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Comment by chipdart | Hacker News Reader

> The build quality of Apple laptops is still pretty unmatched in every price category.

I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly keyboard. It was shit.

How many USB ports do the new MacBook air have? The old ones had two. And shipped with 8GB of RAM? These are shit-tier specs.

The 2020 MacBook pros had a nice thing: USB-C charging, and you could charge the from either side. Current models went back to MagSafe, only on one side. The number of USB ports is still very low.

But the are shiny. I guess that counts as quality.

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I guess we can agree to disagree, but I find the 2020 rev Macbook pros have a good number of USB-C ports (2 on the left, 1 on the right -- all can do PD), a magsafe charger, headphone jack, HDMI port and SD card slot. How many USB-C ports do you need? Sometimes I wish there was ethernet but I get why it's not there.

I agree, the butterfly keyboard was shitty but I absolutely love the keyboard on the 2020 rev. It's still not as great as my mechanical desktop keyboard, but for a laptop keyboard it's serious chef's kiss. Also, I have yet to find a trackpad that is anywhere as good as the Macbook. Precision trackpads are still way way worse.

Finally, the thing that always beings me back to MBPs (vs Surfacebooks or Razers) is battery life. I typically get a good 10+ hours on my MBP. Battery life on my old Razer Blade and Surfacebooks were absolutely comically horrible.

I'm absolutely not an Apple person. Privately own zero Apple hardware.

However there are two awesome things about my work MBP I would really want from my ThinkPad:

Magsafe charger - too many close calls!

And the track pad.

I can't work properly without an external mouse on my ThinkPad. But on the MBP everything just has the right size, location, proportions and handling on the track pad. I had a mouse for the MBP too but I stopped using it!

USB-C charging still works with the Pros (driving a M3 Max), and 3 ports seems reasonable to me.

> I owned a MacBook Pro with the dreaded butterfly keyboard. It was shit.

Yea, the butterfly was utter shit. And they fucked up the touchbar by not just putting it on TOP of the existing F-keys.

But the rest of the laptop was still well machined :D

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