
The Rise of the MacBook Pro Serial Killers - jgrant27
https://imagine27.com/rise-of-the-mac-serial-killers
======
miles
The article highlights Acer's $679.99 Swift 3 as representative of a new class
of MBP killers. Probably worth repeating these cons from the top Amazon review
for that model:

 _Not as magical as it seems at first_ [https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-
reviews/R1UD14VWM1Z6IJ/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-
reviews/R1UD14VWM1Z6IJ/)

\- "The screen is as bad as they say, even after calibration. It's only
slightly better than my old laptop I bought for $350 a few years ago."

\- "I have problems with apps being fuzzy (not scaling to the display
properly), problems with Cortana and the Windows Start menu, and problems with
the screen not immediately waking from sleep."

\- "The BIGGEST CON by far is the thermals. The laptop has amazing specs as I
mentioned above, but it can't use them to their full potential because the
components get too hot and have to cut back on speed. The fans are noisy and
run at full speed often. I regularly experience temps of 70°+ while web
browsing, and 90°+ while (light) gaming or other more intensive tasks."

~~~
lostgame
The build quality and display quality of Apple computers has kept me coming
back for years. To this day, the colour and crispness of my 2004 17” iMac G4
beats the crap out of my 4-year-old Lenovo.

Thermals are super key, too. The author is completely ignoring a massive
subset of features that just doesn’t make sense to me.

I’m not sure if the author just doesn’t have a job that requires them to use
MacOS, doesn’t use it; or hasn’t spent a lot of time with either of those
laptops.

For a professional photo or video editor, for instance - the performance gains
from the ASUS would mean nothing compared to the quality of the Retina
Display, the ability to work at native print resolution, colour correctness;
and build quality if they’re taking it on the field.

~~~
jgrant27
I've used Mac hardware for over 25 years and own both laptops.

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walrus01
The problem with a lot of these is they don't run MacOS natively. Maybe it's
great hardware (as is a $2200 thinkpad if you buy one now), but I'm not going
to use Windows 10 for my mobile workstation.

~~~
jgrant27
It runs Linux perfectly.

~~~
walrus01
That's fine and all but the touchpad support on Linux is greatly lacking,
though I know there's a project in the works to improve that. I can just as
easily run a full screen Debian workstation inside virtualbox on macos with
very little performance impact.

And I'm absolutely not going back to a 16:9 aspect ratio 1080p screen, ever.

------
lostgame
Found this to be fairly click-baity.

If it doesn’t run MacOS natively, it won’t affect my purchase decision or that
of, for instance; the thousands of people in my fields of iOS development and
Logic/Final Cut users.

I run a hackintosh for fun, but I’d never purchase a non-Apple laptop to do
iOS development on.

It’s a cliche, but ‘just works’ is very important when I need to support a new
iOS version and don’t want to worry about upgrades.

People who buy MacBook Pros are likely buying them specifically for a set of
specific use cases.

Furthermore, the upcoming speed increases and cost decreases that come from
the ARM switch should make this fairly irrelevant.

Also, it’s slightly pedantic, but he talked about the ‘killers’ and then only
provided one example. They could have at least provided more than one
comparative set of statistics.

