I agree the hardware upgrades are obscenely expensive, but the base model pro's are hard to beat for the price, depending on what you are looking for.

[–] PraiseTheSoup@lemm.ee 5 points 7 months ago (5 children)

"hard to beat for the price" hahaha

[–] qwertyqwertyqwerty@lemmy.one 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I spent a little bit of time looking for true alternatives to a MacBook that would fit my needs, but there really aren't any. Once you check out laptops with 16+ hour of battery life, then add a bright, HDR, color-accurate display, then add the performance of the M-series chips (which are not THE best, but certainly close to the best options from AMD and Intel), and decent speakers, there really isn't anything to compete.

A base 14" M3 Pro is around $1750, which isn't that far out of line for high-performing laptops in general. If someone needs something cheaper, they can get a used 14" M1 Pro for around $900-$1k. Also, if you're someone that already owns an iPhone, it's kind of hard to even see why you would go with something else unless you are required to use Windows applications or want to play a bunch of AAA games.

I'm beginning to think that people that diss MacBooks are just people that never owned them.

For people that are really struggling financially, but still want the above features, the 2020 13" M1 Air w/16GB RAM and 256GB storage can be found for about $500.

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Mine was free!

I was an Apple employee, though... And they'd bin it and give me a new one every 24 months because upgrading's not an option. Wouldn't even wipe them and hand them/sell them to employees.

All the actual workhorse machines were Lenovo. If you worked with external clients, you'd get a Surface Pro so they didn't have to work around your incompatibilities with their software, systems, and enterprise environments.

Also used to use an old Pentium 4 we found as a team server because multi-threading and 64-bit wasn't available for some MS Enterprise applications in macOS then, but 365 and applications like Power BI is obviously what Apple runs on. This ancient box had a 4:3 monitor and an IBM logo on it, so it was made some time before 2005. But 64-bit CPU and no macOS, so it crunched calculations faster than the 6-core i7 in the MBPs. The day we could finally use all cores and 64-bit on the macOS systems was amazing, but we still kept the old IBM box around to monitor and log connections. I like to think my old friend is still kicking on...

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 months ago

Find another well build machine in a similar form factor that performs similarly, and gets even comparable battery life. Raw benchmarking performance isn’t the only value to a laptop.

The dell xps 13+ maybe? But that’s 13th Gen. intel and battery life is pretty awful.

[–] qwertyqwertyqwerty@lemmy.one 0 points 7 months ago