So.. my MacBook Pro 61 Watt C-Type Adapter sparked and stopped working... and my mac is left with just 6% charge. I have a placement exam on the 7th and a certification exam on the 8th. And also, there's no WiFi provider (or I must say a good one) in my area. The one that provides the service is a known fraudulent company.

Don't know if I should be really sad about the problems or be a bit happy because now I don't have to stare at my screen for hours.. life really sucks sometimes.

Email your faculty/school/uni/whatever, they'll understand

Shouldn't you be able to use a phone charger? Sure, they're way less powerful, but I guess it'd be better than nothing.

@kamen I tried.. it charged the mac by 1% in 10 minutes. Moreover, I read on the support page that "not all cables can charge your Mac". I don't wanna do something that voids my warranty.. cause you know.. I'd love to keep my organs as long as I could.

@dontPanic The placement exam is the eligibility test for a job position at JUSPAY company.. it is not specifically for a bunch of people. It is conducted on a national level. So, if I miss it, I miss it.

@devAstated yikes

@Nanos I wish I could afford 2.. this one cost me $2027 alone (after $200 student discount).

@devAstated I am sorry to learn that you wasted >2000$ on one single laptop, it could have bought you four with similar specs from a different seller. I use wasted in the context of the task at hand, so mac fanboys can point at theire custom software all they want.

@p100sch this is just not true. Its true if you buy shitty macbook airs. But for a mbp 15" with good specs (but no upgrades) you won't save more than 200-300 buying pc... But you wont have the nice metal body and superior OS (unless you like Linux for laptop use, then that is just as good. Its a preference thing but windows is shit compared to the other 2)
@devAstated you wont void anything. just try a few phone chargers (if you have multiple) and see which one provides the most power to the macbook (system profiler shows this)
Its slow but not too bad. Just leave it connected while using and save power wherever you can by closing all unused programs

@eval for the required task, a metal case and MacOS are not required, but even if you where to buy a sturdier one with the same specs, obviously with Linux, you can still get 2 other laptops or at least 1.6 other laptops.

@p100sch the specs thing is jusr not true. Try to find an equivalent to the i9 2.3ghz mid 2019 15" mbp for much cheaper. I challenge you :)

(10kg bricks dont really count. Needs to be similar portability)

@eval The lesson here isn't that you shouldn't have a Mac. It's that you shouldn't spend all your money on a single computer; you should save some for a much weaker but temporarily feasible one. Even if you have just enough for a great Mac that you trust, don't fucking buy it because it can break just as any other.

@eval on the other hand, shoving an i9 into a macbook-size chassis just throttles it, and you don't get i9 performance out of it. It isn't necessarily worth the money.

@Jilano im talking actual benchmarks and not just buzzwords. Should have said it like that.

But well i shouldn't care. Im not an Apple fan, i just see that SOME products are superior. And i am still waiting for someone to show me a compact device that costs half of my MacBook but has the same benchmark results.

And i must also say, there IS often a cheaper alternative, just only 2-300. And that i'd gladly pay for an OS i like more (subjective)

@eval Did you reproduce the benchmark results after a few months of usage, outside lab conditions?

@Lor-inc yes. I benchmarked my mbp (was 3 months old or so) against ma friends 1.5 year old xps15.

Obviously mine destroyed his, but its not a fair comparaison. So we compared it to a geekbench score we found of the new xps15.

Real world cpu performance is almost identical, graphics is better (by quite a bit) on xps. Other specs are similar - price is almost identical. (Note here. Never look the price up on apple.com, that's never what you actually pay.)

So the TLDR for me: the price you pay for the nice metal case and the OS (for dev stuff i'd never want anything other than unix based os. WSL is nice, but for example to use docker you need W10 pro... Cost another 170...)
- is the worse graphics performance. So for me it's simple: if you use it for gaming, clearly XPS (macOS is useless there anyways), for everything else the MBP.

If you really want to do GPU heavy lifting like video rendering/gaming, i'd buy a tower pc anyways though. THEN you get the same for half price!