committed to not keeping logs of it when people do use it.

1. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-13-touc...

2. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air

[ActorNightly]

I dunno if you are serious or not, but the XPS is a big step above the Air in performance.

Even with current M1 Macs, outside of the battery life, you have sub 2k laptops that blow the M1 out of the water

https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15333968

[Lio]

Not sure I’d call that “blowing out of the water”.

I think, for a light weight laptop I’d rather take the single core bump of the air over the marginal gain for multicore of the Asus. That’s just me though.

Geekbench 5:

Asus: 1218 sc, 8031 mc [1]

MacBook Air: 1726 sc, 7417 mc [2]

1. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4854331

2. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4856634

[ActorNightly]

Has there been any sort of long term load tests? I feel like the chassis limitations are going to result in thermal throttling compared to similar performance laptops with actual cooling design. Even if it doesn't thermal throttle, one of my main complaints with Macbooks is that you can't actually use them in your lap cause they get uncomfortably hot.

As for being worth it, wait till the next gen mobile chips in 2021. I feel like we will see similar performance fairly soon in cheaper laptops without being locked into the Apple ecosystem.

[Joeri]

The m1 macbook air reviews all say they don’t get hot, no matter what you throw at them, and they at most throttle down 15%. The macbook pro and mini stay cool and quiet and do not throttle, regardless of the workload. Any performance expectations you have from macs before the transition you should set aside, these are entirely new and come with very different characteristics.

[alwillis]

I feel like we will see similar performance fairly soon in cheaper laptops without being locked into the Apple ecosystem.

That's probably not going to happen any time soon.

If the $999 M1-based MacBook Air is already outperforming almost every Intel laptop that's been shipping (including Apple's), there's little chance Intel or AMD are going to surpass that.

Even if they get close to performance, they're not going to have the same battery life. From Matthew Panzarino's review on Techcrunch on the M1 MacBook Pro [1]:

"In fullscreen 4k/60 video playback, the M1 fares even better, clocking an easy 20 hours with fixed 50% brightness. On an earlier test, I left the auto-adjust on and it crossed the 24 hour mark easily. Yeah, a full day. That’s an iOS-like milestone."

It's important to remember: this is Apple's low-end chip for entry-level/consumer level hardware, yet it's more than competitive with a $5000 iMac Pro.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

[seqastian]

People on the car forum comparing bmw with the same horse power as a fiat will agree with you.

[gnarbarian]

Is the Mac comparable to the bmw because both are nearly impossible to work on and fix when they break?

[niea_11]

I think it's more fair to say comparing a bmw 3 series and a toyota supra. Both are good cars but one is known for its premium finish and quality, and the other for the customization possibilities you can have. :)

[QuotedForTruth]

This is a funny comparison since BMW actually builds the Supra. Its basically a rebranded Z4.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a310046...

[niea_11]

thanks for the link I didn't know that :D.

I'm not a car enthusiast, but the supra is the first car that came to my mind when I read the parent comment because I saw a lot of youtube videos with supras from the 90s (modified and) producing a lot of power.

Like this one [1], I think the car in the video is a 1999 model and stock it produces at most 325hp (info from wikipedia).

1 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvh2HYIyBAs

[QuotedForTruth]

If you meant the older supra then that makes more sense.

The Supra wasn't produced for many years and was recently re-released with this BMW partnership. Many old school Supra fans feel its strayed pretty far from its past and don't regard it well.

The car industry is full of comparisons like this. Luxury is a different scale than performance. You can have either or both. Macs exist higher on the luxury scale than most windows laptops and they offer models across the performance scale. Quite like BMW.