> You just need to recognize that not everybody aspires to be competent with lower-levels of hardware and software
You don't really need that to use Linux.
People should stop copy/pasting urban myths or stories from the late 90's. We are in 2026 and one can perfectly buy a laptop preinstalled on linux with full support and just find the apps they need from an "app store" which in this case is just the frontend for the flatpak and packages manager. Picking up an app from Gnome Software is no different than installing an app from the play/apple/microsoft store.
Your question is essentially "why do Electron apps exist?" and the full answer would be quite long.
The most important one is that an app's lifecycle can be different than a web browser. You don't always keep a web browser open, but you might want to keep Discord open regardless of what you do with the web browser. That kind of lifecycle management can be tedious and frustrating for a regular user.
Discord's electron app has many features that its web app doesn't such as "Minimize to system tray", "Run at startup", "Game/media detection", "In-game overlays" etc.
Even PWAs can't have most of these features, so that's why we have to deploy an entire browser suite per app nowadays.
As new I have no idea but I think I have never spent that much on a computer as I always buy second hand. 400€ has always been my max. I honestly don't know why I should spend more, the brand new laptop the company I work for gave me don't run significantly faster than my 7y old laptop and this has pretty much always been the case in the last 25 years.
Apple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery.
Judging by the sorry state of most second hand Macbook it really feel that they have made their hardware disposable (despite using relatively premium hardware like aluminum compared to plastic stuff on some brands) to force people to subscribe to it. Not that they are the only one to make shitty unreliable stuff (looking at you Asus, Acer and most brand's "family" lines).
Apple stuff lasts me longer than any other computers I've purchased in my life. The Mac had a bit of a dark age in the late 2010s but barring that, I think it's incorrect to say Apple products are unreliable.
I bought a late-2013 13" MacBook Pro when I started university and I used that thing up until the end of 2021 when I got a 14" M1 Pro MBP. And it wasn't even because it was performing that terribly, I just wanted the new Apple silicon machine. Now it's ~4.5 years later and that machine runs like it did on day 1 and I have no desire to upgrade anytime soon.
It's even less correct to exclude the whole decade of unreliable when discussing unreliable. Any product becomes good if you ignore the times when it's bad
Not a decade, it was roughly a 4 year span - from the 2016 super thin chassis redesign with butterfly switches to when they started shipping Apple Silicon in 2020 (they also backtracked on the bad keyboards in 2019 with the i9 MBP I believe)
And anyway, it's an outlier. Exception proves the rule.
Apple's held to such a high standard that people still joke about antenna gate from a decade and a half ago, or the iPhone 6 bending 12 years ago. Every other OEM is nonstop putting out worse devices with worse QC but no one hears about it because no one is shipping units for any individual high-end device in anywhere near the numbers Apple is. They've got a massive magnifying glass on them that no one else does.
I could tell you a swathe of issues I've had with every Android I've owned, all worse than any iPhone I've owned. But most people probably have never heard of those issues and/or don't remember them because it's not notable unless it's Apple. For instance, the Nexus 6P failed so reliably after the first year, it got to a point where you could just call Google, say you're having issues, and they'd fastlane you to sending you a Pixel XL as a replacement. The Nexus 5P from the same year had even worse issues where they practically all started boot looping at some point. If Apple had a dud year to that level, it would have been MAJOR news.
Apple care has always seemed like an extortion scheme to me yet Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery.
It's not about "having to" replace parts. It's for just-in-case. It's essentially insurance.
The battery in my M1 MacBook Pro went bad recently. But I have AppleCare, so I was able to walk into an Apple Store and hand it to someone, and the next day I picked it up all repaired. (New keyboard, too, since the keyboard and battery are considered one part.)
Total cost without AppleCare: $250 + tax.
Total cost with AppleCare: $0.
Total I've spent on AppleCare: $150.
If I had some machine from Dell or Acer or even Microsoft, what would I do? Ship it back to China for six months? There's no store I can walk into to get it fixed the next day.
The value in AppleCare is the same value you have in fire insurance. Maybe you want to save a few bucks and take your chances that everything you own won't burn to ashes and you have to start over with nothing. I'm not in college anymore.
With Dell you can get next business day on-site warranties for a reasonable price.
The tech comes out and does the repair at your home or place of business. Because the tech is often a contractor, in my experience there’s not likely to be an inquest for the purpose of denying the claim.
Lenovo’s on-site service has changed into a massive security risk. They changed the terms within the last year or two. You have to give one of their contractors full remote admin access to your computer to “run diagnostics” before they’ll dispatch the onsite repairman.
This used to be a service worth every penny. But now: read the fine print carefully.
The comment suggested Dell etc. require shipping to China and waiting months instead of making two trips to the Apple store when the reality is an online diagnostics and then a tech comes to your house or office the next business day.
> Total cost without AppleCare: $250 + tax.
> Total cost with AppleCare: $0.
> Total I've spent on AppleCare: $150.
Hence my comment about extortion scheme, even $150 would be way too high a price for a keyboard + battery but they kind of forces you subscribe to it by having absurdly high parts replacement prices. It is like a mafia asking you to pay for your protection yet you still think you made a good deal.
In what world is $150 “way too high” for a battery and a keyboard replacement on a laptop, including installation? Ever looked at pricing from OEMs on their batteries?
I had Apple Care on my 2006 MacBook. It covered around €3000 in repairs. Especially the logic board replacements added up fast. Couple of palm rests as well though that was also covered by extended warranty.
I paid $50 for that Apple Care through an eBay listing and got send a code that I could use to register. This was back when Apple Care was sold in physical boxes and people would resell them from foreign countries. So great deal all round.
But for the rest I never had Apple Care on anything.
Just like when they did this on the iPhones I suspect this is all self-serving.
It’s about making it easier and faster for Apple to fix the machines.
It benefits us all. But I suspect the cost of their super tight integration into large non-replaceable components with lots of glue started to show up in repair work costs.
> Apple owners seemed to feel it was a good deal, not realizing that you shouldn't even have to replace stuff before the 7 to 10 years mark appart maybe for the battery.
This whole post is a [citation needed] on multiple fronts.
From a pure endurance sports point of view, natural ability of latin americans in altitude has been successfully reached by other athletes through altitude training camps, tents simulating altitude and drugs (epo,...).
I am pretty sure that through daily exposition to LLM output, most people's writing style will evolve and will soon be indistinguishable from LLM output
I don't think you need a Mac to get a decent trackpad. You need one maybe to have a great one.
That is the main difference to me. I hate crappy trackpads but the ones on my 2 thinkpads are good enough for the nomad/mobile use. That doesn't mean I wouldn't prefer the one on a Mac but I wouldn't want to suffer a hostile, OS and lack of repairability just to get a better trackpad.
You don't really need that to use Linux.
People should stop copy/pasting urban myths or stories from the late 90's. We are in 2026 and one can perfectly buy a laptop preinstalled on linux with full support and just find the apps they need from an "app store" which in this case is just the frontend for the flatpak and packages manager. Picking up an app from Gnome Software is no different than installing an app from the play/apple/microsoft store.
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