Hacker News Reader

Comment by tagrun | Hacker News Reader

People buying desktop computers care about performance and price, not battery life or the fruit logo on the case.

You'll find it difficult to convince many people who are not already locked in Apple's walled garden and sense of consumerism around its branding to pay $4000 for such a performance, with limited RAM/disk, and no real path to upgrades or user repairs.

> most of these machines can provide better price/performance than most anything else on the market,

I agree, for better performance/price though, you wouldn't buy from Apple.

(A meta comment: I find it difficult to comprehend how people can become so emotionally invested in a company. Finding an excuse to every single shortcoming of Apple, not leaving any criticism unanswered for them.)

View on HN

Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life.

You can't, because it doesn't exist. Here's a hint -- the price is much closer to $1000 than $4000.

I've been a MacFanatic since December of 1983, when I saw a by-invitation-only demo of a prototype of the 128k Mac, a month before the Super Bowl commercial where Apple officially introduced the thing. Yeah, that famous one.

It took only five minutes of playing around with the prototypes of what came to be called MacWrite and MacPaint (because those were the only two pieces of prototype software available yet) to convince me that this was the future of computing, and that all computers should work like this.

But I'm also a Mac realist. I fully recognize that there are markets that Mac doesn't serve well, like Enterprise. Apple has always understood the workgroup level and served that market well, but as you scale up, they do worse and worse. The fact that the Mac works well in an Enterprise is in spite of Apple design philosophy, not because of it.

And I also understand that there are markets where Apple makes no attempt to serve that market, because they don't consider it worthwhile -- whether I agree with them or not.

I even did a short six month contract working for Apple Retail Software Engineering, where I worked with the team that developed all the proprietary software that the Apple Retail personnel use, whether that's everyone in the stores, or the people back at HQ that are coordinating with the people in the stores.

I delivered a CI/CD system for them, so that they would no longer have to do all the building of all their software on the laptops of the individual developers.

After six months, I had contributed code to each of their main code bases (iOS, macOS, and Linux for their back-end servers) to get the to compile on the CI/CD system, and the rest of my job was done. And in the process, I learned that Apple is a company I am happy to be a customer of, but I don't ever want to work there again.

> Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life.

I will happily be the one to tell you.

For between $600-700 you can get a gaming laptop from MSI, HP, Acer, Lenovo, and the like with a 12th or 13th gen Intel CPU (e.g. i5 13420H), 8-16 GB of RAM, and a RTX 3050 or better, along with a 512GB-1TB SSD. Single-core performance is just shy of the M2, multi-core performance beats the M2, GPU performance is significantly better, and the only major shortfall is battery life.

As others have said, the M-series is great at power efficiency, but if performance is your only criteria there are significantly cheaper alternatives. Sure, you're going to have to keep your laptop plugged in most of the time and it will probably sound like a jet engine at times, however Apple is NOT the leader in value for performance as you believe.

Regarding battery life, you could approach Apple levels of usage time by undervolting your CPU. Depending on your configuration and hardware, you could gain a couple more hours of usage time by undervolting as well as using integrated graphics and disabling the GPU in favor of integrated graphics.

So, what is the battery life on that device? One hour? Two hours?

Could you get twelve hours out of it? Eighteen?

And what is the resolution on that screen? Anywhere close to 2880 by 1864?

You have failed to deliver a system that actually meets the specs of the MacBook Air 15" that you are comparing against, and then declaring yourself the victor because your machine is marginally faster.

You fail to grasp that you have actually proven my point for me.

Apple is designing their machines for real people in the real world who may not be anywhere close to a power outlet for a long time. Or, who may not want to tie themselves down to needing to be close to a power outlet all the time.

> So, what is the battery life on that device? One hour? Two hours?

I'd put the average battery life of a $600-700 gaming laptop at ~4-6hr, although if you undervolt the CPU (getting maybe 80% of the performance) you could achieve 8+ hours on a charge. Screens vary, but they're typically 1280x1080 -- however at 120/144Hz. I'd say both are acceptable for most people.

And I am not claiming to compete against the MacBook Air 15" for $600-700. I am just pointing out that performance-wise, a $600-700 gaming laptop can equal a $1200 Macbook, and hence is a much better value.

If however you want me to find a challenger to your MacBook Air 15", I will.

With a $1200 base 15" M2 Macbook Air budget, you can get a Dell XPS 15 for $1,149 (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/12th-gen-intel/spd/x...). The i7-12700H equals the M2 in single-core and beats the M2 in multi-core workloads. It comes with a RTX 3050, 16 GB of DDR5, and a 512GB SSD, and a 3456x2160 OLED touch display. You get 8GB more RAM, twice the storage, a better GPU and multi-core performance than the base model Mac Air for $50 less. Battery lasts up to 13 hours.

I am admittedly also an Apple fan, but that doesn't mean I have my eyes on the competition. While Apple has had its share of advances, and while it is still my go-to for my laptops, I will be the first to admit that there are plenty of alternatives depending on what you're looking for. And some of those alternatives are hands-down a better value depending on your criteria.

If you want a display comparable to an MBA, the Dell XPS starts at $1449 (according to your link).

Indeed, although that extra display is optional. For a MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD (with the XPS still beating it for CPU & GPU), you'll pay $1,499 which again is a $50 savings. I personally don't place too much value in a screen but that's due to my workload, I'm sure that people who do video/graphics work would want the premium screen.

I wouldn’t buy a 1X resolution screen in 2023. I’m surprised they are actually still sold, the quicker we move up to modern resolutions being standard the quicker we can just call them the new 1X and stop all the resolution hackery we have to do to support both at the same time these days.

If you're looking for a gaming laptop, then I agree that Apple doesn't have good solutions in that space. That's primarily because there's not much in the way of good games that run on macOS. Hopefully, that will change with the new game porting kit that Apple has announced, but there's no way to tell right now.

But while 13 hours of battery runtime is quite good by Intel/Windows standards, it's still not the 18 hours you can get with the MacBook Air 15".

It's very clear that Apple has decided to optimize for certain things in their designs, and battery lifetime is one of them. They'll take a slight hit on CPU performance to get that. And most people won't notice the minor loss in CPU performance, but they will notice the significant increase in battery runtime.

There are Windows contenders that do offer comparable battery life to Macbooks, if that's your criteria. The $549 Acer Swift 3 (i7-1165G7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) gets up to 16 hours, and the $799 Asus ZenBook 13 (i7-8565U, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD) gets up to 15 hours.

Performance is close enough to Apple silicon that both laptops would be acceptable competitors for a general consumer's uses, RAM and storage are equal to if not better than Apple's base model Air's, and the price is unquestionably better.

Apple does strike a good balance, but it most definitely isn't leagues ahead of any other company no matter which way you look at it.

> Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price.

> You can't, because it doesn't exist.

Your tunnel vision is appalling. You're obviously not aware of what the market is offering.

From Apple, at $1000, you get an overly priced laptop with weak specs: 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM and an M1 CPU (which is weaker than a Core i5-1240P or Core i5-1335U), with no path to upgrade: https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m1/ That's essentially a mid-range tablet in a laptop form which is poised to become an e-waste in a few years.

You can get a laptop with such specs for around half of that price from virtually any vendor.

However, it's not just the base price: want 2TB storage? I can just get a Samsung Pro 990 2TB for $160-$170 an install it, but Apple won't allow you to do it and will charge you $800 for their soldered 2TB SSD. Want more RAM? You can get 64GB DDR5 for less than $150, whereas with Mac Book Air 16GB is the max you can get (which makes it is pretty useless for science or engineering applications, and 16GB RAM will probably become very limiting even for casual users in the near future) and it costs an extra $200.

I will also have the option to upgrade it to an 8TB (or 16TB by then, who knows) SSD and 96GB DDR5 when their prices come further down in the future, adding more to its life. I will also be able to easily replace the battery myself when the time comes. Whereas your option to upgrade will be to buy the brand new M6 or whatever Mac laptop, perhaps for another $2000 with hopefully half the RAM and SSD of what I will have.

Like most people who use laptop for work, 18 hours of battery life isn't addressing a real need that I have. People have mostly moved on to smart phones and tablets for watching video, casual browsing, etc in the absence of an electrical outlet. Nonetheless, for those who actually need such long battery life, it is possible to buy such laptops from other vendors for still half the price at those specs though (like Acer Swift 3 mentioned in another comment).

But nonetheless, you still feel you need to run to defend this company? It sounds like you've invested so much in Apple and just don't want to be wrong about it, even if it means living in a world of alternative facts in which any laptop that "remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor" for $1000 simply "doesn't exist".

Which $500 (or $1000) laptop lets you install 64GB RAM?

(The Acer Swift 3 supports max 16GB)

As an example, pretty much any recent Dell Inspiron, which happen to be quite serviceable too.

Such as https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-lap... which is $530 at the moment but you can get it for cheaper during Black Friday. The manual may say up to 32GB but installing 64GB works just fine, as the CPU supports up to 64GB.

For $330, you can get an i5 Lenovo IdeaPad 14" today but it goes up to 36GB only because one of the 4GB RAMs is soldered https://www.microcenter.com/product/666315/lenovo-ideapad-3-...

You can install 64GB RAM to i3 laptops as well, which can be as low as ~$300, for example https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-lap... is currently $350, but you can get a similar one for ~$200 during Black Friday.

64GB RAM in a laptop may cost a fortune in Apple-land, but it's pretty cheap to get for "normal" laptops.

(You can't upgrade RAM with Acer Swift 3, it's soldered.)

Yes you can upgrade a lot of Dells, but the maximums in their manuals are based on their supported maximums, so if you run in to problems, your Dell support probably won't be of much use.

I find people trying to compare to a Dell (especially to anything which isn't trying to be a competitor - the XPS) come off a bit naive. Once you start talking about the XPS, the price difference shrinks. In the UK the latest XPS 13 with an i7, 32GB and 1TB and the better screen is around £2,000. The M2 Macbook Air 13 with 24GB and 1TB and fast charger is £1,979. The 13 pro with same specs is £2,149.

Having owned an XPS before (with its flexing chassis, coil whine, overheating, cpu throttling, noisy hot fans, smelly plastic), you couldn't pay me to have one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com