What brands do you avoid at all cost? I don’t keep up with the news all that much, and many of the reasons to avoid something don’t make it there anyway. So I’m asking here to make a big list of things to avoid. It could be anything from bad security practices to really frustrating packaging. Working as a cashier myself, I definitely know there are plenty of brands I avoid purely on the basis that their product is a pain to stock.
On the flip side, what’s the alternative? If you avoid Pepsi, for example, what do you turn to instead?
Apple.
I refuse to pay a premium for locked-down proprietary hardware solely because it looks more visually pleasing than an alternative that performs better.
My work forced a recent macbook pro on me. One of those with the ARM chip.
I am in awe of the quality of that macbook.
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Exactamundo! That’s why snapdragon is playing catch-up LOL
I was trying to get on the list at mt work when I got a hardware refresh this year, I dislike large laptops and the dev spec is a 17" thinkpad (which imo has the left CTL and fn keys backwards, breaks muscle memory when changing between computers) but I’m docked most times but when I’m not the battery is terrible, maybe a handful of hours. Probably due to corporate crapware, but at least the arm macbooks stand a chance, my partner has an m1 mbp and she doesn’t bother charging it most workdays or work with it plugged in, she doesn’t need to. We were playing factorio the other night and she was moonlighting into her desktop, she got through a day’s work, a bunch of hours of game streaming and some of the next work day, that should be the expectation for a normal device.
Apple in my view really understood mobile devices, they had the hands down best trackpad for a long time, a fantastic keyboard, great display, a form factor you can actually carry around and as far as I recall, even the intel macs had better battery life.
It’s very hard to argue against Apple hardware and battery life. Maybe with windows moving slowly toward ARM they’ll catch up some. It’s going to be very tough though - Apple has full control over their hardware, which meat they can optimize their OS for it.
I’m in the exact same situation, however the right shift key broke, and activates randomly. This laptop only ever moved between a cupboard and a desk, without the tiniest bump, but after a couple months of very light use the shift key breaks. I now have to have sticky keys enabled permanently.
Also the only way to enable sticky keys on the login screen is to triple click the power button. You would thing they could just put a button for the accessibility accessibility menu next to the one for the keyboard layout switcher, but no.
Tell that to my 2014 MacBook Pro that is still going strong. I can do CAD and video editing and the thing still performs fine. Battery life decreased a bit but still lasts way more than enough.
and the new Apple chip ones are also ridiculous. I have one for work, and was able to leave my computer closed in my backpack for several hour running code training an ML model. The thing did not even get warm and the battery went down by 2% only.
That being said, I think the best computer is the one that works for YOU. In my previous job I was forced to use windows and boy did I suffer! Even Office felt clunkier on windows than Mac.
I can understand people find Apple stuff outrageously expensive and locked down, but come on have some justice on its performance.
I have a dual boot Win/Linux PC with Ryzen 5800x, and an MBP M2 Pro laptop. MBP blows my PC out of the water for my job, which requires hundreds of layers of audio running bazillions of DSPs in real time. Even renders take 30% less time on M2 on my case. And that’s happening on battery.
I never get that much optimized power on my PC. I have to disagree there’s anything out there that performs better for a user just want to have the job done in a reasonable time.
I really hope the snapdragon x laptops gain some traction. I recently went laptop shopping and what I wanted (good to great display, stays cold, good battery life) line up really well with a MacBook/MB air. I just couldn’t stomach the stupid mark-ups for memory and storage. I wound up with a Lenovo 7x slim. Upgrading to 32 GB memory and 1 TB storage was around $115. The non-emulated performance on windows is solid. Emulated is generally ok for my usage. I’m probably going to try Linux on it when I have a light week, but I’m somewhat wary of the impact that will have on battery life.
From what I’ve heard the Snapdragon chips aren’t that impressive though?
That was absolutely the case until very recently. Qualcomm bought Nuvia, a start-up that was stacked with former Apple engineers, a few years ago. These processors are just now coming to market. Laptops with these processors are benchmarking around MacBook levels (slightly behind single core, slightly ahead in multi core).
Ah okay, thanks for the insight!
There’s more to it than looks…
Then pay a premium for the privacy, which Apple actually tries to give you (unlike Google)