alt Hacker NewsYou could get a laptop with an Nvidia GPU, 16gb ram, 512 ssd... or a 'cheap' Macbook.
I totally understand if you need to compile for iphones. We need to make apps for the lower and middle class people that think a $40/mo cellphone is a status symbol. I get it.
But if you are not... why? I hate windows, but we have Fedora... and you get an Nvidia. Is it just a status symbol? And I have a hard time believing people who tell me stories about low power consumption, because no one had cared about that until Apple pretended people cared about it.
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Maybe it's an excellent experience these days, but every time I've tried Linux on desktop over the past 25 years I get burned. Maybe it works for a while, then your NIC driver gets borked and you spend 2 days trying to get it working again. Or some update goes sideways and you lose the GUI, launching only into a terminal. It's always something. And laptops have even less common hardware than desktops.
On the other hand, every Mac I've used over the past 15 years has been bulletproof. It turns on, it works, it runs *nix. It's an invisible interface to getting work done.
> And I have a hard time believing people who tell me stories about low power consumption, because no one had cared about that until Apple pretended people cared about it.
I haven't packed a charger for the day for 3 years. I can work in coffee shops or on the couch for over 6 hours without even thinking about charging. I'm sorry but if you haven't tried the M* macbooks you don't know what you're criticising.
You get a long-lasting device that's usually pleasant to use. User experience is harder to measure than specs, but at least for me, Macbooks are consistently better laptops than everything else I've used.
People want a laptop that has
- Great battery life
- Solid build quality
- A familiar interface (iPhone is the most popular OS in the US)
- Good enough speed and snappiness for the tasks they can't do on their phone
- Can walk into Costco or buy online at Amazon without having to hunt for deals or refurbs
- Is from a brand they are familiar with and has an association with quality.
- Is somewhere around $500-$800, the most common price range for laptops today
The MacBook Neo ticks all those boxes, and it comes in fun colors. It's the one you can walk into a store, buy, not really sweat the speeds and feeds and know you will have a pretty great experience with. I'm not sure why so many people are having a hard time understanding this.
People care about how long you can run in between charging. Low power consumption helps with that, even if you don't care about it directly.
Yeah, but then MacBook is going to run smoother and faster than the Windows one (and I don’t want to spend even one extra minute on dealing with drivers on Linux). There’re just objective benchmarks for that.
And MacBooks also have a better display and build quality. Like, touchpad is still hit or miss on any non-Apple device.
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Where do I get a Laptop with a Nvidia GPU for 600$ ?
I'm right now in the Market for a new Laptop, because I need way more GPU Power than my T470 provides, and to be honest the MacBookPros are quite competitively priced compared to the P-ThinkPads with Nvidia Cards. (Both around 3000€) They also finally offer a matte screen option
The only thing holding me back right now is the soldered SSD, RAM (and shitty Linux support).
It was quite nice being able to upgrade RAM, SSD and replace the Battery on it. Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted for 9 years
> You could get a laptop with an Nvidia GPU, 16gb ram, 512 ssd... or a 'cheap' Macbook.
That laptop won't have half the battery life the macbook does. It really all only boils down to the "handiness" of the device.
Which laptop is this, with good Linux support?
> And I have a hard time believing people who tell me stories about low power consumption, because no one had cared about that until Apple pretended people cared about it.
That’s because battery life was pretty mediocre across the board, with Apple occasionally squeaking out a bit of an upper hand on the Air. Most laptops were in the same boat, aside from gaming and workstation laptops but battery life has never been the point of those.
That changed dramatically with the M-series Macs. People didn’t start caring because Apple did, but because it meant no longer being tethered to a wall, being able to do a lot of outings without a brick or charger cable at all, and on extended trips being able to get by with a little phone charger instead of a the usual huge ungainly brick.
One of the primary objectives of a laptop is portability, and long battery life is an objective upgrade in that category. Not everybody needs it but for those who do it’s difficult to give up once you’ve had it.
EDIT: Another advantage of that higher efficiency is that MacBooks can run at full performance without being plugged in without it obliterating battery life. x86 laptops universally throttle when untethered and while this can be disabled, they burn through their batteries much more quickly.