The M1/M2 Macbooks are a total game-changer. You made your switch in the Intel era. I certainly get that because it was the dark days of the pointless Touch Bar and the awful butterfly keyboard.
But now an M2 Macbook Air for $1500-2000 (depending on options) is hard to beat.
The only complaint seems to be in heat distribution. Some people use a cheap heat spreader on their desk. Apple definitely chose a stylish package over optimal thermal design. It's an issue but not a major issue.
EDIT: it's a sad day on HN when you mention how M1/M2 MBs are a big step up from the Intel MBs to a comment about laptop recommendations and you get a bunch of commentless downvotes. WTaF?
The thread is about having terrible support from Apple, and the comment you replied to was about getting away from lock-in, but you reply that the more efficient Apple Silicon is a "game-changer." It doesn't change any of the above deal breakers, so your comment comes off as tone deaf.
> the comment you replied to was about getting away from lock-in
The comment was about them giving up on Apple because "I can't see the value in it anymore", and he pointed out how the value proposition changed with the non-intel macs
Exactly which deal breakers do you mean? it literally says "otherwise my experience with them has been satisfactory" ?
Yes, for me it was the poor value proposition that made me switch. I do prefer to not be locked-in to their ecosystem as well, but I will admit that my overall experience with Apple is positive (phone/laptop/etc.).
OP seems to have a poor experience with them and is switching for that reason.
The comment I replied to was about bad experiences with Intel MBPs. Personally, I take no position on whether someone should or shouldn't use a Macbook. I'm not invested in that outcome. Use what you want.
But, at the same time, the particular shortcomings of Intel silicon MBPs is now out-of-date and it seems worth mentioning that.
>EDIT: it's a sad day on HN when you mention how M1/M2 MBs are a big step up from the Intel MBs to a comment about laptop recommendations and you get a bunch of commentless downvotes. WTaF?
>to a comment about laptop recommendations
The thread's title is "Is there a developer laptop that does not suck and is not a Mac in 2022?"
I haven't used the new generation of MacBooks yet, but I might request one from my employer just to get a feel for it.
The Apple experience is more polished for sure, but after Linux, I doubt I will accept any form of proprietary OS/hardware for my personal computer ever again.
You can run Linux on Mac hardware. Linus Torvalds seems to have been doing this for the last decade.
Personally I find Linux desktop environments to be beyond awful with zero hope for salvation but to each their own. I certainly recognize a lot of the shortcomings of OSX but, more than anything, I don't want something I have to endlessly tinker with to get working (and keep working). For me, out of the box experience is paramount.
I think the downvotes are coming from calling it a “game changer”. How has the game actually has changed? What does the new AS MacBook enable that the other ones don’t, or other laptops don’t for that matter?
We live in an age of fast performance and great battery life on most any laptop. Having faster performance and better battery life isn’t changing the game —- that’s how the game has been played as long as laptops have been a consumer product category. If Apple’s support is the same, then the OP’s problem isn’t fixed. Their problem wasn’t performance and battery life.
P.S. I’m speaking as someone who owns both a MacBook Pro and a surface laptop, so I’m not exactly biased against MacBooks.
Battery life for one [1]. Many compare the Dell XPS 13/15 to the MBA/MBP and the XPS has realistically less than half the battery life [2] (the 5.5-7 hours being listed as "feasible" there also requires turning down the display brightness a lot).
The 2011 Macbook Air was heads and shoulders above anything else at the time for that combination of size, cost, power and battery life. Literally nothing else could compete on all of these factors. I mean Linus Torvalds used one [3] (and still does [4]).
On a pure hardware front, the M1/M2 Macbooks are at a similar point where nothing else can compete with that combination of price, power, battery life and form factor, to the point where people will run Linux or Windows on them. You can say it's not for you. You can also say you don't like OSX. That's all fine.
But anti-tribalism is just another form of tribalism. Being irrationally anti-Mac is no better than being irrationally pro-Mac. I'd argue it's worse because the anti-Mac tribalists think they're better than the pro-Mac tribalists.
> On a pure hardware front, the M1/M2 Macbooks are at a similar point where nothing else can compete with that combination of price, power, battery life and form factor
Like I said, the performance and battery improvements are marginal; it's the same game played a little better, not a changed game. The AS processor doesn’t enable completely new or novel ways of using the device, and in fact the form factor is still limited compared to competing options. The reason I use my Surface Laptop over my Macbook are old reasons -- touch screen support, pen support, and windows software compatibility. If my Macbook supported all of that, then that would be a game changer. But that's not what they did; they improved on some performance and some battery life, which as I said is a story as old as computing. It's not enough for me to consider my new Macbook as a "game changer" if the added benefits won't even cause me to pick it up over an alternative.
I think most tech people went from considering intel-based macbooks as a splurge, to the single best value proposition for consumer laptops.
Before there were many tradeoffs for choosing a macbook, most of them around performance/cost, but all of those are gone when the base $999 macbook air beats way more expensive computers.
I'd recommend this machines to literally everyone that needs a laptop, which is something I can't say for the rest of Apple products or any other piece of tech for that matter
> M1/M2 MBs are a big step up from the Intel MBs to a comment about laptop recommendations and you get a bunch of commentless downvotes.
I don't get it, either. What Apple did with the M1 is nothing short of incredible. I bought a stock M1 Air (as in, 8 GB RAM model, since that's what stores carry) as my personal laptop a few months after launch, and could not be happier. The _only_ time I've experienced any issues was in running Minikube, and that was solved by installing Docker Desktop - on Intel, I use hyperkit to avoid that. I think hyperkit supports M1s now anyway.
Also, no heat issues. And I don't ever think I've heard the fan spin up on the M1 MBP, and I've hardly been conservative with loads on it. They're great laptops.
But now an M2 Macbook Air for $1500-2000 (depending on options) is hard to beat.
The only complaint seems to be in heat distribution. Some people use a cheap heat spreader on their desk. Apple definitely chose a stylish package over optimal thermal design. It's an issue but not a major issue.
EDIT: it's a sad day on HN when you mention how M1/M2 MBs are a big step up from the Intel MBs to a comment about laptop recommendations and you get a bunch of commentless downvotes. WTaF?