I don't get the amount of grudge towards Apple for the new MBPs. Yeah, they could support 32GB of Ram, more battery would be nice too, and yeah I think almost no one got overwhelmed by he innovation Apple brought to the table with them, but what are the alternatives?
The author mentions in another post why he is done with Apple after his 2013 13" MBP and states he has no use for the Touch Bar. Thats fine, just get the Pro without the bar and with physical function keys.
The build quality of other laptops just isn't on par with Apples. Greg Koenig and many others have analyzed why Apple has a tremendous edge over other vendors when it comes to building computers and gadgets from aluminum[1].
Also if your are used to macOS, its perfect integration of hardware and software, its polish and many of the very nicely crafted ("made with ︎love") 3rd party applications, it might be very hard to switch to a decent Linux distro, let alone Windows.
It may be wise to first try the switch on your current Mac, inside a Virtual Machine …
For me the issue is with ports. I have exactly zero devices that I can plug into the new fancy USB ports. None of my monitors will connect. I know, they are better, yadda yadda, but I am tired of being held hostage until the "industry" understands how the new ports are better.
Right now I use a MacBook Pro to do my work ("pro", remember?). I need a faster machine, so I will have to upgrade. And I will have to deal with all the dongles, carrying them, remembering about them, losing them, etc. I expect I will eventually make an idiot of myself in front of a client, once they hand me a flash drive with their data and I'll have to admit red-faced that I forgot the dongle thingy.
MacBook Pro used to have the "pro" philosophy: stick every port in there, so that the only thing you have to carry is your macbook and you're ready for everything. Then it started: ethernet disappeared, DVI went away, and successively all ports went away until now we are stuck with 4 ports of the same kind, that are useless (but hey, they show great promise!).
I don't want a thinner machine. I don't need a lighter machine. I need a machine so that I can do my work. Pro, remember?
Price is largely not an issue if you actually use it for work, so I have no complaints there.
For me, ports are not an issue. I am rarely using any plug-in devices when away from a desk, and there are numerous USB-C hubs that provide charging, USB 3.0 A-type sockets, SD card readers, ethernet ports, HDMI and DVI connectors, yadda yadda.
You do not need to buy a dozen Apple dongles, just one USB-C dock/hub/whatever, with the ports that you regularly use. Have one on your desk with monitor, drives, keyboard, mouse, network all connected so you only plug in one cable.
When you go on the road you might want a dock with HDMI so you can plug in to various displays. But you won't need a dozen dongles. Just a hub.
It is just a slightly different way of working rather than plugging all the cables into the laptop and having a huge clumsy mess.
>For me the issue is with ports. I have exactly zero devices that I can plug into the new fancy USB ports. None of my monitors will connect. I know, they are better, yadda yadda, but I am tired of being held hostage until the "industry" understands how the new ports are better.
Then Apple is not the company for you. They have always been first to obsolete things. Remember the hoopla when they canned the DVD drive? Firewire? Literally every other port that isnt USBC
So this seems to be the problem. You're definition of Pro includes "all the ports". The author's definition of Pro includes "avoid HDMI, SD slot, Display Port". It can't both have and not have all the ports.
The author's definition of Pro also includes 16GB RAM, but most posts I've seen complain about not being able to order 32GB RAM. It seems that Apple can't win no matter what they do.
In sum, you want to sacrifice choice with convenience.
USB-C works with all the monitor you have and also with all the monitors you'll have.
You can use any port on the laptop and crucially charge the laptop and connect to a display with the same cable, and can be even used to connect to other peripherals using the same cable.
Your argument is that you don't want to spend $10 in adapters, you'll end up spending more in the future and be limited in terms of compatibility with newer hardware.
"Stick every Port in it" is ridiculous also.
What laptop does have Ethernet, infiniband, USB-A/B/C, thunderbolt 2.0, miniDisplayPort, MiniUSB, MicroUSB, RS232, Centronics, PS/2, VGA, EGA, PCMCIA, SCSI, eSATA, S-video, etc?
> What laptop does have Ethernet, infiniband, USB-A/B/C, thunderbolt 2.0, miniDisplayPort, MiniUSB, MicroUSB, RS232, Centronics, PS/2, VGA, EGA, PCMCIA, SCSI, eSATA, S-video, etc?
Yes, "every" port is ridiculous. In particular, I think most people would happily do away with anything that hasn't been in wide use in new hardware over the last decade.
I like machines with a port for wired network, a port or two for wired video, an SD slot, and 3-4 USB ports in a mix of USB-A and USB-C. For a Mac, I'd argue that some Thunderbolt ports would make good sense, too. I'd rather have my laptop be a self-contained system than have my bag filled with the half-dozen converter dongles that I'd need to provide the connectivity that I use with my current machine.
When my current machine dies, hopefully >5 years from now, I'll have the opportunity to evaluate new machines based on my current needs and where the market's at then. The company that gets my money will be the one that matches closest to what I want, not necessarily what's being marketed as the Next Big Thing at that time. Between now and then, Thunderbolt will either become dominant, or fall by the wayside like Firewire did.
It's a neat, but very niche, piece of technology. It's not dominant, in any sense of the word. It might be in the future, but it's not a sure thing. The fact that you can find hardware that supports it isn't interesting to me. It'll be interesting when I can be just as sure that a machine will have a TB3 port as I can currently be that it'll have a USB-A port.
One of the things I actually dislike about it: a port can be USB-C without being TB3. That's going to be fun with the plain USB-C port in my laptop.
It's not a niche anymore, Intel 7th gen has native Thunderbolt 3, so no extra chips needed, that should expand its popularity. Actually any modern laptop already comes with a TB3 ports (see Dell/HP/Apple stuff).
Everyone doesn't "need" it. It'll just be nice. As you point out, most people don't "need" anything more than a tablet, and those aren't exactly known for their high levels of connectivity.
> It is dominant in the market where USB falls short, that's what matters.
It isn't dominant in the market yet, and that's my entire point. When it is: cool. I don't have much argument against it (aside from the dongle-hell I'll be living in). But right now, I don't own a device with any version of Thunderbolt, even with several new laptops around.
I hate on board ethernet, it's stupid, almost all of them have only one NIC and only 1Gbps, which is laughable in this day, much more in the 4 or 5 years a laptop usually lasts.
So... welcome TB 3.0 (which can be used for 40Gbps daisy chain networking), and 10GbE adapters someday or another.
No, my argument was not about spending money. I specifically noted that I don't much care about the pricing.
My point was that adapters are something that I have to think about, carry separately, and sometimes forget or lose.
I don't know why people keep repeating "USB-C works with X" (replace X with whatever). It might work if I get all the dongles. For the moment, as I said, out of ~40 devices around me there are exactly ZERO that I can plug into the new machine.
Also, let's not get into extremes here: I would not complain if they at least kept at least one or two USB 3 ports.
This is Apple we're talking about. The only thing they've ever sold at a $10 price point is the MagSafe 1 to MagSafe 2 adapter. And, frankly, even that was overpriced.
If you want to try to run, e.g., graphics and power between your $2000+ MBP and your $700+ 4k monitor (like the LG panel) on a $10 cable ... uh, have fun with that. I hope it works out for you.
This kind of apologist attitude, just like everyone throwing money at them when they unilaterally took away the headphone jack, tells Apple they can disappoint and dictate to their customers as much as they want, and will still make money hand over fist for it.
> tells Apple they can disappoint and dictate to their customers
More correctly, tells Apple that they can disappoint and dictate to some of their customers.
Whether it's a problem for Apple is, of course, dependent on whether it disappoints enough customers sufficiently.
My sense is that they will continue to appeal to a large number of people who want highly attractive, easy to use, reasonably capable, reasonably portable kit. They will also continue to attract those who wish to service said people.
What they'll fail to do is continue to service the more niche clientele who traditionally swore by Apple e.g. non-Apple ecosystem devs and heavy duty media makers.
I'm not hugely happy about this trend as I'm sort of in one of these niches. I'd quite like to have access to a big, expandable chunk of kit that has Apple's traditional build quality.
But I'm still likely to upgrade to a 7 when my contract renews as I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones. I mean, I use my phone for appy things and music when I'm travelling. In that regard I'm really not niche at all.
I use my phone as my primary music player, too — both at home and when traveling. I have a nice (Mass Fidelity Core) Bluetooth speaker for home, but for travel, I dropped a couple bills on a nice pair of wired noise-isolating earbuds (B&W C5 S2), and having that purchase unilaterally obviated remains a sore spot for me.
Yes, I could drop another $40 to get that functionality back, but then I sacrifice simultaneous charging. It's hard not to see this as being pushed around by a bully who's after your lunch money (for arbitrarily large values of "lunch money") sometimes.
I'll stick with a 6S for as long as I can, and hopefully this situation will be resolved somehow before then. Maybe they'll release another SE-like device that has a physical headphone jack again, but I'm not holding my breath.
It seems so. Apple gets away with stuff other companies would never be able to.
Why not introducing USB-C on the iPhone 7 and makes it easy for the new MBP crowd? It seems the 2 teams didn't talk. Samsung could pull off the same stunt.
Then you aren't looking very hard. Yes, maybe that's a (small) part of it (though your "28nm gpu" hyperbole really does detract from your point), but it's nowhere near all of it.
What I want is a company willing to piss off a few users by going with the times.
Ever since my first computer 35 years ago, I've dreamed of the day when we could get rid of all these individual ports and finally have the One True Connector.
Yeah, the transition period sucks. Yeah, you'll have to buy $25 dongles. So what? There's a usb-c dongle that has HDMI, SD card reader, and 4 usb 3 type A ports on it for $30. Done. Problem solved. Stop bitching.
I still have old style keyboard to ps/2 adapters, ps/2 to usb adapters, composite to VGA adapters, VGA to DVI adapters, DVI to HDMI adapters, HDMI to thunderbolt adapters, serial and parallel to USB adapters, IDE to SATA adapters, SATA to USB adapters... And now I'm glad to see that era is finally at an end.
And in a few years when there are no more peripherals using outdated ports, nobody will even remember this time, or your griping.
I'm not bitching about USB-C. I'm actually kinda with you on that one, so please try not to put words in my mouth.
But the headphone jack? No, that one is Apple pushing people around. It's not to make the phone "thinner" because that fugly lens protrusion is hideous, and the 7 is exactly as thick as the 6S, anyway. It's not to make the phone "waterproof"; $.00000002/phone worth of silicone around the jack could have done that. As Schiller himself said, it "comes down to one word — courage."
It's purely about seeing if they can dictate to their customers, and people are lining up, all, "Shut up and take my money!"
There have been usb audio adapters on the market for over a decade now. They're available dirt cheap on Amazon, with the newer ones plugging into usb-c. And soon, we'll start seeing headphones that plug directly into the usb port.
You're talking about the MBP, which still has a 3.5mm audio jack. I'm talking about the iPhone 7, and pretty unambiguously have been all along (if, granted, by no other measure than the sheer fact that the computer still has the port in question).
Can we please at least have the same conversation? Or are you more interested in down-shouting anyone who has this objection with "quit your bitching" and "problem solved"?
I'm talking about ALL electronic devices. Phones, tablets, computers, smoke detectors, you name it.
One connector. Not one connector except for this one I particularly like.
And that's why I say I like a company with the balls to bring in the future, even if it pisses off the minority that clings tenaciously to its old tech.
Headphones are analog devices. Analog devices need an analog input.
Most of the best headphone companies are not experts in digital-analog conversion. Nor should they need to be, because having a separate usb audio interface built into every set of headphones is a stupid idea.
It's fine if all you want to use is the absolute crap Apple earbuds, but for people like me who have spent a lot of money on nice headphones, it's ridiculous. If you want to use quality headphones or IEMs, they don't come with USB connectors, and I pray they never need to because that's a stupid idea.
I don't care either way because I hate Apple's business practices and would never purchase their products, but I think Apple will have to backflip on their "courage" on this one.
Even people drinking the Apple kool-aid seem to be angry about this headscratcher. Maybe the base of people who care about what headphones they use won't be large enough to change their "courageous" minds though. Apple doesn't care about professionals and they don't care about audiophiles. I think especially antagonizing the professional market will hurt them in the medium term.
You don't think USB-C will too, one day be obsolete? Because trust me, it's going to be, and we'll all be having this argument x years down the line again. Manufacturers are going to want to make everyone buy new hardware to use new ports.
I can only speak to my situation, but as the macs took longer and longer to update, I came to the realization that I might need to jump ship. And as the upgrade wasn't entirely reassuring, it seems like it might be better to bite the bullet and switch to linux full time—which, incidentally, I'm also pretty excited about and want to do.
The anger/frustration about the new models is about accepting that my time with the mac might be over (a ride which I began back in the OS 8 days). However, seeing how disappointed I've been has only strengthened my resolve to switch as I don't feel I should become that emotionally attached to a company or product (I went through the OS holy wars as a middle schooler, so I can forgive it as a folly of my youth).
> The author mentions in another post why he is done with Apple after his 2013 13" MBP and states he has no use for the Touch Bar. Thats fine, just get the Pro without the bar and with physical function keys.
That model has slower RAM and I'd guess, based on that, an older generation CPU. Lower clock, too. May as well buy a '15 refurb.
Are we seeing different Apple store pages or something? Different (lower-numbered) iris graphics, slower ram, et c. What are you seeing?
[EDIT] discovered via Wikipedia that it is the same processor generation, just a weaker version. Also, USB-C ports cut down from 4 to 2. The non-touchbar Macbook seems to be designed to make people not buy it. And it's still more expensive than the previous entry level.
> The author mentions in another post why he is done with Apple after his 2013 13" MBP and states he has no use for the Touch Bar. That's fine, just get the Pro without the bar and with physical function keys.
The one with physical function keys is less powerful.
Those things is not a deal breaker, it doesn't make sense to pay double price in comparison with similar laptops just to get above things, especially TouchBar which costs about $500 and will make you fill uncomfortable with laptop at least for a first time (but I guess constantly).
> I dont know where you got the $500 touchbar, and I don't want to know.
A small hint, just compare prices for touchbar based laptops and those with usual fn keys (13 inch model is optionally shipped with usual fn keys, not the 15 inch though).
Comparing the 13" with and without the TouchBar from https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/, the price difference between the $1499 model and the $1999 model covers: TouchBar; faster CPU; an extra 256GB of SSD; slightly better GPU; two more USB-C/TB3 ports; an extra microphone.
This is what I meant, TouchBar + a pack of the minor improvements which should not cost +$500. Also take into the account that seems there is no option to get top hardware, but with an usual fn keys.
It's better to get HP x360 for $1300 with i7-7500U / 512 SSD / 16GB Ram (which in addition has a touch screen and it's convertible) than a slightly worse Macbook for $2000.
To me the emoji bar indicates a faltering vision. "Hey developers, we know what a pain typing emoji is for you, we're listening and check out our new touch bar!!" Is Apple really that far off course in understanding developers as a user base?
I get what you're saying about the over-hype and I'm not about to dump my MBP. I don't think anyone is going to produce as high of a quality product anytime soon, but it does leave me curious what else is out there.
> It may be wise to first try the switch on your current Mac, inside a Virtual Machine …
This is exactly what I'm doing. I run Spacemacs in a Ubuntu VM running on Parallels. I'm not too sure if I would be willing to move away from the OS X apps ecosystem though (I use 1Password, Day One, OmniFocus, iBooks, Notes, Photos etc and they all sync perfectly with the iPhone).
I own a Lenovo Thinkpad 550 and the build quality is fine but nowhere near Apple MBP. Bought it because it runs Linux w/o hassles, has an Ethernet port and it costs like less than half the price of the MBP. The screen is also crap compared to Apple MBP.
Apple MBP is nice, but lacks Ethernet, a headphone jack, function keys and a SD card reader, all deal breakers to me. And no, dongles don't qualify.
I feel like I'm missing something. If you don't need MagSafe, USB-A or SD card slots and all you want is Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C including for charging, then what's wrong with the MacBook Pro?
Exactly. This is a list of everything the new MacBooks already have. It sounds like the author should just get the new MBP.
Some of the listed attributes are just odd too: only 16GB RAM? No HDMI? No SD?
Guessing from the relative volumes of complaints that I've seen, a more useful list would probably be something comparable to the previous MBP, but with more RAM and a better CPU, and bonus points for a dedicated GPU.
Another way to look at this post: Here are some of the best laptops that you will be able to buy used for cheap in 12-18 months while the new Macbooks are still expensive.
I used this approach in my student days and it worked pretty well given the very limited budget.
The resale value on a MacBook is actually crazy high, so that's something to consider. I've heard stories of people buying Apple hardware at a steep student discount (20% or more) and re-selling it at the end of the year...for a profit.
Most PC laptops are worthless after 12-18 months of use. You either give them away or throw them out. If you buy a low-end system it's junk, and if you buy a high-end one, the only people looking for such a system would want to buy it new anyway, so you're stuck in a trap.
A MacBook often sells for a minimum of 50% of its purchase price if in good condition, possibly more depending on demand. The metal cases generally hold up a lot better than the plastic housing on less expensive laptops.
> Most PC laptops are worthless after 12-18 months of use.
I'm on a Lenovo x220... it's plenty fast for most of my work. runs ubuntu like a champ. has, hands down, the best laptop keyboard that's ever been made. and only cost me $350, plus there's a strong aftermarket parts option.
Since i don't spend my time watching media, i don't have to worry about fancy monitors or display ports (though i could have gotten a Thunderbolt port).
This is a 5 year old laptop. The battery lasts at least 6 hours.
Student discounts used to be much better 10-15 years ago. These days, the only really good deals are on older hardware—sometimes previous-generation. I've seen these units sold at campus bookstores of large universities (Stanford, UCLA) but never on the web.
The last time I bought a Mac with an education discount, the computer was about 7% cheaper, but the AppleCare was 30% off. Not a bad discount overall, but not enough in the hardware department to break even on a resale, even new in box.
This is my biggest concern as well from trying one out, but apparently you get used to it. I currently use daily:
- a Microsoft Ergonomic Natural 4000 [1]
- A Kinesis Freestyle 2 [2]
- a Macbook Pro (2014)
That's a wide range of keyboard travels and force requirements, and I'm now comfortable with all. A friend got the new MBP and said he got used to its keyboard "within a day".
Depends on how you value the features and build quality of the case. Apple laptop cases are extremely expensive (each one is individually machined from solid aluminum), but the result is a top-notch combination of strength to weight ratio.
You call it "ridiculous", but it's not like they charge you a bunch of money and give you nothing. You get a single vendor for operating system and hardware, free support at their retail stores, and free updates to the operating system.
People these days whinging about "extremely expensive" have no idea. Computers used to be stupidly expensive and ridiculously slow, no matter the brand. We've been spoiled by these vendors willing to sacrifice everything to slash costs and margins.
Do you want a good keyboard, a great trackpad, and a durable metal housing? Be prepared to pay more than you would for some system built out of what was salvaged from the garbage bins of Dell's factory.
Every single one of these alternatives listed is over $1000, and that segment of the PC market is tiny. Most get all dizzy at the thought of spending more than $500 on a laptop, that's what the industry's conditioned people to think.
I dropped my Macbook Air, which is quite thin and light, from about 5 feet up onto a tiled bathroom floor. It hit on a corner at the thinnest end. The corner bent a few mm and the lid doesn't quite close correctly. But it woke from sleep no problem and I have used that laptop for more than 2 years since.
It would be great if Apple could engineer a completely indestructible 3 lb laptop. I'm pretty darn pleased with the durability for its portability.
It would be great if they engineered such a laptop. Since they don't want to try, though, other manufacturers are doing it for them. Those companies are also taking pretty solid amounts of their market share, too. [4]
And that preference is a weird one as those 6th generation processors in Macbook Pro's are a way better than already released 7th generation CPUs. Also the integrated GPU is better.
Reading the earlier post, it seems the extra need is an escape key, which probably wasn't explicitly written since, you know, it's not exactly a differentiator among non-Apple laptops.
OP here: For the record I'm a Sublime / Emacs user. From this earlier post: "I philosophically disagree with the idea of looking at your keyboard to comprehend its interface."
I generally agree that you shouldn't have to look at the keyboard, but I'm currently hoping that peripheral vision plus muscle memory will be enough to make up for the lack of tactile feedback when it comes to commonly used applications. (I haven't tried out the new MBP yet, and I'm going to do so before ordering, but that's my hope.)
In return, I'd get the ability to use slide controls, and have both system controls (volume, brightness) and application-specific ones directly on the bar rather than having to choose Fn for one - which makes for terrible ergonomics. Plus, Touch ID.
But then, I don't care about the Esc key because I've had
Caps Lock mapped to it for years.
I looked at PC laptops recently for a linux project machine. You're going to be very disappointed in the build quality if you're coming from Apple. They are just-OK, and every little detail is worse.
This is the biggest thing that keeps me from switching. I'd happily swap to some other brand and run Linux, but every time I touch a non-Apple laptop it feels cheap, loose, clunky, plasticy, and just...bad.
The Chromebook Pixel is the only laptop I've had that matches Apple build quality. It can also run Linux and ChromeOS synchronously on the same kernel, which leads to a really great user experience.
The Surface Book I'm on now is very close, but the trackpad isn't quite as good. The Pixel trackpad was, honest to god, better than on a MacBook pro.
Agreed. The pixel 2015 is my main computer and now with mailine support (since 4.8) it's fairly easy to run linux. I'm using ubuntu stretch and it works great.
The 2015 model (non-touch) has been my daily driver for a few months, and I prefer the feel of it over current MacBook Pros. The palm rests are slightly soft/rubbery in a nice way, but they are fingerprint magnets.
If you look around you can find it for $600 (refurb).
i wanted to love the XPS sooo much. they have a great linux team and it's damn near perfect were it not for two glaring flaws (imo):
1 - the webcam. what the hell? it's on the bottom right of the screen. if you videoconference often this will drive you insane -- the angle is so bad it borders on being useless
2 - the trackpad. (obv nothing matches apple here), but the xps in particular sucks (and oddly is not mentioned in any reviews i saw). for programmers, having the cursor randomly move while typing is just not acceptable.. from what I read the hardware was picking up noise from somewhere else in the system, causing jumps in the cursor. the latest drivers filter this noise in software, but this lead to increased latency. end result is weak. sold the machine :(
The webcam location is ridiculous. I had a coworker who had an XPS and whenever we were video conferencing he had to avoid all typing as his hands would occult his face.
Panasonic Toughbooks have superior build quality compared to Apple. I also love that mine has a hardware on/off wireless switch, plus a removable battery and hard drive and a 3 foot drop rating. Runs Arch like a dream.
And if you're willing to spend the big bucks, Panasonic offers some pretty rad premium options like 1000 Nit daylight readable display, built-in GPS and 4G wireless.
If you're on a budget, look for used models on Ebay that are being dumped for cheap after a corporate lease runs out.
This article isn't comparing Macbook Pros with cheap plastic tat. HP, Lenovo, Dell, whoever, have nice high-end stuff. If you're a developer and you're not aware of that you must be living in a bubble.
For example, Current Dell XPS 13" (9360) w/ so-called InfinityEdge (bezel-less) display, either 1080p or QHD+ version:
Color Options
- Silver or Rose Gold
Exterior Chassis Materials
- CNC machined aluminum in Silver or Rose Gold
- Edge-to-edge Corning® Gorilla® Glass NBT™ on touch displays
- Carbon fiber composite palm rest with soft touch paint
Keyboard
- Full size, backlit chiclet keyboard; 1.3mm travel
Mouse
- Precision touchpad, seamless glass integrated button
Now if you want first class support for Linux (at least Ubuntu) and don't mind some build quality compromises, System76 has been a great experience for me:
Well, I was comparing it to the MBP and this is an area of personal preference but I like/dislike various things about each.
Razer and Dell were very comparable to an MBP 13 for me. I would be happy to break down some comparisons for you (according to my personal experience/preference having owned all 3) but I would definitely agree the System76 is in a different build quality category...although (IMO) it makes up for it with its first-class hardware support.
As ShaneOG pointed out, the new ones have a 1060 which should have better power consumption profiles.
But also worth noting is battery life is going to depend on what your task load is. For my typical use case, I end up usually hammering on CPU for dev work so my battery life on my MBP isn't actually as impressive as it is for light use (web browsing/typical user workload). So for me, the potential battery life gap between a Blade and 13" MBP is going to be fairly close.
Also worth noting, the Dell Sputnik I have is comparable to a MBP and it is running Ubuntu natively (!!!). Throw an slim external battery in (Dell sells one) and it seems to exceed my MBP battery life (although I haven't really rigorously tested it).
Finally, drop the screen resolution down to the 1080 version and you will get better battery life. Not appropriate for everyone, but it's a compromise you can choose to make if it works for you :)
To each their own, but I find the design of Razer machines to be a bit on the gaudy side. The Dells also don't look much better, although they at least lack the crazy green logo...
I don't understand why a hardware manufacturer hasn't done to Linux what Apple did to FreeBSD and sell a quality laptop with tightly integrated hardware and Linux software. I just have a feeling that if I switched to a "Linux-ready" laptop from Lenovo or Dell I'd still be fighting with the wireless config and external display compatibility like I've always had to.
I have this fantasy of starting a company dedicated to building Linux laptops for developers. Great displays and keyboard, generous ports, beefy specs, with a willingness to trade off size and weight.
I think it hasn't happened yet because it's probably economically not viable.
A lot of what's nice about Macbooks is in the software. The battery life is at least partly due to software, making good/attractive use of the display, handling sleep states well, multimonitor support, and so on. You'd have to put thousands (tens of thousands?) of (expensive-)person-hours into Linux to close that gap enough to matter.
It has happened though. https://system76.com/
I don't know why any developer in 2016 would buy an apple machine honestly. What little software perks they offer aren't really applicable to coding (over what's available in linux and increasingly windows with the linux subsystem), and any productivity requires an external monitor, real keyboard, etc so a lot of the nice build quality features are wasted too.
Isn't that along the lines of System 76 [1]? I haven't tried any of their machines, and they aren't exactly trying to compete with Apple, but they are Linux first.
It appears that they are essentially a reseller of Clevo / Sager laptops, though. On the plus side you are guaranteed good support for the hardware using most distros, the build quality looks to be a bit below, say, a Dell XPS, though.
One problem is that (apart from devs) Linux only supports "typical" computer users, and then only OK. For example a lot of Apple users are multimedia professionals and Linux multimedia apps are simply not in the same league. The same can be said for lots of other categories of apps. Could an accountant switch to Linux without Intuit compatibility? Etc.
I'm not expecting a unibody design and flawless color gamut or anything. Even basic OS functionality like sleep/wake, (dis)connecting external displays, trackpad responsiveness, etc., is vastly inferior on Linux laptops.
Well, depends how well you know Linux. My old Asus Zenbook has been a great servant, running the same Arch installation since I bought the laptop. Superb fonts, suspend/hibernate etc works, Intel and Nvidia GPUs both work, WiFi connects automatically and I can manage the networks from Roxterm, I still have a pretty good battery life and nothing beats my Xmonad setup.
And yes, the build quality doesn't match Apple. But actually I really don't care. Over three years of daily usage already and I can't really complain. Next thing I'm checking the Razer, Dell and Lenovo selection, but it seems I just don't need an update yet.
I'm a developer, I do hard stuff for work. Setting up a Linux distro is peanuts compared to the issues I face daily. And no, OSX is far from a usable operation system for my usage.
Not necessarily incompatible positions. It's perfectly possible you might want 16gb today but 32/64/etc. later down the line. In fact, based on apple's ram prices, this is the advisable approach, providing you can get a machine which actually CAN have the ram upgraded.
HP Spectre 13 (v021nr) has quite good build quality in my opinion, coming from previously using only Macbook Pros.
It has 6th gen Intel i7, USB-C (one gen 1, two gen 2 which are also Thunderbolt 3), it was $1100, weighs 2.4 pounds. It's been the best Linux machine out of the gate I've had. Trackpad works, wireless works, the one glitch I'm running into right now starting with kernel 4.8 is suspend.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185521
The new macbook pro 13" without the touch strip is already in apple stores.
I would suggest you supplement whatever you read about these macbooks with an actual visit to the apple store, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
The color definition on those new screens is INSANE, it's still far better built than any pc I've tried this year (and I tried zillions while considering one last pc before switching), and the keyboard is surprisingly good.
If you get one of these pc's, get ready for a mechanical touchpad that you WILL notice, a flattened aspect that ratio that is not ideal for document editing, and screen quality that just doesn't quite match up despite pixel counts.
Anyway, I've had a rough time switching from windows to mac this year, find it ironic that now everyone is talking about jumping ship the other way.
i've heard that the Asus Zenbook has very similar build quality. I've been looking for one locally to show-room for a bit to confirm that, but haven't had a chance to confirm it.
If they refresh that line or the Dell XPSs with an Nvidia pascal GTX 10xx, then I'll probably go ahead and get one. I figure that if I'm jumping back over to the Windows side as my daily driver, I might as well hold out for decent gaming GPU in a reasonably lightweight platform.
While the Zenbook looks great and has great hardware specs, I can't rightfully recommend it to anyone. A list of complaints:
-Loud fan. With all of its (considerable) horsepower, it can get quite hot. Even when simply booting up or writing a document in Word, the fan is on almost constantly and very audible.
-Keyboard quality. The coating on the keyboard has already started peeling off after 1.5 years of mild use.
-Big and heavy power brick that gets extremely hot.
-Random buggy hardware issues. The webcam stopped working after updating Windows, and I haven't been able to get it working since. The trackpad is HORRIBLE and buggy. Maybe it's because Apple's trackpad has spoiled me, but going from apple's trackpad to Asus' was probably the single most frustrating thing. It's terribly inaccurate, doesn't understand multi-gestures, and worst of all, there's this weird cursor jitter when you touch the trackpad without being electrically grounded. I'm serious. If I want to accurately place my cursor over something, I have to be touching the laptop's aluminum chassis or else the cursor starts spasming.
The overall build quality just cannot be compared to Apple's. Even the mini Sub Woofer my Zenbook came with started working intermittently and I discovered that the port it connected to came loose for no apparent reason. The same thing happened to one of the USB ports.
Oh, and this was all after going throught he trouble of RMA'ing the first one for harddrive failure.
For a higher end, premium priced laptop I really expected better.
What is worse? How is it worse? And what evidence do you have that its systemic?
I've had one MB break the first month and one last a year before I sold it. My current Sony VAIO (VPCZ21) is running like a champ since 2011 and the build quality is stellar.
Da faq you talking about? The ThinkPad Yoga line ++ Unbuntu is computing perfection. I'd get the X260 as a desktop replacement if I could afford it maxed out.
Hardware aside, does anyone who was used to OS X and its app ecosystem's polish really find Linux or Windows that much better? I'd miss Photoshop, Lightroom, Sequel Pro, iTerm 2, Homebrew, Sketch, Transmit, Alfred, Reeder, Keynote, Airmail, Spotify... just to name a few.
Not to mention every other OS I've used has varying HiDPI support and typography really looks best on OS X.
I wonder if some design-minded Linux geeks will rally around making Linux on the desktop a polished enough experience to rival OS X?
I used a Linux desktop (Ubuntu, specifically) for a few months at work this year, but ended up switching back to OS X. The number of basic, table-stakes stuff that was still utterly broken in day-to-day usage was astounding.
(Since someone will inevitably ask, because they personally never have any issues: off the top of my head: the barely-adequate Alfred replacement forgot its keybinding on the daily. Unity's hotcorners would stop working randomly until I cleared and reset them in the prefs. Mouse acceleration was a disaster on my bluetooth trackpad so I wrote a bunch of calls to the synaptics command line util to reset it to something close to reasonable -- but it would randomly reset and I'd have to re-run the script. HiDPI support is a random mess of things working well or appallingly depending on author, toolkit, time of day, and orientation of the sun. The typography situation is awful -- every third person will point you at a different guide to "fixing" it, but they just result in different kinds of awful. The GUI would hard-lock occasionally and no amount of keyboard poking would get me to a TTY I could reboot from -- seemed to be something Systemd was doing. Getting simple system logs is cryptic bullshit thanks to Systemd's binary mess now, naturally. Etc, etc. I could go on for days.)
On the contrary, Systemd has brought a standard, a replacement for messy scripts and logs used before.
Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system. Gnome itself is shitty thing in my opinion, KDE is too complex, XFCE is nice.
> Ubuntu is not a best choice despite of the popularity, I'd recommend Manjaro (XFCE edition since it's simpler - so not a lot of things can be broken, not the Gnome/KDE version), or Debian stable if you need stable system.
Listen: I learned unix by installing MkLinux on a PowerMac G3 (the beige kind that came with MacOS, the single-tasking cooperative OS from the '80s) in 1997. I built my first PC in '99 or '00 and ran Debian on it until the old glibc transition broke so much that I switched to Gentoo, and much later to slack & arch.
I've done the distro-shuffle. There is no magical Happy distro where everything finally Works. Everything is constantly being rewritten, and some percentage of it is egregiously, embarrassingly broken at the user-facing level.
In some ways it's even worse now than it was in the early 2000s. So after nearly 20 years of "you shouldn't have used distro X you should use distro Y", I think I'll pass.
And despite this rant in 3 years I'll probably be dumb enough to think "well maybe this time things are finally working well", yet again.
I run ubuntu on a server at home. Every time I did a distro upgrade, it broke so much stuff (Nvidia drivers/mythtv/random other stuff) that I would have to fix, that I ended up not upgrading it from 12.04 until just a few weeks ago.
I decided to blow everything away and do a fresh install of 16.04. I wanted to have both Gnome and KDE on it, so I could have the choice of window managers. You're meant to be able to do that.
So I put a fresh ubuntu on it, and then the first thing I did was try to install kde. The kubuntu-desktop package install stopped halfway because of conflicts between Gnome and KDE packages, with just a cryptic error message about a background process having an error during package installation!
The failed install broke (both) GUI's and the apt package manager completely. KDE wouldn't launch at all and Gnome would come up with a blank screen and a mouse cursor and nothing else.
It took hours of googling to find the magic commands to actually remove the conflicting Gnome packages to get the KDE install to continue, and any GUI working. I have it working with just KDE now, but could never get it working with both.
A fresh install of the latest "long term support" version of the most popular distro, then I tried to install the second most popular window manager, and that didn't work. What a massive fail.
I actually love using Linux, and it's so refreshing to not be tied to corporate garbage on your PC, but unfortunately, Ubuntu/linux is 100% not ready for normal consumers. I really really hope it improves, but it always seems to be two steps forward, one step back. It's a bit sad.
Given that systemd is the latest iteration of the freedesktop kits (powerkit/powerd now talks to logind to do suspend and hibernate), it will be increasingly hard to do if one want to use any of the major DEs or their relevant toolkits.
Photoshop Lightroom
- Windows: both run fine (sometimes faster)
- Linux: GIMP + darktable? Pretty capable really, but a lot of people have strong opinions on anything that isn't Photoshop + Lightroom
Sequel Pro
- Windows / Linux: MySQL workbench covers a lot of the same territory
iTerm 2, Homebrew:
- Windows: Ubuntu on Windows or (cygwin, mingw, console2) + (chocolatey, oneget, ...)
- Linux: Plenty of solid options for terminal emulators, pick your favorite distro and it will have a solid package manager. I would argue that Linux has been doing terminal and package management longer and better than Mac + Windows
Sketch
- There have been a plethora of web-based UX/UI design tools in the last few years that don't suck.
Transmit
- I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I'd just use the terminal, but maybe Filezilla?
Alfred
- A lot of built-in search and hotkeys on Windows and many Linux distros, add additional tools on top for a lot of flexibility.
Reeder, Airmail
- No suggestions here... looks nice
Spotify
- Spotify on Windows or Linux
Windows has decent HiDPI handling, but probably not as nice as Mac. Linux if you want to take the time to tweak it can work pretty well on HiDPI (I'm on a MacBook Pro running Linux in xfce).
Haha.. like I said, some people have really strong opinions on this (and are really attached to one or the other). To be fair, there are rumors of professionals that use GIMP as a daily driver, but it's not a hill I want to die on.
> ... polish really find Linux or Windows that much better?
It's definitely not better when it comes to polish, it's worse. However, instead of the lickable polish of OSX, you get responsiveness that makes OSX feel laggy in comparison.
Under Windows at least, you still have Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. except I've found they run faster than under OSX. Whether I'm on my PC or my retina Macbook Pro, I usually develop under a Linux VM via VMWare, and VMWare is definitely much more responsive under Windows as well.
Regarding Homebrew, if you didn't want to use a linux vm setup, there's now the linux subsystem on Windows 10, which has worked well for the few things I've tried under it.
But yes, everything looks worse than OSX. I found I haven't cared as much as I originally thought I would, especially with the increased responsiveness and lack of beach-balls (you don't realize how used to beach-balls you are till you stop seeing them).
I recently converted my hackingtosh into a Windows 10 machine when the Windows Subsystem for Linux came out, and can testify to this. Windows nowadays really is a hyper-responsive OS, on the same machine/specs it outperforms OSX in every way. It took a bit to get my workflow back on track on the new OS, but since then I have not looked back, I don't miss it in the least.
I can't respond to all of the above but a couple stood out to me:
- iTerm2 is a far cry from my typical Emacs set up...I would take e-macs with ansi-term/shell buffers over iTerm2 any day (on Linux).
- Homebrew is a shim to get Linux-like packages to work in the limited terminal/shell environment of OSX (at least IMO). I would take `apt-get` over `homebrew` in a heartbeat.
There is definitely a creativity suite void (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.) but you could consider setting up a Virtual Machine on Linux with VT-D passthrough to be able to use those sorts of applications.
For me, I spend most of my time basically in a terminal or in an IDE...and for that, Linux fits quite well...but yeah...
> - Homebrew is a shim to get Linux-like packages to work in the limited terminal/shell environment of OSX (at least IMO). I would take `apt-get` over `homebrew` in a heartbeat.
Having a package manager that mostly keeps its hands off my core system is something I didn't realize I wanted until I tried Mac package managers (now using Homebrew). Keeping "update all the junk I've installed" and "update the system itself" separate is pretty nice, though it'd be trickier in Linux since the two concepts aren't as distinct, especially in GUI-space.
In theory, homebrew is inferior. In practice, I find homebrew is actually easier to use than apt/yum. For example, installing fonts or (de)installing GUI applications is simple and clean. brewfiles are awesome for machine setups. PPAs do make apt as powerful, but there's not always one for the thing you want. With homebrew, you can create your own "casks" (definitions) and tell homebrew to load them from e.g. github.
It's all great until some mysterious happens (maybe because you tried to install your version of ruby or XCode didn't like something) and then you have to start messing with brew doctor etc and you know you are doomed. But when it works it's great
I think you are looking at this problem from the wrong perspective.
I was also making this mistake too in the past. You cannot beat MacOS in its own game, polished object-oriented Apps reminiscent of NeXTStep with a lot of indie offerings.
You need to realise polish means something different in Linux. It means classic open-source text-mode keyboard-driven file-configured programs that do one thing, do it well and are easy to compose in the Unix tradition. URxvt, emacs, vim, mutt, mbsync, zathura, irssi, etc.
Obviously most of these are portable and thus not exclusive of Linux. But you will get most of them in Linux, running a minimal tiling window manager like XMonad and a good package manager like pacman, nix or guix.
This takes time to master, but in my opinion can't be beaten and will not become out of fashion easily.
You need to realise polish means something different in Linux. It means classic open-source text-mode keyboard-driven file-configured programs that do one thing, do it well and are easy to compose in the Unix tradition. URxvt, emacs, vim, mutt, mbsync, zathura, irssi, etc.
[...]
This takes time to master, but in my opinion can't be beaten and will not become out of fashion easily.
Unfortunately, terminal apps do not help with RAW editing, editing vector graphics or diagramming (replacing OmniGraffle).
For these reasons, if I'd flee from macOS, Windows would currently make more sense. There are better replacements for macOS applications and the Linux subsystem holds a lot of promise.
"Rival" OS X? Meh... as far as I'm concerned, the Linux desktop experience exceeds OS X easily. Honestly, after being forced to use OS X daily for the last 6 months, I really don't see anything special about it, with the sole exception of iTerm2 which admittedly rocks.
I guess it's not so much the OS itself, but which tasks you want to perform on it. For instance, most of the programs the parents lists ("Photoshop, Lightroom, Sequel Pro, iTerm 2, Homebrew, Sketch, Transmit, Alfred, Reeder, Keynote, Airmail, Spotify"), I don't even recognize. I'm a computer scientist and probably spend most of my hours every day in front of a computer, but I must be working on completely different things and so most of the programs above don't mean anything to me.
Most of the functionality of my workflow is provided by other programs, but there is also a good portion that's provided by the actual OS -- mostly things like switching between workspaces, starting and closing programs, inspecting disk contents. (Of course, I'm omitting the fact that the OS is responsible for all that metal underneath to do something useful at all, but I guess all of the three major desktop OS's have that part covered.)
If your workflow depends on a functionality that is provided by certain tools/programs, and these tools/programs have no alternative on other OS's, then of course it will be difficult to switch. But I would say that in my case, either the same tool I'm using today is cross-platform and thus available on other OS's too, or the functionality that I need is available through some other tool. This doesn't seem to be the case for what the parent lists, but for me, I guess the main difference after a switch would be interacting across apps, not within apps.
Yes, I do find Linux better, for software development at least. Running on OS X @work, I would much rather run Linux XFCE and not bother with homebrew and having issues with iTerm. The HiDPI is better on the Mac though and app widgets have a uniform look. Virtual desktop switching is too slow on OS X. I can easily switch with my scroll wheel in Linux and move windows from a workspace to another by dragging them around. Maximizing windows sucks badly on OS X, I almost never do it - it now hides the title bar. Finder and the file/open dialogs are pretty dumb: no address/path bar. I could go on for days.
Spotify works the same across all three operating systems (it's a hybrid webapp now)
Keynote is easily replaced by PowerPoint
Sketch: you may be able to replace it in the next future with Adobe XD, that will also support Windows 10 and it will be an UWP app with support for pen and touch (Currently waiting for the first beta, it's due before the end of 2016)
I don't think many people find the OS better. It's the main reason people are still (stuck) with apple. I think most people want to jump ship because of the hardware -- despite it having a great polish.
Maybe we need a MACE emulator. How hard could it possibly be to run macos apps on linux? ;)
Other than that, I tend to agree with the opinions expressed in the article.
I have found four possibilities:
* Dell Precision 7510 paired with TB15 thunderbolt dock (no touch screen)
* Lenovo Thinkpad P50 (People seem to have troubles getting 2 external screens at 4k@60, no touch)
* Falcon Northwest TLX / System76 Oryx Pro / Clevo (1080p no touch, bad battery, but has GTX 1070, more USB-C ports)
There is one more possible contender, which is the as yet unreleased kaby lake XPS 15. Given the XPS 13 refresh, I suspect we'll see the new XPS 15 in the December / January time frame. If I knew for certain that it would support 64GB of RAM, I would wait and get that machine, but at this point I'm leaning towards buying the Precision 7510 in the next week or two.
Software support for hidpi outside of OS X/macOS isn't great. If you can test it out on an existing computer before buying a new one I'd recommend doing that just to be sure that's what you want. Otherwise 1080p would probably be bearable on a 15" screen I would imagine.
I've got a colleague who had the P50 4k display, who said the only annoying part at the time was that moving Chrome or IntelliJ from a lowdpi to highdpi display meant you had to relaunch those processes (and this was some time ago). While I agree this is annoying, Fedora 25 launches this month with Wayland, which is supposed to fix these issues.
The Dell Precision looks like a good option if you don't need a better GPU (Quadro M2000M ~= GTX960m). I've been doing VR dev so I went w/ an Aorus (the smaller X3v6 on preorder), but you may want to look at something like the X5v6 which should tick all your checkboxes save touch and might be more appealing than the Aorus: http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X5%20v6
One bummer about this new gen of Aorus' is the mystifying lack of TB3 (despite USB-C 3.1 on an otherwise top-of-the-line-specced system).
Too bad about the P50 having external display issues. A built-in 100% NTSC / 100% AdobeRGB 4K panel sounds great. (same crap Quadro card though)
Personally, I took a leap of faith and I ordered the new Alienware 15, because 50 % of my time I do Film editing with color grading and graphics heavy things (so the nvidia 10 70 should be useful) and 50% of my time I do development (Kubernetes,...) so the 32gb of RAM come in handy. Plus it has NVMe, 4k screen,HDMI 2 + DP, TB3,... it check a lot of your boxes.
I considered the Thinkpad P50 and the HP Zbook 15 but I found the GPU to be a bit weak. Plus I heard many issues with the HDMI 1.4 on these machines.
The high end XPS 15 currently uses the Skylake-H, and will probably also use the Kaby Lake-H (quad core) as opposed to the U dual core, and we don't know if that will have higher RAM support
If I configure the 7510 with the 3840x2160 LCD, it doesn't let me select Ubuntu as the OS instead of Windows. Do you have any info on whether it works, but just isn't supported?
Ubuntu 14.04 is very likely not going to be a good experience on a 4k display. A newer release, however, should be significantly better. I'm not sure if it's possible to work around Dell's configuration constraint system.
The Precision 7510 weights 6 pounds, which is about a half pound lighter than what the 17 inch macbook pro used to weigh. (750 grams heavier than the current 15 inch macbook pro). So... it falls squarely into Macbook Pro range. Now.. if you're looking for a Macbook Air, of course, this won't come anywhere close to to that.
This is not to say that you'd accept this as a Macbook Pro, but your statement about it not being an alternative to the Macbook Pro is clearly not true.
Personally, I often carry around a 40 pound weight (4-year-old daughter), so for me the difference is negligible.
It's very easy to find a decently made heavy laptop (jut get any Dell/HP workstation, or gaming Alienware/etc), much harder to find a portable decent laptop. The main laptop's feature is its portability, else is secondary.
So a half inch thinner and a pound or two in weight is the main consideration? I have yet to find any laptop that isn't portable by definition. I have an old ThinkPad that I use sometimes for OpenBSD, and I find it to be very portable.
The difference between carrying 2lbs or carrying 6lbs is negligible to me. Unless I'm going hiking with 80lbs of gear, I won't appreciate a loss of a few pounds. Any scenario I can imagine where I'm already carrying 80lbs in gear involves scenarios that I wouldn't be bringing my laptop regardless of the weight.
Especially if you get a proper bag or backpack to carry the laptop with. The laptop would need to weigh over 12lbs before I even noticed I was carrying it with a shoulder-strap.
This message makes me think you are not used to carry your laptop on the daily basis. Try to carry you laptop at least a one day having for example a big walk (get new area/city to explore on the foot, for example).
I lug around my laptop every single day. I bought a cheap bag off Amazon [0] because I also lug around the charger and an external mouse. I also carry a gallon of water with me everywhere I go.
I could understand that answer if laptops weighed 45lbs....but honestly if carrying around a few pounds is too heavy, I'm curious how they have the energy to even walk anywhere? =\
I agree with the OP, it's not a big deal. I used to cycle 20km with the laptop bag on my back, a little more or less is like adding a book to the bag, I don't even notice it
I've been happily running Dell computers for years. They're not perfect, but I've been using Linux for 20 years, and am not about to switch to Apple. I'm too attached to the freedom Linux gives me, and am mostly satisfied with Dells that run Linux as something that just works out of the box.
I have an XPS 13 at home from several revisions back, and at work I have another XPS 13 that is current_revision - 1. In Padova, we had an Inspiron from ~10 years ago that had been turned into a computer for the kids to use, and was still working well. My wife is using another Dell Latitude laptop I got a while back, before the XPS 13. All with Ubuntu. It's probably time to upgrade my wife's computer, but the others are all working great.
I've continued to update Ubuntu on all of them without reinstalling.
Thank you, from your account it looks like this hardware is lasting at least as much as Apple hardware. Recently I had 3 Macbook Air laptops failing in a row... with things that are not easy to fix like motherboard, charging circuit, and so forth. After 2 years the warranty is gone so all they said was, we can change this for a new one for <unreasonable-amount-of-money>. All in all the switch back to Linux looks very interesting.
The thing that most impressed me is when the hard drive failed in the Inspiron when we were living in Austria. I had purchased the computer here in Oregon and brought it over there. I called up the local Dell number, expecting to have some huge hassle where I'd ship the computer to the US or something and wait a month for it to work its way through the system.
Instead, a guy showed up at our door the next day with a new drive that he installed.
It was definitely within the warranty period, but I was really impressed.
They're not perfect computers, and I do tend to be pretty careful with them, but so far so good.
Completely off topic, but I follow your blog about redis for quite some time,and thanks to HN, I just discovered that you're from ~Catania, I was there few months ago and I plan to come back, when I do I would absolutely love to pay you a beer (or a coffee if you prefer that :))
Hello! Sure, please send me an email at antirez/gmail, only condition is that I pay :-) Cheers. Trivia: I'm not actually from Catania but from a different place in Sicily, (Campobello di Licata in the province of Agrigento). However I live here in Catania for several years.
I've posted in a couple other threads. But Thinkpad T430. My only complaint is the screen at 1600x900. But I have it docked with 3 24" @ 1920x1200. Every day I use my macbook pro at work, I curse under my breath and wish for my Thinkpad.
It's maxed out, I bought it back in 2013 used from ebay base was 500, with dock and extra parts ~900 total. The specs outside of GPU for gaming are still more than adequate. I5 dual w. hyperthreading. 16GB Ram, 2 SSD (2.5 128GB, M2 256GB). Spare battery in optical slot, or 1TB sata. About 10 hours battery life. That's one of the biggest things to me, is the flexibility and expansion.
It's the best Linux laptop I've used. Everything on Arch works flawlessly. I haven't done a full reboot in months, opting to suspend. The dock with a custom script, is a breeze. The keyboard, almost as good as my Unicomp.
Lastly ease of maintenance. I replaced the screen after leaving earbuds on the keyboard and cracking it (60$). Dropped it down a flight of stairs, toasted I don't know what [wouldn't boot]. New motherboard, CPU, and stick of ram (80$). Dropped a box on it, broke one hinge (15$). There are also some HiDPI mods floating around replacing the screen with either 2560x1440 or 1920x1080.
I'm either waiting to build a gaming rig, or a laptop with external gpu at this point. There are pain points, the screen viewing angles are atrocious. Speakers are tinny and useless. I gutted them on a rebuild years ago. But I mean when I'm at work or on any other laptop I want my think pad.
I feel I'm an outlier in what I want. I want the old used car of a laptop. Something that has good bones, and I can maitnain myself. Rice it up, soup it up, and use it for several years. I don't mind heft, 6lb is max for me. Give me expansion and good battery life, with linux support. Also things happen, so durability is key.
Dell XPS13 9343. I love that it's super light, long battery life, high res screen, adequate performance. I use Ubuntu 16.04. I usually use chrome with a gazillion tabs open at any time + gnome-terminal running python or C/C++ compiles. Suspend/resume works very well.
Caveat: eventually I tired of the occasional wifi problems and I replaced the broadcom wifi module with an intel one (~$25). Flawless wifi since.
I think my only regret/disappointment would be the memory -- this one is limited to 4GB and I can't upgrade it.
a) I'd be paying more for a touch screen that I don't want. Whatever the cost, I'd rather have the money
b) Does whatever OS I'm running know I've got a touch screen? What's to stop it taking advantage of that? What's to stop it essentially requiring I use it?
c) Even if I don't use it, buying a laptop with a touchscreen suggests there's a market for such a device. I'd rather not add the weight of my support.
Agreed, what is it with the push to touch screen? Although I expect it's manufacturing - better to make all of them touch and then up-sell the customers :/
I find it interesting this reversal of the argument versus when the iPhone originally debuted and people were questioning that decision to go to almost nothing but touch for the device.
Touch is one of the most natural forms of interaction to people. A screen without touch, to a young child, is "broken". The more screens with touch in our lives (such as say the iPhones and iPads), the more that seems to apply to any age that a screen without touch starts to feel "broken".
This is what I find strangest about the arguments by people for the MBP Touch Bar: so many people that support agree how useful touch is. Wouldn't it be more useful just to make the whole screen touch capable than to stop part of the way there with just a tiny strip?
The boldness of the original iPhone at the time was relying entirely on touch. The MBP Touch Bar seems a strange hesitation relative to that.
What's wrong with touch? Critically, it lacks the bandwidth of other forms of input. It's for consumption, not creation. It leaves the screen dirty. It encourages wasteful use of screen real estate by UI. You imply everything else is 'broken' because children like touch, however I believe that's just because touch mirrors physical interaction which we are all familiar with from birth, and thus 'better for the less cognitively developed'. You can't touch this.
«Critically, it lacks the bandwidth of other forms of input.»
The most classic forms of input (keyboard and mouse) are touch manipulations of plastic artifacts: their bandwidth is essentially a subset of touch rather than any other way around.
With modern touch screens we are only beginning to scratch the surface of touch sensory bandwidth. Certainly there remains plenty of interesting areas to expand haptic feedback. There's also plenty of ways left to blend and hybridize touch sensitivity and gestures and even context sensitive/context reliant physical objects (like digital pens/pencils or even how our keyboards might interact with touch).
«It's for consumption, not creation.»
Many of the earliest forms of human creativity were manipulating things through touch. Maybe we haven't yet arrived at something like a good approach to digital sculpting or pottery, but that doesn't mean that we won't.
Even then, I've seen amazingly creative touch apps. There are some really cool touch apps in music creation, just off the top of my head. The fact that you associate touch with consumption (and "less cognitive development") may say more about you than the world of touch apps that already exist.
«It leaves the screen dirty.»
Yeah. So? Things get dirty when you use them. You find ways to clean them. Are you keeping your screen pristine and untouched/undirtied because it needs to be sconced in a museum some day?
I get that it's a personal preference and it plainly drives the Monk-esque sorts of OCD wild, but at the end of the day, entropy wins anyway.
«It encourages wasteful use of screen real estate by UI.»
One person's waste of space is another person's accessibility. Touch invites larger click targets to better accommodate the fatness of people's fingers. That accommodation, however, also helps people with accuracy issues with a mouse (which has always been a big deal easily ignored). Even further, it helps those situations that shouldn't demand accuracy in the first place. When I'm working on a spreadsheet at work, why does every click need to be a "headshot" to get my work accomplished? Lining up those shots takes time and energy I could be spending on the actual work. Just because mice can be pixel accurate doesn't mean they should be. As monitor resolutions increase and DPI increases and pixels shrink this only becomes crazier when an application has a small pixel-accurate hitbox. (It amazes me how many mission critical Enterprise apps you see with old school 16x16 pixel icons on toolbars running on modern hardware as if those businesses have a need to be FPS sniper schools.)
Fitt's Law suggests we should do better than that. Targets that are bigger and/or closer to the mouse pointer are easier to hit. If it takes touch to force more developers to be more mindful of Fitt's Law, then that alone is reason enough to support touch.
We were discussing current touch technology, not future haptic what-ifs.
Bandwidth is information transferred over time. Whether you are discussing input (push/gesture max) or output (can't see the screen because hand is in the way), current-era touch is inferior to traditional input systems.
You failed to provide even one example of a creative use of touchscreens, except a vague music reference. I've seen those apps too, they are frustrating to work with and any serious musician would use a (musical) keyboard with real velocity support in preference.
I agree UIs need to move forward, I simply disagree that current-era touch is creative or high enough bandwidth to get us anywhere useful.
Well, I was originally discussing the merits of just making the MBP screen touch friendly (using current technology) rather than the half-step of the Touch Bar. Why corral touch to just a tiny, sub-screen, if the touch is useful enough to add the bar in the first place? Again, my fascination here is primarily with the people that like the Touch Bar but don't think a Touch Screen would be useful, given how important it was to the original iPhone that the whole thing was touch capable. If the Touch Bar is useful, then a full touch screen would be surely be more useful?
From that perspective a touch screen, even with current technology, is still more bandwidth than no touch screen at all and more creative than no touch screen at all... I'd argue that does get us somewhere useful.
I don't think the onus here is on me to provide examples of how useful that may be, but on you to explain why perfect is not the enemy of the good, in this particular case.
Just replace the motherboard. Sometimes you can score cheap one on eBay and there are manuals with step by step instructions how to replace it on Dell site.
It's not a bad idea. I hadn't considered that. But it looks like the going rate for 8GB is > $300 which represents over 30% of what I paid originally. I'll probably consider it as it ages, though.
I commented in the other thread a few days ago, but I LOVE my XPS 15. I opted for the lower res matte screen, but otherwise maxed out the available specs.
The battery life is fantastic. The touchpad is the best I've ever used on a Windows laptop. The GPU is excellent (960m). The keyboard is great.
Overall, no complaints. I did also purchase an XPS 13, which I thought was great, but the screen was just a little too small.
FWIW I purchased my 'refurb', they pop up from time to time on Dell Outlet, but they go quick.
EDIT: Oh yeah, Linux works flawlessly. Currently running Antergos, but have also run Ubuntu.
I have a T420s. Actually I have two because I bought a second as a spare in case my first one dies.
Pros:
* matte screen
* aftermarket upgrade to 16 GB ram
* aftermarket upgrade to 2 SSDs, one in the normal SATA6 connection and another in the ultrabay with a caddy, so I can always remove it and put the cd/dvd driveback in if required.
* still have a spare PCIe slot so I could add another SSD there or use that instead of getting a caddy for ultrabay
The biggest draw for me: power, ethernet, VGA, 2x USB and mini display port are all on the back of the machine so the cables stay out of the way when it is on a desk connected to external monitors. If I am using the keyboard on the laptop then I can have my paper notebook on the right and it isn't in a tangle of wires, or a wireless mouse and mousepad.
CONS:
* 1600x900, but I use external monitors 95% of the time
* the first T420s had some battery firmware issue so it wouldn't hibernate when the battery got low, it would just turn off. Doesn't seem to happen any more and the problem was only with one of three suppliers of batteries so not everyone had that problem
T550. Probably the best laptop that I've ever laid eyes on. I can switch batteries while it's running because it has two batteries. I get a total of 16h of normal-duty work time out of it. It has 16 GB of RAM and a NVMe as well as a SSD, 3K screen and a pretty good touchpad and usable keyboard.
I think the build quality is nice, it has a serious appeal to it and has a nice weight and feel to it when carried.
I'm a 100% Arch Linux based developer doing all kinds of work.
Thinkpad X1 Yoga. Light, great keyboard, trackpoint is surprisingly useful (and I use it a lot actually), decent touchpad (not as good as on Macbook though), nice WQHD screen, everything works of of the box with Linux (including touchscreen and wacom pen) but fingerprint scanner and auto rotate (I prefer to switch manually anyway, feature will be in kernel 4.9). Hi-DPI app support could be better (improves rapidly). EDIT: Battery lasts ~6.5 in real life settings, but charging is super fast. I am sure battery would be better with i5 (I have i7), FHD and a non NVMe drive.
I think I would like X260 more though. I do not use touchscreen and pen very often and hot-swappable battery would be great.
Thinkpad X61. Solidly built. Compact. Linux runs out of the box. Currently running Fedora. I honestly never max out the 2 gb memory available - it can take 4gb, but I haven't had the need to upgrade yet. I did need to put an SSD in it.
It's been going for 10 years, and probably has at least another 10 years left.
Cons, does get a little hot on my lap from time to time. The little red joystick thing takes a little getting used to. I'm not much of a mouse user so it isn't too much of a problem, I run the i3 window manager. No space is wasted on a trackpad.
Yay another X61 fan. At home I am still using an X61 Tablet with the 1400x1050 AFFS display. I maxed it out at 8GB of memory and installed an SSD. It is so choice.
I have the Precision 5510 which is basically the XPS 15 with the intel wifi card instead of Broadcom. I have had it since April. I initially bought it as it was one of the few laptops that ship with Linux. I have been happy with the battery life and the touchpad.
HP ZBook 15, first generation. I don't truly love it because they added a number pad to the keyboard which skewed the spacebar and the touchpad to the left, so I shift the PC to the right to get the touchpad aligned with the center of my body. There were no better alternatives when I had to buy it (I needed a 15" screen).
What I like is that I can replace almost anything, even the CPU and the GPU. I added RAM, 16 GB out of 32 now and swapped the DVD burner for a 1 TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD. I was using the 32 GB SSD cache of the HDD for the OS so it was already fast, but it's faster now. THD screen is good, the touchpad has 3 physical buttons. The battery lasts 3, maybe 4 hours with care, which is more than enough for me. It's 3 kg and the power brick is a brick but it's ok.
Ubuntu 16.04 works pretty well on it. Almost: it has two problems I can live with, shared by Ubuntu 12.04: 1) it doesn't shutdown, only suspend or restart. If I have to turn it off before going on vacation I press the power button when it restarts 2) plugging out the USB 3 HD I use for backups does something to the USB port and I have to reset the port or the PC won't suspend. Every other drive works. I have a script for that and it runs at the end of the backup script. I'm a developer so it's OK. If you're not, look at another hw.
Everything else is OK, support included. Next business day on site assistance was about 100 Euro for 3 years.
The second and third generation models look iteratively better. Maybe they work better with Linux too.
Edit: however any 15" model without the number pad will win me over.
It's a Dell. Love? No way. I am using xmodmap to swap left Control and left Alt because the Alt key is located where I expect the Command key would be on a Mac. So, my Alt-C copies to the clipboard.
Using AutoKey, I've got most of the Terminal control keys remapped to Alt keys when in the Terminal. Using AutoKey, my Alt-C does Control-Shift-C in Terminal, and Control-C works as I expect in the Terminal.
Lightweight, matte non-glare screen, and double battery. The latter means I can swap batteries if I'm out and about without shutting down. 100% Linux compatibility.
Also under $1K even considering an aftermarket SSD & RAM.
Our office is split mac/pc. We bought about 12 of the T440s/T450s for the pc folks. There is a lot to like. One surprise perk: they use the same mini-displayport dongles to connect to projectors, so we can just leave the dongles on.
Downsides: The screens are pretty washed out and blah compared to the mac screens, but ok for coding. The trackpads also holdup very poorly against the macs.
The key problem for us though is they fail way more than the macs. Probably about half of them have had some issue or another after 2yrs. For the macs it's been closer to 1 in 10 or 1 in 15.
We decided to spend more and push people toward more expensive macs. It saves us so much IT time.
+1 Lenovo. I have a slight preference for the sleek form factor of the X1. I imagine Mac fans might take issues with the textured trackpad, the all plastic surfaces (though high-density plastic at least), and the aforementioned matte screen. Ran Ubuntu on one for years before switching to OSX for a few years (switching back if Apple doesn't give the Pro a spec bump soon (unlikely) ).
Got it preloaded with Linux, which isn't important but felt nice.
It's super light, powerful enough for everything I do (giant pile of chrome tabs + one of gimp, gaming, or webdev), has incredible battery life, and is well-built and generally sturdy. Also the tiny bezel is amazing - it makes the laptop smaller, makes the screen feel bigger, and lets you see more of the rest of the world behind the laptop.
My next laptop will probably be an XPS 15 to see what those are like.
Lenovo Yoga 900. Only thing I don't like about it is to get upgraded specs I had to get a hidpi screen and Linux just ain't there yet. Especially if you're not using a DE.
Great battery life (it's a charge every couple of days laptop for me), love the watch-style hinge (which is really solid), and the keyboard has all the keys I want on it.
From work I have both a ThinkPad T450s, and a 2011 MBP. I work on the train at least an hour a day.
I greatly prefer the ThinkPad for the following reasons: much better battery (even after a brand new battery for the MBP), it is much lighter weight, non-glossy screen (better to counter train window glare), and the keys requires much less force to actuate.
I miss the smooth MBP track pad, but I rarely use the mouse anyway. I'd never buy a Mac for personal use, even without any price either way I prefer the Thinkpad.
I've been using Lenovo X1 Carbons for about 4 years (since they came out) and love them. Super light, enough RAM and CPU, great keyboard (after 3rd Gen...), has a TrackPoint (which I require). I'm been using Debian exclusively since 2008 and Gnome 3 since 3.4 or so. Highly recommended, though HiDPI support is not perfect...
the Lenovo x220 has the best keyboard in the business & an overhead lighting system that i'm fond of. it's very "throwback" but there are some aftermarket upgrades for it to make it significantly quicker.
That post makes me want a MacBook. They all look cheap with so much plastic. Aluminum unibody in my 2012 rMBP is great, and it absorbed a drop by quite well, although with visible damage.
I was disappointed with the new MacBook announcement, but also disappointed when looking at alternatives. I am looking for 32G RAM. I liked the author's short descriptions of the various Intel product lines.
I've been eyeing the XPS 13/15 and took them for a spin at recently an MS store, though I'd get the dev/Linux version. Some things the reviews never seem to mention:
Nice screen, but it is quite glossy which sucks at my place with lots of windows. There is a matte option, but only with the low resolution screen. Not sure why a developer would ever want to use a glossy screen on ultra portable. Perhaps if you travel from dungeon to dungeon.
Second, the super thin keyboards in rage now have very little key travel. The XPS is better than the small macbook, but much worse than last years Pro. It is also a lot worse feeling than my old XPS. It makes a clanking sound when you use it. I was able to avoid that by touching very lightly, so partly my own fault but touching so lightly is less satisfying on some level. Perhaps the new Pro has a better keyboard but the Apple store did not have it in stock yet.
If you're considering upgrading then you might want to ask yourself whether you really need a laptop instead of a desktop. If you work from home and currently have a laptop that you can use while traveling (or for miscellaneous web browsing, media, etc) then a desktop might actually be a better fit.
I recently started feeling like it might be time to upgrade my 1st gen Carbon X1 and after doing some research I found myself really disappointed by how little the laptop landscape has changed over the last four or five years. After giving it some thought though, I realized that I do virtually all of my work at one desk anyway and decided to look into some desktop options. I found that you can put together something in a mini-case with an i7 processor, 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, 2 TB of SSD, a 28" 4k monitor, a mechanical keyboard, and a high quality mouse for less than about $2k dollars.
This made a lot more sense to me than spending a similar amount on a laptop that offers only marginal improvements over my current one. The obvious trade-off is portability but I would guess that most of us here already have laptops that are "good enough" for most purposes and which could still be used as necessary.
I get that different people have different needs, and someone might say there's a need for 64 Gb RAM laptop. But it's not fair to say that MacBooks are not for developers anymore. I'm really happy with 16 Gb RAM on my MBP, which allows me to run Android Studio, XCode, Rails server, Redis Server, PostgreSQL and dozens of other small things at the same time.
I don't see a reason for such reactions.
It depends on what you do, if you have to juggle multiple VMs or deal with massive projects 16GB will be an issue for you. If you are a creative that works with graphics/video/music, your work machine will most definitely require tons of RAM, and that limit will def become an issue.
external displays are 80% hdmi and 20% vga. for the next five years there will be zero dongles available to you at universities.
yes, they are available chained to your employer and mine conference rooms, but that's not the norm when you actually need to project something and forgot your dongle.
I will happily give up the 0.0001mm it will gain to have both of those. my Asus has only a raised connector and is the same thinness of the models without.
irrelevant thickness > missing ports when you need them.
saying otherwise is buying into the thinest-is-better-marketing-pissing-contest and show that you have no idea that support for both those ports are already built into your APU. they just need to run a port with no extra parts. they just leave it out to market it easier to people like you that will pay premium for it.
Great write up, I like the simplicity and the common structure that allows for easy comparison. Would be nice in a chart view, but oh well.
The issue I face is that I need XCode and therefore need an Apple product. Currently using a mid 2010 MBP and was hoping for a good upgrade this round but don't have $3000 to spend. So I'll likely be looking at the used market.
A refurb might work for you, $1700 for a 2015 15". During my consulting years I bought refurbs for my main laptop because then you get a less expensive machine with all of the weird driver and software support issues worked out.
I was thinking about that actually. I like the portability of a laptop (working on couch, at table, back deck etc). I think I need to test it out a bit as my wife would also like a new laptop. Perhaps an iMac or mac mini in the basement would work well. Is it preferrable to use an apple product to remote into another apple product, or could I get a Windows/Chrome/Linux laptop and still remote in?
Presumably because a lot of people wanted to buy a computer in, say, January but decided to hold out for the next refresh, which was at the time expected to happen in March or so. Unfortunately, that new model was seven months overdue (http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Retina_MacBook_Pro) and yielded disappointment over the price (I recall hearing that the price of the base model went up by about $200, but I can't find a citation for this) and the suitability of the system for their work (e.g. replacing the tactile escape key with something that seems like "a useless gimmick").
So they have a computer they wanted to replace ten months ago (or indeed any time since then) and no good options from Apple. And before you suggest they just buy a previous-generation MacBook Pro; do you really think the best thing to do today is to buy a two year old computer?
Cause "everyone and their mother" has been ramming "wait until the new ones come out" in to their heads for 3 years and they want to finally get the new MBP.
I know roughly 4-5 people in this exact situation right now.
Because many bought simultaneously with new Apple releases and have been waiting to see the next major version. In my case our MacBook pros are > 3.5 years old, which is too old for my comfort level; I expect major failures after 3 years that aren't worth even one day of lost productivity.
My MacBook Pro from 5 years ago when I started college just died due to a logic board failure a couple of months ago. A new board was ~$600, so I saved up a little more and bought an Intel NUC. I'm missing the portability though and my Dell 11 chromebook is a bit too small to use comfortably.
I don't _need_ one right now, but I'm definitely in the market and weighing my options.
I think most have similar reasons as me. My Laptop died a few months ago and I've been planning on buying the new MacBooks (would be my first Mac).
The very high prices (especially for the 16GB of Ram that I would get) have made me look elsewhere.
back to school in most universities. everyone see the freshmans with newer models. also apple (thankfully vanishing) reality distortion field passing by
They all have one thing in common, i7-7500U or slower. That is because the quad-core i7 7th gen processor won't be available until next year, and that's probably the reason Apple stayed at the 6th gen for this refresh.
In my list of requirements quad-core is definitely prioritized over which gen the processor is.
The biggest downside for me of this Touch Bar gimmick is not that I have to look at it. I can touch type, but I'd rather have this than a menu bar. You have to look up to the menu bar anyway, and reach for the mouse. Noone is complaining that menu bars are still there. This is like the Office "ribbon" in hardware form. It's fine, stop whining.
The problem for me is that my laptop is usually in "clamshell" mode. If I'm at the office, I have an external monitor. If I am at home, I have an external monitor. So the touch bar would be used for Starbucks and Planes? Meh. If at least the external Apple keyboards had it...
I too have been considering other alternatives. And that's mostly because I am feeling fed up with having multiple machines. I want a machine with a decent GPU, which you can't have in Apple land, no matter how much money you are willing to throw at Apple.
They could have used those speedy thunderbolt connections to power external GPUs, much like Razer and Dell are doing. Even Microsoft is kind of doing it, with the GPU in the Surface Book's keyboard. If there's a company that knows how to do this video card switching thing, it's Apple. I can never tell when the MBP is changing GPUs.
The Surface Book not having Thunderbolt was a surprise to me. I guess that's out then.
> The problem for me is that my laptop is usually in "clamshell" mode. If I'm at the office, I have an external monitor. If I am at home, I have an external monitor. So the touch bar would be used for Starbucks and Planes?
I'm sincerely curious (this isn't some veiled criticism or w/e): what do you like about having it in clamshell mode with an external monitor? I use my MBP with an external at work every day, but I always keep it open for the extra screen.
At this very moment, I have 3 monitors in front of me (2 30", 1 27"). Space is at a premium, I don't gain much with the laptop screen. In clamshell, I can tuck it below the monitors.
Sometimes I will have the laptop open. But then the screen is not properly positioned vs the other(s) monitor. And then I put it in a stand. Which means I no longer have easy access to the keyboard.
This is why, in fact, I bought my first magic trackpad. I caught myself reaching for the laptop's trackpad to use gestures or scroll.
Get me an external keyboard with a touch bar and I'm on board! I don't think that's going to happen though, because right now it is what makes the MBPs stand out.
Makes sense. I use a magic trackpad myself, for the same reasons.
Although I actually disagree -- I think a touchbar standalone keyboard is inevitable. They want people writing touchbar-aware apps, and the only way that's going to happen is to make the touchbar available to the broader installed base. Whether or not it happens right away is going to come down to how efficiently they can drive down the cost.
Initially I bought a Lenovo Yoga 900 - the hardware was great, but I ran into the bios shenanigans which blew up on HN and Reddit a week or so after I'd returned it. (They have since fixed it.)
I then bought a Dell Inspiron 13 7000 which is nice. Touch screen, convertible, reasonable resolution, affordable. Ubuntu installed easily (although I had to jump through minor hoops around UEFI) and everything has worked flawlessly.
Yeah, the touch screen works great (with multi touch in apps that support it, e.g. chrome). The only thing that's not supported is auto inversion of the screen when you fold it over 360 degrees to use it as a tablet. I set up a shortcut key combination to do that, so it's not overly cumbersome.
I am super happy with my Lenovo T450s - it's sturdy, has a super crisp, beautiful IPS display, very long battery life, trackpoint. The only bad thing about it is that the speakers point downwards into the table, but I rarely use them anyway. I run dual-boot Windows 10 and Linux because I need both for my work. The newer Linux kernels support everything and work perfectly with this computer.
On the XPS 13: Cons: Expensive. Unnecessary SD card slot
I find this amusing and interesting. I've seen lots of complaining about the MBP dropping SD card support ("photographers HATE it!"). It looks like everyone rejects it for not-entirely overlapping reasons. Reminds me of political candidates, where everyone has differing reasons to not vote for them.
nice one--for the same reason, i'm doing the research and creating a list of options just now. Myy requirements lists, at least for your first two sets of bullets, are the same.
My leading contender at the moment is an Alienware 13, which is sold in three different configurations from $1,000, $1,100, and $1,500. (note: i have no affiliation with Alienware nor am i a gamer).
it's not ideal for my use cases (which are probably similar to most other dev), eg, i don't need the industrial strength speakers, which is one of the reasons the box depth is a little on thicker than most laptops to say the least. After having a MBP for the past 7-8 years, an Alienware will feel practically cuboid.
one additional criterion i have is high build quality which has led me to look closely at ThinkPad and Alienware. I had an Alienware quite a few years ago before the company was purchased by Dell; The build quality was superb; i have no direct experience with the quality of the newer units (post-acquisition).
Yeah, the list of "must have" and "avoid" attributes made it clear that this is not a list for me. I'll probably never use my laptop with an external GPU that costs as much as the laptop itself. Maybe I'd feel differently if I used a laptop exclusively.
I'm surprised too. The Lemur (14") just got a CPU upgrade and looks enticing, from a hardware perspective. It's serviceable and can sport 32GB RAM and two disks. Unfortunately it's not a looker. But I'm getting fed up with my Dell XPS 13. HiDPI support is still ... not good in Linux, especially when attaching/detaching screens.
To me, many design decisions they have taken with respect to hardware are incomprehensible. It doesn't look like a premium quality laptop. Very few can pull it off like Apple.
I've been googling about them the moment I heard about such laptops. I don't care about the brutal build, the hardware is interesting. According to this Reddit thread they have serious problems with Linux (even though they have Ubuntu installed by default).
What's with the desire for a 4k laptop? The 5.1 megapixels on my 15" rMBP are certainly more than I can see (36yo here). Especially as this guy is looking for a 13" screen, and more pixels leads to less battery life, I don't see the draw.
I have no idea why more options for video output is a problem for the author. I would see this as the advantage. Also "Unnecessary SD slot" is con for one laptop. How is this a problem?
If I'm doing digital video work, then I'm already lugging around all the camera gear. Having an SD card reader in the camera bag works for me. I'd rather not have to carry around the slot otherwise.
OP here: There are USB-C to HDMI/DisplayPort male-to-male cables and male-to-female adapters. Strictly speaking, you don't need it to make your devices work together. But if you don't have Thunderbolt 3, then you're stuck without such options.
Thanks, great writeup - I bookmarked it because my 5 1/2 year old MacBook Air is literally wearing out. I really like Mac laptops but the closest match to my needs now is a MackBook which is probably about as fast as my 5 1/2 year old laptop. Our local non-official Mac store tech guy was telling me that the MacBook is surprisingly fast and since he knows me and my habits (I tend to develop on large memory, multi-core VPSs) he was recommending it highly to me. Still, it seems expensive for what you get.
Apparently Dell still has Ubuntu edition laptops. Based on Reddit comments, they seem to be working really well. For 16Gb ram and this insane resultion, seems great deal for $1800.
You can get HP x360 with the same config for about $1300. And don't forget to check laptop for coil whine (high pitch noise) issue buying Dell XPS laptops, they still do ship laptops with that annoying problem.
There are two versions of the Dell XPS 13" variety. There is the 1080p version and the QHD+ version. The 1080p version is non-touch, the higher res is touch enabled. The 1080p version goes for €1,149.00 (with discounts)[1] from where I'm at right now. I found a HP x360 priced at €1193.00 locally[2]. Interestingly from a developer perspective, the Dell XPS Developer edition comes with Ubuntu 16.04 SP1 out of the box so no Apple or Microsoft or Google tax. Isn't that neat? System76 is the only other well known system builder that I know of that does this. I'm happy to be corrected on this.
Let's compare the HP Spectre x360 and the Dell XPS 9360.
component HP Dell
---
os Windows 10 Home 64bit Ubuntu 16.04 SP1 64bit
processor 6th gen i5-6200U (3MB cache, <2.8GHz) 7th Gen i5-7200U (3MB cache, <3.1GHz)
memory 8GB LPDDR3 1600MHz 8GB LPDDR3 1866MHz
storage 256 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD 256GB PCIe SSD
graphics Intel® HD Graphics 520 Intel® HD Graphics 620
display (13.3") FHD IPS LED-backlit 13.3” FHD AG (1920 x 1080) InfinityEdge display
touch screen (1920 x 1080)
ports 1 headphone/microphone combo 1 Headset jack, 1 Noble lock slot
3 USB 3.0 2 USB 3.0 - 1 w/PowerShare
1 HDMI, 1 Mini DisplayPort 1 Thunderbolt™ 3
expansion 1 multi-format SD media card reader 1 SD card reader (SD, SDHC, SDXC)
So the big plus for HP is that it's a touch screen which opens up possibilities for using it as a tablet which is a very convenient. The minus is that it is Skylake instead of Kabylake and slower memory, last gen integrated graphics, and no thunderbolt 3. A minus for the Dell is, like the new Macbook Pros, that you'll need a dongle to connect to external displays. (But at least you get an SD card reader and regular USB ports which Apple in its infinite wisdom has deemed superfluous to basic requirements now!)
It's not Skylake based anymore, please take updated x360 for this comparison http://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Spectre-x360-13-w023dx-Conve... (7th Gen CPU, became a little lighter/smaller than prev generation, etc) It's convertible which is a good bonus.
> System76 is the only other well known system builder that I know of that does this.
System76 laptop doesn't have Thunderbolt 3 ports.
> Interestingly from a developer perspective, the Dell XPS Developer edition comes with Ubuntu 16.04 SP1 out of the box so no Apple or Microsoft or Google tax. Isn't that neat?
It's not a big deal to install Linux in your own, the distributive you need, not the Ubuntu (Ubuntu is not the best choice for developers in my opinion).
So I really believe x360 is a better choice in all terms than XPS, I hope 15 inch model will also get update soon.
The Linux pre-install is a big deal. Dell supports Linux on some configurations meaning the hardware works (or should work) out of the box. There have been issues which Dell resolves with bios updates. Linux is awesome but it can still be a bit of a crap shoot if you don't do your homework. Dell saves you that legwork.
You make your case well sir. :) I agree that the newly updated HP x360 you point to is on a par with the Dell XPS in every way plus it has a convertible touchscreen. If you want touchscreen on the Dell XPS you have to go to the QHD+ (3200 x 1800) model. And that's hundreds of extra $ or €.
If Linux works well with the latest HP x360 then I agree it seems like a better value proposition than the Dell XPS. I'd be very tempted!
In the context of the article what is good though is that the Lenovo Yoga, HP Spectre, MS Surface Pro/Book†, and Dell XPS all offer excellent chassis build quality and I think they are genuine Macbook Pro competitors. We are spoilt for choice a bit now.
† Not yet Thunderbolt 3 which will be a deal-breaker for most I suspect.
Lenovo doesn't have Thunderbolt 3, but XPS and x360 do have it (x360 have 2 TB3 ports), so Lenovo is not an option. Not sure MS Surface does have TB3 ports.
Thank you for detailed comparison. Really appreciate effort you put into this. It looks that both systems are, as you said, very much alike, with touch in HP as a neat feature, and Ubuntu by default in Dell as an advantage.
Nice to here that you got linux running on the new HP Spectre X360 Late 2016.
Do you really speak from this model: HP Spectre x360 13-w090nz (13.30", Full HD, Intel Core i7-7500U, 16GB, SSD) ? And did you have any issues installing linux? Everythings works out of the box? Touchscreen, Sound, etc.? Which distro do you use?
Sorry for the late reply... I actually have the 13-w023dx, which I think is just the Best Buy-specific model number. All the specs match exactly.
I installed Arch Linux with KDE, and most things worked with minimal configuration, including wifi, touchpad, touchscreen, power management. Sound works, but I think only the bottom speakers are on, not the top ones. Also I'm not sure if Bluetooth works, as I haven't had a need to try it. And then finally the 2-in-1 mode doesn't really work, because screen rotation and disabling the keyboard/touchpad aren't automated.
I would expect other distros to work as well or better, especially if they have a more automated installation process than Arch.
Any recommendations for <1200€, high dpi, matte, i7, 16gb ram, 15"?
I don't mind to carry a bit.
Best I could find so far: https://www.cyberport.de/?DEEP=1C10-2WN&APID=6 (german, but I guess you can see the specs, goes under the brand name "Clevo" elsewhere. would need to upgrade ram, but there is plenty of space I think)
One of the things I have a hard time giving up when looking at alternative laptops is the TrackPoint on my ThinkPad. I've grown to love it and I'm not a fan of most trackpads (although I think Apple got it right with the MacBook). That leaves the ThinkPad P50 as perhaps the only serious contender for me.
Why would you want or need either of these for a Windows/Linux machine? USB-C is near non-existant and the Carbon uses the Lenovo flat connector for charging. Instead you get 3 USB3.0 ports.
> Too many video out ports
Who cares? They aren't taking up space. You get HDMI for easy connecting to a TV without any adapters and a mini-displayport for everything else. Seems like a win-win to me. HDMI is the most common and near universal video connector now. The lack of HDMI on Apple laptops is inexcusable.
> Unnecessary SD slot
Uh, another who cares. Hell, put a second OS on there for kicks, load up photos from your mom's old camera, run a hypervisor on it and use local storage for your VM's, etc.
> 6th generation CPU.
The i7 model has a i7-6500U from Q3 2015. Its fairly newish and a great performer considering its energy use. The current X1 is in its 4th generation and from early this year, so of course it has a late 2015 processor. More than likely you'll see a 5th generation early next year if getting the newest processor is important to you. Not that intel's yearly offerings differ too greatly from last year's model.
Man Razer went long way, that laptop looks awesome. Definitely something to distinguish you from others.
I am would have to research a lot if people got Ubuntu to work there well. Last time I tried 2 yrs ago on my then old Macbook pro, took 2 days to configure everything. Then battery life simply was not that good and I went back to osx.
The author mentions in another post why he is done with Apple after his 2013 13" MBP and states he has no use for the Touch Bar. Thats fine, just get the Pro without the bar and with physical function keys.
The build quality of other laptops just isn't on par with Apples. Greg Koenig and many others have analyzed why Apple has a tremendous edge over other vendors when it comes to building computers and gadgets from aluminum[1].
Also if your are used to macOS, its perfect integration of hardware and software, its polish and many of the very nicely crafted ("made with ︎love") 3rd party applications, it might be very hard to switch to a decent Linux distro, let alone Windows.
It may be wise to first try the switch on your current Mac, inside a Virtual Machine …
[1] http://atomicdelights.com/blog/why-your-next-iphone-wont-be-... (Featured on HN ~ 2 weeks ago)