I’ve had a long-term dislike for Apple (I mean they did threaten legal action against me on 6 different occasions…), but they sure have their shit together compared to everyone else these days. MicroSlop can’t make anything usable at this point. With the exception of Office, I see no reason for them to even exist.
Nightjob bought me an 18″ Alienware Area-51 with an nvidia 5090 – it’s a pretty nice laptop, but windows constantly has these microfreezes where the keyboard and mouse (even bluetooth) stop responding for 1 – 5 seconds. Any videos playing continue working fine. It has 3 hard drives in it (16TB total!) When I boot into Linux (any distro) there are no freezes and it is blazing fast, so I know it isn’t a hardware issue. Although in Linux I cannot control the screen brightness at all and the audio is fucked after each reboot. So, despite the microfeezing it spends most of its time in winblowz. I’ve reinstalled windows 3 times with and without all the dell shit – doesn’t seem to make any difference so I suspect the issue is with windows itself. Speaking of dell shit, their stupid fucking supportassist app frequently stops working and just has a big ‘ole spinning wheel. How hard is it to make shit that works these days? Must be more AI vibe coded shit or something…
Dayjob bought me a 16″ MacBook Pro M5 with 128GB of RAM, but only a single 2TB drive :'( – keep in mind I’m not an Apple fan (see first paragraph) – like at all. That said, this this is fucking awesome! Everything else seems like a pile of shit after using this! The screen is amazing, the keyboard is delightful, MacOS Just-Fucking-Works-Without-All-The-Bullshit (TM) and there is no bastardized WSL – I have native terminal, real UNIX under the hood, and shit just works without having to dick around with things.
Then I saw Apple released a new MacBook Neo in the $599 to $699 price point (depending on options) – I think MicroSlop is completely done for now. I don’t see any of the PC manufacturers being able to compete at that price point with a stable OS. Sure, there’s Linux still, but with the exception of maybe Framework, I don’t really see any serious competition here. The big names (Dell, Lenovo, etc.) that have laptops in the sub-$1K price range with Linux on them are essentially disposable garbage.
