Comment by kettlecorn
9 hours ago
At this point I think few people really will care about that spec difference.
The accumulated brand trust of Apple, and the negative brand trust of Microsoft outweighs the numbers.
Even many technically savvy people believe Apple can deliver a higher quality computing experience with 8GB of RAM than Microsoft can with 16GB, and they're often correct.
> The accumulated brand trust of Apple
This is an important thing to Apple, and Apple users know it. They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience. Microsoft has no such qualms about OEMs shipping an underspecced disaster of a beater laptop (see Vista).
You can (generally) but any Apple product and know you are going to get something quality and a good experience, even from the base/budget models. They don't really have any "bad" products.
>They would not have put out this macbook if it was going to be a subpar experience.
"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs
Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.
And despite antenna gate, the iPhone 4 was still the best smartphone of that year and leaps ahead of it's closest competition (the Galaxy S), and remained the #1 best selling smartphone at year after launch
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Apple certainly puts out experiences that leave much to be improved but to be pedantic the word 'subpar' implies below the 'par'. If 'par' is set by Microsoft then Apple easily clears it.
Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.
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> "You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs
> Apple has put out plenty of subpar experiences in the past, and there's no reason they wouldn't do it in the future.
Come on—that was 16 years ago! Y'all gotta let some things go after a while.
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The Vision Pro and butterfly keyboard would like a word
Fair enough, although I wouldn't call the vision pro a bad product necessarily, it's just too expensive for what it is.
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In laptop keyboards, UI refactorings, or Siri?
Where is exactly the premium quality?
Apple's UX quality, design focus, and respect for its customers is higher quality and more consistent than Microsoft's.
Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.
Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.
Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.
Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.