Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

Annecdata: I've never had a desktop or laptop fan fail on me, and I'm the kind of person who keeps them for a decade.

Spinning HDDs (Toshiba bearings), keyboards and hinges on the other hand have all failed on me multiple times, in macs. but the fans kept going. The keyboards were the last thing to fail in the 2009 design, they last about 10 years.

Also while were at it, mechanical failure isn't always the biggest concern these days, Apple has had nVidia GPU issues (soldier and fab issues) in the past where they ended up underclocking them in a firmware patch in order to push failures out of warrantee.

View on HN

I bought a cheap M1 Air model (only the ram is upgraded to 16gb) at $1030 Apple-refurbished. My intent is to try and sell it a bit before the 1 year mark.

For some of the reasons you mentioned (specially the last paragraph), but also the battery and the general non-reparability. It almost feels like a consumable item, compared to my previous Thinkpad.

Here's the thing: all the other laptops I was looking at cost at least twice the price. High-end Thinkpads, my second choice, almost 3 times.

All of the sudden Apple became the budget choice for my use case. In one year hopefully when I sell this one there will be competitors to the M1 chip (or maybe the M1X?), and I'll have more options.

> Here's the thing: all the other laptops I was looking at cost at least twice the price. High-end Thinkpads, my second choice, almost 3 times.

It shouldn't be this way, but most of the big enterprise retailers have ridiculous sticker prices. Unlike Apple, volume buyers get steep discounts, and individuals are expected to wait for a discount.

Ask around online and you'll find it's fairly simple to get fancy Thinkpads for half-off.

It's highly dependent on the country you're at. I see people on r/thinkpad get new high-end ones discounted, the kind of discounts that you can't get in France.

What you can find in France is heavily discounted ones from people that resell their company-provided ones. I bought 3 T460 like that in the past, for me and my family. But no high-end models, nor much choice in the customization.

It might be worth buying the discounted thinkpad in US (I assume that's where most heavily discounted ones show up) and then ship it to France?

I looked into that too ahah. There are "forwarding" services that do that for you, if you don't have a friend there.

But I don't like thinkpads to the point of doing that rodeo. For now, Apple won my money.

M1 is a complete SOC and discrete nvidia graphics from nvidia were so bad that Apple switched to AMD permanently.

That was just one example, one that affected me and millions of others. There are also plenty of other chip level failures in newer apple hardware as quite well documented by Louis Rossmann. Not all GPU/CPU issues either, there are many other chips that go wrong due to cheap component choices.

The GPU issues were both nVidia's _and_ Apple's fault due to assembly with low quality unleaded solder. In either case their attitude to customers was unforgivable, they replaced old broken boards with new broken boards until people just gave up or were pushed out of warrantee... and for the masses that couldn't be bothered to go through the pain of browbeating an Apple store employee into submission - they got firmware patches to push it out of warrantee.

Component failure, solid state or otherwise is not unique to Apple and is an inevitability, it will happen again - complete disrespect for their users by continually lying to their face on the other hand... That is something Apple is uniquely skilled at.

Fan life really depends on usecase. The bearings roughly have a certain number of cycles, and most consumers just don't push them that hard.

For example a tiny 1000 RPM server fan running 24/7 rotates 5 billion times per year. My desktop spends most of it's time off, but if I game on it 10% of the time it's big fans might be at 1000RPM. This is only 50 million cycles per year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com