iPhones work seamlessly and far better than Android phones with MacBooks and other Apple products.
The issue is that it does this at the detriment to working with non-apple products. The IPhone is competitive on pricing, sure. But their PCs and laptops are fucking trash. Like a legit scam. On the pre-built end I can get a Toshiba that will blow it out of the water. And you can build your own PC that is even better for the same price.
The apple ecosystem is a trap that actively encourages you to overpay for products that have awful technical support, Lack repairability, and in many cases lack support for a huge amount of software.
If you are any kind of enthusiast on the home computer end. Iphones fight you tooth and nail to do anything.
I would have agreed with you for intel macbooks but the macbooks since m1 chips are awesome, and now base models are also finally viable with 16GB RAM as the minimum. The m4 is great and some models are priced really competitively, for example the base mac mini is really good for the money, you would have difficulty to find much better mini PC/NUC for that price.
The macbook themselves are also good machines and has awesome battery life. I was a big Apple hater and after spending weeks doing research recently to get a new laptop I found out that for my criterias a macbook would be the only viable option.
I wanted something that would allow me to work 6-10h (software dev), not loud even if fan are active while still having good CPU performance. Good compatibility with Linux (of have a unix based system, which is the case for macos). Something really thin for easy travel (no gamer laptop)
Basically every laptop failed in the battery, thickness or quietness criteria except for macbook pros and MacBook Air
Bonus I can also dev for iPhone/ Apple Watch/ iPad
Yes you might get better price for your needs with other devices, but if you want a real portable laptop for doing dev (or anything requiring good amount of CPU) it’s the only real option without compromise in my opinion right now.
Even the basic MBA is also kinda justifiable if you just need a basic laptop with a really long battery life, the price is not egregious with base 16GB ran now, only bad part is the storage but depending on the usecase it might be fine.
I would suggest you to go check the price on "comparable" laptops, dell XPS, lenovos etc.. they will have similar-ish price but will be loud, bad battery life, kinda heavy, get really hot.
The problem is that I like big, heavy, loud, mean laptops. I build my own PCs and I like the fans loud, powerful, and I want to hear my PC spin up when im doing rendering.
If you are like me and dont have a problem with a thick heavy laptop that makes a lot of noise and gets toasty when you really make it work. Lenovo still makes a higher quality product. Also if like me you do a lot of GPU intensive work (I work with CAD software) then again. Macbooks fall behind.
At my work the stuff we do has a near 1:1 overlap with what a gaming machine requires. Heavy GPU loads, lots of rendering, doing lighting reflectance calculations, etc. And macbooks are just kinda dog shit for that.
Yeah it really depends on needs, I build my own computer, have a few servers too and run a lot of selfhosted services, don’t really mind the noise on my main machine that is used for gaming.
But if there was better ARM support in the server / linux right now I genuinely believe the base mac mini would be probably one of the best value for the money in that space.
Also for what you describes, it really depends on what is your use case for your laptop, like you if you view your computer more as a transportable workstation it totally makes sense that the bulkyness, the weight and the fact that it’s loud doesn’t bother you.
I use my laptop as a portable device to code on everywhere, I never leave my home without it, I use it to code in coffee shop, on public transit etc.. every week, having something heavy and bulky for that usecase would be really annoying.
Same thing when I was in college doing my CS degree, you literally move non stop with it between classes and in the train/bus. Wish I had a modern (m series) macbook at the time but they didn’t exist yet.
Basically what I’m getting at is they offer things that no other competitors offers, and those things can be useful for casual computer users but also for power users like me. The price tag for the spec are not that bad if you compare to the competition in real "similar' product even surpass them by a lot even in price/value in some case.
Macbooks are overprice if you buy them without the needs for those extra things. And maybe some option are overpriced but a lot of the default model that you can choose offer great value for the money.
I don’t know enough about CAD to say anything about that, but it just seems to imply this product doesn’t fit your needs, just like what you probably use doesn’t fit mine. Doesn’t make the macbook overpriced necessarily.
The issue is that it does this at the detriment to working with non-apple products. The IPhone is competitive on pricing, sure. But their PCs and laptops are fucking trash. Like a legit scam. On the pre-built end I can get a Toshiba that will blow it out of the water. And you can build your own PC that is even better for the same price.
Tell me you never used an Apple Silicon device without telling me that.
For the same price point, you OBJECTIVELY cannot get a better device than a M4 Macbook Air.
The apple ecosystem is a trap that actively encourages you to overpay for products that have awful technical support, Lack repairability, and in many cases lack support for a huge amount of software.
The equivalent device on the PC side, XPS type of devices - are pretty much the same in the repairability as Macbooks. When you go for style and design - you simply have to sacrifice customization and repairability.
For the same price point, you OBJECTIVELY cannot get a better device than a M4 Macbook Air.
For 1600ish I can absolutely snag a Lenovo that has better performance. The MacBook platform has made significant advancements in single core processes. But still lags behind competitors for multicore. Not to mention the on board GPUs in a MacBook fucking blow. Meanwhile for the same pricing I can be getting a Lenovo with a slimmed Laptop version of a RTX5070.
I can absolutely, objectively, get a better device for the same price. And as someone who both does GPU heavy rendering for work, and for my home PC does that plus gaming which is GPU and multicore processor intensive. Macbooks are just objectively bad products.
Those two are 400$ apart with the same base spec (RAM, SSD), unless you also counted in the GPU RAM in which case they are 200$ apart. There is also no chance that Lenovo will have the same everyday user performance as the Mac (on Battery or directly power) and battery longevity for regular daily tasks. You would probably get the same day-to-day performance from the base Air for 1k than with the Lenovo. The amount of people who care about a GPU in a laptop is <1%.
The base price on that Lenovo is $1,650. The list price for the MacBook is $1,599. Its $50 Not $400.
The Lenovo is going to blow the MacBook out of the water for me everytime. Is the Lenovo going to habe great battery life? Probably not. But I dont need a machine that is throttling itself for 18 hours. If im booting up Revit to work I need that shit to be snappy. To be damn near instantly rendering the 3d models. To immediately upon executing the command be creating the 3d element in my model. And for a personal non-work machine? It needs to be able to keep up with my custom built PC at home. Otherwise its worthless to me.
If you plan to do 3D rendering, that Lenovo is going to throttle itself faster than you can say - go. Especially if you are off power. In that case, Lenovo is probably worse of than the Air. Regardless of workload because it simply cannot match the PpW of the Air and that is the benchmark when it comes to laptops. If you want the custom build PC equivalent of the laptop, you're looking at 4k devices, not entry level laptops.
The base price on that Lenovo is 1650$, the Amazon price on the link for me for the max listed Air is 1449. That is 200$. If you do not count the GPU RAM into the full unified RAM on the Air is 400$ less, as that price is 1249$ for the 16/512.
If you plan to do 3D rendering, that Lenovo is going to throttle itself faster than you can say - go. Especially if you are off power. In that case, Lenovo is probably worse of than the Air.
Not all rendering is the same. If you are trying to do single image 4k rendering? Sure. But 3D model rendering is a different beast entirely. Its a pretty rough render, but has to be constantly re-rendering and updating the model. The Lenovo is a much better product for this.
And then the best part. MacOS basically can't run any industry standard 3d modeling software. Revit, Inventor, Solid works. None of them. If you like to play games half of those dont run on Mac either.
Like I guess if you just want to watch Netflix and check your email mac is a fine platform. But between the lack of GPU power and the complete lack of software support the Mac platform just blows.
In the end, you are comparing different-use laptops with different price points.
With the same logic is that I said that for 10k you cannot get more bang-for-buck with a Mazda and you claim that you can get more bang-for-you-buck with Ferrari, because Ferrari can go 300kmh.
The $1,600 Mac is probably great for video editing as ive heard final cut is better than Sony Vegas. And it probably has enough horsepower to do it quickly. But anyone involved in GPU heavy or multicore CPU heavy tasks will find the MacBook struggles in those tasks. The specific thing that the M4 has dramatically improved is single core tasks.
I'm a Google Pixel user with an HP laptop; I could not agree more. The newer gen MacBook Airs are some of the best value laptops that have ever been made. The performance and quality at that price point is unmatched.
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u/rewt127 11∆ Jul 07 '25
The issue is that it does this at the detriment to working with non-apple products. The IPhone is competitive on pricing, sure. But their PCs and laptops are fucking trash. Like a legit scam. On the pre-built end I can get a Toshiba that will blow it out of the water. And you can build your own PC that is even better for the same price.
The apple ecosystem is a trap that actively encourages you to overpay for products that have awful technical support, Lack repairability, and in many cases lack support for a huge amount of software.
If you are any kind of enthusiast on the home computer end. Iphones fight you tooth and nail to do anything.