Comment by gbalduzzi

Comment by gbalduzzi 11 hours ago

34 replies

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I believe there is a similar situation in the mobile space with iphones, at least here is Europe where they are not ubiquitous.

Most people use cheaper android phones, that are slower and with a much shorted timespan. then they try a 1k€ iPhone and it is great and conclude they prefer the iPhone to Android: it is not an apple to apple comparison, you should compare it to a 1k€ android lol.

Same things happens on laptops. If you try to use a 500-600€ laptop as work main machine for multiple years it will fall apart. Than you try a MacBook and it feels great because after 5 years is still usable.

trinix912 8 hours ago

You can easily pay $1000+ for a Windows laptop and still end up with a worse trackpad or keyboard than what all MacBooks have. I've made that mistake myself.

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  • cruano 6 hours ago

    I got a razer blade that is around the same price as a macbook. At first it seemed like great build quality, but after replacing an inflated battery, an SSD that liked to shut off randomly and being blocked off latest windows due to the "old" CPU (this is a 2018-2019 laptop mind you) I've given up on it. Meanwhile my mom is still using my 2013 Macbook Air

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  • rkomorn 8 hours ago

    The trackpad on my X1 Nano (and the associated Linux experience) is a daily annoyance to me compared to the macOS+M1 MacBook Air experience.

    I have way more accidental touches, drags, wrong palm detection, etc.

    Windows isn't much better (or is arguably worse because "natural scrolling" still somehow isn't an out of the box thing).

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    • ezst 7 hours ago

      Funny thing to say in 2025, but you are probably better off using Linux. The Windows drivers ecosystem is a mess, manufacturers don't care to develop or maintain drivers beyond the "get the product out of the door" phase.

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poink 9 hours ago

My experience in the mobile space from having a personal lab with all the flagship phones paid for by my employer was that the hardware on the Android phones was at least as good as Apple but everyone other than Google made the software side feel janky

It wasn’t bad, and I’m sure I’d just get used to it if I picked one and lived with it, the same way I’ve gotten used to Apple’s dumb photo app

Using them side by side made it really obvious tho

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  • poink 9 hours ago

    (That said, I liked the Pixel 4a better than the iPhone 15 Pro I’m typing this on)

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    • ezst 7 hours ago

      FWIW, I liked the Pixel 4a better than the Pixel 9 I'm typing this on

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      • greesil 3 hours ago

        Pixel 10 is heavier than the pixel 9 allegedly.

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mirzap 11 hours ago

You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference.

Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices.

I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.

I really wish Linux were as good as macOS, I really do. I'm pushing myself to use it even though I experience frustration every day, but this simply isn't the case. It's easy to optimize the system and applications for one specific hardware configuration (like Apple does), but it's very hard, if not impossible, to do this for every possible hardware combination available today. That's why Linux and Windows can't win this performance battle.

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  • GCUMstlyHarmls 7 hours ago

    For what little an internet strangers comment is worth, I had similar issues and they disappeared when I swapped from Nvidia to AMD at the start of this year. Nvidia's drivers have had some kind of push since then but they have always been sort of wonky.

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    • mirzap 7 hours ago

      This is interesting to hear. I bought Nvidia because I thought they had better drivers and have a lot of support for AI and stuff, but now, in retrospect, this seems like a bad idea.

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      • PurestGuava 6 hours ago

        For AI, NVidia does have better tech, but on Linux at least the driver situation with AMD is infinitely better.

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  • cycomanic 9 hours ago

    > You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference. > > Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices. >

    Thanks for confirming my point, we have actual benchmarks that objectively show this isn't the case but apple fanboys still make these sort of claims. The same with battery life, if you listen to apple fanboys you get the impression that battery life above 5h was simply unheard off until the M1 came along. I had a x200 in 2009 or 2010 that was giving me 10h+ in the large battery and I could even swap over to the smaller one to get another 6h (?) or so.

    > I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air.

    The only thing I can say to that is that in my experience nvidia drivers have become objectively worse over the last 2 years. On my desktop I used to be able to play games without issues, but recently lots of them lock up after a while (only in games in my experience). My Intel laptop never has any issues. I'm now actively looking for an AMD GPU because it has become so annoying.

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    • dijit 8 hours ago

      Come on, let’s be real for a moment.

      two things could be possibly true, people are sheep and people who interact with the platform can enjoy it so much that they become fans. This means that any person who actually enjoys using the technology is immediately dismissible because now they are fans. Right?

      It’s so stupid because I’m a die hard linux user but I can definitely appreciate my Apple devices.

      I’ve had this discussion so many times in real life, what is the value of a ThinkPad T-series over a ThinkPad E-series; or a HP Elitebook over an Ideabook? The specification looks the same, on paper. Why should I convince my employer to fork out an extra €500?

      The truth is, the things that really matter to people don’t fit very well on a spec sheet. Build quality, palm rejection, colour accuracy, enjoyable sound, even the feel of the chassis. Apple seems to put a lot of care and attention into these things, so yes, they’ve optimised the operating system to be more pleasurable to use… and so it is, even in low memory conditions- they prioritise things the user might care about. (The currently active program, being responsive etc).

      I’ll give another example, The Commodore64. It is so comically weak compared to even the micro processor inside my keyboard… so if compared to a full-blown desktop computer of the modern day (which is thousands of times more powerful still…) I should feel like the modern computer is better. Yet when I type on a Commodore 64 it is so immediate… there is no lag in typing, the words appear on the screen as quickly as they are pressed, it feels mechanical. It feels immediate. it feels direct.

      Why? Clearly the Commodore 64 has much fewer resources, but it feels so much nicer to write text on a Commodore 64. Not because of the keyboard (I have a better one), not because of the processor (because it’s a weaker one). But because the latency of typing is so low that it is barely perceptible and that goes directly against the specification.

      One cannot infer user experience from spec sheets.

      And people interacting with the Apple ecosystem who become fans might have a point. No matter how much you don’t want to hear it.

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    • cycomanic 6 hours ago

      I can definitely appreciate that some people like apple hardware and software. I have a colleague who swears by it, he also only uses defaults on any software out of principle. It's not my thing, and I get frustrated every time I sit in front of a mac and can't change things the way I want. That's OK, everyone is different.

      What is annoying and was why I posted is that a significant number of apple users become fans as you say and somehow view everything that apple does as extraordinary, that leads to statements like in the article that apple is "crazy good" because the used laptops for 5 years without having to repair them. Surely you can admit that that is nothing special?! Similarly, saying osx runs as good on 8 GB as Windows or Linux on 32GB that's just objectively not true. There's been plenty of objective benchmarks which showed differently and I have used macs enough to know that if ram gets tight they grind to a halt just as much.

      I just don't understand the fanboyism about a brand that it becomes like supporting a football club. Do I like thinkpads, yes I had good experiences (and I have trouble with laptops without a trackpoint). Am I a fan? No, Lenovo is just a company which makes plenty of crap, i.e. the new X1 carbon i got from work is a hot piece of garbage.

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  • hermanzegerman 10 hours ago

    You really come off as a Hardcore Apple Fanboy

    > Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB

    Doesn't matter because for the equivalent price you can load up your non-Apple Machine with RAM to the Max, same with SSD Storage. With a MacBook you would need to prepare to cough up, up to 9k more than the base model for a huge SSD and RAM. No more than 1k for this elsewhere

    > ve been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two.

    I don't need to reboot for Weeks, I'm using Fedora though. It sounds like you're doing something terribly wrong, as most Linux Users also don't need to reboot ever 1-2 days. Maybe you should try a more beginner friendly distro if Arch is too complex for you

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    • mirzap 6 hours ago

      I use WebStorm, CLion, Cursor, 2-3 Claude Code instances, Chrome/Brave with 50+ tabs, Docker, and a bunch of other things on MacBook Air all at the same time. It works. Never freezes. Never crashes. I tried that on Windows recently, and now on Arch with a lot more memory (32), and it simply can't handle it. I reboot daily. Freezes in the middle of the work. It may be the issue with nvidia drivers as other pointed out, but that's precisely my point. Apple has very limited number of drivers to maintain, and they can improve them to perfection. They are not perfect, of course, but compared to alternatives, it's light-years ahead.

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      • wltr 23 minutes ago

        I don’t know for sure, I need to confirm it, but it feels like my similarly specced Arch machine would just shrug at it. It’s a 10 years old PC, yet it feels like it’s a non issue for it to handle this. I bet my MacBook Pro from 2014 (with Arch too) won’t even start a fan. It depends on these 50 tabs, I guess, but the rest is just doesn’t feel like a big deal to handle.

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      • svelle 6 hours ago

        I also use a MacBook as my daily driver, but have used different ThinkPads for years and there is no way that that workload should bring any medium specced TP to its knees like you're describing.

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      • altcognito 5 hours ago

        Ollama crashed my MacBook just last week, they definitely crash, as they might not have created the “report this application” feature if they didn’t.

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  • udev4096 6 hours ago

    > using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two

    No wonder you are facing non-existent issues. Stop blaming it on Arch. If it was widespread, there would be a fix by now for it. You messed it up. It's upto you to solve it. Also it's not "your mac". Apple has full remote access and can brick "your mac" anytime. With apple, you get the feeling of owning without actually owning anything. Gotta give it to them

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  • p_ing 6 hours ago

    MacOS isn’t more memory efficient, you can’t be when using 16KiB pages vs 4KiB. That’s a lot of wasted memory.

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    • mirzap 6 hours ago

      My experience running multiple bloated Java JetBrains IDEs, Chrome with 50+ tabs, begs to differ.

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      • p_ing 4 hours ago

        Reread my comment. Yes, macOS (or ARM, here) wastes memory. For every 1KiB page you have, you're wasting 15KiB of memory.

        That's just how this works. It's a performance vs. efficiency tradeoff.

        And there's nothing special about your workload. It's small in comparison to many others that many other OSes on many other ISAs, including Windows & x86 w/ AWE, have been running for quite some time with no issue.

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    • udev4096 6 hours ago

      It's definitely not. I use mac pro for work and it chugs around 16GiB (out of 64) of RAM on IDLE! It also has the worst keyboard I have ever used with a crazy big trackpad which I absolutely hate

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  • herbst 10 hours ago

    I've had a MacBook Pro for about a year. I've got actual burns from the case, I couldn't use a external screen without it being attached to power and it was incredibly loud, I didn't like the OS, the support I've witnessed was horrible, ...

    I know many people like their macs but it's not that single perfekt machine people want it to be

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amelius 4 hours ago

Yes, buy a flagship Samsung phone and you'll see how Apple is lightyears behind in design.

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