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by big-and-small 149 days ago
> Macbook

For most of their history Macbooks were good looking, but overheating and throttling devices with some specifically unlucky generations being pure garbage due to design problems like butterfly keyboard and flexgate. Apple also have a long history of not admitting these design flaws.

Macbooks only became a really good option in last 5 years after switch to ARM and overall industry degradation towards not upgradable and not repairable hardware.

Also even though more than decade under Lenovo thinkapds became much more fragile, but they are still much better suited to survive water, dust and physical damage. This doesn't matter if you work in comfy home, cafe, office or co-working, but there are many people who have to use their laptops in moist or dusty environments.

PS: Written from M1 Air that I bought back in 2020.
2 comments
musicale 147 days ago
The 2012 "Retina" MacBook Pro design was great.

The 2016 redesign stumbled with the terrible "butterfly" keyboard, the unpopular touchbar (which removed a physical esc key), etc., but it also had 4 thunderbolt ports and could drive an external 5K monitor (same panel as 27" "Retina" iMac), and it was significantly thinner than its successor design, the M1 MacBook Pro. Although the ARM models run very cool, the x86 models still had good thermals, better than ThinkPads I am familiar with.

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ofrzeta 149 days ago
I have the same machine and it still holds up great. The only (huge) downside is that you can't upgrade neither SSD nor RAM.
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musicale 147 days ago
Non-upgradable RAM is the downside of "unified" RAM inside the Apple Silicon SiP (upside is good memory bandwidth and eliminating data copies between CPU and GPU.)

Non-upgradable SSD is the downside of Apple using raw flash modules (which macOS manages directly I believe) and soldering them to the board (upside may be more flexible and efficient flash management and possibly thinner with more reliable connections.)

Business upside is Apple getting more money out of us as we are upsold to the next RAM and storage tiers. ;-/

My strategy with Apple laptops to get the max RAM and flash storage you can afford, and a low-profile SD card for offload if necessary (wish Apple supported MicroSD Express like Nintendo does with Switch 2.)

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