I don't know what that measurement means. Neither the Precision nor the ZBook are plastic; they have metal chassis. That's how magnesium, aluminium, and titanium look like without anodising them with fancy colours like Apple does.
These notebooks are also thicker and heavier than usual because they have to dissipate something like 250 W of heat. Good on Apple for designing such power-efficient SoCs; many high-end Windows notebooks have to make do with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA cards that will perform better than that MacBook Pro, but unfortunately also draw about twice as much power.
Finally, these are business workstations, not fashion statements. People—or rather, companies—buy them to get work done on them, not show them off in Starbucks. They are meant to be serviced easily and quickly, and come with up to 5 years of next-business-day onsite support with 24/7 telephone service.
Both the ZBook and the Precisions have 4 DDR5 slots, 3-4 NVMe SSD slots and a WWAN NVMe slot, a replaceable (though possibly not upgradeable) GPU card, an easily-replaceable display assembly and battery, and a productive keyboard with a keypad, and a reasonably large and accurate trackpad with buttons. They have Ethernet ports, USB-A ports, and can support up to five high-resolution displays.
These workstation product lines have also come with service manuals for the past two decades. Apple released service manuals for its own products this year, after significant regulatory and consumer pressure.
The MacBook has its advantages, and I fully understand why someone might buy one. But your argument is in extremely bad faith—it 'looks ugly', but you haven't seen it in person. Having actually used these machines for 5+ years, I can tell you they are pretty damn solid.
I daresay these don't even look that different to Framework's notebooks, which are the apple (pun not intended) of HN readers' eyes.
Businesses ostensibly buy them "to get work done on them" but they actually tend to do so regardless of the work, and they're often truly awful day to day form factors loaded with so much crap software that getting work done on them could be considered lucky. Everything has tradeoffs; rapid serviceability, good deals, and high specs, are all useful traits, but if they come at the cost of introducing friction between the operator and the task, then that's usually ignored by business. Sometimes that's a great tradeoff and no friction is introduced, but that's rarely part of the consideration in a top-down hierarchy where purchasing decisions are made by some other department en-masse.
There is some threshold of computational demand and cost past which the specs dominate other factors, but before that I personally consider friction in various circumstances to be a higher priority.
They might come from the factory that way, but often they're re-imaged with much less spartan Windows installations. My personal reference for this is ages ago in real time, but relatively recent in corporate years
I don't know what that measurement means. Neither the Precision nor the ZBook are plastic; they have metal chassis. That's how magnesium, aluminium, and titanium look like without anodising them with fancy colours like Apple does.
These notebooks are also thicker and heavier than usual because they have to dissipate something like 250 W of heat. Good on Apple for designing such power-efficient SoCs; many high-end Windows notebooks have to make do with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA cards that will perform better than that MacBook Pro, but unfortunately also draw about twice as much power.
Finally, these are business workstations, not fashion statements. People—or rather, companies—buy them to get work done on them, not show them off in Starbucks. They are meant to be serviced easily and quickly, and come with up to 5 years of next-business-day onsite support with 24/7 telephone service.
Both the ZBook and the Precisions have 4 DDR5 slots, 3-4 NVMe SSD slots and a WWAN NVMe slot, a replaceable (though possibly not upgradeable) GPU card, an easily-replaceable display assembly and battery, and a productive keyboard with a keypad, and a reasonably large and accurate trackpad with buttons. They have Ethernet ports, USB-A ports, and can support up to five high-resolution displays.
These workstation product lines have also come with service manuals for the past two decades. Apple released service manuals for its own products this year, after significant regulatory and consumer pressure.
The MacBook has its advantages, and I fully understand why someone might buy one. But your argument is in extremely bad faith—it 'looks ugly', but you haven't seen it in person. Having actually used these machines for 5+ years, I can tell you they are pretty damn solid.
I daresay these don't even look that different to Framework's notebooks, which are the apple (pun not intended) of HN readers' eyes.