@feld@bikeshed.party If you use Apple devices then you're a software/hardware cuckold. If you buy Apple devices then you're knowingly financing a bad company that does patently evil shit for privatization at the expense of its users and even non-users (e.g. Apple provided legal support+guidance to John Deere re "right to repair" lawsuits for farm equipment).
@adiz@feld I have to admit that this macbook pro I got is, in terms of build quality, absolutely beyond anything else I've ever used. The same was true in 2008-ish when I was using one for Linux but the current one, and the iphone I just got, just make my other stuff feel like flimsy plastic.
@feld@bikeshed.party By what metric are you even making that claim? Chassis? Chips? Overall package? Longevity? What is "hardware" and what makes Apple's hardware the best?
@adiz@feld Apple is absolutely hostile to Linux, the new Sonoma update broke Asahi booting. They won't even do the bare minimum to just leave Linux installs alone. I gave up and got a MBP because my newish System76 Linux laptop was already falling apart.
I prefer the three physical buttons on the trackpads on the Thinkpads but thinkpads have been dropping in quality for years now, I won't question your position on the comparative build qualities but I just don't see it.
@Moon@shitposter.club With the current Macs you cannot run anything outside of Asahi Linux, I believe. And, even doing so is fairly difficult and it's not fully compatible with everything from a hardware standpoint. Regardless, there's really no freedom to install whatever thou wilt, nor the ability to upgrade or change anything.
I have a ThinkPad X13 Yoga Gen 3 as my daily driver and I'd honestly say the build quality is on par with my girlfriend's M1 MacBook Pro. I greatly prefer the overall design and build of the ThinkPad over the MacBook, even. ---Additionally, the typing experience and UI/UX design of the track-pad, north-facing physical mouse keys, and pointing device is phenomenal and my muscle memory is all messed up trying to use the MacBook. AND, the MacBook has that stupid touch-bar across the top which replaced the function keys (thankfully removed from subsequent MacBook models). @feld@bikeshed.party
@Moon@adiz they *were* unfriendly to RTR but they've seen the writing on the wall and probably spent the last several years prepping to flip on this and blow everyone else away, so now they're going full speed ahead on RTR because they know their competitors will be caught off guard
@adiz@feld I would still be using my 2014 W530 if it were not literally falling apart after years of hardcore use and replacing almost every part in it.
@Moon@shitposter.club@feld@bikeshed.party I think it widely depends on what ThinkPad you get. I agree that the direction Lenovo is going isn't good. I dislike what they're doing with the ThinkPads---basically removing, little by little, what makes a ThinkPad a ThinkPad. But, the more pricey models like the X series have become very polished and well-made, like design items, whereas the cheaper models like the E series just seem to get crappier.
@feld@bikeshed.party@Moon@shitposter.club Best phone/laptop chassisCompletely up to personal preference.Best screensNot even true.Best trackpad on laptopsProbably.Best camerasNot even close.Best CPU power and performance in the form factorTrue.
@mischievoustomato@Moon@adiz Before the release of the M-series chips the computers were overpriced because the Intel chips they had were trash -- the only ones available that could fit their thermal requirements as Intel failed their promises to bring them faster and efficient chips.
@feld@bikeshed.party Apple isn't even in the top-three slot as far as cameras. They don't even really fight in that category. They have a really good camera setup that works great for most people, and they're not really trying to rock that boat while other manufacturers are doing way more radical stuff year after year competing specifically against one another in smartphone cameras. @Moon@shitposter.club
@feld@Moon@adiz yeah. if Intel stopped sitting on their hands they could've had Apple as a customer for some generations still. Now the whole CPU for laptops market is incredibly competitive and i'm so hyped. I still wanna stay on x86/linux because i love nixos and intel has some good stuff, but as time passes I can't see myself not eventually getting a macbook
@Moon@mischievoustomato@adiz you can play your entire Steam library with GeForce Now, but it's just fancy low latency remote desktop (though it works incredibly well)
@feld@mischievoustomato@PurpCat@adiz everything on mac was point and click because even back then action games ran like crap. Marathon was the biggest thing ever on Mac and it was because nobody thought it could do anything like that (bungie were almost the only ones to do it)
@feld@bikeshed.party Sony, Samsung, and Google (in recent years) have been making consistent gains to their cameras year over year while Apple will step-climb their development. It wasn't until the iPhone 14 that we really saw any major change in Apple's camera setup, and the iPhone 15 is more or less just an evolution or iteration of that. Before they had the same setup, or approximately the same setup, for like 3--4 releases. I have a Google Pixel 7 Pro and my girlfriend has the new iPhone 15 Pro. We just went on a trip together and my camera was consistently out-shooting hers, despite the smartphone being about a year older. To be fair, a lot of that has to do with computational photography and image processing, which is by-and-large up to the whims and desires of whoever is programming the defaults "from the factory". But, in terms of more objective criteria therein, from telephoto to low-light photography, my Pixel just trounced her iPhone. In normal daylight using the default focal lengths it was pretty 1:1. @Moon@shitposter.club
@adiz@feld I siwtched away from android in part because the pixel's heavy processing destroyed a bunch of valuable shots. I don't know if the 15 pro max is going to have problems yet, too early to say.
@Moon@shitposter.club I've heard people make similar statements about earlier Google Pixel devices. I guess they must've fix that problem or moved away from doing that by the time I moved to the Pixel lineup. Probably going to get a Sony Xperia 1 VI whenever its released. The closest you're going to get to actual camera photography on a smartphone vs. like smartphone photography, if that makes sense. @feld@bikeshed.party
@PurpCat@mischievoustomato@Moon@adiz these takes are dumb because your Mac comes with these little things called Thunderbolt ports that can do 40gbit/s so just plug in your favorite brand SSD or NVME in and go hog wild. Much cheaper than $3k for expanding internal storage -- you could do 4TB for a few hundy bux
@feld@bikeshed.party If you want to compare some raw specs check out the iPhone 15 Pro against the Sony Xperia 1 V and Google Pixel 8 Pro. Raw specs will only get you so far as then a lot will be taking place computationally inside the devices (e.g. how my Google Pixel 7 Pro far outshined my gf's iPhone 15 Pro in low-light (which Apple could probably fix in software updates if they wanted). For a cool video from last year doing a crowdsourced smartphone camera test to pick which model produced images most people liked regardless of specifications, this is neat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQdjmGimh04@Moon@shitposter.club
@feld@mischievoustomato@Moon@adiz Okay, that's nice. Now tell me how you'll carry the MacBook with an external ThunderBolt (tm) SSD plugged in around, and how when the onboard SSD dies you'll replace it.
Oh wait, your Mac just went into DFU mode. Whoopsies.
@PurpCat@mischievoustomato@Moon@adiz I wouldn't be retarded and play games on a laptop screen, I'd have the storage connected to my Thunderbolt dock at home and also my 27 inch monitor and that's what I'd game on. So I wouldn't carry it around. But it's not like it would be very bulky to do so in the first place. See attached photo.
> SSD dies
Apple will replace it because I have AppleCare and even if I didn't have AppleCare I'd pay them to do it anyway
> DFU mode
well if it's DFU mode from a bug not hardware failure you can just use another Mac to revive it. Don't want to wait for an appointment with Apple for repair? It's easy:
1. walk into apple store 2. buy laptop 3. take home 4. use laptop with thunderbolt cable to recover laptop stuck in DFU mode 5. walk back to apple store and hand them the laptop you bought and ask for a refund which they will always give you with ZERO questions asked.
I've done this several times before. Broken laptop for work but Apple needs me to mail it in to a repair center? Go buy a new one and return it as soon as your repaired device is back.
The people begging for new Refurbished options will thank you and it's a nice way to fuck Apple over because they lose money on that
@feld@bikeshed.party I popped in an amazing 1 TB SK Hynix P41 SSD for $92. It was fast and easy to do, and if it breaks I can just replace it without issue. You cannot replace or upgrade the storage on a Mac, and if you want 1 TB of storage it's a $200 up-charge across the board. If you want 2 TB of storage it's a $600 premium across the board (a 2 TB SK Hynix P41 retails at $157 for reference). @PurpCat@clubcyberia.co@mischievoustomato@5dollah.click@Moon@shitposter.club
@adiz@feld@Moon Apple makes the “best” tech stuff for people who don’t care about what the “best” really means. It’s a consistent, reliable, gatekept, professional product and people who have lives and careers that use up their free time and energy like that combination.
You can do better than them, true, but rarely in such a way that doesn’t demand more of your time and energy. For tech nerds and IT guys this is a non-issue because they’re doing that stuff anyway, but you won’t sell a CEO juggling the livelihoods of 25 people that he needs to onboard his family/work to a dozen disparate apps to do the same base functions of apple’s OEM crap.
They’re the ‘best’ computers for people who hate wasting time thinking about computers.
@feld@mischievoustomato@Moon@adiz So you're literally piping data over the internet and trying to tell me it's like having the same thing as local storage.
@feld@PurpCat@Moon@adiz Apple also used a kind of M.2 SSD (with a custom connector) for one Macbook Pro (Mid 2015) (The one I'm currently using) There's even an adaptor to connect a normal M.2 to that slot. :blobcat3c:
Statistically even the most scumbag company has to do something that isn't utterly bad, evil or retarded at some point, Facebook did the same with zstd (actually, just one guy that happened to be employed by FB at the time, still, I guess FB told him to do it).
@SAUNDERS@adiz@Moon@feld@PurpCat > In practice everything is just more vendor lock-in. vendor lock in is something that naturally happens as you build stuff to work better with your ecosystem
@Moon@feld@adiz >The same was true in 2008-ish when I was using one for Linux but the current one I was a happy 2008 non-unibody MacBook owner back in 2009-2010, after which I traded it for a mate's T60 (type 2008) plus some cash. Granted, not an MBP, but the T60 became one of my favourite computers of all time, while the 2008 MacBook wasn't missed *too* much. Finding out many years later that the glowing red 3.5mm jack was actually miniTOSlink compatible was a nostalgic surprise, I'm a bit sad my M1 Air has no such thing.
With that out of the way, you can pry my M1 Air from my cold, dead hands. No love for modern Lenovo laptops. It was a long, gradual decline and everyone has their own cutoff on the last "good" one, which tends to be the one they acquired in some used bargain at a formative stage of their life.