I'll save you all a click - author is a developer and recommends chromebook or a Mac based on personal experience (trackpad, keyboard cited as being amazing).
Why is this even here? There are lots of good notebooks out there. I'd recommend ultrabooks. I don't even have one, only a Inspiron 13 5000 2-in-1. The touchpad is one of its best component. Large, smooth and the driver supports lots of gestures.
I use the tablet mode often also. Sometimes it's better to scroll by touching the screen. Weakest part is the audio part, the manufacturer's driver is glitchy and I can't find a good replacement.
I routinely switch between a Dell, an Acer and a Macbook Pro and, quite frankly, they all work for me. What the Acer lacks in display and keyboard it makes up for in weight (it's one of those cheap "Windows Cloudbooks", now with Fedora 26 and extra RAM, very couch-friendly) and battery life. What the Dell (now with Ubuntu 17.04, most of the time attached to a big screen, a Unicomp PC122 keyboard and a reasonable mouse) lacks in display quality, charm and weight, it offers in versatility (sometimes the optical drive is handy after all) and the Macbook Pro is very good, but HFS+ is the crappiest filesystem I've used in over a decade (even NTFS is better). Build quality is unrivalled, however and the newer models maintain that tradition (even if the keyboard takes some time getting used to).
The question is if we need to care about what is used inside. Actually I feel that when there is at least 4 GB RAM (better more) then I can do anything. I didn't cared about computing power for many years and I'm software developer who runs a lot of things during development. That's why I care about how it's pleasant to use instead of technical details. :-)
4 gigs is a bit constrained for me - browsers these days take up a lot of memory. Processing power is also a nice to have since few things are more distracting than sluggish operations. If my tests run for 10 minutes the odds of my mind wandering elsewhere increase.
True. Personally I run only unit tests or tests which do something with my code and the hard work of running all kind of tests I keep for server. Well, all the hard work I do at some server, at least home. Maybe that's why I stopped thinking about that and want notebook which just work out of the box.
I was surprised that as a developer the poster complained about the trackpad so much. I wish I could get a system where I didn't need a pointing device at all. It just gets in the way of typing. I also personally hate gestures on trackpads. When I use them I only expect the level of interaction that I could get 10 years ago (move, click, right click, maybe scroll) and am frequently surprised by backward scroll axis, browsers going to the previous site etc. -- due to a brush with the track pad. The sooner trackpads are removed from these devices the better. That won't work for most people, but as a developer, I could do without it.
A big part of it might be the latency. I'm on an Asus ultrabook (UX430) with a pretty wide, smooth clickable touchpad, but I still don't use it much because it has a noticeable latency that makes it very frustrating to use compared to that of a Macbook. I've noticed the same problem on many laptops (Lenovo ideapad for instance, while my old Thinkpad x220's trackpad was responsive and so more usable despite being absolutely tiny).
Maybe. I use gestures on touchpad all the time. When I tried to use Chromebook with Xubuntu, it didn't worked (even if Chromebook is actually Linux powered), at least two years ago. It's very addictive.
Maybe someone needs to tell the author that different people have different requirements.
Most of his argument is about the touchpad. I don't find the touchpad particularly relevant: Weight, battery mileage, keyboard feeling and screen quality are vastly more important for me (roughly in that order).
Made the jump to Mac about a decade and haven't used anything else (unless experimenting) since then. The OS has the software I need and is built on Unix so the command line is very similar to that of Ubuntu which I use on servers.
No technical comparison provided.