The Apple Silicon MacBooks are very, very good. They're efficient, fast, well-built, have great peripherals, don't power themselves back on when you close the lid, and are generally the best laptops I have ever used.

The worst part of them is macOS, and I hope that either Asahi Linux can get all of the hardware working correctly or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together. Unfortunately, I suspect the former is more likely than the latter...

There’s still no USB-A support, so the dongle book was never truly fixed.

Given that the industry is trying to retire USB-A for good, this doesn't seem likely.

USB-A is, in fact, the thing that drove me off of Apple for good.

There is a decent minority of people for whom USB-A eventually stops working and requires a reboot to restore.

The dongle doesn't matter. The dock doesn't matter. The device doesn't matter. Software updates do not fix it. The thread on it is 40+ pages when Apple closes it and then another 40+ page thread on it reappaears.

The problem is an OS problem. I can pinpoint precisely the OS update that caused it. Apple does not care and will not fix it.

Fine, I get it. So I left for Linux and never looked back.

I haven't used USB-A single time since 2018... My USB-C display has it on its hub, but who cares...

The vast majority of peripherals available at ordinary stores are still usb-a. If you just run into Target to grab [some peripheral] most or all options in that category will be usb-a.

Yeah but does anybody buy it? In my store the peripherals are covered in dust... And it's some cheap Chinese knockoff, nothing like the old high quality ones.

Yes?

My company’s mostly Windows and the peripherals issued are all brand new and are all usb-a. We Mac weirdos have to dongle constantly or not use them. Even the non-Apple major brand Bluetooth wireless earbuds they issue have a usb-a plug on the end of the charging cable for the case.

I was scared of getting a Mac for years because of the dongles. Then I got one from work (they even gave me the dongle and I made fun of it) and turns out I never use any of it. And then I realized the USB-A port on my desktop front panel has been broken probably for years and I didn't notice.

Oh, so you just don't use peripherals at all. That is not a very common scenario.

I do, but it's all wireless. My laptop and desktop both have Bluetooth.

Not even just to plug in a joke gift? I got a gigantic Escape key once, which connected on a usb-A port. Most of that peripheral stuff still uses it.

Hahaha, that's a cool one. But yeah I never got something like that.

I blame perhipheral manufacturers for clinging to USB-A for no reason. It's been 8 years, please let this connector die already.

The chain of blame can be pushed further. Peripheral manufacturers laergely targrt desktop users, of which almost no motherboards support USB-C.

It's a chicken and egg scenario. Motherboard manufacturers load up their I/O panels with USB A ports because people demand them. People demand them because all their perhipherals, like the dongle for their wireless mouse, are USB-A.

Logitech recently released an updated version of my mouse, the G Pro Superlight 2, and the damn thing still ships with a USB-A dongle.

With how many ports modern motherboards often ship with, I would think they could at least split the difference and give me 1/2 USB-C and 1/2 USB-A. but nope, my 2 year old motherboard only has 1 USB-C port on the back and a dozen USB-A. Then at least we would have a path forward.

>don't power themselves back on when you close the lid

Huh? I wish. The thing is periodically blocked throughout the night on my pihole as it continues to send network requests even after I click the "sleep" button in the apple menu.

> or the other laptop manufacturers can get their act together

Microsoft is willing to sell you an ARM-based PC if you like. Qualcomm's efforts aren't quite up to Apple Silicon's par, but they aren't terrible either.

Of course, if you are looking to put Linux on a PC I can definitely understand why Microsoft wouldn't be your first thought for your hardware vendor. It's a weird time we live in, if you remember (or are unfortunately stuck in) 90s Slashdot mindsets.

Being arm-based is not important. They could still be Motorola for all I care. It’s how the final product works as a whole. macOS does a disservice to the hardware package, which is too bad, because the hardware is really unmatched.

The hardware package of Microsoft's Surface line is quite elegant at this point. They've taken a lot of notes from Apple and are doing some strong things. At this point Windows itself is doing some disservice to that hardware, too, especially as the current Windows design team seems stuck trying to turn Windows 11 into a watered down macOS clone.

I highly recommend against Microsoft Surface products. I bought them for my dev team and we saw 3 of the 10 or so devices fail and need to be replaced.

The RMA experience in other countries may differ to Australia, but it meant my team were without a dev spec'd laptop in total of close to a month across the whole team. They had to use off the shelf laptops and use a VDI for computational taxing workloads while waiting for a replacement device.

Throw in how ordinary the support process was with Microsoft, e.g., no phone contact number, only email, correspondance takes 1-2 days to start and the back and forth taking another few hours each way. We wasted a lot of time on these devices and the bullshit Microsoft support process.

Devs are now split between Lenovo ThinkPads and MacBooks now depending on their wants and needs. I've never seen a failure record like what we had with the Surfaces as we have with any other hardware provider.

Not sure if the ARM Surfaces have WSL2 but if yes, that alone would be a very serious consideration for my next enterprise laptop requisition, because Apple very obviously doesn’t care.

I've heard WSL2 on ARM works as expected, with the caveat that you are still limited to ARM Linux distros and their quirks.

Its kinda funny. In the past Apple had terrific OS and bad hardware. Now its the other way around.

Main two things for me that (in my opinion) Apple does better than others are 1) excellent trackpad and 2) no air vents at the bottom of the laptop. With those two things I find MacBooks to be very usable on your lap, like for example in trains, airports, or even in an outdoor chair.

MacBook Air (ARM) is fanless even.

I had an ASUS laptop die to overheating, so fanless sounds terrible. Does that thing just shut down when it starts getting hot or something?

It just doesn't get hot. If I remember correctly, there's a massive heatsink there that distributes it all, and having an aluminum body probably helps as well. Either way it's the most comfortable laptop I've ever used for this exact reason (well, and the humongous haptic trackpad).

Yet it's still fast enough to do development on it, never mind more mundane stuff like web browsing or watching movies. I'm not at all an Apple fan, but when people say that M* silicon is almost magic, they're not wrong.

I don't think my M2 Air has ever reached a temperature you could describe as "hot."

It's basically an iPad (hardware wise) with a bigger screen and a keyboard attached. Why would that be an issue?

It gets less hot than my iPhone

It throttles itself. You can install a thermal conductor on the package which makes the whole chassis into a radiator and the thing gets too hot to touch under load, but you get more performance.

Have a search in this very thread for “laptop manufacturers just don’t care”. To me Apple seems to be the last one to give a shit

So, why doesn’t a great MacBook alternative exist? It’s a valid question.

Everyone seems to prefer to slot into some different niche in the market and leave Apple to have the “actually kinda decent laptops, sort-of” segment all to themselves with no actual competition.

We need a lot of trust-busting in general, but including among computer vendors.

It's remarkable that Apple has maintained such a commanding lead for so long. The 2020 M1 MacBook Air raised the bar for performance and battery life in a fanless laptop, and the rest of the industry is largely still catching up.

The situation will likely continue until the availability of ARM-based ThinkPads, etc.

Yes, battery life, trackpad, monitor quality, performance (especially now with LLMs and MXs) and case are really hard to top.

I think Dell has would have a chance to be great but they do lots of plasticky and heavy stuff.