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Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 41 points 2 years ago (5 children)

The close competition? For the price of a MacBook you could get a beefy ass PC.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [+] -9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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).

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Go on then…

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years 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

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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.

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  • [+] -8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Who relies on the trackpad? Lol they are all annoying to use

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Try macbook trackpad.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why should I?

    I have a mouse.

    It even is ergonomic.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    So you can judge whether it’s good or bad.

    You don’t need to. But it’s not a good thing to have an opinion about something you didn’t even try.

    You can tell it’s expensive by checking the price but you cannot describe how it feels without testing it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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.

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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    You don’t need to buy one to try it. Pass by any apple store and try it.

    I have never owned a Mac. But I’d admit that Macs have the best trackpads.

    I tried Asus, Msi, Dell, Hp, and Lenovo. Nothing come even close.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    What can you do on a Mac that a cheap ass laptop can't do?

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    The Mac can run MacOS. That was the point of this thread, that MacOS is less junked up than Windows.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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), ...

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Then you'd have a laptop twice as thick, 1/5th the battery life, be built worse, and have an awful trackpad.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [+] -8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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...

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years 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

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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?".

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years 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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    In that case, yeah give the guy a Mac lol. Just had to stand up for poor misunderstood IT guys, but sounds like he is in the wrong. Unfortunately there are quite a few of us that seem to just like telling users no.

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