They’re not. The MacBook Air can easily thermal throttle under any sustained load because they went with a fanless design. It may work for casual usage, but it also negates at least half of your claims.
Screen cracking was ~4 years ago for M1 laptops, which also included Apple making screen repairs far more difficult, exacerbating the problems they’re currently being sued over.
They did separate NAND from the rest of the board in recent models, but NAND on the board was only a problem because A) bad engineering & B) greed. Thay’s not even getting into MacOS overwriting to NAND and wearing it out.
“Engineering is hard” is not an excuse for a company that’s worth $4 trillion. With flexgate they cheaped out on shorter flex cables. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of flex cables knows that’s a recipe for disaster. And while Flexgate itself is an older case, it’s a clear example of their profits-at-all-costs approach.
For that ~$900 M1 Macbook Air, you’d get:
- an old laptop, nearing its end-of-life, with:
- a fragile, expensive-to-repair screen, plus:
- thermal throttling on any decent load
All for $1,000, which by the way is not “low-cost”. That same $1,000 can buy you far better machines. Genuinely, it doesn’t fit any realistic use case. Casual users? A Chromebook or cheaper Windows laptop suffices. Productivity? It can’t sustain loads, so heavy workloads are out of the picture (and can be handled more effectively by newer hardware). Its only clear benefit is the battery life, but that’s not enough to spend $900 on a 5yo laptop with known issues.
M1 macbooks are known to have fragile screens, there are multiple class action lawsuits over it. Just because you, anecdotally, have not had issues does not mean they don’t exist.
And the average Joe is far better off with a newer laptop with the same performance for 1/3rd the price. The M1 Air will be out of updates in 2 years, requiring whoever’s listening to your advice to either suffer with an insecure laptop or to spend another grand or more on a new laptop.
Apple has no unique benefits for the average person, and in fact a Chromebook fulfills the average user’s needs perfectly fine.
> Consider the number of m1 laptops manufactured and then the number of claims.
Consider the fact that most consumers wouldn‘t file a claim even if they were eligible—the FTC finds that only about 5-10% of affected consumers actually participate in class actions. And considering there‘s multiple class actions over different models of the laptops, that signifies a decent chunk of users.
> Regarding, the “fragile screens” — find me one that ended at least with a settlement and not dismissed.
Cooling is the reason intel was ditched: intel promised for years new nodes, and apple designed for new power consumption that never came.
You don’t fuck with apple this way unpunished. That’s why nvidia was ditched circa 2013 to never come back.
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As for something-gate: engineering is hard, especially on this scale. Still they were (and are) the best option overall.
= to be good doesn’t mean to be perfect; you just need to be better than competition.
And they are crushing it even in low-cost space. I mean m1 air for $800-900 is uncontested even today for what kind of solid machine you get.