Macbook Pro (2016)

[Guvernator]

I agree with Mr Whippy, in terms of design aesthetics and materials quality I don't think anyone can touch Apple. Even stuff like the XPS etc is good but not good enough. I think it's one of the main reason why Apple laptops still sell despite the so-so specs and extortionate price tags, they are just sooo shiny and that metal case is unmatched by any Windows laptop I've seen. The Apple screens also just seem to burst with colour, not sure how they manage this but I've sat an Apple laptop next to my new £700 monitor and the Apple still looks better.

If someone made a Windows machine which looked as stylish as the Apple, with a decent screen and had a metal case as good, I'd be all over it, unfortunately no Windows manufacturer seems to have cottoned on to this obvious winning combination.

[ZesPak]

Guvernator said:

I agree with Mr Whippy, in terms of design aesthetics and materials quality I don't think anyone can touch Apple. Even stuff like the XPS etc is good but not good enough. I think it's one of the main reason why Apple laptops still sell despite the so-so specs and extortionate price tags, they are just sooo shiny and that metal case is unmatched by any Windows laptop I've seen. The Apple screens also just seem to burst with colour, not sure how they manage this but I've sat an Apple laptop next to my new £700 monitor and the Apple still looks better.

If someone made a Windows machine which looked as stylish as the Apple, with a decent screen and had a metal case as good, I'd be all over it, unfortunately no Windows manufacturer seems to have cottoned on to this obvious winning combination.

Of course we could argue on aesthetics all day, I personally think the Samsung Series 9 looks a lot better and more modern than the MacBooks, especially in that anodised black.

As for the display, it's a bit of a double edged sword imho. I've had two laptops so far (one a macbook) with glossy screens, and they do look the part. The XPS now is available in both, and I specifically specified the lower-end FHD matt screen.

That said, their screens are good but from my experience not really better than the competition?

Edit: Just saw Samsung don't do the series 9 anymore? Too bad, I loved the design on them.

Edited by ZesPak on Wednesday 23 November 17:18

[Guvernator]

ZesPak said:

Of course we could argue on aesthetics all day, I personally think the Samsung Series 9 looks a lot better and more modern than the MacBooks, especially in that anodised black.

As for the display, it's a bit of a double edged sword imho. I've had two laptops so far (one a macbook) with glossy screens, and they do look the part. The XPS now is available in both, and I specifically specified the lower-end FHD matt screen.

That said, their screens are good but from my experience not really better than the competition?

Yeah the Samsung and XPS are two that I'd say get the closest, still prefer the aesthetics of the Mac though but yes that is subjective. As for screens, in terms of raw specs there are probably "better" screens and I actually prefer matt screens too, however I don't know how Apple do it but in real life comparisons that I've done, their screens just look crisper and the colour vibrancy is noticeably better than nearly all other laptops I've compared them to.

[Murph7355]

Guvernator said:

I agree with Mr Whippy, in terms of design aesthetics and materials quality I don't think anyone can touch Apple. Even stuff like the XPS etc is good but not good enough. ...

I used to agree.

But now a "comparable" 13" XPS versus new MBP is close to 50% of the price. It looks great (subjective of course) and hasn't gone st or bust on the ports front, plus has newer processors.

I could live with a 10%-20% hike, even with the lower spec processor etc (I have had 4 Mac laptops), mostly because of OSX (which I still prefer at the moment...though I found OSX becoming troublesome). But a 100% hike? Nope. Insane.

[eps]

Murph7355 said:

Guvernator said:

I agree with Mr Whippy, in terms of design aesthetics and materials quality I don't think anyone can touch Apple. Even stuff like the XPS etc is good but not good enough. ...

I used to agree.

But now a "comparable" 13" XPS versus new MBP is close to 50% of the price. It looks great (subjective of course) and hasn't gone st or bust on the ports front, plus has newer processors.

I could live with a 10%-20% hike, even with the lower spec processor etc (I have had 4 Mac laptops), mostly because of OSX (which I still prefer at the moment...though I found OSX becoming troublesome). But a 100% hike? Nope. Insane.

50%? Sorry - please post both links or screenshots to demonstrate this.

[leglessAlex]

eps said:

50%? Sorry - please post both links or screenshots to demonstrate this.

This 15" Dell XPS is 63% the price of the equivalent 15" MacBook Pro and this 13" XPS is 84% the price of the non-touchbar 13" MacBook Pro and 70% the price of the touchbar model.

50% the price it is not, but you can get money off both those Dells as far as I know (without lying to claim you're a student) making them yet cheaper. The 13" Model also has more up to date graphics whereas the Nvidia 960M card in the 15" Dell probably will be just as powerful as the AMD card in the Apple, even though the AMD is newer.

Like some posters above, I would usually defend the premium you pay claiming it would be worth it for the nice design, (usually) better battery life and OSX but for me they just aren't worth it anymore. Of course, for many people the ports and the price won't be a big deal in which case I'm sure they'll buy them and love them.

I actually went in to the Kingston Apple store the other day and had a look at the only one they had in there, a 13" non-touchbar model. The trackpad was lovely, I'm not unhappy with the size on my previous gen 15" model but it is nice to have a lot of space for gestures. It had a really lovely 'click' to it as well, I was more impressed with the haptic feedback this time around. Keyboard was ok, I didn't love it but I'd get used to it. I picked up one of the old 13" computers next to it and to be honest I barely noticed a difference in the weight, I don't know why they made such a big deal out of it. The thickness (or thinness) wasn't all that noticeable either.

They were quite open about the fact that if I bought a new iPhone to go with it I simply wouldn't be able to use the lightning earbuds as they don't make a female lightning to male 3.5mm dongle/adapter. That's really poor.


Edit: Depending on how what you see as a competitor and whether you want it now or not, if you were to buy an 13" XPS with the 1080p instead of the QHD screen and compared it to a 13" Touchbar MacBook Pro then it would cost you 55% of what the Apple does, £967 against £1749. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that's a fair comparison or not, I don't think it is but for many people it will be.

Edit 2: If you want a 15" laptop with the current 12% off on the Dells they will cost 55% of what a MacBook Pro equivalent costs.

Edited by leglessAlex on Thursday 24th November 01:40

Edited by leglessAlex on Thursday 24th November 01:52

[dmsims]

eps said:

50%? Sorry - please post both links or screenshots to demonstrate this.

Macbook Pro 13

[RobDickinson]

remember to include a hdmi dongle, USB dongle, SD card reader dongle, lighting cable etc etc in the mac price...

[dmsims]

[leglessAlex]

RobDickinson said:

Remember to include a hdmi dongle, USB dongle, SD card reader dongle, lighting cable etc etc in the mac price...

Fair point, I hadn't thought about that. How much do you think that would add for you as a photographer Rob?

[RobDickinson]

leglessAlex said:

Fair point, I hadn't thought about that. How much do you think that would add for you as a photographer Rob?

To get the features of my XPS 15 I would need (all from apple uk store) multi av port, £49, lightning cable £19, ethernet gigabit £22, sd card reader £33

So about £120 extra

[leglessAlex]

RobDickinson said:

leglessAlex said:

Fair point, I hadn't thought about that. How much do you think that would add for you as a photographer Rob?

To get the features of my XPS 15 I would need (all from apple uk store) multi av port, £49, lightning cable £19, ethernet gigabit £22, sd card reader £33

So about £120 extra

/wince/

So yeah, if you add that £120 to the Apple and take into account the current discounts on the Dell, the 15" Dell XPS is literally half (well, 53%) the cost of the equivalent Apple. Man, I've been known to be slightly fanboy like at times and even I wouldn't know where to begin trying to justify that.

[eps]

dmsims said:

eps said:

50%? Sorry - please post both links or screenshots to demonstrate this.

Macbook Pro 13

Well done genius, go to the top of the class. I already looked and couldn't find a 50% price difference - neither could you either otherwise you'd have posted it.

There's no doubt that Macs are more expensive but not 100% more. So please post two links which show this.

[eps]

leglessAlex said:

eps said:

50%? Sorry - please post both links or screenshots to demonstrate this.

This 15" Dell XPS is 63% the price of the equivalent 15" MacBook Pro and this 13" XPS is 84% the price of the non-touchbar 13" MacBook Pro and 70% the price of the touchbar model.

50% the price it is not, but you can get money off both those Dells as far as I know (without lying to claim you're a student) making them yet cheaper. The 13" Model also has more up to date graphics whereas the Nvidia 960M card in the 15" Dell probably will be just as powerful as the AMD card in the Apple, even though the AMD is newer.

Like some posters above, I would usually defend the premium you pay claiming it would be worth it for the nice design, (usually) better battery life and OSX but for me they just aren't worth it anymore. Of course, for many people the ports and the price won't be a big deal in which case I'm sure they'll buy them and love them.

I actually went in to the Kingston Apple store the other day and had a look at the only one they had in there, a 13" non-touchbar model. The trackpad was lovely, I'm not unhappy with the size on my previous gen 15" model but it is nice to have a lot of space for gestures. It had a really lovely 'click' to it as well, I was more impressed with the haptic feedback this time around. Keyboard was ok, I didn't love it but I'd get used to it. I picked up one of the old 13" computers next to it and to be honest I barely noticed a difference in the weight, I don't know why they made such a big deal out of it. The thickness (or thinness) wasn't all that noticeable either.

They were quite open about the fact that if I bought a new iPhone to go with it I simply wouldn't be able to use the lightning earbuds as they don't make a female lightning to male 3.5mm dongle/adapter. That's really poor.


Edit: Depending on how what you see as a competitor and whether you want it now or not, if you were to buy an 13" XPS with the 1080p instead of the QHD screen and compared it to a 13" Touchbar MacBook Pro then it would cost you 55% of what the Apple does, £967 against £1749. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that's a fair comparison or not, I don't think it is but for many people it will be.

Edit 2: If you want a 15" laptop with the current 12% off on the Dells they will cost 55% of what a MacBook Pro equivalent costs.

Edited by leglessAlex on Thursday 24th November 01:40

Edited by leglessAlex on Thursday 24th November 01:52

Cheers - a good post. I think if we're going to compare like for like then both models should be the newer ones and come with as similar tech as poss - this includes the screen, SSD size, RAM and either touchscreen or touchbar. FWIW I do think that the new ones are over-priced and they've certainly gone 'aggressive' on the port removal but they've done this quite a lot over the past few years or even decades. Some people were still clinging on to floppy disks, but USB flash drives were and still are the way to go rather rapidly.

Admittedly I use my laptop (MBP late 2013) for software development but saying that I would miss not having an SD card reader as it works for me, but lots of devices transfer information wirelessly now - admittedly some of those methods are slow, but that will only speed up.

I'd be the first one to buy a 15" XPS or similar if it had the following and was half the price of a comparable MBP. 1TB SSD (or possibly fusion drive), 16+GB RAM, screen resolution and the battery life was comparable as well, which I'm sure they are.

ETA : removed 8GB - as I use 16GB to be able to run 2 VMs at the same time

Edited by eps on Thursday 24th November 10:02

[eps]

Okay I've specced a 15" new XPS and a 15" new MBP

Both with 1TB storage and at least 16GB RAM.

I had to add Easy PC Transfer as I'm sure you're all aware that Macs already have Time Machine included.

But, the prices were markedly different, not 50% but more like 33%.

XPS (with Win 10 Pro not Home) was 1954.51 inc. delivery and VAT

MBP was 3059.00 inc. delivery and VAT

The XPS did have a 12% discount applied - this runs out in 4 days time, although I'm sure that another discount code will come along.

Of course if I was buying a new laptop of that sort right now, I'd probably get the XPS, but I would need to purchase VMWare - although admittedly I've already purchased that on the MBP. But 50% difference it is not, although the poster who posted that did say it was for 13" XPS vs 13" MBP, so they could still be correct, but I couldn't find it.

It's relatively easy to skew the prices by comparing lesser spec. machines or older machines against newer models but there isn't the 100% extra inferred by some.

Anyway I'm not upgrading any time soon as my MBP is still quick and responsive. I used to find that after about 2 years of use a Windows laptop would start to slow down and become unusable, but maybe that's just me! I always used the Pro versions of the OS and had at least 3 different makes of laptops. Although admittedly the last time I compared the same spec. machines was around 3-4 years ago. For the moment I am quite happy with the MBP I've got and the ease with which it performs tasks - especially the Time Machine part and the ability to simply transfer it all to another machine. Not sure how well that part works on a Windows laptop - although I'm sure it is fairly comparable - but it seemed to be getting more and more difficult to do (well the last time I did it anyway).

[ZesPak]

eps said:

I'd be the first one to buy a 15" XPS or similar if it had the following and was half the price of a comparable MBP. 1TB SSD (or possibly fusion drive), 16+GB RAM, screen resolution and the battery life was comparable as well, which I'm sure they are.

http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd?oc=bnx5534&model_id=xps-15-9550-laptop
32GB, 1TB SSD, 4K screen, 1858 excl vat

Closest I could get with the MBP is 2700 excl vat (it only goes up to 16GB RAM?).
The Dell is not half the price, but the Mac is 50% more expensive.
The Dell has a higher res screen, double the RAM, but the Mac CPU and GPU might be slightly ahead. That is, depending on thermal properties of course.

The difference on the 13" is a bit higher, but 50% would be a stretch. Still, 1000£ EXTRA would take a whole lot of justification imho. That buys you a complete new 13" XPS. So you could have a base spec XPS 13 AND a fully loaded 15 for the price of the equivalent MBP 15" :/.

Edited by ZesPak on Thursday 24th November 10:49

[Rawwr]

eps said:

but I would need to purchase VMWare

Windows 10 does come with Hyper-V out-of-the-box now, which is quite helpful.

[eps]

Rawwr said:

eps said:

but I would need to purchase VMWare

Windows 10 does come with Hyper-V out-of-the-box now, which is quite helpful.

good call and the VMs can be converted between the two

[silentbrown]

eps said:

Okay I've specced a 15" new XPS and a 15" new MBP

Both with 1TB storage and at least 16GB RAM.

What you're trying to say is the Dell has 32Gb, while the Mac has 16Gb. How much is a 32Gb Mac? (No need to answer...)

Either way, the comparison isn't far off. I compared 16GB/512Gb machines and got £1,645 vs £2,699, so it's still in the range of 50-60% more than an XPS.

Everyone has different priorities, so you can easily skew the figures further. For me the ability to go to 32Gb, full touchscreen, on-site support (at half the price of applecare) and sensible port configuration all add significant value to the Dell.

Re VM's : Try Virtualbox - it's free.

[silentbrown]

ZesPak said:

http://www.dell.com/uk/business/p/xps-15-9550-lapt...
32GB, 1TB SSD, 4K screen, 1858 excl vat

Closest I could get with the MBP is 2700 excl vat (it only goes up to 16GB RAM?).
The Dell has a higher res screen, double the RAM, but the Mac CPU and GPU might be slightly ahead. That is, depending on thermal properties of course.

That £2700 Mac price will include vat - but also there's a 12% discount available on XPS prices.

Re CPU/GPU : XPS has current latest i7 chip, MBP has previous generation so XPS should be a bit ahead.