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.
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?