Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by notepad0x90 236 days ago
From personal experience, laptops that cost $30000+ (yes, USD) still come nowhere close to even a macbook air in terms of build quality. They have much better specs, but if you run Windows on it, the effects are much less pronounced. I have moved from a new Dell to a macbook with half the cpu and ram and for me t least it "feels" like the macbook is twice as fast and as responsive. I don't know if it is just better architecture or fine tuned software, but that's my experience.

Apple used the whole "economy of scale" effect to invest in specialized tooling/machining that would be too costly to recover the ROI for other OEMs. Keep in mind that consumer laptop makers to the most part don't make a profit (or have a low profit margin - last i checked at least) on laptops and printers. No one else has made the economics of using quality material, top of the line design, and specialized machining/tooling work like Apple.
2 comments
rzerowan 236 days ago
I think for generic OEMs that may hold , however for manufactures like Huawei with their matebookX line the build quality is pretty much on-par while the components and options being offthe shelf standard means it should be easier to upgrade/support and port Linux to than MacBooks.Also the price is pretty much competititve for the kit that one gets. The blocking isseu would be getting one as the whole US attack on the company means their kit is pretty much limited edition within China at the moment currently.Maybe in a year or two they should be available at previous volumes.
link
kstenerud 236 days ago
I had a Huawei Magicbook for years that finally died last year. It was as close to Apple quality as I'd ever seen in hardware (except for the damn touchpad again - although the Huawei one was head and shoulders above any other non-Apple one).

For hardware quality, Huawei is solidly in second place, with the rest trailing pretty far behind.

link
pjmlp 236 days ago
My 2000 euro Thinkpad has better specs, I run Windows 11 on it, get to do CUDA and Vulkan natively, and there is DirectX 12 Ultimate as well.

Macs are great as an OS with UNIX infrastructure, aa graphical laptops relevant for workloads besides Photoshop and Sketch, not so much.

link