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Will Fanboys ever stop defending the MacBook?

S

scaramoosh

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 30, 2014
852
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Several years ago everyone I knew had a MacBook... you just had to if you wanted a portable Laptop with some kind of power. Windows had these terrible hulking things aimed at gaming, the battery lasted half hour, and anything smaller was a Netbook. However now the rest of manufacturing world has caught up with Apple. You can get slim and more powerful Laptops for a quarter of the price of any equivalent MacBook, it is crazy that MacBook prices keep rising, yet the specs aren't relative to everything else.

Then we have crap like everything being soldered to the board, nothing is replaceable now, even the keyboard is impossible, yet that is the thing I used to have to replace the most on customer Laptops.

I know a handful of people personally, who have broken MacBooks and Apple refuse to repair them. My Boss's Daughter spilt water on her Laptop, her Keyboard stopped working and they said it would cost more than the price of the Laptop to fix. So I took it apart (as I used to repair Laptops) and saw that it was just a short and corrosion, I fixed that problem and the Laptop now works. The MacBook 2016, my friend has a keyboard where some of the keys do random things, probably due to crap stuck behind there... but again Apple won't sort it.

Apple's Customer Service used to be amazing, but now they ignore their customers and charge them a crap load. It's sad how far Apple have fallen under Time Cook, and I wont even attempt the Keyboard repair as it looks welded or something... mental.

144hrz 17 inch screen, 16GB (removable) ram, 2 x sata ports + NVMe or M.2 drive, 8300 Quad Core, 1060 Nvidia, all the ports you can hope for, removable battery, nice slickly keyboard etc etc. I got that for £600 during a sale, meanwhile there are no MacBook Pros with that kind of power for quadruple the price.
 
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People will always go all out to justify their purchases just so to feel better.

I too felt that Mac is going downhill with all the recent ‘upgrades’.
By making everything non upgradeable and soldering even the RAM and SSDs while charging a brick for upgrading it.
Then they made sure customers purchase dongles just so that hard disk with USB-A could work, or that HDMI on the TV could work, or the iPhone lightning earphone.... (wait that still doesn’t work!).
Don’t get me started with the butterfly keyboard, why on earth switch out a perfect keyboard for something inferior.

What I can see here is Apple is aiming to maximise $$ while having their loyal customers pay for it.
 
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Or maybe, just maybe, even with the flaws it’s still an excellent laptop.

And if all you want are specs, then yes, terrible buy. But i wouldn’t want your gaming laptop any day of the week - I don’t care how powerful it is.
 
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scaramoosh said:
144hrz 17 inch screen, 16GB (removable) ram, 2 x sata ports + NVMe or M.2 drive, 8300 Quad Core, 1060 Nvidia, all the ports you can hope for, removable battery, nice slickly keyboard etc etc. I got that for £600 during a sale, meanwhile there are no MacBook Pros with that kind of power for quadruple the price.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you got what you wanted at a good price
Not sure why you feel the need to complain that something else isn't what you wanted for a higher price
 
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There are definitely issues with the MacBook Pro. I happen to be lucky and have two of the 2019 models and they have been perfect (pause to go knock on wood). I worried about buying them - would I have keyboard, display, throttling, crash issues....but it has worked out so far. Unfortunately I do not have enough current experience with other laptops to know if there are "issues there as well", I will say on cursory exploration of other manufacturer's forums I think there are similar issues - whether more or less, more serious or less, I cannot assess.

All that said, this forum attracts people with issues, and people who are geeks imho. I am one. But that is not Apple's larger customer base. Apple is doing MUCH BETTER in sales of laptops than their competitors, so the larger audience of customers must be very happy with the products - people continue to buy MBP's more than ever. This April 2019 report from Trendforce backs up that statement:

The updated MacBook Pro in 2Q18 helped Apple expand shipments by 18% for the whole year, the highest growth rate among all the notebook brands. The market share of Apple reached 9.6%, 1.3 percentage points up from 2016, which allowed Apple surpass ASUS and rank fourth.

With notebook sales climbing, Apple is expected to increase its own market share to 10.4% next year, enough to retain its #4 slot and edge a little closer to third-placed Dell, at 15.2% in 2017 and forecast to hit 15.6% this year.

Note too, as far as I can recall every other major laptop manufacturer is seeing laptop sales go down.

This is better than Jobs ever did - maybe MacBook Pro is now one that appeals to the masses more and the techies and geeks who know more - less. We know that MBP's are more expensive too, yet the market still prefers them! The tradeoffs that anger many people here are what the larger market has been looking for to decide on buying an Apple laptop. I know most here won't agree with this post, not sure why I even posted it lol. But that's my .02.
 
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My employer has been issuing 2016, 2017, and 2018 MBP without issue. I know one group who has used them for years and are very happy. No keyboard issues and no Bridge 2 issues, not that I've gotten wind of. And I've been asking. They also have iMac Pro workstations for paired programmer with 2 keyboards and 2 mice connected. Still no issues reported.
 
Sorry man, but your last paragraph detailing specs makes me want to call you out for being one of those “Mac is stupid because it’s expensive” people. If it makes you feel better, MacBooks fall under the ultrabooks territory. It’s not fair to compare them spec by spec for the price. Ultrabooks will always be more expensive because they need to have specialized attention.

Good that you have what you want. I have an Alienware 15 R4 and a gaming desktop in addition to my MacBook Pro.

I’m sure it’s far lighter than your huge laptop and the battery will last longer too. In fact that’s the one thing I hated about my Alienware, as powerful as it is.
 
Over the years competition has grown and pc makers are making comparable sleek, unibody metal housed ultrabooks and b/c of this apple is facing tougher competition than before. We have a lot more choices than we did 5 years ago.

At the current pricing regimes that apple has been exercising for the past several years charging more and more on the upgrade fees and jacking up the base prices of all the laptops year after year, I personally don't think this practice is warranted. If they keep this up, I will carefully conjecture that they will lose a lot of loyal customers and I believe they already have. We're already seeing a lot of long-time apple fans migrating to pc's and haven't looked back.

Having said that, I still buy apple laptops exclusively b/c of their build quality which is 2nd to none and the tight integration b/w my iphone and the joy and stability of using macos is superior to w10. Apple's design philosophy has been always form over function so as long as they look pretty, we will always have people buying them.
 
scaramoosh said:
144hrz 17 inch screen, 16GB (removable) ram, 2 x sata ports + NVMe or M.2 drive, 8300 Quad Core, 1060 Nvidia, all the ports you can hope for, removable battery, nice slickly keyboard etc etc. I got that for £600 during a sale, meanwhile there are no MacBook Pros with that kind of power for quadruple the price.
Click to expand...

I assume thats an MSI GV62 8RE? Happy you got a nice price on it, but why would you brag about your budget gaming laptop while bashing a MBP?

Your laptop's 8300H is a budget CPU that performs closer to a 13" MBP than to a 15" MBP... its battery life is pretty much non-existent, the SSD is slowish, the display is at best mediocre and the laptop completely lacks any kind of high-speed connectivity (which is expected given that its a cheap gaming machine). I am sure that it's great for gaming, but for most kind of professional use as a laptop, its utterly pointless.
 
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scaramoosh said:
Will Fanboys ever stop defending the MacBook?
Click to expand...
Maybe it isn't that Apple fans are defending the Macbook but that their requirements are different than yours. With the growing diversity of Apple's offerings, they are catering to a wider range of customers and their needs.

Gone are the days where there were 3 models and everybody knew what "lane" they were in. In those days, those who bought a Macbook Pro bought one because it was the one that fit their needs the best.

But now, there are more models and the functional/marketing "gap" between the models are smaller and so there's a lot of cross-over of customers buying a particular model for different reasons. The herd mentality has been fractured but many people haven't made the transition... if a particular model doesn't suit their needs then they say that it is a terrible product and should no longer exist.

If repairability is requirement for a person, then Apple products aren't the best fit. And the alternatives are dwindling in number too. More and more, companies are producing disposable laptops.
 
This thread brings up interesting topic. I have used the Mac since 1986 for my hone computer. In my various jobs over the years I was forced to use PC’s with all the various versions of Windows. Never like windows in the beginning it was just a shell over DOS and slowly progressed from there. Now I feel it is closer to Mac than ever before but no cigar. For me I do not care if they have better specs, are thinner, etc. The windows hardware doesn’t run OSX.


In all the years of owning Apple products I have never had one break and have never bought apple care. My current 2012 retina macbook pro still runs great.


I know that since Steve died Apple has been more interested in making money than making hardware the “just works” , but I can’t switch to windows. Too much time, money, etc. invested. I hope they see the light and fix the keyboard issue on the laptops.
 
calliex said:
I know that since Steve died Apple has been more interested in making money than making hardware the “just works” , but I can’t switch to windows. Too much time, money, etc. invested. I hope they see the light and fix the keyboard issue on the laptops.
Click to expand...

Current Mac hardware is probably more expensive to make than back in Steve's days and certainly more complex. Contemporary Macs use more custom chips and components than the Intel Macs just few years ago. If Apple's goal was indeed making money at the expense of everything else, I'd expect them to stick to old proven designs. Instead, they took more risky, expensive decisions in the last few years (completely new keyboard mechanism, Touch Bar, redesign of base hardware functions around a custom coprocessor) than in all the years the MBP existed.
 
What are the types and levels of fanboy-dom? Thank god I never got the tattoo.... I was bit*ing and moaning about the Touchbar and the Twitchy-Pad a year or so back and I got three 'wake up and and smell the get a life already' messages. Two were just slappy-slappy, 'you are just a complainer. Stop it.' One guy on MacRumors said (I paraphrase), 'Ya shoulda took it back got your money and bought a refurb 2015' Duh. The first two I strongly suspect Cupertino employees doing some voluntary overtime. Clearly fanboys. Did I flame back? Nah, I can take a shot. The third guy? That was great advice. So why didn't I think of that? or why didn't anybody else think of that and tell me? when I could still have done it. Part of the situation I was complaining about is I wanted the new MacBookPro, it didn't matter that whatever the speed boost I didn't need, I could've installed a huge SSD drive in an older Mac.

Signs of the crypto fanboy: We complain a lot on Apple specific forums. At some point we think we're having an original thought when we think "Steve woulda fixed this." [This is the exact equivalent of "If only Stalin knew what these idiots were doing....." ] We cringe when we even hear the words 'fanboy'. We don't want to admit it. [This meeting is anonymous, right?]

Like for ten years now we fail to realize how utterly bizarre it is that absolutely obvious features still do not exist, such as why we can't simply drag and drop things between computer and IOS. [Dropbox? that's the why did I just spend all this money to now have to buy 3rd party USB adapters?] (Why in Photos can I send an image to Message (but not to myself), eMail, Add to Notes, Save PDF to Books, Save to Drop Box, Assign to Contact, Print, Copy, etc....: but there's no option for simply adding the damn photo to my MacBook from my iPhone, or my MacBook to my iPhone?
[emailing myself has been the only reliable way to move photos and images between my devices. Mojave 10.14.4 killed Mail Send. Maybe I can remember how to FTP....]
Admit it: you (us) never wondered why we couldn't just plug a USB stick into our iPhones until we saw some guy doing it with his Android.
 
WillNN said:
What are the types and levels of fanboy-dom? Thank god I never got the tattoo.... I was bit*ing and moaning about the Touchbar and the Twitchy-Pad a year or so back and I got three 'wake up and and smell the get a life already' messages. Two were just slappy-slappy, 'you are just a complainer. Stop it.' One guy on MacRumors said (I paraphrase), 'Ya shoulda took it back got your money and bought a refurb 2015' Duh. The first two I strongly suspect Cupertino employees doing some voluntary overtime. Clearly fanboys. Did I flame back? Nah, I can take a shot. The third guy? That was great advice. So why didn't I think of that? or why didn't anybody else think of that and tell me? when I could still have done it. Part of the situation I was complaining about is I wanted the new MacBookPro, it didn't matter that whatever the speed boost I didn't need, I could've installed a huge SSD drive in an older Mac.

Signs of the crypto fanboy: We complain a lot on Apple specific forums. At some point we think we're having an original thought when we think "Steve woulda fixed this." [This is the exact equivalent of "If only Stalin knew what these idiots were doing....." ] We cringe when we even hear the words 'fanboy'. We don't want to admit it. [This meeting is anonymous, right?]

Like for ten years now we fail to realize how utterly bizarre it is that absolutely obvious features still do not exist, such as why we can't simply drag and drop things between computer and IOS. [Dropbox? that's the why did I just spend all this money to now have to buy 3rd party USB adapters?] (Why in Photos can I send an image to Message (but not to myself), eMail, Add to Notes, Save PDF to Books, Save to Drop Box, Assign to Contact, Print, Copy, etc....: but there's no option for simply adding the damn photo to my MacBook from my iPhone, or my MacBook to my iPhone?
[emailing myself has been the only reliable way to move photos and images between my devices. Mojave 10.14.4 killed Mail Send. Maybe I can remember how to FTP....]
Admit it: you (us) never wondered why we couldn't just plug a USB stick into our iPhones until we saw some guy doing it with his Android.
Click to expand...
You can add photos directly to notes from photos or messages.
I send myself photos via messages all the time.
AirDrop things between phone and Mac.
Print directly from various apps.
The usb complaint is valid but not sure if I would use it.
Maybe I misunderstood your post
 
scaramoosh said:
Several years ago everyone I knew had a MacBook... you just had to if you wanted a portable Laptop with some kind of power. Windows had these terrible hulking things aimed at gaming, the battery lasted half hour, and anything smaller was a Netbook. However now the rest of manufacturing world has caught up with Apple. You can get slim and more powerful Laptops for a quarter of the price of any equivalent MacBook, it is crazy that MacBook prices keep rising, yet the specs aren't relative to everything else.

Then we have crap like everything being soldered to the board, nothing is replaceable now, even the keyboard is impossible, yet that is the thing I used to have to replace the most on customer Laptops.

I know a handful of people personally, who have broken MacBooks and Apple refuse to repair them. My Boss's Daughter spilt water on her Laptop, her Keyboard stopped working and they said it would cost more than the price of the Laptop to fix. So I took it apart (as I used to repair Laptops) and saw that it was just a short and corrosion, I fixed that problem and the Laptop now works. The MacBook 2016, my friend has a keyboard where some of the keys do random things, probably due to crap stuck behind there... but again Apple won't sort it.

Apple's Customer Service used to be amazing, but now they ignore their customers and charge them a crap load. It's sad how far Apple have fallen under Time Cook, and I wont even attempt the Keyboard repair as it looks welded or something... mental.

144hrz 17 inch screen, 16GB (removable) ram, 2 x sata ports + NVMe or M.2 drive, 8300 Quad Core, 1060 Nvidia, all the ports you can hope for, removable battery, nice slickly keyboard etc etc. I got that for £600 during a sale, meanwhile there are no MacBook Pros with that kind of power for quadruple the price.
Click to expand...

I feel like you're making a statement based on the wrong arguments. There are very few "fanboy" like comments these days, compare to the days of "Mac Guy" vs "PC Guy" commercials. Many people agree here that Apple is at the wrong turn with their computer offerings, but for reasons other than not having 144Hz 17inch screen laptop for £600 on sale, and there are many reasons why your statement is wrong.
Selling a very high spec computer, and what you posted is very high spec, at £600 is not normal. This happened due to some or any of the following: overproduction, mismarketing, low demand, poor company/зкщвгсе reputation, stock clearance, new supply coming in, end of the quarter sale, gaining market share etc etc.
I mostly buy thinkpads and the base price for a ThinkPad so far is not that much different from macbook pro. The problem is that MacBooks base configuration is the very basic, very small hard drive, low ram and when you want to go "Standard", not even better than currently considered normal, prices are rocketing.
Laptops like the one you stated always existed, these days it's HP and MSI, back in the day it was cheap Dells with huge specs, they are very different computer and were always aimed at a different market.
So, yes, loads of people are unhappy with Apple and don't buy their hardware, because of the weird keyboard, overpriced upgrades, limited ports etc etc, but I don't think anybody expects Apple to make huge bulky laptops for under $1000.
 
scaramoosh said:
Several years ago everyone I knew had a MacBook... you just had to if you wanted a portable Laptop with some kind of power. Windows had these terrible hulking things aimed at gaming, the battery lasted half hour, and anything smaller was a Netbook. However now the rest of manufacturing world has caught up with Apple. You can get slim and more powerful Laptops for a quarter of the price of any equivalent MacBook, it is crazy that MacBook prices keep rising, yet the specs aren't relative to everything else.

Then we have crap like everything being soldered to the board, nothing is replaceable now, even the keyboard is impossible, yet that is the thing I used to have to replace the most on customer Laptops.

I know a handful of people personally, who have broken MacBooks and Apple refuse to repair them. My Boss's Daughter spilt water on her Laptop, her Keyboard stopped working and they said it would cost more than the price of the Laptop to fix. So I took it apart (as I used to repair Laptops) and saw that it was just a short and corrosion, I fixed that problem and the Laptop now works. The MacBook 2016, my friend has a keyboard where some of the keys do random things, probably due to crap stuck behind there... but again Apple won't sort it.

Apple's Customer Service used to be amazing, but now they ignore their customers and charge them a crap load. It's sad how far Apple have fallen under Time Cook, and I wont even attempt the Keyboard repair as it looks welded or something... mental.

144hrz 17 inch screen, 16GB (removable) ram, 2 x sata ports + NVMe or M.2 drive, 8300 Quad Core, 1060 Nvidia, all the ports you can hope for, removable battery, nice slickly keyboard etc etc. I got that for £600 during a sale, meanwhile there are no MacBook Pros with that kind of power for quadruple the price.
Click to expand...
 
All I ever see on here is complaining this thread included.
The current MacBooks are excellent laptops and the complaints and so called defending are such a minor user base. I’ve never read anything on here to encourage or discourage an Apple purchase.
 
rutrack said:
Selling a very high spec computer, and what you posted is very high spec, at £600 is not normal.
Click to expand...

The specs he is mentioning are not high or impressive any means. It's a budget quad-core CPU made from rejected premium quad-core batch, a mid-range GPU without any power optimization, put together with a bunch of budget components on a budget platform. The new price of a laptop like that is around $1000 USD. It's a machine put together with the only purpose of being a cheap gaming platform.
 
GoldfishRT said:
Or maybe, just maybe, even with the flaws it’s still an excellent laptop.

And if all you want are specs, then yes, terrible buy. But i wouldn’t want your gaming laptop any day of the week - I don’t care how powerful it is.
Click to expand...
Excellent laptop when it works lol

Would it still be an excellent laptop when a key is stuck or repeating, or any of the known issues starts to act up?
 
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