gentooguy

esummers said:

This shouldn't be too surprising since the number 1 purchase right now is cheap windows laptops for people who normally would not be allowed to work from home.  You can tell this is having a strong effect because Dell gained marketshare.  Their customer mix is almost all business.

I guarantee you that no one is buying cheap Windows laptops because those things are useless for work. If you think that you can keep 3 or 4 applications going at the same time (especially if one of them is Chrome) - or even 1 application if it is a real resource hog like Excel - on a device that has anything less than an Intel i5 (or AMD equivalent) and 8 GB of RAM then you are sadly misguided.

To put it another way, no one is going to buy any Windows device for work purposes that has inferior specs to, say, a MacBook Air. It is just that a Lenovo, Dell or HP with $999 MBA specs will cost about $650 and an Acer or Asus with MBA specs can be had for $500. So while you might call them "cheap" they actually do have the same CPU, integrated graphics card, RAM module etc. as the MBA does with the real differences likely being the screen - and even that is going to be 1080p as opposed to the 1366x768 that you will see on actual cheap Windows devices - plus the lack of USB Type C ports and of course it is going to be maybe twice as thick build wise.

loopless said:

Our company is a heavy buyer of Dell workstations and laptops. Without exception that are unmitigated pieces of junk that barely last 2 years. The number of failures we have with Dells is tragic and they are just poorly designed built to a price throw away crap. Compared to the amazing longevity of Apple hardware there is no comparison. Just helped a friend replace his perfectly functional 2008 MacBook Pro. My 2014 27” iMac is a joy to use.

Shockingly none of my several former workplaces that used Dell had similar experiences. Case in point: my Iast Dell worked fine for 8 years until the power unit died. I inherited it from someone else when I started, used it until it was time for a refresh and they just gave it to me, and it was my main home laptop for 3 more years. Similarly if you go on the many Windows forums, none of them report such problems with Dells. Including - gasp! - your job. Because look ... if Dells were nearly as bad as you claim your company would have gone out of business long ago.

Look, I know that you like and prefer Macs - I cannot blame you as my work issued 13 inch MBPro is the single most favorite laptop that I have ever owned or used and my #4 favorite among all tech devices I have ever owned behind my NES, my Sony Walkman and my Samsung Galaxy Mega smartphone - but there is no reason to just make up stuff. Windows, Android, ChromeOS etc. would never succeed in the marketplace if they were half as bad as Apple fans claim that they are. The funny thing is that it is mostly one-sided. Few Windows, Android or ChromeOS users bash Apple products, and when they do 99% of it is either price or because the devices are a bit more locked down than they prefer, i.e. perfectly valid - and actually accurate - economic or tech reasons. But go to the Apple forums and it is endless trashing of users of other platforms simply for the crime of merely existing. And for the vast majority of them it is easy to tell that they have never seriously used - or used at all - the devices they are trashing.