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Comment by throwaway675309 | Hacker News Reader

Oh c'mon... I'm not going to argue that battery/build quality is better on the apple, but that is some serious FUD.

Literally just picked up an asus zephyrs g15 15.6" with 2560 x 1440QHD 165 hz refresh rate, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS, 16GB Memory, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 and 1 Tb ssd for $1850 at Best Buy, then picked up 2x16gb DDR4 3200 MHz for $150 off Amazon to upgrade to 32gb.

Weight is a little over 4 lbs. (4.1lbs)

Total cost: $2000

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The device doesn't even have the same specs, the $4000 is for a MacBook with 2 TB SSD and 64 GB of RAM yours has a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM that's half.

Other than that yes MacBooks are expensive. But so are HP EliteBooks or Lenovo ThinkPads.

You can get comparable Thinkpads at ~2800$ if you use the secret store and/or wait for sales.

Can you elaborate on the "secret store" ?

There is a Lenovo storefront called "perkopolis" to which you can find an entry key fairly easily that has deeply discounted thinkpads. So for example a 5800HS + GTX3060 + 16GB RAM + 512GB SSD laptop is going to run you around 1200$ there vs 2000$ without a discount.

Is this a US-only thing, or is it available elsewhere?

You are comparing a high-end MacBook to a mid-range Asus. Build quality costs money.

As someone who owns an Asus and a work-provided Dell XPS, and has extensively used a 2016 MBP... Yeah, no. Build quality differences are minimal, and at least on the Asus and to an extent the Dell not everything is glued/soldered on so it's maintainable. And it wasn't Dell or Asus who shipped faulty keyboards they refused to replace.

I own both a MBP (2019) and an Asus Zephyrus G14 (2020). While the latter is good value for the money (I use it for gaming), chassis, screen, sound, touchpad, fingerprint sensor, and reliability are much inferior. If you want to compare the new MBP to PC laptops, at least compare apples to apples (ROG Strix, Legion 7, etc.). Otherwise you're just arguing that a high-end laptop isn't worth the money to you, which is fine but has nothing to do with Mac vs. PC.

Total cost: $2000

What's your point. Of course you can get a laptop with lesser specs from a cheaper manufacturer for less, especially if you upgrade it yourself after the fact.

But if you price a Thinkpad P series of HP ZBook with 64GB RAM, 2TB storage, and similar GPU/CPU performance, you are looking at $4000. I know because I have one.

A 2TB SSD an 64 GB of RAM will cost around 800$, so that will be 2600$.

Have you been to Lenovo's or HP's homepage and seen what they charge for their high end ZBooks and P series laptops with those specs? No one is saying that you cannot get a Windows laptop with similar specs for cheaper if you buy from a cheaper brand and upgrade it yourself. But if you want a top of the line high end Windows laptop from someone like Lenovo or HP with matching specs then those companies charge basically the same as Apple.

Yeah I have. Lenovo has a really high list price but it has a secret store and a lot of sales.

Anyways that's the beauty of PCs, you don't have to pay the exorbitant prices or the OEM if you don't want to, a Lenovo P15 will allow you to swap the RAM and SSD however you want and it takes 5 minutes and like 9 screws.

FWIW, similarly spec'd 16" MBP (32GB, 1TB) is about $3100 though it will likely outperform the Asus in various measures that may or may not matter to a particular owner.

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