My stepdad keeps saying that Apple is an evil company

X1 have the ThinkPad stamp on them just for marketing, and I don’t agree with Lenovo doing it with several other models that are not in line with what a ThinkPad represents.

A Thinkpad is not pretty, to be honest in that regard they look more like bricks, and it’s main point is being a robust laptop that you can use outside in working construction sites, because they were built with some military grade specs that allow them to cope with water in the keyboard and much more dust then others.

Keyboards in the true Thinkpads were also one of their strong points. Regardind track pads I always hated them in any laptop, but I love the track point(the red dot).

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I was lucky to have been able to avoid that ‘bad phase’ :joy: (I had actually been buying a MBP for about 3 years before the 16" came out, but always ended up sending them back because they just didn’t feel like enough of a step up from my MBA - I was always sure to tell them that too).

No need to apologise, when it comes to expensive items like hardware, I think we should be allowed to vent our frustration… sometimes companies need to hear just how much something bothers their customers.

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They are for sure quite a long way from the original think pads in many respects that is fair to say. Unfortunately I believe Lenovo are basically carrying the brand at this point and we are talking about a fairly recent flagship offering here. I get the point of what they used to be, but as you say now it is basically marketing. It is a sad state of affairs to be sure but IMHO there is not really any way about the current state of ThinkPad as anything more than exploiting the status of the brand… I don’t really see how this holds up as an example in an argument against BMW or Apple for using marketing and their brand.

The keyboard isn’t worst thing in the world bad, it is worse than the 16” MacBook and worse than the 2015 MacBook and worse the a mechanical of any sort I have every touched. It is however better than the 2016-(some of but being phased out now) MacBooks of particular bad keyboard lore both in feel and not having that feeling it may die at any minute, it is moderately robust, it isn’t great in either sense though. It does have the nipple. I’m not a fan, but if that is your thing then it does have that going for it.

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Older school ThinkPads were amazing. But these times are long gone.

For my last job I was issued a T490. Amazingly cute and compact machine!

…Aaaand that was about the only thing good about it. I hooked it to an external display and put it on a laptop stand so it can cool itself easily at the bottom.

Didn’t make a difference. The moment you loaded the CPU for 5s – incremental compilation – the fans would blast off at 3300 RPM for at least a minute.

I’ve used older school ThinkPads and I was seriously pondering buying one last year but that experience has put me off. Plus I’ve read a ton of Linux ThinkPad horror stories, too.

Apparently the brand has been hijacked by Lenovo and no longer has the same quality, for years now.

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They are doing it a lot for sure by extending the use of the brand in models that shouldn’t carry them.

A Thinkpad is T, X, W or P series, anything else is exploiting the name by Lenovo.

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That makes a lot of sense. I got stuck in that place of needing more for some VM based workflows and also needing to run windows some of the time, but also living in fear that my keyboard way about to die at any moment. Thankfully it didn’t, the rest of the machine was fine enough overall but that keyboard though I didn’t mind typing on it as much as some people it gave me the fear.

:joy: sometimes they do. At this point we pretty much all know they don’t really care, they money rolls in anyway.

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Ok, I son’t have experience with the last T’s.

Or you had a bad model or they really killed the Thinkpad brand.

Nothing as the same quality of the old days, be it cars, computers, appliances or whatever. At least in my experience :wink:

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There is some truth in that!

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in the last 10 years I had a lot of issues in this regards, sometimes things break just passed the warranty.

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“Sometimes”, more like most of the time. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I don’t think companies are “good” or “bad” consistently, most of the time a company decisions are driven by profit. Also any company can act differently in different circumstances.

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That’s true IMO. When people classify a company as “good” that’s only because the company’s business goals temporarily align with your values. And that can change at any time.

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Thisssssss

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On X, not wayland.

And different sessions are segmented regardless so can’t do it there in either case.

Ahh global hooks are fun!

At least here at my work (a college) the Mac’s have a whole lot more issues than the chromebooks (though the windows laptops are easily worst in terms of issues), so does that make the chromebooks the highest quality? Lol

I work entirely the opposite way. The more I pay the more I expect of perfection. The less I pay then the more I’m willing to fix my own issues as long as they give me access (and less access is roughly on par with higher cost to me, if I don’t have access then it better be perfect!).

Mine is of the Pixel line, very open, I have root access, can swap OS’s with ease, can fix almost any issue I run into (which is surprisingly few to none so far in the past few years) and definitely of the ‘higher-end’ tier. The openness allows me to do things that I just cannot do on iPhones, like my custom VPN, system-wide adblock’s, etc…

Yeah software quality is a big thing, but can’t blame that on the OS. Most software I use is very high quality though, I wonder if there’s much correlation with most software I run being FOSS unlike what’s common on iPhones.

Do I have root without resorting to hacks? Can I install a systemwide adblock? Can I replace it with another OS like linux if I so wish like I can on my phone?

Mine is that for me in all regards except battery. Heavy SSH use or heavy rendering or so will flatten my battery in 4-6 hours. I would happily take a phone twice the thickness to have 3 times the battery for example. I don’t get this whole lightweight and thin phone stuff, they feel breakable. Gimme a brick with tons of battery!

That’s from talking, not the RF. It’s literally infeasible for it to do anything to your head at anywhere within hundreds of times of the power level it puts out, and even if it could dump its entire battery into RF (which remember, is just light of a lower, I.E. less damaging, wavelength of light than visible light, so doing this would be like just a very bright floodlight from your antennae in the RF light spectrum) would do much much less to you than standing next to fireplace for a second, I.E. just barely warm up your skin. There’s just not enough physical interaction otherwise. To actually cause radiative damage you need to start getting into the UVC range, which is well above visible light. Below UVC the most light can really do is warm you up slightly, and the lower the wavelength the less heat it can impart as well.

+1

Even more +1. Planned obsolescence is definitely a real thing.


My thoughts of apple, yes they are ‘more’ evil than many other big companies. I think companies like Nestle and Sony and such hold the crown on that, but Apple is more so than, say, Microsoft or Google due to how they produce information and try to hold on to things they shouldn’t, not to say MS and Google wouldn’t do the same if they could, they likely would, just they don’t right now.

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What’s wrong with Sony :rofl: I like Sony :blush:

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We’re saying the same thing. I already know what I am getting when I buy an iPhone and I am OK with the deal. I would want more but I am trying to be a realist simply because I am not willing to invest weeks in hand-crafting the perfect software stack for my use-cases on a $400 Xiaomi Android device.

Fundamental differences in values. Even with me being a techie I am severely burned out on the “tinkering with stuff I already paid for” front. I want to pay and get the product and services I want. If that is not happening then I might as well go scour my local second-hand market, assemble my own stuff and then look for FOSS software, right? I know I can but I don’t want to.

Without examples this is just generic bashing, dude. :man_shrugging:

For 19.5 years of career I only met one guy whose MacBook lost an SSD out of the blue – and he got it replaced the next week (the whole laptop). And one girl who dropped hot coffee on it and then complained the keyboard is partially not working. Well… I’d like military-grade hardware myself as well but apparently there’s no such thing in Apple land.

I mean I get it, anecdotal evidence, filter bubbles etc. are a thing but we should try to keep an open mind. I’ve searched for this on the net and both camps are very well represented: there are people who mostly witnessed Macs crapping the bed in all different sorts of ways, and then there are people like me who worked for 10+ employers during their career (and well over 20 contracts inbetween) and in every team the people were mostly happy with their Macs – barring some cooling / fan annoyances which are sadly innate to all laptops.

Not sure what to think myself. Depending on which side you prefer to listen to you’d arrive at dramatically different conclusions, that much is certain.

Sure, but let’s not assume everyone is you. :stuck_out_tongue: I personally am looking to do more human stuff in my life because I’ve been a work drone most of my conscious life. So buying a cheap Android and making it 100% mine is way down my priority list.

I don’t think there is, Apple just does their best to have their stuff be fast – and they fail even there occasionally but that’s another topic. :smiley:

Dedicated enthusiasts will always be better than a corporation. But that’s the pickle right there: for 99% of the things people out there want there doesn’t exist a team of dedicated enthusiasts. I can’t take the risk to wait for somebody to make the perfect budget app that synchronizes its DB in a decentralized manner over encrypted tunnels on Android – one example.

Don’t use Apple. That’s not that their offering. Easy.


When this thread started, I didn’t come here to defend Apple and that’s still not my goal. I came here to urge people not to conflate things. “Apple products aren’t a good fit for me” is NOT the same as “Apple sucks” and I’ll keep saying it!

Also, “Apple is an evil company” is a very 16 year-old thing to say. Most corps, after they go beyond a certain scale, become super evil. It’s like saying “water is wet” from where I am standing. Just stating super obvious things.

Yeah they are evil but in the meantime you can use their products to help you in your life a little bit. If we go down this idealistic rabbit hole – who’s evil and do you want to “support” them by using their products, then eventually you’ll find yourself living in a cave in the mountains with zero technology.

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They’ve had some very… morally questionable practices involving the nestle-style slave-like labor and all, one of the companies I try to avoid. ^.^;

I want something to work well by default, but I want to be able to change anything about it and not be locked out. I don’t want to build my own thing from scratch, I’m not an Arch user. :wink:

Oh it’s entirely anecdotal, but that’s what I have to go on, the sample size is up near a hundred over the years here though so it’s not like it’s low.

Hence my thing above that it needs to work well by default, and they do. They get updates as soon as they come out (unlike waiting 6 months to never for samsung and others), everything works on them as they have basically every speciality feature android can have, etc… etc… There are both low end and high end models, but that’s mostly changes in body and CPU, mostly the same feature-set of near-everything. It’s a good line.

Eh that’s mostly newer objective-c versions without GC and using swift and such. Java on android I still say was such a huge detriment to overall speed, though it does have the benefits that it can run on a variety of different architectures without needing recompilation, which was a boon for android in the early days, but now everything is arm64 based anyway. I hope for the soon-days of RISC-V chips!

Or they could actually be open and get an even larger userbase!

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Me too, dude, but I am not here to argue theoreticals and what could be. We gotta work with what we have. When we have to choose between “a ready-baked pie that you can consume right away” and “go create your own wheat for the flour and make all your ingredients and then make a pie out of that”, I choose the former. Not here to convince anybody else otherwise. :man_shrugging:

Weird. One theory I have is that your circle is comprised of people like you who like to hold on to tech for a long time and maybe there MacBooks crap the bed? Although to be fair, I know people who still use MBP 2012 and they only once replaced its battery and they are still working just fine.

It’s very obvious that they disagree. :stuck_out_tongue:

And I think you are being way too charitable and optimistic about the common folk’s technical prowess. Having viruses and rootkits on Android devices because somebody figured they’ll side-load a hacked game by downloading dodgy .adb files from the net is an actual thing. It became so big at one point that a lot of vendors quietly added antiviruses that shut down and disable most of these software pieces after they launch the first time.

So yeah, I want more liberty on my iPhone as well but you shouldn’t also forget that Apple has to defend against law enforcement seizing your phone and extracting everything from it. That is an another factor in the “no freedom” part for iDevices.

Again, I ain’t defending them, I am enumerating tradeoffs. If we have to choose (and we have to, yeah) then I’ll choose the more closed device that’s supposedly protecting me better because it’s already doing 90% of what I want it to do. The rest 10% I can live without. :man_shrugging:

And even if they lie through their teeth that the locked down nature of the devices is for our protection while it actually isn’t, well, what choice do I have anyway? As I said before, I can buy a $400 Xiaomi device that’s fairly high-end but the mere thought of the weeks it will take me to make it completely mine is making me grind my teeth. Feck that noise, I want something that I buy, unpack, restore all my data from a cloud backup I did 30 minutes ago on my previous device, and get going. And that’s exactly what I get with iPhones.

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If they bypass the multiple warnings and go through the multiple steps to allow unsigned installation then they fully deserve whatever happens. If you change the fuel pump on your car to an aftermarket one and it blows up, well you don’t go complaining to the car manufacturer about it. :wink:

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Not only will they complain, they’ll also sue you for making it possible for them to shoot themselves in the foot. It’s the world we’re living in.

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