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Comment by shiburizu | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious: I don't work in the space of CAD, video editing or any other field that people tend to use to justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet. Do these really do anything a sufficiently equipped laptop from anyone else can't? Plenty of options with latest gen Intel and Nvidia 10xx series are out there for less insane prices. Granted, I don't see many with that much storage space and RAM but I'd love to hear how some of you have experienced the same workload on non-Apple devices and felt you should keep buying MacBook.

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> justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet

If you think people buy MacBook Pros because of their tech specs, you are missing the point. MacBooks are by far the best general purpose, well-rounded laptops on the market from a build quality perspective. Everything from the screen to the touchpad to sleep/hibernate (and, until recently, the keyboard) is finely tuned to the point that you can't find another laptop on the market that just feels anywhere as nice as a whole. The tight integration between the hardware and the software doesn't hurt, either.

If all you need is a powerful laptop, or if you don't care about any of those details, you are probably better off getting a more cost effective machine, but you will always sacrifice some combination of things for it. (For me personally, the biggest one is the touchpad.)

I say this as someone who doesn't own any other Apple products, but I will likely never buy a laptop other than a MacBook Pro.

Seconding the touchpad. If I'm spending eight or so hours a day using a computer you can bet I'm going to get the one that feels best. CPU performance matters, but I'm not running at 100% CPU all day. I am clicking and typing all day, though.

Have you taken the Surface Book 2 for a spin? Pricey, but gives the MBP a good run for its money, and does a couple tricks the MBP cannot, such as having an excellent touch/pen surface for a screen. Real ports, including SD card. The outstanding downside is, of course, the abominable Windows 10.

I have, and to give Microsoft credit, it's the closest thing to a MBP I've ever used. That said, it still doesn't just quite feel as polished (the touchpad isn't as accurate, for one). But if I had to use a non-Apple laptop, I would probably go for a Surface Book.

How often do you rely on the touch screen? I know it seems like a naive question, but I have an older surface pro and I rarely used the touch screen. The machine itself was bulkier than an iPad or Nexus9, so I tended to use those instead for tooling around and mindless consumption. The surface pro was pretty much useless for actual work unless I had a second monitor, actual keyboard, and trackpad.

I do native Windows dev for a living, but I have no urge to pick up a machine with a touch screen unless it's a tablet. Is a touch pen/surface actually useful in day to day work?

The surface pro seemed designed to be a tablet that could also be your computer. The surface book is a laptop that can also be a tablet. This difference is really important for interaction. That said I feel like the digitizer is only really useful for taking notes that contain diagrams, or things like digital art. I also barely use my surface book, despite thinking it's one of the best alternatives to my beloved 2015 15" MBP.

I have a touchscreen on my dell e7470. I use it daily and I wouldn't want to miss it. It's perfect for like web browsing, navigating diagrams, and presenting. It's not useful for actual coding itself, only for supporting activities. I only use the laptop monitor itself, as soon as a actual monitor becomes the primary monitor, the usefulness of a touchscreen declines massively.

I use the touch screen all the time. They made it very easy to do one important thing, they let you take a screenshot by pressing the pen eraser twice, and immediately begin annotating it by drawing right on top of it. For doing things like UI prototypes this is a huge booster. Someone sends me a test build or concept, and I can leap right into graphical annotation. Why waste time typing when unambiguous visual communication is this easy.

As a pen input device it's at least as good as my Intuos2 which it replaced, plus you get to draw right on the screen. (I don't like the side button though, it requires too much force to press.)

I have a handful of laptops but by far my most reliable have been my macbook pros. I'm writing this on a mid-2010 mbp that's run like a champ since day one. I also have a 2014 mbp for work, but I really like the 2010. It's not a skinny ultra-portable but it's not a tank either. It only runs hot when I have it hooked up to a large display. Eight years with no notable problems for a daily driver is pretty good in my eyes.

I agree completely on the touchpad. I picked up an XPS13 that I'd intended to use as a replacement. The touchpad is as good as I've had on a non-Apple product, but it's still not on par with Apple. On the otherhand I've started playing with OpenBSD with ratpoison & qutebroswser and it's pretty remarkable how far you can get without a touchpad at all.

A couple years ago I wouldn't have considered anything but an mbp, but with the recent touchbar and butterfly keyboard shenanigans I would absolutely consider something other than an mbp. I hope Apple comes to recognize that reliability is more important than super skinny unrepairable machines.

In general, I would agree that Macbook Pros are very reliable.

Having said that, it's not like Apple hasn't had their share of lemons. I was unfortunate enough to have an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro. Without getting into too much details, it's a known lemon that has been discussed here on HN many times. My 2011 MBP was the first laptop I've ever had that actually stopped working. FWIW, most of my other laptops were PC laptops that didn't cost nearly as much as the MBP.

I appreciate your comment and sentiment, and agree to some extent about previous MBPs, but saying that "it only gets hot when attached to a large display" is quite shocking...I normally use 3 external screens for work on my Dell XPS (previously Thinkpad), and don't understand why a powerful laptop would get hot just by outputting to displays..

I do some Photoshop and Lightroom work, but generally don't need an overly powerful laptop. I used to detest OS9 or whatever Apple had before OSX and stuck with Windows for some time. But after switching and when I last upgraded, price was no issue. There might've been a powerful, $500 Windows laptop, and I would ignore it. The MacBook Pro has simple, clean lines. It works well. The OS stays out of my way (I shrink and hide the Dock and don't use many of the other features - Expose, etc - can't even remember what they're called). I can't trust that to be the same for Windows-based laptops or other hardware.

If it costs $3-5k and I use it for hours and hours each day, years on end, it's peanuts as a professional tool. I'd rather pay and enjoy using it than take a discount but be frustrated each day.

OSX really. Loss of productivity from the little stuff in windows just isn’t manageable for me. OS X has problems, but I’m used to it and familiar with it and it works as expected.

I agree with the loss of productivity in Windows. For me it started with Win7, really took hold with Win8/server 2012 "metro", and only got a little better in Win10.

I don't understand why there are two significantly different ways to do simple things like connect to a network or configure an existing connection. The OS throws the pretty/flat metro inspired applet at you, but it has 10% of the actual functionality you're looking for, so you end up popping open the control panel anyway. The start menu ads are an insane addition. The apps in the app store are pretty much pointless and anything you actually need you can install via chocolatey.

If MS were to produce an actual "pro" version of Windows that removed all of the fluffy inconsistent stuff, ripped out all vestiges of Win8, and put PowerShell front and center, it would appeal to a lot of people that just want to get stuff done.

OSX, as sibling pointed out, but let me be much more specific:

- iMessage

- excellent integration between Contacts, Maps, iMessage, Mail, and Spotlight

- Mail.app, the best desktop mail client (IMO)

- Siri > Cortana > Whatever tarball you are expected to run autoconf inside of to get your linux box to act like a mac from the 90s

- excellent HiDPI support (neither Windows nor Linux have figured this out yet)

- plug and play external display support

- configuration-free lid switch sanity

- configuration-free trackpad sanity

- Lack of vendor adware (Windows obvs, did Ubuntu ever remove those Amazon search things?)

- painless FDE (extremely important)

- good fonts

- iOS development possible

- the most common modifier key is where my thumb can reach it and is not overloaded with the unix modifier key (is ctrl-c copy or SIGINT?)

- copy and paste work between apps using consistent keystrokes (windows figured this one out, linux not so much)

- less malware than windows

- an order of magnitude better a11y than anyone else in the history of OSes (it’s literally not even a race anymore, Apple is so far ahead here)

Finally, in not-OSX:

- build quality, even with keyboard and thermal issues, is still simply a head and shoulders higher than everyone else

The only people who could reasonably challenge Apple’s level of fit and finish from an OS perspective are Google, which is why I carry an rMBP and the 16gb Pixelbook. ChromeOS these days is a fucking marvel, up there on quality par with google search before answer cards, google assistant, and google maps. It’s a major achievement and is the first actually workable/usable Linux desktop.

Genuinely can someone explain why this is downvoted? The answer says “the software” which people constantly discount - just look at the cycle predicting Nintendo’s death every few years.

Comsol and sometime CAD user here, on a 2015 MacBook Pro, the latest of many Apple laptops for me.

My workflow runs faster on many laptops outside the walled garden. But I've gotten used to an exceptional build quality that's reliable under hard use, and OSX lets me think & work more like I want than other OSes. Also, my customer experience with Apple has been outstanding for decades.

For me, Apple has a mix of quality and aesthetics that I like better than what I've experienced from other manufacturers. It's been worth the price premium for me.

That said, I'm avoiding the butterfly keyboards until they really get them figured out.

In general, unless you are running a long computation (in CAD, that could be a stress analysis; in graphic design that could be rendering a frame) you won’t notice any difference in snappiness of workflow.

I run Autodesk Inventor 2018 on a bootcamped mid-2017 Mackbook 12”, it has a built in Intel video card (650 I believe). The only time I wish I had more processing power is when doing huge FEA analysis, my 15W processor goes into a down-clocked limp mode, and computations take 4X longer than on a latest gen desktop).

> Do these really do anything a sufficiently equipped laptop from anyone else can't?

Yes, mac touchpads are light years ahead of non mac touchpads.

Yep Its just a million little details that make it such quality. The awesome UI of the OS. The trackpad is the best trackpad I've ever used. Every other trackpad feels clumsy after using one. The fact that it's a TRUE linux machine not just retrofitted Windows linux. The fact that everything just works. The chance of getting a virus is incredibly small. The time saved in troubleshooting is worth the price. Operating system upgrades are like 30 bucks vs the 1-200 dollars of every new windows release. Also, the build quality is the best. I have a macbook that has lasted 10 years and still works great. Never had a windows machine do that. So the quality, UI, attention to detail, upgrades, and more make it more than worth the upfront price tag in hassle saved down the line.

> Operating system upgrades are like 30 bucks vs the 1-200 dollars of every new windows release.

When was the last time you upgraded macOS? It's been free for several years. :)

Also, to be fair to Microsoft, Windows 10 is supposed to be the last version of Windows, so you should only have to buy it once and never upgrade again.

The fact that it's a TRUE linux machine

To be pedantic, a GNU/Darwin/Mach/BSD machine.

Yessir. A flavor of Linux but Linux nonetheless.

A flavour of UNIX. BSD (and OS X) evolved mostly separately from GNU or Linux, with some limited cross-over. Even basic CLI tools have subtle differences. The only Linus Torvalds code in a Mac would be git.

Sorry. you're right my bad. I was thinking Unix but kept typing Linux for some reason.

A more accurate statement is that it's a true posix compliant Unix based system down to the metal.

The "retrofitted Windows linux" is more Linuxy than the Mac (and both suck compared to an actual Linux OS).

Try interfacing in depth with your Hardware with the windows Linux.

> Also, the build quality is the best. I have a macbook that has lasted 10 years and still works great

I have a Mid-2010 MBP that is a large and ugly paperweight.

Due to shonky quality control, it hard-locks every 5 minutes when using the GPU. This only started when Mountain Lion was released, but good luck rolling back if you want to actually use XCode.

Given that it was such a piece of garbage, and that (at the time) workers were jumping to their deaths rather than keep building Apple products, and more recently the crap with sneaky performance reductions on iPhone, I have sworn completely off Apple products.

I was a systems engineer at an Enterprise environment with over a thousand users and about 50/50 Mac/PC split. You can guess which were less headaches from a hardware perspective. And by less headaches I mean virtually non-existent Hardware failures.

Turning them into Enterprise friendly machines from a software perspective was a different story.

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