• _g_be@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            A MacBook is very good at what it does. If you tried to spec out a laptop/portable computer for similar tasks, the Mac would be pretty competitive and have longer battery life.

            Once you try to do anything that apple didn’t intend for it to do (play games, for example) or if we turn to desktops then the value proposition goes away pretty quickly

            • msage@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              So my all-purpose PC is now limited by the intentions of the silicone manufacturer, and therefore it’s better than the other options?

              • darth_helmet@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Your computer always has been limited by the intentions of the system designer. It’s not malice, it’s market-fit and optimization.

                Look at those x3d variants that amd has been putting out. Fantastic for gamers, but relatively niche for general computing tasks. If I were an OEM, would I pick those parts for my workstation prebuilts? Fuck no, they’re overpriced for someone using office and a web browser. But for my gaming line, maybe, if I could get a deal.

                All computers have many of these price/performance/size/power draw/availability decisions to make, and portables even more so. Apple knows that most of their users need xyz, and they build for that. Everyone else’s needs go into the pile of lower priority, some of which will be supported if they feel like it.

                • barsoap@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  If all you need is office and a web browser there’s plenty of suitable ARM systems. Handful of A72 cores, generally come with more than enough of a GPU to drive 2d, important: At least a couple of PCIe lanes for an SSD. I’m sure by now there’s more suitable systems but an RK3399 is sufficient, originally a chipset for set-top boxes (hence why it has a beast of a VPU (for its price and age) which can decode 4k h265). Bought the board for about 100 bucks back in the days, what, three or four years ago. Actually I should hook it up to a monitor and check out those fancy new GPU drivers that have been coming along, the thing is vulkan-capable (back in the days I was stuck with a gles blob, and using the VPU meant using an overlay).

          • scoredseqrica@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            That’s not apples to apples. If you spec a windows laptop, good luck getting the same performance and the same battery life and portability at the same price. Also build quality, screen, speaker and trackpad quality will likely not be at apples level from the windows machine. If that’s what you’re in the market for Apple machines are not bad. For instance a photographer/videographer working on location, truly amazing for them. Should everyone buy one? No. Are there a 100 better ways to spend the money if you don’t have that specific Apple favoured use case. Sure, e.g. your mum doesn’t need a MacBook Pro for Facebook / Amazon browsing and your cousin shouldn’t buy a Mac Studio for gaming. But use cases do exist, and for those people Macs are genuinely a good proposition.

            • Stinkywinks@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I’m willing to bet you could find a laptop with a really nice track pad, screen and camera if you really wanted to for half the price. Everything “quality” about Mac is double the price just for having an apple logo on it.

              • jackfrost@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                The issue I have with non-Apple laptops is that comparable performance requires an active cooling system that is often distractingly loud. I am willing and able to pay extra for a platform that lets me focus, and lets me watch some Netflix without having to crank the volume to drown out the fans. Then the all-metal exterior is also quite durable, the trackpad and speakers are top-notch, the Pro comes with that XDR screen, and the battery life is hard to beat. Plus I can take it to a nearby Apple store if I’m having a problem with it, instead of having to mail it to a regional support shop and wait potentially for weeks without the device. It’s more than the sum of its parts–and that is reflected in the resale value as well. Some Windows laptops will do specific things better (chiefly game support), but I didn’t find anything that was as good overall as an M1 Macbook Pro, and I say that as someone who had never owned a Mac of any kind, despite using PCs since the early 1980s and building them for the last 25 years.

                I would have preferred a laptop that could run Windows or Linux, but I just couldn’t find anything that was a complete package like the M1 MBP.

                • ditty@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  I’m in exactly the same camp as you. I haven’t bought an M1/2 Mac for personal use yet since Linux support is not there yet, but that may change once Asahi + Fedora comes out

                • Stinkywinks@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  The features you talk about seem pretty easy to put in any laptop. Battery life? Laptop speakers? Screens? Metal case? But sure you get to go pay twice the price for an Apple tech to charge you to replace the entire internals for minor problems. Seems like y’all bought the Kool aid and didn’t try to find alternatives because you don’t mind throwing some extra money at it. If you throw enough money at anything, generally, you can make it good lol

              • deleted@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                You cannot understand the quality of apple unless you use it as a daily driver.

                Are they a shitty company? Yes.

                Do they design their products to be hard to repair? Yes.

                Do they provide half baked products? No.

                Can you find product that matches the performance, battery life, build quality, and weight? I don’t think so.

              • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Nothing will come close with similar build quality. The XPS 13+ is probably the closest competitor to the 13" pro/air. But it has a 12th gen Intel CPU which will get awful battery life in anything but the most ideal scenarios.

                With an Apple silicon Mac you have to try to get bad battery life, with an Intel Machine I can’t get it to have good battery life and do anything other than sit idle. AMD will come close, but few manufactures make a premium AMD laptop.

                  • FiveMacs@lemmy.ca
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                    1 year ago

                    That would mean using apple products, I’ll pass. I won’t support that kind of closed overpriced enviroment.

                  • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Honestly it’s still pretty bad. I can’t stand touch pads. Even the good ones are janky. For what is worth, the touch pad on my legion 7 is about as good as a Mac. It’s also smaller which I like. The macbook touch pad is so big it reacts to my palm while typing constantly.

            • beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 year ago

              What you using all that power for? Gaming? Not likely on Mac, Machine learning? Also not likely with that GPU… Maybe a Photoshop machine? Enjoy that non expandable ram.

              For a nice dev machine I get it, nice battery life and watch Netflix on a screen, but it’s not like you can’t get a same performance machine for the same/lesser price with Dell/Thinkpad and use Linux…

              • michaelfone@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                That’s a rather narrow set of use cases. For example, they are audio and video editing powerhouses. Audio in particular is exceptional because of core audio in MacOS.

                And upgradable components aren’t something 95% of the population is worried about. Max out what you need when you buy it. My last Mac lasted 8 years with no trouble. And by the time I was ready to upgrade, the bottleneck was mainly the cpu, which in a case of 8 years, that means a new motherboard, and at that point you might as well upgrade the whole computer, as standards have changed and updated.

              • ashok36@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I have a colleague that spends 90% of their time out of the office on trains and on airplanes. They need to connect to an RDP server, answer emails, and do some InDesign work. Our IT dept manager has the same attitude as you and will only issue them a beefy laptop that weighs twice as much as a macbook and has half the battery. My colleague has tried to explain that compute power is not their primary concern but the IT manager won’t listen because he doesn’t have the perspective to imagine what it’s like to do someone else’s job.

                • JFowler369@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  As an IT worker, it is more likely that they don’t want to deal with the headache of enterprise management of a Mac for just one person.

                  Just buying a Mac is easy, setting that Mac up to be monitored, managed, and secured centrally is a whole other issue. Especially when none of their current infrastructure supports Mac, because why would it when no one current uses one.

                  The user is worried about what type of device works best for their specific use. The IT manager is worried about what type of device do I have a licences for anti virus, what device can I audit security settings remotely, what device can I centrally manage updates, etc…

                  That being said, for personal use there is definitely a niche for Apple products. It just isn’t so clear cut when it comes to using those devices in an enterprise setting. And speaking from experience just one person never stays at one person. Once someone gets one, everyone will be saying “well, why can’t I get one too?”.

                  • LinkOpensChest.wav@lemmy.one
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                    1 year ago

                    Had to smile at your last sentence because there’s so much truth to office envy. I was issued a cell phone by my last employer because my position required weekly travel in an area with a diameter of >150 miles, and the people who thought it unfair only worked from the office. Same with a disabled person getting some sort of accommodation, the chicken coop was cackling about unfairness, constantly.

                    There’s nothing more toxic than a group of office workers.

                  • ashok36@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    I never said that no one else uses Macs in our office. Our entire marketing department and half the executives use Macs. For whatever reason our IT guy just has a ‘sales guys don’t get macs’ personal policy it seems.

                    If you think that’s too stupid to believe, join the club.

              • darth_helmet@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Apple silicon has a pretty decent on-board ML subsystem, you can get LLMs to output a respectable number of tokens per second off of it if you have the memory for them. I’m honesty shocked that they haven’t built a little LLM to power Siri

          • Gowens@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            A beefy PC that you’re going to be itching to upgrade in 2 years.

            I will say though, if you’re planning on gaming then Mac is still a no go. It’s best for design and audio professionals. Average joes should just be getting a Chromebook or something.

                • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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                  1 year ago

                  Less junked up?

                  What about all the forced apple junk? Itunes, App Store, Books, Chess, DVD Player, Facetime, GarageBand, Home, Imovie, Keynote, Podcasts, Photo Booth, Pages, Quicktime Player, Safari (which doesn’t allow you to install a decent browser), …

                  • matthewmercury@reddthat.com
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                    1 year ago

                    The original post in this thread said:

                    Using a MacOS, even with all its flaws it’s such a clean experience compared to [Windows].

                    I agree with that. If you don’t, that’s okay.

                • Stinkywinks@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Guess what my response was to that? “But then I’d have to support apple trash”. Im responding to the fan bois

              • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It’s not about not being able to do it, it’s about being able to do it well, and have a nice experience.

                My $200 Thinkpad T14 will browse the web, but I get about 4 hours battery life at best doing that. My M1 MBP gets 15 doing the exact same thing.

              • Gowens@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                The Adobe suite. Even big Figma files would give a cheap ass laptop trouble. Obviously if you’re planning on coding iOS Apps then you need Xcode unless you want disgusting performance.

                Also the build quality on a cheap laptop is a joke these days. They try to make their laptops Apple-like but use the cheapest components even in the $1000 price range.

                For the average power user who doesn’t game or have some design or audio job, then it’s better to go with Linux, but either way MacOS is way more solid and reliable than you’re giving it credit for.

            • elscallr@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You really don’t get any of those things. Be a Mac fan if that’s your thing, but don’t try to pretend they’re actually any better because all the PCs you’ve used have been trash.

              • BURN@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I’ve yet to find a PC laptop that can replicate a Mac TouchPad. They’ve gotten better in the last few years, but are still miles off Apple.

                They’re not better for everything, but some stuff they’ve absolutely nailed over the competition and it’s not even close.

                • elscallr@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  If I’m honest I hate touchpads in general, even Macs. I’ve got a brand new top of the line Mac issued by my company. I use a mouse.

                  • BURN@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    And I prefer touchpads and find using a mouse on Mac a terrible experience. Touchpad gestures are a constant part of my workflow on a laptop due to the nature of only having one screen.

                    Like I said though, Mac touchpads are miles ahead of windows touchpads and it’s not even close to a competition.

        • fckreddit@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Right. Buy products that is not only expensive to buy, but also expensive to repair. Pass…

            • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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              1 year ago

              You will even have to give up compatible software because Apple deemed it “too old”

        • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Before I will even think about buying a Mac I will buy a Framework laptop and install debian.
          And I don’t even use Linux outside of a home server.

            • Melco@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Its the tone. The language sounds unnatural, like you have an agenda. Commercials and marketing sounds like this because its trying to persuade or manipulate you how great this company or product is.

        • MooseBoys@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          far beyond the close competition in both quality and performance

          It’s true that Apple continues to be the king of build quality. And while they do currently hold the performance per watt crown, there are plenty of laptops that beat the M2 when it comes to raw performance, especially if you throw in a dGPU. And of course, none of this matters if the device doesn’t run the software you want, which is what I suspect most people on Lemmy have issue with.

        • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, I remember XP and Seven as solid OSes where everything just worked.

          Now it’s a mix of crap, hey this app is in night mode, this one isn’t! Want to change a parameter? Ha ha you can’t! You want to share a folder? Good luck!

          And it’s heuristics/analysis just because Windows is inherently insecure drags any pc down to a crawl…

          And publicity??!

          Aurgh

          Edit: can I run my old CS3 Photoshop in wine or something? And 3dstudio without crazy lags? If so I’ll stop using windows completely.

          • Sendbeer@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Windows 7 was peak Windows. They smoothed out all the problems of Vista (plus hardware caught up to the recommended specs) and all the new tech that Vista introduced matured a bit. Was one of the nicest looking operating systems they ever released too - though that is highly subjective.

            Everything after has introduced some form of garbage in it’s iteration. Windows 8 had a garbage tablet interface that sucked when used with keyboard/mouse. Like the majority of devices that it was installed on. Windows 10 rolled back some of those shit changes but was the version Microsoft started implementing their adware. Windows 11 took it to 11 and put in a bunch of hardware requirements that conveniently required you to dump some money into Intel hardware.

            Been running Linux for last six months and it is crazy how much better it runs. It isn’t as cumbersome to use as the old days… But every once in a while I run into something that requires Googling and tweaking in Terminal. It’s been my best experience with the OS though going back to WAY back (Mandrake and Slackware days - or are they still around? Early 2000’s maybe???)

            • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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              1 year ago

              Because I’m used to it I guess, and I haven’t found a single app that handles pixels and transparency well.

              Like zoom in like crazy, update 1 pixel, save, transparency is still there.

              Haven’t looked for a bunch of years though, maybe it’s time to try again :-)

              • rem26_art@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Krita’s always done transparency just fine for me. It’s pretty good these days. There’s also a built in option to set your keyboard shortcuts to the same ones that Photoshop uses.

              • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                Yeah, I try never to underestimate the value of sheer familiarity. New software is like breaking in a new pair of leather shoes, sometimes you have to bleed a little before your feet adapt and you adjust it to fit.

    • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I switched to MacOS last year and it’s so much better. Considering a full Linux switch when this iMac is too old unless the VisionPros turn out to be as good as advertised

      • Dudewitbow@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Its kinda why chrome os works. Majority of people only need the browser, and if you need basic office suite, google has their own cloud options.

        Its when you have specific use cases when you HAVE to use a certain os over another (e.g gaming with anti cheat, AI/ML and engineering software is usually windows foward, adobe stability on OSX. A lot of backend and server applications on linux)

    • TerryMathews@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Unless you make it a point to procure an LTSC version, which Microsoft won’t even sell to you unless you have a site license.

      LTSC is the only version of Windows that behaves like it’s still your computer, and I have uptime measured in months on a computer who serves Plex all day long.

    • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I have a friend who runs MacOS too. She bought it used and it’s a desktop so it isn’t impossible to repair.