IMO there is no such thing as a 'Pro' laptop. I've owned MBPs, XPSs, MSI Gaming Laptops, and they all fall short. Especially 6ish months later when I want some extra oomph but NO; Laptop; At best you can maybe upgrade RAM / Disk but thats about it.

For me, 'Pro' is being able to max out anything, swap parts/upgrade when I want or need to. And this is only possible with a tower, hell even a mini atx build can kick anything Apple is selling out of the water. And you will always be able to upgrade at your own pace / price point.

For portable, I like my Chromebooks and do like the Macbook Air. But for the Air you gotta buy it maxed out, and with the Apple extended warranty.

You bought what I would all consider consumer laptops, and thusly feel 'pro' laptops dont exist? What you are describing are business laptops. Thinkpads, Latitudes, Precisions, Zbooks etc. You want a new wireless card, you can swap it in. Different screen model? if you venture outside the consumer market, there are varying levels of upgradability.

But this reminds me of actually the real reasone why laptops will never be pro.

Pro is in the Peripherals!!

My monitors, keyboard, and mice are all things im super picky about. And dont want tied to and priced into the core of my computer. I've used the same mouse for over decade (Microsoft Intellimouse). And keyboards, when I find a good one it will stick with me for a while, but always trying new ones. I have recently upgraded all my monitors to 4ks, but before that I was fine with my few year old proarts.

Apples trackpad is A+, but their keyboard is a F for me. Biggest Grip, the LCTRL key was at the most left key. When I use macs I always have to use the full usb wired keyboard because of LCTRL.

All the other brands trackpads and keyboards are B- at best.

These are things that no single vendor can satisfy for me, and the lockin that's required for laptops just absolutely will never make them first-class/pro machines for me.

Anecdotally, my father used to think I wasted my time 'playing with computers' when I was growing up. He'd tell me stories about how at my age he was building cars from junkyard parts. From a time long ago when you could build a beautiful car in your garage with any number of parts and some hacky engineering. Later in life, I was able to explain how my computers and software and art was very much like him building his hotrods, decorating them with flaming skulls, and I think he finally understood my interest.

If you like laptops for reasons that I dislike them, that's fine.I still wouldn't call them 'Pro' Every part of them deprecates faster than any parts that you used to build a desktop. Any and Every part.

Laptops offer nothing but faster turnovers for the brands that sell them.

This is a problem with proprietary systems like Apple, where you have no alternative hardware supplier. If Apple doesn't want to make it, you can't have it (unless you can Hackintosh it).

Ok maybe it doesn't have all day battery life - but most people, especially people who want "Pro" hardware, probably only need a few hours max.

I've had an Air for two years, and I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I've used the full battery - all international flights and trains I've been on have had power sockets, so I can charge on the go. Plus thanks to USB-C, you can use a power bank to charge your laptop if you need more power:

http://www.macworld.com/article/3028132/consumer-electronics...

Apple is no longer giving consumers a choice, before there was the MacBook (old one) if you wanted a more-affordable entry level machine, the Air if you needed ok performance but great portability, and the Pro if you wanted performance in a laptop package.

Now everything is lumped together with portability as the #1 priority. If Apple had just launched this as a new version of the Air I don't think anyone would be complaining so much.

Part of the reason why they make bad computers is they cave and make design decisions based on what random users ask. Users who potentially have no knowledge or experience in system design.

As the famous quote goes, if you ask people what they want, they'd tell you a faster horse.

That would be a reasonable conclusion if I could run macOS on these computers. If I could develop iOS apps on a Razer Blade without running a fragile Hackintosh setup, I would have ordered one already. (Plus a sticker to cover up the gross green logo.)

Apple makes kind of above-average computers, and ones that fall down for current-day, up-to-date professional uses. They make a better operating system. The reason people are pissed is because Apple used to do both, and it's rapidly becoming the case that the lousy hardware and high prices aren't balancing out the operating system. If not for already being comfortable, it would probably be more effective for me to switch between Windows and Linux as necessary on PC hardware (both desktop and laptop) than to use OS X anywhere. That's why I'm probably going to have to switch, and that's why I'm kinda mad.

Estimated battery life is quite bad for it. This is I'm assuming the base configuration with 16gb ram, so if you jack that up to 32 or 64, battery probably drops significantly more.

It's these details of actual use that drive me to apple, as I've tried thick, full of ports, jacked up laptops with touch screens and in practice they almost always never work well.

Dell's professional brands are Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision. If you want a power-user workstation, you could have a look at the Precision line.

But, if anything you do could even be mildly improved with GPU support you're better off looking elsewhere. Most of the precision line are on some old Quattro's which are simply annihilated but the new released GTX 10 series GPU's.

Most of the base line CPUs are the lower 6300HQ models too, rather than the 6700HQ you get in others like the XPS 15 line or nearly all of the gaming laptops now released, so you have to bump the price straight away to get comparable baseline performance on many other models.

I'm very much looking around at the moment for a new laptop as a MacBook Pro (2010) refugee and have looked at way too many to list here.

So do consider the Precision line but it's certainly not the 'best' one out there.

Incidentally, one of the best I've seen is actually the new Razer Blade (if you put a skin or cover over that horrible logo) or even the Alienware 13 with the OLED screen.

Whilst these are traditionally 'gaming' setups, the Razer Blade certainly has the style and form factor to mimic the MacBook and the Alienware with it's toned down styling looks far more like the business Dell's of yesteryear. The Alienware also has what almost all reviewers/users state to be an exceptional keyboard (something where the XPS line has not done so well).

As for upcoming models, the Q1 2017 release of the XPS 15 would most likely come with a GTX 1050 (unless they copy Razer and find some Vapour Chamber cooling magic and stick a GTX 1060 in there) and it'll also probably have one of the first of Intel's Kaby Lake quad core mobile series too.

So it may be worth waiting if you can to see what comes in the next few months as there is a MASSIVE amount of change occurring with Nvidia's new GPU and Intel's new CPU offerings.

I now do all my work on a beefy box running Ubuntu, as I did prior to my last year's stint in trying Apple hardware full time. I'm transitioning who I can onto similar setups and moving away from the laptop-as-the-main-computer setup. They just aren't good enough for it.

Beefy desktops also have much better ergonomics (unless laptops are used on a riser with an external keyboard etc).

This should mean fewer computer-induced injuries and fewer courses of expensive physiotherapy in the future.

I've needed two courses, after foolishly working full-time on laptops. As a result, I've gone back to desktops. The superior performance, lower prices, and the fact that they last much longer are extra benefits...

Another way of putting this: modern software is so bloated and poorly designed that it wastes massive amounts of memory and processor resources.

For the first time in a decade I went out and built a desktop.

I could probably go buy a big workstation/gaming style pc laptop, but I'd rather pay more for a lightweight model.

the "pro" in pro just means "professional", as in "connected to one's profession". It does not mean "professional computer-user" or "professional computer programmer"; it does not mean "this is the most powerful thing on the market", it means "you can stake your livelihood on the reliability and versatility of this tool".

A lot of professionals use their laptop every single day for work, and they commute with it every single day. Lightening the load in your bag matters to a lot of professionals. Making sure you can get through an entire day of meetings on a single charge matters to a lot of professionals.

Anyway, if this sounds like apple fanboy apologism: I'm not buying a new MBP. I've even gone as far as turning down a free one from my employer. It offers me nothing over my existing MBP, which will in all likelihood be the last Apple laptop I ever buy.

The point is: this computer is not designed for programmers, and that's ok.

It was a game changer. I can get through airports quicker, I can pop my computer in and out of my bag anywhere I want. I can keep it on all day a client sites without having to plug it in. I only need to carry one bag with me when I travel Monday-Thursday. Prior to the MacBook, I was carrying a backpack with my laptop and a suitcase with my clothes, because they wouldn't fit together into a carry-on-sized bag. Now it's just one backpack.

I can't stress enough how much of an improvement that has had on my life. I wouldn't want to sacrifice anything: not a minute of battery life, not a centimeter of thickness, not a gram of weight. Every measurement matters when you're traveling.

Longer battery life, and smaller battery also have benefits. Particularly, a smaller battery can be charged faster. Lower power consumption allows this, and their design decisions such as limiting RAM to 16 was made to achieve this.

I run a linux VM and do dev work and even on 8GB is fine. I'm a programmer, and technical guy, but I understand that Apple can still make better computer building decisions than me, or any other nerds who just like to ramp up spec numbers in their custom build PC.

Considering the number of people who make YouTube videos, memes, SoundCloud tracks, web pages, blog posts, photo uploads and shares, and so on - that's a lot of users. 16GB means they're going to be waiting around the disk to thrash its way through a swap whenever they switch between applications.

My iMac has 32GB, and it's a bare minimum for comfortable thrash-free media creation.

Remember when media and creation was an Apple thing? That.

[1] - https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/01/2016-macbook-pro-ssd/

It's not uber-thin and light, no; this is a literal desktop replacement and weighs twelve pounds. It's not the machine I'd buy, because I don't need a GTX 1080 in a portable machine--but that machine is equivalent to Apple's best, actually-serious desktop while being cheaper and portable! It goes without saying that you can scale down to something that's a little more reasonable for a physical-effort-averse nerdy type and still get something that's very favorable compared to Apple's offerings, both in terms of perf and price.

Apple missed the memo: you really can have both, these days. Maybe they don't care about that audience anymore, and that's their prerogative, but it's why I'm probably bouncing back to Windows/Linux. (Dual-booting. Ew.)

As it stands, you can neither recycle it as an external display nor can you run Linux on it at full resolution.

Not really a "pro" complaint - just something to keep in mind if you plan to hand it on.

It was released in October 2013, so more than 3 years.

For some people. But you can also look at a laptop as being the ultimate "all-in-one" PC.

The only cable you need to plug in is the power cable. For a lot of people, that's more convenient than having to deal with a monitor, keyboard, mouse and desktop with the associated mess of cables and added desk space. That a laptop is portable and runs on a battery is gravy.

Then why all this fuzz? Why did the MacBook become so popular among professionals and programmers?

It's certainly never been the most powerful laptop on the market.

I'm not sure people are willing to admit it, but I think the reason the MacBooks have been so popular, even among programmers, is precisely because they've always pushed the boundary on being thin, sleek and portable.

Maybe you don't think the few mm they shaved off this time matters. But if they didn't have this attitude, they would still be the same size and weight they were 20 years ago.

Good, because it isn't: http://apple.com/macbook