I have a Retina MacBook Pro with the same issue. It has really soured me to Macs (which I've used literally all my life). You know if this has happened to one of their more high-profile products (one that begins with an "i" and fits in your hand), it wouldn't fly. But Apple haven't had much pride in their Macs for years now, and have let really bad design flaws like this go unfixed.
Sometimes you can fix it yourself by running an animation with only 3 frames: one red, one green and one blue. Let it run all night if possible.
It once fixed my Dell monitor with (as they called it) "lazy pixels".
Glad I got a Lenovo. I was mulling over getting a macbook for the longest time since I wanted the option to develop iPhone apps. After thinking it over I realized that I was disgusted with Apple's practices and didn't want to support them beyond what I absolutely had to, so I'm getting a Thinkpad and I'm quite content with that. Any phone dev will have Android first and I'll get a second hand mini or something when I need to do iPhone work.
Sorry, not sure if you're talking about grabbing the second-hand mini when the time comes or talking about my laptop purchase.
In both cases it's not an issue of price it's an issue of Apple doesn't deserve my money and any transactions that I have to do with them will be solely based on accessing iOS users.
My four-month-old rMBP's screen failed last week and now I'm staring at replacing it out-of-pocket, or never using it as a portable machine again and leaving it hooked up to an external monitor. I'm so unhappy with Apple right now.
EDIT: I couldn't find the default warranty (sans AppleCare) and based this comment off of other similar situations (including OP). I found out this morning that it IS COVERED by the default warranty, so I'm not unhappy anymore. This is my bad.
It has a 1 year warranty. Use it. You can also buy AppleCare any time during the first year of ownership if you decide you want a warranty longer than one year.
My coworker's display retina has the same ghosting problem and it looks pretty bad. I know I would be very annoyed if mine had ghosting. I would love to use a non-mac version of a laptop with a 2560px+ display, but I'm not aware if one exists.
Revision A Apple projects have had issues for as long as Apple has been making products.
Second gen Macbook Air's had Logic board issues, 2007 era RevA Macbook Pros had video card issues, dodgy graphics cards on the early Mac Pros, the iPhone4 antenna, the list is endless. Often it's taken years for the issues to be resolved and Apple to pay for repairs, if at all.
It's simple, if you want the shiniest tech, buy whatever Apple is selling today. If you want reliable hardware, wait for the first revision when the kinks have been worked out. That way we don't all get spammed with the histronics of endless bloggers who think this is a new phenomenon.
I'm pointing out Apple have a long history of doing this with Revision A products, which the Retina MBA is. It's not new, it's not unusual and it shouldn't be unexpected.
I think the thing is that the two statements aren't really at odds.
Apple has always bent over to resolve issues for customers if they acknowledge the issue. For example, I had a pre-unibody MBP that the power button pushed through the top case. Apple very promptly took it back, replaced the top case and a few other cosmetic dings I hadn't complained about, and got it back to me.
On the other hand, Apple also has a long history of refusing to acknowledge some issues and giving the customer the run around on them, which is the type of complaint in this article.
It's more along the lines that really, you shouldn't be surprised that something which has been happening for 15 years or so with no end in sight still happens.
> The point isn't with the fact that there is an issue, its that Apple is seemingly trying to sweep it under the rug.
I don't think that's quite it. Apple realises there's a problem, and that's why they have the standardised test. I think the real problem here is that Apple's test is insufficient, but they don't know that, so they don't believe their customers when they say they're having still having issues. And that's not reassuring for someone who's just spent a lot of money on a new machine.
Personally, I've never had this issue with my rMBP, but I'm sympathetic with those that do.
Possibly, you are right that its in the fact that the test is insufficient. The question is if this is known by Apple or not.
I personally can't see how they could not know, this is not the kind of issue where ppl are going to be blowing there whistle for no reason. So Apple knows there is an issue, if there own tests do not match the numbers of complains(to some degree) even more red flags should be going up.
I am no conspiracy theorist, but there seems to be some valid points in the article.
When batteries for my 2006 MBP's model had problems, Apple issued a recall. I got a new one in a UPS box that I could use to send the old one back. This cost apple parts and shipping, not even a technician's time. Service like this is much harder to provide if the computers you build are not repairable at all. They created a situation where fixing one problem means exchanging the whole unit. That is their own fault. Are you seriously blaming the customer for wanting a fault fixed in his 3kUSD computer with paid warranty extension?
From my understanding of the comment, he wasn't blaming the customer. Rather, he's trying to say that people shouldn't rush to buy the revision A (or version 1 or 1st generation or whatever) of an Apple product. Instead, wait for the initial (and what are now expected) flaws to be fixed and then buy them. However, I think this is a problem that is likely to happen with any company, not just Apple.
In most markets, the law does not allow beta products and caveat emptor. Warranties against product flaws are mandatory. Personally, I would consider ghosting as shown by the OP a defect covered by warranty. In addition to that, a premium brand should treat early adopters well, especially those who bought the flagship product. This is the point OP seems to be making. However, due to their own design decisions, they have made this very expensive, which incentivizes them to provide shitty service, which is damaging their brand image.
AFAIK, as a consumer, you cannot sign away these rights for physical products. For software, which you license, i.e. acquire usage rights, the situation seems to be different.
For an example, see this summary of the baseline for warranties in the EU
http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/shopping/shopping-abroa...
I suppose the reason why the software industry gets around this is that you can't buy software but only license it.
The suggestion of avoiding gen 1 products isn't to blame the customer, but warn them of trouble before purchasing. Whether you get a timely recall/replacement or the problem is ignored still means you have to go of your way to discover, troubleshoot, and resolve the problem. It's nice in many cases they've gone out of their way to fix the issue, but I would rather not have it in the first place. So I generally avoid gen 1 Apple products.
I’m ok with first gen products having issues. I’m not ok with the way with which Apple treats their customers when those issues appear.
Issues can appear, especially with first gen products. I can totally understand that. I cannot for the life of me understand how Apple decided to handle this issue. I’m just not used to Apple treating their customers with contempt and treating them like stupid idiots.
Just pointing out that for anyone I've ever met, the antennagate was just media sites drumming up page-views.
I never had an issue, and despite everyone at my office having iPhone4s and 4Ss, the only time any of us were ever able to affect antenna-strength was having a wet hand, and then purposefully applying a lot of pressure to attempt to attenuate the case.
It could be the signal-strength display "fix" was hiding issues (actually, this is almost certainly the case), but in practice, it was never an issue, and the 4 had consistently better signal than any other device I've owned, including a GalaxyS2 since the iPhones could get a good enough signal in elevators that previous phones (both iPhone and Android) didn't.
And despite being the same basic design AFAICT, never seen a mention of the issue with the iPhone5.
I could consistently re-create antennagate on my iphone 4 every single time I "held it wrong." I was forced to completely change the way I help my phone, permanently.
If this makes you think it's not a premium product, or the best out there, go get a different product. What's so wrong with that? I want a pony, but dammit Apple doesn't offer ponies. Saying "I WANT A PONY FROM APPLE NOW" isn't going to make it so. Quit bitching and take your business elsewhere. If you happen to think the iPhone is still the best even with this problem, then get a case or hold the phone differently.
I agree with Politician A on every point except one. So since we have that one disagreement, I'm going to vote for politician B instead, with whom I disagree on every issue but this one.
One issue doesn't mean you have to hate the phone as a whole, or stop using it. The more acceptable response is to ask that the issue be fixed. Just because an iPhone has signal issues that are inconvenient doesn't mean it's not the phone that this person likes better than the others.
It's a problem with the phone. Apple offered a free solution, put a case on it. If you don't like that solution, what do you want them to do about it? Re-engineer the phone just for you and give you a replacement? It's not like this was a 1-off problem, like Joe's phone was defective so we replace Joe's phone. EVERY phone was made the same with this problem. You can't just "fix it" for Joe. It isn't a matter of customer service where they can just fix the issue.
You're missing the point. Just because there's one problem with the iPhone, no matter how many people it affects, doesn't mean it's automatically a bad choice if every other feature is what you're looking for in a smartphone. If the antenna makes a phone 90/100 but every other phone is still at best 80/100, does switching platforms make sense? It's still a valid issue to complain about, but not enough to make the decision to abandon the platform for some people.
The point is, the iPhone is what these customers were looking for. They still like it enough to keep it, and they like it enough to complain when there are quality issues rather than switch.
I think you're missing my point. What do you want Apple to do about it? They gave everyone a free case with which it works fine. It wasn't a quality issue, it was a design issue. These are different things. No amount of QA will fix a design issue.
What possible other response from a customer service perspective could you want here?
I believe (and some quick Googling corroborates) that the iPhone 5 has a completely different antennae setup. I believe they also tweaked it for the CDMA iPhone 4 and all the 4S models, so perhaps you've not been having a problem because they fixed it.
Antennagate was way overblown, but it was a real issue for some people. With the right combination of specific unit (varying tolerances for the antenna / radio assembly) and cell phone coverage, you would run into problems.
The iPhone 4S and 5 has a different antenna design and (i think) has some kind of coating on the metal frame to lessen the issue.
I recently removed my iPhone 4 cover because I was sick of it and suddenly it was dropping calls and losing signal when I was holding it in my hand. I never had any of these issues back in Holland either (better signal perhaps?) but here in SF the problem is very real.
I never had a problem with the antenna on my iPhone 4... Until I switched to t-mobile. Then it was a noticeable problem. I could force it into 'searching' mode just by holding it wrong.
No, but the tone and ensuing vitriol does. I'd hasten to add that this happen with other manufacturers with startling regularity too. I've been given the run around by HP on a similar spec'ed and similarly priced month old EliteBook, that is faulty to point of unsuitability for any practical use. This is replacing a Thinkpad whose screen came away from it hinges after less than 6 months use. Had I written a scathing blog post about either and linked to it here, I doubt that it would have even raised a comment, let alone a single up-vote. And rightly so because just like the OP, it's ANECDOTAL.
So the person that down-voted without explaining why either thinks that there has been a lack of vitriol or thinks that anecdotal evidence in the negative outweighs the plethora of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. We'll never know because this has developed into the usual inevitable flame fest.
Gotta agree with this point. I was a 2006 MBP owner (1st-gen), and at one point a CD got stuck in the drive. Took it to an authorized reseller, but I was made to pay for not only the CD drive repair but also a case repair since apparently that was also dented. The reason for all this? The CD drive on the 2006 MBP was located underneath the area where one might rest their wrists on the laptop, so over time this force simply made the hollow CDR drive collapse.
Cost me over $600, after I already purchased AppleCare. It's all good now though, I've been pirating Logic and Final Cut for years so it's pretty much paid back. :)
I don't see it as spam, I see it as a necessary part of getting the kinks worked out ahead of when we middle-adopters buy the 2nd or 3rd gen products. The more bloggers gripe about these problems the more likely Apple will have prioritized fixing them before the next generation comes out.
So we grade Apple on a curve? We let other manufacturers get away with it because they are not Apple? Because that is what is happening. Apple aren't the only company that positions themselves as premium and they sure as heck aren't the only company that sells $3000 dollar laptops that may (or may not, mainly may not) develop faults. HP and Lenovo for instance...
This is the reason why I bought a top end early 2011 MBP rather than the newest widget version. I knew that was the end of a long line, but should last a fair amount of abuse for some time to come.
They're all about earning money by ANY unethical means possible. We should already boycott it for not only suing big companies for ridiculous patents, but for trying to EXTORT money from small coffee shops and online grocery shops who have nothing to do with electronics business!
Sure! Though I'd love if people would ask this question before giving negative votes. Anyway, before you read these, just try to be a bit impartial towards any side, which is generally difficult for Apple fans.
(Tell me very honestly, if you think the logo of this small coffee shop in Germany has really any similarity with Apple's logo, except the fact that both of them are derived from the fruit apple!)
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1231539-Apple-sues-small...
That poor woman just sold coffee, not electronic devices. Any sane mind would not find any 'infringement', unless they believe Apple 'owns' the fruit itself now.
Second, they sue an online GROCERY shop from Poland since its website name is "a.pl". ".pl" is the top level domain code for Poland, a is the first alphabet. Even they are not competing with Apple in any manner, but it claims "they are using our reputation". WTF!
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409669,00.asp
They always know that small businesses can't fight back, so they are easy targets.
No, please don't come up with arguments like "What's wrong with defending your brand?". This is NOT defending your brand. There's no brand name getting hurt here. You just think you own the fruit.
There is still a difference between what Apple Records did to Apple Inc. and what Apple Inc. is doing to these small shop owners for something not even remotely same. That coffee house logo is a "pure, unadulterated picture" of the fruit apple, in a natural red color - and a child's head inside. Everyone who thinks it's infringement should be declared insane.
Oh wow. This is amazing. Is this what it has all come to? Your multi-billion dollar company is gonna sue some small time grocery store in Poland claiming to 'use their reputation?'
Yeah, will be discouraging anyone I know from buying their products (not that I liked them to begin with)
These lawsuits are an unfortunate business practice, but Apple is not alone here. I'm not a big fan of them, but that's the way the game is played.
Other corporations do this all the time, but apart from the Olympic Committee, which sues anyone and anything with "Olympic" in their name, most don't have a regular English word as their name. This leads to more conflict in practice, and Apple must, according to the law, work harder to "defend" their brand or have it weakened.
Different standards apply to famous marks vs. regular trademarks. Imagine if a company which made heavy mining equipment had a logo of a swoosh with a hardhat inside. Would Nike be justified in claiming trademark dilution? Absolutely. Or if that same heavy mining equipment manufacturer had a logo of a big rounded arching M with a hardhat on it. McDonalds would legitimately claim dilution there as well, even though the restaurant has no plans to get into the mining industry. These situations would not be dissimilar to an apple logo with a child's head inside.
It's easy to say "poor woman" but the cafe owner must comply with trademark law, imperfect as it is. I hope she prevails actually. However, the process must be allowed to continue. She filed for a trademark application. Apple has apparently contested the trademark registration and sent the cafe owner a cease & desist letter on the side, hoping she'll voluntarily withdraw the application. She doesn't want to withdraw, so now it's in the hands of the German trademark office to sort out.
You really think the only thing different in those two logos is that there's a child's head inside right? How would you draw a real red apple fruit? If I was good in drawing, this is the closest I'd get to a real apple. It's definitely saying no one can use the fruit anymore, since a company chose to keep it's own name by that. She filed for a trademark application, but there must be someone insane sitting in Cupertino who thought they'd milk her on that.
The funniest part is who would have even known someone was using another logo with an apple, in Germany. If not for Apple itself making a bid deal about it.
That's not restricted to Apple. It's a feature of trademark law; you have to try to protect it, or you risk losing it.
Google used to ask people to not use Google as a verb; Bic pens write letters if bic is used as a generic instead of ballpoint; everyone does it because they have to do it.
Sure, it's annoying that a huge multinational company spends money on lawyers against a teeny tiny company. But it's not Apple, it's the system.
So you're front page Hacker News. Why not put together a poll of people with similar issues and file a joint complaint? You purchased an expensive machine, I'd imagine anyone similarly experiencing the issue would be willing to put in some effort to get a bit more attention drawn to it.
How are you performing this test? Are you creating an application with a plain grey window and running it?
I think this could be an OS issue/graphics driver issue. I sometimes notice things "behind" my dark grey Xcode editor window - like for example, I can see this website in Safari behind Xcode. However, sometimes, I see stuff that isn't directly behind Xcode - but it is in another Space.
If the hardware test is succeeding, and you are only seeing "ghosting" on particularly colored windows, I think it is safe to say it may not be the display. (It still may be the display. I'm just saying there are more variables here, and I don't have all of your information.)
I hope this goes viral. Apple was starting to actually gain a little bit of market share in the home computer space and IMO support was a big reason. I know I can have a better spec for less money but I felt like more effort and care was put into Apple products. No one is going to be interested in paying the "Apple tax" if you get the same shitty support you get from most PC makers.
You do realize they sell truckloads of these products and any flaws in them will be publicized due to the staggering volumes involved, right?
Companies like Dell can hide behind several factors, like their notebooks are usually priced a lot lower, quality expectations aren't as high, and they make such a dizzying number of models that any problems are diluted.
I do hope it gets more press so that the problem can be properly addressed, Apple does pay attention to the squeaky wheels after all, but don't get all crazy now. Nobody's dying because their screen has a ghosting issue.
Are there historical contexts for comparing 1) the failure rate of Apple laptops, particularly first gen and 2) the response to these hardware failures?
I'm curious if this is something more widespread or if the author got unlucky and has simply suffered for the first time what many others have suffered previously.
in my experience, it takes a few tries to successfully roll the hard six to get a sympathetic genius. it's not exactly social engineering, but there are some folks who are more likely to take your side especially if you can show that the problem is happening while you're sitting there with them.
still, the fact that the applecare universe works like that at all is a bit disheartening especially if you have a legitimate hardware issue but an unsympathetic genius.
Antenna causing problems? "You're holding it wrong."
Camera artifacts? "You're holding it wrong." [1]
Burn-in? "Does not compute."
Scruffing on the iPhone 5 [2]? People don't even bother to write about it. Same for the poor performance on Retina devices. Unless you're someone like Anandtech who are so meticulous many don't bother to read the fint print.
Maybe it's time we got some Apple-specific buyer's guides from people who don't grade on a curve. I still want to buy Apple products (not first-edition versions, though), but I want to know what I'm in for.
If you're talking about small-time bitching in forums, then probably, but when's the last time someone's blog post about a defect on their Dell is considered newsworthy?
Fuck everything about this. I had two screen replaced, luckily before Apple came up with this idiotic test. On the second replacement I lucked out and got a Samsung screen that doesn’t have the issue. But that they still have not solved that problem that is plain as day fucking sucks! What is wrong with those idiots?! Why do they do stuff like that? It makes my blood boil.
Apple, fuck you! Why do you do this to your customers? Why do you torture them like that? Still!
I really believed that by now you would have solved that problem. After I got my Samsung screen I honestly stopped reading the forums because it brought down my mood. To know hear – months later – that they still haven’t solved the issue in any real way makes me just angry and sad.
This is not excusable. Excuses about this being a first gen product are obviously not valid. If you can’t sell it in a satisfactory manner, you have to give your customers their money back (or give them Samsung screen which are, unlike LG screens, not affected by the issue).
If not for this issue, the rMBP would be the best laptop for me personally by miles and miles. Of course I care! No one else makes products that get me but Apple, so this disappointment weighs extra heavy.
I'm exploring alternatives, but that is years out.
I can totally understand that. For example, the Nexus 4 looks like the perfect phone for me, if only it wasn't so ridiculously large. I'm still going to try to get it when they (hopefully) restock in the UK.
With all due respect, you have to keep in mind that Apple is producing millions of units and, for its own sake, can't be beholden to a single supplier. If they were, that supplier would have enormous leverage ("pay us $5b now, or we will stop shipping you screens for your flagship laptop."). Aside from that, they'd also be susceptible to production issues - imagine if Samsung's factory had a fire/flood/hurricane and had to stop production. Supply chain management at Apple's scale is unbelievably hard. It's certainly not excusable for the issues you're encountering, but from what I've seen / heard, Apple has a top notch supply chain management team pretty much unrivaled by any other company.
I'm sure Apple would be happy to refund you. If the Apple store won't help, try shooting an email to tcook@.
My rMBP works now because I have a Samsung screen.
If they can’t reliably make a laptop without it being defect they can’t sell it. Make a recall and stop selling rMBPs until you nail the issue down. Problem solved. Wimping out with lame excuses is not the way to go.
You have absolutely no concept of the difference between "leverage" and "extortion", the latter of which is exactly what you described. Last I checked, not only is extorting your customers bad for business, it's probably illegal. That being said, I'm going to dare throw an anti-Apple comment in here: after all the BS Apple's pulled in the past few years, I'm sure most people in the world wouldn't blink twice if Samsung did try to pull something like that (how would you feel if one of your clients tried to sue you?). Fortunately, I think Samsung is smart enough to not pull a stunt like that.
And for what it's worth - "[...] Supply chain management at Apple's scale is unbelievably hard." How do you think Samsung feels?
Oh by the way, Samsung deserves everything they get from Apple. Since Samsung has been down this road before; TV, business phones - it's a long list of products Samsung copied, dumps onto the market and then hides behinds it's "culture". Meanwhile Samsung now has carved a foot hold in your market. Effective strategy. And it's worked for them for years.
What I find funny is that it all goes around. Cause now Samsung is being copied by cheap Chinese knock-offs. Who are flooding the Chinese market.
I'm sorry, but down opting this doesn't change the facts. Neither does portraying Samsung as an entirely innocent and hard-done-by party. They screwed their own pooch.
> Supply chain management at Apple's scale is unbelievably hard. It's certainly not excusable for the issues you're encountering, but from what I've seen / heard, Apple has a top notch supply chain management team pretty much unrivaled by any other company.
Who was it at Apple who said, after you reach a certain level, there are no more excuses?
> Fuck everything about this. I had two screen replaced, luckily before Apple came up with this idiotic test.
The cost of those two replacements is probably why they came out with this test.
> But that they still have not solved that problem that is plain as day fucking sucks!
Considering that they have billed the Retina MBP as something to be used by designers and content creators, they shouldn't limit things to an arbitrary test. If the problem is perceived as a problem and can be consistently detected, double blind, then it should be replaced, period.
I have the same issue on my rMBP, and while I wish it didn't happen, I still quite like the laptop. It's not a constant thing and it hasn't interfered at all with my ability to see what's supposed to be on the screen.
I wouldn't buy another Apple product either. Between a MacBook Pro which caught fire, an AirPort which melted, an iMac which the backlight went on and a MacBook which had to go back 4 times (!) due to logic board problems, it scares the shit out of me parting with that sort of cash and actually depending on it. The muppets at the "genius bar" (retard shelf as we call it now) aren't exactly helpful and usher you away so other people don't hear about it as well.
I now buy OLD Lenovo machines (T61 series) and chuck Debian on them. I buy two at a time and stick a (Samsung) SSD in them for less than half the cost of an MBP. One lives in the cupboard as a backup. I have a few spare batteries (9-cell and Ultrabay) sitting around as well.
Also, I find it objectionable purchasing anything that doesn't have a way of isolating the power either i.e. removing the battery. One short on a LiPoly pack and your tech gadget turns neatly into an incendiary device, which is what happened to my 2010 MBP. It nearly burned my house down.
I genuinely don't get all these people who think they are soundly engineered. They are expensive trinkets with no engineering applied past appearance.
Although you might have requirements that aren't met by Apple's products, such as wanting a removable battery, to call them "expensive trinkets" with "no engineering" is absurd.
Apple's work on the unibody case is but one example of how they're pushing manufacturing technology as far as it can go today. Other vendors are content to stamp out the same old plastic clamshell, to fit in the same old motherboard and optical drive, whatever's cheapest and quickest.
With the exception of Sony and HP, few companies even try to do what Apple's doing.
You're essentially saying that any computer with a metal case, or extensive metal shielding inside could suffer the same problem. HP makes a number of metal laptops, for instance, in an effort to make them more recyclable, the same reasoning behind Apple's materials decision.
Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. I hope they've improved the trackpad because those were nearly unusable before.
I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing.
I guess I should be wearing shoes made from truck tires and old seatbelts, shirts made from recycled canvas bags, and underpants made from old rags because who cares about appearances.
Realize that aesthetics are largely subjective. I personally think the Thinkpad line looks a hell of a lot BETTER than the rounded corner/aluminum macbooks.
So then appearances are important to you, but you have a different sense of what looks better. That's a lot more reasonable than insisting appearance doesn't matter.
I think people who say "appearance doesn't matter" really just mean "appearance is ranked much lower than whatever specs I am looking for", obviously at some level the look of the thing will come into play.
Until there are other vendors on the same page as Apple, there's no way to put it otherwise.
If you want to buy power tools, a watch, a car, you have many choices of first-rate products. When it comes to computers it's such a broken marketplace. It'd be a world where there's BMW and a whole bunch of Hyundai-type companies.
I have my head in the gutter because I have standards? Expectations? That appearances do matter? Sorry if I don't come from the school of function trumping form, and that I care about attention to details.
You're missing the point. It's not about benchmarks. That's like buying a car based on horsepower or quarter mile times. It doesn't matter as much as you'd think.
It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value.
"It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value."
That's fine, and that's perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, I think you are missing the point, since Apple products don't have any of those qualities (especially vendor support, given the text of the linked article...). I might bend a bit on build quality (especially since a majority of the parts aren't manufactured by Apple to begin with, and the parts that are do generally have good durability), but I see absolutely no advantage by Apple in the other departments.
And really, how good of a metric metric is build quality when the entire computer ends up super-glued together?
Gas mileage and average life of transmission, etc. are benchmarks that do matter to the average consumer. The max horsepower isn't used at all by people purchasing cars for travel on the main roads, but max processor power is probably used at least from time to time on people purchasing computers, maybe because of running badly-written software or just trying to open a million tabs in Chrome.
Build quality/durability is quite a tough pickle to nail statstics on. Used Apple sales may still carry a higher price tag because people paid more for them in the first place, or because of the brand name. % of devices still running to their consumer's satisfaction is a statistic I haven't seen before, and might be skewed by the type of respondents. Some of the tests done here that I put stock into are actually some of the most interesting: like dropping Nintendo cartridges from 3 story buildings, or leaving a laptop in your freezer or out on the hot pavement for an hour to see what happens when you try to use them again. There are a lot of stories here about what kind of abuse their laptops take, but I would go on over to Youtube and actually look at some people who went out of their way to record this. Word of mouth and anecdotes really do dominate this area, so I can't say much about this outside of personal experience, which really comes down to "Wait at least a year, do at least an hour's research, and hope you're lucky". Even within a brand, some products are very durable while others are flimsy.
ASUS falls off that list when it comes to vendor support, but Sony, Dell and Lenovo all offer support, though I have never come across useful vendor support, so I'll have to keep quiet about that. Generally I try to buy equipment that is durable enough not to fail within that warranty period, and after that I'll move on.
Don't forget resale value. That's the part where you make up the difference in price when you sell the Macbook two years later for 75% of retail price. Not sure any other computer manufacturer's product can do that.
When it comes to cars -- the Macbooks are like BMW's. Look good, drive fast, even the door makes a solid thud when you close it. You can tell it's been well engineered.
The T-Series thinkpads -- more like a Toyota Hilux.
I wouldn't bother arguing. If people want to use other laptop hardware, for reasons partly imaginary, defending their choice by juvenile name-calling, let them.
No I'm not. I'm saying that there is no acceptable insulation in the device. The chassis for example uses air gap between the board and the base for insulation. Even condensation can bridge it, which is the theory why mine exploded.
Regarding appearance, and? Does that really matter?
That and you can throw the damn thing across the room and it'll still work. Mine is 5 years old, has been thrown, dropped, spilled on, yanked off the table, stood on and it's as good as new.
I'm not a fanboy - the thing is just built to last which when you're spending n-thousand dollars is a shit load more important than the shiny factor which you are obviously obsessed with.
Boards usually have a transparent coating, I doubt that it's only air separating the board from the chassis. For this very reason - laptops are thrown into the water as a test, they must not explode after that. I have never had a problem with a unibody Macbook. Please don't be ridiculous.
I think he's talking about conformal coating, not solder mask. Conformal coating can help but it's mostly there to prevent shorting across component leads from condensation. If you smash the Al casing against the board there's a good chance you can chip the coating and short things out.
> The chassis for example uses air gap between the board and the base for insulation. Even condensation can bridge it, which is the theory why mine exploded.
What environment are you using your laptop in that's allowing condensation to form inside the device? Electronics are typically not rated for use in condensing environments at all.
Air gaps as insulators are pretty typical in electronics. That's how it works in every desktop machine I've ever used. And it looks like the air gap inside the MBP is plenty large, and even if it weren't, the attached components would be making contact with the case, not the board itself.
I think the "condensation inside the case" theory is incorrect. I don't know if that's your own theory or if someone working for Apple told you that, but I don't see that as feasible. You'd need a lot of liquid inside the case for a short to involve the case. And frankly, if you've got any liquid inside your laptop, the fact that the case is metal is irrelevant.
> Regarding appearance, and? Does that really matter?
Of course not. No one cares about the way their $1300 device looks any more. As a society, we moved past caring about appearances in 1992.
> "What environment are you using your laptop in that's allowing condensation to form inside the device?"
I can think of a pretty easy hypothetical--have the laptop indoors, powered down in a very cool air conditioned room for enough time to make it cool. Then take it outside in a high humidity region like Florida and turn it on. Bam, condensation inside the device.
That's a fair point, but it doesn't seem extremely likely. I could see developing "fog" on/in the device (like glasses fogging when coming in from the cold), but enough to produce a short is hard to believe. The aluminum should actually reach equilibrium with the environment faster than plastic.
The number of MacBooks in the environment that I work in that have serious dents, battle damage from severe falls, outnumbers those that don't, and they're all in functioning condition. Don't think that Lenovo laptops are the only ones that are durable.
If you look at the resale value for a MacBook it's a lot higher than a Lenovo. I'm sure there's something other than "shiny" that makes a five year old MacBook still have significant value.
"If you look at the resale value for a MacBook it's a lot higher than a Lenovo. I'm sure there's something other than "shiny" that makes a five year old MacBook still have significant value."
I rather enjoy the availability of cheap good recycled laptops such as the Lenovo Thinkpads.
I suspect the lower price compared to Apple laptops of similar vintage may have to do with the volume available, and the tendency of corporate purchasers to refresh their stock en masse.
If my hypothesis is correct, one would expect to see a drop in resale value of Apple laptops in the future as the volume increases, and as they are seen more in the corporate world in larger numbers.
I don't even have a dog in this fight except for the following facts
1) I am a current owner of the storied T61 and
2) I have grown fond of the stupendously neat rMBP and am mulling getting one.
That and you can throw the damn thing across the room and
it'll still work. Mine is 5 years old, has been thrown,
dropped, spilled on, yanked off the table, stood on and
it's as good as new.
Now that I've been made familiar with the fact that the T61 is in very small company of notebooks that can put up with even moderate household battery - a fact I've long suspected but never gloated about, given it's outmodedness - I am suddenly struck with angst over my limited options.
Yes, T61 is all those things that the author mentioned.
My T61 has survived falls on hardwood floors, physical shocks in poorly padded cases and other uncharitable abuse.
I just can't fathom the prospect of not being able to do all those things to my new notebook, whatever the eventual pick is.
rMBP owners: Please do share your insights into the mean level of abuse your units have handsomely survived.
> rMBP owners: Please do share your insights into the mean level of abuse your units have handsomely survived.
I do not own a rMBP, but laptops in general are not as fragile as we sometimes imagine. Most of the failures I've experienced over the years have been for things unrelated to drops. I've had a dead screen backlight, a dead trackpad (water spill), and similar one-off failures. I've also seen overheating, failed logic boards, and of course dead batteries. I've never seen a laptop that died because someone dropped it (though obviously that can happen).
However, if you drop a metal laptop, you're likely to get scratches and dents. You won't see that as much on a Thinkpad because the plastic will shrug this off better. With cheaper plastic laptops, you might see cracked plastic.
If you drop your laptop a lot, you might want something like a ThinkPad just so it won't get dinged up. But then you might want to just stop dropping your laptop so much.
I have dropped my rMBP at least three times from a coffee table or bed height or so. It seems sturdier than the regular MBP in that I haven't any noticeable dents, though I believe I got lucky in that each impact seemed spread across the edge or the bottom, and not a corner. I also have the SSD version, for what it's worth.
After using it for 4 months daily travelling cross-continent for development, presentations, and running multiple virtual machines, it's the finest laptop I've owned - by far the fastest and most aesthetically pleasing.
For background, I've owned three Dell Inspirion or Latitudes, a Thinkpad T61, three MacBook Pros, a Macbook Air, and three PowerBook G3/G4s.
I'm a continuous early adopter of first gen Apple technology - I've had some mishaps (heat on the first MBP that needed a warranty repair; poor backlight on a pre-unibody Macbook Pro, poor signal reliability on the first AirPort Extreme, and case flex on the early PowerBook G4s and MacBook Pros) but nothing that made me curse their name. I was lucky to avoid the logic board issues on the iBook G3s which was the worst experience I know of based on my friends' experiences.
I once slipped on ice and dropped my T60p from about chest height onto a steel manhole cover. It was perfectly fine. Worrying about the structural strength of a T-series Thinkpad is entirely unjustified as far as I can tell.
> rMBP owners: Please do share your insights into the mean level of abuse your units have handsomely survived.
A week or so ago, I was riding my bicycle on the comute from work and had to avoid a psychopath in a car. I'd forgotten to close the straps over the rMBP and it went flying off the back of the bike, skittered along the bitumen for a couple of metres and smashed into a gutter. It's not quite as handsome as it was, but despite landing on the screen corner everything still lines up perfectly, opens and closes perfectly and works perfectly.
I own a new W530, and I can confirm the trackpad still stinks.
After my Macbook Pro died, I switched to Lenovo because how much work and fraught with difficulty keeping Linux running on the MBP was. Installs have been easier, but now I've found I've made a whole host of different sacrifices, mainly the crappy feeling you mentioned. They are not as solid as my good old pre-unibody MBP.
> Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick.
And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there. In fact, I don't even use a mouse with my desktop - I have a USB version of the ThinkPad keyboard[0]. With the TrackPoint, you can use the mouse without ever moving your hand from the home position on the keyboard. It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad.
And instead of the stupid "two-finger scrolling" you see on Macs these days, you can hold the middle mouse button and push up or down with the TrackPoint to scroll infinitely.
And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important.
Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality.
> I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier.
You really need to stop drinking the Apple Kool-aid and realize that there are far superior laptops to the MacBooks.
The parent comment was wrong to brand its opponents fanatics, but yours is also excessively opinionated. TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste, not of Kool-Aid.
> TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste
I don't see how it is. It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row.
When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable?
In fact, I have completely disabled the trackpad on my ThinkPad in the BIOS. I have no need for it when there's the TrackPoint.
Quick switching between keyboard and mouse is indeed a strength of the TrackPoint, and if you need to do that a lot, the TrackPoint might be superior. Some mitigating factors: one, imo Apple trackpads best shine when used for reading (web pages or PDFs), where it's not necessary to use the keyboard at all; two, unlike a mouse, the trackpad on my MBP is just a rotation of my right wrist away, which is certainly more than the rotation I would need to access a TrackPoint, but not unbearably disruptive. However, it's certainly true that when I'm on the keyboard, I try to stay on the keyboard (which is why I'm a vim user, heh).
For scrolling, Apple trackpads offer almost direct manipulation, which affords a sheer ease and precision that a mouse certainly cannot compete with; I'm skeptical that a TrackPoint can. Note also that you can do a quick scroll without having to actually press any buttons, just the wrist rotation and a flick; or if you're already moving the pointer, it's insanely easy to switch to a scroll. And there are other gestures: zooming, for instance, is certainly possible with other input methods, but doing it with direct manipulation on a trackpad again allows unmatched precision and doesn't require clicking any buttons. Or use three fingers to quickly flick between Spaces, if you're the kind of person that uses those; a keyboard shortcut would work, but the trackpad is very convenient.
(I never had a laptop with a TrackPoint, fwiw, so I can't personally compare both; keep in mind, though, that experience with a non-Apple trackpad is not really a good substitute for an Apple one either.)
> one, imo Apple trackpads best shine when used for reading (web pages or PDFs), where it's not necessary to use the keyboard at all
I don't think this is particularly true, especially for web browsing. For example, in responding to your comment, I just had to copy and paste your text to quote it. Because of the TrackPoint, I was able to easily copy and paste the text while keeping my hands in essentially one place.
If I were using a trackpad, I would have had to (a) move my hand onto the trackpad, (b) select the text, (c) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+c, (d) move my hands back to the trackpad to move the cursor to the input box and click in it, (e) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+v. That's back and forth twice. Just to copy and paste some text.
As a side note, text selection is something else I've found to be frustrating with trackpads, especially the new "clickpads" which don't have separate mouse buttons. It's hard to press down and move your finger at the same time. This isn't an issue at all with the TrackPoint, though.
> the trackpad on my MBP is just a rotation of my right wrist away
Perhaps it's because I'm not experienced with trackpads, but I have found that I really have to lift my hand up and move it down, using my arm muscles, to access any trackpad.
> For scrolling, Apple trackpads offer almost direct manipulation, which affords a sheer ease and precision that a mouse certainly cannot compete with; I'm skeptical that a TrackPoint can.
I just got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon a few days back, an ultrabook which reviews have said has a trackpad comparable to that on the MacBooks. Out of curiosity, I thought I'd try using it, but I found it to be no less precise than a TrackPoint and much more tedious to use.
I think part of the issue is that the TrackPoint has a learning curve that the trackpads do not. Most people give up on the TrackPoint before they ever learn how to use it properly. For whatever reason, when I got my first ThinkPad, I started using the TrackPoint extensively, and after a few weeks, I had the hang of it. Since you're also a Vim user, perhaps you can understand it as similar to the difference between using a plain-old text editor and Vim, in terms of the learning curve and eventual advantages.
> And there are other gestures: zooming, for instance, is certainly possible with other input methods, but doing it with direct manipulation on a trackpad again allows unmatched precision and doesn't require clicking any buttons. Or use three fingers to quickly flick between Spaces, if you're the kind of person that uses those; a keyboard shortcut would work, but the trackpad is very convenient.
I don't have much experience with zooming - it really hasn't ever been necessary on a computer for me to use it on a regular basis, so I can't comment on that.
As for window management, I've traditionally used XMonad, so keyboard shortcuts are how I get things done with respect to window management. However, I have XFCE installed instead on my new laptop, so I'll see how that goes. Of course, OS X and Windows are much less customizable than Linux, so custom shortcuts may not be an option there.
> If I were using a trackpad, I would have had to (a) move my hand onto the trackpad, (b) select the text, (c) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+c, (d) move my hands back to the trackpad to move the cursor to the input box and click in it, (e) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+v. That's back and forth twice. Just to copy and paste some text.
Well, trackpad only requires one hand, the other one can stay on the left side of the keyboard for those keyboard shortcuts. Certainly can sitll be annoying if you have to actually type something, such as in the address bar.
> As a side note, text selection is something else I've found to be frustrating with trackpads, especially the new "clickpads" which don't have separate mouse buttons. It's hard to press down and move your finger at the same time. This isn't an issue at all with the TrackPoint, though.
Indeed, which is why I emulate the old style and click with my thumb while dragging with a finger - this works fine.
> Perhaps it's because I'm not experienced with trackpads, but I have found that I really have to lift my hand up and move it down, using my arm muscles, to access any trackpad.
It helps that I have big hands.
> Since you're also a Vim user, perhaps you can understand it as similar to the difference between using a plain-old text editor and Vim, in terms of the learning curve and eventual advantages.
I wouldn't be surprised - but I'm not convinced that the result is actually better than a trackpad.
> I don't have much experience with zooming - it really hasn't ever been necessary on a computer for me to use it on a regular basis, so I can't comment on that.
It makes fitting, say, the window with the portion of a PDF document you want to read relatively easy (although PDFs don't scroll and zoom nearly as smoothly as web pages in Safari; ugh).
> As for window management, I've traditionally used XMonad, so keyboard shortcuts are how I get things done with respect to window management.
Me too, actually - I use SizeUp, which lets me move windows to predefined regions of the screen with keyboard shortcuts, and since I also use Cmd-Tab extensively, a keyboard shortcut is superior for me here - but I know many people love their Spaces.
> When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches.
~2 is not "several" in modern english usage.
More to the point: personally, I use my thumb on the trackpad, so by your standards of evidence the track point is less efficient than the trackpad; my fingers never leave their home row positions, whereas yours do to use the track point. In reality, yes, it's personal preference.
On my X1 Carbon[0] it's 4" from the home row to the middle of the trackpad. Subtracting 0.5" for the separate mouse buttons, that would be 3.5" to the middle of the trackpad.
> personally, I use my thumb on the trackpad
Can you "two-finger scroll" with your thumb on the trackpad? And from what another post said, you have to rotate your wrist to do this anyway.
> so by your standards of evidence the track point is less efficient than the trackpad; my fingers never leave their home row positions, whereas yours do to use the track point.
What are you talking about? My fingers never leave the home row to use the TrackPoint. You do realize that the TrackPoint is located between the "G", "H", and "B" keys, right?
To "two finger" it all you have to do is rotate your hand slightly and swipe with finger and thumb. This gesture becomes effortless once you internalize it.
The problem with the "stick" is that, like a game-pad controller, it operates like a steering wheel. It doesn't move the mouse directly, but it changes the rate at which the mouse is moving. This is a degree removed from actually steering the mouse and it's why it frustrates a lot of people.
If you're a "home row" person that's fine, we all have our preferences, but you're probably in the minority and the appeal of that feature is more limited than a responsive track-pad.
"the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row"
This really, is the end of the discussion for me. After using the trackpoint for years and becoming spoiled by being able to maintain proper posture at all times, not having a trackpoint on all of my other keyboards has lead me to slowly abandon mouse use wherever possible. For me, it is a choice between either a trackpoint or nothing at all. If I had a MBP, I would disable the trackpad entirely; it would only get in my way.
You come across as an Apple hater here. You're not making objective arguments or even providing personal anecdotes. You're just pushing your personal opinion as fact.
> And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there.
When you call someone ignorant, you should typically follow up with a factual statement and not just your personal opinion. In my experience, the TrackPoint is tedious and awkward. Good for you if you like it, but everyone else in the world isn't "ignorant" for having a different opinion.
> It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad.
Not in my experience, but a bigger issue is that the TrackPoint is abstracted further, which makes it less intuitive. If touching something on the screen directly is a first-level abstraction, introducing a mouse or trackpad is a second-level abstraction, because your motions are moving a proxy (the cursor) around on screen. The TrackPoint is a third-level abstraction, because you're using a joystick to move the proxy, so your motions are no longer paralleled on the screen (i.e. the cursor moves but you didn't actually move the TrackPoint).
> And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important.
Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality.
This is just unadulterated Apple hate combined with some vacuous claims. This doesn't convince anyone that you're correct. It just makes you sound petty and bitter.
> When you call someone ignorant, you should typically follow up with a factual statement and not just your personal opinion.
Funny, this is what I would call "personal opinion":
> the TrackPoint is tedious and awkward
And this is what I would call a "factual statement":
> It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row.
> When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable?
I would say that I have provided a much more factual basis for my argument than your explanation that it's "tedious and awkward".
> The TrackPoint is a third-level abstraction, because you're using a joystick to move the proxy, so your motions are no longer paralleled on the screen (i.e. the cursor moves but you didn't actually move the TrackPoint).
The fact that the TrackPoint doesn't move is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It allows you to scroll infinitely, never move your hand from the home row, etc.
Getting used to the TrackPoint is just a matter of time (a few days for me), but having to move your hands a lot when using a trackpad or mouse will never change - it's physical reality.
And if it's so difficult to use a joystick to control things, how is it that millions of people are able to play console video games without any problem? Many of the people who complain about the TrackPoint are the same people who play Wii, 360, or PS3 games that make extensive use of joysticks.
> This is just unadulterated Apple hate combined with some vacuous claims. This doesn't convince anyone that you're correct. It just makes you sound petty and bitter.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I find no reason to return your ad hominem attack on me, so whatever.
> Funny, this is what I would call "personal opinion"
Funny, I didn't call you "ignorant" right before I posted my opinion. I also made it clear that I was posting my personal experience (hence the term "my experience") and not making some blanket claim.
> And this is what I would call a "factual statement"
Nope. It's more efficient for you, perhaps. It is considerably less efficient for someone who finds it awkward. Moving my hand to the trackpad takes less than a second. I don't consider that a high cost.
If you find yourself in a type-mouse-type-mouse loop that repeats so rapidly that moving your hand to the trackpad is actually a significant cost, then the UI you're using is terrible. Or else you need to learn to use the tab key for switching between fields, which is faster than either the trackpad or the trackpoint.
As for your scrolling example, you're missing a couple of important details. First, modern trackpads support inertial scrolling, which means you can "flick" and then stop the scrolling when you get to the point you want. This is far faster than the trackpoint for long-distance scrolling. Second, the trackpad also supports more fine-grained speed control in general. The trackpoint has a very small range of motion, which means you're trading off speed and accuracy. The large surface of a modern trackpad gives both simultaneously. I can mouse from corner to corner on screen multiple times per second with a trackpad. I can also get extremely fine-grained control. I seriously doubt your trackpoint can match both the speed and accuracy (though you can presumably match one of them). This likely more than offsets the "home row advantage". And even if you could match the speed and accuracy from a hardware standpoint, you'd be asking for either extremely fine inputs from the finger (for control), or extremely firm inputs (for speed), both of which would be very suboptimal in terms of ease of use and comfort.
> The fact that the TrackPoint doesn't move is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It allows you to scroll infinitely, never move your hand from the home row, etc.
No, it's a tradeoff. If you value keeping your hands on the home row, then it might be an advantage for you. I value the intuitive interaction of the trackpad far more.
> Getting used to the TrackPoint is just a matter of time (a few days for me), but having to move your hands a lot when using a trackpad or mouse will never change - it's physical reality.
Sure. You can get used to just about anything. Whether there's value in doing so is a different question. For most people, the answer appears to be no, given the low popularity of the trackpoint. The tradeoff between speed and accuracy in the trackpoint will also never change. That's physical reality, too.
> And if it's so difficult to use a joystick to control things, how is it that millions of people are able to play console video games without any problem? Many of the people who complain about the TrackPoint are the same people who play Wii, 360, or PS3 games that make extensive use of joysticks.
This would be a more compelling argument if interacting with game menus via joystick weren't so annoying (especially if the game gives you a "cursor" to move with said joystick). A joystick is a very useful input method for gameplay because "keep moving in this direction" is a common need there. It's frustrating for traditional interfaces because "keep moving in this direction" is not common. "Jump to this, now this, now this" is far more common.
> I'm sorry you feel that way, but I find no reason to return your ad hominem attack on me, so whatever.
It's a little late to reach for the high road when you start by calling someone ignorant for holding a different opinion, and then end by claiming that Apple users are "chasing after the latest shiny bauble". Also, nothing I posted is actually an ad hominem attack, but if it makes you feel better to think so, please continue.
And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are
I don't have any strong opinions about either ThinkPads or MacBooks, but I do care about HN. If you're not trying to be civil, please try. If you are trying, please try harder. Thanks.
Last time I've disassembled a Lenovo laptop it still had the entire thin aluminum shield thingie inside, y'know. And desktops are made of metal instead of wood and rich corinthian leather for (a bunch of) reason(s). On the other hand, my experiences with Lenovo T-series were mostly of the "flimsy pieces of crap that only look solid" category (but maybe I was just less than lucky).
Aggregated studies of customer satisfaction seem to still be so much better for Apple than for other manufacturers, that it's a bit hard to blame it all on confirmation bias.
Lenovo's relatively low score is because they shift out lots of low quality consumer grade laptops (g-series) which are to be honest, just junk but earn them a lot of money. They don't even assemble them themselves. If you took just ThinkPad series machines, there would be a very different result.
I said it looks solid, I had a T-series laptop, and I replaced it with an MBP, so I know a bit about their respective constructions. The cage and everything didn't help the T being in worse shape (loose hinges, cracks in plastic, failed display close sensor) in half the time I've used the MBP (which is still going strong). So yeah, my personal case was very different.
And as for the flex test mentioned just above, it's not really an interesting test. It doesn't matter if anything flexes, it matters whether and when it breaks, and that's a test I'm not going to make. This is what I mean by making a product look solid, not be solid.
FWIW, I tend to carry two different MBPs from different ages holding them by the display regularly, and they're still alive and well after, respectively, years and months of abuse. And the first thing I did after buying the first one was dropping it off the table, which is twice the height that killed the T completely (after it wasting its battery completely after a year, that is, another feat that MBP didn't replicate).
Also, what the sibling said: stop acting like a child. Thank you.
Have you ever done the "flex test" with an MBA and a T61? Very noticeable different with a magnesium rollcage vs. an aluminum unibody. There is no flex in a T61.
Sadly, Lenovo cannot be relied on as they once were (even for the first few years post-IBM). My W520 has been to warranty depot three times - still not fixed - for this problem that has been known for 1.5 years:
Just as it has always been, the T series will be the best built laptops. You were free to purchase a T530 with any of the i5 or i7 CPUs and 1920 x 1080 screen. The only downside to them is the lack of higher end GPUs. They are just about as solidly built as the older T series.
I bought it specifically for the quadro 2000, for volume-rendering and cuda. Thanks for the heads-up, I didn't realize the W series was created post-IBM.
I have Lenovo T420 as work laptop, it costs nearly as much as my unibody 13" MBP did in 2010, except it has a shitty trackpad, keyboard (which isn't backlit, instead they have this useless lamp at the top of the screen), the screen doesn't have auto-brightness which I consider a must now and it overall has this cheap, plastic feel to it. The top border of the display separated from it's backing after a couple months (and I'm usually gentle with my tech), the optical drive eject button is positioned in such a way that you always accidentally trigger the open action - everyone at my job has this problem, I think it's because the eject button is the right most object on the side and very easily pushed.
If I paid that much of my own money I'd be very pissed. Given my experience, I will not be buying Lenovo machines. Dell however was quite a nice workhorse, still not in the same category as MBPs though.
It sounds like you had some bad experiences, but do you really think that Apple makes products with "no engineering applied past experience"? Surely Apple's products have had faults, and it sounds like you've been bitten more than once. I don't blame you for not liking the company or its products. However, there are lots of satisfied customers, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believed that their build process and supply chain is not top notch.
FWIW, whenever I've had any trouble with getting support for Apple products, an email to sjobs@apple.com (now tcook@) solved the problem promptly. In my experience, the company does screw up, but if you bring a problem to their attention, they'll make it right.
Yes I do - they are shit, so is their engineering and I'm not afraid to go against the grain and say it.
I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer i.e. most of the praise comes from new users with shiny toys. My father has just been screwed by his 1st gen iPad because some of the apps will no longer install and IOS6 is not available (to the trash it goes), his white iPhone 4S has proximity sensor issues to the point it's unusable and they refuse to repair it, my boss's MBP LCD inverter melted, we've got a cupboard full of 7 dead Mac Minis in the office, the old optical mice just didn't work (the one with the little ball) or the logic board fell out inside and lets not even mention the time capsule saga or the OSX update which fucked the filesystems on lots of machines (10.5.3).
There is a whole million miles of these problems out there and so far it's usually kept covered by the reality distortion field.
Build process fine. Supply chain fine. But the inputs to those is unadulterated crap.
Fuck, I don't want to have to complain - I want something to just work with no problems. Screw sjobs@ / tcook@ pandering. Just make some shit that works.
> I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer
Four MBPs, including a retina MBP. Couldn't be happier. Two iPads and two iPhones, switched to Android largely because of a new job and because I wanted a local environment for running vim.
See? Other people have anecdotes too. But I get that contrariness and the application of your own pet anecdotes over evidence is really fun, so continue, by all means.
I think what he's going for is that, had you kept your original MBP, you would be unsatisfied. Not saying he's right or wrong there.
However, I think it is fair to say that the majority of Apple fans often have a pretty frequent upgrade cycle. Consequently I don't think there are too many "long term customers" of Apple products in his sense of the word. I think Meaty is really going for "long term" customer as in - infrequent customer, keeping devices for long term.
I'd be "unsatisfied" because a slow processor, a 4GB RAM maximum, and a shitty GPU would suck, sure. I upgrade and sell my old machines on a yearly basis or so because paying a $300-$400 delta (sell the old one, buy the new one) is worth it to have something in the target area for Apple and for developers. There's no point for me in keeping older devices long-term because nobody really targets the trailing edge. I spend more on car repairs in any given year than I do on my laptop upgrades; it is just not a significant amount of money.
If "people who keep old stuff" was what he was really going for, he's doing poorly at describing it, because I don't think that "long term customer" doesn't mean "customer who refuses to upgrade for geologic eras" among reasonable folks. And I certainly don't think an ecosystem where newer devices are generally preferred is a symptom of "bad engineering"--more "engineering decisions he doesn't like." Every MBP iteration has made me much more pleased to actually use the machine, and that's the core of what matters.
You see with Windows, Microsoft targetted (or at least went WAY out of their way to accommodate) the trailing edge. hell, they even held support for many DOS programs for a long time. This pattern looks like it might be changing with Metro though.
Microsoft did, sure, but I'm referring more to application and game developers. The OS features are nice-to-haves to be sure, but if your applications are outpacing your hardware...
That's mostly fair, but gigantic multiplayer experiences have in general tried to target more modest min. reqs., like Starcraft II on the competitive side, or all of those East asian MMOs on the casual side.
My Wife has my old MBP circa 2008. Its still runs surprisingly well - outside the new trackpad and larger size, I don't notice a difference using that compared to my current. While I like the T61 (alot), when I left my previous job I was given the choice of keeping either it or the MBP (both with similar specs). I chose the MBP and haven't regretted it once.
In my circle, I would disagree. I'm using a 6 year old Mac Pro, have a 2006 Mac mini as an HTPC, another as a fileserver in the basement. Our household has an original iPad, an iPad 3G, two iPhone 3GS used as ersatz iPod Touches for the kids. I did recently upgrade to the iPhone 5 from the iPhone 3GS, but that's because I don't want to be on a two year treadmill.
The only issue I ever had was with a balky videocard in the Mac Pro that would die after about 4 months of World of Warcraft. Apple was quick to replace the card twice without any troubles.
So everyone's mileage varies.
Since I recently upgraded to an SSD in the Mac Pro, and bumped up the memory to 32GB, I see no need to replace this machine until it suffers a serious mechanical failure. The only downside is that it'll forever be stuck running Lion.
If you have the right video card, you can get Mountain Lion running with these instructions: http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47
This worked for me with my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 w/ an ATI HD5770 graphics card. I do have an issue where it often doesn't come back from sleep, so I never put it to sleep, but other than that it's been flawless so far. I haven't spent any time looking into the sleep issue, maybe it's a solvable problem.
By strictly hardware performance standards, the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 did not deserve to lose support so soon, and are still more than adequate. Especially the 8-core versions, which have benchmarks higher than many 2012 Macs.
If you have a 4 core model: I researched putting in replacement CPUs a while back (but never went through with it). Replacing a CPU in a Mac Pro is not the easiest and is a bit of a pain from what I hear, but it is possible, and if you have 4 cores right now you can get a serious CPU performance boost with the right 8 core CPU upgrades (2 x 4-core CPUs, that is). There are many options that will will work. If you're interested, I can give you more details on which CPUs work.
I have the four core model; I'm not sure for my work flow that faster CPUs or more cores would really help much compared to the cost. My SSD upgrade has really given it new life in terms of responsiveness.
Thanks for the link to the workaround. Hopefully it isn't something that will get broken with updates.
Yeah, I'm a little concerned about updates breaking things. The good thing about this hack is that you don't have to modify your installed OS X system. If I understand correctly, the Chameleon bootloader emulates EFI64 and fakes OS X into thinking you booted an EFI64 system. So I think the likelihood of updates breaking things is much smaller than that of Hackintoshes, for example.
Nevertheless, I'm going to try to make sure I have a full backup before doing any major OS X updates. I also have both a Lion backup (as well as an old Snow Leopard backup) that I can boot up in case I need to.
I'm a happy long term Mac user. However, I've resisted buying first generation products, and I wouldn't buy Apple products without an option to cancel the purchase. I'm happy with the attention put into the product design, but not with their quality control. If Lenovo made laptops with touchpads that worked as well as MacBooks, I would switch. But no such luck so far.
The Thinkpad X1 Carbon has a nice touchpad with 2-finger scroll as well. The only (minor) quibble I have with it is that it only lets you go one direction with the 2-finger scroll (you have to swipe down for down--you can't reverse it like you can on a Mac.) Otherwise, it's very comparable.
Just to add to the anecdotal evidence bandwagon, I'm another very happy long term customer, with almost a decade of happy purchases. I've never had a problem nor experienced anything but excellent service. I've had iPhones replaced for free (without Apple Care), free repairs for faulty components in 2 MacBook Pro's (performed immediately and at no cost).
I don't blame you for you dislike of the Apple brand given how you've apparently been treated, but realize that your experience seems to be somewhat anomalous.
This may just be a difference in attitude. For myself, I would count having multiple iPhones and MacBook Pros replaced or repaired as a terrible experience. Good service is better than bad service, and occasional defects are unavoidable, but the iPhone is only 5 years old; multiple replacements within that span would give me doubts about a company (unless you're buying lots of them, e.g. if your at a company that supplies employees with phones).
Somewhat less anecdotally, I worked Helpdesk at a company ~3 yrs ago, and most of our employees had either Lenovo's (T61's, T400s) or MBP's. I didn't notice a significant difference in the failure rate between the two.
I would agree, but do note that one iPhone was dropped in a cup of tea, which I can't really blame on Apple, and the other on cement, which I likewise can't really blame on Apple.
The macbooks both had bad video cards, which I do blame Apple for. But one was fixed in less than an hour, the other RMA'd and returned in 48 hours. This after almost 3 years of continuous use. I can put up with 2 or 3 days of repair after that many years of trouble-free life.
This kind of service and reliability led me to buy an iMac from them as my work computer and I haven't had a single problem with it.
Over 13 years I have purchased 8 Apple laptops, three iMacs, five iPhones, and two iPads. With the Macs I have had three or four minor problems from time to time (covered under warranty), and have also had several iPhones replaced due to accidental damage (some for free). All were first gen purchases.
During this time I've also owned three Dell laptops, an Acer, and a Thinkpad. The Dells were mostly study though one's motherboard died. The Acer was also OK but was stolen so I didn't get a full life out of it.
In short, I'm quite happy with Apple quality, and have no desire to move away from them unless there's a very compelling alternative to come.
It's important to dispose of iPads in an environmentally friendly manner. There are lots of toxic materials and metals in the PCB and other components, and the batteries can start fires or emit noxious gases. Rather than throwing it away in the trash, I recommend sending it to me for proper disposal.
A great example of "no engineering applied past appearance":
The strain reliefs on every power adapter they make start out horrible, they fray, they get a lawsuit, then they fix them to look "uglier" but actually work.
Then they release a new power adapter that looks good but sucks again and the cycle continues.
I'm having trouble finding the lawsuit over the old powerbook connectors, so let's start with magsafe 1
Original magsafe 1: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4127
They got sued. This was the settlement. Note that every single magsafe power adapter i have frayed.
Whoops, back to the same issue of cables mostly bent at harsh angles due to T shaped adapters, and a smaller strain relief.
Admittedly, it's bigger than the original magsafe 1 strain relief, but I expect it's only a matter of time before these fray again.
It's not weird. Plenty of people have not had problems with aluminum wiring in their houses, even when screwed to copper fixtures. Others have had house fires.
The lack of a 100% instantaneous failure rate does not mean there was a good engineering design, or even any engineering design past appearance.
In the case of magsafe, the incidence and number of claims of fraying, actual wire melting, etc, was so high that it was very clearly "bad engineering".
(You are talking about at least tens of thousands of adapters that were actually replaced after actual signs of failure)
The case was settled through ADR 6 months after ADR starterd, and included apple agreeing to replace all adapters that showed any signs of strain relief failure for up to three years from the date of the initial settlement.
I've been doing the exact same thing for years. I now use a T61p. It's amazing that these things are around $200 on eBay. The Linux support is fantastic, and the laptop is powerful enough to even brand new games. The 1920x1200 resolution yields 147 PPI, which is as high as laptops go without getting Apple's retina display. I like having a fast laptop that I really don't have to fiddle with and costs a small fraction of what you buy an MBP for. And my warranty plan? If a laptop breaks (this has never happened, mind you), a replacement laptop is less than the cost of AppleCare itself.
It is evidence for you, personally, yes. However, in aggregate, for all consumers, it is anecdata. There are people who swear by the opposite experience, of years of bad issues with non-Apple tech until they switched over. The ultimate problem with this discussion is that yours is only one data point, when a full survey would be required to determine which manufacturer is best. At the same time, sympathies for your bad experiences and best of luck with the new tech.
I wonder how often these studies are taken- annually? Quarterly? It'd be neat if they were done frequently, rather like polls during campaign season. Maybe a month or two after major product launches to gauge if satisfaction has changed.
To rebut his claim though you'd need a survey asking people how many times they've had faulty components/hardware. Not how good they feel about the supplier.
Not really - basic psych says that a person who needed repairs and had them done in an emotionally pleasing way will be happier about the supplier than a person who didn't need repairs and so didn't care.
But rationally it's quite clear that it is better to not need repairs (=waste time) in the first place.
It's the same as in many jobs - saving the day in a disaster will get more praise than preventing a disaster from happening; but, of course, prevention is far more valuable.
Ah good point. Although I would agree that it's better to not need the repairs in the first place. Either way, Apple has clearly been doing a good job satisfying their customers.
Not only is it anecdotal, these sorts of discussions seem to bring all the outliers out of the woodwork. There are always going to be some people who have many bad experiences with a company, even if overall reliability is good. Here is the relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/882/
They are soundly engineered, but quality control leaves something to be desired. If you don't think the engineering is applied past appearance, open one up and see for yourself.
While Apple may tend to cut corners in reliability, they generally aren't doing it to out of laziness or to save money but rather to make their products smaller, lighter, and smoother. It takes a lot of effort on the part of designers to squeeze functionality into a size and weight budget, just as much as to make something reliable, and I think that saying that "no engineering was applied past appearance" is horribly unfair.
Now, not everybody is OK with trading off reliability for those things. My friend who worked on an Apple product in some capacity[1] was horrified at what they were doing and warned me never to get the Apple product they worked on for this reason. But I did anyways because of the shiny, and despite the fact that it did end up breaking down in the way they warned about I don't actually regret it.
[1] I'm being paranoidly vague here since they broke an NDA telling me this and Apple is renowned for being litigious about these things.
Don't act like the T6x series was perfect, they had plenty of issues too. They used cheap coils that would squeal when running on battery power. The heat sink fan is a cheap design and fails frequently. I had to replace mine 3 times with remaned ones because they don't sell them new anymore. The battery life is poor compared to MacBooks, even with the giant extended battery that sticks way off the back. Their weight (mid to upper 5 lbs) is heavy compared to rMBP and Airs.
This isn't even factoring in their performance vs newer laptops.
You've had four different products that have either melted, caught fire, or suffered hardware failures? Are you sure it's not an issue with the power coming out of your outlets? Perhaps the Lenovos have better power filtering, but by the sound of it, you're pretty paranoid about those failing, too.
I bought the Macbook Pro retina back over the summer and was a little upset when a small dead pixel cluster appeared on the display after about a month of use.
I brought it back to the apple store (i did not purchase applecare). I was told that this was happening in about 1 our of every 40 MBP retinas and they happily replaced the display in less than 24 hours.
I'm not implying that my situation is "unique/new/ particularly note-worthy" but it is just as antidotal as yours and ended with a positive outcome.
our designer had the same problem: after 2 weeks of usage some dead pixels appeared right in the middle of the retina display. unfortunatly in austria we don't have a apple store - just resellers. he was told that he should try to send it back but that there is a tolerance of pixels that are allowed to be dead, so actually those few dead pixels are tolerable. he decided to send it back anyway, i wonder what will happen...
When I went to have it looked at, the Apple store employee was fairly sympathetic even though it failed the test (he told me that people do fail it, but that more often than not it's just below the threshold). He told me to keep trying the test at the store until it fails. Whether other Apple store employees will be as sympathetic, I don't know.
Is corporate trying to sweep it under the rug? Maybe. But this is a costly repair for a part that is in incredibly high demand. It's not right and I'm frustrated about it, but I'm not surprised.
The reaction expected from you is rage, and not frustration and helplessness. I don't know of any other company that would kick its customers in the nuts and that too the early adopters.
Remember that apple sells millions of these things and we are <200 commenters on a website filled with edge case power users.
Odds are that a good amount of buyers either don't care or haven't noticed the problem. It's not kicking their customers in the nuts. They poorly structured the evaluation method to set a threshold for repair and are having to backtrack and fix an expensive quality control mistake.
They're not kicking me in the nuts. They're a company of humans that has to deal with a problem in a way that satisfies their suppliers, shareholders, and engineers. I've found greater success in approaching problems like this with rationality. With lots of noise, maybe the test will change (only 30 seconds on the grey screen will make a metric shit-ton of the units qualify for replacement).
If the customers start sympathizing like that then they're going to stop listening to us and only act according to the other constraints you mentioned.
If i go and buy a Pro Retina, the screen is the last thing i want trouble with, and if they fail in ensuring that it works, they should just replace it. Period. I don't give a damn about thresholds and whether im being 'reasonable' in whining or not. Maybe it's just me i want the best when i pay for it. Screw the shareholders and suppliers.
Really, I've found the case to be just the opposite.
I have a friend who had a 15" MBP, prob circa 2009. He kept complaining that a pixel would be missing on the screen on occassion. He tried to point it out to me, but it's something I never noticed. He took it to the Apple store multiple times, and they said they fixed it, but nothing was ever changed according to him. Finally, when he took it back one final time, they just replaced it with the newest 15" MBP available at the time.
I was a bit surprised.
I thought Apple got this concept but PR is more than just spinning half-truths on TV to make the company look good. The highest calling of PR is the ability to say "it will cost more than we made selling this thing to fix it, but we need to do it anyway."
Companies that care about their reputations have guys like that head their PR departments and listen to them when they say this.
Frankly, you expect this kind of behavior from companies that are costing on autopilot with no one willing to take responsibility for anything at the helm. It is surprising to see it from Apple.
Had this happen to my Retina MacBook Pro too. Went to the Apple store and after some pleading was able to get them to place an order for a new one. Two weeks of glazing over staring at ghosts later I go to pick it up. They upgraded the replacement to the largest size SSD for free! It was all down hill after that.
I had to transfer my data from the lemon. The Geniuses on staff were clearly unfamiliar with some of the quirks of Migration Assistant. I offered to do the migration myself if they gave me a Thunderbolt cable. That ends up forcing me to spend another hour in the store, which of course I use to check for signs of ghosting on the new machine.
Like the lemon, the new one is an LG panel as well. Word on the forums is that only the LG panels have the ghosting issue. I ask the Genius if I can swap once more before leaving the store. He says no. I head home anxiously, hoping my screen is pure.
Nope. While it is still one of the best computers I have ever used, it is just unacceptable to be gambling $4000 for hardware I rely on. I will be trying for another exchange soon because there is really no other option, but the standards for "it just works" have noticeably slipped across the company.
I don't want this question to sound loaded and threaded with negative connotations for/against apple but why would you label the computer as "one of the best I have ever used" if one of the primary interfaces to the user is repeatedly faulty?
I'm not a Mac user. My work and personal desires drive me towards Windows/Linux and I would have foregone any manufacturer that pulled that type of behavior on me (as I have with numerous retailers already). Sort of a "fool me once" type scenario as I see it.
> I don't want this question to sound loaded and threaded with negative connotations for/against apple but why would you label the computer as "one of the best I have ever used" if one of the primary interfaces to the user is repeatedly faulty?
Because mac users tend to put the weight and thinness of the machine over anything else and since the rMBP is the thinnest and lightest 15" laptop it makes it the "best". Hell, Apple is doing the "thin/small and light" thing even with their "desktop" machines like the iMac and Mac Mini.
Mac and PC users just have different set of priorities. I used to own macs but I fully went back to the PC because being able to handle repairs myself in a timely manner is much more important than the niceties of OS X for me, particularly with desktop machines. The mac mini is not good enough for me, and the iMac is exactly what I don't want, if anything fails in the computer I want to be able to replace the part in five minutes and be done with it. That and the fact that the screen tends to outlive my computers in usefulness, I replace them less often than the parts of my desktop PC so buying a computer attached to the screen feels offensive to me.
The Mac Pro could've been an alternative but.. 2600 euros for a computer that is outdated in every single way out of the box is not attractive. Its GPU used to be a mid-range gamer card, used to, because it's not even mid-range in 2012, it's low end. If you build your own computer a GPU with that kind of performance will cost about ~100 to 150 euros, which is not acceptable for a 2600 eur computer. The rest (cpu, ram) is decent but still doesn't really warrant the price tag. It was good when it first launched.. that's about it.
Good question - it is something I regularly wrestle with myself as I evaluate the various hardware and software options out there. In the end though, it always is a matter of tradeoffs based on your personal value system.
For the past few years, the most valuable property that I have tried to maximize when pitting multiple hardware offerings against each other is time. For other people it may be money, gaming performance, or other intrinsic values such as freedom.
For me, buying the latest Apple hardware as default has become the easiest way to maximize time: I do not need to perform exhaustive research across the market, the shopping experience is smooth, support is same day and local, the resale value is high and selling is easy, the hardware supports the tools I have built my current workflow around (a UNIX command line, emacs shortcuts system-wide, Xcode for iOS development, Photoshop, etc.), and configuration and backup is simple (iTunes, Migration Assistant, Time Machine, and iCloud for a limited scope of data).
Now obviously a lot of this is a result of vendor lock-in, which I try to remain vigilant about. How did I get fooled into being locked in?
It is simply a result of a string of great experiences early on in my dealings with the company. All companies provide varying levels of experience across their lineup of products and services. In my opinion, Apple manages to have more peaks in more fields that matter to me. The early positive experiences in areas that resonate deeply with me, built a great deal of respect and trust in the people who create things at Apple, earning them the spot as my default hardware
Regarding the Retina MacBook Pro product specifically: it is still "one of the best [computers] I have ever used" because it hits peaks in many right spots. The performance, portability, keyboard and trackpad, how it fits in my backpack and on my desk, design, ecosystem, and OS X are all positives for me. What I believe to be low points (Wi-Fi issues, video card performance in certain situations, Mission Control, the annoying MagSafe 2 adapter, iPhoto woes, etc.), are tradeoffs I am willing to make.
The "ghosting" is the one point I cannot concede. I work with pixels and color too much to let it slide. Thus far, Apple has offered me one replacement, with a free SSD update thrown in. I consider that great support, but poor quality control.
This is an interesting tradeoff because of how the two fields are closely related. Poor quality control necessitates good support. Whether that support is good enough (or the quality control poor enough) for me to continue leaving Apple's hardware as my default depends on whether they offer me another replacement, and whether that one is satisfactory.
Times change though. Open hardware and software is more important to me than ever. We must all be able to tune the properties of our hardware and software to our liking, without sacrificing the state of the art.
I have the Macbook Pro that keeps making a constant white noise right after the machine boots up. The sound is loud enough when I am by myself that it totally distracts me. I have had 3 mac laptops before and this is the loudest one by bar. After I compared my machine with a close friend who has an exact machine (same late October last year generation), I realized that the machine had some issues.
I took it to the apple store. They said they tested it and could not "hear" the noise. So they wouldn't do anything about it. Yet when I put my macbook pro next to any laptop, everyone can tell my laptop is the loudest.
I have become one of their disappointed customers.
Apple seems to have pulled back on the whole positive customer experience in store this year, I've had issues with marking below the display surface and they instantly said "not a defect, £350 please", except it looks like the tolerance on my Air is off. It's a shame, they're starting to reduce customer satisfaction in maximisation of profits, rather than increasing profits through customer satisfaction.
I had the exact same issue ("ghosting"), found it was an LG screen (which are known to have this issue), went to the Apple Store, and got it replaced under the guarantee. Just had to show the issue once, no further questions asked. Got it back with new screen after 3 days.
This was in Switzerland. Would be surprised, though, if they had such drastically different replacement or repair policies for such an obvious issue.
406 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadIn both cases it's not an issue of price it's an issue of Apple doesn't deserve my money and any transactions that I have to do with them will be solely based on accessing iOS users.
EDIT: I couldn't find the default warranty (sans AppleCare) and based this comment off of other similar situations (including OP). I found out this morning that it IS COVERED by the default warranty, so I'm not unhappy anymore. This is my bad.
http://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/
See also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19788361
Second gen Macbook Air's had Logic board issues, 2007 era RevA Macbook Pros had video card issues, dodgy graphics cards on the early Mac Pros, the iPhone4 antenna, the list is endless. Often it's taken years for the issues to be resolved and Apple to pay for repairs, if at all.
It's simple, if you want the shiniest tech, buy whatever Apple is selling today. If you want reliable hardware, wait for the first revision when the kinks have been worked out. That way we don't all get spammed with the histronics of endless bloggers who think this is a new phenomenon.
The point isn't with the fact that there is an issue, its that Apple is seemingly trying to sweep it under the rug.
>I remember an Apple that bent over backwards to understand its customers’ point of view and stretched itself to meet the high expectations it sets.
Apple has always bent over to resolve issues for customers if they acknowledge the issue. For example, I had a pre-unibody MBP that the power button pushed through the top case. Apple very promptly took it back, replaced the top case and a few other cosmetic dings I hadn't complained about, and got it back to me.
On the other hand, Apple also has a long history of refusing to acknowledge some issues and giving the customer the run around on them, which is the type of complaint in this article.
I don't think that's quite it. Apple realises there's a problem, and that's why they have the standardised test. I think the real problem here is that Apple's test is insufficient, but they don't know that, so they don't believe their customers when they say they're having still having issues. And that's not reassuring for someone who's just spent a lot of money on a new machine.
Personally, I've never had this issue with my rMBP, but I'm sympathetic with those that do.
I personally can't see how they could not know, this is not the kind of issue where ppl are going to be blowing there whistle for no reason. So Apple knows there is an issue, if there own tests do not match the numbers of complains(to some degree) even more red flags should be going up.
I am no conspiracy theorist, but there seems to be some valid points in the article.
> The point isn't with the fact that there is an issue, its that Apple is seemingly trying to sweep it under the rug.
I think you missed the whole point of OP post: That is exactly what Apple has a reputation for doing. For example: The Antenna Fiasco -
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphon...
If that were true...
the software industry would be in REAL trouble.
[1]: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
[2]: http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause
I also had an issue with a 1Gen time capsule, which when it broke got replaced in store no questions asked.
I guess I have been lucky?
Issues can appear, especially with first gen products. I can totally understand that. I cannot for the life of me understand how Apple decided to handle this issue. I’m just not used to Apple treating their customers with contempt and treating them like stupid idiots.
I never had an issue, and despite everyone at my office having iPhone4s and 4Ss, the only time any of us were ever able to affect antenna-strength was having a wet hand, and then purposefully applying a lot of pressure to attempt to attenuate the case.
It could be the signal-strength display "fix" was hiding issues (actually, this is almost certainly the case), but in practice, it was never an issue, and the 4 had consistently better signal than any other device I've owned, including a GalaxyS2 since the iPhones could get a good enough signal in elevators that previous phones (both iPhone and Android) didn't.
And despite being the same basic design AFAICT, never seen a mention of the issue with the iPhone5.
Person A: Apple is amazing. Antenna-gate was mass media nonsense.
Person B: I, personally, had major problems with the antenna.
Person C: Why don't you just get rid of your phone then? No one told you to buy one.
Or, I can demand the quality and service I expect from a premium product. What's wrong with that?
One issue doesn't mean you have to hate the phone as a whole, or stop using it. The more acceptable response is to ask that the issue be fixed. Just because an iPhone has signal issues that are inconvenient doesn't mean it's not the phone that this person likes better than the others.
The point is, the iPhone is what these customers were looking for. They still like it enough to keep it, and they like it enough to complain when there are quality issues rather than switch.
What possible other response from a customer service perspective could you want here?
The iPhone 4S and 5 has a different antenna design and (i think) has some kind of coating on the metal frame to lessen the issue.
Cost me over $600, after I already purchased AppleCare. It's all good now though, I've been pirating Logic and Final Cut for years so it's pretty much paid back. :)
(Tell me very honestly, if you think the logo of this small coffee shop in Germany has really any similarity with Apple's logo, except the fact that both of them are derived from the fruit apple!) http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1231539-Apple-sues-small...
That poor woman just sold coffee, not electronic devices. Any sane mind would not find any 'infringement', unless they believe Apple 'owns' the fruit itself now.
Second, they sue an online GROCERY shop from Poland since its website name is "a.pl". ".pl" is the top level domain code for Poland, a is the first alphabet. Even they are not competing with Apple in any manner, but it claims "they are using our reputation". WTF! http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409669,00.asp
They always know that small businesses can't fight back, so they are easy targets. No, please don't come up with arguments like "What's wrong with defending your brand?". This is NOT defending your brand. There's no brand name getting hurt here. You just think you own the fruit.
Yeah, will be discouraging anyone I know from buying their products (not that I liked them to begin with)
Other corporations do this all the time, but apart from the Olympic Committee, which sues anyone and anything with "Olympic" in their name, most don't have a regular English word as their name. This leads to more conflict in practice, and Apple must, according to the law, work harder to "defend" their brand or have it weakened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_dilution
Different standards apply to famous marks vs. regular trademarks. Imagine if a company which made heavy mining equipment had a logo of a swoosh with a hardhat inside. Would Nike be justified in claiming trademark dilution? Absolutely. Or if that same heavy mining equipment manufacturer had a logo of a big rounded arching M with a hardhat on it. McDonalds would legitimately claim dilution there as well, even though the restaurant has no plans to get into the mining industry. These situations would not be dissimilar to an apple logo with a child's head inside.
It's easy to say "poor woman" but the cafe owner must comply with trademark law, imperfect as it is. I hope she prevails actually. However, the process must be allowed to continue. She filed for a trademark application. Apple has apparently contested the trademark registration and sent the cafe owner a cease & desist letter on the side, hoping she'll voluntarily withdraw the application. She doesn't want to withdraw, so now it's in the hands of the German trademark office to sort out.
Any multi-national brand will do this and I wouldn't call it extortion when they're not asking for money.
You can argue it's heavy handed or even bullying, but it's not extortion.
Google used to ask people to not use Google as a verb; Bic pens write letters if bic is used as a generic instead of ballpoint; everyone does it because they have to do it.
Sure, it's annoying that a huge multinational company spends money on lawyers against a teeny tiny company. But it's not Apple, it's the system.
I think this could be an OS issue/graphics driver issue. I sometimes notice things "behind" my dark grey Xcode editor window - like for example, I can see this website in Safari behind Xcode. However, sometimes, I see stuff that isn't directly behind Xcode - but it is in another Space.
If the hardware test is succeeding, and you are only seeing "ghosting" on particularly colored windows, I think it is safe to say it may not be the display. (It still may be the display. I'm just saying there are more variables here, and I don't have all of your information.)
If it were a software problem Apple would probably not be replacing any screens at all or even performing a screen test.
Companies like Dell can hide behind several factors, like their notebooks are usually priced a lot lower, quality expectations aren't as high, and they make such a dizzying number of models that any problems are diluted.
I do hope it gets more press so that the problem can be properly addressed, Apple does pay attention to the squeaky wheels after all, but don't get all crazy now. Nobody's dying because their screen has a ghosting issue.
I'm curious if this is something more widespread or if the author got unlucky and has simply suffered for the first time what many others have suffered previously.
still, the fact that the applecare universe works like that at all is a bit disheartening especially if you have a legitimate hardware issue but an unsympathetic genius.
Camera artifacts? "You're holding it wrong." [1]
Burn-in? "Does not compute."
Scruffing on the iPhone 5 [2]? People don't even bother to write about it. Same for the poor performance on Retina devices. Unless you're someone like Anandtech who are so meticulous many don't bother to read the fint print.
Maybe it's time we got some Apple-specific buyer's guides from people who don't grade on a curve. I still want to buy Apple products (not first-edition versions, though), but I want to know what I'm in for.
[1]: http://gizmodo.com/5947972/apple-acknowledges-iphone-5-camer...
[2]: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/17/hon-hais-explanation-...
I haven't heard people losing their shit because their $4,000 Sony laptop webcam isn't as amazing as Sony promised.
Apple, fuck you! Why do you do this to your customers? Why do you torture them like that? Still!
I really believed that by now you would have solved that problem. After I got my Samsung screen I honestly stopped reading the forums because it brought down my mood. To know hear – months later – that they still haven’t solved the issue in any real way makes me just angry and sad.
This is not excusable. Excuses about this being a first gen product are obviously not valid. If you can’t sell it in a satisfactory manner, you have to give your customers their money back (or give them Samsung screen which are, unlike LG screens, not affected by the issue).
I'm exploring alternatives, but that is years out.
I'm sure Apple would be happy to refund you. If the Apple store won't help, try shooting an email to tcook@.
If they can’t reliably make a laptop without it being defect they can’t sell it. Make a recall and stop selling rMBPs until you nail the issue down. Problem solved. Wimping out with lame excuses is not the way to go.
And for what it's worth - "[...] Supply chain management at Apple's scale is unbelievably hard." How do you think Samsung feels?
Samsung feels fine. They're making billions.
Oh by the way, Samsung deserves everything they get from Apple. Since Samsung has been down this road before; TV, business phones - it's a long list of products Samsung copied, dumps onto the market and then hides behinds it's "culture". Meanwhile Samsung now has carved a foot hold in your market. Effective strategy. And it's worked for them for years.
What I find funny is that it all goes around. Cause now Samsung is being copied by cheap Chinese knock-offs. Who are flooding the Chinese market.
Who was it at Apple who said, after you reach a certain level, there are no more excuses?
The cost of those two replacements is probably why they came out with this test.
> But that they still have not solved that problem that is plain as day fucking sucks!
Considering that they have billed the Retina MBP as something to be used by designers and content creators, they shouldn't limit things to an arbitrary test. If the problem is perceived as a problem and can be consistently detected, double blind, then it should be replaced, period.
I now buy OLD Lenovo machines (T61 series) and chuck Debian on them. I buy two at a time and stick a (Samsung) SSD in them for less than half the cost of an MBP. One lives in the cupboard as a backup. I have a few spare batteries (9-cell and Ultrabay) sitting around as well.
Also, I find it objectionable purchasing anything that doesn't have a way of isolating the power either i.e. removing the battery. One short on a LiPoly pack and your tech gadget turns neatly into an incendiary device, which is what happened to my 2010 MBP. It nearly burned my house down.
I genuinely don't get all these people who think they are soundly engineered. They are expensive trinkets with no engineering applied past appearance.
Apple's work on the unibody case is but one example of how they're pushing manufacturing technology as far as it can go today. Other vendors are content to stamp out the same old plastic clamshell, to fit in the same old motherboard and optical drive, whatever's cheapest and quickest.
With the exception of Sony and HP, few companies even try to do what Apple's doing.
It's engineering, but it's not SOUND ENGINEERING.
I stand by my expensive trinket comment.
Buy a Lenovo T-series and you'll understand.
Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. I hope they've improved the trackpad because those were nearly unusable before.
I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing.
Maybe you should get your head out of the gutter and realize a laptop isn't deemed "good" because it's an alternative to "what Apple's doing".
Edit: And to whoever downvoted this, thank you for proving my point.
If you want to buy power tools, a watch, a car, you have many choices of first-rate products. When it comes to computers it's such a broken marketplace. It'd be a world where there's BMW and a whole bunch of Hyundai-type companies.
I have my head in the gutter because I have standards? Expectations? That appearances do matter? Sorry if I don't come from the school of function trumping form, and that I care about attention to details.
It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value.
That's fine, and that's perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, I think you are missing the point, since Apple products don't have any of those qualities (especially vendor support, given the text of the linked article...). I might bend a bit on build quality (especially since a majority of the parts aren't manufactured by Apple to begin with, and the parts that are do generally have good durability), but I see absolutely no advantage by Apple in the other departments.
And really, how good of a metric metric is build quality when the entire computer ends up super-glued together?
Build quality/durability is quite a tough pickle to nail statstics on. Used Apple sales may still carry a higher price tag because people paid more for them in the first place, or because of the brand name. % of devices still running to their consumer's satisfaction is a statistic I haven't seen before, and might be skewed by the type of respondents. Some of the tests done here that I put stock into are actually some of the most interesting: like dropping Nintendo cartridges from 3 story buildings, or leaving a laptop in your freezer or out on the hot pavement for an hour to see what happens when you try to use them again. There are a lot of stories here about what kind of abuse their laptops take, but I would go on over to Youtube and actually look at some people who went out of their way to record this. Word of mouth and anecdotes really do dominate this area, so I can't say much about this outside of personal experience, which really comes down to "Wait at least a year, do at least an hour's research, and hope you're lucky". Even within a brand, some products are very durable while others are flimsy.
ASUS falls off that list when it comes to vendor support, but Sony, Dell and Lenovo all offer support, though I have never come across useful vendor support, so I'll have to keep quiet about that. Generally I try to buy equipment that is durable enough not to fail within that warranty period, and after that I'll move on.
The T-Series thinkpads -- more like a Toyota Hilux.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17514172
Regarding appearance, and? Does that really matter?
Why you pick a ThinkPad: http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg
That and you can throw the damn thing across the room and it'll still work. Mine is 5 years old, has been thrown, dropped, spilled on, yanked off the table, stood on and it's as good as new.
I'm not a fanboy - the thing is just built to last which when you're spending n-thousand dollars is a shit load more important than the shiny factor which you are obviously obsessed with.
Compressing the bottom of the case will short.
It's badly designed.
What environment are you using your laptop in that's allowing condensation to form inside the device? Electronics are typically not rated for use in condensing environments at all.
Air gaps as insulators are pretty typical in electronics. That's how it works in every desktop machine I've ever used. And it looks like the air gap inside the MBP is plenty large, and even if it weren't, the attached components would be making contact with the case, not the board itself.
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+M...
I think the "condensation inside the case" theory is incorrect. I don't know if that's your own theory or if someone working for Apple told you that, but I don't see that as feasible. You'd need a lot of liquid inside the case for a short to involve the case. And frankly, if you've got any liquid inside your laptop, the fact that the case is metal is irrelevant.
> Regarding appearance, and? Does that really matter?
Of course not. No one cares about the way their $1300 device looks any more. As a society, we moved past caring about appearances in 1992.
I can think of a pretty easy hypothetical--have the laptop indoors, powered down in a very cool air conditioned room for enough time to make it cool. Then take it outside in a high humidity region like Florida and turn it on. Bam, condensation inside the device.
The number of MacBooks in the environment that I work in that have serious dents, battle damage from severe falls, outnumbers those that don't, and they're all in functioning condition. Don't think that Lenovo laptops are the only ones that are durable.
If you look at the resale value for a MacBook it's a lot higher than a Lenovo. I'm sure there's something other than "shiny" that makes a five year old MacBook still have significant value.
I rather enjoy the availability of cheap good recycled laptops such as the Lenovo Thinkpads.
I suspect the lower price compared to Apple laptops of similar vintage may have to do with the volume available, and the tendency of corporate purchasers to refresh their stock en masse.
If my hypothesis is correct, one would expect to see a drop in resale value of Apple laptops in the future as the volume increases, and as they are seen more in the corporate world in larger numbers.
I don't even have a dog in this fight except for the following facts
1) I am a current owner of the storied T61 and 2) I have grown fond of the stupendously neat rMBP and am mulling getting one.
Now that I've been made familiar with the fact that the T61 is in very small company of notebooks that can put up with even moderate household battery - a fact I've long suspected but never gloated about, given it's outmodedness - I am suddenly struck with angst over my limited options.Yes, T61 is all those things that the author mentioned.
My T61 has survived falls on hardwood floors, physical shocks in poorly padded cases and other uncharitable abuse.
I just can't fathom the prospect of not being able to do all those things to my new notebook, whatever the eventual pick is.
rMBP owners: Please do share your insights into the mean level of abuse your units have handsomely survived.
I do not own a rMBP, but laptops in general are not as fragile as we sometimes imagine. Most of the failures I've experienced over the years have been for things unrelated to drops. I've had a dead screen backlight, a dead trackpad (water spill), and similar one-off failures. I've also seen overheating, failed logic boards, and of course dead batteries. I've never seen a laptop that died because someone dropped it (though obviously that can happen).
However, if you drop a metal laptop, you're likely to get scratches and dents. You won't see that as much on a Thinkpad because the plastic will shrug this off better. With cheaper plastic laptops, you might see cracked plastic.
If you drop your laptop a lot, you might want something like a ThinkPad just so it won't get dinged up. But then you might want to just stop dropping your laptop so much.
After using it for 4 months daily travelling cross-continent for development, presentations, and running multiple virtual machines, it's the finest laptop I've owned - by far the fastest and most aesthetically pleasing.
For background, I've owned three Dell Inspirion or Latitudes, a Thinkpad T61, three MacBook Pros, a Macbook Air, and three PowerBook G3/G4s.
I'm a continuous early adopter of first gen Apple technology - I've had some mishaps (heat on the first MBP that needed a warranty repair; poor backlight on a pre-unibody Macbook Pro, poor signal reliability on the first AirPort Extreme, and case flex on the early PowerBook G4s and MacBook Pros) but nothing that made me curse their name. I was lucky to avoid the logic board issues on the iBook G3s which was the worst experience I know of based on my friends' experiences.
A week or so ago, I was riding my bicycle on the comute from work and had to avoid a psychopath in a car. I'd forgotten to close the straps over the rMBP and it went flying off the back of the bike, skittered along the bitumen for a couple of metres and smashed into a gutter. It's not quite as handsome as it was, but despite landing on the screen corner everything still lines up perfectly, opens and closes perfectly and works perfectly.
That's the point!
Thinkpad T series laptops are what apple laptops can only dream of being.
I reckon my T61 wouldn't get nicked and can quite happily use it on a train out of London even at night without being fussed.
The same could not be said for a MacBook which just has "mug me" written on it.
After my Macbook Pro died, I switched to Lenovo because how much work and fraught with difficulty keeping Linux running on the MBP was. Installs have been easier, but now I've found I've made a whole host of different sacrifices, mainly the crappy feeling you mentioned. They are not as solid as my good old pre-unibody MBP.
And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there. In fact, I don't even use a mouse with my desktop - I have a USB version of the ThinkPad keyboard[0]. With the TrackPoint, you can use the mouse without ever moving your hand from the home position on the keyboard. It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad.
And instead of the stupid "two-finger scrolling" you see on Macs these days, you can hold the middle mouse button and push up or down with the TrackPoint to scroll infinitely.
And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important.
Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality.
> I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier.
You really need to stop drinking the Apple Kool-aid and realize that there are far superior laptops to the MacBooks.
0: http://i.imgur.com/oVKgB.jpg
I don't see how it is. It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row.
When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable?
In fact, I have completely disabled the trackpad on my ThinkPad in the BIOS. I have no need for it when there's the TrackPoint.
Quick switching between keyboard and mouse is indeed a strength of the TrackPoint, and if you need to do that a lot, the TrackPoint might be superior. Some mitigating factors: one, imo Apple trackpads best shine when used for reading (web pages or PDFs), where it's not necessary to use the keyboard at all; two, unlike a mouse, the trackpad on my MBP is just a rotation of my right wrist away, which is certainly more than the rotation I would need to access a TrackPoint, but not unbearably disruptive. However, it's certainly true that when I'm on the keyboard, I try to stay on the keyboard (which is why I'm a vim user, heh).
For scrolling, Apple trackpads offer almost direct manipulation, which affords a sheer ease and precision that a mouse certainly cannot compete with; I'm skeptical that a TrackPoint can. Note also that you can do a quick scroll without having to actually press any buttons, just the wrist rotation and a flick; or if you're already moving the pointer, it's insanely easy to switch to a scroll. And there are other gestures: zooming, for instance, is certainly possible with other input methods, but doing it with direct manipulation on a trackpad again allows unmatched precision and doesn't require clicking any buttons. Or use three fingers to quickly flick between Spaces, if you're the kind of person that uses those; a keyboard shortcut would work, but the trackpad is very convenient.
(I never had a laptop with a TrackPoint, fwiw, so I can't personally compare both; keep in mind, though, that experience with a non-Apple trackpad is not really a good substitute for an Apple one either.)
[edited.]
I don't think this is particularly true, especially for web browsing. For example, in responding to your comment, I just had to copy and paste your text to quote it. Because of the TrackPoint, I was able to easily copy and paste the text while keeping my hands in essentially one place.
If I were using a trackpad, I would have had to (a) move my hand onto the trackpad, (b) select the text, (c) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+c, (d) move my hands back to the trackpad to move the cursor to the input box and click in it, (e) move my hands back to the keyboard to hit Ctrl+v. That's back and forth twice. Just to copy and paste some text.
As a side note, text selection is something else I've found to be frustrating with trackpads, especially the new "clickpads" which don't have separate mouse buttons. It's hard to press down and move your finger at the same time. This isn't an issue at all with the TrackPoint, though.
> the trackpad on my MBP is just a rotation of my right wrist away
Perhaps it's because I'm not experienced with trackpads, but I have found that I really have to lift my hand up and move it down, using my arm muscles, to access any trackpad.
> For scrolling, Apple trackpads offer almost direct manipulation, which affords a sheer ease and precision that a mouse certainly cannot compete with; I'm skeptical that a TrackPoint can.
I just got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon a few days back, an ultrabook which reviews have said has a trackpad comparable to that on the MacBooks. Out of curiosity, I thought I'd try using it, but I found it to be no less precise than a TrackPoint and much more tedious to use.
I think part of the issue is that the TrackPoint has a learning curve that the trackpads do not. Most people give up on the TrackPoint before they ever learn how to use it properly. For whatever reason, when I got my first ThinkPad, I started using the TrackPoint extensively, and after a few weeks, I had the hang of it. Since you're also a Vim user, perhaps you can understand it as similar to the difference between using a plain-old text editor and Vim, in terms of the learning curve and eventual advantages.
> And there are other gestures: zooming, for instance, is certainly possible with other input methods, but doing it with direct manipulation on a trackpad again allows unmatched precision and doesn't require clicking any buttons. Or use three fingers to quickly flick between Spaces, if you're the kind of person that uses those; a keyboard shortcut would work, but the trackpad is very convenient.
I don't have much experience with zooming - it really hasn't ever been necessary on a computer for me to use it on a regular basis, so I can't comment on that.
As for window management, I've traditionally used XMonad, so keyboard shortcuts are how I get things done with respect to window management. However, I have XFCE installed instead on my new laptop, so I'll see how that goes. Of course, OS X and Windows are much less customizable than Linux, so custom shortcuts may not be an option there.
Well, trackpad only requires one hand, the other one can stay on the left side of the keyboard for those keyboard shortcuts. Certainly can sitll be annoying if you have to actually type something, such as in the address bar.
> As a side note, text selection is something else I've found to be frustrating with trackpads, especially the new "clickpads" which don't have separate mouse buttons. It's hard to press down and move your finger at the same time. This isn't an issue at all with the TrackPoint, though.
Indeed, which is why I emulate the old style and click with my thumb while dragging with a finger - this works fine.
> Perhaps it's because I'm not experienced with trackpads, but I have found that I really have to lift my hand up and move it down, using my arm muscles, to access any trackpad.
It helps that I have big hands.
> Since you're also a Vim user, perhaps you can understand it as similar to the difference between using a plain-old text editor and Vim, in terms of the learning curve and eventual advantages.
I wouldn't be surprised - but I'm not convinced that the result is actually better than a trackpad.
> I don't have much experience with zooming - it really hasn't ever been necessary on a computer for me to use it on a regular basis, so I can't comment on that.
It makes fitting, say, the window with the portion of a PDF document you want to read relatively easy (although PDFs don't scroll and zoom nearly as smoothly as web pages in Safari; ugh).
> As for window management, I've traditionally used XMonad, so keyboard shortcuts are how I get things done with respect to window management.
Me too, actually - I use SizeUp, which lets me move windows to predefined regions of the screen with keyboard shortcuts, and since I also use Cmd-Tab extensively, a keyboard shortcut is superior for me here - but I know many people love their Spaces.
~2 is not "several" in modern english usage.
More to the point: personally, I use my thumb on the trackpad, so by your standards of evidence the track point is less efficient than the trackpad; my fingers never leave their home row positions, whereas yours do to use the track point. In reality, yes, it's personal preference.
It looks like at least 3 to 4 inches to me from the home row to the middle of the trackpad on the 13" MacBook Air: http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/macb...
On my X1 Carbon[0] it's 4" from the home row to the middle of the trackpad. Subtracting 0.5" for the separate mouse buttons, that would be 3.5" to the middle of the trackpad.
> personally, I use my thumb on the trackpad
Can you "two-finger scroll" with your thumb on the trackpad? And from what another post said, you have to rotate your wrist to do this anyway.
> so by your standards of evidence the track point is less efficient than the trackpad; my fingers never leave their home row positions, whereas yours do to use the track point.
What are you talking about? My fingers never leave the home row to use the TrackPoint. You do realize that the TrackPoint is located between the "G", "H", and "B" keys, right?
0: http://asset3.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/08/07/ThinkP...
The problem with the "stick" is that, like a game-pad controller, it operates like a steering wheel. It doesn't move the mouse directly, but it changes the rate at which the mouse is moving. This is a degree removed from actually steering the mouse and it's why it frustrates a lot of people.
If you're a "home row" person that's fine, we all have our preferences, but you're probably in the minority and the appeal of that feature is more limited than a responsive track-pad.
This really, is the end of the discussion for me. After using the trackpoint for years and becoming spoiled by being able to maintain proper posture at all times, not having a trackpoint on all of my other keyboards has lead me to slowly abandon mouse use wherever possible. For me, it is a choice between either a trackpoint or nothing at all. If I had a MBP, I would disable the trackpad entirely; it would only get in my way.
> And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there.
When you call someone ignorant, you should typically follow up with a factual statement and not just your personal opinion. In my experience, the TrackPoint is tedious and awkward. Good for you if you like it, but everyone else in the world isn't "ignorant" for having a different opinion.
> It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad.
Not in my experience, but a bigger issue is that the TrackPoint is abstracted further, which makes it less intuitive. If touching something on the screen directly is a first-level abstraction, introducing a mouse or trackpad is a second-level abstraction, because your motions are moving a proxy (the cursor) around on screen. The TrackPoint is a third-level abstraction, because you're using a joystick to move the proxy, so your motions are no longer paralleled on the screen (i.e. the cursor moves but you didn't actually move the TrackPoint).
> And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important. Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality.
This is just unadulterated Apple hate combined with some vacuous claims. This doesn't convince anyone that you're correct. It just makes you sound petty and bitter.
Funny, this is what I would call "personal opinion":
> the TrackPoint is tedious and awkward
And this is what I would call a "factual statement":
> It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row.
> When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable?
I would say that I have provided a much more factual basis for my argument than your explanation that it's "tedious and awkward".
> The TrackPoint is a third-level abstraction, because you're using a joystick to move the proxy, so your motions are no longer paralleled on the screen (i.e. the cursor moves but you didn't actually move the TrackPoint).
The fact that the TrackPoint doesn't move is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It allows you to scroll infinitely, never move your hand from the home row, etc.
Getting used to the TrackPoint is just a matter of time (a few days for me), but having to move your hands a lot when using a trackpad or mouse will never change - it's physical reality.
And if it's so difficult to use a joystick to control things, how is it that millions of people are able to play console video games without any problem? Many of the people who complain about the TrackPoint are the same people who play Wii, 360, or PS3 games that make extensive use of joysticks.
> This is just unadulterated Apple hate combined with some vacuous claims. This doesn't convince anyone that you're correct. It just makes you sound petty and bitter.
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I find no reason to return your ad hominem attack on me, so whatever.
Funny, I didn't call you "ignorant" right before I posted my opinion. I also made it clear that I was posting my personal experience (hence the term "my experience") and not making some blanket claim.
> And this is what I would call a "factual statement"
Nope. It's more efficient for you, perhaps. It is considerably less efficient for someone who finds it awkward. Moving my hand to the trackpad takes less than a second. I don't consider that a high cost.
If you find yourself in a type-mouse-type-mouse loop that repeats so rapidly that moving your hand to the trackpad is actually a significant cost, then the UI you're using is terrible. Or else you need to learn to use the tab key for switching between fields, which is faster than either the trackpad or the trackpoint.
As for your scrolling example, you're missing a couple of important details. First, modern trackpads support inertial scrolling, which means you can "flick" and then stop the scrolling when you get to the point you want. This is far faster than the trackpoint for long-distance scrolling. Second, the trackpad also supports more fine-grained speed control in general. The trackpoint has a very small range of motion, which means you're trading off speed and accuracy. The large surface of a modern trackpad gives both simultaneously. I can mouse from corner to corner on screen multiple times per second with a trackpad. I can also get extremely fine-grained control. I seriously doubt your trackpoint can match both the speed and accuracy (though you can presumably match one of them). This likely more than offsets the "home row advantage". And even if you could match the speed and accuracy from a hardware standpoint, you'd be asking for either extremely fine inputs from the finger (for control), or extremely firm inputs (for speed), both of which would be very suboptimal in terms of ease of use and comfort.
> The fact that the TrackPoint doesn't move is an advantage, not a disadvantage. It allows you to scroll infinitely, never move your hand from the home row, etc.
No, it's a tradeoff. If you value keeping your hands on the home row, then it might be an advantage for you. I value the intuitive interaction of the trackpad far more.
> Getting used to the TrackPoint is just a matter of time (a few days for me), but having to move your hands a lot when using a trackpad or mouse will never change - it's physical reality.
Sure. You can get used to just about anything. Whether there's value in doing so is a different question. For most people, the answer appears to be no, given the low popularity of the trackpoint. The tradeoff between speed and accuracy in the trackpoint will also never change. That's physical reality, too.
> And if it's so difficult to use a joystick to control things, how is it that millions of people are able to play console video games without any problem? Many of the people who complain about the TrackPoint are the same people who play Wii, 360, or PS3 games that make extensive use of joysticks.
This would be a more compelling argument if interacting with game menus via joystick weren't so annoying (especially if the game gives you a "cursor" to move with said joystick). A joystick is a very useful input method for gameplay because "keep moving in this direction" is a common need there. It's frustrating for traditional interfaces because "keep moving in this direction" is not common. "Jump to this, now this, now this" is far more common.
> I'm sorry you feel that way, but I find no reason to return your ad hominem attack on me, so whatever.
It's a little late to reach for the high road when you start by calling someone ignorant for holding a different opinion, and then end by claiming that Apple users are "chasing after the latest shiny bauble". Also, nothing I posted is actually an ad hominem attack, but if it makes you feel better to think so, please continue.
"No, conditioner is bettah."
C'mon people.... they all implement INotebook.
I think that you should stop using such inflammatory language and grow up a bit.
I don't have any strong opinions about either ThinkPads or MacBooks, but I do care about HN. If you're not trying to be civil, please try. If you are trying, please try harder. Thanks.
Not with 768 vertical pixels it isn't.
Aggregated studies of customer satisfaction seem to still be so much better for Apple than for other manufacturers, that it's a bit hard to blame it all on confirmation bias.
http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg
Lenovo's relatively low score is because they shift out lots of low quality consumer grade laptops (g-series) which are to be honest, just junk but earn them a lot of money. They don't even assemble them themselves. If you took just ThinkPad series machines, there would be a very different result.
Stop acting like a child.
And as for the flex test mentioned just above, it's not really an interesting test. It doesn't matter if anything flexes, it matters whether and when it breaks, and that's a test I'm not going to make. This is what I mean by making a product look solid, not be solid.
FWIW, I tend to carry two different MBPs from different ages holding them by the display regularly, and they're still alive and well after, respectively, years and months of abuse. And the first thing I did after buying the first one was dropping it off the table, which is twice the height that killed the T completely (after it wasting its battery completely after a year, that is, another feat that MBP didn't replicate).
Also, what the sibling said: stop acting like a child. Thank you.
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-s...
I'm still using, and loving, my T61P. If only there was a way to get an i5 or i7 in that lovely reliable chassis :(
If I paid that much of my own money I'd be very pissed. Given my experience, I will not be buying Lenovo machines. Dell however was quite a nice workhorse, still not in the same category as MBPs though.
FWIW, whenever I've had any trouble with getting support for Apple products, an email to sjobs@apple.com (now tcook@) solved the problem promptly. In my experience, the company does screw up, but if you bring a problem to their attention, they'll make it right.
I've never heard of a satisfied long term customer i.e. most of the praise comes from new users with shiny toys. My father has just been screwed by his 1st gen iPad because some of the apps will no longer install and IOS6 is not available (to the trash it goes), his white iPhone 4S has proximity sensor issues to the point it's unusable and they refuse to repair it, my boss's MBP LCD inverter melted, we've got a cupboard full of 7 dead Mac Minis in the office, the old optical mice just didn't work (the one with the little ball) or the logic board fell out inside and lets not even mention the time capsule saga or the OSX update which fucked the filesystems on lots of machines (10.5.3).
There is a whole million miles of these problems out there and so far it's usually kept covered by the reality distortion field.
Build process fine. Supply chain fine. But the inputs to those is unadulterated crap.
Fuck, I don't want to have to complain - I want something to just work with no problems. Screw sjobs@ / tcook@ pandering. Just make some shit that works.
Four MBPs, including a retina MBP. Couldn't be happier. Two iPads and two iPhones, switched to Android largely because of a new job and because I wanted a local environment for running vim.
See? Other people have anecdotes too. But I get that contrariness and the application of your own pet anecdotes over evidence is really fun, so continue, by all means.
However, I think it is fair to say that the majority of Apple fans often have a pretty frequent upgrade cycle. Consequently I don't think there are too many "long term customers" of Apple products in his sense of the word. I think Meaty is really going for "long term" customer as in - infrequent customer, keeping devices for long term.
If "people who keep old stuff" was what he was really going for, he's doing poorly at describing it, because I don't think that "long term customer" doesn't mean "customer who refuses to upgrade for geologic eras" among reasonable folks. And I certainly don't think an ecosystem where newer devices are generally preferred is a symptom of "bad engineering"--more "engineering decisions he doesn't like." Every MBP iteration has made me much more pleased to actually use the machine, and that's the core of what matters.
The only issue I ever had was with a balky videocard in the Mac Pro that would die after about 4 months of World of Warcraft. Apple was quick to replace the card twice without any troubles.
So everyone's mileage varies.
Since I recently upgraded to an SSD in the Mac Pro, and bumped up the memory to 32GB, I see no need to replace this machine until it suffers a serious mechanical failure. The only downside is that it'll forever be stuck running Lion.
This worked for me with my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 w/ an ATI HD5770 graphics card. I do have an issue where it often doesn't come back from sleep, so I never put it to sleep, but other than that it's been flawless so far. I haven't spent any time looking into the sleep issue, maybe it's a solvable problem.
By strictly hardware performance standards, the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 did not deserve to lose support so soon, and are still more than adequate. Especially the 8-core versions, which have benchmarks higher than many 2012 Macs.
If you have a 4 core model: I researched putting in replacement CPUs a while back (but never went through with it). Replacing a CPU in a Mac Pro is not the easiest and is a bit of a pain from what I hear, but it is possible, and if you have 4 cores right now you can get a serious CPU performance boost with the right 8 core CPU upgrades (2 x 4-core CPUs, that is). There are many options that will will work. If you're interested, I can give you more details on which CPUs work.
Thanks for the link to the workaround. Hopefully it isn't something that will get broken with updates.
Nevertheless, I'm going to try to make sure I have a full backup before doing any major OS X updates. I also have both a Lion backup (as well as an old Snow Leopard backup) that I can boot up in case I need to.
I don't blame you for you dislike of the Apple brand given how you've apparently been treated, but realize that your experience seems to be somewhat anomalous.
The macbooks both had bad video cards, which I do blame Apple for. But one was fixed in less than an hour, the other RMA'd and returned in 48 hours. This after almost 3 years of continuous use. I can put up with 2 or 3 days of repair after that many years of trouble-free life.
This kind of service and reliability led me to buy an iMac from them as my work computer and I haven't had a single problem with it.
During this time I've also owned three Dell laptops, an Acer, and a Thinkpad. The Dells were mostly study though one's motherboard died. The Acer was also OK but was stolen so I didn't get a full life out of it.
In short, I'm quite happy with Apple quality, and have no desire to move away from them unless there's a very compelling alternative to come.
It's important to dispose of iPads in an environmentally friendly manner. There are lots of toxic materials and metals in the PCB and other components, and the batteries can start fires or emit noxious gases. Rather than throwing it away in the trash, I recommend sending it to me for proper disposal.
The strain reliefs on every power adapter they make start out horrible, they fray, they get a lawsuit, then they fix them to look "uglier" but actually work. Then they release a new power adapter that looks good but sucks again and the cycle continues.
I'm having trouble finding the lawsuit over the old powerbook connectors, so let's start with magsafe 1
Original magsafe 1: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4127 They got sued. This was the settlement. Note that every single magsafe power adapter i have frayed.
There is an article in an atlantic that quotes a supposed apple employee saying they knew this was a bad idea. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/why-apples...
(Obviously, i don't think this is reliable sourcing, but it's plausible)
Newer magsafe 1: These are the ones that are sideways and have a much larger strain relief, and look like this: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/07/why-apples...
Great, problem solved, less strain.
Let's look at magsafe 2: http://photos.appleinsider.com/12.06.11-MBP-3.jpg
Whoops, back to the same issue of cables mostly bent at harsh angles due to T shaped adapters, and a smaller strain relief. Admittedly, it's bigger than the original magsafe 1 strain relief, but I expect it's only a matter of time before these fray again.
The lack of a 100% instantaneous failure rate does not mean there was a good engineering design, or even any engineering design past appearance.
In the case of magsafe, the incidence and number of claims of fraying, actual wire melting, etc, was so high that it was very clearly "bad engineering". (You are talking about at least tens of thousands of adapters that were actually replaced after actual signs of failure)
The case was settled through ADR 6 months after ADR starterd, and included apple agreeing to replace all adapters that showed any signs of strain relief failure for up to three years from the date of the initial settlement.
I wonder how often these studies are taken- annually? Quarterly? It'd be neat if they were done frequently, rather like polls during campaign season. Maybe a month or two after major product launches to gauge if satisfaction has changed.
But rationally it's quite clear that it is better to not need repairs (=waste time) in the first place.
It's the same as in many jobs - saving the day in a disaster will get more praise than preventing a disaster from happening; but, of course, prevention is far more valuable.
Now, not everybody is OK with trading off reliability for those things. My friend who worked on an Apple product in some capacity[1] was horrified at what they were doing and warned me never to get the Apple product they worked on for this reason. But I did anyways because of the shiny, and despite the fact that it did end up breaking down in the way they warned about I don't actually regret it.
[1] I'm being paranoidly vague here since they broke an NDA telling me this and Apple is renowned for being litigious about these things.
This isn't even factoring in their performance vs newer laptops.
Regarding owning two, its because I don't put all my eggs in one basket. Why buy one when you can have two for twice the cost.
I brought it back to the apple store (i did not purchase applecare). I was told that this was happening in about 1 our of every 40 MBP retinas and they happily replaced the display in less than 24 hours.
I'm not implying that my situation is "unique/new/ particularly note-worthy" but it is just as antidotal as yours and ended with a positive outcome.
Is corporate trying to sweep it under the rug? Maybe. But this is a costly repair for a part that is in incredibly high demand. It's not right and I'm frustrated about it, but I'm not surprised.
Odds are that a good amount of buyers either don't care or haven't noticed the problem. It's not kicking their customers in the nuts. They poorly structured the evaluation method to set a threshold for repair and are having to backtrack and fix an expensive quality control mistake.
They're not kicking me in the nuts. They're a company of humans that has to deal with a problem in a way that satisfies their suppliers, shareholders, and engineers. I've found greater success in approaching problems like this with rationality. With lots of noise, maybe the test will change (only 30 seconds on the grey screen will make a metric shit-ton of the units qualify for replacement).
Have some common sense.
Companies that care about their reputations have guys like that head their PR departments and listen to them when they say this.
Frankly, you expect this kind of behavior from companies that are costing on autopilot with no one willing to take responsibility for anything at the helm. It is surprising to see it from Apple.
I had to transfer my data from the lemon. The Geniuses on staff were clearly unfamiliar with some of the quirks of Migration Assistant. I offered to do the migration myself if they gave me a Thunderbolt cable. That ends up forcing me to spend another hour in the store, which of course I use to check for signs of ghosting on the new machine.
I run the following command:
Like the lemon, the new one is an LG panel as well. Word on the forums is that only the LG panels have the ghosting issue. I ask the Genius if I can swap once more before leaving the store. He says no. I head home anxiously, hoping my screen is pure.Nope. While it is still one of the best computers I have ever used, it is just unacceptable to be gambling $4000 for hardware I rely on. I will be trying for another exchange soon because there is really no other option, but the standards for "it just works" have noticeably slipped across the company.
I'm not a Mac user. My work and personal desires drive me towards Windows/Linux and I would have foregone any manufacturer that pulled that type of behavior on me (as I have with numerous retailers already). Sort of a "fool me once" type scenario as I see it.
Because mac users tend to put the weight and thinness of the machine over anything else and since the rMBP is the thinnest and lightest 15" laptop it makes it the "best". Hell, Apple is doing the "thin/small and light" thing even with their "desktop" machines like the iMac and Mac Mini.
Mac and PC users just have different set of priorities. I used to own macs but I fully went back to the PC because being able to handle repairs myself in a timely manner is much more important than the niceties of OS X for me, particularly with desktop machines. The mac mini is not good enough for me, and the iMac is exactly what I don't want, if anything fails in the computer I want to be able to replace the part in five minutes and be done with it. That and the fact that the screen tends to outlive my computers in usefulness, I replace them less often than the parts of my desktop PC so buying a computer attached to the screen feels offensive to me.
The Mac Pro could've been an alternative but.. 2600 euros for a computer that is outdated in every single way out of the box is not attractive. Its GPU used to be a mid-range gamer card, used to, because it's not even mid-range in 2012, it's low end. If you build your own computer a GPU with that kind of performance will cost about ~100 to 150 euros, which is not acceptable for a 2600 eur computer. The rest (cpu, ram) is decent but still doesn't really warrant the price tag. It was good when it first launched.. that's about it.
For the past few years, the most valuable property that I have tried to maximize when pitting multiple hardware offerings against each other is time. For other people it may be money, gaming performance, or other intrinsic values such as freedom.
For me, buying the latest Apple hardware as default has become the easiest way to maximize time: I do not need to perform exhaustive research across the market, the shopping experience is smooth, support is same day and local, the resale value is high and selling is easy, the hardware supports the tools I have built my current workflow around (a UNIX command line, emacs shortcuts system-wide, Xcode for iOS development, Photoshop, etc.), and configuration and backup is simple (iTunes, Migration Assistant, Time Machine, and iCloud for a limited scope of data).
Now obviously a lot of this is a result of vendor lock-in, which I try to remain vigilant about. How did I get fooled into being locked in?
It is simply a result of a string of great experiences early on in my dealings with the company. All companies provide varying levels of experience across their lineup of products and services. In my opinion, Apple manages to have more peaks in more fields that matter to me. The early positive experiences in areas that resonate deeply with me, built a great deal of respect and trust in the people who create things at Apple, earning them the spot as my default hardware
Regarding the Retina MacBook Pro product specifically: it is still "one of the best [computers] I have ever used" because it hits peaks in many right spots. The performance, portability, keyboard and trackpad, how it fits in my backpack and on my desk, design, ecosystem, and OS X are all positives for me. What I believe to be low points (Wi-Fi issues, video card performance in certain situations, Mission Control, the annoying MagSafe 2 adapter, iPhoto woes, etc.), are tradeoffs I am willing to make.
The "ghosting" is the one point I cannot concede. I work with pixels and color too much to let it slide. Thus far, Apple has offered me one replacement, with a free SSD update thrown in. I consider that great support, but poor quality control.
This is an interesting tradeoff because of how the two fields are closely related. Poor quality control necessitates good support. Whether that support is good enough (or the quality control poor enough) for me to continue leaving Apple's hardware as my default depends on whether they offer me another replacement, and whether that one is satisfactory.
Times change though. Open hardware and software is more important to me than ever. We must all be able to tune the properties of our hardware and software to our liking, without sacrificing the state of the art.
I took it to the apple store. They said they tested it and could not "hear" the noise. So they wouldn't do anything about it. Yet when I put my macbook pro next to any laptop, everyone can tell my laptop is the loudest.
I have become one of their disappointed customers.
This was in Switzerland. Would be surprised, though, if they had such drastically different replacement or repair policies for such an obvious issue.