OT: Need a new laptop

[fkelly]

I'm on my second Sagernotebook (Sagernotebook.com). Basically a custom built Windows computer with top line components throughout.

By having it custom built you can eliminate crapware which all the standard vendors (Dell, HP etc.) load the computers down with. It can take days after you get a new computer with crapware to get rid of most of it. Of course, Windows comes with crapware built in too. Unless you want a tablet and touch screen you'll need to load Classic Shell on top of Windows and pound hard on the keyboard and mouse a few times to get Windows thoroughly buried so you can have a standard start menu listing just the programs you really want to use.

[TunaAndBikes]

Originally Posted by vqdriver

i agree with this. just bought a macbook air for the wife and found this video from last year spot on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XSC_UG5_kU

Yeah this also came into accounts TBH.
Bootcamping is all good and well but having to spend an extra leg for dongles was going a bit overboard...

Seeing less and less apples in cafes and at school

Sent from my SM-G920W8 using Tapatalk

[fuzzalow]

Lotta negative things to say about about products that anyone can choose not to buy.

But I'd bet you'd jump outta your skin to buy an Apple MacBook Pro if it was priced identical to Dell/HP/Lenovo/whatever commodity technology. All thoughts of MacBooks not being good enough for the money....simply....vanish. Sometimes stuff costs what it costs and just maybe the company that conceived, manufactured and marketed that product earned what they got.

The missing point in this thread isn't why somebody didn't buy Apple but rather why somebody didn't buy AAPL.

[Llewellyn]

Originally Posted by fuzzalow

Lotta negative things to say about about products that anyone can choose not to buy.

But I'd bet you'd jump outta your skin to buy an Apple MacBook Pro if it was priced identical to Dell/HP/Lenovo/whatever commodity technology. All thoughts of MacBooks not being good enough for the money....simply....vanish. Sometimes stuff costs what it costs and just maybe the company that conceived, manufactured and marketed that product earned what they got.

Nope. I just won't buy anything from Apple on principle. But that's just me.....most people who use the gear seem to like it. It's all just personal preference in the end.

[OtayBW]

Originally Posted by Llewellyn

Nope. I just won't buy anything from Apple on principle. But that's just me.....most people who use the gear seem to like it. It's all just personal preference in the end.

Yep - I've had a nice MacBook Pro that was given to me sitting on my desk at work. Don't use it. For what I need, the PCs are still the way to go even though - yes - Microsoft pisses me off royalty sometimes.

[fuzzalow]

Originally Posted by Llewellyn

Nope. I just won't buy anything from Apple on principle. But that's just me.....most people who use the gear seem to like it. It's all just personal preference in the end.

OK. That fine with me. Can you elaborate on what that principle is that would make your choice in buying an Apple product untenable?

I am not apostolic about any brand or consumer good but I am curious as to how you feel as you do about Apple. So I'm not offering a defense of Apple, they don't need my help; and all this stuff sort themselves out in the free market.

Apples OK with me, any company that does a good job ought to be admired in some fashion.

[paredown]

Originally Posted by fuzzalow

OK. That fine with me. Can you elaborate on what that principle is that would make your choice in buying an Apple product untenable?

I am not apostolic about any brand or consumer good but I am curious as to how you feel as you do about Apple. So I'm not offering a defense of Apple, they don't need my help; and all this stuff sort themselves out in the free market.

Apples OK with me, any company that does a good job ought to be admired in some fashion.

My annoyance with Apple (I know the question was directed at someone else but I feel the same way) is the closed eco-system, the patronizing attitude, the limited control you have over your devices and the fact that you pay a very large premium for what is now the virtually the same hardware as a standard PC. (In fact there is a cottage industry of building Hackintoshes using PC hardware.)

I would put my wife's Lenovo Yoga up against a comparable Mac Air--and it wins on price, and is as good on build quality and performance and I think design as well. So why would I pay the premium? I might feel differently if I used an iPhone (never saw the point, esp the new ones) or wanted to pay high prices to stream music (never saw the point) or put my data on their cloud (never saw the point) or use versions of standard apps like Office that work less well (never saw the point.)

[TunaAndBikes]

Originally Posted by fuzzalow

Lotta negative things to say about about products that anyone can choose not to buy.

But I'd bet you'd jump outta your skin to buy an Apple MacBook Pro if it was priced identical to Dell/HP/Lenovo/whatever commodity technology. All thoughts of MacBooks not being good enough for the money....simply....vanish. Sometimes stuff costs what it costs and just maybe the company that conceived, manufactured and marketed that product earned what they got.

The missing point in this thread isn't why somebody didn't buy Apple but rather why somebody didn't buy AAPL.

Apple's stuff costs what it costs because they make huge profit margins and have thousands of stores to maintain with hundreds of employees paid 20$ an hour to greet you. That and marketing is how they succeeded.
To the post's OP; If you feel like you might need frequent tech help or if you don't want to deal with third party repair people, Apple is probably an ok option.

If you were to ask me to chose; I'd still go for higher end Lenovos, Dells or an HP. They have their X series, Inspiron/XPS, and Envy/Spectre series that are all at least a bit ahead of what Apple has been pumping out in terms of features and such. Like Paredown up above; my Inspiron has better features, specs and looks than their entry level MB Pro with 500 extra loonies in my pocket (about 200 if I hadn't got it at back to school discount), where am I at advantage going with Apple?

As you are Fuzzalow, i'm not emotionally involved with any brand. If Apple comes up with the next big thing and I've got budget to spare I might renegotiate, but a Touchbar over the keyboard probably ain't it.

I'd also add that a lack of a decent computer that's in the 500 buckaroos area, that actually has decent capabilities like storage or power, is also another argument to withhold against the big AAPL.
Oh and the new Microsoft OS really is pretty decent, got several design and feature "inspiration" from Apple's OS and got really more user friendly than what was available in the past.


And as always; different strokes for different folks, you'll be happy with whatever you get until you're not.
Choose what you want in a computer, read reviews and pull the trigger on what's in your budget.

[fuzzalow]

Originally Posted by paredown

My annoyance with Apple (I know the question was directed at someone else but I feel the same way) is the closed eco-system, the patronizing attitude, the limited control you have over your devices and the fact that you pay a very large premium for what is now the virtually the same hardware as a standard PC. (In fact there is a cottage industry of building Hackintoshes using PC hardware.)

It is an open discussion and I appreciate the response. I'd think this forum would always be welcoming of substantive conversations.

I can't fault anything you've said about your view on Apple because I view what they do as part and parcel of either benefits or detractions from how they approach their customer and the implementation they use to satisfy those goals. For our use of Apple in my household I am more than happy to buy into the ecosystem because it is something I don't have to attend to for a computer I don't use. So, like frozen food from the supermarket, I am paying through the nose for the convenience and I know it and pay up anyway.

I still build my own desktop computers and largely use Linux because I used Unix workstations in financial services most all my career and it is how I know to use a computer. Lotsa command line in bash shell to do anything outside a browser, yikes. So yeah I could figure stuff out and avoid all the patronizing attitude of Apple except I don't want to. 'Cos to me it's not patronizing, it is convenience and works well enough that I only do low touch sys-admin occasionally for the Macs in my household. So I pay.

In fairness, I like Apple's aesthetics so I'd buy the product almost on looks alone but the fact that it works pretty well too makes buying Apple not that painful in our household.

I would put my wife's Lenovo Yoga up against a comparable Mac Air--and it wins on price, and is as good on build quality and performance and I think design as well. So why would I pay the premium? I might feel differently if I used an iPhone (never saw the point, esp the new ones) or wanted to pay high prices to stream music (never saw the point) or put my data on their cloud (never saw the point) or use versions of standard apps like Office that work less well (never saw the point.)

We don't use any of the above either.

Thanks for the response, nice talking with you.

[Gsinill]

Originally Posted by paredown

... you pay a very large premium for what is now the virtually the same hardware as a standard PC

It's not about the hardware anymore...
IBM says it is 3X more expensive to manage PCs than Macs

[Llewellyn]

Paredown's response sums up my feelings about Apple perfectly. Plus it's just a whole range of other things about the company that I won't support including their labour practices in China, making you take a faulty product back to an Apple store rather than allowing the place where you bought it to fix it or replace it (illegal under Australian law), using special screws that can only be removed by an Apple service centre etc, etc.

But fuzz is right, it's completely Apple's prerogative to run their business like that if they want and I have a choice whether to participate in it as a consumer or not. They're certainly not going to go broke as a result my personal boycott.

[paredown]

Originally Posted by Gsinill

It's not about the hardware anymore...
IBM says it is 3X more expensive to manage PCs than Macs

Interesting...

[tylercheung]

With Apple, their early oughts, in the early iMac/iBook/first versions of OS X days had been a bit uneven at the time, but I stuck with them because using Windows was so painful.

The last 4 MacBooks (and a desktop iMac) I've had over the years (serial upgrader...) however, have been flawless. OS X is solid and way more intuitive than anything Windows and it just works. The apps available for OS X are just better designed and easier on the eyes. It also runs a lot of scientific software written for linux (via home-brew), which is a plus.

Windows....Windows 10 is still a mess. It works well enough for me but I still wouldn't use it daily. (Believe me, I know...built 2 Windows desktop boxes for certain specific purposes, and there are a couple of Dells that we use at work.)

As for the labor/supply chain - Apple takes a lot of flak, but whether out of the goodness of their hearts or a corporate fear of bad PR, they at least have some auditing and public reporting of their labor/supply chain. I doubt Lenovo, Samsung or Dell (least of all Samsung), without as much public scrutiny on their own practices as Apple has experienced, care even at least 1/10th as much as Apple...

As an aside...I've sworn off separate GPUs for anything mobile...that stuff will overhead and fry itself after a few years. Integrated GPU's in laptops all the way...(or SOC's for phones...), anything GPU heavy belongs on the Desktop.

To each their own, I suppose. For me, Macs all the way. If I were forced to do otherwise, would probably get a decent Dell and run Ubuntu or Elementary OS.

[rkhatibi]

I've had good luck with the Dell Latitude line over the years. Generally I encourage people to buy business/pro lines as the parts are better and warranties longer. Consumer models tend to have more driver problems, weird hardware that falls out of support or updates, and just poor performance.

For the latest round of household updates the Dell 7470 came in at $1100 for 3yr warranty, 6th gen i7, 16GB, 512GB SSD, and retina screen like resolution. I shopped fairly hard for that deal and bought the ram separately though included in the total cost. Only downside is on chip GPU which doesn't have the horsepower of a dedicated graphics card. I don't really game so that was a decent tradeoff for better battery life.

[tylercheung]

Originally Posted by rkhatibi

I've had good luck with the Dell Latitude line over the years. Generally I encourage people to buy business/pro lines as the parts are better and warranties longer. Consumer models tend to have more driver problems, weird hardware that falls out of support or updates, and just poor performance.

For the latest round of household updates the Dell 7470 came in at $1100 for 3yr warranty, 6th gen i7, 16GB, 512GB SSD, and retina screen like resolution. I shopped fairly hard for that deal and bought the ram separately though included in the total cost. Only downside is on chip GPU which doesn't have the horsepower of a dedicated graphics card. I don't really game so that was a decent tradeoff for better battery life.

That's not a downside...by going integrated, you don't have to have as much fans, vents, and bulk for the thermal cooling involved. And if you aren't gaming using power-hungry 3D engines or doing crazy multi-GPU compute tasks like deep learning or inferencing, why carry all that bulk around with you on a machine that you sling over your shoulder all day? (Especially when all that horsepower is available on the cloud these days)