If you didn't know anything about laptops and wanted to buy your first one, it would be a nightmare to figure out what all those seemingly random numbers mean on most non-Apple laptops.

Apple continues to simplify the laptop naming scheme, we're at a point where it's simply:

Air OR Pro

Small screen OR big screen

All other details can be configured in the buying flow but there's not much to think about if you just want a simple laptop.

It's not even close to a competition. Macbooks are just so far ahead of everyone else that you can't even compare them.

Most Windows laptops have abysmal batteries, to the point that you can barely call them laptops. The trackpads are downright unusable. The keyboards are a hit or a miss. And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.

Anything even remotely within Macbook vicinity costs the same as a Macbook anyway.

Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.

I picked my daughter up an m1 macbook air about a year ago. It was an absolute delight of a machine to use. Light weight, no fans, no hot bits during general usage, long battery life, a screen that didn't upset my eyes, and importantly the OS just got out of the way during general usage.

I wound up buying myself an m1 air about 6 months later.

My only gripe is that I wish it had more RAM, but even then the unified memory approach has made my expected ram usage vs actual ram usage a bit of an odd thing. It consistently uses less ram than I'd normally anticipate. That said, more ram by default would help fill in those times when I do load it up.

I currently have Photoshop, Illustrator, VSCode, multiple Chrome windows - each with 20-40 tabs - and this thing is not even sweating.

I get 8-10 hours of useful work out of it even on battery.

Completely changed the way I work

If you become "enlightened" you can notice that sometimes when you, say, open your spotify window after a long time elsewhere, the spotify is briefly unresponsive. Not in a way you notice, more in the sense that if you are looking for it, you can see hints it is swapping.

The only time I wish I had more is when I got into iOS development and began running VMs on my mac.

You're never going to read those, before the links rot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611

Brave (by default at least) will ask you if you want to load the archive.org version when a page fails to load. Not 100% automatic but almost.

I'm using Vimium for general use and have an Alfred plugin/thing/extension but even that's a bit unwieldy. How many windows is this?

I've only managed to hear the fan when chatting with a LLM, for anything else it's been an absolutely silent beast.

It's going to be hard to justify upgrading this thing for awhile.

My own machines are M1 Max 32GB and they fare slightly better.

Similarly, I am for the first time going to care about how much RAM is in my next iPhone. My iPhone 13's 4GB is suddenly inadequate.

My daily driver before this was a Ryzen 5700x desktop with 64GB RAM, so I know what a powerful processor + RAM combo feels like.

Haven’t even heard the fan even once.

I have to use macbooks at work, and they do bother me. The mirror-finish screen always reflects bright lights into my eyes, be it a window or a ceiling light at a distance. The OS is thankfully a certified Unix, but the GUI, while having a few brilliant features, also has warts like no way to align or snap windows, apps running without a window, with only a menu bar, with a window from a different app showing, etc. This continues for many years, so it's likely a design principle.

Of course, Windows is even worse in the GUI department, there's no comparison.

So, sadly, a Macbook remains the most sane computer for non-technical people :(

I read that Apple follows a document model, where the application is kinda a background thing a window is supposed to be for a specific task. Not like Windows where the main windows is the hub of interaction. So you use CMD + to switch between these tasks and CMD + TAB for switching between applications. The menu bar is part of the application, but windows can modify it to suit the focused tasks.

I've used Rectangle for quick window management, but in time I've come to understand the philosophy so it does not bother me as much. It's more leaned into the desktop analogy than other OS.

The desktop represents the active app, and a window is the active document in that app.

This doesn't make all that much sense with today's screen sizes and multiplatform apps.

For window snapping, there are countless apps that will easy solve your problem. But I get why you would struggle - I still get frustrated at times with the way MacOS works.

Just download Rectangle for free. I recently switched from Dell XPS to M3 Pro and that was my gripe to. One install and it's much better, moving windows with ctrl+opt+arrows is also close to Windows and makes it fairly usable.

It also has imo better ports and a track point.

The problem is that Windows sucks more and more with every iteration and there is nothing Lenovo or other manufacturers can do about it. Lenovo also keeps shipping hot and loud Intel CPUs which hurt reputation of the ThinkPad line and may confuse new buyers. Still if you know what to choose you will get more for your money with P14 than Macbook air imo.

The last point of TPs using loud and hot Intel CPUs cannot be understated. The P14 throttles so hard when I'm trying to do any work because it's using some sh*t Comet Lake U-series, that I literally breathe a sigh of relief when I can use my desktop computer that doesn't hang up every time I load up IntelliJ. MBs are so efficient for the power profile it runs circles around any x86 mobile CPU when on battery.

Obviously I've had 10x better experience with a trusty Ryzen 5600U over that Intel CPU. But still nothing close to a MB. Also the TP trackpads are sand paper garbage.

My MacBook on the otherhand lacks a trackpoint (that will never be fixed) but is otherwise snappy and quiet. Sure it had some software/OS issues, but overall it is miles ahead of the Thinkpad.

To be fair it’s not exactly fair to be comparing this to a MacBook. Dell XPS, Lenovo X1/Z/? series would be closer equivalents, of course AFAIK while the battery life is much better fans/temperature are still an issue.

I distinctly remember running a firmware update and the utility had several typos in it: "Updating fimiware". Sure it's just a status message on an installer, but I lost a lot of confidence in Lenovo's quality control that day. I have no proof but I'm sure that thermal control code was outsourced.

I've experienced that myself, and from that point on I told myself I would never buy another TP ever again. The issue confuses me because I've used the low-tier IdeaPads with an AMD H-series CPU and honestly I've had similar battery life but without the unlivable throttling. The IdeaPad is thicker but I prefer it over my work ThinkPad for everything.

> The problem is that Windows sucks more and more...

Not to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like the ThinkPads have been technical specs, but the overall experience is worse due to the software.

If so, I might challenge your final comment, which is "you get more for your money". Ultimately, I think people want a great experience, not a bunch of specs.

Windows keeps dropping the ball and Linux just stands there looking at it on the ground.

I also find something weirdly repulsive about the plastics they use on ThinkPads. A true Macbook alternative shouldn't be using much plastic at all, though.

I also can't stand the Mac keyboard, especially compared to the Thinkpad.

Windows sucks in the default install, but if you know what you're doing you can remove all the junk from it and make Windows almost as efficient as, say, Linux (and way more efficient than macOS).

In my opinion, Macbooks are for people who'd rather pay more than take care of and optimize their laptops. I could have paid 3 times as much for a similarly spec'ed Macbook, but then I'd have to put up with a silly notch, not having a right Ctrl key, a keyboard getting shiny after a couple of months and other annoyances. So why even bother with Macbooks?

I can answer this as someone who, throughout last 6 months of his new job, used a Dell XPS 9570 with Windows, then PopOS, then Windows again, and just switched to an M3 Pro a week or two ago. No - you will never get close. That Dell could run fps games like CS:GO or Valorant with 100+ fps, had custom tweaks incl. thermalpads connecting to the chasis, exchanged thermal paste, was undervolted and with a custom fan curve. It still throttled from time to time. Granted - it was 8th gen i7, but it was on paper good enough to handle everything I do. Only on paper.

It also choke on my day to day work, which is WebStorm, Docker and Typescript web development. Indexing, autocomplete, builds(even with swc) took a really long time. I switched to PopOS for a while, but overal user experience was even worse to me, with constant issues ranging from monitors behaving weirdly, stuff crashing, requiring weird driver installations, even Docker didn't 'just work', I had to fight it half a day to get it to actually run. Went back to Windows until I got frustrated enough and just bought a 36gb M3 Pro, and I'm never going back. This just works, builds take 1/6th of what they did, I can run full swc build in 100ms, full tsc build takes 10 seconds(down from around 60), nothing ever stutters, nothing slows down, didn't hear fans yet. It does have some annoyances, mostly with window management, new keyboard layout and a ton of shortcuts needed to do basic stuff but once I learned those - it's really nice.

Besides the horrible touchpad, screen (did you really get > 1080p for $1050?) and the plastic body

> I could have paid 3 times as much for a similarly spec'ed Macbook

I could get a desktop with even better specs for as much. Not exactly a fair comparison of course since different people have different needs (how much is never hearing the dans fans and a proper touchpad worth? Supposedly a lot to some people).

> and way more efficient than macOS).

Can you explain what do you even mean by that? Do you get better battery life than with an M series macbook after these “optimizations”?

They are awesome, but not perfect.

Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS. Any one of these could be reason enough for people to look elsewhere.

I just want to display on 3 screens. But the base model is the only one that corporate IT will buy. So I have to buy a DisplayLink adapter to do what the Intel macbooks did with zero problem.

Thing that was possible at 300$ windows laptop cannot be done on 2500$ machine with 60$ connector.

Apple is in the business of selling you hardware, specifically premium hardware. Think car dealership.

People agree to pay ridiculous prices for memory or apple connectors - why not to charge them maximum?

There's no excuse for a $2000+ machine to not support more than two external monitors. DisplayLink on MacOS is far from ideal, either: it works alright, but it has to use the screen recording functionality in the OS, which causes anything with protected content to freak out.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/101571

This only happens on my Acer Predator, and only if I’m using DP —> USB-C. The secondary LG doesn’t care, nor does the Acer if it’s over HDMI.

The fix I’ve found is to wake up the Mac first with the external keyboard, then turn the Acer on and wait for sync, login, then turn the LG on.

While I’d obviously rather not have to deal with this, I feel like it’s at least partially on the incredibly aggressive power saving of the Acer, which I can’t find any way to disable or extend the timeout of.

side steps the problem of single monitor output

> When they design a product they don’t start from the specs, they start from how people use the product.

So they impose arbitrary limitations that have basically nothing to do with the specs just so that people who are supposed to use more expensive machines wouldn’t buy the cheaper models? Sounds about right.

Apple is trying to maximize their revenue because they can. There is nothing wrong about a for profit company doing that. Trying to find any other explanation is a bit silly though..

Most people don't buy Macs. So why even sell them then?

They literally took away a feature that their cheapest Intel Macs could do, and restricted it to their most expensive Apple Silicon Macs. They should be lambasted for this.

>Finally, a used M1 Max system will cost you under $2000 and is barely 3 years old.

A Raspberry Pi can do this for under $100. Come on.

and those skylake laptops are stuck on HDMI 1.4b, so they top out at effectively 1080p60, but sure, you get three of them. And the DP/thunderbolt tops out at 4K60 non-HDR with crappy decode support, and you get at most like 2 ports per laptop.

the grass isn't always greener, there's lots of pain points with x86 hardware too. heck, those celerons you're so fond of are down to literally a single memory channel by this point. is a single stick going to be enough raw bandwidth for a developer that wants to be compiling code etc?

> the grass isn't always greener, there's lots of pain points with x86 hardware too. heck, those celerons you're so fond of are down to literally a single memory channel by this point. is a single stick going to be enough raw bandwidth for a developer that wants to be compiling code etc?

What a weird argument; no shit a bargain bin CPU from 10 years ago is worse than a brand new mid-range chip. That's the exact point I'm making. That Celeron was bad 10 years ago. 10 years of progress, billions of dollars of investment and you get the same maximum RAM capacity, less external monitors at a much higher price.

It has 2x the bandwidth of a Radeon 780M and runs at 35w, it has as much bandwidth as a PS5. there are pluses and minuses to doing it both ways, but, detractors only want to look at the handful of areas where traditional chips have an edge.

Except they crippled it on purpose as a form of market segmentation. Claiming anything else is beyond absurd.

The MBA is an extremely close competitor to the Dell XPS line too. And "Pro" doesn't even guarantee you more monitors. The $1600 M3 MBP is just as limited as the "consumer" Air.

Stuck with macOS: technically not true, Asahi Linux exists.

Connecting multiple monitors: a legitimate negative limitation unusual at the MacBook Air price point, but still something that only a small fraction of consumer laptop buyers care about.

> Way over-priced storage and RAM upgrades, can't connect multiple monitors unless you pay up, and you're stuck with MacOS.

Basically boils down to "Apple is selling a much better product, and they know it." I.e. your first bullets (over priced storage, RAM, charging for multi monitor support) all just boil down to "Apple charges more because they can". The "you're stuck with MacOS" is obviously true but just highlights that Apple has always been about optimizing hardware and software together.

If anything, I think the "dark times" for Apple laptops was the late teens during the era of stuff like the butterfly keyboard, the touchbar, and too few ports. I think Apple consumers have consigned themselves to paying more for a much better product. What they're not willing to do (as much anyway) is to pay a premium for a crappier product. The butterfly keyboard especially was such a disaster ("We shaved .2 mm off the width, all at the minor expense of any key randomly stopping to work at any time!") Admitting mistakes in big corporations is hard so I'm glad they just jettisoned all that stuff.

Linux on the Desktop has finally arrived !

You have to set up a bash script to do something as basic as change the scrollwheel speed. Bluetooth is extremely spotty. Installing most software is still a pain unless you know all sorts of terminal-fu

I could go on, there's many basic features MacOS has been missing for going on a decade, let's not pretend they get it all right either.

The whole HDR thing seems more like a meme or weird flex type of thing to me, I've never noticed it ever really making a difference for me.

Also a weird hill to die on when talking about relative strengths of each platform, but you do you.

Ah this is why technical professionals all use linux, right?

[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t...

but yea, i agree, probably the 2nd biggest draw

It's night-and-day compared to the Intel MBPs.

It takes a long operation e.g. compilation for 10-20 mins before it really starts to fall behind the Pro models.

It is disturbing it didn't sink the Macbooks. It speaks volumes of how little people care about their own data. About their own privacy. There should've been zero sold. It truly is dismal and a very large systemic problem a laptop like this is sold.

Because when it breaks, are you going to wipe it and restore from backup? No. You will just hand it over to a repair person and even an ethical shop much less Apple doesn't even have a chance to hand the disk back before handling it. An unknown amount of complete strangers will access your everything. Your medical records, your banking, your private photos, everything.

And people pay real world money for this, money they worked hard for. It's unfathomable to me.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/volume-encryption-w...

Soldered-in components make for higher quality, lower cost production. Anecdotally, every Windows machine I've had has failed. Every MacBook machine I have replaced after 4-5 years when I wanted to upgrade to the latest technology.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXAXabAzbk0

Additionally, data in the flash chips are always encrypted by the unique key burned in the M chip (previously T2 secure enclave).

Pretty fathomable.

To your point, then comes the lower end ("just give me something cheap"), the corporate middle ("the same laptop as at work"), and the super high end (gaming, CAD, anything needing special software or a discrete GPU), with the outliers (linux etc)

IMHO windows laptop nowadays are for people who either don't really care, or have already a very specific target or limitation.

For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple.

[0] resistance to abuse isn't there. A macbook's screen will be dead pretty quick if not handled with appropriate care. A Lenovo Flex for instance will take it a lot longer.

It's a bit more nuanced. Lenovo/Asus seem to be experimenting a lot more, but more like by throwing (relatively) easy-to-build variations at the wall to see what sticks, then release a few more polished SKUs. Apple doesn't really do that, but they do attack those limits and design aspects they care about very aggressively and with a ton of resources (e.g. battery life pre-M1, manufacturing tolerances).

We've seen that with the touchbar: it got a first release, and basically no improvements, no bug fixes, no better support from there. A laptop only feature gets no love from today's Apple.

Even the iPad saw little to no progress in recent years, outside of sharing specs with the mac.

I posit we'd see a foldable/bendable phone from Apple before we ever see something significant form factor change in laptops.

If they lost you eight years ago, then you haven't been an Apple user for the last 20 years.

Also, 2016 was eight years ago. Get over it. Or at least find an axe to grind from this decade.

It is not correct, unless you select minimal amount of ram and SSD. Select versions with proper amount of memory and MacBook becomes much more expensive than comparable windows machine.

Until you want more memory or a larger SSD then the Macbook is all of a sudden double the price of the equivalent PC laptop.

>Increasingly feels like most manufacturers have given up on the laptop as an innovation center and are happy to just scrape up the consumers who can't or won't buy Apple.

That's basically true, but with Apple becoming more and more expensive that does leave a very large low-end market for them to play in.

Of course, it does not have high-DPI mini LED screen, great speakers or 18 hours of battery life, but none of that really matters, and I'd choose this any day over a similarly speced Macbook Pro 14 that would cost me $2,399.

I am in the group of people who go for Full HD. It's enough for me, my eyesight is relatively bad. Then again, I use 3 monitors.

They are what Apple calls "Retina" displays.

A 13"-15" 1080p screen is pretty similar PPI to a 27" 4K display. This is pretty nice because if you have both at the scaling level elements are the same size on both.

The opposite ("macs are overpriced") is something I've never been able to understand. Back in 2013 when I bought my current laptop, the mac book air was the thinnest, lightest, longest battery life, nicest keyboard, and a bunch of superlatives I don't remember, and it was somewhat over £1000. The closest non-mac "ultrabooks" I could find in shops at the time cost the same, and felt like cheap rubbish. And this laptop just refuses to die, and handles my workload just fine after all these years. I'm dreading the day I have to replace it.

It's simple: People without much money have basic needs and want a ~$600 laptop but Apple doesn't sell one.

It doesn't matter if the $1000 Macbook has better battery life than a $1000 Dell because they don't have a $1000 budget.

Overpriced would be "costs more than it should for what it is," not "costs what it should but is more product than I can afford."

But it's also that, because their bottom configurations are weird/crippled.

It's hard to find a PC laptop with a 4k screen for much less than $1000, but then the $1000 machine has 12 cores and 32GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Apple's $1000 laptop has 8 cores and 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, i.e. overpriced.

Okay, but DDR5 is ~$3/GB and NVMe SSDs are ~$0.10/GB, so really that's only a value difference of like $100 and you could just upgrade it. Except that Apple charges $25/GB for DDR5 and $1.28/GB for storage and then solders everything, so you'd actually have to pay an extra $800. Except that the Macbook Air isn't available with 32GB of RAM, or more than 8 cores, so then you need the Pro, which is even more.

The good part is that the DRAM is connected to the GPU as well as the CPU.

Moreover, they could put the APU in a socket and then if you wanted more of the integrated memory you could replace the APU without having to replace the entire machine.

It's the fact that Apple is grifting everyone who needs more than the base specs.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FGN63LL/A/refurbished-133...

The thing that's really sad is that the build quality on sub $1k laptops is just such shite

That's not the same thing. If you're budget conscious then you presumably need to keep it for a long time, but now you've got a used battery and a machine that will fall out of support sooner.

> The thing that's really sad is that the build quality on sub $1k laptops is just such shite

The secret to this one might be refurbished Framework laptops. Sure, you've got a used battery, but now it's easy to replace and costs $50 instead of $250.

(My iPad Air was $599 new, and I use a shockingly pleasant $30 case-and-keyboard combination for typing--no, it's not a mechanical keyboard, but c'mon.)

Also the M1 MacBook Air was on sale many times for $700. That's less than $100 more than your iPad Air + keyboard.

It's not a laptop, no--but that's also not inherently a bad thing. If you need what a laptop can do, sure. I have a 32GB M1 Max for a reason. But more and more it seems obvious to me that the median computer user doesn't need that, and the affordances from overlap with their more accustomed part of the ecosystem (their phone) are strong and pretty valuable.

When have MacBooks ever had the nicest keyboard? They have pretty good keyboards, but I have 10 year old ThinkPads with keyboards that I prefer.

I've been positively delighted by my two Intel Alder Lake laptops I use during travel for play (ASUS Vivobook S 14X OLED, 12700H CPU) and work (Lenovo V14 G3, 1255U CPU) respectively. I can get 4 to 8 hours off of them depending on use with the charge limited to 80% for longer overall life, and as I just mentioned the hardware are quite powerful in their own right.

>The trackpads are downright unusable.

Both of my laptops I just mentioned have wonderful touchpads. Frankly though, this absolutely will vary by several country miles depending on manufacturer and even model. I suppose I got lucky here.

>And for some reason, so many companies are still shipping laptops with 1080p screens in 2024.

I'm gonna be honest: I fucking hate screens bigger than 1920x1080 (or x1200 for 16:10 screen ratios). My laptop for play has a 2880x1800 screen, but I've got it rendering at 1920x1200 because so many programs just assume pixel densities around that area and either can't or won't handle scaling.

I also have to still do some scaling up even at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 at laptop screen sizes anyway because everything is so small, but it's still less compatibility headaches compared to physically denser pixels.

My prior experiences with older hardware have been barely an hour or two, which is impractically retarded.

I also have an M2 Macbook Air and find its battery life even more impressive (literally days between charging), but I don't really use it because it doesn't satisfy my requirements which are games (for play) and clean interoperability with other Windows machines at home (for both play and work).

I have a MacBook Pro M1, which is pure fluid bliss. It cost less, it's faster, and the battery lasts for days.

The weird part of that argument to me: to arrive to that point you've already made a ton of choices that need to be educated.

You decided on the form factor: you don't want a convertible (neither a Surface like tablet + keyboard, nor something like a Yoga).

You decided to forgo touch.

You decided you don't really want to game. You also evaluated you don't need anything Windows or x86 only.

Then sure there's about 10 models. But at that point is it much complicated than say, choose from the DELL XPS line ?

I am not saying the mac isn't good at filling that niche, just that people who really don't care about computers also don't care if it's a mac, and will probably be fine with any recent default configuration machine from a major maker.

PS: > bring your Mac to the next Apple Store

You need an Apple Store. In my experience people have come to terms with shipping devices and waiting for repairs. Cloud sync helps a lot in that respect, as keeping another computer around has become decently manageable.

And if I did that, they'd also come back with that DELL - and then I'd be stuck doing tech support for them for however long the thing lasts. I cannot begin to count the number of times they've gone and bought some junk computer that they got upsold on.

This is not an experience unique to me, either. The non-Apple laptop segment is (mostly) a broken experience in comparison.

I stopped doing tech support for family members using Windows. THAT was the main reason they changed to Mac. And now, hardly do any support for them at all.

It isn't close to an apple device in terms of materials or performance, but at a tenth of the cost of a pro it makes a lot of sense.

Ah really? Ever heard of worldwide on-site next day repair warranty?

I was talking with my dad recently, and he wanted a new computer that could handle email, a little Excel, Facebook, and some other light web browsing that didn’t get stuck in an infinite reboot loop for system updates (which somehow his Windows got stuck somehow). There are a bagillion options for Windows laptops that fit those needs. He ended up not being able to make a decision and is still using his same old laptop.

Whereas my son wanted a desktop computer that would support playing Valorant at 60fps at 1440. That narrowed things down substantially and ended up building one to his specs.

If a Mac fits your requirements, then you have far fewer decisions. And that’s part of the point. For the a long time, Apple has stuck to a restricted set of SKUs. This is by design. It’s not that they couldn’t offer a touchscreen, or a convertible, or a xMac. It’s that they’ve been there… had many form factors and SKUs and it almost killed the company.

Even if you say you want a Dell laptop — have you ever tried to browse their site? If you say you want a laptop you’re presented with 68 options (I just did this). 68.

That's what OP said? Because now you have already decided you don't want to game, etc.

>Even if you say you want a Dell laptop — have you ever tried to browse their site?

This is the iPhone versus Android discussion all over again. Yes, many will be happy with the iPhone, but they also often didn't know they had the option to buy an Android phone that could do something the iPhone couldn't that they'd like to be able to do (like copy&paste or whatever). Ignorance is bliss for some. Others want the choices, and Apple have nothing for those buyers.

That’s exactly what I’m not saying. If you want to play games (with Windows only games), then a Mac won’t work for you. If you get a Mac, that means that gaming likely wasn’t part of your decision tree.

Think of the choices as a positive selection. I want to do X, does computer A allow me to do that? People make decisions based on positive selections… not negatives. If gaming isn’t on your requirements list — you aren’t actively rejecting gaming… you just don’t care one way or the other. The post I was replying to asserted that if you chose a Mac, then you’ve already decided not to do X and not to do Y and that you don’t want form factor Z. But that’s not it… decisions are made based on what you DO want. They aren’t made based upon what you don’t want.

Some people just prefer one ecosystem over the other… it doesn’t mean that they don’t know that other options exist. It’s not ignorance, it’s just a different choice than you made.

it is amazing how much the android crowd loves to shit on apple "brainless sheeple" etc given how little they clearly know about the products themselves.

I keep bringing it up over and over and it's never not true, the android crowd is just so utterly uncivil and it's completely normalized and accepted as public discourse. The AMD fanbase has the exact same problem. It's constant "brainless sheep" and "the ONLY reason anyone buys [not my brand] is [infantilizing and insulting remark goes here]".

If anyone on the other side did anything remotely like that they'd be slapped with a mod comment etc. But if you point it out, that people are misbehaving and acting out, you're the bad guy, because acknowledging the constant microaggressions is the greatest crime of all.

Then you have to pay real money and you might as well buy a Mac.

Although I heard many complaints about the Yoga. Never owned one, but if I had a laptop with a touch screen, that seems like the route to go. The Surface too, but I've also heard those stop feeling snappy pretty quick and tons of thermal issues.

Yes. A thousand times more complicated. I usually get Apple gear for myself, but am always asked to help friends and relatives with PC laptop buying decisions...

The average punter buys whatever crap they have on sale at Target or Best Buy.

The MacBook Air used to have a multiple USB-A ports plus video, now it 2 ports that have to handle everything. So now the dongle/no dongle question has to become considered as well.

I doubt this is much of a constraint in the real world. Most people plug power in, perhaps an external mouse, and that's it. (They should be plugging in external storage for backups, which might require an extra port, but I doubt most people do in practice).

> So now the dongle/no dongle question has to become considered as well.

I'm pretty much USB-C only at this point, but even before then I never understood the fixation on "dongles".

You start with the idea of cheap model, then start going the ladders up.

Though it’s not a big issue in practice. When at home or the office, I just plug into a display with a USB or Thunderbolt hub. On-the-go, the Apple adapter works great.

Having to plug more than one cable is annoying anyway when you move between desks.

And the crazy thing is, despite Dell having 170+ laptop SKUs they don't use that fact to actually have a wide range of products.

You'd think with 170 different SKUs they could produce an ultrabook with ports, wouldn't you? A modernised version of the E7270? Apparently not, though.

With such bloated webapps now a days, those 8G of RAM are going to cook too fast...

Dell has XPS 13, XPS 15, and XPS 17 and now the plus designation. It's pretty easy.

- XPS 13 Laptop

or

- XPS 13 Laptop

https://i.imgur.com/2SHL91Y.png

I gather that one of these is a newer revision than the other, but it's a lot more confusing than "M2" and "M3". I need to know whether I want (up to) a Core Ultra 7 155H vs a Core i7-1250U, and whether (up to) Intel Arc Graphics is better than Intel Iris Xe graphics.

Scrolling down further adds the XPS 13 Plus and XPS 13 2-in-1 Laptop. How does XPS 13 Plus compared to XPS 13 Laptop? What about to the other XPS 13 Laptop, is it better than both? Or is this a weird side-grade where you get a different form factor which is in some ways nicer, but then also comes with all the dumb parts of the Apple's "Touch Bar" and none of the good parts? (that's my 10 second interpretation of the product, but more clueless customers will have absolutely no idea)

But then there are all the variations with different amounts of RAM, SSD, processors (M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max)

And every little upgrade costs you 10X compared to a PC laptop.

Yes, Apple changed to a randomized serial number format in 2021. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/14/apple-preapres-for-rand...

So, if you have a device made after that transition and Apple doesn't already know the details (e.g. because you didn't buy it direct), they'll also need to know how much RAM and SSD space it has.

They ask for serial which you can copy and paste from the "About this Mac" dialog box that is in MacOS.

From there it asks you the year of your laptop which is also in the same dialog box.

From there it asks you which CPU version and core count you have (for M series laptops with multiple options.) To get this info, you click on "More Info" on the same dialog box(In Sonoma you also click System Report and it is all there).

Afterwards it just asks the condition of the laptop (ie, does it turn on, screen cracked etc.)

I don't see why you would need MacRumors for this.

I have seen that serial number prompt before though, I don’t know what makes it ask for a serial number versus prompting to use the current device’s serial number. I’m not even sure how it knew what device I was on to be honest.

It's also available inside of the about this mac screen.

Multiple orders of magnitude easier than the PC laptop space.

Newegg's feature selector is pretty good at sorting through this. Just uncheck all the bad screen resolutions and CPU models and see what's left. Bonus: Require at least 32GB of memory in an exact power of two, excluding all the junk that solders 8GB to the system board.

The problem with this tactic is that there's a lot of SKUs that give people a terrible experience and they jump to another brand.

Apple's solution to this is to instead have 50 SKUs, organize them by a few very easily understandable categories, and then price every SKU exactly within $50-$75 of one another so that there's always a meaningful upgrade for slightly more money. This is also why Apple is very stingy with storage and RAM. They use the cost of upgrades to pull you to higher priced SKUs, which then need their own upgrades, and OH LOOK there's an even nicer base model for just a little more!

[0] The amount of money you save when the thing you want to buy turns out to be cheaper than what you were willing to pay.

If you remember back in the day, Nokia also had a crazy number of SKUs for their phones. Nokia is no longer the power it used to be. Could it mean many SKUS means a lack of focus ? Thinking you can out market / out segment your competition rather than try to concentrate more on the product ?

I find AMD also has less SKUs than Intel. Here, as a challenger you can't really afford to segment the market as much as the leader. You need to concentrate your offerings in a few potent products.