Overpriced? Yes, garbage? No. The MacBooks are far beyond the close competition in both quality and performance. Apple Silicon is a game changer for the industry and it’s making Intel and AMD look very bad.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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), …
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.
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.
A beefy ass desktop that weights about 15kg and eats as much energy as a microwave when gaming. For performance per watt nothing beats the Apple Silicon.
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…
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.
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
Yeah those laptops from Framework seems very interesting. They don’t ship here yet, but I’m indeed keeping an eye on them. I know Framework project thanks to LTT, which is one of the few things right they’ve been doing these latest months: introducing people to easy to repair projects.
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.
When I say performance I include the package as a whole. Battery-wise is top in the competition lasting more hours than the average Windows competitor, also the productivity software most times work a lot better on Mac than on Windows, so even if the Windows laptop has more raw power, while even consuming a lot more energy, Windows itself will for sure cripple the computer’s performance.
If I was working on ASUS or any other OEM, I’d be pushing for usage of Linux distros like hell (I’d be pushing those based on Debian, like Ubuntu, Pop_OS, etc…).
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…
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???)
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.
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.
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
I’m using Windows 10 at home and 11 at work. I’ve already turned an old gaming laptop into a Linux machine, and I don’t think I’ll ever switch to Windows 11. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the moment I read an article about Microsoft’s vision to make Windows entirely cloud based.
Eventually everyone’s going to reach a breaking point where they feel subscriptioned out. I’ve already reached that point, but it appears the threshold for most people is much greater than mine, unfortunately.
They’re great for productivity but not so much for gaming.
Yet, since they’ve been pushing to that sector for quite a while, they even released tools to help developers porting their games to Mac, which apparently some people are now using to actually play games on a MacBook.
keep in mind he’s running most of the games on a <1000$ Mac Mini.
Edit: The games in the video are being emulated, both Windows to MacOS and DirectX to Metal. So about 50% of the performance is being lost for emulation only.
Yeah, the pricing of the hardware is quite steep, but the OS is quite good. To be fair, some of the parts of a MacBook have an astonishing quality, like the speakers, the keyboard, mousepad, screen. Stuff that you must search pretty hard to find in the competition in the same package.
Probably would be better off getting a MacBook Pro 14" with 16 gb of ram and the base M2 Pro with 512gb SSD. Half that hardware of the Dell would get eaten up by Windows garbage and I can’t really use Linux to work.
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)
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.
They are not “impossible” to repair they are very expensive to repair. For example, if you break a screen on a MacBook usually Apple solution is to replace the entire fucking lid. So because of a broken screen you throw the metal, camera, microfones and all other bullshit that comes in a MacBook lid just to fix a fucking screen.
TLDR: Windows is now the bloatware.
Windows is getting shittier and shittier each version. Using a MacOS, even with all its flaws it’s such a clean experience compared to it.
But then I’d have to support Macintosh’s overpriced garbage.
Get what you pay for. My M2 MacBook pro is best computer I’ve ever used by a huge margin
Overpriced? Yes, garbage? No. The MacBooks are far beyond the close competition in both quality and performance. Apple Silicon is a game changer for the industry and it’s making Intel and AMD look very bad.
Right. Buy products that is not only expensive to buy, but also expensive to repair. Pass…
And you are forced to give up system control, and choice of software
You will even have to give up compatible software because Apple deemed it “too old”
The close competition? For the price of a MacBook you could get a beefy ass PC.
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
So my all-purpose PC is now limited by the intentions of the silicone manufacturer, and therefore it’s better than the other options?
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.
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).
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.
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.
What can you do on a Mac that a cheap ass laptop can’t do?
The Mac can run MacOS. That was the point of this thread, that MacOS is less junked up than Windows.
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), …
The original post in this thread said:
I agree with that. If you don’t, that’s okay.
Guess what my response was to that? “But then I’d have to support apple trash”. Im responding to the fan bois
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.
Then you’d have a laptop twice as thick, 1/5th the battery life, be built worse, and have an awful trackpad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A beefy ass desktop that weights about 15kg and eats as much energy as a microwave when gaming. For performance per watt nothing beats the Apple Silicon.
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…
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.
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
With that software support…?
Or a beefy laptop that can do more than send emails and Photoshop lol
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.
Yeah those laptops from Framework seems very interesting. They don’t ship here yet, but I’m indeed keeping an eye on them. I know Framework project thanks to LTT, which is one of the few things right they’ve been doing these latest months: introducing people to easy to repair projects.
deleted by creator
I’m literally stating the negatives, now only because I said there’s good stuff about them I’m an advertising bot?
deleted by creator
I’m so sorry for English not being my native language 🧐
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.
When I say performance I include the package as a whole. Battery-wise is top in the competition lasting more hours than the average Windows competitor, also the productivity software most times work a lot better on Mac than on Windows, so even if the Windows laptop has more raw power, while even consuming a lot more energy, Windows itself will for sure cripple the computer’s performance.
If I was working on ASUS or any other OEM, I’d be pushing for usage of Linux distros like hell (I’d be pushing those based on Debian, like Ubuntu, Pop_OS, etc…).
Windows : making Linux better by comparison!
Maybe thanks to Windows being so shit, Linux will have its year soon
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
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???)
Why cs3 when krita would have more features and be free? Familiarity?
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 :-)
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.
Well then I’ll have to re-check it out :-)
Cheers
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.
Or a whole lot if you go the Blender route…
I guess it’s like smoking.
You know it’s bad for you, and it costs a lot, but it’s a hassle to drop, so you just keep smoking anyway.
And the CPUs riddled with security flaws that suddenly get discovered, fixed and you lose 20% of performance overnight.
That obviously sucks but it isn’t limited to windows, right?
Yes, that’s mostly related to the CPU maker.
Since 1998
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
I’m using Windows 10 at home and 11 at work. I’ve already turned an old gaming laptop into a Linux machine, and I don’t think I’ll ever switch to Windows 11. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the moment I read an article about Microsoft’s vision to make Windows entirely cloud based.
That’s so they can run everything as SaaS and bill you monthly to use the computer you already paid for.
Eventually everyone’s going to reach a breaking point where they feel subscriptioned out. I’ve already reached that point, but it appears the threshold for most people is much greater than mine, unfortunately.
Astonishing how Microshit is making Apple look good in comparison.
MacOS has been fine for awhile now, but Apple’s hardware is very expensive. They’re great for productivity but not so much for gaming.
Yet, since they’ve been pushing to that sector for quite a while, they even released tools to help developers porting their games to Mac, which apparently some people are now using to actually play games on a MacBook.
Even emulating the performance is quite impressive. Yet another coverage that LTT screwed up badly, so I give you this better video to check: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beYODfD2ipo&t=99s
keep in mind he’s running most of the games on a <1000$ Mac Mini.
Edit: The games in the video are being emulated, both Windows to MacOS and DirectX to Metal. So about 50% of the performance is being lost for emulation only.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=beYODfD2ipo&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Yeah, the pricing of the hardware is quite steep, but the OS is quite good. To be fair, some of the parts of a MacBook have an astonishing quality, like the speakers, the keyboard, mousepad, screen. Stuff that you must search pretty hard to find in the competition in the same package.
This is pretty much my view, hardware is good, software is good, price is stupid, and Apple being Apple can suck. But I’m happy with it
Sometimes they have deals which can make them have a pretty decent pricing… but it’s a rare sometimes.
Dell precision 5570
Maxed our about $3000, not bad, but an i9 no thank you.
Probably would be better off getting a MacBook Pro 14" with 16 gb of ram and the base M2 Pro with 512gb SSD. Half that hardware of the Dell would get eaten up by Windows garbage and I can’t really use Linux to work.
ive slapped mint on so many PCs… people barely know its not windows
most people only use the freakin browser
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)
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.
I have a friend who runs MacOS too. She bought it used and it’s a desktop so it isn’t impossible to repair.
They are not “impossible” to repair they are very expensive to repair. For example, if you break a screen on a MacBook usually Apple solution is to replace the entire fucking lid. So because of a broken screen you throw the metal, camera, microfones and all other bullshit that comes in a MacBook lid just to fix a fucking screen.