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I've certainly been keeping my eyes open for a MacBook Pro alternative. On my last time looking, I thought I'd try to find something with:

- retina-like resolution 15" screen - 32GB RAM - slim and light without a flimsy plastic case - good battery life - good trackpad - keyboard home row centred

I could not find anything. I couldn't even find something with the first three items.

I'm starting to think it might make sense to go with a cheaper MacBook and a little pocket server like this: https://liliputing.com/2020/08/first-look-gmk-nucbox-2-4-inc...




For some reason (bad software support? tradition?) the PC laptop market seems to simply not care that much about extremely high resolution displays. There are some, but none in systems with the overall build quality of a MBP.


There are many laptops that has 4K display that's more resolution compared to MacBook Pro, if you choose correct product line.

Cheap laptops don't care HiDPI displays because it's cheap. Gaming laptops less care HiDPI displays because it's too much resolution on current GPU.

Most premium models provide both FHD and 4K model, FHD is for battery life and price.


That's what I found. Another pet peeve was extremely wide screens, although we don't see that as much these days. Not great for editing text or code.


Where does the XPS15 fall short?


I could get the retina screen with 16GB RAM, or 32GB RAM with a lower res screen. It was a few months back, so hopefully that has changed. I'm no longer looking though.

Other than that, the XPS15 was a front runner.




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