Until you need to repair something or change some hardware ... Which is something the author of the article totally neglects, IMHO.
How often does this happen, though? I have a 2013 MBP that still works perfectly. And I'm not even talking about the screen, which is ridiculously better than most new pc laptops. And then, of course, there's the touchpad, which, for some reason, is still unmatched in pc land.
It has 512 GB of SSD and 16 of RAM. This is basically what the new "upgraded" PCs people get at my office. In 2026, 13 years later.
Yeah, I'd use my decade-old mac any day rather than the crappy HPs at work.
to be fair, given the choice between a decade-old macbook and basically any current windows box with same specs, i'd take the macbook every time. but, if i could put linux on it...
But now I'm typing this on a Lenovo P14 something-or-other, under Linux (I run Arch, by the way), and it's an all-around nicer experience than the Mac. The touchpad is somewhat inferior, but good enough. And the screen is actually better: it has a slightly higher resolution, but, most importantly, it's matte. It's not as bright as the Mac, but it's bright enough that I rarely set it above 20-30%. The machine is overall very snappy and quiet, but this is probably more due to my DE not going crazy with animations.
But, two other frameworks were totally unacceptable for users, so it wasn’t really a great experiment.
> The Framework is more expensive, slower (in most cases), louder (its fan ramps up quite often), has a pretty poor display, but it is a touchscreen, has a 360° hinge, and is more repairable and upgradeable.
> While the Neo is probably one of the easiest Mac laptops to repair in recent memory, the Framework 12 allows you to upgrade components including a DDR5 SODIMM, 2230-sized NVMe SSD, WiFi card, and even four modular ports around the sides. I outfitted mine with 2x USB-C, 1x USB-A, and 1x full-size HDMI.
The overwhelming majority of people would just go buy a new one. The downtime for ordering parts and waiting repairs has a price tag, likely greater than the laptop's price. Maybe that will change with how the prices of everything have been soaring lately.
The only real issue I’ve had was when I dropped one and destroyed the screen. It was covered by AppleCare, and Apple replaced it.
I usually get a new laptop every 3 to 4 years and pass the old one to family members. My dad is still using one that’s about 10 years old and it works fine for what he needs. No issues.
So the repair argument is a bit hard for me to relate to. I understand things break. But I also think taking reasonable care of your stuff goes a long way. “A stitch in time saves nine,” right?
I guess I’ve replaced the feet on a few of them but that’s a $5 dollar kit from Amazon and a screwdriver and a little bit of glue…
And for normal wear and tear, like battery life, Apple laptops can get a battery replacement through the Apple Store for a pretty reasonable cost.
Anyway, Apple makes good product products that don’t really break from me or my family. I’ve been really happy with all their stuff.
I had way worse luck, for example, building a PC to game on. Two or three years and I had to replace the power supply and I think four years and I had to replace the SSD. Like those things were annoying. I’ve never had hardware from Apple go bad on me.
(Not since I had a Performa 5200 and they had to send somebody out to fix the logic board.)
But if you don't need repairs, you might want upgrades. I have a Framework 13 from 2022 and I expect I won't be buying a full new laptop for many many years. It's great that you've been able to repurpose your old laptops for other family members, but every new laptop manufactured eventually becomes e-waste.
It's not that uncommon experience with Apple hardware. I hand my old Macs off to family members, and currently in the house are 2, 4, 8 and 10 year-old MacBooks.
Only thing wrong with any of them is that the 10 year old one only runs about 20 minutes off the charger.
That said, I do skip all the problem models (no butterfly keyboard switches, etc), and ~12 years ago I did need a logicboard replacement under AppleCare
In all fairness, most Apple users are technically illiterate (hardware-wise). And running upgradeable machines to optimum efficiency necessitates running a redundant setup, e. g. the main bird and a compatible support unit, usually an older one, but capable enough to take over relatively seamlessly for a while, enable diagnostics, facilitate maintenance, and so on.
Most Apple users have only one computer, with their secondary machine the iPhone, itself a neutered simulacrum of a pocket computer, just good enough to do some basic outsourcing of troubleshooting, and to place an order for the next computer of course.
People who gravitate to Frameworks offerings, or similar machines, are just of a completely different mindset than the typical Apple customer. As evidenced by threads like this one. That's also one of the reasons why the F-12 was a misfire. You don't "half-ass" machines built for long-term support. And in this climate, an entry-level LTS machine that's supposed to become popular needed and needs a different approach. Which begins with the form factor.
Maybe upgrading the RAM or HD could be useful, but wear and tear on all components is a bigger concern for me than just one. My laptop is a critical part of my life. I can't risk being out of service for a week while parts arrive.
Its like buying a car... you can repair and maintain it to 200k miles, but the reliability will go down as more things break. Or you can buy a brand new machine to reclaim your time.
Certainly if you're in the 0.01% of Apple purchasers that just have a terrible experience (broken device, out of warranty, etc) and one of your largest purchases doesn't work the way you want it, then that is terrible.
but I think the vast majority of Apple users have a stellar experience.
In a roughly 50 person company with refresh every 3 years, we send a macbook back for repair/replacement roughly three times a year. I would estimate that as a 2% hardware problem rate, 200x higher than what you quote.
2% is satisfactory for corporate use, by the way.
I'm considering going this way on my M1 MBP. Is there anything you miss wrt. hardware compatibility?
For some reason, Apple's ideal desktop experience is tailored around focusing on one application at a time. Which is certainly true for some workflows, but that's not me.
[0]: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
[1]: https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher
Recent discussion on the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708818
This is a very weird-sounding take to someone who has used Macs for three decades and recalls that for most of that time they never even had a full-screen mode.
Apple's desktop experience DNA is still, for better or worse, deeply anchored to spatial arrangement of partially-overlapping windows (or non-overlapping, if screen is big enough and window small enough), driven by mouse (Expose hot corners back in 2004 were basically the end-game after which they haven't made any new significant changes to this, and haven't had to). Their full-screen/single-app modes are IMO a weird half-baked Windows-maximize alternative.
But yes, it's a very mouse-oriented, single-desktop spatially-organized-and-layered world.
> This is a very weird-sounding take to someone who has used Macs for three decades and recalls that for most of that time they never even had a full-screen mode.
Sorry about that. I should've clarified better. What I meant was that Apple's opinion of an ideal desktop is closely matching a cluttered desk where only the owner knows the position of something and the focus shifts back and forth from one primary task to another task/interruption.
Edit: typos
The ideal desktop is a cluttered desk, where only the desk knows where it has stuck your tasks.
Stretch an app across two monitors? Not with that config! Display port? Oh no! Scaling cleanly? Never heard of it.
Seriously bad stuff. I’ve thought about writing a book with everything wrong with it. It’s bonkers.
You can hide it. I rarely use it as I use a launcher.
Upgraded to Mac OS 26?
> You can hide it. I rarely use it as I use a launcher.
Cmd+Space, type first letters of application name, enter.
MacOS doesn't really have a window manager, it has an app switcher, and a really inconvenient way to pick the context of your workspace.
GNOME does it right, and uses super + <the key above tab>. Works the same as the Mac in the US, but is infinitely better in the rest of the world.
(you might be able to remap it on macos using an undocumented 'hidutil' command, but I've never got it to work on an external keyboard)
Can’t imagine going back.
Yes, it can: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mac-window-tiling-i...
You can define additional shortcuts in Keyboard settings: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...
The first link is about arranging/tiling the windows. There are zero keyboard shortcuts to move the focus from the window on left to the window on right. It looks like someone used the equivalent of monitor codenames for keyboard shortcuts. Some operations don't even have a keyboard shortcut.
Additionally, while it does show how tiling is performed on macOS, tiling is not treated as a serious feature of the desktop. When "tiling" is used in context of window managers on Linux and BSDs, it implies that the windows are tiled automatically by the WM. It is done for several purposes, but ones that are important to me are:
1. Determinism (for the lack of a better word) of window placement. When I open n^th window, I know where to move my eyes. At the moment, this is arbitrary-ish on macOS. 2. Not having to tile every window manually. I only do this when I have a specific layout in mind. Default tiling behaviour can be configured by the WM's config file(s). At the moment, on macOS, I need to be explicit in tiling every window. 3. Keyboard oriented traversal between tiled windows. This is an extremely important part of a tiling WM. I can move my window or just the focus anywhere, without ever needing to reach for my mouse. Granted, I'm not a superhuman who can take advantage of this speed but I like control over my navigation of the desktop I am interacting with.
None of these are satisfied by macOS natively. Unless some app/plugin is used, which has no guarantee of working in future if Apple wishes to break something. On Linux, this is not the case, the WM is part of the desktop, even more so on Wayland.
> You can define additional shortcuts in Keyboard settings: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/create-keyboard-sho...
This is about setting keyboard shortcuts for custom actions for applications, not window traversal on the desktop. Something like Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right which moves the focus between virtual desktops, but for the current desktop, moving the focus between the windows. I am not aware of this being possible at the moment.
Moving between windows of the same app is cmd+~. Cmd-tab moves to another app, remaining on the same desktop if that has a window there.
The delay in focus can be reduced by turning off animations in “accessibility”.
Regardless, I’m with you on that everything is way more snappy on my Linux machine. Even if it’s running a “full” WM/DM like KDE.
The "All Applications" section lets you define global shortcuts. As long as there is a menu bar item for it (in this case, one from the Window menu) you can define a shortcut for it.
Now I just need to figure out how to make Word stick to these commands and not decide that right half of the screen means the right 3/4 of the screen.
I've always had to use 3rd party tools to achieve this.
OTOH, switching users on Gnome or KDE login managers is flawless.
Burning windows away on close is my favorite
Are there actually a lot of such people? Linux-on-desktop users are certainly loud, but also extremely uncommon.
Strictly speaking, I'm not yet ready to move off x86 either, but it's getting harder to find high quality hardware in the PC world.
The funny thing is, I'm using macOS for ~20 years now, and there are "still" things which are way better on Linux. As a result, macOS is a laptop-only secondary OS for me.
I have a couple of Desktop computers both for work and personal use, and they run Linux exclusively, for 20+ years.
Wish Asahi to be more successful.
the art of idle software and efficient energy consumption is not landed in windows and Linux takes too much work..
mac does it not too bad + having good batteries, but thats not to say a laptop with a lesser battery should be trashed by a bad OS.
mobile operating systems are usually much more tuned to being good with battery life. I suppose Linux and perhaps windows do not seem to have laptops as main target even for 'desktop' distros or versions.
I’ve literally never heard this from anyone before, and I have to admit, I’m curious enough to try it for myself.
The last time I tried FreeBSD was 2001.
maybe my linux had a big or wrong setup u know, but it was running very lean. Freebsd runs about as lean tho.
cannot be bothered ofc to go back and measure it is some hp-elitebook withh a ryzen and iGPU in there.
If i run things like Claude it sucks my battery. But if i just run my editors code all day myself its all gd..use firefox as browser on both. other then that its x,i3,hx,rg,fd,fzf. thats about all i use..(so u see i hate it when any laptop empties soon.... i hardly use anything of it). usually i dont even open x/i3.
I don't have one but would consider a Ryzen AI based one instead of a MBP. The Intel based ones have upgradable RAM and Mac-competetive battery life on Linux. The shared RAM on the Ryzen is useful for local AI though.
Again, I love the ambition of the Asahi project and what they've done. They're impressive hackers, and thousands of people will doubtless get years of happy Linux life out of their work— maybe including me! I have no complaints for them, and no wishlist I want to bring to them. In fact, I think maybe I should send them a donation or a kind email or both upon their next release.
But I want to give the bulk of my financial support to a computer vendor who offers me first-class, day-1 support for software environments that make me feel happy and respected. The Asahi team can't turn Apple into that by themselves.
Given that you can score a used M1 Air for half the price of a new Macbook Neo (and have Linux be supported), it's an even better value compared to the Framework, for those who prefer Linux.
> "Hey can you remove MDM from this Macbook so I can install Linux?"
No.
> "Hey can I get a linux laptop for a hardware refresh?"
Sure.
Asahi on an M2 Macbook Pro supports almost everything https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
Is there no MDM for Linux clients? How do the big tech companies with Linux developer machines (Google, Facebook, etc) manage their inventory? Do they roll their own MDM?
The corporate VPN (or equivalent) can then perform 'posture checking' requiring that the tools be installed and working before connecting to the corporate network.
Obviously, 99% of Linux users have root on their device so nothing stops them wiping it and installing something new from scratch. But then they'll fail the posture checks until the device is returned to the approved setup.
Kolide does a spot check like "is falcon sensor running" but if the user logs in, has the session token created, and then disables whatever the session token would still be valid.
Also Kolide doesn't actually count as an MDM. Has a bunch of missing features. I recently evaluated it.
Everything else just works. What is the problem?
Many people prefer to get new devices so that they can be covered by Apple Care. That completely removes Linux as an option because Asahi Linux never supports any of the recent models.
Just to add, I also do my work from an M1 MacBook that I crammed Asahi onto. I got it used for a few hundred dollars last year and it's a perfectly fine experience (for me).
https://lwn.net/Articles/903023/
"On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now."
You can remove the screws on the bottom and replace the battery (which is screwed in, too, no glue to peel) or the M.2 NVME which is enough "servicability" for me....
With that said, I'd probably prefer a Windows laptop over a MacBook too, their hardware is great, but the software is just so awful. But whatever you do, don't get Microsoft's hardware, I got a Surface Pro 8 some years ago and throughout my ~25 years of computing I've never had a worse laptop, and just 2-3 weeks after the warranty went out, the entire machine bricked itself during an update and it no longer boots at all, basically threw 1500 EUR into the sea with nothing to show for it.
No sound, no webcam, no USB-C(iirc) and no video hardware acceleration.
It was a Thinkpad T14s with Snapdragon Elite X-2 if it matters.
https://github.com/qualcomm/fastrpc/issues/193
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1ryv59a/qualc...
This is not super popular Macbook hardware so chances that someone will reverse engineer their firmware are very small.
DHH showed the Framework laptops with latest Intel Panther Lake SoCs having similar battery life to AS Macs (~14 hours) under Omarchy linux while gaming benchmarks put their iGPUs in line or better than AMD's Ryzne SoCs at gaming.
The era of long battery life being the USP feature exclusive to Macbooks is slowly going away, especially if AMD pulls a similar move and heats up the competition.
Once the chip shortage from AI datacenters bubble pops, we could see even better SoCs from Intel, AMD, and even Qualcomm and Nvidia could join the ARM laptop battle in a serious way.
X86_amd64 + Linux let's goooo!
AMD actually got access to TSMC 2nm before Apple: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-4-14-amd...
> Once the chip shortage from AI datacenters bubble pops, we could see even better SoCs from Intel, AMD, and even Qualcomm and Nvidia could join the ARM laptop battle in a serious way.
EPYC (the 2nm AMD chip being produced at TSMC Arizona) is still going to support the datacenter demand, not consumer devices. You and I are still screwed. Apple is the only behemoth, IMO, that wields significant power against other trillion dollar companies. Not Acer, not HP, not even Dell (I don’t think). This is my personal opinion, I don’t have specific facts at hand to back it. Just a strong intuition.
But hey, govts might step in at some point and say - we need to put a cap on how much supply data-centres can buy. Since computers and phones are the backbone of modern society. There may be some rationing happening down the line.
Forget about raw FLOPs and focus on performance per watt. Computers have been fast enough for most people for a decade now.
I've been around a lot of modern MacBooks both in my company and I've also owned a bunch, none of them stunk.
I think this is a rare issue. At least it is lower than 1/20, if not much much lower.
The tech industry might actually be worse than it was 20 years ago.
I also fully acknowledge that change starts with me, unfortunately those changes don't pay the bills.
Apparently it's a meme and Zoomers are huffing their Steam Deck exhaust. Hmm.
From the descriptions I've read the smell is similar or identical.
Maybe they use the same magic ooze.
Ethyl acetate is used to wash flux off PCBs.
It's also used as an artificial flavoring in British "pear drops" which is probably why some people say it smells like pineapple.
It is a sweet odor, but chemically irritating. It cannot be good to breathe.
I'm shocked no one has identified the source of the odor yet. Is it thermal paste? Flux/solder paste? Turtle jizz?
The comparison itself seems moot, comparing a consumer-grade consumable device built out of a phone, to a more sustainable, modular, upgrade-able device.