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I don't get this. The only reason I feel Apple has an advantage compared to competition is software integration.

M1 performance in laptops is great but that's only been true for a year or so, for the last 5 years Apple laptops have been hot garbage.

As an owner of fully loaded 2018 mbp (i9/upgraded GPU, 32 GB ram) I can without a doubt say it's the worst premium device I've ever owned. The battery runs out on me after 1 hour meeting - and I have >100 cycles on it. The amount of heat and noise it produces is surreal, and that's after I opened it and cleaned up the vents (which clog easily) and added thermal pads to connect VRM to chassis (which helped significantly, prior to that the CPU would downclock so bad I couldn't use anything on my device after 15 mins in a Google meet connected to a 5k monitor).

Not to mention all the bugs I had to go through with it - wasn't untill 6 months after I purchased the device that I could actually use my 5k on my USBC monitor on full resolution - only started working after an OS upgrade.

And the keyboards failing being a known problem they replace out of warranty because they recognise their design sucks (luckily I use external keyboard 95% of the time).

Apple hardware was mediocre at best for the price they charge, up until M1.

In the mobile space, they are faster but as someone who switched from an iPhone to Samsung - I can't really say it matters. Phones are good and well rounded but nothing spectacular, hardware is on par with Samsung.

Again using the Mac/iOS combo is really nice so the software integration is next level, but considering their business practices I refuse to get locked in to the ecosystem, it's just too limiting.

And Linux on M1 would likely be subpar to any premium x86 device, Linux support sucked even on x86 Macs.




I understand the frustration, especially if your first impression of Apple is a MacBook Pro is in the 2016-2019 era - you've probably seen the worst MacBooks available and not the best of Apple.

There were some good things, the displays were excellent, the touchpad is still the best in class, and the size/weight were excellent.

But usb-c only was step too far, the Touch Bar wasn't the right move for a Pro audience (i), there wasn't enough room for cooling the intel chips and the keyboard situation was farcical - it's the primary interface to a Mac (can you imagine the outcry if iPhones had touch displays randomly not working, doing extra touches etc?!).

I think Apple gets a lot of leeway because the 2008-2015 MacBook Pros were probably the best laptops you could buy.

Having owned a 2009 MacBook Pro which in my opinion was the best laptop I'd ever owned and never made me question the amount of money I spent on it. The 2016 MacBook Pro was the exact opposite (mainly due to the keyboard being so bad).

I'm glad Apple have come to their senses and course corrected. I do wonder though for people that have only seen the 2016-2019 era if they will bother to try Apple again...

(i) I understand it probably would've made it too expensive to produce but I think the Touch Bar would've gone down well on a MacBook Air where I would imagine there's a lot more hunt-and-peck typists that'd appreciate and notice what's being displayed on the Touch Bar. As a touch typist I never looked down to see the Touch Bar so it was a mostly wasted on me.


> I'm glad Apple have come to their senses and course corrected. I do wonder though for people that have only seen the 2016-2019 era if they will bother to try Apple again...

I'm one of those angry bastards, and I even own an M1 Macbook Air. The hardware is impressive, no doubt, but MacOS frustrates me so much these days that I cannot daily-drive it for my workflow. Plus, once you make the switch to Linux it's really hard to see Apple products as an upgrade anymore. You're giving away your freedom, and condemning yourself to paying $8 to manage your windows properly or $10 just to hide some statusbar icons. And when all is said-and-done, I can't move that statusbar to the left side of my screen... God it frustrates me endlessly. When I saw how Big Sur redesigned everything, I just gave up on the OS altogether. The thousand papercuts I feel on MacOS are reduced to a couple hundred on Linux, the majority of which I can automate away without worrying about some bigger company pulling the rug out from under me.

I really wanted Apple Silicon to be a barnburner for me, and I was hoping beyond hope that they would take the extra space savings to add an M.2 drive or an easier to repair chassis. At this point though, I think I'm contented to just stop caring. Apple courageously headed in a direction I'm not ready to follow in, so I cut them loose in exchange for all my sweet creature comforts. And how comforting it is.


I sympathize with many of your takes, but have you looked into Framework[1] laptops?

They're currently only Intel based, but there's a marketplace where you can buy or sell just the mainboards once the AMD, RISC V, or ARM64 models become available.

[1] https://frame.work/


Framework looks great! I actually have no real need to upgrade my hardware right now though, as all my devices still run fine. I'd be very interested in picking up a RISC-V model once it hits manufacturing though, they seem very promising.


This is why Apple went to their own CPUs due to the poor thermal dynamics of the recent x86 chips. The recent chips are like the PowerPC chips of 2005.


Do you have any 5nm x86 chips that you could compare it to?




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