I bought an original Macbook Air. It always worked well. As it got on to about 10 years old, I took it in to an Apple Store a couple miles from my house and asked if they could replace the battery. The battery worked pretty well, but I figured.. the machine was going strong and if they still had batteries in stock, I should grab one now and the laptop will live even longer. They replaced the battery for $99 and when it came back (3 days later), they also replaced the motherboard for some reason. I don't know why, but basically, aside from the screen and the keyboard, it's a new machine. I still use it today -- the only thing I can't really do on it is edit 4K video.
Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son. A couple of weeks ago the keyboard stopped working. We bought a replacement keyboard and swapped it out. Still didn't work. So, something on the motherboard. When we called and asked about getting it fixed, they said it wasn't in warranty anymore and the price to diagnose and replace the broken part couldn't be estimated, nor could they estimate how long it would take. We'd have to ship it to a third-party repair center. So my son is walking around his college campus with a Lenovo laptop and an external keyboard, for a laptop we bought 2 years ago for almost $2,000.
So, no. No Lenovo for me. And given my previous stupendously negative experience with Dell (they couldn't repair 2 brand new machines that were shipped to us with broken WiFi and took so long to declare it unrepairable the machines couldn't be returned either -- two machines bought together had to be reported in separate calls to tech support and the third party tech support people who came to the house weren't very knowledgable -- calls disputing the non-returnable declaration took so long to return and were bounced among so many unhelpful people at Dell Headquarters they basically convinced me to give up, buy third-party wifi cards and live without Bluetooth in these machines), no Dell XPS laptops for me either.
On those experiences, I'll only spend my own money on Apple laptop hardware.
These are not comparable. There are wildly different quality of laptops under the Lenovo brand. A ton of them are complete crap. Apple simply doesn't sell anything like that. The author is comparing to a Thinkpad specifically.
Additionally, the 10 years old Apple that made your macbook is a very different company from today. Although they are still a premium brand, the reliability and replaceability of parts is completely different. I have one of the first unibody MBPs from 2009, and ran it for almost 10 years (although I had to switch to freebsd and linux by the end because of Apple). That laptop was incredibly sturdy, and parts were reasonably replaceable, keyboard lasted 10 years before getting squishy. Battery was a terrible hot pocket but replaceable without screws! back then it was all SATA so I upgraded to an intel SSD from before they sold their controllers to samsung - also in a user serviceable compartment next to the battery.
None of these things are true of Apple laptops today.
I’ll give you the user-serviceability point, but not the longevity point. I would bet lots of money that my 2021 14” MBP will still be very usable in 2031.
(Maybe not by me, but that’s only because I’ll succumb to the urge to buy something new and shiny and tax deductible in a few years.)
> I’ll give you the user-serviceability point, but not the longevity point.
I just replaced my 2012 Thinkpad T430s (which I bought second-hand!) with a 2019 x390. Part of it is that the T430 became a loaner that I have gifted to a friend who needed a laptop for light paperwork, but also the battery on it (and any replacements I could find) had a pretty short lifespan, about 2.5 hours at best. The laptop was still very usable, but I've become too tied to my desk and my desktop lately and I wanted to be able to work with more mobility and not worry about having an outlet constantly available.
All that is just to say that Thinkpads, even post-IBM era ones, have the longevity you expect from a Macbook. Unfortunately, the user-serviceability has also gone downhill, with soldered-on memory being common and now the charging port is a USB-C that is built onto the motherboard.
But the T430 us legendary like that. I have written many scrapping and alerting bots, but the only one still running is the 'find me any new refurbished T430 trove nearby' and haul ass to buy some. I love this machine so much I'd like to retire with a stock of them, praying I'll still be able to browse whatever the slow web will be then and code the night away as I've always done with this beauty.
IDK, the last Thinkpad I had, I used for a decade, then passed it on to a relative who used it for a few more years before something finally broke. Have also owned a Lenovo Yoga series laptop, and it's absolutely not in the same category at all as a Thinkpad.
The Legion 5/5 Pro/7 are very solid as workstations in my experience, and with the exception of the keyboard, everything I would want to service is accessible. I've switched the memory, added new SSDs and even repasted my Legion 7 Gen6. I've even been able to run VFIO virtualized Windows on these machines.
I will agree that it's not quite as easy to fix/service/upgrade as it used to, but I bought my Macbook Pro (Intel i9) in 2020, used it daily since then, thrown it in a backpack and had to thrashed around in airports repeated, and the thing still works about as well as when I purchased it.
I really do think Apple does a reasonably good job at making sure stuff lasts. It hurt to pay nearly 4 grand for a computer three years ago, but I suspect I'll get at least another five years out of it.
Yeah it's sad but the butterfly keyboard generation of MBPs had such issues. Keyboard aside, USB-C ports burned out / stopped working all the time. Battery life was just OK on Intel.
The latest gen is better thanks to MagSafe and Mx chips help yield much better battery life.
I didn't say anything about blame, only that the category of laptops being compared by the parent are not in the same class as what the author of the article was comparing.
Every single laptop I owned before switching to Apple was a huge piece of shit, in hindsight—like, probably shouldn't have been saleable, just a straight-up lemon by design.
... except an IBM (yes, it's that long ago) Thinkpad that was super-underpowered even for the time. Though, it did have the ~2-3hr actual-in-practice battery life that was typical of laptops at the time, no matter what they promised, so like all the rest the battery was really just for hopping from one outlet to the next (I don't know if Apple laptops were like that at the time, but I do know that no subsequent laptop let me feel like I could leave my power brick behind when getting up from my desk until I got a Macbook)
If I ever go back to PC-land, it'll be to an underpowered device from a business-oriented line. Worked once, so, maybe it'll work again...
> Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son.
This especially is a big part of your problem. Discrete graphics card in a laptop = 2x the problems—and that holds even for Apple (in the Intel days, anyway). Gaming-marketed on top of that? Add another 1x for 3x the rate of trouble over baseline. Avoid, avoid, avoid.
You know what? I’ve only had my Steam Deck for slightly under a year, but I’m honestly astounded at the amount of abuse it has endured without showing any apparent problems. I’m very curious to see how long it lasts.
I doubt it will be competitive with a Switch for durability, which is the closest mirror to a Deck that also has some similarities to Apple-style hardware-quality + lock-in.
But that said, I’ve had problems with Apple laptop keyboards after only a couple years of use, and had a laptop monitor from Apple start to yellow bizarrely after less than a year. Nintendo joycons started having issues after under a year.
Sometimes you’re just at the bad-end of the bell-curve. It’s a shame that online reviews aren’t that helpful anymore; it can be hard to know what’s real with consumer tech, and hard to know how big the lemon segment is.
Supply-chain rumors suggest the launch of a 15.6" MBA in the near future, leakers suggest it has M2 Pro as an option. If so it might offer 32GB (or like the mini vs studio, maybe that will remain a segmentation point). Current rumors are maybe June launch.
I agree though, 16GB is tolerable for casual usage and consumption without massive swapping, but, 32GB would really be nice.
The T series Lenovos are still great business machines -- I wouldn't buy any other Lenovo. I prefer my macbook for the most part, but sometimes you need different hardware.
It's out of my wheelhouse, but I am looking for a gaming laptop manufacturer recommendation that is high quality...
I agree with Apple being the king of the hill... But it really isn't all that bad on the other side. There are some Windows laptops that will last you a work day on battery, albeit none of them can do considerable compute. I've seen some non-Apple hardware last for 5-ish years all right too.
And if all you need from the laptop is Chrome and SSH, then Chromebooks are actually a pretty sweet deal. I still run a 6 year old Pixelbook as the daily driver. Battery deteriorated to the point of lasting only 6-ish hours, but I have nowhere near that many meetings in a day. A new premium Chromebook should reliably last 10 hours and stay good for 5-ish years.
In my experience, Lenovo is basically two different companies for their Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad machines. If you have a Thinkpad and have a warranty issue, they'll overnight you a shipping box with an overnight label. I had an issue with mine that needed a motherboard replacement and I was only without my laptop for 3 days. Meanwhile, I had a similar issue with a non-Thinkpad laptop and they emailed me a UPS ground shipping label, expected me to provide my own box, and quoted a turnaround time of several weeks. I ended up buying another of the same model of laptop and returning the defective one instead.
Comparing to Apple (I run both Lenovo and apple kit) I’ve lost two bits of hardware with apple for multiple days on repairs in the UK. A friend just got told that there’s a 2 month turnaround on his custom M1 MBP 16 which has a logic board problem.
That scared the shit out of me enough to throw the money in on a Lenovo T14 gen 3 with NBD on site repairs. If I sell my apple kit I can afford to buy another identical machine and stick it on the shelf. I’m still £120 up on my mac and mitigated a whole bunch of risks.
A couple of T490’s is probably good enough for me to be fair.
It's odd to me that Apple has never offered a 24h turnaround (or cross ship) higher tier support package. This was a hold up for businesses using Apple machines for a long time. I guess enough employees started requesting Apple machines eventually getting businesses to offer them anyway.
> It's odd to me that Apple has never offered a 24h turnaround (or cross ship) higher tier support package.
They used to have an even more exotic AppleCare tier than that for Xserve customers - onsite hardware support within 4 hours if you had a problem during the business day. I don’t remember exactly how much it cost but I want to say it was less than $500.
They offer “express replacements” with applecare, I did it for my broken ipad. They overnighted me a new one and I sent the old one back to them in the included box/label.
I consider Apple that they don't sell "non-Thinkpad" products. That's how I can easily pass the spect sheets which promise better-than-apple-for-much-less and pay a bit more and be happy about it.
In US, ThinkPads have been especially popular in the corporate world, with some companies practically standardizing on them as business laptops; e.g. Microsoft used to be like 90% Thinkpads early-to-mid 2010s. I suspect that much of the support infrastructure benefits that we get are derived from it being that pervasive. Are they generally less common in Europe?
Prices in Switzerland are ok, to not say cheaper than elsewhere, but support...Unless in warranty, is atrocious. They asked me to send my laptop for "diagnostic" with unknown cost when I requested how to buy the part (out of stock on their website) to replace it.
If you trust ebay/aliexpress for battery, good luck. I am lucky enough to have been able to buy what looks a genuine one from a store here as I hope they sourced it from official Lenovo European reseller, which are available only for company (req. Vat number etc)
Digital River was the third party maintenance company, never experienced such bad service. I'd purchased onsite support. Getting them to listen and actually book the repair was painful.
Opposite experience for me.
Had a MacBook for ~10 years and I had various hardware failures, every time you have to book an appointment at the genius bar first to try and convince them that it's really an issue. Go into the shop, then you have to wait for 7-21 days for it to get fixed for an unknown price and because it's all connected replacing the rubber feet means changing the whole bottom case etc.
Then you have to go in and pick it up again.
This is in Germany where a Apple Store might not be around the corner.
And yes, because I relied on it for business I spent the money on their Joint Venture program to get faster service and a replacement laptop (but only if the Apple Store in question had one available which was never the case for me which is ridiculous). Until they canceled the program.
Lenovo instead: Bought premium support, had an issue, someone physically came to my house to replace the memory at my kitchen table the next day.
Apple - in my experience - is not great for freelancers and small businesses. It might be good for private people and large businesses.
I hate the ceremony and the Apple Store experience.
I've owned a few MacBook Pros and I now use a ThinkPad X1 Extreme. I paid for the support plans on all of them.
The Macs were generally very good until the generation prior to the M1. That was the worst laptop I've ever owned. I had to repair it multiple times - keyboard multiple times and also a motherboard that went bad - and I was without it for days each time. Not to mention, I also had to make an appointment, often days away, just to drop it off. The AppleCare experience with laptops was pathetic. To be fair, they've done a fantastic job on the phones and iPads I've had to bring in.
My ThinkPad's touchpad started flaking out so I called about a repair. They had someone at my house the next day and I was only without the laptop for about 15 minutes. It was a night and day difference between AppleCare and Lenovo's premium support. There's nothing sexy about this ThinkPad and the hardware isn't as good as the latest Macs, but the Linux support is flawless and I know I can count on Lenovo to provide good service.
+1 to Framework. I self-repaired my kid's laptop twice (spills; once I had to swap the keyboard, and another time - motherboard), and it's being straightforward to fix.
I've purchased a lot of computers from Lenovo and other brands. The service and parts availability difference between the Thinkpad/Station/Centre models and everything else Lenovo makes is vast. The build quality between Thinkpads and other Lenovo models is also stark.
Parts, firmware updates, repair manuals...even warranty extensions for 5+ year old Thinkpads is totally normal.
For computers other than Think branded things that Lenovo makes, they're functionally abandoned ASAP. They make some innovative and well-engineered things, but outside the Think line everything is basically a disposable commodity machine.
WSL2 under Windows is very good these days, you can run ML tasks without much overhead, and Windows 11 has an x server that allows graphical applications to run from WSL2. So for home development, all you really need is Windows (if you game, if you don't or run games that work well under Linux, Linux is the better choice).
For laptop, it very much varies by use case. For general higher level coding and web browsing, M1/M2s work very well. For more specialized use cases, Linux is simply better than OS X.
I’m now using a Macbook Pro (3 months give or take) after being on windows HPs and the hardware is excellent but macOS itself… not great by any means. Windows+WSL2 is a better developer experience and I’m honestly surprised as I expected it to be the other way around. Granted to make windows usable I had to install tons of tools, but the same is true for the Mac!
I'm a self-confessed Thinkpad fanboi so very happy to contribute my story. I bought the laptop I am typing on now (P51s) on eBay 4 years ago for ~£600 with a couple of years of warranty remaining. During a covid lockdown it developed a motherboard fault and they sent someone out the next day to my house to fix it onsite.
With Apple I was always told to take it to a service centre. I mean, that's what I signed up for I guess, but the damn thing cost me £2000. I think there is not enough emphasis on the price differentials in these conversations. In fact, my repair story is kind of irrelevant to my point which is that for me the availability, cost and repairability(?) of these machines is key. I have an IT cabinet with spare parts, PSUs, clonky docking stations, and have managed to get most of my family onto Thinkpads so we have a pretty robust setup whereby if somebody has a problem we can probably sort it within an hour or two, either with a replacement part or a replacement machine. I am a bit envious of recent Apple silicon for battery life but stubbornly sticking with my old Thinkpads for now!
It all comes down to what you want and what you buy.
I've had my 11" MBA in service since it launched. I did have to pull off OSX because (it became garbage); but the hardware has been solid for a decade+ now.
My 2019 rMBP lasted ~2.5 years before an OSX update came in and cooked it ~1w outside of corporate Apple Care expiring on it (see: I was told to scrap it).
I've also had a Dell tech sitting at my kitchen table replacing a bad motherboard the same day the laptop failed to post; ~8h turnaround 'Dead' to 'Working fine'.
You get what you buy and what you pay for to a large extent. Much of Apples reputation is that they simply don't sell a cheap gaming laptop.
I switched from a Macbook to PC laptop a few years ago. I'd say there are two rules to making that switch comfortably.
Rule #1: do a ton of research and comparison shopping to be certain you're making a good PC buy. These huge brands like Lenovo, Dell, Acer, etc churn out so many laptops, and the build quality varies wildly between them. For my process, I completely factored out most brands: absolutely no shopping for Acer, MSI, Dell, Toshiba, etc. They're just too much of a roulette, unless you know a specific model that fits your needs (like the Thinkpad!). At the time I was shopping I was only looking at Asus, Alienware and Gigabyte (not sure if they're all still good brands in 2023).
Rule #2: be able to do basic small maintenance. I ended up buying a Gigabyte laptop that's still running perfectly 5 years later, and it IS a gaming laptop with all the heat / cooling issues that implies. I've had to replace the SSD, the battery (heat degradation), didn't replace but had to oil and reseat the fans, repasted CPU / GPU, and make various software tweaks. A computer shop could do the same, just like the Genius bar, but it just makes things so much less stressful when you can do the kind of quick maintenance that Apple so strongly discourages.
It's crazy how good apples are. I have a 2013 MacBook Air which I replaced batteries now after 10 years. Still as fast and snappy as day 1. It is crazy.
I can't say the same thing about my HP ZBook from 2014. Reason: it's snappier now after I upgraded the RAM from 16 to 32 GB and swapped the HDD for two SSDs years ago.
I didn't check the specs of that Air, but is it upgradeable? If it is, maybe you could make it faster too.
Anyway, there is no reason for your Air to be slower after 10 years. The hardware is the same. Either Apple makes a slower OS for it or it will be as fast as ever.
In my case I moved to Debian two months ago after years of Ubuntu. It was fast enough but it feels faster now. The fan didn't turn on often but it's even more silent now. Maybe less stuff running in background or a newer kernel and graphic driver, who knows.
On the other side, my friend's cheap Windows laptops become slower and slower until they buy a new one. I'm not sure to know somebody with a 2000 Euro Windows laptop. Maybe it's different.
I use my 2011 13" MacBook Pro daily, though the OS is so out of date I don't log into my Apple ID with it or even Chrome. Media consumption, ssh to servers, web browsing is all super fast still. I even use Parsec to game on it connecting to my PC in the basement, it does so perfectly. I replaced the battery twice, but otherwise it's been issue-free. 16gb ram and an SSD gave it a new life.
Some stuff the dual core i5 just can't handle anymore, but it won't be e-waste any time soon.
I was in the same situation with a Macbook Air 2011. At about 9 years old I needed to replace the battery, but got turned away from the Apple Store because it was 'too old'.
I tried buying a replacement battery online but it only worked for a short time before it stopped charging all-together.
Left a really sour taste in my mouth because the battery was the only thing stopping me from using an otherwise perfectly fine piece of hardware.
Everyone has their own unique experience. I bought an IdeaPad in 2012 and to this day it is working well enough that I haven't replaced it (though when I'm home I have a modern tower I built 2 years ago). I could not be happier with the build quality and longevity. I must have 10 000 hours absolute minimum on that device, I really wish there was a counter in the BIOS I could check.
I have a ThinkPad R61 from 2007 that still works. It's a core2duo 1.83ghz with 4gb of DDR2 and GMA950 graphics so even with a really lightweight Linux install it's basically useless-- but it boots right up and the battery still works.
I had Apple quote me $900 to replace a failed screen (no visible damage, but no image either) and tell me that they weren't sure it would even work because of "liquid damage" to the mainboard. I can assure you that the computer never got wet. I bought a replacement screen from ifixit for less than half the price and installed it myself in an hour.
> Dell (they couldn't repair 2 brand new machines that were shipped to us with broken
WiFi and took so long to declare it unrepairable
Didn't they use socketed WiFi cards? On every non hair thin laptop I could crack open, I always found the WiFi card to be mounted on a MiniPCI or newer socket, so unless that problem was due to the mainboard, it was just a matter of replacing the WiFi card and install the relevant driver.
Also, if you know how to solder and have a really thin laptop with one available internal USB port, you can fit a small module such as this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225197524670
Complete it with a small pcb antenna and you have a new WiFi card. Very useful also for small SBCs which beside the usual USB sockets usually have internal USB ports pins.
Do they make laptops with internal USB ports? I've never heard of one, but that doesn't mean much.
I've seen the feature on servers for the same reason they can come with (dual) internal SD cards, but I can't imagine a manufacturer putting in a full-size USB-A port in an ultrathin laptop. I'd really like to see an example if I'm wrong however.
I only ever bought T series laptops from them and they all still work flawlessly, the oldest being a T420 currently used by my mom who needs a computer about once a month to visit a website.
On those experiences, I'll only spend my own money on Lenovo laptop hardware. ;-)
Apple's customer service is really unrivaled in the computer repair space. I had a similar experience with my MacBook Pro in the past, my display stopped working, dropped it off at a store and picked it up a couple days later. They had replaced basically the entire laptop sans the plate on the bottom.
Tried getting HP to fix a monitor with a defective port and was going to have to ship it to them at my own cost with no estimates of the repair time or cost. I just went out and bought a Samsung.
If you have the time and knowledge to repair your own computers like the author it can be a fun hobby, I also have two custom built PCs, but I don't do work on them for a reason.
I've had Lenovo send a tech over within 24 hours and do a repair on my kitchen table. The several day wait typical of Apple in-store-repair is glacial in comparison. And that's assuming the Apple store doesn't ship it out to the depot for a repair where the reimaging-happy techs are likely to impose a couple extra hours of restoring from backup when you get your machine back in your hands.
I think you got exceededly lucky with your MBA repair. And honestly it's a bit tough to believe they replaced the motherboard for free 3ish years after they typically refuse to stop servicing the device entirely for anything besides the battery and have declared the device obsolete. Had it hit the 11 year mark they probably would have offered to recycle it and maybe give you $50 off a new one.
I've had extremely bad luck with Apple support and products. The last time I had to do some ridiculous process to prove it was still under warranty and they still tried to pawn it off on the retailer.
Had an OLD iPhone that needed a battery. Apple ended up replacing the whole thing with a refurb, as apparently the replacement battery process went sideways and broke the circuit board.
I bought a t470s on ebay for 100 dollars during the holidays and I’m blown away that its mostly an intel era macbook air (was there a 2017 model?) with upgradeable ram 16gb (for 35 dollars), nvme, and a replaceable battery.
Gaming pcs, until about a year or two ago, are pretty much desktop replacement pcs.
A personal anecdote, I've had the the complete opposite experience with Asus and Lenovo laptops lasting forever, not even needing any sort of repair, while my 2007 MacBook pro died because of a known flaw on Nvidia GPU after less than 4 year and the fix costed as much as a new laptop
I disagree. My office have me 15 year old Lenovo E440s when COVID hit and we all worked from home. Some of them are going on close to 20 years and I've had few problems other than slowness. A few had WiFi fail but other than that ran strong
I bought an original Macbook Air. It always worked well. As it got on to about 10 years old, I took it in to an Apple Store a couple miles from my house and asked if they could replace the battery. The battery worked pretty well, but I figured.. the machine was going strong and if they still had batteries in stock, I should grab one now and the laptop will live even longer. They replaced the battery for $99 and when it came back (3 days later), they also replaced the motherboard for some reason. I don't know why, but basically, aside from the screen and the keyboard, it's a new machine. I still use it today -- the only thing I can't really do on it is edit 4K video.
Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son. A couple of weeks ago the keyboard stopped working. We bought a replacement keyboard and swapped it out. Still didn't work. So, something on the motherboard. When we called and asked about getting it fixed, they said it wasn't in warranty anymore and the price to diagnose and replace the broken part couldn't be estimated, nor could they estimate how long it would take. We'd have to ship it to a third-party repair center. So my son is walking around his college campus with a Lenovo laptop and an external keyboard, for a laptop we bought 2 years ago for almost $2,000.
So, no. No Lenovo for me. And given my previous stupendously negative experience with Dell (they couldn't repair 2 brand new machines that were shipped to us with broken WiFi and took so long to declare it unrepairable the machines couldn't be returned either -- two machines bought together had to be reported in separate calls to tech support and the third party tech support people who came to the house weren't very knowledgable -- calls disputing the non-returnable declaration took so long to return and were bounced among so many unhelpful people at Dell Headquarters they basically convinced me to give up, buy third-party wifi cards and live without Bluetooth in these machines), no Dell XPS laptops for me either.
On those experiences, I'll only spend my own money on Apple laptop hardware.