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Comment by ajju | Hacker News Reader

The MacBook air is a so-so piece of hardware with a world class operating system. Dell can easily best the Air at hardware but definitely not at software (unless Apple frees Leopard)

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Looking at its size, weight, construction, rigidity, manufacturing process, backlit keyboard, magnetic power connector, DisplayPort interface, etc. I'd have to conclude that every facet of the Air represents the cutting edge in industrial design. I also must admit that, while clearly subjective, the majority of my coworkers and I find it aesthetically pleasing to look at.

I am curious, then, as to why you would rate it as "so-so" hardware. Because it doesn't have a removable battery? Seriously, what?

Mostly because every other Macbook air owner I know experiences overheating and random shutdowns multiple times a week:

http://blog.weatherby.net/2008/07/cool-air.html

http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/03/20/review-macbook-air

I think we all know that people who are unhappy with something usually speak up louder than those who are happy; as such, claiming that "every other" MacBook Air is flawed is (likely) severely exaggerated.

My girlfriend has a MacBook Air, it's the perfect laptop for her — it's light (she's a Uni student), well-designed, and runs fast enough to satisfy all her needs. No issues with it, so far.

I'm trying not to resort to sarcasm, but honestly. If your evidence of "so-so" hardware is an anecdotal sampling of people who may well have defective units, that's some pretty weak tea.

Hundreds of posts on Apple's forums lead me to believe that it's more than a handful of users. To pick just two of those threads:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1387729...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1415343...

It would seem you don't have a very clear understanding of the definition of "anecdotal":

   not necessarily true or reliable, because based on personal accounts rather than facts or research

Let me put it another way: Pick for us the very paradigm of what you consider to be fantastic hardware. I could find for you -- anecdotally -- a few hundred people who have had problems with it. Does that mean you're a) a bad judge of hardware or b) that there's bound to be some small percentage of problem cases when dealing with mass-produced electronics?

Apple shipped 2 million Macintoshes last quarter alone. If even only a tenth of those were Air sales, "hundreds of posts" doesn't even add up to 1% of units sold that quarter. Any consumer electronics manufacturer (including Apple!) would kill for a defect rate of under 1%.

I apologize. I should have requested Apple to grant me access to real time information on their actual hardware failure rates instead of basing my assumptions on the two sample universes I have access to. My bad.

Put another way, when I encounter anecdotal information about a specific hardware failure I find unacceptable more than a threshold number of times, I tend to base my buy decisions on that. The converse is also true in terms of praise. That's how I bought my Macbook, that's why I am not buying this version of the Air.

Why not? Dell sells Ubuntu laptops.

I use Ubuntu myself but I think it's still a year away from my grandma being able to use it.

I love Ubuntu on the server side, but on the desktop it always feels unfinished and I usually have to hack around to get something to work. I'm at the point in my life where futzing around to fix the basics isn't much fun.

OS X is polished and works really well. Sure, I have issues with it and Apple's control fetish, but since leaving Windows and Red Hat/Gentoo/Ubuntu/Debian I've been very happy.

Ubuntu is not world-class. I think Ubuntu might be close to competing with Windows, though it still lacks a lot of basic stuff. Both Ubuntu and Windows (up to and including Windows 7) are still years away from being on the same plane as OS X. (My policy is, until I see a text editor as good as TextEdit on another operating system, I won't even consider a comparison between the two.)

   My policy is, until I see a text editor as good as 
   TextEdit on another operating system, I won't even 
   consider a comparison between the two.

You forgot to mention your first axiom:

  1) Nothing is as good as TextMate.

Be realistic here: VI(M), Notepad++, and Emacs are all great text editors.

Sorry - I was referring to non code-focused editors. The great thing about TextEdit is that it looks like Notepad when I launch it, and yet it has incredible support for design, typography, layout, and positioning. I can write most school papers in it, but it still looks and feels ultrasimple.

TextMate does some awesome stuff, from what I've heard, but it's much more focused on coding. TextEdit is more general-purpose, which is why it's my standard. Until another OS spends as much time making a kickass all-purpose editor, it probably hasn't got the level of detail that I want in my operating system.

Oh, woops! Misread TextEdit for TextMate! That said, I find that Wordpad is a fantastic simplistic tool for creating school papers. For Linux I tend to use the slightly more complex (yet still very clean) LyX.

Wordpad is really good, but it lacks the wow factor of TextEdit (which I'm slightly addicted to).

I've never used LyX; forgive me if this is a dumb question, but is it available for Ubuntu? I might boot up a virtual machine and give it a try if so.

Sure is, it's in the repo so "sudo apt-get install lyx" should grab it.

It's also available for Windows/OS X so you might be better off just trying it on your primary OS.

http://www.lyx.org/

I don't think you're going to find the kind of simplicity you enjoy in TextEdit though.

Personally I use text-editors e.g. vim, for every kind of writing I do, code or not.

Plaintext formats like http://eleanor.rubyforge.org/ (for screenplays) and Taskpaper (for planning/todo lists) are really helpful for this sort of thing.

TextEdit isn't a text editor; it's a rich text editor.

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