<story><title>Ask HN: MacBooks seems to be the only viable option these days</title><text>I&amp;#x27;ve used ThinkPads all the way from the IBM days and those good old solid Dell computers too.&lt;p&gt;Recently, I decided it was time for an update. I use Linux on the often so it was important for me to purchase a laptop that was compatible.&lt;p&gt;I bought 2 laptops, all of which I had to return in the last 2 months.&lt;p&gt;1. Dell XPS: I spent over 20+ hours with their support going back and forth. I also had a tech come to my house to replace my motherboard before I gave up and demanded a return&lt;p&gt;2. Lenovo Carbon X1: The laptop came with a faulty keyboard so I just returned it because I didn&amp;#x27;t want to wait 30 days for a mail-in repair or drive 2 hours to go to a &amp;quot;local&amp;quot; repair shop. They also made me order the laptop 3 times because their system kept cancelling it for whatever reason so it took an insane amount of time to just purchase the laptop (I spent ~6 hours to just purchase the laptop)&lt;p&gt;Maybe I&amp;#x27;m just unlucky but the time I spent and energy I spent to just purchase these laptops shows you why people buy from Apple instead. I strongly dislike MacOS because they force the &amp;quot;apple way&amp;quot; of doing things. But it seems to be the only option these days to buy a computer with ease and get a computer &amp;quot;that just works&amp;quot;. My Macbook was more expensive but the time I saved outweighs the price imo.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>uniqueuid</author><text>All true, but why is the &lt;i&gt;culture&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;aesthetic&lt;/i&gt; of computers inherently trashy?&lt;p&gt;Look at all the fields where superior quality is a completely natural criterion (whether it exists may be another question): Watches, cars, pens, paper notebooks, furniture, fashion, jewellery, architecture, bikes, coffee machines ...&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s more - if you look at the visual representations of computers - i.e. marketing material, art, illustrations, unix porn etc - all that highly values aesthetics and beauty. But the actual products are a disgrace to all of that!</text></item><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>Because every other computer manufacturer realized they can save on the BOM cost by shoving the whole computer under plastic gingerbread. That weight distribution? It&amp;#x27;d cost way too much to redesign the product correctly. Flickering redraws? We don&amp;#x27;t make the OS, we just sell Microsoft&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;Occasionally you &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; see PC OEMs that try for taste in the Windows ecosystem. Sony did that with their VAIO laptops, with the somewhat-inflated price tag to match. In fact, it impressed Jobs so much he literally just offered them an OSX license (which they didn&amp;#x27;t bite on).</text></item><item><author>uniqueuid</author><text>I may be an outlier, but for me, the problem with non-mac machines is that they seem just careless.&lt;p&gt;Steve jobs famously said &amp;quot;The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.&amp;quot;, and this seems true to me for almost all hardware manufacturers, and to a larger degree still for software.&lt;p&gt;Why does nobody care about creaking plastic? About sticky-feeling texture? About uneven weight distribution? About the sound that materials make when handling them? About flickering in software? About inconsistent spacing? About janky color combinations?&lt;p&gt;There has been amazing workmanship for thousands of years. The Minoan culture made golden jewellery out of sub-milimeter spheres. Why should we now tolerate the insult that consumer computers are?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lr</author><text>I think you just answered the question: All of the categories you note have both high-end and, sadly, mostly low-end options. What is surprising is that, in the world of computing, there is very little at the high end (Apple -- from going by this original thread), and almost all of it is at the low end. I guess some company could make an amazing PC that ran Windows, but the, you&amp;#x27;d have an amazing piece of hardware that... ran Windows.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: MacBooks seems to be the only viable option these days</title><text>I&amp;#x27;ve used ThinkPads all the way from the IBM days and those good old solid Dell computers too.&lt;p&gt;Recently, I decided it was time for an update. I use Linux on the often so it was important for me to purchase a laptop that was compatible.&lt;p&gt;I bought 2 laptops, all of which I had to return in the last 2 months.&lt;p&gt;1. Dell XPS: I spent over 20+ hours with their support going back and forth. I also had a tech come to my house to replace my motherboard before I gave up and demanded a return&lt;p&gt;2. Lenovo Carbon X1: The laptop came with a faulty keyboard so I just returned it because I didn&amp;#x27;t want to wait 30 days for a mail-in repair or drive 2 hours to go to a &amp;quot;local&amp;quot; repair shop. They also made me order the laptop 3 times because their system kept cancelling it for whatever reason so it took an insane amount of time to just purchase the laptop (I spent ~6 hours to just purchase the laptop)&lt;p&gt;Maybe I&amp;#x27;m just unlucky but the time I spent and energy I spent to just purchase these laptops shows you why people buy from Apple instead. I strongly dislike MacOS because they force the &amp;quot;apple way&amp;quot; of doing things. But it seems to be the only option these days to buy a computer with ease and get a computer &amp;quot;that just works&amp;quot;. My Macbook was more expensive but the time I saved outweighs the price imo.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>uniqueuid</author><text>All true, but why is the &lt;i&gt;culture&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;aesthetic&lt;/i&gt; of computers inherently trashy?&lt;p&gt;Look at all the fields where superior quality is a completely natural criterion (whether it exists may be another question): Watches, cars, pens, paper notebooks, furniture, fashion, jewellery, architecture, bikes, coffee machines ...&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s more - if you look at the visual representations of computers - i.e. marketing material, art, illustrations, unix porn etc - all that highly values aesthetics and beauty. But the actual products are a disgrace to all of that!</text></item><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>Because every other computer manufacturer realized they can save on the BOM cost by shoving the whole computer under plastic gingerbread. That weight distribution? It&amp;#x27;d cost way too much to redesign the product correctly. Flickering redraws? We don&amp;#x27;t make the OS, we just sell Microsoft&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;Occasionally you &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; see PC OEMs that try for taste in the Windows ecosystem. Sony did that with their VAIO laptops, with the somewhat-inflated price tag to match. In fact, it impressed Jobs so much he literally just offered them an OSX license (which they didn&amp;#x27;t bite on).</text></item><item><author>uniqueuid</author><text>I may be an outlier, but for me, the problem with non-mac machines is that they seem just careless.&lt;p&gt;Steve jobs famously said &amp;quot;The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.&amp;quot;, and this seems true to me for almost all hardware manufacturers, and to a larger degree still for software.&lt;p&gt;Why does nobody care about creaking plastic? About sticky-feeling texture? About uneven weight distribution? About the sound that materials make when handling them? About flickering in software? About inconsistent spacing? About janky color combinations?&lt;p&gt;There has been amazing workmanship for thousands of years. The Minoan culture made golden jewellery out of sub-milimeter spheres. Why should we now tolerate the insult that consumer computers are?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chaostheory</author><text>&amp;gt; All true, but why is the culture and aesthetic of computers inherently trashy?&lt;p&gt;Because it needs to be affordable to the masses as a whole, and not just the upper middle class and up.</text></comment>