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Comment by Corrado | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a perfect advertisement for a MacBook (Pro). When I buy a computer (for business) I want it to just work and continue to work for years and years. Not having to deal with things like coil whine and screen flicker are extremely good reasons to purchase an Apple product. I've been a Mac user for years and I didn't even know what coil whine was and had to look it up. Sure, Apple products have their flaws, but they generally don't force you to deal with electronic buzzing sounds coming from the graphics drivers and the computer frying itself on the way to work.

Building a computer to play with and learn from is great. But when you have to get work done, it pays to get the best. Spending time fooling around with problems that shouldn't be there in the first place is a time & money waste.

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> Building a computer to play with and learn from is great. But when you have to get work done, it pays to get the best.

Right, but "the best" is completely subjective. I've wasted more time trying to get OS X and Macs to do what I want than I've ever spent building my own desktop machines or getting Windows to do what I want.

That's the reason why the vast majority of businesses don't run OS X too. It's not the best for them. Not even close.

If I had to use OS X daily, it would be death by a thousand cuts for me since it's missing so many features. The things that it's missing are really stupid and simple too, like the ability to just disable a monitor without having to unplug it. I can't spend all day hunting down third party solutions to every problem in OS X. There are too many. Nevermind the fact that the software that many businesses run wouldn't work on a Mac unless you virtualized it.

Using Mac hardware without OS X turns that nice hardware into crap, so that's exactly what Mac hardware is worth to me. I need to buy it to test stuff for iOS though, so I always buy refurbished desktop Macs since Apple won't let you upgrade their laptops.

IMO all laptops suck anyway. I don't get why people buy them. All my work is done at a nice fat PC desktop with 32 GB of RAM, a fast CPU and multiple SSDs which was thrown together from commodity parts...for cheap...which is easily upgradeable...and which also smokes the refurb Mac Pro (Mid-2012) that I also bought.

(When I go to a meeting I bring my Dell XPS or my Surface Pro, both of which are over 5 years old and still working very reliably with no problems - meanwhile my old 2008 MBP will not be able to run macOS sierra next year.)

This is the sort of thing that makes me afraid to buy non-Apple products. I know what coil whine is--my last Dell laptop (an XPS 15 from be P4 days) had a bad case of it too. It's also frustrating because PC reviewers never talk about things like that. They'll spend pages on benchmarks and not say a word about the trackpad or fan noise.

Which is a shame because the XPS 15 looks neat--way smaller footprint than the rMBP 15".

Not true, coil whine is a very well known XPS issue. You just need to get familiar with the owners reviews, not the regular/advertising reviews.

If you take all the laptops with those annoyances from being possible candidates for a new laptop; What is a good non-apple laptop? I always was anti-Apple, still do, but I just can't fault the Macbook Air 2012, which for the time had reasonable resolution/memory/cpu for the price. But more importantly, it had none of the annoyances.

I'm going replace my current Dell Latitude 14 inch laptop and yes it's a hard to find something decent on the market to run Linux even if price is not the issue. So far my top candidate is Acer TravelMate P648, I mentioned it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12290096 I first need to find a chance to try it in action.

It's easy to explain why MacBooks work well and have a decent battery life. Because Apple has a very limited and predefined line of machines and in that situation it's not a problem to polish OS to work well with a limited line of devices.

Sounds like a good idea. Some OEMs should follow suit. Sometimes they try with their upper echelon hardware and they always fail somehow. Look at this XPS15 with all its annoyances. I still don't understand why they keep making consumer crap and tarnish their own brand, while they could take that design time of crappy stuff towards the upper echelon stuff, to make them truly great.

For what it's worth, I got an MBP from work and it's power supply has an annoying coil whine/hum. I've looked online and it is common enough I haven't bothered to ask for a replacement. Quality issues like that exist among all manufacturers. Likewise with the software side. OSX still has bugs and I still waste time working around behaviors like in Windows or Linux.

There are definitely benefits to it but there are drawbacks too.

Did you also use other machines for that long or are you just raving on your anecdote?

Oh, I've been in the business for a long time and have used many, many different types of machines. Everything from (very) cheap eMachines to IBM Thinkpad to Dell laptops; I've used them all and all I can think about is how lacking they are. I'm a professional programmer, I make my living with these things, they have to work correctly, all the time. My father was a mechanic and he had to purchase a lot of his own tools. Did he get the $3 screwdriver from Harbor Freight? No, he purchased the $45 one from SnapOn, and it was worth every, single, penny. I feel the same way about my tools. The chair I'm sitting in is a 10 year old Aeron and it works just as well as the day it was made. Sure it costs more than the $90 "office" chair at Staples, but I sit in it all day every day and it doesn't make my back hurt. It was worth every, single, penny.

If the price is so important, I have a €1800 Fujitsu laptop from work and could name no issue. It even works perfectly with Linux. Consumer devices are not necessarily bad but often the price increase from that to a business tool is worth it, as you say. I just find the Apple praise weird when people often never used an equivalent non-Apple device.

I have used several PCs and laptop PCs, and 99% have been crap compared to something like an Air or MBPr.

And while there are some production runs of Macs with faults (including the coil whine mentioned, it was an issue back a few years ago for some runs), if you are unlucky to chance on one, you can trade it in (or sell it -- Macs always keep a high resale price).

The problems of the PC laptops, on the other hand, are by design, and not fixable that easily.

> The problems of the PC laptops, on the other hand, are by design, and not fixable that easily.

Huh? Do you mean the physical design or something about the software?

Mostly the physical design (and the culture and market decisions behind it). The cheap plastic mentioned in the article that attracts thumbprints. The lack of attention to things like coil whine. The screen flicker, fan noise, random wake ups, etc.

Are you aware that there are countless different designs on the market? Try a nice model some day.

I'm well aware. I'm also aware that the nice models are both few and far between and (the few that exist) cost the same (or more) than a Mac laptop.

Here's what Linus (or a certain OS fame) wrote about the situation:

"I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light".

That was back 3 years ago. Since then he also adopted the Chromebook, but the general complaint still stands.

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