[zer01]

I disagree, having migrated multiple family members away from shitty plastic laptops full of bloat ware and ads and shitty Android phones full of the same they are much more able to use their devices.

I also find as a dev that iPhones and MacBooks “just work” and let me get my stuff done, much much more so than a Linux desktop environment or windows laptop.

I guess we may be talking about different things though if you’re saying the apple ecosystem isn’t living up to its full potential, but IMO the rest of the phone/computer ecosystem is full of cheap shitty plastic crap with windows installs that OEMs have had free reign to install whatever they want on (and even without that, why tf when I install windows 10 do I get ads for “candy crush” on my start menu?!)

[sschueller]

If you spend apple prices on PC hardware you will get more performance and a lot less plastic crap.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

This has been debunked time and time again over the years; when you spec out something truly similar, the price is more or less the same.

[KerrAvon]

This is absolutely not the case; such comparisons always leave something out that isn’t important to the person doing the comparison but would in fact bloat the price on the PC side if it were truly equivalent.

[lynndotpy]

Wait, what? I think I'm missing something because the price difference is still there. This argument is old as the hills but has generally held up.

The 2020 MBA (to avoid having arguments comparing ARM and x64 cpus) launched at $1000 started at a 256GB disk, 1.1GHz two-core i3, and 8GB of RAM.

A quick search will find the 2020 Acer Swift 3, $700, with a 512GB disk, 1.8GHz eight-core Ryzen 7, and 8GB of RAM. It looks pretty sleek, metal, and thin too.

I do mean this sincerely, am I missing something? Because I don't know of any perspective where the price-spec gap disappears with Apple laptops. When people talk about buying Apple "for the hardware", I really don't think the argument is about the specs.

[karlshea]

I’ve done this exercise, and the non-Apple laptop always has a worse screen, or way slower SSD, or slower RAM, or a combination. Just looking at the top-level numbers isn’t a great comparison.

I looked at the 2020 Acer Swift 3 you mentioned and it’s the same sorry: 1080 250-nit display, and IT Pro’s review says it’s “mediocre in several areas – the screen, build quality and design are all underwhelming, and the keyboard and battery are middling.”

[lynndotpy]

The impression I get is that is all already "known".

Over the past 10 years, I think the assumption is that Apple laptops cost more for equivalent computational specs, but are prettier* and built better (controversies aside), and have MacOS (which is a plus for many.) (I did pick this laptop for comparison because its RAM and SSD sounded good above its base numbers.)

I guess my main argument is that there's not enough here to "debunk" this trend, even with deeper insights into hardware. This might be different with the M1, which I have no experience with.

(*This is a quality that I don't mean to dismiss. A better screen is important for a device that might see >10h of use in a day.)

[karlshea]

I think the issue is that if one was to buy a typical laptop I'm sure one would be perfectly happy with it, and (that specific laptop aside) there are definitely PC laptops that are pretty decent. The Razer Blade has been reviewed well, there are some good ThinkPads, etc.

But if you've ever actually owned an Apple laptop and then use ANY of these other ones, it's completely obvious right away what you're paying a little more for. Apple has issues too (I had a previous model with the shitty keyboard, my current Touch Bar is dying, and it was a horrible idea in the first place), but even if I didn't care about macOS I'd still never even consider getting a different brand because those shortcomings are so stark.

The screens are great, they don't flex or creak, the touchpad is amazing, it's not covered in plastic, and it doesn't feel like you're paying for maybe a great processor and SSD but everything else is crap.

Those differences don't show up on a spec sheet though, so for many people it makes no sense why people pay a little more for Apple, and that "little more" really isn't a whole lot when you are actually trying to compare equivalents. When you get a similar-specced PC laptop and the MacBook is maybe $100 more, that $100 is actually going to better components in general. E.g. both have a trackpad but Apple's is significantly better.

Another example is monitors: why pay $1700 for Apple's Studio Display? Well, because literally no one else sells a 27" 5k display except for that one from LG which was widely known to have tons of reliability problems. Why do you need a 5k instead of 4k? Retina text. If you haven't lived with it this doesn't matter, but if you have then moving back to 4k kinda sucks.

[lotsofpulp]

Based on experience, I would assume all of the components in the Acer laptop are lower quality than the MacBook Air.

Once I learned about “binning” years and years ago, I stopped paying attention to specs and instead just pay attention to commercial/business line branding. Or Apple in this case, which does not have a business line, but has earned a reputation for not using bottom dollar components.

[duped]

The thing you're missing is display, trackpad, and speakers. Like that acer is only 1080p.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Now compare the battery life and LCD quality.

[seanmcdirmid]

I think you mean a lot more plastic crap, right? For a PC laptop of the same price (eg Lenovo X1), I find that they are a lot more flimsy than a aluminum unibody construction. In fact, I mostly moved to Apple to get away from plastic.

If I’m wrong and you have specific examples, let me know. But the last time I checked, PC quality price per price was still pretty bad compared to Apple.

[howinteresting]

A Lenovo X1 can handle spills unlike an Apple laptop. That's what build quality is about.

[jeroenhd]

Comparing Apple's hardware to shitty plastic laptops is a false equivalence though. Once you spend Apple money on hardware, you get much better stuff in return.

Apple is perceived to be high quality because they only serve the high end. When you compare ecosystems, you should at least compare the same market segment. There are also market segments that Apple has no products in (convertibles, for examples, or sub 600 dollar laptops).

Candy crush hasn't been installed by default for years now. There's plenty wrong with Windows 11, but the spam has severely reduced and the user experience has improved in many points (and made worse in others, i.e. not being able to dock the task bar to the side, though you can't do that on macOS either).

[donarb]

> not being able to dock the task bar to the side, though you can't do that on macOS either

In System Preferences > General you can set the dock to the left, right or bottom of the screen.

[lotsofpulp]

I would not qualify entry level MacBook Airs as “high end”, yet they are unmatched for the tasks that 80% of people require from their laptops. And it has been this way for 10 years.

[toast0]

> I would not qualify entry level MacBook Airs as “high end”

They aren't high end, but if we're comparing to other laptops, $1000 is far from entry level. Entry level is $200-250, and mid-level, probably good machines tend to start around $500; for $1000, you usually get either good specs or nice aesthetics and sometimes both.

Of course, for some users, the $250 laptop has more than enough computing power for their needs (as long as it has a half-decent SSD, cause windows 10, and I assume 11 can't stop thrashing a spinning drive and there goes your perceived performance; I've never dug into it like in this article though, swapping in an SSD is good enough)

[lotsofpulp]

I have never seen a laptop for sale for $250. I have probably seen laptops for sale for $500, years ago. Which I assume came with malware, a 30min battery, and the worst quality components that lead to significant odds of failure within a few years.

There is somewhat of a correlation between price and quality of product. After a certain price, any lower, and you start getting into the “it’s more expensive to be poor” scenarios, where the amortized cost the product over its lifetime ends up higher than the ones that cost more upfront.

I still remember the standard advice of buying a Windows consumer laptop was to reinstall the OS after buying it. In what world should that be acceptable? In my accounting, that time and effort spent installing an OS gets added to the price.

[progman32]

Several options for sale under 250 usd. Barely usable, but entry level for sure.

Dell https://www.newegg.com/aluminum-silver-dell-latitude-e6530-m...

Lenovo https://www.newegg.com/p/2WC-000J-01931

Hp https://www.newegg.com/black-hp-stream-pro-11-g5-everyday-va...

Under 200 https://www.newegg.com/black-evoo-ultra-thin/p/1TS-00AY-000D...

[toast0]

Have you been shopping lately? For $250, you can get something from almost everyone. It's likely to have an Atom processor, or something anemic from AMD, probably only 4GB ram, but most will have a (small) SSD these days. It may or may not come with preinstalled garbage, but you can usually uninstall that lately. Or just live with it. If these computers fit your needs, the junkware isn't going to impact you that much anyway. Some models even are upgradable at these prices, but soldered parts do save costs, and you have to accept cost savings if you're buying at the bottom of the market.

Sure, there's some correlation between price and quality, but if you're worried about longevity, 3-4 laptops of questionable quality are likely to last longer than a $1000 laptop anyway. And, screen aside, the 3rd and 4th cheap laptop might end up with better specs than the single quality laptop. If screens are important to you, then that's not going to work, and that's valid; but a lot of people get a fancy hires screen only to run it in 2x mode and push 4x the pixels for a small difference in experience; it's certainly worthwhile for some people, but it doesn't make a big difference to me and many others. In an ideal world, you could pick between screens on a laptop; there's a huge spectrum of screens that meet different needs and wants, but most manufacturers aren't giving options beyond glossy (eww) or matte in a normalish resolution, and on higher priced machines maybe one higher res option with no choice in finish. Sometimes, business oriented laptops will have a couple adjacent sizes available with the same bottom half of the chassis, but that doesn't happen for consumer laptops.

> I still remember the standard advice of buying a Windows consumer laptop was to reinstall the OS after buying it. In what world should that be acceptable? In my accounting, that time and effort spent installing an OS gets added to the price.

A lot of people say a lot of things. Windows works fine out of the box, most of the time. If you want something that values your time, Chrome OS devices are better: works out of the box; cold boots in a couple seconds; no junk (other than google login, but you can run in guest mode if you don't need persistence); updates are done in the background, reboot whenever, none of those long waits at startup to finish stuff like MacOS and Windows. Plus, they start at even lower prices: usually something for $100, something with a mainstream x86 processor around $200.

[progman32]

I used an x86 Chromebook from Acer running Ubuntu for years at work, as a light meeting and trip machine. Still holding up really well 8 years later. Just put a bigger ssd in it. C720.

[bgoggin]

You can move the dock to the side on MacOS and this has existed for years.

[AnthonBerg]

I have honestly, earnestly tried. I have tried to find a laptop that is for my needs and purposes truly equivalent to an Apple Macbook Pro. Or better. I always end up going with an Apple machine. There has always been a significant part of the assembly that just isn’t as good. It’s often disk speed or display quality. Build quality too.

I want to underline that this is true for what I need out of a laptop.

The opposite has been true in desktops. I have a Ryzen 3900X box and there still isn’t anything from Apple that I would replace it with. Not even to run macOS on it (which I do on the AMD box, using GPU passthrough).

[microtonal]

The opposite has been true in desktops. I have a Ryzen 3900X box and there still isn’t anything from Apple that I would replace it with. Not even to run macOS on it (which I do on the AMD box, using GPU passthrough).

My MacBook Pro 14" is pretty much on-par with my Ryzen 5900X CPU-wise (the M1 Ultra would surpass it by a wide margin). The GPU of the M1 Max is nothing to sneeze at, but I'd love it if they'd bring eGPU support to the M1 line. (And if one can dream, if NVIDIA would also make CUDA available.)

[floatboth]

> the M1 Ultra would surpass it by a wide margin

Well, in which tasks?

Comparing e.g. geekbench results for the M1 Ultra https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14664498 and a decent 5950X (PBO) result https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14665931 it looks like a lot of Apple's multicore score is attributable to AES (which uses special fixed-function HW). And with other tests, different CPUs win different benchmarks. 5950X notably wins in clang :)

> bring eGPU support to the M1 line

Probably not M1.

marcan tweeted recently that Apple's PCIe integration has been is broken in the same way as on Broadcom's RPi4 SoC — mapping PCIe BARs as normal memory (which allows unaligned access) doesn't work. I can't find the tweet (deleted??) but here's the RPi thread: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss... Basically there's no quick kernel level workaround for this, if you really want a GPU to work on such a broken platform you need to patch every single thing in userspace to avoid unaligned access.

We'll see soon if that's fixed in M2, but I suspect they don't care…

[floatboth]

(err, tweet is https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1534825580801433600)

[AnthonBerg]

No contest! – The thing is mostly that I can mess with the Ryzen box, and run a bunch of different OS-es at full speed, and use various add-in hardware like video cards.

[JimmyAustin]

Depending on your workload, the Mac Studio would be the replacement for a 3900X box. It's not a GPU powerhouse, and lacks expandability though.

[AnthonBerg]

That’s exactly it :)