Not disagreeing with the premise, but just want to plug a machine I am very happy with.
I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not modifiable in any way, and Apple's customer service is not what it used to be. So I decided to get a non-Mac for the first time in my life.
I ended up with an Asus Zenbook UX305LA. It's a 13" 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Core i5 processor. Cost me $749 and I dual-boot WIndows 10 and Ubuntu (spending 95% of my time in Ubuntu). It costs about 50% what a similar specced Macbook would cost and is similar size/weight to the Macbook air. Build quality is fantastic (open with one hand, good keyboard, glass trackpad, etc). The battery life is not quite as good as a 13" MBA but better than a Macbook Pro. Overall I am extremely happy with it.
Considering that my last MBP cost me $2200 up front plus ~$300 in repairs over time and lasted me ~4.5 years. That's about $500 a year. This machine cost $750. If it lasts over a year and a half, the experiment is a success. So far it's been nothing but great.
I have both, and I find the things that Macs have that everything else is missing just aren't articulated on a spec sheet.
The display on the Macbook Pro Retina is just flawless. The colors, the anti-glare, and the picture quality from all angles, it's just really well done. The brushed aluminum chassis makes it very cool and lightweight, great to travel with and keep on your lap. Excellent battery life. It's just a great machine to live with overall.
Most of the PC options are steel and plastic, so they're hot and heavy. They'll burn your legs, they have comparably poor battery life. The screen looks terrible if your viewing angle isn't perpendicular. The hardware I've had has tended to die faster, too.
I do spend most of my time in Linux on this old Dell, though. The OS is more important to me and I prefer Linux. But Macbooks are great, and I wish I could find something as good to install Linux on.
> Macbooks are great, and I wish I could find something as good to install Linux on.
You can install Linux on a Macbook if that's what you want. Despite the marketing a Macbook these days is just an expensive, well-designed PC with particular software.
> Most of the PC options are steel and plastic, so they're hot and heavy. They'll burn your legs, they have comparably poor battery life. The screen looks terrible if your viewing angle isn't perpendicular. The hardware I've had has tended to die faster, too.
Not my experience for machines from the last couple of years, particularly if you look at similar price points.
You'll need an older Mac Pro then. There is quite a bit of proprietary hardware in the new ones that I'm pretty sure have no open source drivers (ie: SMC controller, force touch pad, etc).
Not that the community couldn't find a way to reverse-engineer and build an open source version... but a straight up Ubuntu install on a current-generation Mac Pro is probably the fastest way to kill a battery, processor, flash drive and miss out on taking advantage of the ambient sensors.
To use an unfitting analogy -- you might as well buy a sports car to retrofit it into a classic gremlin.
On the latest Macbook Pro everything works under Linux except for the webcam and maybe the brightness sensor (it's hard to tell because it doesn't seem to do anything under OSX either).
Matter of opinion. I've seen better OpenGL performance on Linux on the same hardware, for example, and better filesystem performance too. (I'd also be much less productive without the customizability of Linux window management, but that's getting into more subjective territory).
Aside, ticks me off to no end that Ubuntu removed the reverse-scrolling option (at least with a desktop) ... On windows, I use an autohotkey script to reverse the scrolling, and for media shortcuts (non-media kb). Ubuntu is the odd one out there for me now.
If you mean "natural scrolling", you can do it at a lower level in linux by remapping the "buttons" with xmodmap. Gnome ignores the system setting for this (or used to, at least; I don't use any Gnome stuff now, so maybe they've fixed it), but pretty much everything else in X will obey those settings.
Yeah, but it was a checkbox option in settings, and not something people trip over... they didn't need to remove it, at least they shouldn't, without another way to do it relatively easily.
I've got a MBP from around 2012 and a big problem is that when running any OS besides OS X, it runs very hot with very short battery life because it can only use discrete graphics (NVidia) full time. The integrated graphics is disabled in Apple's efi (maybe by Bootcamp?), and I don't know that anyone has ever found a workaround. There's an extremely longstanding Apple support issue still open about it.
So if planning to run anything other than OS X via Bootcamp on a MBP, do beware this issue.
I'm not sure, it looks like it just disables the discrete GPU? If so, I've tried that - the problem is there's no other graphics to fall back on, Apple's proprietary EFI doesn't let non-OS X systems see that the integrated graphics are present at all (currently running only Windows 10 on it since I need Visual Studio). Maybe the patched Grub might be the start of a solution (could run Windows with a VM in Linux) but I'm not sure I'm that brave - last time I tried messing around with Apple's EFI for multi-booting it didn't end well :)
It really is about the details - sometimes you don't notice them until you really need them. Examples:
- MBPs have the best wifi of any notebooks - to my knowledge, they still are the only ones to have 3 MIMO streams. Right now, my TX rate is 585 MBit/s.
- Thunderbolt and I/O: we recently started to stream our tech meetups to Youtube. The two thunderbolt ports are processing two 1080p streams from BlackMagic Mini boxes - other laptops simply don't have the necessary ports or enough PCIe lanes to do this reliably.
- We just got Dell 4k/60Hz monitors. Most of our MBPs can drive them just fine via DisplayPort, others can only do it at 30Hz, if at all.
I have an i3-5010U hooked up to a 4k display (spare pc), and it tends to stutter a bit in actual use... is the 5200U much better? been thinking of moving to an i7-6600U brix, but concerned that I'll still have trouble with driving the display.
You seem to have only looked at the older PCs. Have you looked at the Dell XPS 13 or Microsoft Surface Book? They may dispel your complaints. You can even buy the XPS with Ubuntu.
I second this. I've been a long-time fan of Lenovo (the X1 carbons are particularly good), but recently got a Dell XPS 13. Aside from the camera (which looks up your nose), they are really great machines.
I really want to buy a surface book. But it seems like everyone on /r/surface is having the same recurring issues: battery drain/overheating during sleep, tablet failing to undock, computer mistakenly thinking tablet is undocked, graphics driver crashes, slow SSD writes, etc.
It's also ridiculously expensive. The cheapest option with 16GB of memory costs $200 more than a 15" Retina MBP.
I'd like to buy Microsoft Surface Book or Microsoft Surface Pro 4 but after a glance at https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/ it seems like people who dual boot may be having trouble with Ubuntu failing to boot after system updates (either Windows or Linux updates, anything which re-runs GRUB or whatever the Windows equivalent of that is; there are work-arounds eg https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/43an26/repair... but i'm scared of them because i don't understand them well enough to know if future system updates will break it again), and with getting either of the touchscreen or the cameras to work at all. I may be wrong, though, I didn't read too closely.
Ah my bad; I read somewhere it was much much less. Maybe that's outdated information. But when people say 9 hours, basically I get 3-4 out of them... Usually.
My XPS 13 with Arch Linux lasts 10+ hours of continuous use on a single charge. Mine is the non-HD non-touch model though. I suspect the model with the beefier resolution and touch screen wouldn't do as well.
Macbook Pro is the first laptop that I've ever owned that was so hot on the bottom that you can't rest it on your lap. If anyone is doubting this, please try to do something that involves all cores for 10 minutes. Any kind of non-trivial parallel task would do that.
So, Apple used to ship the matte screen as standard, and upsold the glossy one as "movies! colours!". Then they shipped the glossy screen as standard, and upsold the matte one as "no glare!"...
We're the odd folks out in wanting the matte screens.
Glossy looks way better in stores (especially since Apple controls the lighting to make glare incredibly unlikely) and in pretty much any case where you do not have direct light. It's what the public wants.
Have to agree. It's always the small details that aren't obvious at first blush.
Here's another one that always gets me about PC laptops: Air vents on the bottoms so I can't safely rest it on anything soft that would block them. On my MBP I only have to worry about the very back.
My favorite thing about the air vents is that when the Macbook is in use (opened), the backs of the keyboard and display close in against the vents, creating a natural barrier to prevent most things (like bed sheets) from blocking the vents.
It seems really minor, but it's seriously prevented my Macbook from overheating probably dozens of times by now. I can't say the same for my PC, which has the flat ventilation panel on the side and has been killed by bedsheets many times.
A minor detail, but a really clever one. I like it.
The Thinkpad is the X201, and the HP was a DV2, an old model. They might have some small bottom vents, but they didn't have any problems cooling while sitting on my bed. Neither are probably comparable to an MBP 13, though.
I use my W530 on my couch frequently, with no issues. The main cooling happens in the back corner, where there are vents on both the side and the back. I'm not sure what the bottom vents are for, but blocking them doesn't cause issues even when I'm gaming.
And it is pretty amazing that Apple packs in quad core CPU to the very slim package. Of course the drawback is that you don't get onsite repairs with this construction, but still. Compare this to for example Lenovo quad core models which are quite rare and thick.
On the Wintel side the more powerful machines seem to be more or less targeted to very specific use cases, like CAD and these computers are more like portable workstations than laptops.
My MBP is the hottest machine I've ever owned. Run any game on it and not only is it too hot to put on my lap it's too hot to touch the keyboard. It actually stings my fingers
Or you know... sitting outside in 30C summer in shorts. That 80C chasis temperature then somehow isn't as fun anymore. Current rMBP is unusable outside in summer due to hot chasis... my previous Dell XPS didn't have this issue.
>Or you know... sitting outside in 30C summer in shorts.
Well, anyone that wears shorts and sandals and is over 20, deserves it.
>Current rMBP is unusable outside in summer due to hot chasis...
Maybe sit on a table? I use mine in a country that frequently gets 38-40 oC, and in a country that is constantly Lousiana-summer level heat and humidity (Singapore) and never had much of a problem.
Or one could use any kind of towel or pad below their laptop.
Kind of reminds me of the Louis CK routine about people complaining about trivial things (e.g. the food) while flying, sitting on a chair in the sky, across thousands of miles, in a few hours (something that just 3-4 generations ago took days or even months, discomfort and a few deaths along the way).
We now have undreamt-of power in our PCs or even mobile phones (power which used to take a device as big as a house and with its own cooling infrastructure), and we complain for them being uncomfortamble to have on our bare laps...
Heat, definitely. Also, that was the time you started seeing 17"+ notebooks on the high end. One of my wife's friends bought a 20" "laptop" for her electrical engineering work. It looked comical on her lap, but was awesome for bringing work home on.
Sorry, I felt the need to respond to this. Why are shorts juvenile? They are a perfectly rational and sane climatic adaptation of clothing, allowing decent airflow over a human body.
To decry shorts as juvenile is sympotmatic of simple minded attitudes that lead to people in warm climates spending the hottest part of the day wearing full suits in fully glazed boxes which need to be energy intensively air conditioned so that they don't die.
Some of them even go to work like this, especially if they don't work directly with customers and their companies don't have business attire requirements.
The XPS13 may fit what you're looking for, if you want a PC. Amazing screen (touchscreen even). Solid, great build. Not hot and heavy. They even have a special one built for linux.
That depends on your taste. I bought my first retina macbook pro last year and I really don't like it compared to my Air. Actaully it's rotting in a cupboard now because of the ghastly battery life. I agree with the premise; computers are locked down and cheap build quality in general. But for me only battery life matters, so I bought a stack (from a broker; it was very cheap) of Lenovo X220s with a 9 cell batteries and i'm happy as a clam. It costs a fraction of the Macbook Pro (10% actually) and it actualy just chugs along with Ubuntu installed for 12 hours after which I just swap batteries for another 12 hours. I was never that bothered with the whole lock-in thing before but now that i'm back working in Linux (2009 was my first Mac, before that I went from DOS to Unix in the early 90s and after that straight to Linux until 2009) I really don't want to touch anything else. But YMMV.
If the battery life is the only thing that matters then a USB-C charged laptop (Macbook one, pixel, some new stuff) + some heavy duty battery pack is probably a good option as well.
Yes, agreed. I had that for a while, but it was one of those cheap things from Asus. I did not know the Macbook can do that via USB... Maybe i'll sell my Pro and get me one of those... Thanks.
I am still using a seemingly ancient macbook pro 15" 2009 model, simply because it has a matte screen, yet still runs the latest OSX. The super glossy screens make my eyes hurt after a while. I have been hoping that some day the glossiness gets down to a level that I can tolerate enough to get a newer macbook. However, if my laptop ends up giving up the ghost along the way though... I may look at using something like the matte screen zenbook discussed by the parent, and running FreeBSD or OpenBSD on it.
I use a screen protector on my MBP: it removes the glare and covers up the horrible ugly streak marks (production fault which Apple only admitted after being sued).
Still, I've just bought an XPS15; it has a better screen than the MBP and incredible specs. The only real downsides are 16:9 and not using the new Samsung 950 Pro PCIE-SSD (which is 25% faster). Upgradability, a massive amount of RAM, fantastic screen and a tiny shell more than make up for that :)
From my experience the matte films are pretty poor, they really do reduce the visual quality of the display to far worse than the actual Matte displays
I think a lot of people use a laptop throughout the day like in our office - plugged into a large monitor, mouse, keyboard and put up on a desktop stand.
You then have the flexibility to just get up and walk into a meeting with it or walk out at the end of the day with everything just as you left it and carry on working on the train should you need.
Apple's official monitors double as docking stations, with USB/Firewire/Ethernet being carried over thunderbolt.
The most recent ones also half a decade old and still quite expensive, so I can't imagine buying one, but Apple would tell you that they do have a first-party docking station, complete with monitor built-in!
You could simply add a Thunderbolt or USB 3 dock....
Using an external keyboard and mouse solves the ergonomic problems of using a laptop for long periods. (Sad to say, I see very few people actually doing this.)
Of course, you don't get the benefits of running a faster, hotter processor, expandability etc, though Apple no longer offers a reasonably priced tower system anyway....
Oh my yes! For the reasons mentioned in the article (laptop manufacturer suckage), I went back to a PC at home last year. It's been great. Great hardware compatibility, even with OpenBSD. I spent practically nothing for a whole lot of horsepower too.
But moreover, a PC forces me to do my work in a place I have dedicated to work. People are now recognizing the importance of sanitary sleep habits. Well, my PC helps me maintain sanitary work habits. Well, it did when I was working from home a bunch.
I started a new job a couple months back, which has me working from their offices on a shiny new Mac Book Pro. I hate it. I've grown to love the efficiency and instantaneousness of everything on my utterly predictable libre *nix desktop. Plus, even if I don't plan to do work outside working hours, there's a strong corporate culture of taking your laptop home--I don't know, to maintain optics of always being working or something. Either way, my employer could have saved a few dollars and made me much happier by locking a workstation to my desk.
Just started a new job, since we're moving to a new building with an "open" concept and dual 24" monitors at each station, I didn't get a monitor since I'm in an older building.
In less than two weeks I already have neck and back problems from hunching over my laptop all day. Thank god I only have two more days of this insanity.
For coding, I use a smaller font size now than I used before I had a retina display. It allows me to use a physically smaller laptop, which is a huge advantage when working on the train / on the bus etc.
For me Retina meant that I stopped printing papers, now I can read PDFs comfortably straight from the screen. Not sure it's better form my eyes, but it saves time a lot.
+1 to this machine. I bought one for my wife last June and so far it's been great.
As a side note: Asus's naming sure could use some help. If I search the Microsoft Store's website right now, there's a Zenbook UX305FA, 2 UX305CA's, UX303UB, and two Zenbook Pro UX501JW's. I'm sure if I searched Amazon I could find even more unique names. I consider myself a pretty savvy PC shopper and even I find that incredibly confusing.
The worst part of their naming conventions is that the larger numbers don't always mean better / faster. And this would be ok if it was consistent but its not.
Asus also often has many sub-models specified by a suffix to the main model number. And what they show on their many inconsistent marketing websites often won't match what's actually available in your country. Not to mention that it appears on the website months before the product (well, a slightly different, less attractive product with a similar name) becomes available. Asus are bad for this.
I'm really happy with my Toshiba Tecra Z series. The article totally missed Toshiba, which is still a decent manufacturer.
I get 5-6 hours of battery life with real usage, close to 10 hours in "green" mode, I've got a 15.6" screen, a keypad, 16Gb of RAM, an i7 processor, and a 1Tb SSD. And it's just over 4 pounds and pretty thin. I have NVIDIA graphics. The Tecra Z has an available 3K touch display, and its HDMI port can power a 4K monitor at 60Hz (even while its internal monitor is still going, and its USB3 port is powering a third monitor; that's my office development setup).
I've had it over a year and a half already, and it's still going strong.
I don't agree at all with the new Thinkpad keyboards being garbage. The old ones were nice (maybe even nicer than the new ones) but the new ones are still the best laptop keyboards in the market at the moment.
The keyboard has no flex or mushiness. The keys have some resistance and a nice feel when depressing them. Finally the keys are slightly curved inwards so that the fingesrs easily find the centers of the keys.
Still, I've heard of a lot of people that don't like the new keyboards. Maybe there are different versions for different models? I've only used W530 and T440s.
No dedicated function keys are the worst decision lenovo made. Kind of a pain in the ass when one is trying to avoid using the mouse (which most developers working for long periods tend to do).
For me the keys default to F1-F12 and multimedia functions require the Fn key. Works pretty well, I don't use the multimedia keys except for adjusting volume (this is a Desktop machine with the USB version of the keyboard, on a laptop the brightness keys would be relevant as well). Considering how often I hit F<something> (a lot!) and how often I adjust the volume (rarely) this works very well for me.
Instead, I miss the double-height escape and delete key, and PgUp/PgDown near the top of the keyboard. They're next to the arrow keys now, which isn't as nice as the back/forward buttons that used to be there.
At least on mine, you can use Fn-Esc to engage "FnLk" and use the F keys as default. Also, somewhat related you can swap Ctrl and Fn in the BIOS if you prefer your Ctrl key to be in the bottom left, like me.
Completely agree. I use the ThinkPad external keyboard as my main keyboard at work, mostly for the TrackPoint but also because it's just a really nice keyboard.
What bothers me about it is that it's a 6-row layout. I liked the 7 rows on the old keyboards, with double-height escape and delete keys.
At work, I have a L540. I don't like the look of the new-ish ThinkPad keyboards, but otherwise, the only complaint I have is that a few keys will sometimes (rarely) fire twice when I push them.
Otherwise it is a nice keyboard. Tactile feedback is not comparable to a Model M, of course, but it is okay. Acoustically it works nicely.
I am not sure how much of a difference it makes, but I was surprised when I got my machine to find out it is a 17" model, so the keyboard is rather close in size to an external keyboard, which is very nice. (I don't usually carry this beast with me, so I don't mind the size. YMMV!)
The new keyboards are pretty good (perhaps even the best) relative to other modern laptop keyboards, but probably wouldn't even have earned a mention eight years ago before the great chiclet revolution...
I still can't quite comprehend how the market could have managed to conspire to so thoroughly eradicate the technologically superior option that not even obscure non-US vendors serving only local markets offer it anywhere anymore.
wow, honestly, you are one of the first people i hear talking good things about the concave-chiclet-keys. Good to know it. for me the keys are already too spaced out and the travel is so low and i would have welcomed flat or convex keys. ideally less space (so larger keys) and convex to prevent mistype.
That was my impression too. I'm not an expert on Windows hardware/devices but from what I hear the Dell XPS 13 is an excellent machine if you don't want a MacBook. Not even mentioning Dell tells me this guy misses a few things.
I have the XPS 13 Developer Edition, and it's a fine laptop in many ways... But it's marketed as a Linux laptop, yet requires a proprietary WiFi driver. After I upgraded my kernel a month ago, the WiFi started kernel panicking randomly and often, so I don't bother even using the computer anymore... I just use a full screen terminal on my old MacBook and ssh to a VPS. One day I'll reinstall the driver or something, but, god damn, why must everything suck?
Presumably this is the older non-skylake model. I heard the new one (9350) will ship with an Intel wireless card which already has support in the kernel. But I don't think it's out yet.
I've got the new non-developer version and I did have to jump through some hoops to get the wireless working. And suspend still doesn't work. But other than that it is the best laptop I've used.
I have the same laptop. I wanted to run Debian/sid on it so I knew going in that I was going to need to do something about the wireless card. I researched[1] a bit and bought an Intel Wireless 7260 for ~$25, swapped it in, and it made all the difference.
Thanks. The proprietary Broadcom driver worked well enough until it didn't, and now I know firsthand why not to use them, so that's a useful experience at least.
I too was quite frustrated with the wifi card, apparently they've sourced different cards. The Broadcom (I think?) was pure crap in linux, fine in windows. I upgraded to the non bluetooth intel card, everything is fantastic now.
I figured out which part people were having luck with, archlinux forums/wiki, and ordered it on amazon. intel 7265ngw + bluetooth. Looks like I went for BT and turned it off in bios. Currently 22$ + 2$ shipping. Maybe 8 torx 5 T-5 needed to be removed, swapped in a few mins.
Oh yeah, the touchpad is frankly awful compared to my MacBook's. I've almost considered disabling it, because I keep brushing against it with my palm causing wild cursor behavior and accidental button presses. It's difficult for me to control even when I do it intentionally.
But I don't use the mouse much anyway (hence ratpoison).
The HiDPI screen is pretty good, I talked about it in a sibling comment. Chromium understands the DPI setting and so does Xterm, and honestly I don't use any other programs. I imagine if I used different desktop applications, I'd probably run into some issues like maybe icons being too small or something.
> Not even mentioning Dell tells me this guy misses a few things.
I fully expected to see the (2015) XPS 13 mentioned too and perhaps Microsoft's Surface Book (which could be used as a laptop 100% of the time if required).
The way he talked about "Microsoft Surface" made it sound like Microsoft only made the Pro model.
Fair points. I'm personally not a Dell fan, though I used one for a year that was purchased by my employer, and yes, it didn't completely suck. Just wasn't my first choice.
It did fail as a laptop, though. Something about how it tended to bend on a laptop would cause the physical trackpad "button" to get stuck when it was sitting on a lap in some positions until you picked up the laptop by the sides. :| It was also a lot heavier than my Toshiba.
But as a portable computer, it actually did a fine job.
Did you somehow just read the paragraph where he was disappointed with Lenovo, and miss the entire rest of the blog post where he was also disappointed with a bunch of other manufacturers?
I used to buy only Toshiba, Fujitsu & Panasonic. Panasonic still has great laptops in Japan and Fujitsu (used to) have the best warranty I could get where I live; no questions asked new laptop whatever happened for 5 years. But that time laptops were all expensive if you wanted something good; now these are overpriced last I checked.
... and god help you if you ever need the Asus customer support for repairing that thing. A truely horrible experience.
I can provide details of my "experience" with them, but the Internet is already full of horror stories that cover everything that is to say about that topic.
And no, buying a new laptop after a year and a half simply isn't acceptable to me, even if it makes sense in your economic situation.
Can confirm - ASUS declined my warranty on a keyboard problem people complained about (basically sending thrash instead of pressed keystrokes); I had to order a new one from Asusparts and replace it myself; all within 3 months of purchase of their most expensive Zenbook. They even attempted to sell me a "repair" of motherboard that would cost almost the same as a brand new Zenbook (yet the mobo works fine since I replaced keyboard). Horrible, horrible experience.
I had great experience with Asus service in EU. I called them up, they asked for a serial number and what was the problem, they sent UPS to pick it up (from Cyprus), a week later I had it back fixed. Considering how bad support for hardware is in this country and the fact that the service center is overseas I'd say they were one of my best after sales experiences.
I don't know how things are over in the US, but here in Czech republic, my experience with them was nothing but good. When my SSD broke down after about a month of using the thing, they paid for the shipping to and from the repair shop and replaced the drive in... a week I think. I've been using it for about a year now and I've had no other problems.
I had a poor experience with them in the UK. The hinge snapped on my ultrabook (I don't remember the exact model as the codes are obscure.) E-mailed support, provided plenty of pictures of the issue. Keep in mind I only owned the thing for 6 months so still in warranty.
Best they would offer is an out of warranty repair.
I know someone with the same model, exact same problem happened to him.
If you're ever in that situation again, take it to the seller, mention the sales of goods act if you have to. Warranties aren't how things are supposed to work in the UK, it's the seller that carries the responsibility and so they're generally a lot better at it.
I join the others in praising ASUS support in Europe. Here in Belgium I had a laptop still under warranty picked up the day after calling support service for a failed motherboard and two weeks later it was back, no questions asked. Picked up by EDP (or something) and probably serviced in The Netherlands.
I bought the first Zenbook UX31 when it came out and last year bought a retina MBP.
The zenbook was at the time half the price for the comparable mac air and I enjoyed it very much the first year, but since then I had it repaired 3 times costing me more than the purchase price (HDD, ram, power plug) and the power plug still doesnt work well so I can't use it anymore. It served me well, but not sure I would recommend it again.
I'm very happy with the MPB so far, never thought I'd buy a mac but there was just no alternative for build quality, as the article suggested. Still haven't put Linux on it, which I thought I'd do immediately, so the OS is not that bad. If the MPB were a little lighter, it would be the perfect machine for me.
I think it's not only about build quality. If you use Linux, sadly it's also about compatibility.
I bought a MBA 11' (2012) because it's an all-Intel machine, which was used by Linus for some time and hardware support is almost perfect. It's only lacking ACPI events for battery discharge, something very few machines have.
While Macs are good, I think they are optimised for the looks and not for robustness. Glossy screens are a bit uncomfortable, and aluminium tends to be too rigid, transmitting shocks to the screen as a consequence.
I had a Thinkpad T440s running Ubuntu and then Arch, and now I have a 13" rMBP. I love the glossy screen, vivid colors, and most importantly, battery life. OS X also has the advantage of everything just working perfectly out of the box so I'm happy.
I don't think I'll go back to Linux any time soon, though I do miss tiling WMs.
I have good experience with Asus as well. Until recently I was still using my early 2011 Asus U36JC. It was probably one of the first ultrabook-like laptops, even though it wasn't branded as one, since it had a second discrete GPU. Reasonably thin at 19 mm and 1.4 kg, with stellar battery life (10h+ under Debian) and great performance.
Even though it had 1st generation Core i5, it was still snappier then most of my classmate's laptops with latest i5s.
It even had a USB 3.0 port, which was something for a ~700€ 13" laptop at that time.
Over the time I upgraded to 8GB RAM and swapped the disk for SSD.
Only downside was a pretty crappy glossy screen, but I mostly had it hooked up to an external monitor so I didn't mind so much.
I finally decided to go for a new laptop last December because the battery life was degrading after the years. I was consideing just buying a replacement battery, but I wasn't able to find one under $200 including shipping and I got a really good deal on a top of the line refurbished X220 together with a docking station for 380€.
My sister, a teacher, is now using the Asus laptop and not considering the battery life it still runs smoothly.
If you still want to bring your old MBP back to life, I just replaced the battery on my sister's 2011 MBP with an aftermarket one from Amazon. There were a lot of pro/con reviews and it's only a couple weeks in but so far it's great. I went the one branded by Anker and it came with the correct screwdriver which was a nice touch. Installation was very simple. She also needed a new HDD so I put in an SSD and the machine is surprisingly zippy with the latest OS X.
I have the UX305LA. I had a clicky trackpad[1], so I opened it up and fixed it. It was too good in other aspects, so I couldn't bother sending it back. Battery is replaceable.
Still though, with Asus you never know whether your laptop will be perfect out of the box or not. That's what sucks about PCs in general - if you want a hassle-free laptop, you either have to pay extra or invest a lot of time into research. I had to send 2 laptops back before I got the Zenbook, but even that had the clicky trackpad problem.
This is why I'm thinking that when I have to buy a new laptop, I'll first be looking at the Apple lines. I've never had a Mac (since they're pricy), but I'm done with doing hours and hours of research. I just need a laptop that works.
One thing Apple does very well is simply not shipping crap products. It's forgivable from Asus since they started out as a budget brand, but the premium PC brands like Sony have really dropped the ball.
Yeah...I primarily use a desktop for anything demanding but at one point, I needed a laptop for occasional multimedia dj/vj stuff (nothing paid or professional, more personal or artistic endeavors) and I spent some time doing price comparisons.
There were a few things I specifically wanted: fast processor (preferably i7 due to the occasional 3d rendering stuff I was going to be doing), at least 16gb of RAM, a decent, discrete GPU, and minimum 1920x1080 resolution.
Other stuff wasn't as important. I could do without the latest "retina" screen since I was mostly just going to be looking at DJ/VJ software interfaces and hooking it up to projection. SSD wasn't absolutely necessary but I wouldn't mind one (this was a few years ago when they were considerably more expensive).
I had it down to an Asus (non-ultrabook) and a Macbook Pro. The Macbook had a nicer display, slightly more solid hardware (the Asus was only aluminum on top and on the top of the keyboard side, not the underside of the laptop), and may have offered a faster storage drive (can't remember the details now).
On the flip side, the GPU options were all lower-end than the Asus. Also, the MBP in a configuration closest to what I needed cost around $2499. The Asus was $999.
The Apple had some other features like early Thunderbolt support but those weren't relevant to my uses. As much as I liked the display on the Apple and the somewhat stronger build, I couldn't justify paying more than double the cost.
If this was going to be my sole/main computer then I would've weighted stuff like viewing angles and storage drive speed higher but as a secondary computer, I was mainly looking to get certain specs/features without spending too much dough.
So yeah, it's a "budget" brand to me. I could get the major specs and decent build for a lot less but I gave up some things that would've been a lot more important if it was my main computer. To this day, my only real beef with the Asus is that the display's viewing angles suck. It's not one of those awful 1366x768 displays that OEMs were slapping into cheap laptops for so long and it's not a glossy mess but you really need to look at it dead-on if you want a decent image. For techie art projects it's great but if I had to look at it every day for 8-12 hours I would go insane.
I own a UX305LA and have owned two previous models in the UX line. Glad to see it mentioned, I like them all very much.
The battery is proprietary but easily replaced. My main issue with my previous UX31 was with the SSD. It died within a year and was no longer readable. It was a piece of proprietary SanDisk crap. Googling around about it yields various complaints about it (http://www.pcper.com/news/Mobile/Be-careful-which-ASUS-Zenbo...).
Battery life: I run Arch Linux with LXQt and get about 6 hours on a full charge. It's not great but IIRC I was getting better on Windows so it might be a software issue.
It's hard to say since I mostly use it for heavy-drain stuff. Streaming movies on Netflix, building apps in Android Studio, etc. Always have Chrome running with a ton of tabs.
I'd say 6h of use in Ubuntu. The reviews I read say that the battery is better using it with Windows 10 (closer to 10h) but I just can't get my work done in Windows.
Overall the battery is not disappointing. Not sure if I can change the battery by myself but for $750 I don't intend to invest much in repairs. I'll just ride it until it dies.
I also have UX305 and I easily get at least 6 hours under moderate loads. Eight or nine with light web-browsing (avoiding javascript pages that spike cpu usage), ten or more with lighter use (text editor).
I installed Ubuntu 14.x and i3 window manager. I have dual boot with original Windows install and power use is comparable between Windows and Linux. It's a pleasure to use. Only power management tweak I made in Ubuntu was to install the TLP power management tool and (I think) make simple change from its defaults: http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html
EDIT: Mine is a UX305FA, the one with less powerful Core M processor. It's slightly slower than my Thinkpad x220, which has an older i7. So it's not a powerful machine, and I assume less powerful processor means better battery life than the faster x305's that have come out since I got mine.
I don't remember. I would check power usage with powertop and make sure you've got no 'bad' indicators on the 'Tunables' tab (actually I think I still have one bad). On the 'Device Stats' tab you should be able to get 'system baseline power usage' under 5 watts under light loads. I run mine with display brightness fairly low, 20% or 30%, but it's still has comparable brightness to my other main laptop's (Lenovo x220) full brightness.
I actually have a Lenovo x220 as one of my machines, and with 70-80% brightness I get about 4 hours of battery life (wifi included) on a 9 cells battery. Does it sound reasonable or am I not getting what I should?
Sounds about right, I have 6 cell in my x220 (with Win7) and I'd guess its life is around 2.5 hours with those settings. It's short enough that I don't feel comfortable using it on the go, keep x220 at home almost always plugged in to AC. The battery difference between it and the UX305 is huge.
The x250 has great battery life. The keyboard is a little better than the X240, but not as good as the X220 or even the X230. Some of the keys are not full size. The function keys are garbage by default, but there's a persistent Fn lock (might be a BIOS setting, don't recall).
Performance wise it's very nice. Screen is decent, too. My only complaint is the that the keyboard has a bunch of non-full size keys. End and Insert are on a single key. Someone should be shot for that.
I have the x220 with a used 9-cell battery (last full charge was 75%) and I'm easily able to get just under 6 hours of standard use (browsing, WiFi, watching movies, coding) and screen brightness at around 60%.
I have a similar Asus machine. Nice build quality. Lasted 3 years of fairly hard use so far. Shiny screen could be improved, that's about it. Would recommend Asus highly.
I'm in a similar boat, I have a mid-2010 MacBook Pro which I've added RAM and an SSD to. I'm dreading the day it dies because it's such a perfect laptop for me.
The new MacBook Pros are nice, I've got a work-issued one, but whatever configuration you buy is what you're stuck with until you replace it. That sucks.
If what happens to the economy, and Apple sales--I feel comming. I think you might see, a Mac that's easy to upgrade/repair be suddenly available. I just hope they don't wait too long, and their stores look like Sears.
I was a long time Mac aficionado. I loved Apple and their products. It was a heart breaking experience when I felt like it was time to move on.
I paid about $2,300 for a Performa 550 back in 1993. That machine served me well. I added memory, internal and external hard drives, a Zip drive, a 68882 FPU and a bunch of other peripherals. Between 1990 and 2000, I probably spent $6,000 in hardware, software and peripherals for those machines.
They served me well. I still have a G3 and Performa 6400/200 with G3 upgrade under my desk. Every once in a while, I fire one up just to reminisce.
Commodity parts and easy interchange is just so powerful that the community of Apple users just doesn't provide the same kind of benefits to outweigh that. At least, in my humble opinion.
I was so very tempted by this laptop but there's one requirement I will never forego -- the backlit keyboard. If they make a second iteration of that model with a backlit keyboard I'll run to the nearest store and I WILL JUST BUY IT right there and then.
Serious question - can someone explain the appeal of the backlit keyboards? I notice it's a big deal whether you're a Mac or PC fan, but I generally don't understand it. Is it for people who can't touch type without looking at the keyboard?
Admittedly, my desktop keyboard is backlit (I had to buy a gaming keyboard to get the macro keys I wanted), but the only purpose of the backlight for me is to know which of the four keyboard profiles I'm using -- and this feature isn't on many laptops at all.
As others have said, it helps quickly orientate yourself before you start typing. It's hard to explain rationally but having that makes me much more productive.
I've been practicing by my work (as a programmer) and actively learning it aside -- typing without looking, and I am damn good at it.
There are however different use cases. Sometimes I have long reading sessions. Suddenly I decide the story is too big and want to stop reading it. Or I try to find a keyword in it. Or a hundred more things.
If I am to use programming terms, it reduces your bootstrap time when you want to use the keyboard after a period of inactivity.
...That, plus the fact that most are gorgeous and simply very nice to look at. There are definitely aesthetical factors as well, won't deny the facts. So it's 50% subjective, no doubt.
For me I would say its about simply initial orientation of setting my hands down. Its hard to articulate but like the OP I will never buy one without it again - its just a nice feature that I have decided is essential.
It's nice if you use the weird keys that are far from the nubs - like F10, F11, F12, or anything where the grid doesn't give you tactile wayfinding.
For example, I use the backlit keyboard when I'm debugging at night, because hitting the wrong key carries a penalty, and F9 is not nearly as heavily used as 'A'
I also relatively recently bought a Zenbook with the mobile fanless processor also (battery life is pretty decent, but of course I can't play many games on it or anything), put Arch Linux on it -- been happily hacking ever since!
A 13" macbook air with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Core i5 processor costs $1 299.00, so more like 60%.
There also seem to be some small things where Asus is saving money: It uses a SATA SSD instead of a NVMe PCIe SSD for instance.
There are third party batteries that will puff up and explode. I wouldn't blame Apple for that. If it was an Apple battery, I'm curious which Apple store gave you grief about this. Care to tell?
I noticed the original battery of my 2006 MacBook was puffed up when I was at my parents over Christmas, so yes Apple batteries do definitely have the same issue.
I asked about a replacement and they said they don't make them anymore, but said if I really want one to get a third party battery from Amazon (the guy even searched on Amazon to show me how much it would be).
Do you like the MacBook but don't like the OS? go ahead and change it, you can have triple boot.
Tiny fonts and pop ups doesn't have anything to do with the machine you are going to buy (unless you also want the website).
HP makes the elitebook, magnesium construction a la thinkpad.
And last but not least I would like to give this entry the RAGE post award, nomination points for
What I want is a computer with:
-Decent build quality
-Decent performance and battery life
-A decent website. It doesn't have to be an icon of web
design, like apple.com. It can be simple and
utilitarian, like an Amazon page. It just has to be
honest and up to date. It should contain pictures,
text, and a Buy button.
-A clean OS without crapware or malware factory
installed
Is that too much to ask? Make one and you can have my
money!
Apple, Lenovo, Microsoft and HP make systems like the one you want, you can install your choice of OS and buy it on Amazon or eBay if you want.
Bonus points for calling apple website an icon of web design when it weights almost 100mb.
"HP makes the elitebook, magnesium construction a la thinkpad."
I've been burned so badly by an HP laptop, that I'm unlikely to ever buy another HP product in any category. It is horrifically bad. Damned near everything is wrong with it. It also had some crapware, and the system restore partition didn't work...so I had a dead laptop for two weeks waiting for physical restore media to arrive (that I paid $10+shipping for). Specs were great, among the highest end available at the time. The quality, on the other hand, has been worse than any computer I've ever owned.
I guess is isn't all that constructive as comments go, but I feel ethically obligated to steer people away from considering HP laptops.
HP's consumer and enterprise divisions are effectively separate companies (and, in fact, were acquired from separate sources.) The enterprise "workstation" laptops are some of the best-put-together, simplest-to-repair, most-natively-well-supported-without-needing-drivers, and otherwise most "obvious" in their design machines I've ever had the pleasure of refurbishing.
The EliteBook line is the one laptop where seeing inside actually made me want to own it more. (And I did buy one, and it was an excellent machine that served me well for years and would still be decently competitive today.)
Other neat thing: the EliteBooks I was refurbishing tended to be 2007 models—but they came with fully-working UEFI, hidden under a "this is only a prototype implementation" warning. It was fun playing with 64-bit Windows 8 on them; none of the other machines in the shop could make heads or tails of the W8 install discs.
They also tended to come with fingerprint sensors. I got used to unlocking my laptop with my thumb long before TouchID was a thing.
> HP's consumer and enterprise divisions are effectively separate companies
Bingo. This seems to be the pattern across the market. I have heard time and again that Acer laptops are crap. But at the same time i have seen at least one of their enterprise models survive basically decade of use with just the cooling fan needed replacing.
The only thing that makes Macbooks "special" is that they are effectively enterprise grade products sold to consumers.
That the article author balks at getting a Thinkpad because of the Superfish debacle shows a lack of research. No Thinkpad was found to have that installed, it was strictly limited to their Ideapad range.
A 2007 (maybe 2006) HP EliteBook was the last non MacBook Pro laptop I had. I loved that thing and it was incredibly easy to add my own RAM and an SSD to. Pretty sure it maxed out at 8GB.
I'm sure they're sleeker now but that thing was pretty thick and the batteries on them seemed to wear down and die very fast. Bonus points for having an AWESOME dock that worked near flawlessly in Windows 7 for me, not so much, but not bad with Ubuntu 10 Desktop. Also you could get extended batteries and the batteries swapped easily, so I had a pair that could get me through a day at a client's site with no power if I needed.
I can't imagine I'll go back, I love my MBPs, but I would check out the latest EliteBooks if I was going that way again.
The EliteBooks aren't even close to Macs in engineering. They're probably the closest thing I've found, but there are teething issues with all of them - like poor speakers, or noisy 3.5mm jacks, or poor display, or iffy keyboards, or poor trackpads.
Apple get all of this stuff right almost all the time, in almost every machine they build.
In fact, I only say almost above because it seems like they would have at least one lemon, but I can't think of what it is.
I have to agree 100%. My work computer is an EliteBook and the headphone jack has constant static, the fan runs high even on simple tasks, and the trackpad is downright terrible. I prefer my older MacBook Air's hardware by far.
That's a good point. I forgot how magical the trackpad is on the MBPs compared to every other laptop I've ever touched. I couldn't imagine bringing a travel mouse with me but I used to ALWAYS have one with my PC laptops.
Like around seven years ago, I bought a tablet PC from HP. An Touchsmart TX2. 2h max if batery and usage if plastic, but durable. I don't have any problem with it except the disappointed 3d performance (I expected more from it), AMD stoping of update the graphics drivers, and very very rare freeze on boot (like one time every 3 months). Also, an OS update to Windows 8 was an really improve on performance (even using beta drivers from AMD)
How ever, I know friends with HP's that breaked very easy. One give small electric shocks. Other had an previous version of the same tablet PC that me, and it ended generating smoke (Old touchsmart TXs have a tendency to overheat)
We bought 120 HP netbooks and had almost 90% drive failure (Seagate) and their firmware only for service contract customers has really soured me on HP. I find SuperMicro makes better servers, so I am pretty much out of HP now.
The HP consumer and enterprise lines are vastly different in terms of quality.
By the way, upon first boot of an HP laptop you will be prompted to burn recovery DVDs. $10 is actually pretty reasonable compared to what others would charge you.
My anecdotal evidence points the other way. My own Ho dv6 gave me a good 4 years of running.
- Yes, the crapware is unavoidable. but who doesn't ship with that?
- For me the system restore worked like magic. I tried it a bunch of times on my own machine and those of some friends. The machine was virgin again with just a click of a button.
- It's also very easy to get into. Very helpfully labeled; tons of guides available online. It's like its designed to be opened and hacked around. When it finally died, I scavenged it for parts and ported to my new desktop machine
> Yes, the crapware is unavoidable. but who doesn't ship with that?
Well Apple for one (unless you count their superfluous apps, but I find those much less intrusive)
I think the crapware is inexcusable. If almost every car manufacturer places a fresh pile of dog poo on your brand new car seat would you be okay with it just because everyone does it?...
Crapware is usually found on consumer machines, where installing crapware pays for the OS and reduces the price. Pro machines from Dell and HP generally don't have crapware apart from anit-virus), in my experience.
However, they may have "useful" extra software, which I could do without. (Dell Data Safe backup etc. Lenovo is the worst.)
But you can download a crapware-free version of Windows 7 or 10 from Microsoft and do a clean installation.
"Everything is wrong with it"? Name it, one by one. Otherwise it's FUD.
Why didn't you install a clean OS downloaded from the official Microsoft/Ubuntu/Debian website instead of waiting two weeks for a restore Windows restore DVD from HP with crapware pre-installed? The first thing I would do after buying a new laptop is to format it completely and start afresh.
Meh. The pictures are pretty, but other than that, what's so great about it? The stuff moving up and down as you scroll is just dizzying, and the tech specs page is way too sparse. Frankly, I prefer the ASUS notebooks site.
Functional design. A lot of haters misunderstand it as style.
>but
Uh-oh
>they sell things that are locked down, both physically and in software.
OK, I guess you read that on the Internet. But you should question it.
When I bought my first Mac the first thing I did before buying it was call Apple support and check whether I could open it and upgrade the hard drive without voiding the warranty. The answer? YES. Same goes for memory, etc.
Was true then, is true today. Although for some models the options are now removed due to technical limitations put in place not because Apple is trying to offend you, but because that's how they get the battery life you like. In my experience Apple is very cool about user upgrades.
What they're not cool about is stuff like putting in third party batteries, which then explode, and then asking Apple to eat the cost for that. Um, no.
On the software side, of course Apple doesn't want to set all its users up with totally vulnerable systems that can lead to all manner of harm. But it doesn't prevent more advanced users like us from doing what we want to on our own systems. Feel free to install Linux, even though it's already a UNIX machine, whatever... So you don't have to let the software factor in to your decision about a machine.
>You're not supposed to open them, you're not supposed to replace parts
It's just normal life that some things can be replaced, and some can't. This isn't specific to Apple. If you attempt to open a lithium battery, it may burst into flames. Therefore, they are made, deliberately, to be hard to open. And you being not supposed to open them is a correct thing, not a problem.
We don't know the story behind pentalobe screws But I imagine maybe third party battery replacement businesses were getting out of control, leading to damaged phones and fires, and that little side industry needed a speed bump while it got its batteries up to snuff. Who knows. It's easy to think up legitimate reasons rather than "Apple hates your freedoms." But bashing Apple is just the cool thing to do, right?
> and if they break you're supposed to take them to your nearest "Genius Bar". Not my style.
I would encourage you to think beyond style. I build my own PCs too but the Geniuses are backed by a truly awesome knowledge base with problems, troubleshooting tools, solutions, and discretionary power to make you very, very happy when things go wrong, if you're not a dick about things.
>Also, Apple makes beautiful hardware
Functional. I'm sure beauty is also a goal but I think a lot of it comes as a side effect of the intrinsic functional nature of every detail. But yeah, it's beautiful too.
>but their software is getting worse.
You read this on the internet too. Please. Think for yourself. Of course their software has problems. All software has problems. Apple's software is taking on HUGE challenges, basically helping each person manage all their information, and responsibly, which means with security measures in place, which are there to reduce the likelihood of actual harmful real threats to their users. Yes, it's complicated.
All that being said... I agree with one thing, which is that it would be great if there were more fantastic machines out there, from more vendors. But I think to make machines really great, they would inevitably end up including some of the features that you diss when talking about Apple, like security features and tradeoffs on end-user upgradability in return for other benefits.
The lack of buttons below the trackpad makes right clicking in a controlled manner impossible - I cannot feel nor hover my thumb over the button I want. Accidentally touching the "right" part of the trackpad jumps the mouse cursor over there, or activates some multi-touch gimmick.
The power button looks like a regular keyboard ke.
The edges of the case are actually too sharp to rest your wrists on. Rounded edges would solve this problem. So does filing down the case as some have done Youtube.
The keyboard keys lack any concavity. This is on all keyboards made since type-writers because it helps center your finger when you side-strike a key. This stops it slipping to the neighboring key. In the case of the Apple keyboard, it slips towards the gap between keys.
The keyboard has no Home, End, Page Up/Page Down or Delete keys. It is also lacking an Insert (overwrite) key. These aren't unused keys, they're pretty ordinary text editing functions.
Functional? No Apple absolutely made a whole bunch of stylistic choices. Apple wants a very specific line and minimalism to their products. Accomodations for practicality complicate that - otherwise why are we losing 3.5mm jacks on iPhones in the interest of thinness when most everyone agrees they want more battery life?
For right click, configure it as 2-finger click, it's easier (at least for me)
Concavity helps but chiclet keyboards are usually better than regular ones for notebooks
> The keyboard has no Home, End, Page Up/Page Down or Delete keys. It is also lacking an Insert (overwrite) key
True, that sucks. But there are combinations of keys to do that. PgUp = Fn+Up direction key. Home/End for single line entries is Up/Down, etc (google it)
You kind of get used to it until you plug a PC keyboard then hate yourself for a couple of days (but it gets back eventually)
I like how you respond to concerns about not being able to modify the physical hardware with both "apple totally lets you do that!" and "some things in life you just can't do!"
The second comment is more amusing, given you then compare Apple's laptop with a battery case, instead of other vendors' laptops, whmo frequently provide free service manuals with exploded diagrams showing exactly how to open the thing and get inside.
The whole comment reads like apologia, but the funniest part was the assertion that Apple don't design for beauty, it just happens to be a by-product of designing for function. Apple. The company famous for intentionally designing beauty into their hardware products. The company that files design patent after design patent. Ah, well, I guess "you read that somewhere on the internet", but really, you should "think for yourself".
If you attempt to open a lithium battery, it may burst into flames.
Batteries come in cases, whether it's the shell around a single battery cell, or the plastic armature that holds several cells. If you really want to go down this pedantic road of "I didn't mention a case!", then you should have called it a cell.
> Where did you see this "assertion"?
"I think a lot of it comes as a side effect of the intrinsic functional nature of every detail."
Again, pedantry isn't going to get you anywhere. You were suggesting that Apple was only minorly interested in physical appearance, but were first-and-foremost designing for function. This flies in the face of what Apple (and Jobs) are famous for, and their actions as a company. Their attention to design is not the side-effect you paint it as.
As a clear example: if physical beauty was not their main goal and only functionality was, then "you're holding it wrong" would never have happened. Any radio designer with half a clue knows that human touch changes the tuning of an antenna. This event was an unmitigated disaster for them, both in the short term (Jobs insults his users) and in the long term (users are now trained to hide the beautiful hardware inside crappy plastic holders). It was definitely an event where form took precedence over attention-to-detail function.
> I think you're reading something else into what I said
This (along with the ad hominem part of the rest of your post) is uncharitable. The GP is hardly alone in thinking that Apple software is getting worse; I think it, too, and not just out of conformity—if anything I'm frustrated by not being able to find enough people on the Internet who agree with my longing for the good old days of Snow Leopard.
I think the OP has missed the Microsoft "Signature" edition products. They're a clean Windows 10 image and you buy direct from Microsoft. I just wish they'd sell me the XPS 13 9350 (the highest spec'd one) in Australia.
Edit: AFAICT a lot of the battery life on a MacBook comes from the way OS X works - friends who use Bootcamp tell me it significantly reduces their battery time.
> Edit: AFAICT a lot of the battery life on a MacBook comes from the way OS X works - friends who use Bootcamp tell me it significantly reduces their battery time.
It's not just OSX—even using Safari instead of Chrome or Firefox adds over an hour to my battery life (god knows there's no other reason to use it). As of ~1 year ago when I worked somewhere that required me to use lots of tablets from both Apple and a variety of top Android manufacturers on a regular basis, battery life (especially idle battery life) on the Apple devices was borderline miraculous while the Android devices seemed to treat the battery like an infinite resource—the difference was not subtle.
I'd love a world in which it seems like any company other than Apple holds battery life as a high priority. My observation has been that we do not live in that world. They're the only hardware manufacturer I've seen that gives more-or-less honest battery life estimates in their marketing, and those figures are not low. It'd be really, really hard for me to jump ship solely for that reason.
They do. I bought a Lenovo from the Microsoft store. No crapware at all (well, you can debate about some of the driver update software both from Lenovo and Intel, but definitely no added root certificates and such).
If Windows gets bad battery life on MacBooks then that's an indictment of Apple's windows drivers.
Just one poorly written driver can ruin your battery life, and that's a place where the MS "hardware manufacturers write the drivers for their hardware" model really falls down - there are Windows laptops where you can nearly double the battery life by fixing the touchpad driver, or the webcam driver, or, .... In theory a manufacturer/integrator should be auditing the drivers they're shipping and making sure the whole thing works together. Maybe the signature edition programme will improve this.
That's lame they don't sell those there. I got a 9350 myself and loaded Ubuntu onto it and it's been fantastic. What do they limit you to? Just the basic XPS 13 models?
Also, what if someone in the US bought one and had it shipped to Australia? Is that doable?
I shouldn't complain too much, the 8GB / 256GB version is the highest they offer here. It's just that I'd like to run VMs on the thing and 16GB of RAM is needed.
My other constraint is weight, for $REASONS - I don't really want something >1.5KG.
It could really stand to suck a little less. Based on this thread I went to checkout the Elitebook line and the "View all notebook products" link from the Elitebook line page just goes to a promo for some new one that isn't available yet, and when you go to the shop it just takes you to search results with 217 results for "elitebook"
Lucky thing he wasn't shopping a couple of years ago when it was near impossible to buy a PC laptop with a screen at any resolution other than 1366x768.
Also, I know they're uncool and all, but the author should really look at the Dell XPS series. They're rather expensive but hit most all of his points.
The latest MacBook (2015) doesn't use USB internally for the keyboard and touchpad. As a result, Linux doesn't support it. I was thinking about writing patches to fix it (it does boot) but it looks far too complicated (I'm not even sure if the "protocol" is the same over different serial protocols).
I had a motherboard fail on a 2011 MacBook Pro running Windows 7 - I just wiped the drive on another Mac and put it back in and have it to them. No questions asked.
I didn't know whether or not it would and for the 10 minutes it took, it was worth it to not have to stand in the Apple Store and explain why I was running Windows and not OS X.
Wow, ok - go ahead and down vote me on that without commenting. I was genuinely curious if there was some part of their site that actually was 100mb (it sounds extremely crazy but sadly feasible).
I went through the same thought process in December, never owned an Apple computer but needed a new laptop. Despite trying to fend off the idea of getting a Macbook (due to some combination of price/not wanting to succumb to herd mentality/proprietary nature of Apple) I caved.
It felt silly to spend a lot of time researching and configuring a custom laptop. I've never purchased a pre-built desktop but customizing a laptop seemed too poor a risk/reward proposition for my liking. Even with a great deal of effort it would be difficult to create something comparable to what I could simply purchase.
Apple's hardware is easy to appreciate down to small details. You can open the lid without holding the other half of the laptop (my previous laptop would lift up otherwise) and the screen isn't too loose either (doesn't bounce when you type hard). The speakers sound orders better than any of my previous laptops. Battery life is great. Retina is beautiful & responsive (easy to read text, even while scrolling). The trackpad is unbelievable for a variety of reasons (click anywhere, accuracy to the very edge of the pad, multitouch/gestures). I hadn't previously seen any trackpad worth using let alone nearly as good as a standard mouse, but haven't ever needed to connect a mouse to this one. It's just a great overall experience.
There have been a couple software glitches that required a restart to fix, but other than that and the temps (~90°C) it reaches under load it has been a pleasure (@ 2 months of heavy use). Figuring out OSX took a week or two.
I don't envy anyone who tries to save money while achieving a similar experience.
So many little things that Apple just do better. I'd add some things to your list as well - the keyboards are nice and snappy, the machines are silent for general tasks, and the fans are generally quiet unless you're going crazy, with no stupid things like electrical noise / coil whine.
Even under heavy load you can sit the thing on your legs and it won't burn you. The machines are very sturdy and don't bend, so they remain level (unlike even the 'sturdy' Thinkpads). The rubber feet are svelte and not blocky and intrusive. There are no stupid panels to catch on clothing, or vents on the underside of the machine to get blocked.
Then there's stuff like MagSafe. And Thunderbolt (sure, USB 3.1 with Type C will do this stuff soon, but TBolt has done it for years already).
I would say it depends on what you do. Mac laptops definitely have strong features that their PC cousins don't have, but...
The two Mac laptops I have, they get hot and the fan is noisy, especially my Macbook Pro.
The port selection is nice, but the ports are too close together unless you're using all Apple cables. A chunky USB key or mini-display port cable can block other ports. I had to use a knife and shave off the edges of a mini display port cable I had.
>> "The two Mac laptops I have, they get hot and the fan is noisy, especially my Macbook Pro."
What are you doing on them? I'm generally running browser/Xcode/iTunes or Logic Pro X/iTunes/Browser and my fan never spins up. In fact it spins so rarely I tend to think somethings going wrong when it does. It freaks me out. I'm on the lowest spec 13" MacBook Pro.
I run mostly dev tools, text editor, etc. But I have a bad habit of having more than 50 Chrome tabs open, and Chrome is a notorious pig on just about every OS.
My Macbook Pro (2011, quad core i7) is famous for heating issues, but that aside, any app that forces use of the discrete GPU (at one point, even Coda did) would cause the fans to spin.
I don't want to sound like a snob, but the 13" MBPs aren't comparable with 15" MBPs, since many of them use lesser CPUs (i.e., not the MQ/HQ/QM series chips) that don't generate nearly as much heat.
Those 2011 quad cores are powerful machines, especially for their size (thickness, mainly). I've used HP Elitebooks with similar CPUs, that are close to twice as thick, yet still have worse heat issues.
You've gotta work them pretty hard to start reaching thermal issues - as you are doing with lots of Chrome tabs :P
Yes, they are. In raw CPU benchmarks, it will still blow away just about any latest rev mac laptop that isn't a 15" Macbook Pro.
edit - as for the thermal issues, you don't have to work it hard, that model year had all sorts of issues in general, hence the Apple repair order that was issued last year. My MBP bricked itself a couple of months before that repair order was issued. That was the first laptop I ever had (Windows or Mac) that just up and died.
Previously to this machine I had a 15" MacBook Pro (2012) and didn't have any issues either. I don't run many browser tabs, that might be the difference. Although I do think the fans spun up more often on the 15" you're right.
The 2012's had the second generation CPUs of that class, and they ran cooler than those used in 2011. A lot of people had major heat issues with the 2011, it's quite famous.
Apple was basically in denial about the issue until last year when they issued the repair order.
Having said that, most of the quad core models will get hot pretty fast, especially if you use something like Chrome. If you use Safari, you probably won't have those issues, as it's much more efficient than Chrome, but that's a preference thing.
Agree with all of this. Also worth noting that the best part is that these features are all in ONE device, not just a wishlist of things from a variety of laptops.
I agree with you that Apple hardware is generally much better than the competition. However, there is one thing that really bugs me about Apple laptops - they don't open 180 degrees, which make them somewhat impractical to use with a stand. And simply using a laptop as-is is not very ergonomic.
My 2015 MBP opens to 120° which seems like it'd be enough but I haven't purchased a stand yet so I'm not sure. Good to know since I've been looking at the Rain stand, which looks like it's pitched at 30°, so the laptop screen would be perfectly upright at most, as shown in images of the Rain stand: http://cdn1.bigcommerce.com/server800/c1529/product_images/u...
Not sure if that'll be okay, it is helpful to be able to angle the screen backward a touch if you're close to it and higher than the screen. That's probably less often the case with a stand since the laptop will be higher but helpful to keep in mind.
I'm a bit near-sighted so I prefer having my monitor somewhat close. That's especially true with a laptop, since the screen is smaller. However, if you're not near-sighted, then I suppose a MBP that opens to 120° might be fine.
I have the "old X1 Carbon with a low res screen", except that the article is a little inaccurate: it doesn't have to have a low res screen. You can select a 2560x1440 screen. Even better, it's a non-reflective (matte) screen and even has a non-touch option! I guess I'm not alone in disliking reflective screens.
What sold me more than anything, though, was that I could select the best parts without being forced into a touchscreen. In so many other company's product lineups, if I wanted the 1440p screen (or whatever is highest), they were convinced I absolutely wanted a touchscreen, yes sirree! Thank you, Lenovo, for understanding my needs.
I don't remember which manufacturer it was, but I remember one option page where if I wanted to select the Core i7 option, it required the touchscreen upgrade as well. I don't see any logic behind that at all except "Hey, that i7 means you must be a big spender, guess we'll milk you for all you've got!"
As for OS, I run Linux Mint (Cinnamon) currently and experience no particular hardware or driver issues. Battery life is 5-8 hours depending on load, screen brightness, etc.
I actually intentionally got the "900p" lowres version (also matte) because I didn't feel like dealing with HiDPI support. I _love_ the click pad. 3 finger click (for middle click) is a million times more reliable than 3 finger tap in my experience.
Easily the best device i have used in a very long time. Expensive (especially the i7 dGPU option) but i am amazed at how good this machine is.
Huge battery life, powerful when it needs to be. Connect to a dock and you have a powerful desktop.
Currently use it when im working in the office doing design work (plugged into a couple of Dell U2715H) then when i am out on mine sites use it as a portable machine in the field.
The tablet mode and pen is just a cherry on top. Writing notes in the field, marking up drawings etc. ridiculously easy.
It's nice, but I have a pretty long list of gripes that pretty much prevent me from buying one.
Mushy keyboard. Average speakers. Lacklustre I/O port selection. Kinda average camera, despite its resolution. Headphone jack in a stupid place for laptop mode. No brightness controls on keyboard. Trackpad might look and feel nice, but it just isn't as good as the Mac's for palm rejection, and scrolling is still stuttery vs butter smooth on a Mac. Power connector has nothing on MagSafe.
Then there's the price. Woooah.
It's also an Ultrabook-esque machine. I'm not really wanting one of those. I'd be happy to take the thin tablet part, but mate it to a thicker base that gave me things like... RAM slots, a gruntier CPU, user serviceable storage, triple external display support.
Recent discovery from my Surface Pro: You can adjust the brightness with Fn + Backspace and Fn + Del. Works with the Surface Book as well.
Regarding multiple display ports, I think the SB was meant to be used with the dock for the "power user" mode. I quote like the ease of the docking capabilities even though I've had a few display issues with it when the machine resumes from sleep
It's really just Mac (the desktop line) and Macbook (the laptop line). It's simple.
The problem is that Surface can mean anything. It can mean a tablet, a laptop, or a ginormous screen or table e.g. Surface (a tablet, a table, or a laptop?), Surface Pro (a more powerful version of the tablet, table or laptop?), Surfacebook (another version of the tablet?)
Am I wrong? Think about it. Why would a blog post complaining about the absense of a great PC laptop get so many upvotes on HN when MS has the answer in the form of a 'Surface'? imo something is just really wrong with MS's marketing.
It's standard PC hardware so you can install Linux on it if you'd like. I guess you're paying the "Microsoft Tax" for the OS license that won't be used but you could say the same about installing Linux on a MacBook too.
Also I'm not sure why you're being downvoted - I'm a .NET developer and spend all day in Windows but even I appreciate that others' workflows are built around Linux or OS X. Horses for courses and all that.
I think it's safe to say a lot of people in tech have the same knee jerk reaction (I know I do), but sadly what are the open alternatives?
Closest I can think of would be Android, but you're throwing a lot of flexibility and openness out already. I had high hopes that FxOS would grow into the {reasonably hackable, consumer pricing, works out of the box if needed, higher abstraction (eg. don't make me think about my kernel) system APIs} market.
Right now, to have any degree of control beyond "here's a GUI with the 5 settings we thought you'd need", you need to use way too much relatively advanced knowledge (setting a 'nix ARM system up, hardware quality, commitment to maintaining your setup at a fairly low level) for it to be widespread.
I guess I'm asking the smart people on here why can't we have a tablet ecosystem more akin to the mid/high end desktop market? (Emphasis on modularity, _standards_ and interoperability)
Do the actors in that area reckon there's not enough interest/commercial opportunities in contrast to the OEM/OS siloing? Or is there a project out there I should start throwing contributions at?
((EDIT: please don't say Canonical: the GUI is nonstarter because of limited resources, and if you're using server editions then we're back to the original low-level problem in this case))
Speaking of tablets, apart from BQ Aquaris M10 with Ubuntu, there is also Samsung Galaxy 2 with Replicant [http://www.replicant.us], which is fully free software.
Check out the Dell Developer Edition XPS. It comes with Ubuntu on it and has 100% full driver support out of the box. It's a great machine, we use them for work. Screen is great too and it looks really beautiful. https://sputnik.github.io/
I want to like this machine, but it comes stock with 8GB of RAM and only a 256GB drive for the high end model with no options to upgrade (at least on Dell's site).
Just wait a little longer. If you go to the project sputnik google+ page you'll see Barton George say they're clearing out the old stock before releasing the developer edition of the new skylake XPS 13s.
Annoyingly, neither the price nor the spec have been updated recently. The non-developer XPSes are already on Skylake and come with more RAM and storage: http://www.dell.com/uk/p/xps-13-9350-laptop/pd
12.04 is still under LTS support by Ubuntu for another 4 years (LTS releases are supported for 7 years), so even if it's "old" it's also receiving active support. That being said, there's nothing stopping you from upgrading to 14.04 yourself.
It seems like you should really just buy a MacBook Pro. Sure the software isn't perfect, but it's an order of magnitude closer to perfect than Windows has been lately. You buy it, boot it up, and it works wonderfully. Of course the one day out of the year that it doesn't you go rage comment on how it sucks and it scares Windows users away from Mac, but the rest of the time you'd never consider going back to a typical PC.
Is it really only one day a year for you? I was given the latest MBP for my new job, which was the first time I'd used a Mac.
The external keyboard uses a non standard USB port. That's broken.
It's not easy to maximise a window fully. Apparently I'm not supposed to do this, but I don't like being told how I'm supposed to use a computer.
Focus follows mouse can't be done.
There are very few ways the window manager can be customised.
Homebrew lacks many packages. Coming from Debian / Ubuntu, the package repository was always the first place to look when I needed some software.
The window manager plus homebrew pushed me to using Kubuntu after a month. It doesn't yet support using a high dpi display at the same time as a normal, external display, but that's all.
Mostly true, but you may want to look into Divvy (which makes it very easy to maximize and manage windows) and TotalSpaces2.
I'd rather deal with these issues and run a ubuntu VM for some things than deal with the cornucopia of crap that is the PC laptop market but hopefully some day that will change.
Oh absolutely, but there is only one laptop that can run Linux with proper hardware support, 10+ hr battery life, high-quality screen, good build quality: the Chromebook Pixel, and that is limited to 64gb storage and a 12" screen.
There's such an extreme lack of decent laptops around that working around the limitations of OSX seems to be the only option for now.
Maybe the next version of the Pixel will be more suitable as a general purpose development machine or someone else will make a decent linux laptop (if Google can do it, why can't Dell?)
I've had good luck with the Thinkpad W530. A little large for some (15''), but for me it works. 16Gb of RAM, SSD and an extra battery (which attaches to the back and angles the keyboard just right) gives me approx 10 hrs of battery life (even when fitting models/compiling).
Haha! High-end Dell and ASUS machines are good, but the lack of Apple competition is why Microsoft made the Surface Book. "We gave you nearly twenty years to make something good! Fine! We'll do it ourselves."
I have had the thought that if the Surface machines had good Linux support (still can't stand Windows for development), they'd be a great option. The irony of running Linux on Microsoft hardware would be a major plus also.
With the way MS is going maybe they'll introduce official support!
As an owner of an SP2 for >2yrs, I strongly agree with your idea. However as things are now, it's very difficult to install Linux, FreeBSD or other OS on the SP[2-4], I know because I've tried to do it, not a pleasant experience at all.
OTOH it is pretty easy to run just about any OS in a Hyper-V VM. My SP2 has FBSD running most of the time. One use is letting the VM act like a remote node that clients on the host OS can access. Makes a convenient arrangement for server development and testing in a way that dual booting would not accomplish.
On the downside MS hardware means running Windows 10 on new machines, which I'm not happy about. I won't go into details re: Win10, it's been discussed plenty. When it works the hardware's great, though MS firmware skills are marginal at best, it's bitten me a few times, but there's another bunch of long stories that ATM I'll refrain from telling.
As a developer I work with text all day, a task made thoroughly more pleasant with good font rendering and proper HiDPI support, neither of which are available on Linux. I'll take my 13 inches of Retina display over a pair of 27-inch externals any day.
SSH and rsync for remote editing work just fine from an rMBP.
It's possible to use HiDPI on Linux, but I guess it depends on what software you use. I've used it for almost a year. I set my DPI in X and GTK. I believe GNOME understands DPI, but I just use ratpoison so I don't know. After turning off hunting, fonts look very nice.
Don't bother trying to connect an external monitor with a different DPI though, hehe. I've heard that problem is unsolvable with the X11 paradigm but will be fixed in Wayland (whatever that is).
I want you to re-read the first paragraph you wrote. That's exactly why I don't use Linux. I don't mean this to be a condescending comment, but really, the contents of your entire first paragraph are just things that I don't want to deal with. It's all just bullshit, and I don't have time to deal with bullshit like that. I really just don't want to even think about stuff like that. Not even a tiny bit, not even for a second.
Sure, that's fine with me, you can choose to spend your time however you want.
Someone said proper HiDPI support is not available on Linux. So I replied that I have used HiDPI on Linux for a long time without major issues.
That's not an advocacy argument for anyone to choose Linux. So I might ask you to re-read my paragraph—unless you're so allergic to Linux "bullshit" that mere anecdotes cause you pain, in which case I'm sorry. (That's meant to be just slightly condescending...)
> It's all just bullshit, and I don't have time to deal with bullshit like that
It's bullshit to you, but it doesn't make Linux bullshit - others prioritise different aspects.
You care about HiDPI - perhaps you are a designer, so it's important. But, you're not everyone. For example, I have no need for HiDPI and I personally have much more focus on the power and control Linux gives me. I wouldn't want HiDPI if I had to give up a proper Window Manager.
Your choice is fair enough, but it's no more than a personal preference.
Well you sure convinced me with your accurate statistics. You talk of benefits as if higher dpi cures cancer, it looks better and that's it. I really don't know what the big deal is, I have a HiDPI screen, works fine under linux as most of my work is done in terminals all I've had to "configure" was turning off hinting for my emulators and that was that. But they are waay more important things I would like from my machine so there's no need to be condescending just because you and your friends were impressed by the high res screens.
You seriously think more than 1% of computer users care about some esoteric configuration flexibility of a Linux window manager? How insular is your view of the world?
Right... which makes it kind of ridiculous to claim that any mention of configuring Linux to work with HiDPI is "bullshit." Because there are a lot of Linux enthusiasts here.
Far be it for me to defend somebody else's words, but I happen to entirely agree with askafriend when he described the manual tinkering required to get HiDPI functioning well as "things that I don't want to deal with. It's all just bullshit, and I don't have time to deal with bullshit like that. I really just don't want to even think about stuff like that. Not even a tiny bit, not even for a second."
There are indeed a lot of Linux enthusiasts here, myself included, but being a Linux enthusiast doesn't mean we all want to act as systems integrator all the time.
This was a pointless squabble to begin with. I just reacted to "askafriend"'s way of arguing against my non-argumentative semi-helpful anecdote... because I think it's really tedious that mere mentions of Linux configurations can turn into a flame war... it also struck me as a little odd to be so ferociously reluctant to engage in any kind of computer configuration, "for even a second", on a forum about hacking.
I happen to see a lot of value in the availability of a free and open operating system, so I take offense when people rail against it in this sweeping way. Yeah, it's not polished perfect like Apple's products (let's imagine that they don't have any tedious bullshit problems), but it's free software and a community effort.
So when people say it's "insane for any normal human being" to use it... eh, that pushes my buttons.
If you install Postgres, you have to mess around with some configuration files. Some people might consider that tedious, painful, horrible bullshit. I just see it as a necessary reality, and I don't whine condescendingly at people who offer advice or anecdotes.
Use Linux Mint with Cinnamon - HiDPI is awesome there, Linux finally looks good! I switched development over there from OS X & Win, on three 4k monitors and a notebook with 3200x1800 resolution.
You should check out the Infinality[1] patch sets. Installation is extremely simple when using your distro's package manager. The improvement made on rendering text is astronomical.
I feel the same way. Every few months I will have a moment where I think, "I really shouldn't be using this small screen 14 hours a day, lets hook up my 22 inch monitor" and I use it for all of 8 minutes before I switch back. The text rendering is absolutely beautiful.
I live in the command line and use a modern toolchain. Package management has no bearing on my development. mvn, npm, composer, gem, and pip all work just fine. Home brew gets you the OS packages and I've yet to run into an even remotely popular package not in a Homebrew repo somewhere.
On top of all that- with Vagrant and (or even just) Virtualbox you have whatever flavor of Linux you want running on your desktop.
I have found OSX to be the best combination of just works enough OS with all the command line power I need. I can't effing stand Windows anymore and all the Linux desktop distros, though may have some appealing niche characteristics over OS X, there are way more rough edges. I could see one day leaving OS X for a Linux distro, but it won't be any time soon.
We've just given up on OS X for developers at my workplace. There are just too many little incompatibilities. Especially around clang replacing gcc messing with our C++ code, but also different revisions of various gems - especially browser testing - that cause hiccups. And then there's setting up all the ancillary services like databases etc. - not just once, but repeatedly, and reconfiguration when the arrangement changes. We can reuse many of our actual deployment Puppet scripts for setting up developer Linux machines; not so much for Mac.
Various utility scripts need to be written more defensively to run correctly in OS X with its ancient shell and BSD tools.
Overall it's just not worth the hassle, particularly when you need to ramp up new developer machines in minimal time.
We use Vagrant and Chef to provision everything, and where possible, I like to keep my OS relatively clean- so I don't have any databases or anything installed in OS X anymore. We have a number of Vagrant and Chef scripts that will take developers from zero to fully running development environment with a simple vagrant init command followed by a few steps for hooking up whatever must be hooked up in the IDE for remote debugging where necessary. It's been fantastic, but we're mostly JVM based.
I could definitely see how clang would screw things up. I don't have experience as a C/C++ developer in OS X for anything other than personal electronics projects.
My personal and professional experience with significant development time in Java, PHP, Python, and Node has been that only Linux could do it as well, but the trade offs for daily desktop use simply aren't worth it. Being able to pump my development environments into a VM of the same flavor as the target environment has given me the best of all worlds. But I've genuinely never run into anything that just refused to work on OSX. I will say that Python and Python env are sometimes a PITA, but not any constant issues.
> I live in the command line and use a modern toolchain. Package management has no bearing on my development. mvn, npm, composer, gem, and pip all work just fine. Home brew gets you the OS packages and I've yet to run into an even remotely popular package not in a Homebrew repo somewhere.
When you're building for a managed runtime it's fine. When you're building native code not so much.
I would say that the same does apply for native code as well.
Developing native code means writing code, reading code and documentation, and interacting with the build system / debugger. Those tasks need to happen directly on the developer's workstation, but not the actual building and execution/testing of that native code.
This is better done in an environment with known state, i.e. either an isolated local or remote VM that will have the environment set up as required for production, and likely multiple different, incompatible environments, or some external hardware for many use cases of native code. Best practices and a modern toolchain would imply things like reproducible builds which you can't really have if you're building and running C or C++ code directly with whatever setup and libraries each developer has on their own workstation, no matter if they're on linux, windows or mac.
You need both a reproducible build environment and an environment that your IDE is tightly integrated with - at present IDE-VM integration isn't quite good enough for the same environment to act as both. The closer together those two environments are, the less common bugs that can't be reproduced in the dev environment will be, and such bugs are the hardest to deal with. (You still have to be capable of dealing with them - you'll get them even when running the same OS in both cases - but the lower the rate, the better).
There are many developers who value high several OS X features, such as well-implemented HiDPI mode with custom resolutions, super-easy backup solution, solid energy saving & suspend & resume functionalities (no conflicts with crappy 3D drivers), etc, etc. Those features wouldn't mean much without the possibility to easily¹ run FOSS on unix-like system.
¹) The differences between various package management systems are not significant in this context.
eh? I have a both and I far prefer developing on the MBP just because the computer is so great and I can use it anywhere hassle free. My ubuntu machine is hard to tab around the windows and generally has a bad UI and the fonts are terrible. I actually had an ubuntu machine before I ever used a mac computer, so if anything I should be bias towards the more familiar linux setup. The MBP totally blew me away. Linux package managers may be superior, but I don't actually spend most of my development time installing system packages thankfully. npm, maven, pip are identical experiences on both.
This is certainly not true. You can basically get any package with Homebrew that you can on Linux, (assuming it's on GitHub, you can get all of them) in fact there's even a port of it to Linux for people that love it on Mac.
Decade old heavy Linux user who got his first Macbook a few months ago. I agree that Homebrew is not as good as most package managers. However, it's good enough and doesn't get in the way. It does what it needs to do and because of that, I don't think it's fair to use that as a reason to claim that OS X is worse than Linux for developers.
Tbh, yum and apt both get in the way for other reasons. Homebrew is nice and straightforward. Very much depends on what development you do though - anything web-related, and you're absolutely fine on a Mac.
This is somewhat untruthful. If apt fails, it tends to leave detailed error reports, and does its best to leave things in a sane state. However, if you're using apt, you're doing it wrong - aptitude is where it's at.
Home brew, when things go wrong, goes wrong disastrously in my experience. You're never quite sure where you're left, and you have to spend a fair bit of time picking through what actually failed.
If APT fails catastrophically, your complete system could be in limbo. If Homebrew fails catastrophically (which never happened to me), the rest of your system is fine, you wipe out /usr/local and are up and running again in a couple of minutes (since most large packages are bottled).
By the way, aptitude does not really help you in the typical error case: a package (continuously) fails in dpkg-reconfigure, which causes the complete install/upgrade to fail.
apt is not the only package manager on Linux. At least you have abundant choices as to what you can use. As always on Linux, for about everything, there are tons of ways to do it.
And homebrew isn't the only package manager on OSX.
I actually see this as an argument in favour of OSX, as it is much more straightforward to change package manager than on Linux, where the sane way to change package manager is to change your distribution.
Homebrew is certainly not as good as a regular package manager you get in Linux.
It's actually better, for three reasons:
- If a library is not in Homebrew (which happens frequently when you are a developer ;)), you just install it into /usr/local/Cellar/<name>/<version> and you can use all the regular Homebrew tools (brew link <name>, brew unlink <name>), etc.
- It's much easier to build and distribute your own stuff in Homebrew, by providing a repository of formulae. I have packaged both Debian packages (distributed via Launchpad's PPA) and created Homebrew formulae. Packaging for Homebrew is much easier.
- Homebrew is packaging is decoupled from OS packaging/updates. This means that you can update a new application without having to upgrade half of your system. In Linux, you usually have the choice of: stable OS, outdated software. Up to date software, in-flux OS.
> This means that you can update a new application without having to upgrade half of your system. In Linux, you usually have the choice of: stable OS, outdated software. Up to date software, in-flux OS.
I've never seen an application on Linux asking to update half of my system libraries or something. Please stop using hyperbole, this is not useful for the sake of conversation.
On top of that, you can install recent software in many ways (OpenSUSE has specific, updated repositories that can be triggered with one-click on their website, Ubuntu has pretty much the same thing with PPAs) or you can even build everything from source on Arch with AUR and just ensure you have updated libraries as required (which is not half of your system).
And if you don't want to update ANY of your system libraries, it's fairly straightforward symlink local versions of libraries instead of system ones.
It might be for a package maintainer or if you aspire to be. As a develop I have no aspiration for that.
Homebrew frequently requires you to manually perform steps or edit files. While it might not be directly homebrews fault, that 100% disqualifies it for the label "It's actually better".
- you have way more packages on any Linux package manager.
- Linux package managers do not mess with /usr/local as expected in a UNIX compatible OS. Homebrew does. Linux package managers run as root, not in user-space.
- Apparently Homebrew gets broken by Apple software/OS updates.
- Linux package managers are an integral part of the OS environment and update process - it's structured this way even for critical system and kernel patches.
- Aptitude, for example, gets rid of older versions of packages, while Homebrew keeps all previous versions and simply changes the symlink. Cleanup is also automated in Linux package managers, not Homebrew as far as I know.
- Homebrew sometimes pulls up sources to compile software locally, while Linux distros usually pull up binaries (except AUR on Arch or Portage on Gentoo, or Sbopkg on Slackware). While compiling from source is nothing wrong, it can take a lot of time depending on what you are building.
- you have way more packages on any Linux package manager.
And Homebrew tends to be more up to date then most distribution repositories. Especially if I want to have a stable OS.
Linux package managers do not mess with /usr/local as expected in a UNIX compatible OS. Homebrew does.
You can install Homebrew in another directory, it works fine.
Linux package managers are an integral part of the OS environment and update process
Which is bad. Application updates are typically tied to base system package updates. Either you use some stable branch (like Debian) stable and you are stuck with old software. Or you use some rolling release, but then your kernel, X11, Gtk+, or whatever could break.
Decoupling the installation of applications from the base operating system is a good thing.
- Aptitude, for example, gets rid of older versions of packages, while Homebrew keeps all previous versions and simply changes the symlink.
brew cleanup
...and old versions are removed and downloads are cleared. Also, you can add the --cleanup flag to upgrade and it will remove old versions. I prefer Homebrew's approach here, because it's easier to rollback.
While compiling from source is nothing wrong, it can take a lot of time depending on what you are building.
Luckily, Homebrew bottles most software that has long compile times. I have a MacBook with a Core M processor and install times have never been a problem (and I have installed Boost, Rust, and ghc, to name just a few larger things).
> Decoupling the installation of applications from the base operating system is a good thing.
How is that a good thing if an application needs some core OS features that are not available in its current state? Newer libraries become available for all software and benefit from the upgrades. And yeah, sometimes some things break, but it's easy enough to roll back to a previous library version if you need to, instead of bloating the system with multiple versions of different libraries.
> You can install Homebrew in another directory, it works fine.
But it's not its default. How many users change its directory ?
> And Homebrew tends to be more up to date then most distribution repositories. Especially if I want to have a stable OS.
Honestly you can't compete with AUR (Arch) on that level.
I went from Windows to using Ubuntu for years then to Mac only a few years ago. I really disliked the packaged management as well. Homebrew and seeing individual apps give me "an update is available!" pop-ups felt like such a step backwards.
However...what specifically are you wanting to install and update on Mac that a better package manager would significantly help with? I find on Mac I'm rarely installing or updating new packages so it doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would. As long as I can easily install and update Python, Node, Vagrant, Chrome and a few other things I'm happy.
I'd love a laptop that had a long life battery, good screen, good build, was light, ran an open source OS that supported all the software I need etc. but you have to compromise unfortunately and I can compromise on package management.
Being broken is a feature? Changing /usr/local instead of being sane? Leaving old versions of packages lying about instead of cleaning them up? Breaking when the Apple devs wonder if it would be fun to switch things up a bit under the hood without telling anyone?
The one thing I can think of that's a "feature" is that brew compiles locally, instead of pulling down a binary, but even that has some draw backs.
I'm all for product loyalty, but a spade's a spade.
What exactly is wrong with writing to /usr/local? It seems to fall in line with the FHS standard, at least as far as I can tell.
Sometimes older versions of different packages may be dependencies of newer packages. This is a thing that happens with software. When it's not a problem, `brew cleanup` gets rid of old versions.
Most of the time brew does install binaries, they're called Bottles. When it can't find a binary, it compiles locally. Yes this is sometimes annoying but it's not a deal breaker, at least not for me.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Breaking when the Apple devs wonder if it would be fun to switch things up a bit under the hood without telling anyone." This has never happened to me or anyone I know and furthermore Brew is a Unix compliant tool and OS X is a SUS compliant operating system.
Sorry if I'm sounding harsh, it just sounds a little like you're a Linux user who doesn't or possibly hasn't ever used OS X. Brew is not a panacea but it's honestly pretty good. There's also MacPorts if you're used to more old-style tools and a couple other package managers as well. You can even use Nix on OS X.
Better than most OS X programs, which seem to have paths like /Applications/Something.app/Contents/Resources/SomethingElse.app/Contents/Developer/Frameworks/Resources/Something.dylib/Contents/Resources/MacOS/Resources/Frameworks/Something.dylib/Contents/Developer
Case in point, an excerpt from the program Lipo's usage text:
I'm not understanding what is "insane" about installing to /usr/local/Cellar and dropping a symlink in /usr/local/bin. This is the convention on OS X. All tools I have ever seen install to /usr/local.
My point being that human beings writing native desktop and mobile applications, device drivers, games, vertical integrations, plugins for commercial software are developers as well.
Actually I thought that, however in my company we bought 2 MacBook Pro's (Late 2013), we used two different distributors. Actually one (mine) works totally fine, except that the AC Power Adapter is totally shitty (damnit Apple MagSafe cable sucks). However his laptop had some really aweful bugs even that we are running the complete same version of Apple Mac OS X we even installed the image from my computer. At the last month his OS X gave up totally (currently he used Bootcamp so not a big deal), but at the moment he can't even boot os x
This sounds like a troll comment, and maybe it is. But I agree, and for me, switching a lot of my usage from a laptop to a desktop was a solution.
After 5-6 years of adoring a series of macbooks, I finally got fed up with Apple slowly locking down OSX. And if you're not willing to run OSX, then even the macbooks lose a lot of their luster.
If you run a desktop, though, then most everything pretty much works great (even with Linux). You can spec up to a giant monitor or multiple monitors, incredibly powerful graphics, CPUs with lots of cores (or even get two), and 64 or even 128GB RAM, or any combination of the above. Or you can build a compact, low-power system. And you can swap components in and out, buy upgrades, and sell/gift parts you don't need, etc.
I still have the laptop, but I only use that whenever I have to move around (and I use syncthing to keep everything synced continuously between them to make smooth transitions between them).
I was thinking the exact same thing. I recently got Intel NUC boxes for every developer at our office. Linux support out of the box. It's 4 inches square ans easy to take different locations provided you can hook up to screen.
Everyone's got a laptop too, but they can now also VNC or SSH to their Linux machine if they need to work remote. Hell you can VNC into them from a chromebook.
I can't bring my desktop to any environment, therefore it's a non-starter.
I _do_ think it's interesting to think "maybe buying 1 (even 2) desktops is actually better for me than buying 1 laptop", but I cannot bring my desktop to the library. I feel like this comment is on the same level as "don't buy a phone, you can do better with a laptop", which is absurd on a similar level without extra context.
My personal solution is a desktop and a 7-inch tablet. Sure the tablet loses some of the power as compared to a laptop, but huge portability gain. And it fits my use case. I don't write code while on the move. I do that at my desk. For all other use cases like consumption of data or even blogging, the tablet works.
Blogging with an onscreen keyboard is painful, and carrying around tablet + bluetooth keyboard is more cumbersome than a 9" or 11" "ultrabook". The ability to run old binary-only windows/x86 programs comes in handy too.
What do you do for a phone? What works for me is: 6"+ phone that does anything I'd use a 7" tablet for (smartwatch means I don't need to take it out my pocket as often), 11" ultrabook for doing things on the go, 18" "desktop replacement"/"gaming laptop"/"luggable" for home and the occasional longer trip or LAN party. (I do have a desktop/"home server" but these days it's pretty much an oversized NAS).
I used to think that. But then i got the hang of it and now I do most of my writings on my tablet
> What do you do for a phone?
I don't have the use case for an expensive phone or even a data plan. I have a low end smart phone ($70) that I use mostly for just texts and calls. Even my whatsapp is on my tablet (needs manual .apk as playstore won't let you do this).
I am at my desk most of the day (office), so all Internet related things I do on desktop. After work hours I have my tablet at home so don't really need my phone for much else. Have a desktop at home as well.
So you leave the tablet at home? Do you keep your phone on you at home? (not criticizing, just curious).
For me it just meant one less thing to carry (you could see it as less getting rid of the tablet and more buying a tablet that does phone calls so that I don't have to carry a phone around). Public transport especially is where a 6-7" device is really handy, but I don't want to be carrying more than I can fit in my pockets.
I don't know, buying a prebuilt desktop is just as bad of an experience. Building one piece meal from Newegg shouldn't be as convenient as buying something from Dell, it's damn close some days though.
Building a desktop from parts is easier than some Lego sets these days. I think the only possibly tricky part is making sure you apply the thermal paste and install the heat-sink correctly. Everything else you just screw in, snap in, and plug in.
Not necessarily. My budget is pretty finely calibrated at the moment - my desktop is going to remain pretty broken for a while so that I can get a new laptop.
In which dystopia does it cost you $1000's to fly locally, as many would do? I can cross my goddamn continent for $600 return and that's over 4000km away. Going interstate costs $200 return on a good day.
Sure, but the marginal utility of a given flight is far higher than the marginal utility of a second computer. Moreover, I may be paying for my computer but my company may be paying for my flights.
A desktop does nothing more than marginally better for my work use cases; I have one that's literally strictly for video games, and I don't care in the least about making those portable. But I care about going to my client's office and being able to work. Why would a desktop be "better"? If a desktop was sufficiently "better", why would I buy a good laptop? If I have to buy a good laptop, what delta exists, for me, to incentivize buying a good desktop as well? This is of course not an answerable question for you, because you have no idea what I or the literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet who own laptops do with our computers--so why did you then act like your preferences are so universal?
Past that: it costs me three hundred dollars, round-trip, to fly from Logan to Reagan. Where does "thousands" come into it? Why would somebody who occasionally fly for business necessarily have the cash to burn on redundancies? Why would having that money imply that one should?
Laptops do not make desktops redundant. You will not be able to strap on a 6" tower H/S or better to cool down the highest performance processors, let alone be able to pack a battery to run said processor and a HP GPU into any laptop form factor.
It is true that not every work load needs such a capable machine and you should only spend as much as you need.
That being said, I was working with a friend on a recent project and he told me that his MacBook was "burning up" while running through a build script that put together a a handful of Docker containers. My ~5 y/o Desktop barely even hiccuped on the same thing.
I would have thought, given the thrust of my post, that the "for me" with regards to redundancies was completely and wholly implied, no? Of course desktops can do things laptops can't; I've been careful to say nothing at all to the contrary and that's fortunate because that would be a stupid statement. And laptops can do things that desktops can't, too, and whether or not that matters depends wholly on you and your needs. Which is why the sneering you-don't-need-that of the post I originally replied to rustled my jimmies in the first place.
Honestly if you get a Mac you can install rEFInd on it and boot Linux just fine, or run Linux in a VM. The hardware also almost never breaks and especially if you have AppleCare they frequently replace it for free. Yes, it may be difficult to upgrade yourself. That's entirely true and if it's a deal breaker there's not much else around.
You might do well to look at https://puri.sm if you're a Linux user, they seem to make pretty good machines with free software down to the BIOS. There's also always http://minifree.org but they don't really make modern machines.
> You might do well to look at https://puri.sm if you're a Linux user, they seem to make pretty good machines with free software down to the BIOS.
Purism must have great marketing, because I keep seeing this fiction repeated. Their BIOS is not open.
The only big difference between a Purism laptop and other laptops (Acer, Asus, Dell, etc.) is that the CPU has been fused to allow running unsigned firmware. Unfortunately, since we still don't have free firmware to run in place of Intel's, Purism has no present advantage over buying most any laptop and installing Linux yourself.
Purism loudly trumpets their roadmaps[0] and plans[1] so as to suggest a trajectory towards totally free software, but until they achieve it their product is not worth a premium compared to installing Linux on an ultrabook of your choice.
[0] https://puri.sm/posts/roadmap-to-a-completely-free-bios/ Here they outline many things that need to be done. But note the language- "Purism’s goal is to publish a Free Software implementation ... as soon as an implementation is available." But who is responsible for implementing it?
[1] https://puri.sm/road-to-fsf-ryf-endorsement-and-beyond/ Note that the FSF hasn't actually endorsed them yet, although this page is supposed to convince you that they're awful close. Why not wait until they're actually endorsed?
I did buy a Libreboot X200 from minifree, and I am quite happy with it.
There's some value over other laptops, notably that it's tested with Linux as the main target and uses recent hardware that is virtualization friendly (+15" which is a personal requirement for me). Configuring a laptop like that takes a nontrivial amount of time from my experience.
What interests me is that it will run Qubes OS before the 15" ships if that statement is to be trusted. It is one of the more interesting approaches out there and I'll gladly pay a premium for a Qubes laptop.
The BIOS is not free and the laptop won't be free anytime soon due to Intel ME [1]. Unfortunately the compromise for the foreseeable future seems to be freedom vs. more power or hoping for something awesome non-x86.
Agreed. All of the points in this article that are against the PC makers are both valid and quite significant. The Apple ones are not practical problems. Sure you aren't encouraged to open it, but you can. I've replaced virtually every part on virtually every generation of Intel Mac just fine. Screens, memory, batteries, disk drives, etc...
If you don't like the OS and the free software that's included, replace it. You weren't gonna stick with the OEM bloatware Windows install on the Thinkpad anyway.
The author is correct, we need more competition, but for the time being a Mac is truly the best piece of kit you can get. It'll run any OS and doesn't ship with an ssl mitm.
> If you don't like the OS and the free software that's included, replace it. You weren't gonna stick with the OEM bloatware Windows install on the Thinkpad anyway.
Fair point. I've heard mixed reviews from people dual booting Linux on a retina MBP because Ubuntu has bad high DPI support.
> The author is correct, we need more competition, but for the time being a Mac is truly the best piece of kit you can get. It'll run any OS and doesn't ship with an ssl mitm.
Yeah, I think there's an untapped market for a well built standard laptop (not a tablet crossover, not a Chromebook) that's not a Mac!
Don't you get annoying hardware incompatibility when running Linux on Apple hardware? The Arch Linux wiki on Macbook Pro, for example, doesn't suggest running Linux on it is simple.
Well I'll put it this way: I've owned three Windows laptops and one Mac and the Mac has outlasted all three individually, two of them combined, and on track to outlast all three of them combined in the next year.
It also has yet to slow down.
But that's just my anecdotal experience. Think of it what you will.
Same experience here. 1 MBP has outlasted (and is still working like new in most important respects, including battery life) the combined lifetimes of all 3 plastic garbage Windows laptops I've owned before getting this one. That's 5 years and change, still counting.
I'm no Apple fanboy, but the difference in hardware quality is incomparable in my limited experience.
I have exactly opposite experience. What I've bought from Apple ended up breaking or revealing hardware issues after the warranty was over and outside of the series that was entitled for free replacements.
I bought Apple Mouse and found that I have to clean it every week and that to do this I have to break it, because it's not meant to be taken apart for cleaning. And to take it apart I had to deal with two tiny connectors and three very small screws and other paths that are rather hard to handle. Compare with my Logitech mouse: I can easily take it apart with a plain screwdriver and over ten years of everyday use I only had to do it twice.
I tried to install new memory into my old Mac Mini myself (there's no Apple service where I live) and while I'm reasonably savvy with this, I ended up breaking one of the plastic holders and probably broke the sound somehow, because now it is silent. All this was in vain though, because it turned out Macs require some very specific memory chips, usually twice as expensive as normal ones.
The only working piece of Mac hardware I still own is an old Mac Mini that is practically unusable since I've had to upgrade the OS to v10.9 or 10, I forgot which. Everything became so slow I could not believe it. Fortunately, all I need from Mac is to compile code for Mac OS X and I can do this via SSH from my Windows laptop. It certainly works faster this way.
I don't think I'll ever buy anything from Apple unless I absolutely need it for business and that is going to be the cheapest option.
I've had two MBPs since 2007/8 and the first one still works just fine- in fact it works great with upgraded RAM and an SSD. The second is a late 2014... I was on a 2 year cycle with my PC laptops. Batteries, screens, the fact that they were shit to begin with...
" if you have AppleCare they frequently replace it for free" - as long as you have warranty right? I had a issue with motherboard, the official Apple service center near my place quoted a replacement price equal to a new windows laptop with just 6 months additional warranty.
I feel compelled to bring up how cheap, modular and abundant bad-ass second-hand thinkpads are. Not to mention that even the new-generation keyboards are amazing, and put the shallow crap on my macbook pro to shame.
The money you'd spend on even a 'cheap' macbook pro will get you something solidly built with a nice screen that's plenty fast for devlopment work AND money left over for an extra battery or 2 + a brand new fat SSD + 16 GB brand new RAM + a nice dinner (maybe even with a date).
Just be careful not to get one from the awkward phase recently where they didn't have individual clicky-butons and this strange ceramic trackpad.
Most Thinkpads have terrible screens. Many used Thinkpads will need shims or otherwise under keyboards to stop them rattling. They also suffer from a number of issues such as electrical noise (i.e. coil whine),
If you're thinking about a Thinkpad to replace a Macbook Pro, consider:
- X220, X230 with IPS displays. Most aren't. Check for backlight bleed.
- X250 with IPS display, but be mindful that the CPU is actually no faster than the X230 (15W U series vs 28-35W). X240 has weird buttons that don't work, avoid.
- X1 Carbon, 1st or 3rd gen. Avoid 2nd gen as split backspace key will drive you insane if you ever use more than one keyboard. Again, be mindful of U series CPUs.
- T5xx have better displays than T4xx in general. But if you don't want the extra size, then avoid AU Optronics displays on T420 and T430 series, as they are grainy and poor. I believe the Tx50 series has IPS display options, maybe on the s model?
I can confirm on the screen, I was impatient and did not seek out an ips screen on my x230 - it has awful viewing angles.
My wife has an X1 2nd gen and the split backspace is something I must have repressed, good call there. Total shit.
I would also make sure not to think of a used, "does enough" thinkpad as a replacement for a new Macbook Pro any more than picking up an early 2000s Acura would be a replacement for a new Mercedes. It's an alternative, with its own trade-offs that may suit some people, but by no means a direct replacement.
The IBM T60 is great, and its running price is around $50-65. I've been using a similar model for about a year, and with a lightweight Linux distro, my development efficiency is not decreased due to the performance.
I am a bit on the compulsive side, so I have (or had) them all - all the Thinkpads, all the Macs... currently X220, X1 Carbon, a Macbook Air and a Macbook/Retina. I use them all regularly, but I have to say that Thinkpads are not what they used to be. When I'm looking for a laptop to put in my bag I will always reach for the Macbook.
> They display low ratings for their own products on their own website. What.
How is this a complaint? I'd love other companies to post both good and bad reviews without filtering.
> Except that page is deceptive, because that's actually the old X1 Carbon
Don't know about other locations, but here the X1 got a really nice discount once the 2016 model got announced. (also visible in the screenshot) I got it and I'm really happy about it. It has a high res screen (WQHD), so the same as the 2016 model, so that note in the post is also a mistake.
Just a note but while Apple doesn't show ratings for their main lineup of devices (and probably for exactly the reasons mentioned by link) they do show them for accessories and some of them are pretty low rated:
And that's exactly why I wouldn't feature reviews on my website / shop. It may work for Amazon, but I'm pretty certain most people bothering to provide a review for something as simple as a lightning cable had a bad experience. Nobody writes rave reviews for a cable that just works.
Sorry, I don't get this. Two companies sell basically the same thing. Both will give you all the usual marketing crap and slightly hidden actual specs. One will also give you actual opinions of people who aren't hired to take your money away. How is the other one better?
I get the whole apple cult idea and buying a status symbol. But if anyone is going to compare the products, they'll just go to another site and see exactly the same ratings. Allowing ratings on your main page even allows you to respond to some specific issues. (wifi 5G disconnects often -> we published a bios update for that here/link)
I don't have an issue with featuring third party reviews of your own product on your own page. But if you're going to show those, and they're only 3/5 star reviews, the assumed law of self-interestedness would seem to indicate that that was the best you could do... 3/5 stars. You're stating publicly that you can only satisfy your customers to 60%. Why are your standards so low, I would ask?
Store.apple.com ALSO shows reviews, but they're almost all at least 4 stars. That's something to be proud of.
... except for things like batteries, cables, and chargers, which have had 1 star reviews for literally years, and Apple has done nothing to change their design. Hrm.
Plenty of them give 1-star reviews for stuff like... lack of strain relief causing premature failures on cables. But yes, agreed (within reason - $19 for the MagSafe->2 converter is a little ridiculous).
Recently released 5510[1] is looking absolutely awesome, will be picking one up when return to States in April to replace current Precision M4700.
2 X SSD + 32GB memory, high end CPU, decent GPU with 3840 X 2160 screen...will be sorted for next few years. If you NewEgg a couple of 480GB SSDs you're around $2,500 for a beastly machine that weighs under 4 lbs (M4700 is nice but hefty, nearly 7 lbs).
The 5-hr battery life is a huge let down. For most developers, a faster CPU/GPU is just a marginal improvement. But being able to leave home without the charger and not having to look for power sockets is way more compelling.
Which is why I use a Mac, w/OS X. Compared to everything else I've ever tried, it's the only one that I've never had to worry about battery life, literally hours and hours of coding. Also, with two small kids I need to close it and open it all the time, it's practically instant on, and I can pick right back up where I left off, and that's without ever plugging it in.
I also switched back to Safari from Chrome b/c I found Chrome to be a horrendous battery drain.
As much crap as Apple's gotten recently for their software, the attention to battery life is a huge blessing. My MBP is easily worth $ for the time and convenience.
Even if my laptop would have 24h batter life, I just do not want the mental hurdle of anyway always thinking "will it end now, when was the last time it charged, how much is left". Fuck that.
Bring a cable where ever I go, never think of battery life.
btw, Dell Precision M4800 is a beast, evil mean machine, its the best computer I ever had, macbook pros are trash in comparison. The keys are so soft, so finely grooved, so silent, so evenly spaced, the screen color reproduction is best ever, and its heavy, it doesnt feel like a toy to toss around, it sticks on the desk where I put it. It has 3 mouse buttons, on two places. Who can work on a computer without middle click to paste!? To not speak of the internals, i7, 32GB ram and so on.
I love my ThinkPad X220 and highly recommend ThinkPad X series.
I remember the day UPS delivered it. I had a flash drive with a Debian 6 image ready to be installed, didn't even boot up the windows to check if everything was OK.
~2.5 years after using it for about 10 hours per day USB ports started to randomly disconnect and reconnect it was very annoying.
I had no idea that ThinkPad X series has 3 years of warranty and still cannot believe that Lenovo sent someone to my house (3 days after I contacted them!) and changed the motherboard it's basically a brand new laptop. FYI, bought it directly from lenove's outlet website for ~$700.
My thinker is ~4 years old and it's still one of my most beloved objects in this world.
I'm surprised not to see a link to the Librem laptops: https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-13. They're an attempt to solve the problem being posited, AFAICT, though they ship with Linux, not Windows.
I gave $10 to their initial Kickstarter but have never used one.
Purism/Librem looks extremely similar to System76 - they are rebranded laptops from an Asian ODM running a variant of Linux.
None of their marketing materials make reference to better build quality, battery life, or support, just "security, privacy, and freedom". I would love for them to hit all of these boxes, but I am unsure that their hardware will be as free/secure as they claim (see https://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2015/02/23/the-truth-about-p...).
Looking forward to the next Linux Action Show which will have a review of the 15" Librem. Meanwhile Chris talks about the Librem on Linux Unplugged, haven't listened to that one yet.
I purchased a System76 Galago UltraPro (this model does not seem to be available anymore) at the end of 2014. I have been observing System76 for a year or more before I caved in and purchased this. I live in Finland - and they shipped it across. I really love this laptop. I'm also a Mac user (Air, Pro etc) and I expected the build quality to be lower, but it was surprisingly solid. Perhaps their build quality has improved? Also, one of the most common complaints was about their keyboard and it seems they have fixed this - I have had no problems. I love having a Ubuntu portable for my day-to-day devops work over VPN and with everything set up (all my tools, IDE's etc), it's been a pleasure. Their new line up looks impressive (I'm tempted to get another one). But yes, the battery life is really bad - 2-3 hour max or even less if you have IntelliJ or a VM running. So I have placed a power adapter at all my usual work locations :)
Edit : spelling
I had the UltraPro as my work laptop at my last employer, and I despised it. The keyboard was impossible to work with (typos, keys didn't always register), and it felt flimsy and cheap. Not what I would expect from a system that cost as much as a MacBook. The only benefit was the powerful specs.
Avoid the dell developers edition xps13. There's no end key, the trackpad is unusable. Even worse, avoid getting the windows version and installing Linux on that: the trackpad is even less unusable (resets to lower corner intermittently on clicks), and in order to get the wi-fi working I had to recompile the kernel driver telling it that it was FOSS.
For the most part these issues are all fixed in recent kernel versions (> 4.2). The default trackpad driver (synaptics) is indeed buggy, but the newer libinput driver (available in the Ubuntu repos since 15.10) works perfectly. The WiFi card is a bit annoying if you want to build the driver yourself but it works out of the box on stock Ubuntu 15.10.
Admittedly there were some issues early on, but now that issues have all been patched it's an excellent laptop. Fantastic build quality, great battery life, and the display is the best I've seen on a laptop.
There are many independent laptop PC manufacturers in Japan. Panasonic Let's Note (cf. http://panasonic.jp/pc/ ) is known to have excellent battery life while being decent. Laptops from Mouse Computer (cf. http://www.mouse-jp.co.jp/ ) have almost no pre-installed crap. Unfortunately, many of them don't sell outside the country. They're probably too small/thin to Western people. People tend to think a 17-inch laptop "giant" here.
I had a thinkpad running ubuntu for a couple of years, around 2010-2013, but I was forced to switch to a mbp for one simple reason:
About 1/10 of the time when I would be at a coffee shop or something and would try to connect to the wi-fi router, ubuntu simply wouldn't be able to connect. This thinkpad had one of the officially supported wifi chips in it, and it still didn't work.
Lots of forum posts told me to downgrade driver versions or some such thing, I wasted a bunch of time trying many different solutions and nothing ever fixed it.
I'm a web dev, and without internet I can't get anything done- I had to eventually get rid of it. Too bad, because the build quality was nice and it's a much better deal than a mbp, but unreliable internet is a deal-breaker.
(If there had been some way for me to pay someone with driver knowledge to diagnose and patch the driver problem I would have done that!)
Linux wifi can be a bit of a curious beast, but there is some element of the random number generator playing against people here. Last year I was working for a company in a startup colocation. My computer is a desktop and I run linux... and we moved into the colo only to find there was no wired network. Wifi was the only way. I tried a couple of USB wifi cards (yuck) and then just bought a cheap pci one. After that, it worked perfectly. Over the next few months, there were frequently times that all the macbook users in our company would be complaining and asking each other about the wifi being down, meanwhile my card was going rock solid and never missed a beat.
At a previous workplace, the folks on macbooks often complained of wifi dropouts and the folks on windows laptops never did.
But then there are stories like yours that are the other way around. Wifi is a difficult thing to pinpoint, because you can never be sure just what it is that's causing problems; there are so many factors, and it's difficult to really nail down without a lot of time and alternate parts to swap out.
I thought that the hardware drivers were independent of the distro? or at least debian? I lazily assumed hardware support on other distros would be crappier.
I think the big issue here is that if a piece of hardware is listed as officially supported and it still doesn't work after you try to fix it with whatever hacks are suggested, it's not a workable situation.
Technically most drivers will land-up in the main-line kernel at some point. But, for testing whether a "whole" laptop works means making sure all the drivers are working at the right version - it's fiddly. Consequently, what you really care about is whether your distribution supports that hardware version.
b. Getting support for a Linux laptop
In many ways the fact that users had to load Linux themselves in the 90's has been the biggest problem for users now.
If you want a "Linux" laptop you should buy one with Linux preloaded. That way you'll get one with a known working configuration on the hardware and software. If something doesn't work there's a venue for you to get support - the person who sold it to you. Otherwise, if you do have problems you're stuck doing whatever "the internet" tells you to do - half of which will probably be wrong, or it's just happenstance that it worked for them.
That's why buying from a Zareason, System76 or Dell (XPS 13) is important
c. Lenovo certifies but doesn't provide support for Linux
Lenovo does a type of certification for Ubuntu that means it "works for them". But, AFAIK there's no avenue to get support from them if the hardware doesn't work. Generally, it does work (writing this on one now), but you're stuck if you have problems.
I really like my Razer laptop. They basically look like black MacBook Pros. Quality seems very high and I have enjoyed using it for several months. Quad core Cpu and 16 GB of RAM provides plenty of power as a dev box.
Yeah, I'd love to get the new Razer[0] that came out this year, but unfortunately they went the way of "thunderbolt3.0 all the things" which is... not going to work with Linux. At all :(
I'm posting from a Razer Blade Stealth QHD/256 right now on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The USB 3.1 ports function fine, the USB-C charger functions fine. Not attempted to attach a Thunderbolt over USB-C peripheral yet, but it would not be the end of the world if it wasn't functioning since everything but suspend and the camera behave fine.
The real downer is Intel's appalling OpenGL support in their Skylake drivers. Games and certain other applications are pretty much hosed if they expect remotely modern shader support, otherwise it is quite the capable chip.
I've been very happy with my Dell Precision M3800 which has outstanding build quality, easily comparable to my previous MacBook, and runs Ubuntu perfectly. In fact I like it better hardware-wise than the macbooks because it has a much more pleasant keyboard-surround surface, which is not freezing cold like my MacBook, nor does it have that unpleasant vertical front leading edge which in my opinion is uncomfortable when touch typing.
On a separate note though, Lenovo has kinda promised to build a 90's-level robust "retro-Thinkpad", the feedback forums for which were wildly successful.
Agreed. The M3800 workstation is what I chose after a similarly frustrating search to the OP's over a year ago.
It's all subjective, but big pros for me was Win7 (as a business machine this was available over a year ago, at a time when most new laptops were Win8 only), really good Debian support (with VMware I rarely need to boot into Win7 now), 16GB RAM option, two drive bays (mSATA and SATA) so 2TB SSD is obtainable, very high resolution screen (3200x1800).
Cons - gloss screen occasionally frustrating, all that space and they relegated page-up/down and home/end into Fn-accessible keys, short battery life, 15" is perhaps too big (but 13" is untenable as a mobile computer), poor touch-screen support in Debian, hideously expensive when properly kitted out (16GB, after-market two x 1TB drives, best display, etc).
In any case, OP has some good points - with Lenovo breaking everyone's trust (and their keyboards going downhill) options for good GNU/Linux mobile workstations are drastically reduced, and it's a painful process to try to work out what hardware support is actually like before you actually have a new machine in front of you.
yes - I have a fully kitted out one (16GB, 512 ssd, quadro, hidpi etc) and it hit me for around 2000 pounds at the time. Same price as similar MBP. The only issue I've had is that I couldn't get CUDA running properly under any Linux flavour when I also had an external monitor plugged in. Completely frustrating so the quadro 1100 basically goes unused. Other than that, I like the machine a lot. It's superseded now but the new one looks even better. I don't honestly think I'll need to replace this for another couple of years so 4-5 years for this to me makes the initial outlay easy to justify.
I've got an aging Asus Zenbook UX31A ultrabook which is amazingly thin and light, and still pretty decently fast. There was also very little crapware on it (was originally a Win7 machine with Win8 and then Win10 free upgrades).
My one complaint is that the (small, light) power bricks are apparently made of unobtainium. They're near impossible to find, and the ones you can are extraordinarily expensive.
Given my hate for proprietary power adapters - I'm holding out for a USB-C powered replacement.
Asus doesn't appear to be offering anything, but Razer's Blade Stealth[1] looks like it could be a great option.
I've been following the USB-C power delivery for some time. HP has one, but they disabled the ability to charge it from another PCs USB port because they can't trust other manufacturers didn't mess up the standard. Google Pixel, obviously perfect compliance with the spec. I am currently on thinkpad X230 with Debian Linux and W8. haven't booted into W8 for more than a year now. I wish the X260 had USB-C
Same thing here, I just got one off ebay that we'll see if it kills my laptop. My complains about the laptop compared to macbook air:
- Battery life: with Ubuntu I'm getting ~2.5h, which really sucks. I'm still in Ivy Bridge though, I've read that newer ones double the life. Still ridiculously small
- The SSD is also proprietary (but I've read the ones from 2 years to now are standard). Same as Macbook
However, it also has some good advantages:
- Normal keyboard
- 1080p screen
- $900, which was around 700€ at the time I bought it
I looked at the 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Skylake variant of the XPS 13. Amazing looking machine, fits my filter criteria of "has service manual available to mortals" except for one problem - Dell won't sell me one, and neither will Microsoft (Signature Edition). They only seem to be available in the US and even if I was willing to spend the nearly $4000AUD to import one they won't ship to a non-US address.
Several of the best Dell laptops are sold here in Australia with a considerable markup, even allowing for exchange rate. I tried to buy an XPS variant which was considered a 'workstation' for Australian Dell and so had an exorbitant markup which I'm not willing to pay.
If you find the right discount code or sales person (over the phone) you can get the price down. Many employers also have deals with Dell that give you 10-15 percent off.
My issue is that the variant isn't available at all.
I got my XPS 15 from two weeks ago from JB HiFi on Elizabeth street (Melbourne), and $1000 cheaper that what you've been quoted ($2999). It's an awesome machine and everyone in the office is envious - to the point that we'll probably get more soon.
At the moment, the only thing that doesn't work yet in Debian Testing is the wifi... but I'm happy to wait - currently on a Ethernet-to-USB dongle.
Edit: oh, just noticed you were after the 13". It's nice, but I'm pretty damn happy with the 15"
If you would have gotten the Latitude 14 7000 instead of the XPS, then you get the Intel wireless + BT out of the box which always seems to just work.
It also has an option for an insane 10-hour battery; the default is like 6.
Unfortunately Dell never puts the Latitude line front and center on the website, so you have to know to look for them.
Latitude isn't entry-level, it's just the business line. Yes, they have the high end Precision workstation line, but Latitude models typically are built as good as or better than XPS models.
That's OK, I hate the Force trackpad on the newer Macbooks, too. (and it looks like using the Synaptics driver or Windows 10 1522+ helps with your issue)
Dell's website is even worse. I can't just navigate to buy laptop, I have to decide upfront if it's "for work" or "for home". Why does it matter? Will picking one eliminate options? Once I choose, I'm presented with 6 lines - Latitude, Vostro, Inspiron, Precision, XPS, and Chromebook. What's the difference? I guess I have to go read the marketing description for all of them. Who has time for this?
Posting this from an XPS 13. You're right - they look quite nice, and the performance is really there for an ultrabook. Dell has a developer edition that comes with Ubuntu on it out of the box if that's more your style, but Windows 10 is actually not too bad either.
The Precision M3800 is also a great 15" laptop for running Linux (but you can't trust them not to screw up the bundled Ubuntu distro, and need to write some systemd wifi-restart scripts).
Why is a decent website relevant at all? Would it make buying a laptop easier? Sure. But 90% of consumers are going to do almost all of their research off-site and enter the lenovo looking for specific products or categories. Not everyone follows the Apple-Disney ethos of design every consumer facing thing to be flawless.
I haven't done the research but I bet you could see lenovo pages ranking higher for long-tail keywords (specific products) than than more general pages.
I've bought old thinkpad T-series on ebay for ~$300, installed arch, and moved on with my life. I keep most of my relevant data on git repos or a home server. If it dies, which usually happens after a good few years, I just get a new one. Not ideal, and certainly not for everybody, but a reasonable option if it fits your needs.
That's actually a good idea if you don't need too much extra horsepower. You get a good keyboard, an acceptable display, and a lightweight machine for a don't-care-if-you-drop-it price.
Post didn't address - buy apple hardware, run something other than OS X on it.
Seems simple. Sure you are locked to apple hardware issues/resolutions, but Apple today is what the Thinkpad was for years (pre-Lenovo), hardware mostly just works.
Insert arguments of customization, configurability, etc... Most people don't care. Lenovo doesn't deliver as well as IBM did on the Thinkpad line. What's the alternative besides Apple?
I have used five (5) post IBM Thinkpad and the build quality has been absolutely fine and they mostly just work as you put it. And all of them have been reinstalled with Ubuntu at some point.
I recently bought a third generation Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It had a very annoying fan, which made it unusable for me. It wasn't very loud, but it was a high-frequency sound which made it annoying.
Eventually, I got myself a Lenovo Thinkpad T450 instead. So far this T450 has been very good. The fan almost never comes on. However, it should probably be noted that I got the T450 model with the slowest CPU.
For those of us who are sensitive to noise, I suppose it's a good idea to always choose the slowest CPU, if several options are available. I didn't think about that when buying the X1, and bought one of the faster models.
Got the T450s with an i7-5600U, 20GB RAM, 1TB SSD (bought from another vendor and swapped, much cheaper than the 500GB SSD from Lenovo).
Ubuntu 14.04 works like charm.
With an additional battery (the thick one), I can spend a whole day without electricity and the battery can be swapped without switching off the laptop.
It's so far the best ThinkPad that I had until now. I have the impression that at least with this one Lenovo improved a little bit the quality and usability.
The T440s was unusable - I sent it back after two days. The T430s was good, but flimsier and much heavier than the T450s.
The biggest problem was that it didn't have physical buttons above the trackpoint - they very virtual. For trackpoint only users it's unusable, because we often have the thumb on the button for dragging, double clicking etc. Often we have even both thumbs on the buttons. And the virtual buttons didn't work on Linux.
The keyboard was utterly broken (I guess it was the keyboard electronics or firmware), because combination of some three keys didn't work - I remember that RightCtrl + AltGr + H, didn't work, I use this kind of combinations with Virtualbox.
Additionally I have chosen a screen that was reflecting so working more than half an hour made the head hurt. And on their web-site there was no indication which screen had anti-glare.
I guess there were more things that I disliked, but I don't remember any more. Sent it back and bought a used T430s that served me very well.
> Apple has great design, but they sell things that are locked down, both physically and in software. You're not supposed to open them, you're not supposed to replace parts, and if they break you're supposed to take them to your nearest "Genius Bar". Not my style.
It was addressed in the first full paragraph. He's one of the ones that cares.
Personally, I use far too much mainstream software to be able to run Linux as my only OS, and I hate dual-booting. Sometimes I'll run Linux in a VM for convenience, but Linux is so broken with respect to so much hardware, I'm not interested in running it as the main OS.
And running Apple's OS as the top level OS would drive me insane. So unless you're suggesting I try to run Windows 10 on Apple hardware, I agree with the article that the world needs a better hardware options.
Until then I'll stick with my Toshiba. I'm pretty happy with it, all told. I don't see it as "better" in an engineering sense than Apple, but I get an i7 with 16Gb of RAM and a 1Tb SSD for about 1/2 the cost of the equivalent Apple hardware.
And the control key is in the right place (the bottom left corner of the keyboard) ergonomically. That alone kills all Apple hardware for me.
>Personally I prefer using the caps-lock key as control, which can be set in the system preferences on a mac.
Actually that can be set on Windows as well. But my fingers know the bottom-left corner, and Ctrl-ZXCV would be much worse from the caps-lock location. It also messes up the symmetry; I use right-ctrl a lot as well, usually with arrow keys.
Which is another thing the Mac keyboard control gets wrong without plugins. Sigh.
A year or so ago I was having the same dilemma, but then stumbled across Samsung Chronos. Previously I'd only seen the lower end of Samsung laptops and they were predictably crap. But the higher end Chronos' are something special, sleek design, solid build quality and decent specifications. My only quibble is that Samsung lean a little more towards Apple's design than HPs, so accessing components is a little harder work than I'd have liked. But the upside is my Chronos has excellent compatibility with Linux.
I'm very pleased with my laptop and would recommend the Chronos range to others.
I have an Acer laptop I won from a church basket raffle. It only has a 1.5 Ghz AMD Dual core CPU and 3Gigs of RAM and 250 Gig hard drive. So it runs slow at first and takes a time to load everything.
It upgraded to Windows 10 Pro quite well.
It is one of those cheaper laptops and it has an AMD GPU as well. I don't know how user serviceable it is, but it hasn't needed any work yet.
I used to have Ubuntu on it, but my wife didn't like it so I had to put Windows back with it as we share the laptop. So I know it runs Ubuntu very well, and it runs Ubuntu faster than it does Windows.
But PC quality has gone down since they moved things to China. Motherboards, you are lucky if they last three years now. My son had an ATX custom system with an ATX motherboard for the Intel 1150 socket made by ASUS, and it went out and was replaced with an Intel brand motherboard that we had to buy from eBay because the socket is so old they don't make new motherboards for it anymore. Motherboard lasted maybe two years before it blew out. We got a Datavac to clean up dust from it and would replace the CPU resin every six months or so.
It's not really a laptop, really a portable all-in-one desktop with a battery, unless you're talking about that very expensive wood & cork thing. Nice that it's not Intel but you will take a speed hit for that.
Honestly I swear by my Surface Pro 3. Maybe learn to hack some device drivers and get Ubuntu running (better) on a device like this. Some people already have it working:
Surface are great but you are severely limited in screen size. It's great for portability, but if you need a little more screen surface it's not a good choice anymore.
I'm very happy with my Asus UX305F. I have Linux installed, everything except brightness keys works perfectly. Great build quality, mate screen, battery lasts very long. And it was cheaper than most of what people mention here. For CPU intense task, I just use my desktop.
I also own one and can second all you say about it. The only problem is the lack of a backlit keyboard, which might be a show stopper for some people. Other than that it's a very good machine, at a very good price and installing Linux (at least ubuntu, from my experience) is absolutely painless.
One very strong point which not that many discuss here is how awful websites of non-Apple manufacturers are. They are a strong indication of how bad things are organized and developed at those companies, if they can't make a nice website answering all your questions in an attractive manner – how can they expect you to buy stuff from them? Always impressed me.
HP's website should be discussed in UX curricula as best example how to never, ever, under any circumstances including death threats to design a website. From crazy URLs to crazy design to absurd uptime issues to random slowdowns, the inability to use it for anything made me go away from procuring HP products.
Lenovo's is not quite as bad, but the article already highlighted the worst offences. At least I've memorized what to augment my google searches with to find the specific page I need. (I know, I know.)
From the "enterprise" vendors, Dell is the best, because you only need to navigate through a single poorly worded drop-down menu to find somewhere to enter your service tag. Their shop, on the other hand, is absurd (clunky interface and zero configuration options) and seems to solely exist to make you bother a Dell reseller instead (who have better prices, more options, and are, despite email ping-pong, faster).
Dell used to provide abundant configurations. You could get significantly different prices for identical or very similar machines depending on the shop you used, special URLs, promotions or changing components on different models.
Asus was lauded ITT for their website design. I'd disagree because I've been considering a zenbook. I couldn't find the comparison between the models or even the submodels of the UX305. It is pretty though.
Even if you know you want to buy from Lenovo... have you ever tried it?
In Europe that means interacting with Digital River. It's extremely common that your first order will just be binned by their fraud squad, and from there if you persevere you'll be welcomed by even more pain and torture until the laptop eventually arrives and your view of Lenovo is already very negative.
i have a 2014 x1 carbon. solid build, decent battery under linux(5hrs average load). probably will get an x1 next round too. dont get booged down with specs though. newest is outdated in a year, and if you don't get a new laptop every year, arguing specs is pretty moot.
drawbacks - soldered on ram + it's a premium
not super modular.
positive - its solid and nicely designed with a great keyboard (and this is from an otherwise chicklet style hater, but really nice travel)
Go for gaming PCs/laptops.
It's the same with clothes today: you can get the "survival/military" type of outwear which is better in quality and tend to last longer than usual outwear. You will look like a show-off, but in reality it's where the jean companies used to be when they first appeared (they used to be made for gold miners and construction workers).
I would get something like Aorus X3 or Razer Blade Stealth, both feature really good screens and great hardware. Also seem to be well-engineered, unlike those plastic toys from Dell, Lenovo and all the others.
Not sure on the battery life, but check out the HP ZBook G3. We have the G2 at work and it's quite nice. It's got a lot of horsepower and I can go 4-6 hours on battery.
The power brick is heavier than my own little 11 inch personal machine. It is a workstation line, not an ultrabook line.
Do you know who OEMed those ports? I've had a horrible run of luck with crappy USB3 chipsets in desktops - with the same symptoms as you're having. Do you still get the resets in Windows 8.1/10?
Well it's very connected with Intel: 8086 -> 80186 + 80286 -> 80386 -> 80486 you know. USB 3.0 problems could also be mechanical problems with the connector. It's a very high bandwidth signal, about the frequency of standard wifi.
2) ECC , IMHO, is useless on personal laptop. Error rate is quite low that "opportunity cost" is too high.
Except that, MBPr is proper solution. So, let's hope Apple to solve your USB3 port issue. (you can report, by the way)
Next laptop I get for hacking will probably be FreeBSD[1] and I'll be running ZFS so ECC would be a bonus. I understand the debate, but ECC should be standard given how much memory we are putting in these things.
1) well, PC-BSD most probably. I am more an OpenBSD person so I might still go that route.
I wish the author included something about the Intel Management Engine. It runs closed source software with privileged access to your entire machine including support for remote execution, has a history of critical vulnerabilities, and is present on every current Intel chip.
Why isn't there a Linux distribution that's specifically for installing on Macbooks? Given how few Macbook models there are, you could include exactly (and only) the correct drivers. Optimize everything to work perfectly, including things that often require tweaking to get working correctly (WiFi, screen brightness, power settings, etc).
If I knew it would not be an adventure installing Linux on my MBP, I'd pay good money for such a distro!
I am surprised that the author did not consider Dell. I T410i user, but I will not be buying another thinkpad based on the current line up. Plus I have many issues with Linux drivers. Windows is no more reliable and I am forced to move on. Mac is great but the inability to modify is bugging me. I have a MBP also.
Of course, nothing beats a PC but its tough while travelling or when you just want to move around while working.
Micheal Dell making the company private will be good if he planning to focus on making quality hardware like Dell Developer Edition XPS + Project Sputnik, which is an interesting project. But still needs to mature.
So if I have to buy a machine today, I am lost. There is a need for quality machine for developers as we spend long time with it. It needs to be durable, light, matte screen(its very tough to get that now a days), low heat, good keyboard (mechanical like old thinkpads), good driver support for Linux, decent battery. PLUS have a higher score on iFixit. I like the rating of XPS 13 @ https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Dell+XPS+13+Teardown/36157
I'm not sure I get it? Why not just buy a Macbook and install Ubuntu? you get the nicely designed hardware and don't have to run OSX if you don't want to.
I have a rule that a machine has to be with me for atleast 5 years. But around the 3 years, a ram upgrade and hd change is vital to extent the life. My HP Compaq lasted for 8 years before its fell in water. My thinkpad is done 6 yrs and I am current using that. I doubt I get equal life from my soon to be 1 yr mbp without some tweaking and the low score on iFixit is dishearting. iFixit is a great site and I feel it need more attention. I dream is to get a machine with iFixit score of 10.
The headline is misleading. It should say a better laptop. A PC is not equal to a laptop. I was hoping for a in depth article about modern computer design, but instead found a rant about bad websites and lack of well engineered laptops.
Just get a MacBook Pro and skip the aggravation entirely. You pay more for a reason. That reason is that no one else knows how to make a proper laptop anymore.
It would be really cool if someone could do a clean developer book.
Software:
Would love something that comes with a Debian distro installed. Something minimal and clean.
Body:
Brushed metal exterior, hard rubber for hand rests- no sharp edges either (my wrists hate MBP's edges).
Nice big touchpad.
Elegant branding (love the lightbar on the chromebook pixels) but perhaps even more subtle (the new macbooks do a good job of this- eliminating the obnoxious glowing apple). Thin would be good.
Hardware:
500GB SSD would be more than enough.
Don't need GFX card.
8gb ram is more than enough.
Good CPU please.
Fan-less would be amazing.
USB-C would be interesting, at least need a couple of those.
And then a pair of USB-3 ports, and a headphone/mic jack. Maybe an HDMI. It would be good if the internals were simple enough to swap out everything with a small philips head.
MOST IMPORTANT THING:
I can buy replacement parts on your site for everything (screen, keyboard, shell, all of the hardware, touchpad, etc.)
Price:
I would pay anywhere from 1-2k US for this computer. Honestly just to support some healthy competition in the space- I would even go to 2.5k
Some of the big PC vendors have started catching up. I just bought an HP Envy for my father in law, and the hardware is pretty solid, and it had some features I really like(256GB ssd and 1TB hybrid drive, 16gb ram stock, nice display). It is really snappy, and despite his being non technical and wary of moving from Windows 7 to 10, he got on with it really quickly.
I think there is another issue with PC battery life here. Nothing heats up/drains my macbook pro's battery life quicker than windows 10. I have tried various power settings, but nothing ever quite "fixes" it. I have had to do the following "tweaks" to improve battery performance of Windows 10:
1)Disable Cortana(at least as much as you are able to)
2)remove this "phone companion" app that seems to reinstall with every new update
3)adjust power management which noticeably slows performance and or annoyingly shuts down the screen.
4)randomly go in and kill rogue battery robbing processes
Mac OS seems to seamlessly handle power management regardless of what Im doing- including multitrack audio recording/processing. I never hear the fan while running OSX only. But without fail my laptop heats up and the fan starts cranking while I have Windows running. I am getting closer to not ever needing to run windows, but I still do some .NET work and work with Sql Server. For me, its a huge turn off to hear a laptop constantly fighting to stay cool. In fact this is the major flaw I saw with the HP laptop I got my father in law. It would get hot and crank the fan. In my anecdotal opinion, windows is a poor laptop OS, and I don't see how there could be a better pc/laptop/tablet until Microsoft figures out how to manage power. I don't have a use case for Linux, so things could be better there, but Linux is still relegated to niche users for the most part in laptops.
I'm quite happy with my Asus X200M. It's compact, lightweight, and was pretty cheap, though I think it's discontinued now. It's small enough to stuff into a bag, in my bike basket, and cheap enough that I don't worry too much about damaging it.
I try to be platform-independent as much as possible. My "operating system" is Jupyter/Python. Knowing that I could switch to Ubuntu in a jiffy makes Windows seem much less annoying.
You should get a dell latitude--woot periodically has excellent deals on "last-year's models", brand-new with 3 years warranty. They are reliable, modifiable, and get excellent battery life. They come pre-installed with Windows Professional, with minimal bloatware--but forget about it. Scrub off the Windoze crap, install Linux, and you will have an awesome little machine.
Dell Latitude for the win. I have a E6410 and I am very happy with it. Long battery life, rugged, good build. A little heavy, but that never bothered me. And I get all kinds of curious looks since it looks so different. :)
Yep, just picked up an e6220 for €200 (with a new 6 cell battery) - runs for ~7.5 hours with MX-15 (Debian without systemd) and TLP installed. Military-grade ruggedness and a nice keyboard, too.
The new ThinkPads are indeed awful, get the X220 aka the last good one. That should do you well until something worthwhile comes to replace it (maybe HP?)
- Last old-style ThinkPad with great build quality
- Last one with the classic keyboard
- Small form factor
- Sandy bridge i7, still kicks butt because it's not undervolted (check the benchmarks)
- up to 16 GB memory
- 10 hours of battery with a new 9-cell battery (+ tlp package on linux)
I was a big ThinkPad guy until a few years ago, and I get why you recommend the X220...agree it's "the last good one." But can you explain what the "tlp package" does?
Has the quality of laptops really been decreasing or are we just remembering "the old days" with nostalgia? Seems like a perfect question that could be easily answered with proper research.
My guess: if you're prepared to pay several thousand you can still buy quality modern laptops today (like ThinkPad P70.) Or do it the cheap way: buy old hardware that's known for its reliability like used ThinkPads (currently using a ThinkPad T520 myself.) There's a good guide here for choosing a ThinkPad model if you're a fan of solid laptops that will last: https://wiki.installgentoo.com/images/8/8f/Tpg140901.png -- it's a bit memey but has solid advice.
That's not even remotely true. I am posting on a Razer Blade Stealth QHD/256 right now running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
This thing has only been in my possession since the first of the month and already I have experienced the following:
- The trackpad is poorly constructed and is prone to randomly sticking when clicked. The drivers on both Windows and Linux also do not remotely have the level of work pumped into them that the OS X trackpad drivers had, so there's a lot of false inputs and finicky behavior.
- The chassis is not at all a proper unibody construction and already the bottom plate on the lower right of the machine is starting to separate as it throws a screw I need to keep tightening. The plate wobbles if I squeeze the lower-right corner.
- The fans like to buzz and whine in a very obnoxious way due to poor construction, they rattle against things.
This is a pretty okay laptop and overall I do not regret the purchase yet, but do not kid yourself for a second thinking that Razer builds things on the level quality Apple does.
> Thin and light as the Macbook
This also isn't true. The 2015 MacBook I just replaced with the Razer Blade Stealth is both smaller and lighter.
* 2015 MacBook: 11.04" x 7.74" x 0.52" @ 2.03 lbs
* Razer Blade Stealth: 12.6" x 8.1" x 0.52" @ 2.75 lbs
The Stealth actually feels a lot heavier after using the MacBook solidly for a year and I keep thinking it weighs as much as an older MacBook Pro I used to carry.
ALSO: This isn't even going into what a fucking NIGHTMARE it is dealing with the RazerZone store and its almost total absence of support when something goes wrong as they limit the means of contacting them. I'm still waiting for them to refund me for the second Stealth they shipped (and charged me for) by accident.
Isn't that kind of like saying that Apples phone chargers and cords are always failing/breaking so Apple has bad build quality on all of their products?
I think if Google decided to sell the Chromebook Pixel (2015) with Linux instead of ChromeOS, OP, I, and a horde of other developers would all buy it.
In reality, it doesn't seem very easy to install Linux on the 2015 Pixel or any other Chromebook without either remembering to press Ctrl+D on each boot or by going through a significant set of hoops.
I think the question of the parent was if you could install Linux as you can with a normal PC (just by plugging an installation CD or USB drive), and the answer would be: "no you can't, unless you go through some hoops".
It's like installing Mac OSX on a PC, or Linux on a Mac: you can, but not easily and not in a way that is supported by the manufacturer.
You just have to scroll down in the link to see that there are several limitations that you wouldn't have with an OS that is supported natively.
Well, he mentioned developers and I'd like to think for the majority of developers those few extra steps wouldn't present a major challenge. Also the hardware is 100% supported when using a linux kernel optimized for pixel - https://github.com/raphael/linux-samus.
I use a Chromebook Pixel as my daily driver, and after wrestling with issues (e.g. no sound) I just went back to Chrome OS. You can see that others are having similar problems with that kernel: https://github.com/raphael/linux-samus/issues
I want the Pixel for its USB C charging capabilities. the biggest reason I don't get one is because while I have no regrets with wiping windows, I have FOMO about wiping ChromeOS.
if the SSD weren't only 64GB... I could put Debian and chrome OS on it.
I regret mine. Keyboard is missing so many keys, speakers are garbage, getting Debian to support the hardware was nontrivial and stuff continues to break. So few ports. And if it's plugged in when the battery gets to full charge, it will often emit a high-pitched whine until I unplug it, meaning I can't leave it sitting plugged-in with full battery (perhaps a defective unit? but who knows if that's due to running Linux instead of ChromeOS?).
I'm shopping around for a new laptop to replace it, that will be more linux-hacker friendly (more keyboard keys, touchpad with real buttons, etc.)
I second that. I've got a 2015 Pixel LS and running vanilla Ubuntu (wiped out ChromeOS) with kernel 4.4 and it's a beast. Best laptop setup I've ever had.
I too came to the same conclusion that the article did quite some time ago. Apple just owns on build quality.
I am Longtime Lenovo + Linux user that recently switched to Mac and as much I really hate OSX UI the build quality of apple is worth it (that and skype sort of works better on mac than Linux).
The thing that shocks me with my new Mac is how incredibly unstable OSX is at times (El Capitan and previous version). You would think given such hardware control my mac would be more stable than my parents Windows 10 Lenovo Yoga or even Linux on crappy hardware but lately it has not been the case for me.
My real issue is finding a decent 13inch laptop that allows 2x4K Monitors at 60hz via simple Docking.
The Surface Book failed in that regard and I haven't gotten confirmation from Dell that the TB 15 Dock will support it.
In the 15 inch Category there is only the HP Zbook with its gorgeous 4 Thunderbolt Ports that allow it. But that's Desktop Replacement, not a portable 13 incher.
Currently I drive 2 2560x1440 Monitors on my Surface Pro 2, one via MiniDp and one via USB3 and am kinda happy with it, I just need more ram... But upgrading and then once again hitting the limits so soon would give me buyers remorse quick.
I have a lenovo t450 with Ubuntu and I have 3 monitors working from the dock. Don't know if it supports 4k or not, but it should, the dock has two display ports.
Meh, the author wants a better computer, but isn't willing to spend for it. The author runs linux, so the crapware from lenovo shouldn't matter, and the lenovo thinkpad line have excellent build quality (stay away from the ideapads). But the author complains that the cheap end of X1 town isn't retina. Sure, for the same price, a macbook air does retina, but that low-end X1 carbon has other features that the air does not have.
So by 'better PC', the author really means 'cheap PC filled with top-end gizmos and a top-end build quality'.
> "they sell things that are locked down, both physically and in software"
Well, I can understand the physically part, but fortunately you can solve it with money, you just have to pay for your hardware upfront, it is expensive, but I work on my MacBook Pro > 9hrs a day. It's four years old now and doesn't need replacement yet, it's doing fine, the battery is doing fine.
Most people only look at how much an item costs at the time of purchase, but a fairer comparison would include the span of time that your device is sufficient and you don't need replacement.
I use my laptop for my job, the amount of money I make with a laptop outweighs the cost of a laptop by far. Most professionals in their job invest in good material, why would it be different in IT?
As for the software part, the software that Apple provides is astonishing to me. For example wiping a HD multiple times is just a setting, in windows you can start looking for freeware for doing the same thing. It comes with so many possibilities out of the box, I can't think of anything that I would want to do that I can't do now.
Just yesterday I sat next to a guy running Ubuntu and I couldn't believe what I saw, when he tried to search his hard drive he typed in his search parameters.. but then the first thing that popped up were shopping items, faster than the items present on his hard drive... Really?!?
A MacBook pro isn't perfect and it is costly but it's simply the best option for me now.
So he says there are some good computers out there (like the Lenovo Carbon X1), but due to his bad luck and timing on his part it's a bad choice for another month.
If you just wipe Windows clean on those Lenovos and use them for Linux (Fedora runs great on them!) you wont have to worry about those Superfish issues and everything else plaguing the world of windows-users.
I can see why you would decide not to want to reward Lenovo with your money after those incidents, but it's still some of the best you are going to get.
Not only that, all desktop OSes are regressing. Well, windows 10 is an improvement over the massive shitstorm of Windows 8 where Microsoft apparently tried to commit corporate suicide.
Ubuntu and desktop linux continue to be extremely frustrating. I tried Suse, Ubuntu, and Mint in the last box I built for Xmas, and Ubuntu was the only one that installed cleanly, a marked improvement from the previous couple releases.
OSX is hardware-locked and it has many many problems and frustrations, especially if you are used to key bindings from the PC / Linux realm.
Desktop/laptop is steadily dying. We are all basically waiting on a hybrid of Android to take over desktop.
I continue to be mystified as to why Google does not pursue a desktop Linux operating system that's good. (aka not ChromeOS). It's a gigantic market to take over that Microsoft was begging someone to take from them throughout the Windows 8 debacle. With an unnoticeable hit to their bottom line they could assemble a team that would clean up Crossoffice, merge with Android, make tons of money from Android app store, get search/voice search/services integration at the OS...
ChromeOS could/should be this, but either it's not properly funded to handle the Windows interoperability (put/fund WINE on steroids) more seamlessly or doesn't have very good people on it.
I agree with the content, but not necessarily with the headline.
If you need a Desktop PC the options are plenty, you can pick from a large set of components and build pretty much what you want, from decent formfactor to big towers with powerful and good hardware.
For high quality notebooks however I came to the same conclusion as the author. I wanted to buy a new personal notebook last year, and actually did not want to get a Macbook, as I am not that into Apple and OSX. But I could not really find an alternative, even in the same (high) price region, so I got a MBP13 and I'm happy with it. For the windows machines either the build quality is way lower, battery life is lower, screen resolution is lower, input devices suck or the price tag is even higher (X1 Carbon, XPS13. Surface book too, but it wasn't available in germany anyway).
Another thing that influenced my decision heavily was the Touchpad. On the MBP it works beautifully, and in combination gesture features of the OS it makes working on such a small screen and without an external mouse much more pleasant. On the windows machines the touchpad response is mostly somewhere between bad and mediocre, and there's no swipe between workspaces and such stuff.
The author thinks apple.com is the pinnacle of web design, values form over function as he prefers the x1 carbon, gets overwhelmed when having too many choices, dislikes seeing user reviews on a product site and probably lies on the ground on a fetal position at the thought of replacing a hard drive by himself.
He is exactly the kind of person Apple makes products for. Just get a Macbook already.
You missed the part about hardware locking and replaceable parts. Because of that, I will never ever buy anything from Apple, it's a big deal for me to replace RAM and HDD whenever I want, for whatever I want. I used to have mac book running Getnoo Linux, until I wanted to add new RAM... I bought new Dell. I have one SSD and one HDD in my laptop (because I don't need cdrom in 2016), I removed it and put HDD there and 4x USBs.
Thanks for the post. I think, we need more of these. I too have been feeling that the companies in a sense "aren't even trying" to show some care and respect for a customer. We agree to pay money for "hardware", they accustomed to "assemble together" some electronic components. There's no inspiration, no consideration, no ambition to provide experience that lasts (despite that hardware is fast-to-become-obsolete, the brand image and the impression you leave can be relevant for a much longer time).
For me personally the only decent machine out there is MacBook Air. It does not make false promises about performance (like other laptops do, only to fail miserably later).
My ideal machine would be lightweight plastic with mechanic keyboard. Performance is not really critical. Something like Surface pro with 14 inch display and mechanical keyboard (touch-screen is not necessary; good, macbook-like touchpad is) would do.
I wish I could buy laptops that are not built in China. The Chinese army has zero scruples with regards to hacking. The hack where they got all US federal employees' info was an act of war as far as I'm concerned. I just don't see any reason why they would not be putting in backdoors into all the computers they manufacture.
No offense, but the author has a first world problem. The notebook should be functional - powerful, lightweight, long lasting, not necessarily pretty. It is not an exhibit, it's a tool. Why does he need a good web page to buy it???
That said, he can grab a Chromebook and install a full-blown Linux distro on it.
The article ignores the Surface Book (thought it does mention the Surface itself), Razer Blade and Dell XPS lines which are all pretty renowned for their quality. OEMs make some crappy PCs, no doubt...but it has gotten a lot better in the past 2 years. HP's Spectre is also a really nice device.
I'm quite happy with my 11" Macbook from 2012, she's quite the lil devil still. I stay on Yosemite and my machine is strong enough for me. If the author requires power, he/she could build a decent Xeon desktop and keep it at home, then just remote into it for intensive development. I keep a backup Core 2 Duo at my appt for work and play and it's still packing enough of a punch to do most of my work (only bottleneck is latency).
To be honest, sometimes I even think my MBA is unnecessary and contemplate a cheap Asus Eee PC netbook because I live in the command line (and consequently don't need to load up heavy IDEs). However, I understand if that approach is too much work for most people who just want a simple solution without all the fuss, but where's the fun in that?
This idea that laptops should be tinker able is just so weird to me. No laptop is really tinker able. The best you can do is replace RAM and HDD. Motherboards, battery modules, etc. are all proprietary in these things and usually anything beyond those three is non-trivial to replace.
Call me crazy but I'd rather just have a machine that's specced right out of the box, and with a battery module that I never need to replace.
My 2012 15" Retina MacBook is still going strong over 3.5 years later. Not only that but the machine has been a pleasure to use every day.
It's true there should be alternatives to Apple products out there that are similar build quality, but I have yet to find them. Some of my coworkers are hard line anti-Apple and their laptops are all really poorly made, IMHO.
Sorry in advance for taking the headline and talking about something else.
What I want is a real personal computer that can fit in my pocket. A mobile device that is extremely open and very easy to hack on. I would like it to expose sensory readings in a UI and then provide a simple if-this-then-that UI that would allow me to teach daemons to respond to events that occur during the day and additionally support scripting for more complex automations. And once this device exists I'd like open protocols to exist to help other I/O devices to expose themselves to it.
Simply put I'd like devices to start offering extra senses to us beyond the five we were born with, and for these to be unencumbered from walled gardens.
I had this same problem almost exactly a year ago. I now have a Surface Pro 3.
I wanted a decent CPU, high res screen, , good build, long battery life and small chassis. Then I chose whichever was cheapest which met those criteria.
Does anyone have experience with the Tuxedo Computers - http://www.tuxedocomputers.com ? They have just recently released an interesting 13.3" InfinityBook.
Was about to post the same link. I was just recently introduced to them. Haven't seen or used one.
But there is one user review (small one though) at the very bottom of the page.
Roughly translated: "Very good build quality, light and nice design. Everything works out of the box. Great and nice customer service. Thanks again!"
Apple has great design, but they sell things that are locked down, both physically and in software. You're not supposed to open them, you're not supposed to replace parts, and if they break you're supposed to take them to your nearest "Genius Bar". Not my style."
I agree with the article. I switched to Apple because the OS & hardware were superior, but they aren't anymore. Hardware vendors are catching up and Windows 10 is actually not that bad. OS X is actually getting worse.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm still using a T61 because I don't really like any of the models that succeeded it. The new keyboard, the reduced keyboard layout, the huge touchpad (which I disable anyway) with those reduced buttons, small screen resolutions compared to my 1400x1050 (unless you pay for the ultra expensive display panel or get)...it's just not attractive anymore. And as the author said, thinkpads are still among the best laptops :/ I'd be willing to throw some money at lenovo for a laptop I want to have but it looks like they're no longer producing those :(
I've been happy with the first ZBook. 1080p, SDD or spinning disks, you can add replace the DVD with another disk, up to 32 GB RAM, apparently you can replace the CPU and the NVIDIA card too. The ZBook G2 specs are even better.
The only minus on your list would be the battery. It can reach maybe 4 hours (Linux) but not more. I knew that and it's not a problem, there is always a power plug nearby where I work.
The only minus in my list was the keyboard, because it has a number pad, but the keys are excellent. It's also definitely not a 1 kg laptop and the power brick is as heavy as a brick, but I don't care much.
Their desktops are great, we use them for all of our dev boxes. Their laptops are basically branded Clevos, they're plasticky and feel like they were duct taped together. This is pretty typical of most of the "Linux Laptop" vendors.
As someone who owns and works on the exact same machine mentioned in the article (Galago Ultra Pro), I agree. It's build quality isn't that great and the non-computing hardware is sub-par (battery, fans, bezel, touchpad...).
I just wish there was a real alternative to the 13" Air.
I will not buy System76 laptops again because of the build quality. I had one, and an minor accident with it was a disaster. The computer wouldn't start after.
I have a MacBook Pro for work and a Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu (which I bought on the day the System76 failed) on it. Generally, I like the latter.
I believe it is a rebranded Clevo, which is custom-built for you. Lately, I changed the WiFi card without any issue. You can also change the SSD if you want, same for the RAM. The best parts are: Build quality, price (you don't pay for the OS, only if you want to and you get to pay for parts you want), keyboard is nice, lightweight and screen is great.
I've been buying Lenovo's for about 6 years and are mostly happy. I always buy a bare-bones version and add my own memory and SSD and do a clean OS install (after updating all firmware). A "new machine" is a 20 hour minimum time commitment so I don't do it more frequently than necessary. I always overlap two machines so I have backup.
I am due for an upgrade and was looking at the T460p. But I just read about the bad decisions Lenovo made regarding internal storage so now I am looking for something else.
Lenovo only inherited the name from IBM. It's not the same as it used to be... I really wish the author of the post looked beyond one or two laptops given the title he used for his writeup.
I'm finding $300 Acer laptop (or netbook, one of their Inspire line) loaded with Linux surprisingly usable. (It was preloaded with Linpus, but I've replaced with my own.) At 1.10 GHz Dual-Core, 4GB RAM, it's a bit slow at times, but as long as I'm not running intensive process on it, it's very usable on the go machine. (Mainly, TeX, translations, web stuff, browsing, and occasional spreadsheet, is what I do on the machine.) I do have a desktop machine for things that requires more power.
Well, I did add that I do have a desktop that I use for more demanding tasks.
I guess it's the matter of doing the right thing on right machines.
Though, I do understand there are plenty of people out there who requires a laptop with decent capabilities. A $300 machine that "surprisingly usable" can be a good compromise in some use cases.
I have a Lenovo X1 carbon and I re-installed Windows to remove all the Lenovo crapware after I bought it. Windows is easy to download and install now. It will save your license, but blow away everything else. It only takes about 30-45 minutes. But I do agree, this is totally ridiculous that you have to do this.
I did buy an MS Surface and it was by far the best PC experience I ever had, however they don't make a keyboard cover with a touch-stick, that's the only reason I went back to a ThinkPad.
Wasn't there ab article about Lenovo getting around this solution? I did the same thing with my y40. Came with an absurd amount of bullshit, but overall its a great laptop.
A good anecdote but I disagree with the notion that Surface is not a laptop but a tablet. I use my Surface Pro 4 i5 as a laptop and it's a pretty good one at that.
I have a Toshiba p835-z370. It's a few years old but it still runs like a champ and all the hardware is supported on Ubuntu. Toshiba build quality is pretty good.
Aha! These seemed comparable with the Asus Zenbooks that came out at the same time. I've only seen one z370 in the wild though - what's the battery life like under Ubuntu?
I am stuck with Win 7 world. Microsoft turned against consumer by serving them subscription based products Office365 and Windows 10 that also spy on consumers - no thank you! They force others to over only Win10 ready notebooks, with locked down UEFI BIOS and crypto module - try to boot Linux, good luck.
What about Vaios? The specs on it are impressive (WQHD, 16GB memory, 20h+ battery life) with a sleek build. Wondering if it goes along well with linux...
I have a Vaio Pro 13, one of the last Sony models. I bought it over two years ago now. It works very well under Linux. Initially there was a small issue with CPU frequency scaling because it was basically the first Haswell ultrabook, and I had to patch and compile my own kernel to work around it, but that was mainlined after one or two months. I got a version without a touchscreen and I consider it one of the best ultrabooks available, even today.
Reagarding the newer models, I have no feedback yet but I hope they will be fully supported, if not at the time of release then a few months later at most.
True, there should something to rival Apple in the laptop arena.
Unfortunately there isn't. Apple just makes hardware that's so sexy and intuitive to use. Example, Apple TV. I never used one before but I demo'd one at Best Buy the other day and in 10 seconds I knew how to operate it. Apple does this best, their earnings prove that.
Just buy a Macbook Air, sturdy as hell, long battery life, and great Unix-enough-y OS.
Hell, even now the possibly best laptop, the Dell XPS with that sexy edgeless screen, still has a shitty ass touchpad compared to even a 7 year old MBP. And let's not get started on the fact that the best quality control of PCs is so shit that you're almost guaranteed to have regrets. There is simply nothing that even comes close to Apple's build quality. You can use a 5 yo MBP and it still run just as good as a new PC laptop for all the 80% of task you would need it for. It's really pretty damn amazing.
It's still at the mercy of Apple, Intel and all the other opaque firmware vendors and microcode updates. Plus, it's not nearly UNIX enough, the damn linker doesnt do linker scripts so good luck developing non-xnu kernels without compiling under something else. And the sources aren't always released in a timely manner. Why is Apple still not open sourcing more of the OS?
In the future, I'd like to be able to choose a design of laptop or tablet online, modify it, choose an open cpu core and so on and create an entire, beautiful computer at home. Not everyone will want to do that, but I think enough people will realize open source hw is the future especially in terms of supply-chain security and reducing or adding features. (More broadly: How cool would it be to have company-specific devices, designed and built just for them?)
I've repaired it from severe rain damage, and it's generally easy to disassemble and replace the parts to.
it's got a reasonably nice screen, nice build quality, and reasonably good performance, though you cant change out the wifi chip, nor the ram The webasite also said about enough to do well, and the windows install it came with just had some acer junk on it.
I was in this situation , I've moved away from osx a month ago i couldn't be happier.
I've moved from a macbook pro retina to a Lenovo x250/i5/8GB/HD screen, Running xubuntu 15.10 ... most bits work (DualScreen/VPN/NiceRDPapp(Remmina)/etc etc)
I've had major issues with Webex (need to have a jre 32bit running on a 64 bit os) but other than that all good!
I went through a similar process recently after getting fed up with Apple's direction. I ended up getting a Surface Pro 4. The build quality seems good, battery is ok. The software/drivers are terrible - it rarely wakes up from sleep, and I don't get much delight from using Windows. Hoping Linux support improves in the near future.
What do you mean by drivers are terrible?
Do some components fail randomly in Windows? Or do you mean they just don't work with Linux?
Just asking because I'm planning to buy a Surface Pro
There seems to be something up with the display driver in Windows relating to sleep. Sometimes after I login, Windows proudly tells me it's recovered from a display driver problem. Other times the screen just won't turn on (the keyboard lights come on, and the IR light that Hello uses comes on), so I have to keep restarting the machine. I'm guessing this will get fixed eventually though. Only seems to happen after disconnecting from the charger.
Issues with drivers have affected display, charging hibernation on surface devices. Other skylake laptops have seen similar problems so they may share the same root cause.
For those who don't know much about non-Apple PCs:
The only laptops worth considering are the enterprise lines from dell hp, and lenovo. They are night and day differences from the consumer products, because they are usually entirely separate divisions. Within this, certain lines are better than others. For example, with lenovo I would only really consider a t-series, w-series, or x-series. The p-series looks promising, but that just came out, so maybe don't rush into that if you want to reduce risk.
If the laptop doesn't have the RAM or harddrive soldered on, it's probably cheaper to buy from newegg and install an upgrade yourself than it is to upgrade through the product configurator. This does not void the warranty. The support pages from the website have explicit instruction manuals for doing this yourself as well as full disassembly instructions.
The enterprise laptops have support pages with crapware free drivers. If you don't feel like surgically removing crapware from a new installation, just nuke it from space and install the OS fresh. Heck, most time you don't even need to install those drivers, because the base windows drivers are fine for most things (there's probably a performance bump to using the drivers, and some things, like the fingerprint reader, will need a driver), so you could just skip the driver install.
Since these are enterprise laptops, you can still get 7 and 8 preinstalled (thank god for corporate compliance policies, am i right?! ;). MS call it "downgrade rights". Much like Apple, the best MS OS is the one released in 2009 (windows 7), so splurge for the "downgrade" to it if it's offered for the laptop you want.
If you care inordinately about crapware and don't want to spend time nuking a fresh laptop, then buy a laptop (again only enterprise laptops from lenovo, hp, and dell) from microsoft directly, since those don't come with spyware: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store?SiteID=msusa&Locale=en_U...
You can also get warranties that last much longer than 2 years (some go up to 5), cover accidental damage, or cover the battery, but the specific policies offered depend on which company you go with. I have taken advantage of the lenovo accidental damage warranty a few times, and it was great. The default warranty requires you to ship the laptop off (lenovo overnights me a box with a prepaid overnight shipping label inside it so all I have to do is pack my laptop and drop it at the UPS store) and then they return it within a week, but you can also get an onsite repair warranty where someone will come to you to fix the laptop.
Trust me, it's worth dealing with a website that isn't as shiny as apple's website.
Lenovo T-series and W-series both had trash tier track pads last time I used either of them. Literally un-fucking-usable. For the first time in my life I got a tiny usb mouse to carry with me. My cardiologist wouldn't stop complaining about my blood pressure. Writing haskell should not be easier than right clicking.
Maybe they're different now, but if not, I mean, great scott that's terrible.
The keyboards were about as good as a macbook, which was nice.
I like and use Apple gear but I dont like untinkerable black boxes or opaque firmwares.
I think we need a beautiful, functional servers,computer, handheld and wearables with opensource desktop lithography and 3d material deposition. It would take about $20 million and the right people to get going, but it could be hw UNIX -> Linux.
Macbook Pro is best windows pc - runs perfectly via bootcamp.
So much better than slower flackier virtual options - i tried all of them - fast reboot so easy to switch.
I need windows for 64 bit Excel 2016 much fatser than mac 32 bit only.
2 diplay ports also great- drives 2 32 inch high res monitors perfectly.
Currently my biggest problem with apple machines is the low amount of storage, and in the case of the news iMacs and Macbooks, how costly and IMPOSSIBLE to replace them are.
I wish apple forget spinning hardrives, go full on SSD and ship with > 512 GB
Yup. I agree. We need a good PC with the form factor of Mac mini but without Mac OS. Only option I have is to buy a Mac mini and install Ubuntu on that. Or buy Intel mini PC (Intel NUC). Both options are quite expensive, at least in India.
How much RAM do you need for gaming? However, I have 8GB RAM but the game hardly takes 4GB for functioning. One of my friends has 32 GB RAM but I think he is more paying for it. Is more than 8GB RAM needed for gaming?
For me, that better PC is the Chromebook Pixel (2015), of course, running linux instead of the crippled Chrome OS. It's my main dev machine and I use it more than the MBP that I got @ work.
This is why I don't buy laptop computers... they are still overpriced toys. I mean, on a theoretical level, the idea of a mobile computer is appealing, but in practice they all suck very badly.
I had a Surface Book but sent it back as it is plagued with problems still. Just have a quick Google for issues and you will find some real show-stoppers, such a shame as it is a beautiful machine.
If I were getting a new laptop right now, I'd get the Dell XPS 13 (2015). I get the post's sentiment though, but what really sucks IMO is not the PC/laptop market but mobile...
I used an X1 Carbon for years - it's a sweet machine. If you get one, make sure you don't order the generation with the touch-pad control bar, because it craps out.
The Lenovo website is one of the worst websites I've ever visited. For instance, if you try to filter laptops by memory, and tick the 16GB box, you won't find any Thinkpads. Only Yoga crap. Even though the X250 can ship with 16GB... Bunch of wankers are so incompetent it's a miracle they sell any laptops at all.
i'm using a lenovo W540 and am genuinely happy. 32GB RAM, SSD + HDD, old-style keyboard. the only downside is screen resolution of 1920x1080. that's perhaps the only reason why i'm going to replace it
10.4 took until 10.4.11 to be stable. Snow Leopards wasn't great out of the box either. Marco's original post was nerd rage and the new mDNS solution. Was it annoying? Yes. Is it symptomatic of a larger issue? Hardly. I think, like may others, you are looking at this with extremely rosey glasses, especially given the comparison to Linux desktops, which in my experience (around 15 years) is still not as reliable as OS X out of the box or intuitive; too many desktops trying to do too many things too differently. Of course YMMV, but I'd argue it was likely due to confirmation bias.
I stand by the fact that this is nothing more than a meme.
Maybe I have the ole' tinted glasses a la Rose, but I don't remember any really bad bugs with 10.4. Spotlight was slow, iTunes broke yet again, but in general it seemed to work OK. Maybe because I was on a PPC machine back then?
I won't even try to defend Linux desktops, but I definitely notice just as many day to day issue with OS X than I did in the past, and really, I notice a lot more little bugs that really affect me. Like my multi monitor setup menu items disappear. And sometimes the windows don't render themselves correctly. Finder and smb etc..
Well, there was also the Lion period where you literally couldn't use fullscreen and multi displays... despite previous versions supporting multiple displays perfectly. Took them until Mavericks to sort that out.
I've had lots of issues with Mail.app recently too. Especially with older IMAP servers. Then there are also issues with the systemwide accounts.. ugh. I've literally filed over 100 bugs in Radar in the past 2 years vs a handful before that.
Before Apple started making really amazing machines, I used to be a big fan of the T and X series ThinkPads. But Lenovo haven't impressed me in a long time.
Lots of niggly stupid issues - like terrible audio quality, or poor LCDs, or poor build quality requiring stuff like shims under keyboards to stop them rattling (seriously?!). Crappy touchpads. Dumb experiments with the keyboard and touchpad/trackpoint buttons.
Every time I think I should give one of the newer X's a proper go, I go and have a play with them and realise that they're still full of compromises.
I still feel like a MacBook Pro would be a good choice for the author. He starts out by talking about being able to replace parts, but later doesn't make that as a requirement when he asks for:
- Decent build quality
- Decent performance and battery life
- A decent website
- A clean OS without crapware or malware factory installed
If you want a laptop that's somewhat thin, light and with decent battery life, you often do have to sacrifice being able to replace anything. By soldering on the RAM and storage, you get more room for batteries. This also especially becomes evident by his System76 Galago that can last 3 hours.
So in conclusion: Just get a MacBook, it has decent build quality, performance, battery life and website. A good OS? I'm not going to be the judge of that, but installing Ubuntu or Windows on a Mac is luckily very easy.
That was a pretty quick dismissal of Lenovo, and a warped portrayal at that. As far as we can tell, Superfish was not intentionally installed by Lenovo, and any money it made didn’t go to them since it wasn’t their software. There’s nothing here to suggest that this is a sign of anything untrustworthy happening at Lenovo, any more than there is at any other major laptop seller. It seems like this was just a case of their software QA being not quite on par with their hardware QA. Also, all websites suck. Just sayin’.
I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not modifiable in any way, and Apple's customer service is not what it used to be. So I decided to get a non-Mac for the first time in my life.
I ended up with an Asus Zenbook UX305LA. It's a 13" 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Core i5 processor. Cost me $749 and I dual-boot WIndows 10 and Ubuntu (spending 95% of my time in Ubuntu). It costs about 50% what a similar specced Macbook would cost and is similar size/weight to the Macbook air. Build quality is fantastic (open with one hand, good keyboard, glass trackpad, etc). The battery life is not quite as good as a 13" MBA but better than a Macbook Pro. Overall I am extremely happy with it.
Considering that my last MBP cost me $2200 up front plus ~$300 in repairs over time and lasted me ~4.5 years. That's about $500 a year. This machine cost $750. If it lasts over a year and a half, the experiment is a success. So far it's been nothing but great.