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.
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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 :)
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.