I’m back to say I was wrong, and I’ve found a machine that not only matches Apple’s standard of hardware quality, but goes far beyond it to demonstrate how a laptop of the future should work.
That machine is the 15-inch Surface Book 2 and somehow Microsoft has made the 2-in-1 that Apple should’ve been building all along, to the same level of quality I’d expect from anyone other than Microsoft.
I’ve used the Surface Book 2 as my daily computer for three months now and it’s consistently blown me away with how well considered it is across the board, how great the software works and has completely converted me into the touchscreen laptop camp.
That’s what happens when Apple ignores its Mac product line – people start looking at alternatives, only to realize that Apple’s laptops weren’t nearly as far ahead of the rest – if at all – as they once thought.
There’s a few backhanded compliments about the hardware, but Microsoft has always been quite good with the hardware it does produce.
It was the software that was flaky at times, and most of it was the third party software (drivers especially) cutting corners.
I kind of knew once Steve Jobs passed away that Apple would soon fall into the same bad habits it had back in the late 80’s and early to mid-nineties when it stopped innovating and nearly went bankrupt. Can anyone say with a straight face that Apple has produced anything truly innovating since the Steve Jobs era? iPhones are desperately copying Androids (bigger screens, slim bezels, you name it) but still no USB-C or SD card slots. iPads keep getting gimmikier without actually innovating. Apple computers are a pathetic shell of their former glory having years old hardware specifications and sporting one gimmicky feature after the other as a substitute for innovation (does anyone actually use that gimmicky keyboard screen that replaced the function keys?) Apple’s best bet at this point is to focus on it’s iPhones and release macOS as an alternative operating system that people can buy and install on any x86 hardware of their choice. Leave the open source community to maintain hardware drivers just like the Linux community does with Linux. I would definitely use macOS, but certainly not on any current Apple hardware.
Yep, he and Wozniak were the driving souls of the company.
Without them Apple is just yet another computer company.
Cellphone company.
I think you are going to like this video: Why Midrange Phones Are Now Better Than Flagships; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I36qvNvWBRY
That video perfectly (and I am a nitpicker!) explains why many luxury products aren’t good products anymore. The money quote in the video is at 2:49. “Flagships happily sacrifice durability, battery life, a headphone jack and many other really practical features for 1 main reason: “Becoming desirable”
They got lucky with smart phones and tablets, they wasted money on self driving car and AI initiatives due to their only us mentality. You would think they could at least put more effort into their core business, but now they’re full of execs chasing the next big thing instead of improving and maintaining their enormous lead.
Oh the irony (cmost). You speak of the bad habits and the bad old days, then your suggestion is for Apple to sell it’s OS out to the general public for their “clones”. I think Apple will be fine thanks without any help or the late SJ. I was working with clones in the 90s. Interesting times they were…for Apple and it’s users. I have never actually purchased or owned any Apple products.
When I bought my early 2013 MacBook Pro, it really did possess a great deal of value compared with every PC on the market. It had a FAR superior screen, CPU/GPU, SSD as standard, etc. The keyboard and touchpad were FAR superior to everything in the Windows world.
Today that’s not the case. I have to pay a $600 premium over my old MacBook, for a touchbar no one wants, and for CPU/GPU which is more of a lateral move (even from my 2013 model), the screen is largely the same, similar sized SSD, similar amount of RAM – 5 years later, and it costs MORE than my better laptop from 2013 cost.
Apple may have always sold expensive hardware, but it also sold hardware that justified the cost. That’s no longer the case. The build quality on PCs have caught up, or in some cases exceeded Apple (Surface Book, Razer’s line, etc.) and Apple simply doesn’t seem to care.
I HATE Windows, but I might suck it up with a cheap laptop to replace my failing MBP (I used the hell out of it, I’m not bitter about it failing, I’m bitter that there’s nothing to replace it with from Apple…). If I can make it work, I may buy a premium “pro” level Windows laptop for the first time in 15 years.
What about a used/refurb MacBook? An awful lot cheaper and you’ll probably get years of use out it.
I could do that – but the truth is, I watch my daughter drawing on her $650 HP Envy machine, and I’m like – why am I staying with mac? They clearly don’t care about value any more, and they’ve got their heads way too far up their iOS asses.
iPad is not a computer, at least not yet. Mine sits and collects dust. Their marketing around that is dishonest and that’s frustrating. It’s promising that they are talking about integration, and moving macOS to ARM, but I don’t see that they can pull it off effectively – and certainly not any time soon. I don’t see the vision there any more.
I’ll give you an example of what I could have considered vision – instead of that pointless and expensive touch bar, bundle in the iPad as a tablet companion. Apple is kind of right that a touch screen in a clam-shell form factor doesn’t make much sense, and convertibles are cool and all, but they are also problematic. Apple’s solution should clearly have been to up sell an iPad for every pro user. Properly marketed, this would have sold easily – I’m sure of it.
Instead they rarely even show both platforms next to each other. If it were me, I’d always show an iPad and Pencil right next to the MacBook Pro or iMac. But they have no vision left.
Instead of doing that though, and enhancing their convergence, and all that – they just added a useless touchbar, and tacked on $600 to the base cost of their laptop lines. What even is that?
Yes, Apple neglected the MacBooks, and the current models are outdated and too compromised (no ports, crap keyboard, not even user serviceable SSD), but the Surface Book 2 is not that much better, especially with the n-trig touch screens being plagued by phantom touches and dead zones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVX-7ZI8ysk Still waiting for an extended warranty program
! And do not buy this glued together Surface books! You will never be able to service anything without destroying the keyboard with a heat-gun: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-surface-l…
Apple wants to obsolete Mac OS X because it is too open, allowing app installations outside the App Store and such. Look at how they are pushing the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement.
Basically they are taking a page out of Microsoft’s playbook, back when they killed Windows Mobile for Windows Phone (it was never about the UI, as the HD2 proved). Apple are just going the tactful way of letting Mac OS X rot instead of killing it.
Edited 2018-07-03 10:37 UTC
It isn’t just the Surface Book. Every major manufacturer now has 1 or more really great high-end laptops that combine great hardware with great build quality. Just have a look at https://www.windowscentral.com/best-windows-laptop to see many examples. These laptops aren’t competing with Apple hardware by offering 90% of the quality for 70% of the price like they often did in the past. They now go head-to-head on all aspects while mostly having more practical features (and ports) at the same pricepoints.
It should also be clear that these laptops are all different so there is actual choice where you can find a laptop that matches you, instead of you having to adjust to the one-and-only MacBook.
That basically just leaves only 1 really unique feature of the MacBook…it runs MacOS
I actually do use the touch bar quite a bit.
It is really comfortable in allowing you to control one background application while working on the other.
I use it mostly for zoom conferencing where I can for example mute/unmute myself. Start/stop my video, unshare my screen etc. Without having to go looking for the window. The controls are just always available on the touch bar. Same for example for Facetime audio calls. Super helpful.
It is also nice for sublime as it makes switching between editor tabs super comfortable.
The functionality surely depends on the application developers, as the functionality exposed and how it is exposed super depends on them.
Google Chrome is an example of an implementation that is NOT useful, and done really bad.
It is a good concept. And is quite helpful if used properly by the application developers.
The touch bar isn’t a horrible idea, but if any other company had introduced it it would have been an immediate failure. Even now there is hardly any software for it, hardly and hardware sold that supports it and thus hardly anyone really using it.
If they had implemented it inside the bottom of a touch-screen, wouldn’t it have been better?
If they actually had made the whole screen a touch-screen…even better?
Take a look at the Oryx Pro by System 76: https://betanews.com/2018/05/09/system76-oryx-pro-linux-laptop/
I’ve no affiliation with the company, but I am a customer. Apple used to have the best laptops for developers bar none, but at the moment I’d say this laptop provides a much nicer developer experience.
The million dollar question: have they improved the keyboard? Specifically, have they finally wised up and removed, or at least allow us to disable, the fn key lock hardware function? For a keyboard power user like myself, this makes using any current Surface device a maddening experience especially when the only way to tell if it’s on is a stupid little LED in the key. I’m a touch typist. I don’t ever look at the keyboard.
****EDIT**** I meant as a TABLET. The forum doesn’t let me update the comment title
At the company I work for we have a BYOD policy. Each one can use whatever laptop/os combination they like.
Most people (60+%) are on Mac’s, the rest are a split between windows and Linux.
There are a couple of Surface users.
I ever never seen anyone use the surface in laptop mode, neither seen the touchscreen used.
The are always using it as a regular laptop, also very often with external mouse.
What is the use case for the touch screen? The windows UI seems to have elements that are too small to hit comfortably.
Edited 2018-07-03 17:22 UTC
I have a Surface Pro 4, and i do use it as a tablet, somtimes. But converting mine is of course a lot easier than the book as i just yank off the keyboard and toss it aside.
As for touch on a display, i love it. I wish my desktop monitors had it. There are often small tasks that are easier to just touch than having to go grab the mouse or try to figure out how to do it by keyboard. Something as simple as scrolling, moving, closing non active windows, change tab in browser, click a link, etc.
I would even like a pen too, making it easy to draw on the screen when having online meetings.
Would i use it for most things and retire my mouse? No, of course not, but the more input methods the better as i see it.
I would like it to change keyboard layout too. i do it rarely enough that mapping a shortcut is a waste of a precious key binding, but having to switch to the mouse is annoying. I disabled the standard shortcut of ctrl-shift as i hit that multiple times a day by accident, when writing code it kinda matters if the keyboard is in Danish or US mode
There’s no official way to get MS computers here in Brazil. Google suffers the same problem, I cannot buy any Google products (expection: Google Chrome). OTOH, Apple is everywhere here.
Edited 2018-07-03 19:12 UTC
Chromecast*
Ah well, as bad as the Apple kit has gotten at least they’re not Razer. The rubber foot bumper on my Razerblade Stealth 2017 finally fell off after a year of mostly hanging in a useless U-arc under the laptop. The build quality of the Razer has been outstanding except that one cheapass thing. Sadly Razer haven’t learnt from their mistakes with the 2018 model having the same problem. No point in upgrading now if all Razer is doing is CPU bumping their machines without actually addressing engineering issues such as heat causing the rubber feet to fall off. Surely a simple fix such as a better adhesive, or a redesigned bumper would be better than shipping more flawed laptops?