The article highlights Acer's $679.99 Swift 3 as representative of a new class of MBP killers. Probably worth repeating these cons from the top Amazon review for that model:
- "The screen is as bad as they say, even after calibration. It's only slightly better than my old laptop I bought for $350 a few years ago."
- "I have problems with apps being fuzzy (not scaling to the display properly), problems with Cortana and the Windows Start menu, and problems with the screen not immediately waking from sleep."
- "The BIGGEST CON by far is the thermals. The laptop has amazing specs as I mentioned above, but it can't use them to their full potential because the components get too hot and have to cut back on speed. The fans are noisy and run at full speed often. I regularly experience temps of 70°+ while web browsing, and 90°+ while (light) gaming or other more intensive tasks."
The build quality and display quality of Apple computers has kept me coming back for years. To this day, the colour and crispness of my 2004 17” iMac G4 beats the crap out of my 4-year-old Lenovo.
Thermals are super key, too. The author is completely ignoring a massive subset of features that just doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m not sure if the author just doesn’t have a job that requires them to use MacOS, doesn’t use it; or hasn’t spent a lot of time with either of those laptops.
For a professional photo or video editor, for instance - the performance gains from the ASUS would mean nothing compared to the quality of the Retina Display, the ability to work at native print resolution, colour correctness; and build quality if they’re taking it on the field.
> "I have problems with apps being fuzzy (not scaling to the display properly), problems with Cortana and the Windows Start menu, and problems with the screen not immediately waking from sleep."
that should be blamed on windows, or maybe on the graphics adapter drivers, not on the hardware per se.
Why omit the positive parts from a generally positive review? You could have just found a negative one instead of cherry picking.
For completeness, here is the rest of the review:
"Taking a look at the specs of this laptop, you would expect it to be incredible, especially for this price point. Taking a look at the online reviews shows that the screen isn't the best, and it takes a few more hits, but even so it looks like an amazing deal. After using it, in my opinion it's worth the money, but not as fantastic as it appears.
TLDR: Look at what you want in a laptop before buying this one. For me it works fine but there are a few key drawbacks that might affect different tasks you would want to use this laptop for.
The PRO's
+ Build Quality is fantastic, with sturdy metal and a keyboard I surprisingly quite enjoy using.
+ Big PRO: The Ryzen 4700U processor is a beast, and the snappiest processor I've used. Productivity use such as coding, taking notes in class, running other professional programs like the Microsoft suite or Zoom are handled easily and perfectly.
+ Big PRO: A 512GB SSD for this price is incredible! And it's even a really good SSD at that.
...
Overall, I am disappointed by the low upper limit of the hardware, but for my needs as a tech-savvy college student looking for a good laptop for classes, it's perfect. It's light and portable, sturdy, fast, and cheap. Even the gaming/heavy use cases are.... acceptable, even if they aren't what they could be. I recommend this laptop to many people, but it's not for everyone."
The problem with a lot of these is they don't run MacOS natively. Maybe it's great hardware (as is a $2200 thinkpad if you buy one now), but I'm not going to use Windows 10 for my mobile workstation.
That's fine and all but the touchpad support on Linux is greatly lacking, though I know there's a project in the works to improve that. I can just as easily run a full screen Debian workstation inside virtualbox on macos with very little performance impact.
And I'm absolutely not going back to a 16:9 aspect ratio 1080p screen, ever.
If it doesn’t run MacOS natively, it won’t affect my purchase decision or that of, for instance; the thousands of people in my fields of iOS development and Logic/Final Cut users.
I run a hackintosh for fun, but I’d never purchase a non-Apple laptop to do iOS development on.
It’s a cliche, but ‘just works’ is very important when I need to support a new iOS version and don’t want to worry about upgrades.
People who buy MacBook Pros are likely buying them specifically for a set of specific use cases.
Furthermore, the upcoming speed increases and cost decreases that come from the ARM switch should make this fairly irrelevant.
Also, it’s slightly pedantic, but he talked about the ‘killers’ and then only provided one example. They could have at least provided more than one comparative set of statistics.
Not as magical as it seems at first https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1UD14VWM1Z6IJ/
- "The screen is as bad as they say, even after calibration. It's only slightly better than my old laptop I bought for $350 a few years ago."
- "I have problems with apps being fuzzy (not scaling to the display properly), problems with Cortana and the Windows Start menu, and problems with the screen not immediately waking from sleep."
- "The BIGGEST CON by far is the thermals. The laptop has amazing specs as I mentioned above, but it can't use them to their full potential because the components get too hot and have to cut back on speed. The fans are noisy and run at full speed often. I regularly experience temps of 70°+ while web browsing, and 90°+ while (light) gaming or other more intensive tasks."