undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbenoau4h ago0 comments

As nice as Apple's hardware is it's all undermined by who they are as a company, intentionally limiting their devices more and more while they relentlessly argue in courts and to regulators that we owe them more and more for using our devices.

Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software. Work can buy them for me but I won't spend my money on a platform like that anymore.

Depending on how their Supreme Court argument goes in a few weeks I will stop buying an iPhone too, if they establish the precedent that any method of paying for Netflix deserves a $5/month fee then they will leverage that to extract the same fee everywhere else.

0 comments

cardanome2h ago

That is all true but even as a hardcore Linux and Thinkpad user, I have to admit it is a hard sell when no one can offer the quality of Apple.

Apple is the only hardware company where you can buy a product and it is good hardware wise. Sure other companies have flagship offerings but with apple you get a really good base model.

And that is where it breaks down for me. Pay 20% more for freedom? Yes, absolutely. But pay more for much worse? Yeah, not many people are going to be so idealistic.

I don't know why no one else can produce a laptop with decent battery life with an near silent fan and good display and overall great production quality. Yes, it is much easier when you are as big as apple and can rely on economics of scale but that doesn't totally explain the lack of quality when it comes to the competition.

trouve_search2h ago

I've been using an asus zenbook 14 OLED with linux. Compatibility is great.

The screen blows apple out completely. It's clearly, obviously better. The fan noise and battery life are worse than Apple. The keyboard feels better to type on, the trackpad is slightly worse, but not enough to annoy me.

The new Pop OS cosmic is a very fun OS concept for laptops with the autotiling workspaces as a fundamental primitive.

kvuj1h ago

From a quick search online, the max brightness of your laptop is 400 nits SDR and 500 HDR. My M5 MacBook Pro is 1000 and 1500 nits.

Screen brightness is not something I will compromise on after having a taste of greatness.

I personally wouldn't mind spending 30-40% more for a Linux laptop with similar qualities + repairability. But I will not settle for something much more expensive and worst in some aspects.

There are also arguments agains repairability in Framework's laptop. I did the calculations and for the Framework 16, it would be cheaper to buy a gaming Asus laptop and throw it out in a couple years to replace it versus buying a framework and upgrading it. Utter insanity.

pdimitar1h ago

Is the fan turning on often? Is it very loud?

From my research on Macbook alternatives only the Zenbooks looked like almost-an-even-match to me. Curious what's your experience with day-to-day fan noise and heat.

1 more reply

neonstatic59m ago

> The fan noise and battery life are worse than Apple.

That's the main issue for me. I am on M1 Max 32GB RAM. Except for local LLMs, there is absolutely nothing that gets even close to the performance limits of this device. As a result, all the work I do is performed in perfect silence. Very occasionally the device would get warm, never hot. Based on my usage, I could probably go for an Air model, except for how many external screens it supports.

Zero-noise is non-negotiable for me. It's lamentable how absolutely no-one comes even close.

fragmede2h ago

And that device is the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 OLED. The paper specs are great, all that's required is to turn it into a fully fleged Linux laptop and get rid of ChromeOS and core boot entirely. I just got hibernate working on it last night, wifi, sleep and sound and the fingerprint sensor works. There's some more polish and tuning to be done, but this'll be the machine I move off my apple silicon laptop for.

Apple hardware is only perfect when looked at through rose tinted glasses. The whole butterfly keyboard issue should be enough to indight them from being seen as perfect with hardware. There's a reason Applecare exists, and it's not just because of accidental spills.

tencentshill3h ago

When is reasonable to stop supporting a platform that only hinders the user experience? Should they have supported PPC emulation forever? x86 is on the way out in for most consumer devices. Apple is usually a bit early to drop technologies, but still acknowledges and fixes real mistakes (USB-C-only laptops and the associated keyboards) when they impact customer experience.

pdimitarnew7m ago

> x86 is on the way out in for most consumer devices.

Define "consumer devices"? I am holding on to my AMD Ryzen machines until they literally fall dead. I have no complaints from them. Maybe some modern or even next-gen ARM CPUs will be even better on Linux but I don't think we are quite there yet.

x86_64 is here to stay for a long time still.

But maybe you literally meant x86 as in the 32-bit CPU arch? If so, I'd mostly agree but not quite; they could be used in low-power micro-PCs for a long time still as well.

jbm3h ago

> Should they have supported PPC emulation forever

Yes.

throw0101c39m ago

Linux hasn't even bothered continuing supporting processors in the same family, dropping support for 386:

* https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup...

and more recently, 486:

* https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start...

and here we are expecting support for completely different CPU classes. :)

ghostpepper3h ago

Supporting everything forever is how you end up with Windows

7 more replies

cloverich3h ago

The other day i saw a slick scifi movie and really liked the interface in one of the random background terminals. I thought id recreate a working version of it. I snapped a screenshot on my iphone where i was watching, but lo it was blacked out? Same after several attempts. Ugh fine, go to my macbook, fire up netflix in a browser there, screenshot from desktop. Nope. Still blacked out.

Its not just older architecture we are losing out on.

nozzlegear3h ago

Is this just "Person discovers DRM, c. 2026" dressed up as a complaint about Apple?

_hyn33h ago

Only if you are solely an Apple user, because it's literally not a problem anywhere else. I've taken tons of photos of movies with my Pixels.

2 more replies

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse