Most people is a sketchy expression, but I would venture a guess that "most people" buy cheap laptops because they don't really care, they don't know how to adequately judge which ones are worth more, and they also just don't want to spend much on a computer.

It's hard to imagine, but "most people" actually care little about computers.

A macbook would be like buying a top spec Mercedes when all they need is a no frills base model Ford.

It would be but it's also kind of overkill based on the specs you can get nowadays for general computer usage.

I recently picked up a $399 15.6" Lenovo laptop new on Amazon for a family member. It has all of the important stats for a regular user. A 1080p display, fairly light, 11th gen Intel CPU (i3), 8gb of memory and most importantly an SSD. It's lightning fast for browsing the web, working with Excel and playing browser games.

If you did care more about development they have a 20gb of memory version with a 512 GB SSD for $540 and a 36gb of memory version with a 1 TB SSD for $630.

We have a bunch of $400 Lenovos at work and their trackpads are absolutely atrocious. When someone is using one of those, they almost always use an external mouse with them, because otherwise, mouse cursor handling is just too frustrating.

I can't speak for the trackpad. When setting up the laptop I found it to be ok but I only have 2 occasions of using it for 20 minutes (2 different laptops) which isn't enough time to really evaluate it since so many things can be hit or miss with trackpads. The people who use it do use an external mouse, mainly because using a trackpad is too foreign to them.

Both Lenovos are IdeaPads that were purchased a few years apart. The latest one wasn't to replace the first one, it was for someone else. The first one is still going strong. I had forgotten I even picked a Lenovo the first time around and ended up picking the same brand / model when researching "what is a really good budget'ish laptop for general computer use".

Almost yearly she'd buy some $150-$200 Dell clunker, all plastic, atrociously low resolution, loaded with bloatware.

For years I told her if she'd just buy one "overpriced" Macbook she'd save money in the long run, since despite some hiccups over the years, Macbooks are not particularly unreliable.

-

Eventually I took it upon myself to give her my old Surface since she didn't want to learn OSX.

A machine I optioned out to nearly 1k, for someone who only checks emails and writes word docs... yet 4 years later and she hasn't needed a new one.

She's easily saved her money's worth if she had bought it new herself simply from not dealing with the hassle of needing a new machine every 12-24 months.

Phone's are not heavily discounted with 2 year contracts, definitely not here in Australia anyway. Carriers are going down the route of customers paying the standard device repayment per month (equalling the RRP). The days of device subsidies by taking a plan are fading.

Plans from mobile carriers are becoming suped up pre-paid plans with a device payment tacked on.

In addition, when a vehicle reaches the point where any common repair costs more than it's current market value, it's basically considered worthless and only desperate people buy them. How long does it take an apple product to reach that point? A year?

For traditional cars, as long as it's not a completely blown motor or transmission or a extensive front end collision, it's always economically viable to repair them.

I got this from my brother, so it's really not that far away from us.

It serves all their use cases, and most of them are still working fine with no real repair need.

The apple branch of the family though (my in-laws) have been having hardware failures almost consistently during that time.

As for Apple reliability, I set my grandfather up with an iMac 11 years ago. It was still functional when I replaced it with a Chrome desktop machine last year. (Of course it was no longer supported for OS upgrades, so that was the final reason to replace it). Likewise, my girlfriend daily drives my 2014 MBP which I used and abused around the world for years. I did an Apple service center battery replacement, and otherwise it performs as new. 8 years with a laptop is pretty great, especially considering it still does everything it's supposed to.

Oh, the wifi at my grandfather's house is still the original Airport I setup 11 years ago. It still does its job, without fail. I think I had to provide tech support (unplug, wait, replug) once.

For low-tech family, I now recommend Chrome devices. They are about the easiest things to support, and they are fairly low priced.

Makes the apple gear look and behave like flowers.

In all it's just a beautiful thing I'm very, very happy with.

Use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_T_series

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_X1_series

& Ebay. But it's also a very reasonable & justifiable decision to buy a new thinkpad imho. When it's a couple of years old the hardware support is usually perfect on first install - but I guess I don't use garbage like fingerprint readers so ymmv on that kind of silliness.

Thinkpads, T-Series, X1 carbon are the best laptops on the market by a good margin and have been there in that spot consistently for a long time. Buy apple if you really want/need to run apple software. I'd say just about /any/ distro will place nicely with the kernel-hackers laptop of choice. I'd bet fedora, rhel/centos, debian, arch would all be just terrific if you prefer one of those (and why not?)

(And, on your "kernel-hackers laptop of choice comment," it's curious that Linus released the last kernel from a MacBook device)

systemd vs $INITSYSTEM is also temporary, though on a longer timescale. We need the old generation to die before systemd is accepted by everyone.

I don't mean to shit on your argument, but most things are either just preferences or progress that isn't done yet.

I'm about as bleeding-edge as can be (always latest stable kernel with xanmod patches) from NixOS, using Wayland and PipeWire.

The move to PipeWire made literally everything better for me (just works TM). While Wayland isn't perfect yet.

Gnome or KDE is a preference, it doesn't matter much and they're cooperating on many Wayland extensions.

systemd hate is either because you love the drama or you like bash scripts.

I don't particularly like either, so I like systemd.

A good thing people often forget with Wayland, PipeWire and systemd is that they are making our ecosystem a bit less fragmented, which I see as a great win, especially since I'm a NixOS user, my system relies heavily on systemd being declarative. My distro of choice wouldn't work as well (at all) without all "standards" (both real and implementation) that systemd and freedesktop puts forward.

Back on topic, the Linux desktop is honestly quite great if you constrain yourself a bit (Run a stable distro with boring tech, no Nvidia) or live on the bleeding edge where things also work well but might require more maintenance.

Lets be honest though, if I wasn't running NixOS I would probably run Ubuntu with whatever display and audio server they decided for me. And the package manager would be apt, brew, nix or flatpak depending on application. (Now it's Nix and Flatpak only).

Something like this (fedora, debian are fine, I've heard arch is fine, no doubt others also) is the /only/ fair approach in comparison it to an apple or windows laptop. It's the only approach _possible_ with microsoft & apple.

Doing fun stuff like re-writing the default kernel scheduler and putting a bug in there on linux is really just not a point against linux in any way when you can (a) choose not to do that and (b) can't choose that at all with windows. Apple? Does anyone compile their own laptop kernel on apple? Common enough on linux because you can make your use as complicated as suits you in all the ways you can't on windows and apple...

It is true that apple sysadmin gets super complicated and hard with the answer usually boiling down to something not far away from: "you can't do what you want even if it used to work fine and you paid apple for the privilege. But you can pay apple an ever bigger subscription to do something related the way they want and stop complaining, apple is so user-friendly! Apple knows best. Freedom is tyranny."

I mourn the death of the Nokia N900. I hope for the oncoming pine phone & pine time revolution because Apple really are every bit as foul as Google. These things aren't yet easy the way laptops really are now.

For PipeWire I'd say we're already there, it just works better than pulse when doing pulse things, and they also implement JACK and ALSA if you need them.

Regarding Wayland, yes a lot of old DE's and WM's will die, but that's just the way of nature, there are still many great options for people to use, we must deprecate things eventually.

Wayland impressions so far: Annoying that windows can't take focus, annoying that electron doesn't default to it yet, TouchPad input works better, scaling works better. Some apps (vscode) shows a generic icon in Wayland rather than vscode.

Remember that you can run XWayland on Wayland. XWayland will keep most X11 apps working just the same, and X11 really needs depreciation. I'm almost most excited about "Waypipe". When it's mature enough it'll run circles around X11 forwarding while being performant and secure!

I mean I realize how I've turned into one of those "you just have to do these easy things to make it work" kind of people, but for "dumb usersč on "good hardware" (Linux compatible) it's really quite nice, my father had less issues on Linux Mint than Windows.

The year of the Linux desktop is here, it's just wrapped into a VM (crosvm) or a gaming console (SteamDeck/SteamOS).

Honestly with a bit more customization options, and no tracking I would probably get a Chromebook as the next machine (They run Android and "Linux" apps now)

With Waydroid or Anbox you can run Android apps on Linux too, but last I tried wasn't great.

Progress is being made on the shittiest of fronts too! NVIDIA moving code from the driver into firmware is "great" from a usability perspective, I don't really care enough about FLOSS to demand my GPU implementation details being open, as long as compatibility is good.

Gnome vs kde (and there's /plenty/ of other options) is a choice, make it. Done. No further issues. And as a happy gnome guy I'm very sure KDE is excellent and will serve well.

deb vs rpm. That choice is made when you choose your distro, never to be revisited or cared about again. Likewise pulseaudio, systemd are chosen when you chose your desktop and distro respectively and you don't have to think about them on your laptop again. X vs Wayland - whatever comes with your distro you use if you're even aware of it.

But yes you can complicate it all as much as suits you if you have the need or want to do so which you basically can't with apple, so... And your knowledge then translates to the pi or other SBC so that's pretty cool too. And to your servers or ones you work with for money. This is not a negative imho.

Go to any kernel conference and you'll see all kinds of laptops for sure, some hilariously eccentric. Linus used a mac 15 years ago too (powerpc iirc). Yet you'll see Thinkpads are always, clearly and obviously the most commonly used by a large margin unless things have changed dramatically during pandemic times, which I kind of doubt.

Anyway I bought a T480s second hand for peanuts, dumped ubu on it and have been contemplating its beauty and utility since. Apple gear is a _much_ bigger sysadmin headache for me (and it isn't close) but might be less so for you if that's what you know and understand. This is /my/ experience of it.

Linux on the laptop in 2022 is flipping great. Shhhhh, don't tell.

I can vouch for Linux in laptops, I've been running Debian+xfce (recently switched to Debian+lxde, for maybe slightly less ram usage) on my Acer Aspire One for probably more then 10 years now! It's my go-to machine whenever any hardware needs testing, be it networking or just a printer.

Thanks again!

Previous Mac was a 13" Macbook Pro if anyone is keeping score. Loved it, but just didn't want or need something that expensive.

yeah we buy 500$ (150$ in my case) laptops over apple products precisely because we can judge which ones are worth more

People buy expensive laptops because they don't know how to adequately judge which ones ain’t worth more. Not just on HN, I’m observing same behavior among friends and co-workers.

People buy ultra-thin laptops because marketing sells them as high-end. It’s often impossible to upgrade them to good specs like 32-64 GB RAM and fast 2TB+ SSD. And even CPU performance ain’t great because thermal throttling, hard to dissipate heat from an ultra-thin computer.

Similarly, people who never play videogames buy laptops with discrete GPUs like nVidia 3070, paying money, weight, and even battery life for something they don’t need.

There is a noticeable loss in human productivity by not having a separate large monitor (and sometimes also a nice external keyboard+mouse). However, I find that the small screen constraint can be beneficial sometimes as it forces me to approach my work a bit differently. I would say it's a bit like how changing my scenery or routine temporarily can recharge me.

Work-wise, the only thing I like about laptops is the ability to quite literally change my scenery (going in a café or in nature for an afternoon). But it's always with the intent of doing the few things I can do on that sort of device : reading or writing some doc and doing some surface level diagnostics through SSH (my job is a mix of Kubernetes administration and miscellaneous production tasks).

It's nice to have, but it also can't be the tool of my trade. Putting any significant money into a machine that'll end up 70% of the time as a self-standing Netflix screen in bed isn't worth it.

I know a few people who can work exclusively on their laptop, but they also use no UI scaling and have much better eyesight :)

It's why you buy $500 laptops. You can't extrapolate that to most people.

Another reason is that they only have $500 and are buying whatever is available in that price range.

Also hoping we'll see them execute on some additional keyboard layouts (or someone will) - avoiding Mac-like keyboards is one of my primary desires laptop wise.

The trackpad works better than any windows laptop I've used.

My T440s is still going strong, and that was second hand back in 2016 (I did upgrade to an FHD matte screen).

They're not quite as good as they used to be though, the T580 definitely feels like a step down in build quality.

I may consider a Framework next go-around but for now, that's my strategy.

But I have a hunch Apple will make good on this.

AppleCare+ is $70/year for M1 MacBook Air and covers damages. It also covers accidents such as coffee spills or drops.

I have 3 year AppleCare+ for 16" MacBook Pro.

You're going to be out an additional $99 if you only damaged the display or only damaged the top case. But if you had a liquid spill or significant drop, you're likely going to be out the $299 (for damaging both, or for damaging the logic board/anything else internal at all).

It's a decent deal if you've got a high end machine, but it doesn't as much sense IMO if you bought something like an Air or a Base 13".

--------

In contrast, ~$160 on a $1.5k Dell Latitude will get 3 years of warranty + accidental damage coverage with no deductible.

disclaimer: I have applecare+ on an m1 pro

You have been gaslit by Apple.

You know when it's your fault... but with Apple, you can never be sure.

How about your body? Medical and life insurance are nearly universal.

You should not pay insurance for all the tech crap we buy. You're just losing money on average. Only way to win with this type of insurance is to be unlucky.

Much history of costs/return in various domains show the power of ex ante investments vs ex post restitution.

If I spend $1200 on a high end phone, and it costs $300 to replace a screen, or $30 with insurance, after a $200 one time premium for 2 years… it depends how often you break your screen on average. If it’s at least once every 2 years, then yes, it’s worth it. And then that’s not even counting other things that may go wrong.

Same logic for extended car warranties. Sometimes they pay for themselves quickly, sometimes not.

>can't risk paying for it yourself.

is intended to mean

>can’t afford for themselves.

At a bigger scale than product warrantees, Health and Life insurance are both profitable but also often worth purchasing to protect you or your family as it’s the ultimate case of hedging against bad luck. You’re trading reasonable, predictable costs against actuarial events with huge (potentially bankrupting) costs. Some folks that didn’t need it, they spent a reasonable an amount of money and still got value out if it: risk coverage and piece of mind.

Dell is the same. IIRC, HP was too. There's nothing to see here.

Though after the first year the onus is on the consumer to prove a manufacturing defect. During that first year the manufacturer has to prove it wasn't broken by the customer. That makes the discussion a bit harder after the first year. Also, these protections only apply to consumers. Businesses have to fend for themselves and that includes -employed when buying as such (and thus avoiding VAT)

Indeed you are free to sue a wide variety of criminals, but ususally we don't refer to them with reverence and respect

The other comment is entirely right. The fact that Apple can sell a first-party service entirely dedicated to replacing broken iDevices is evidence enough that it's a racket.

Doesn't feel like a racket to me. Rather, if you buy an expensive device, and you cannot easily afford a replacement if it breaks, get an insurance. That's Apple Care (plus). It is an easy enough to understand concept.

Interesting that you compare Apple with Ford: https://fee.org/articles/how-henry-ford-zapped-a-licensing-m...

Like Ford, Apple wants to be free to innovate. If you don't like the quality of their products, don't buy them. There are plenty of other great choices out there. Oops, maybe not so much for the M1 MacBook Air.

"If you don't like the country you live in, just move!"

Seems pretty asinine now that the shoe is on the other foot. Here's the problem: I bought the iPhone X. I have the Macbook Pro. None of them do anything for me. Sometimes I boot up the Macbook to test a Darwin build once in a blue moon, but MacOS isn't even on my radar of daily-driver OSes right now. The BSD compatibility layer is festering, and Apple's refusal to implement modern APIs like Vulkan is childish. MacOS has been heading downhill for the better half of a decade, and Linux support on M1 is barely existent.

So, I think I'm perfectly contented to call Apple out for poor innovation. I paid their price-of-admission, now I get to leave a bad review. If you don't like the content of my feedback, don't take it personally. There are plenty of other great comments out there. Oops, maybe not so much from the technocrat-apologist crowd on Hacker News.

Done that.

> Apple's refusal to implement modern APIs like Vulkan is childish

No, it makes perfect sense. Metal is a nice, compact, and easy API. This is one of the reasons that allowed them to get out the M1 in the first place, because they could reuse all the work on Metal for iOS. Why would they try to accommodate the shit show that is Vulkan? And why would they try to appease people who really want Linux, not macOS?

Personally though, I am turning away from Apple when it comes to programming. It is just becoming too insular. It is great if you want to only reach people in Apple land, the tools (like Swift and Metal) are pretty nice. But in the end, web tools are also very nice these days, and your reach is just so much bigger. It is great to see your software running on a £150 Chromebook!

It's also worth pointing out that the $500 laptop will probably last a lot longer than the most expensive Macbook. All plastic, they use a lot of older/reliable technology, they don't get used as rough - the most common failure mode is they get too old/slow for the user.

When averaged out to cost per year, in my experience, Apple is way cheaper.

I also think that people don't necessarily appreciate how much quality improvements have been made in the last 5-7 years in consumer laptops. Optical drives are gone, everything has an SSD, performance has plateaued and AMD is good again.

Someone walking into Best Buy today and dropping $500 on a laptop will be getting a much more robust machine than when I did the same back in college.

I can attest that recently, the average laptop is way better. My machines were a toshiba, surface (2nd gen), and think pads (during their dark ages), dell XPS.

My MacBook Air M1 had that very screen defect thing happen for no reason after... 10 months.

So, basically: ten years vs ten months.

Many people are reporting this issue: Apple fucked up big times and it's time to stop apologizing.

I don't care how genius the Apple geniuses are and I don't care that my 10 years old MacBook are still working: what I do care about is that my 10 months old M1 Air died on me out of nowhere.

Currently, I still have faith in Apple, despite their lemons only because other companies laptops sucked more.

But that does not mean your point in invalid, at all. I just hope that this is an isolated incident to a particular generation vs a broad company trend.

I've got a 2014 15" MBP. It's had the screen replacement (free), and a bulging battery got me a new lower case & battery for $200. Still my daily driver.

OTOH, my wife has a 2017 MacBook which is on its third keyboard/lower case. Both the replacements were free, but it's a PITA to have to take it to the store and be without it for a few days while they swap in the new one.

Either way, my experiences have been uniformly positive with Apple's service, and whatever issues exist with the underlying hardware, if they're Apple's fault, I've had no trouble getting replacements for free.

All anecdata, I acknowledge.

If you want to do more than rehash 4 decades of “PC/Macs suck” forum posts, try finding some hard stats on resell value or enterprise fleet longevity.

Computers are harder to get that for, especially when you have to correct for things like whether different classes of buyer have notably different habits.

> I probably use my laptops harder than most people

Yeah, I didn't. This was basically a sedentary laptop, 95% of the time sitting on a desk connected to external screens / kb / mouse in an AC office, never in the sun. The other 5% I'd carry it around to meetings in the same building.

Since I was using it so little as a portable, it actually outlasted my colleagues' ones by two generations! So, it wasn't just my particular one that was a piece of junk.

It blows all the “premium” work laptops out of the water.

I disagree. I loved my Thinkpad T450s so much I bought an identical used machine when I quit the job. Since then it's been stepped on, dropped onto concrete multiple times, had beer and wine spilled on the keyboard.

It cost me $250 + $100 for a battery replacement + $34 for a new keyboard (when the wine spilled on it, it still worked but the keys were sticky) + $150 to upgrade the RAM.

It's currently running Visual Studio Code, Photoshop, and prepping to run a pub trivia event later.

But this is all a digression - my larger point is that a $500 laptop bought today is going to have a lot more longevity than people will give it credit for.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hvb60f/thinkpad_t...

and https://twitter.com/jacobgorm/status/1496099294159544321 for an acceptable workaround using Sugru.

But my current Dell Precision from work is a spectacular nightmare POS.

I love that the older macbooks can be opened up and fixed if needed. I had to replace the HD connector a couple times (and learnt to add some electrical tape to stop the issue), and I recently cleaned the old CPU adhesive off and added some new (old macbooks can start to smell like Body odour!).

With 16GB of RAM the macbook performance is still decent, able to run docker and run modern IDEs.

It's a great machine. The only downside is that you can no longer update to the most recent OS versions.

Im unsure about the 2012 MBP (not having had one), but if its an internal battery, battery death usually means user unfixable, for most users.