Make me not buy a Mac Book Pro

Hardware Hub Laptops & Netbooks
1

Hey there!

I am seriously considering dropping ~1.5k on a MBP 13".

Now, I have never owned a Mac and the only experience I have with them is the few cases I HAVE to use the universities Macs instead of using my laptop for stuff like printing.

Now, I’m not all that much into Mac or anything but… I have had nothing but trouble with Windows Laptops. As I use my laptop solely for work, I want something I can turn on and rely on it working.

Atm I am using a Sony VAIO Pro 13. Dual Booting Arch Linux and Win 8.1. Now, the bluetooth is dead, for some odd reason, and Sony is giving me a hard time about RMA (you have to do Factory reset first!!! → Which I can’t as I formatted the whole laptop when Installing arch and windows.] and so on and so forth, now I could send it in but risk like 200$ for “wrongly RMAing” which surely isn’t the case but ya…

Now I have considered the MBP. The programs I use daily are M$ Office, Gimp, Axuse, SPSS, R, Sublime-Text and google docs, so nothing too fancy and they’d all run on mac aswell.

My problem with WIndows laptops is that either they’ve got shitty specs (like the lenovos appart from the x2 carbon but that’s somewhat over my budget at 2.5k) or are simply bad specs and poo poo all together, or rather not reliable.

I am seriously considering buying an MPB just to have this peace of mind of walking into a presentation and have my laptop work. Linux is way too unreliable (had to reinstall linux on 2/3 PCs after the kernel update yesterday) and Windows is not reliable at all I found.

Do you have any consideration you’d share with me to keep me from buying a MBP (nice screen, 8gb ram, 256gb pcie ssd with bootcamp)? Like I used to be really against buying apple stuff appart from iPods, but at the moment, I find them to be the only reliable laptops.

I am looking for → Nice screens, somewhat decent CPU (dual core with HT will do), RELIABLE and battery life at 8h+

thanks guys :slight_smile:

2 Likes
2

Macs don't necessarily just work. My dad uses a Mac Pro 2013 and because Office for Mac is so poorly coded he has to restart 1-2 times a day. Now this is a software issue, but he's also had trouble with getting things like Handoff to work because they'd pushed a buggy OSX update for the Mac Pro while everything else was fine or something like that.

If I were you I'd take a look at the Razer Blade 14 2015.

3

WOOOOoooOOOOooo!!! This is your future self... Don't buy a Mac... WoooOOOOoo...

TBH, if you're looking for good battery life and a nice screen, a mac will do just fine.

There is this XPS 13 which I just configured for $1099. http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd?oc=dncwt5130s&variant=8:256SSD&model_id=xps-13-9343-laptop#overrides=dncwt5130s:8~256SSD

  • i5-5200U
  • 8GB RAM
  • 256GB SSD
  • 1080p matte IPS screen
  • Battery gets about 10 hours of browsing (According to Notebookcheck's Review)
3 Likes
4

Pretty much, the only thing I can fault about my Mac is software.

As a piece of hardware, it is great! Its well constructed has a gorgeous screen, excellent battery life and one of the better laptop keyboards I have used.
On my MacBook Pro (mid 2014 - base model) I can get above 4 hours battery life, with 2 Virtual machines open and a IDE (Netbeans) and several tabs in safari open (usually with a vid playing) and I don't have to keep the screen backlight really low!
With just casual use (internet browsing and light document editing) I have had 12 Hours+ out of it.

As for software.... obviously there are somethings that don't work. However from your list my only concern is MS Office. As many have pointed out, in short "Tis Shit!". Its not as dull featured as its Windows counterpart and can be a bit crappy. However Pages is a really good substitute and I don't find myself using office anymore. Numbers is a little poor in comparison to excel, but keynote is pretty good as well.

The thing that made be buy a Mac was (other than requiring a new laptop) the lifespan of them. A friend of mine has a Macbook Air (one of the first ones from 2009) and even on Yosemite, it is excellent and is only now starting to show its age.

Contrary to all of what I have just said, definitely look into some other options, notably the Dell XPS line.

5

Good thing your friend didn't get a "unibody" 15" Macbook Pro in 2009. That piece of Apple design perfection was so great (and "unibody"), it was made up of two parts glued with adhesive that incidentally had a fan exhaust hot air from the machine directly into it, crapping up many of them.
Don't be so hasty to praise their hardware for "quality". Every year some Apple hardware shows up with a design flaw that forces many people to go repair their shit for hundreds of bucks, or worse yet deal with Apple sponsored repair shops that will rather makes you pay $600 for the replacement of a whole screen for the sake of a $200 problem that you could solve at a private repair shop for that much.

I'd rather give OP the advice to go to private repair shops if his Apple product ever breaks, and to never expect his laptop back if it is stolen because Apple actually refuses to cooperate with police and the justice system on providing info on owners of found laptops, because they want you to buy new ones.

6

Macs don't just work all the time, they can have just as many problems as a windows or linux or bsd laptop especially if you are using office with it.

A thinkpad or dell lattitude are generally really well built and reliable, they come in different battery life depending on the model. If you want to get a mac theres not much anyone can do to stop you, but I would look at those before I got one.

7

T430 or 430s Thinkpad that comes with the 1600x900 panel + a big samsung 850 ssd. Cant beat the toughness of the T series, really good keyboard, never any issues with whatever distro of linux you throw at em, 6 cell battery probably lasts me a good 5 hrs. I also use the desktop dock as well.
The MBP's are nice, i personally dont like the Mac os and I'd run probably zorin os on it but each to their own.

8
  1. There's typically no need to update Kernels.
  2. Get a more reliable or user-friendly distribution than Arch.

If you've had ipods and iphones and you haven't found itunes and the itunes store to be annoying and frustrating, then maybe a mac is a good fit for you.

9

The only reason that matters: you'll slowly turn into a full blown hipster, it will start small with organic foods and before you know it you'll be wearing weird clothes petting a Himalayan cat holding the keys to a brand new Prius. PSA: FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS BUY MAC.

2 Likes
10

Sounds like you've already made your decision. What is really important is your use-case scenario. You mentioned all the programs you use are compatible on a mac, but are you certain they will run identically or will compromises have to be made? Generally speaking macs are pretty good compared to their windows counterparts (use-case scenario largely dependent.) The genius bar is also a nice value add.

11

If it was me looking for a laptop, which I am lol, I'd be going for this Asus variant: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/ASUS-Zenbook-UX303LA-US51T-Signature-Edition-Laptop/productID.313371600

Its a broadwell I5, 8gb's of ram, a 256gb ssd, and a 3k display. Pretty amazing at under $1k if you ask me.

12

It is really not worth the money. I think the 1.5k would be much better spent on a ASUS, Dell or A Lenovo thinkpad. Equally good quality and probably you can get better specs for the same money plus the MS Office port for MAC OS sucks big time cause microsoft. I would suggest to use a Virtual Windows machine for Office if you buy the mac.

I would also boot up Linux for most of the applications you are talking about. If you use out-of-the box friendly distros (like Mint or Ubuntu) there is almost no setting up needed to be done. A Kernel update is not a typical update you do on the system. You always update at your own risk if the new Kernel is not tested by the Devs. And usually most distros keep the old Kernel (before the update) intact. If there is an issue with the new update you did not have to re-install the whole OS. You just boot up with the old Kernel from Grub. If a Kernel thing is your only reason for unreliability then its really not an issue.

13

Dude feel free to just do whatever you want, but I think you know that generally speaking the community here is not particularly in favour of apple, their 'walled garden', and the large premiums you have to pay for an apple sticker.

And no I don't think you can expect better support from apple, unless perhaps you pay for their 'premium support', which is over and above the premium you are already paying for the privilege of the apple brand. By the time you spend that much money, it probably isn't worth the premium for the percieved better reliability.

Infact I suspect that a large part of the reason why you see so many old apple products floating around is not because of their 'excellent reliability' but because they are so damned expensive and the type of people who buy an apple product in general are not power users, they never need to upgrade...

If you don't need the performance just geting a netbook/chromebook, or some cheap portable or transforming device will probably be a pretty good option. You save some money, and it is not a pain in the asse to take around with you. :p

14

Good Morning ^^

Thanks for your input!

As I said, I am really not too fond of Apple in general (apart from my iPod Classic, which is awesome and even works in my new Volvo :D ). And one thing really bothering me about the idea fof buying a Mac, is the walled garden, which has been mentioned a few time in the posts above.
I really love customizing things on my computers and well a mac just won't let me do that, that's why I am somewhat hesitant.

My problems with windows laptops is that they don't seem very well thought out. There's always that one part not really working or horribly designed (for example the wifi for my vaio pro).

Don't get me wrong, I'd never buy a Mac for home use, perfectly happy with my Win8 / Arch Dual Boot at home. Just the fact that i can fix stuff at home if something doesn't work makes it perfectly usable. And I'm a tinkerer, so a Mac at home would make me really sad ;) But as I said, my laptop servers no other purpose than being a working utility so at the end of the day it doesn't matter what OS I use my stuff on as long as it works reliably and all my programs work. (SPSS doesn't work on anything but Red Hat, and they don't have any new versions for Linux it seems, Axure is M$ and OS X only and Office 2013 won't work on Linux at all appart from the online version, which depends on an internet connection whcih I don't always have :/ ]

About getting a more reliable Distro than Arch -> I found Arch to be one of the most reliable and user friendly (once installed). Find something on the AUR and install it. Ubuntu really doesn't work for me, starting with advertisment integration to messing up stuff on my PC when I tried 15.04 a few days ago (hardware initialization would take like 5mins before posting when ubuntu was installed).

Ah well, I guess I'ma stick around with this laptop and see how hard it'll break my balls. The laptop I'd really want is the new Lenovo Carbon, but starting at like 2.2k is way over my budget. And I do want at least 1080p on the screen and ips / pls or something that doesn't color shift when chaning the angle. I don't care if the laptop is 1800p 1880p 1600p or w/e 1080p is fine for 13".

But thanks guys ^^

Oh and btw, I know this community is not that mac friendly, that's why I posted it here ;)

15

Yeah IPS/PLS and 1080p is going to cost you, IDK why (well I do, it is product segregation, but still market forces should push that into mainstream, guess they don't compete), although at smaller resoloutions might not be that bad. Particularly if all you do is word processing at uni or something.

Have seen some really nice ultra-portables, I mean they suffer from bad screens (low res, and bad colour reproduction), but still.. Asus has some nice examples... And they look real premium with their metal tops.

I wish the windows tablets (other than surface) had proper cases with keyboards.. I really like them, and some of them have nice screens like the same one used in the Ipads

I think in general I agree most laptops seem poorly designed, with acer being a big offender. What I cant understand is why no one has taken these cheap low-powered AMD APUs (which have great graphics performance for their price tier), put it onto a MOBO with a bit of ram and flash storage (which are cheap), and take some of these savings and spend the lionshare of the money on a decent panel/case and battery. You would get a very cheap, portable device with a great battery and screen, that would be perfect for 99% of people and compete with the very expensive intel-based ultra-portables....

Apple just did that, but they used an expensive intel processor... I am sure AMD could make some frankesntein ARM/X86 monster that integrates a cellular radio. Theoretically they could use HBM too, and then all you have is a CPU, some flash, and an aerial... But why bother when everyone just uses intel because....

1 Like
16

I build my own dekstops but I've always used Mac laptops so I might be biased. I made the comparison between what was out there back when the first unibody macbook came out and it just made sense. All the non-mac alternatives where a joke and they are still trying to catch up. I've been through 3 MacBooks since then and was surprised how well they kept their value. I sold both previous ones for more then half their original price even though they were more than 3 years old. Also, battery life, the hardware and software is tailored for each other so you'll have a hard time finding a more efficient solution.

I browsed around looking for a Windows laptop for a friend earlier this year and it was a pain in the ass. Most of the vendors' website are unusable or a maze to navigate. Even as someone who built his own machines it's confusing to get the information you want. Half of the websites just break when you try to get to the specs or place an actual order. If these companies can't even get a simple website right what should I expect from their hardware? It's very discomforting and is keeping me from recommending anything but Apple to friends who aren't technically inclined.

If you want to get shit done, you pay the Apple tax and get on with your life. It's well worth the time you would else spend debugging your hardware, messing around with drivers and dealing with shitty customer support. Just having to wipe the device and doing a clean install to get rid of all the bloatware you get with a pc will probably offset the additional cost.

1 Like
17

Debate over, as far as I'm concerned. If you buy a Retina you can't customise the hardware post-sale, except for the harddrive (which, I believe, voids the warranty). From the software side of things you can use third-party tools to customise aspects of the interface but even then you're reasonably limited.

One of the biggest pains with Macs, which is one of the simplest things possible, is that you can't merge directories from the GUI. If you drag & drop a folder onto one that has the same name you get the option to cancel or overwrite the contents. It is possible to do it with Ditto if you drop down to the command line or if you use Path Finder but then you're getting into paying for a fundamental basic of an operating system.
Also, with windows, the maximise button doesn't actually maximise the window like it does on Windows or Linux; it's a "smart resize" that increases the size of the window to fit the content. Similarly, dragging a window to the top of the screen is non-existent, nor is the ability to snap to the side of the screen. Again, third-party will add this in with a tool like Hyper Dock.

One of the noted rivals to a Macbook is a Dell workstation laptop, which has a 4K screen, SSD options (I think it has the options of a mechanical too, not sure), Quadro graphics and good RAM capacities. That was about the same price as a rMBP at the time. It was a few months ago, though, so there will undoubtedly be successors.
I, personally, have a re-branded MSI GS70 Stealth, which is a light, slim laptop with two mSATA SSDs in RAID-0, a 1TB mechanical drive, 16GB DDR3 1600MHz and a 1920x1080 matte display. It also has more USB ports than a Macbook, cost less and has an RJ45 port! I also upgraded it with a more modern Bluetooth card with Wireless AC. Booting to Windows on that is faster than booting OSX on a rMBP and that is saying something!

Maybe go part-way and go for a laptop with Linux. Join the club :-)

18

If the sole purpose of that machine will be simple office usage, did you consider a chromebook? they seem fine for just that and there are some with really crisp screens

19

Thanks for your input!

Haha, I'm in the club already, have been for alike 5-6 years at least ^^ Running Linux on my laptop as well as my Desktop and my server. The problem is that Axure RP, M$ Office and SPSS won't run on Linux. So I need either M$ or OS X ^^

Chromebooks really aren't an option due to a lot of programs I need. ^^'

So ya, the only thing I will not touch with a stick is ASUS. My experiences with ASUS and their tech support make me wish they'd go to hell and die... hard... and painfully.

20

XPS 13. Nuff said.