10 years ago, there was no PC hardware that even came close the weight, dimensions, and build quality of the MacBook Air.

Nowadays, PC "ultrabooks" like the XPS13 and UX305 are similar in size and build quality but come in a variety of configurations with better battery life and a choice between low power low res screens and high power high res screens. And they're significantly cheaper.

Linux works perfectly on the Intel chipsets these computers use as well with open source drivers from Intel themselves. I haven't had any problems with Ubuntu, my install is pretty much stock Unity.

I used to work for Apple and still have Apple stock. As a stock holder, I think they need to make a similar leap with their computers as they did back with the MacBook Air.

The two things I would most want from them are a 40" curved screen iMac and and a MacPro replacement that looks something like the Razor Blade Stealth where a full powered GPU attaches via USB-C. I mention these 2 designs because they require a lot of tinkering to get working on the PC side and while Apple doesn't really make anything new, they do polish existing technology extremely well.

The build quality still usually is a narrow miss. Namely, non-apple manufacturers LOVE to cut corners by using plastic on the bottom or more fragmented case design. Touchpads are always iffy too.

Does anyone know of any non-apple machines that truly are at parity in build quality? The new Thinkpad X1 looks nice.

Try the Asus UX305. No seams, completely aluminum body, no fans, large nice touchpad, and matte wide gamut IPS display for $600 or so when it's on sale. It's similar in design to a 13" MacBook Air but a little smaller/lighter and with a far superior display.

At first I thought the Core M processor would be slow, but it's comparable, maybe 15% slower than an i5, once it reaches the full thermal throttle.

(And the keyboard isn't backlit but I always thought that feature was kind of lame anyways.)

Traded in my UX305UB (so i7 instead of Core M, 940m instead of integrated, and 4K) for an 2015 i5 RMBP.

By all accounts a strict downgrade right?

Except by the end of ownership I had grown so tired of Windows and Linux that I had to Hackintosh it to be bareable. That disabled the 940m (which I didn't miss anyways) and messed with power management so aim guessing the i7 wasn't turbo boosting anymore but it was still worth it to get an OS that supported all my monitors without fuss, had developer mindshare, didn't crash from sleep and had a bash shell without compatibility layers and VMs.

I posted about it on here in another comment and realized how silly that was and looked up someone selling a RMBP and asked for a trade the very next day (I'd have bought a 2016 MBP but I want to see the what next model will bring). Tellingly enough, the i7 UX305ub has depreciated so much faster than the i5 MBP that I should have owed the guy.

The supposed "exodus" from Macbooks has the strangest timing to me.

6 months ago if you asked what the best hardware for a development machine was, you'd get some Thinkpad answers, but the mainstream was a 2015 MacBook Pro.

Suddenly the 2016 comes out and isn't what people want, so everyone acts like the 2015 ceased to exist...

Now people are recommending laptops that they used to recommend the 2015 RMBP over as where to head! Is it a need to have the shiniest new MBP? 2015s went on sale in most retail outlets so the prices are even better now. It's not like the hardware degraded because there's a new model either.

Or maybe there's less substance to all the commotion than HN comments and posts would imply?

Can't touch Lenovo given their spyware antics and even more recently it was revealed a couple of their mobiles have secret backdoors. Not saying Thinkpads do. It's a vote of no confidence on the whole

That and their sales worm insisted I could run Linux on a t400 I bought new and have no problems with support (paid for NBD repairs.) Screen flakes out and their tech team insisted i reformat to Windows before they're replace an obviously hardware defect

So spying issues and BS salesmen == no more Lenovo for me

Dell developer 13" and 15" can be beefed up pretty nicely. That and Dell is officially supporting Linux through and through; have heard first hand stories of calling in and getting help with Arch related issues. They ended up fixing it in new drivers.

That to me makes Dell the only alternative to Apple (these days I get by fine with a maxed MB Air, running Ubuntu only booting off a tbolt disk into OSX)

Samsung Series 9 notebooks are rock solid, with a thin alloy chassis and rank anecdotally among the best keyboards out there. You can even upgrade/replace your SSD, which simply isn't possible with modern Apple machines.

Mine runs Xubuntu beautifully (I prefer the minimalism of XFCE).

Surfacebook and Surfacebook pro are as good or better. The track pad is just as good as the one on the mac, and there's a touch screen as well. Plus it turns into a tablet.

Was looking at the XPS13/15, unfortunately they have 16:9 glossy hidpi screens I find suboptimal. (Not interested in a low-res screen.)

Surface Pro 4 / Surface Book, their build quality is amazing. (actually better than Mac's probably)

Is Surface Pro 4 build quality amazing? Don't they have those keyboard cover things that are encased in a vinyl. How is that comparable to an aluminium unibody?

The surface book is closer - I like its features/specs but still find it very ugly - I can't get over that huge gappy hinge.

I want to like MS products but they are not the quality I want yet. Surface Studio really turned my head though.

Both the surface book and surface pro are fully made of magnesium. The keyboard cover is actually amazing. I'm using it daily, no idea what it's made of, the texture is really nice to the hand. Anyways, I really prefer this keyboard over the MBP one (this one is more clicky).

Regarding the ugliness, that's matter of taste.

> The keyboard cover is actually amazing

It makes me really wonder if we can be talking about the same thing. After similar comments, I looked at one in a store looking forward to being impressed but it turned out to be a flimsy thing with no key travel. It reminded me of a cover of ring binder. The sort of thing that if it bounces around a bag for a couple of months it would become dog-eared and split at the edges.

> Regarding the ugliness, that's matter of taste.

I don't know... I really feel I can make the case that its ugly! It looks like its not properly closed and that it won't be protecting the screen properly. If a metal pen gets loose in a bag its going to love bouncing around scratching up the screen.

Originally there were two versions, but I think there is only one now. The touch cover looks more like a ring binder cover. (random link I found, no connection) http://www.alphr.com/features/378001/microsoft-surface-touch...

MS Surface bang for your buck seems pretty much the same for comparable specs to Apple machines. It's great there's viable high quality alternatives to Apple on the market finally, but they don't really seem like a compelling reason to switch based on price and quality alone.

10 years ago, there was no MacBook Air ;)

> 40" curved screen iMac

why?

> MacPro replacement that looks something like the Razor Blade Stealth where a full powered GPU attaches via USB-C.

oh god why?

both of these just seem like gimmicks instead of just making a top notch dev machine.

Lots of ram, good CPU, discrete GPU option, fast SSD, decent port selection, great battery life (tweak machine options to get a bit more or less, but always good).

That's why the 2013 was such a great machine. Mine is still easily good enough today.

Now we have gimmicky touchbars, the ram hasn't increased, the CPUs are older models, they have dropped a bunch of useful ports (HDMI, magsafe power supplies), and the battery life isn't even what it used to be.

A big discrete GPU box that works over thunderbolt is just a gimmick. Windows laptop makers do stuff like that but their touchpads are still pretty much meh.

> A big discrete GPU box that works over thunderbolt is just a gimmick.

A valid use case for this could be someone travels a lot who wants a thin, lite laptop but when they are home, they want to play AAA game titles.

How heavy are gaming laptops with enough GPU grunt to play the latest AAA titles on ultra settings?

I have still yet to find a trackpad that is even close to as good as Apple's. This has been the main thing keeping me on Apple's hardware for about 5 years now.

There's always "something", for most of us.

For me, it was the unibody and screen hinges - they were just way more durable than anything else out there, at almost any price. Now I share your affinity for the trackpad.

I think I'm at the end of wanting a full-function laptop at this point. Once my 2015 rMBP dies I'll likely replace it with a powerful work/gaming PC at home and a convertible tablet PC like a Surface Pro.

>better battery life

If we're comparing those laptops running linux with macbooks running macos, I highly doubt it.

And why the curved screen?

Mainly because my primary monitor is a 40" curved 4k TV these days. When you sit an arm's length away, the curve helps your peripheral vision. It also makes 3D games really pop.

Anything else feels tiny now and multimonitor setups are just plain annoying in comparison.

> XPS13 and UX305

> And they're significantly cheaper.

I tend to disagree, when I shopped around I found the zenbook and xps 2 to 3 times the price of a mac air.

> These rants are typical but would be much better if people identified the glorious PC hardware they are using.

As someone who's never bought Apple HW (but used it, when paid for by employers, as secondary devices): There is no "glorious" PC hardware anymore (though, the top-of-the-line thinkpads from about 2000 were amazing (a20p, anyone?).

But today, compared to Apple's pricing, they are so cheap that I can get equivalent HW for half the price (equivalent wrt performance, not manufacturing quality!). I can have it serviced around the world without having to find a vendor-specific shop. And if it really is FUBAR, I can invest the 50% I saved on the initial purchase and get a brand new, next generation PC.

> There is no "glorious" PC hardware anymore

Just built a PC at home for gaming and Windows tinkering, and I have to say - it feels pretty glorious.

Also, and I feel like a shill for having said this so many times, the new Razer Blade laptops, Surface Book Pro, and Surface Studio have successfully plucked the "top tier industrial design" mantle from Apple, in terms of innovation and coolness factor (which, as Apple has proved time and again, really does matter).

Which is more interesting - a massive touch screen computer that moves weightlessly, with a hockey puck sensor that makes those cool radial menus we see in every other science fiction movie, or a laptop with a touch screen above the keyboard?

I think there is a great future for 'glorious PC hardware', both for enthusiasts like myself who build their own rig, and from companies like Microsoft, ASUS and the like, who have had their clock cleaned by Apple for the last few years and have finally come up with a response that's not just "copy the MacBook" (and not "novelty for novelty's sake" either).

I played around with my friends surface pro and the surface studio at the MS store and while the build quality on both have been excellent, the touch & dial interface has left a bit to be desired.

I feel like the recent output has been releasing new features for the sake of doing it because it is possible, not necessarily because there are significant usability/ux improvements.

I found the dial & touch to be a bit fatigue inducing and less efficient than using a keyboard/mouse for anything beyond the first 20-30 minutes of work. Touch works on smaller screens because the physical effort to swipe a finger is minimal, but on large screens, it's fatigue inducing. I'd be guessing that Apple has tried these other input methods, but hasn't quite figured out how to address usability in this context of a large screen.

The fatigue issue of raising a hand to a screen (even if the studio is laid down flat) is pretty huge, or resting a dial on the screen taking up pixels becomes an interference to either constantly move on/off or keep stationary next to the keyboard.

Most people working hours a day on the computer can keep their hands within several inches, but the other input methods do feel gimmicky for general purpose use. Not to discount the dial entirely, as there was an old 3rd party Apple accessory maker who released a dial exactly like the surface dial over a decade ago, but targeted film & music makers who would use the dial for scrubbing video/audio.

Microsoft is definitely upping it's ante, but there is a certain touch of refinement that feels missing, while Apple is slowly degrading in their small touches of refinement that bring user happiness.

To be fair, for the intended target - i.e. media creators, you can stick the dial over the existing controls that are most likely taking up screen real estate anyway.

If you're not using keyboard input as much, I can definitely see the utility of the dial. I've got one of those Palette Gear setups above my keyboard that I've integrated with IntelliJ for some common tasks, works pretty well.

>> There is no "glorious" PC hardware anymore

> Just built a PC at home for gaming and Windows tinkering, and I have to say - it feels pretty glorious.

Oh, I was just speaking about laptops since that is what the OP was talking about. You are absolutely right, building stationary setups is still lots of fun, probably even more than a decade or two ago.

> Which is more interesting - a massive touch screen computer that moves weightlessly, with a hockey puck sensor that makes those cool radial menus we see in every other science fiction movie, or a laptop with a touch screen above the keyboard?

The former.

Which would I buy? The latter. Which would I rather use? The latter.

Apologies for the late response.

I agree with you that the macbook is more practical - but that's not the argument that Apple is making. Apple is trying to say that their devices are beautiful, innovative, and cutting edge, when that's simply not the case anymore.

> But today, compared to Apple's pricing, they are so cheap that I can get equivalent HW for half the price (equivalent wrt performance, not manufacturing quality!).

How true is this? For instance, I often see the XPS brought up as an alternative to the MPB, but whenever I look into it, it seems like the price is comparable for similar hardware configurations.[1]

[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-macbook-pro-13-...

Top of the line XPS 15, including touch screen is $1650:

- i5 Quad Core (i5-6300HQ)

- 8GB RAM (upgradeable to 32)

- 256GB HD (upgradeable)

- 2GB Graphics card (GTX 960M)

Lowest quality new model MBP (15" w/ touch bar) is $2399:

- i7 quad core

- 16GB RAM (not upgradeable)

- 256GB HD (not upgradeable)

- 2GB Graphics card (Radeon Pro 450)

So for $750 you get a little more RAM, slightly better CPU, and Mac build quality (I have no idea how the graphics cards compare). That seems like a pretty big difference to me for fairly similar specs. Especially considering that you can upgrade your XPS in the future.

I'm on a Macbook Air now, but for my next laptop I'll be deciding between the 2 above (or possibly the last model rMBP).

Getting a little off topic here, but I've bought several XPS 13s (note not 15s) for work and have been pretty underwhelmed by the performance. Not sure if it's a thermal management issue or what.

Based on the Ars review of the HP Spectre x360 [0], though, I'd probably add that to your list as well. I'm eager to try one myself.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/hps-new-spectre-x360-...

I upgraded from a $3200 rMBP (mid-2012) to a $1700 XPS13 i7 (9343/2015). The speed and battery life of the XPS13 have seemed on-par with the rMBP to me.

If I was underwhelmed about anything, it was the rMBP feeling slightly slower than the bottom-of-the-line MBP I got in 2010 with upgraded RAM & SSD.

Granted, the hampered rMBP performance was probably mostly due to that specific model being underpowered for the new retina display.

> (not upgradeable)

True, this is a real issue, and I agree we're paying premium_price^2 for the newest MBPs.

However, in this day and age of networked computing and fast WiFi why would 256 GB not be enough? Did you check the performance of the XPS SSD compared to the MBP?

I take it the RAM is DDR4. The 16 GB LPDDR3 RAM means more battery life. The resolution of the 2015 MBP 15" is also in between 1080p and 4k, a sacrifice, for battery power.

The graphics card isn't upgradeable on either machine. And I did look at the XPS. I'm not going to buy a machine which makes a lot of noise, and the XPS has coil whine. Why don't you compare to the 2015 rMBP? I tried out the butterfly keyboard of the 2016 version in store and I found it far too noisy (the travel also isn't a good aspect). Do you really need the graphics card? Have you looked at eGPU?

> in this day and age of networked computing and fast WiFi why would 256 GB not be enough?

My rMBP is only 256GB, and while it's "enough" - only barely. Having to think about disk space regularly and make sure to remove software I'm not using regularly is something that I've not had to do in a very long time. It's tight enough that I'm hesitant to dual-boot Windows with Boot Camp like I have on every other Mac I've owned for gaming and such.

This is the typical response I get from Apple users whenever I ask how to do something with a Mac that just can't be done.

I've been hearing it for 20 years from Mac users: "Why would you want XYZ feature anyway?"

It's hilarious and there is no wonder in my mind as to why the vast, vast majority of businesses use Windows and not Mac.

> there is no wonder in my mind as to why the vast, vast majority of businesses use Windows and not Mac.

Well, I can't speak to most businesses but every corporate I've worked at in the last few years has been characterised by an SOE that involves strangely spec'd machines eg. only 4GB RAM but 1TB HDD which is 95% empty but thrashes nicely when swapping (just running browser with a few tabs, office and outlook). It will also most likely be an i7 that never gets to top out, meanwhile the underwhelming wifi infrastructure (not PC specific) means boot times (due to profile and policy replication) are in the order of minutes. Oh, and regardless of how old they are they never get upgraded (eg extra RAM, switch to SSD) because the bureaucracy disincentivises doing so.

That's a bit of a non-sequitur. I understand corporations order the wrong configuration all the time...

At least they have a configuration to choose from! If they shopped Apple, they'd get 3 choices: Cheap overpriced crap that they have no control over, overpriced crap that they have no control over and Expensive overpriced crap that they have no control over. But hey, it would be shiny! They'd then just have to build their own infrastructure to manage their fleet of Macs like Google did because nobody else builds stuff like that for Macs since nobody uses them in business.

Corporates are a different fish to SMEs though. Every SME I've seen in the last few years has at least some hardware that's been recycled by upgrading.

If you don't care about touch bar / touch screen it's similar. $1400 XPS vs $1999 MBP, a $600 difference, but the MBP doesn't have a dedicated graphics card.

And the XPS without the dGPU is cheaper too...

It's only true if you focus on one or two features or specs and ignore everything else. When people make that claim they usually find something with the same CPU and amount of memory and use it as a comp.

Of course. But considering things I do not consider essential is like saying "yes" to "you save $1 when buying 5 apples, we charge for 4" when you only wanted one in the first place. The OP wrote about the specific "sw dev" group, not the average user. (e.g.: If I could downgrade the resolution of the displays for a significant discount, apple hw would be much more tempting to me - after all, 99% of the time I spend on computers I look at monospace fonts in emacs...)

I feel like text is where the retina screens really pay off. I'm not even sure if I could notice the difference looking at photos. But a good font on a retina display is something I still notice, even after having used it for 2 years+.

> But today, compared to Apple's pricing, they are so cheap that I can get equivalent HW for half the price (equivalent wrt performance, not manufacturing quality!).

Agreed. With Linux I can control the price of my hardware. I can move my environment, the part I care about, up and down the price spectrum as I care to and where I can afford.

I care much more about what I'm doing with the abstract "computer" in front of me than what it physically is. Particularly something as fast-changing and fast-obsoleting as computer hardware. And obsolescence does matter, as newer softer slowly comes to expect newer hardware.

I've got a Surface Book and it's glorious.

The issue may not be the current hardware he is on, but rather Apple has put their (developer machine) future in doubt by releasing lackluster upgrades to their MacBook Pro line and neglecting it's Mac Pro line for a long time. Thus signaling that they may not be the best option for development longevity.

I know it's a decision point of mine, as after the last MacBook Pro release, I decided that my next hardware refresh will most likely be a PC based laptop running one of the BSD's. I was really hoping for a 32 GB ram option. With my need for virtualization and needing to run other machines 16 is getting a little light. I was really disheartened when they went to the soldered ram as it constrains one to the max ram offered via Apple. I just cannot justify buying another 16gb laptop so it's kind of the straw that broke the camels back for me.

It is apparent to most that they are moving away from the needs of the developer (in relation to hardware) and many of us don't want to be further constrained by those decisions. I have no ill will towards Apple, just stating my reasoning. They made a business decision and I don't factor into that decision as the best course of action. I therefore have to make the best business decision for myself and factor in how I adjust. It sucks, I like Apple products and will miss OSX but the lack of some hardware capabilities in now outweighing the benefits of the OS.

My next machine will most likely be a Sager Laptop running a BSD.

He says he switched from OS X to Linux years ago, which I assume is long before 2013 when the trashcan Mac Pro was released.

This article is garbage. If he likes Linux, that's fine, but don't pretend that Apple's actions in 2016 caused him to travel back in time years ago and switch to Linux...

That's not what he's saying. He's saying "developers are switching from OSX to Linux, here are some links for the interested, I did it years ago and I'm really satisfied".

The article doesn't even mention what his reasons were for switching.

I agree. This article is basically click bate for people that are not fans of apple (me). It never answer the question posed by the title. The author has not even switched off of Apple totally... but predicts that they will when funds are available.

The big three for me where:

The discontinuation of the 17 inch MacBook Pro

The soldered in ram.

And the final one was with the last refresh where they held the top of the line model at 16GB of ram.

As a note these where probably all sound business decisions they just chip away at my ideal machine. Which is a large screen machine, with a lot of horse power so that I can simulate an entire network environment locally to eliminate variables as well as use in a disconnected environment.

Interesting that the iPhone offers 128GB option, but the top end for laptops is 16GB.

Why would Apple want to drive developers away?

You've misunderstood. One is RAM, one is storage.

I don't think they want to drive developers away, I think that the removal of the 17 inch MBP from their line was a sound business decision the only market left for them are intense gamer who are on the go (i.e 17-20 somethings in school) and developers. The MBP has never been seen as a first class game system so they where never really competitive there and developers are a small subset of the computing market and not all of them prefer a large monitor.

Soldered in ram was a decision to reduce the overall size of the MBP to make it thinner. Again this probably appeals to the large consumer market.

I don't know the reasoning for not moving the line up to at least 32GB of ram but I would assume their cost to produce to market segment came to a higher profit calculation by not doing it, maybe it offset the cost of the touch bar but that is speculation but I assume they had their reasons.

I don't think it is an intentional effort to drive developers away, rather calculated attempt to chase the largest market segment.

RAM vs. Flash storage. You're comparing apples and oranges here.

Actually Apples vs Apples

For reference the top end in flash storage for the MBPro is current 2TB. That's 16X the iPhone's max 128GB.

It used to be that Apple was pretty dominant in creating decent laptop hardware, but these days machines like the XPS 13 and Spectre are very competitive.

When we replace my wife's 2012 MacBook Air I think we'll probably get a Windows machine, the latest MacBook refresh was pretty disappointing.

> These rants are typical but would be much better if people identified the glorious PC hardware they are using. So I looked for that here, and it turns out he is still using Apple hardware.

Yeah, this stuff is really tiresome. What a bandwagon people have going now.

Remember back in 2015 when it was cool to be anti-Microsoft on HN? Somewhere in 2016, maybe after WWDC, suddenly the Surface was in and Apple was out. The consensus changed almost overnight, anyone using Apple wasn't a hacker anymore. Either you're on Windows wishing you were using Linux, or you're on macOS wishing you were on Windows wishing you were using Linux. And god forbid you buy any new Apple hardware, you dirty shill. Facebook machine, not a professional, MacBook Pro Air and all that.

I think people like to support the "underdog". Whatever is popular will inevitably have people that rebel against that popularity. Maybe it's a bit of the hipster attitude.

I use a MBP for work, and while the build quality is great, I find the machine itself to be...meh. My older one had more ports, some that I used often and still miss. I would never have a new Mac for that very reason. The OS is decent, usable certainly, but I really would rather be using Linux. I don't have any very strong opinions though. I'd be fine with any machine with a unixy OS on it.

I think very strong, hardline opinions on this kind of stuff can sometimes betray immaturity. The world is rarely "black and white".

Yeah. Amen.

I've not seen a single PC with the Apple build quality. Combine that with Apple Stores providing excellent, best in industry support for a good price: I'd love to go Linux, but someone needs to build a good Linux notebook with Apple grade support for that to happen. I have no time for tinkering or downtime.

The near-unanimous criticism is indeed something new, but I seem to remember Apple getting some flack every time they ship anything. It's usually "This new OS X 10.x is just catering to the unwashed masses. OS X 10.x-2 was a beautiful system for professionals".

Part of the problem may be our myopic view of the past, from where it seems as if Apple revolutionised computing on something like a yearly basis. A system that "just works" seems to bore today's "professionals" – even though I'd argue that SSDs and retina displays were two of the last decades' largest improvements in performance and ergonomics, respectively.

> The consensus changed almost overnight, anyone using Apple wasn't a hacker anymore.

FWIW, I've (snarkily, unfairly, wrongly) thought that for many years now. I'm not defending that, because — as noted — it's snarky, unfair and incorrect. But I really have wondered why people who are liberated enough to not use Windows use macOS instead of going all the way to Linux. If you're willing to break the social norm, why not go all the way and be free?

> Either you're on Windows wishing you were using Linux, or you're on macOS wishing you were on Windows wishing you were using Linux.

Some of us just use Linux, and are happy.

I love Linux on the server. For desktops, I believe it brings out all the worst qualities of the open source community: its inconsistent, has a tendency to skirt decision-making through configuration, fragmented, sometimes badly trying to copy windows/macOS, too eager to throw everything out and start anew etc. Just regarding the aesthetics, most Linux desktops seem to cater to the crowd that buys motherboards with LEDs and puts a window in their case.

> If you're willing to break the social norm, why not go all the way and be free?

Because Linux is only free if your time is worthless is still about as true today as ever before.

Oh sure, I can use most of my hardware without too many issues. It took me hours to configure my monitor because of some issue with EDID, but I'm willing to count that as an outlier.

The problem is I get Ubuntu working and then I still have to deal with fucking Unity.

OSX works out of the box with the hardware, and the OS is just a much more pleasant desktop experience while being a good enough OS to get work done (vs windows being more difficult).

> The problem is I get Ubuntu working and then I still have to deal with fucking Unity.

I solve that by using neither Ubuntu nor Unity:-)

> OSX works out of the box with the hardware, and the OS is just a much more pleasant desktop experience while being a good enough OS to get work done (vs windows being more difficult).

But macOS is only pleasant if impeding your workflow doesn't affect your pleasure.

Yes, certainly, trying to use one of the major desktop environments as a replacement for macOS may be worse (although I'm personally unconvinced: GNOME & Unity don't cause me pain like using a Mac, but I'm sure I could get used to the latter). But try using a tiling WM, with a good terminal emulator, an editor & a browser.

After having spent, maybe, two weeks total effort customising my environment, I have something which is a much more pleasant computing experience that either macOS or Windows. My computer gets out of my way when I need it to; it's an extension of my brain; it's a tool, not a toy I'm constantly playing with.

Frankly, the desktop metaphor was probably a mistake in the long run, and choosing to ape the desktop metaphor was probably a mistake for free software. We should have focused on the next advance, not tried to reproduce an advance, but this time with fewer resources and more folks pulling in different directions.

GUIs are great, but draggable windows really aren't so much. GUI elements are great, but being forced to mouse around for any action really isn't so much. Curated software can provide a great ride, but it's not so great when you need to get off the rails and explore new territory.

> But try using a tiling WM,

No. I don't want to. i don't get off on tweaking window environments and other BS. I don't want an ugly half baked interface.

This is why I honestly do think "linux is free if your time is worthless" is more than just a snarky comment.

> After having spent, maybe, two weeks total effort customising my environment

Two weeks. That's absurd. I can go into the apple store and buy a mac and just install homebrew. takes minutes.

> > But try using a tiling WM,

> No. I don't want to. i don't get off on tweaking window environments and other BS. I don't want an ugly half baked interface.

That's a bit like not wanting to use a jackhammer to break up asphalt because it doesn't have velvet handles. A tiling WM is neither ugly, nor half-baked, nor does it require tweaking (or require much).

> Two weeks. That's absurd. I can go into the apple store and buy a mac and just install homebrew. takes minutes.

That's a bit like saying it's absurd that it took four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge, when after all anyone can build a footbridge for his backyard in a weekend. The interface you have available to you on your Mac hinders you more than the interface I have available to me on my Linux boxes; the interface you have available to you on your Mac augments you less than the interface I have available to me on my Linux boxes. I invested two weeks, and they have made me an order of magnitude more productive.

This is, yet again, a case of the Blub Paradox. Surely you can see that there are less-powerful, more-painful interfaces to use than that of a Mac — is it so difficult to believe that there are more-powerful, less-painful interfaces than a Mac?

If you accept that it's at least possible, are you willing to entertain my contention that window management is in fact wasted time? Are you willing to entertain my contention that having all my regularly-used programs a few keystrokes away can be faster than moving my hands off of the keyboard and using the mouse? Are you willing to entertain my contention that a minimalist interface is — or at least can be — less distracting and thus enables one to enter the zone more easily and stay in it longer?

What a wonderful and generous explanation!!!

>Some of us just use Linux, and are happy.

Like you said, those are the ones who have "broken free". Everyone else (the "hackers") either use Windows and wish they used Linux or use macOS and wish they used Linux. But they don't actually use Linux, because [reasons].

To be fair to them, I don't use desktop Linux because [reasons].

> But I really have wondered why people who are liberated enough to not use Windows use macOS instead of going all the way to Linux.

I used Linux for years. I built a MythTV box and bought a digital TV tuner card for it and, later, a device to get the video from the cable box, along with an IR blaster to change the channels on the cable box. I have owned five laptops on which I used Linux exclusively (1 Dell Latitude, 1 HP EliteBook, and 3 Thinkpads). I built my desktop system for Linux. I have used Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, and SUSE as my daily drivers, and have tried other systems like Mandriva and Fedora. I have compiled kernels and filed bugreports.

I now use OS X. In the end I got tired of desktops with tons of broken stuff. The transition away from GNOME 2 and KDE 3 was rough, with years of no usable major desktops at all. So I switched to barebones window managers like i3, FVWM, and Xmonad. (I have XMonad to thank for introducing me to Haskell, which I still use daily.) I got tired of reading man pages to do simple stuff like change my clock.

The thing that broke me in the end was doing my US income taxes. Our taxes are complicated so it helps to have software to do them. There's nothing for Linux. So I filled in my taxes on PDF forms. Even that was not easy: not all Linux PDF readers have the ability to do forms, and figuring out which ones do requires forum searching or trial-and-error. So I resorted to Adobe's non-free software. Even then, doing a US tax return on fillable PDFs is awful. I considered using an online service but I did not want a cloud solution for my private data.

That pushed me over and I got a Mac. I had actually tried Macs a few years ago when they were making the white plastic Macbook, but I returned it and stuck with Linux. I found that OS X had come a long way since I had last tried it. I enjoyed doing little things like downloading a song--things that would be a pain on Linux (do I have the right codecs installed? the right package?) And there's a ton of third-party software available. Some of it costs a few bucks, where something similar on Linux would be free--like a little tool to graphically show what is eating my disk space. But it's worth spending a few bucks to save hours hunting for something on Linux and fixing the breakage.

So that's why I don't use Linux. My time and my ability to get things done is more important than nebulous "freedom". Proprietary software provides an incentive to some companies to produce useful software. So be it.

>I got tired of reading man pages to do simple stuff like change my clock

Oh lord, I used a WM I loved on my EeePC, until I wanted to change the clock from 24 hour time to 12 hour time. Three days later, I still couldn't get it to display properly. I can't remember which WM it was, I feel like it was the one that shipped with Crunchbang.

You are mixing the WM and the panel/bar. They are usually separate things. Crunchbang used tint2 for the bar and openbox for the WM IIRC.

> Either you're on Windows wishing you were using Linux, or you're on macOS wishing you were on Windows wishing you were using Linux

Hahaha so good. So true. One thing that's totally crazy is Linux on Windows what a world. Why? So you can run Photoshop?

Not only that, but I think the hate on the new MBP is rather unjustified. I'm writing on my work 13" 2015 MBP and I have a personal 15" 2016 MBP Touchbar. The new MBP weighs a similar amount, the screen is beautiful, and it feels much faster (thanks to the great SSD). Sure, the battery life has issues but I expect that this will be rectified in the next few months.

Fact is, I can't find a single Windows laptop right now with anything close to the high quality feel of a MBP right now. I love working in Linux so the OS isn't an issue... but it's like every Windows laptop I use feels plasticy or flimsy in some way.

OSX has its own fair share of issues, sure. But fact is, it's productive if you're a developer. With Windows (until WSL matures a lot) you find yourself using hacky workarounds and VMs to get stuff done.

Hmm, I've spent a fair bit of time with the 2016 MBPs and have owned and used many Mac laptops over the past decade.

I wouldn't agree that there are no machines with "anything close" to the feel. I agree that the MBP is still at the top, but the Dell XPS, Thinkpad X1, X2x0, X4x0s are close in case, keyboard but lose in speakers and display. HP's top end models are close. Surface Book is extremely close.

To be honest, the removal of MagSafe actually drops the overall "quality feel" of the 2016 Mac a step below the older Macs for me. As does the removal of certain other features over the years - such as the battery lights, pulsing sleep light, charging indicator light, tiny microphone input flowers replaced with single larger holes, inbuilt IR remote, etc. I would classify these things as "design quality" - so possibly not the build quality of what is there, but definitely contributed to the machines feeling like they are a cut above what else is out there.

The fact that I can't upgrade the Mac at all is basically a deal breaker for me. I thought I could live with it, but after four years of having personal Macs (Air) that can't be upgraded, and work MBPs, seeing my spend on computer hardware literally double thanks to shorter new machine cycles, higher cost of "upgrades", and reduced resale value, I've had enough. Not only that, but my machine satisfaction drops a lot near the end of a machine's usable life (where previously it would be quite linear as I periodically upgraded things), and having to make compromises on storage etc is just too much.

Whether OSX is productive as a developer depends greatly on what your particular environment is. In many cases I've observed that Linux can be more streamlined for everyday development, and the disruption that is OSX software updates has increased to the point where it's just as bad as Linux updates. If you can take advantage of Visual Studio for your dev and use some of the integrated toolchains there, you may even get superior productivity to OSX.

I took a look into linux recently, as a Mac user for the past 10 years. Ended up buying a Chromebook to mess around with it and it is pretty nice, but desktop linux is still missing so much software that I use regularly in macOS.

Also, finding suitable notebook hardware to run linux on is still a nightmare unless you enjoy spending time debugging the device that is supposed to improve your productivity. All the unique hardware is missing drivers (SP4, surface book) and things like touch screens and wifi drivers across more "normal" hardware is still finicky.

My main gig is iOS dev, so I obviously can't completely swap, but there just isn't any comparable hardware out there that can just run ubuntu out of the box (minus some exceptions like that dell developer edition xps.)

Many articles about people switching from Mac to Linux laptop begin this way: "It's great, but my laptop can't handle sleep mode properly, network stops working from time to time...etc etc But I'm very happy!".

I have a mid-2014 13" retina MBP and it has its fair share of problems, namely:

* Screen coating wearing off and leaving horrible marks behind (I now use it plugged into a monitor more often than not)

* Inputs (trackpad and keyboard) occasionally lock up, usually when unplugging external keyboard/mouse. Closing and opening the lid sometimes fixes this, toggling bluetooth or plugging/unplugging keyboard also sometimes fix; failing that I have to power-cycle using the keyboard power button (the only button that seems to still respond)

* Wifi connection has all sorts of problems - access hangs for ~30 seconds every couple of minutes or so. This is very intermittent, and seems to be a problem with our home connection, but other devices don't appear to suffer.

I mainly bring this up because the latter two pretty much match your examples of linux complaints - Apple machines are far from perfect!

Regarding the input, if you can demonstrate that with a clean OS install that these lock up happen, it's a very good candidate for hardware replacement, assuming you have AppleCare which would still keep you in warranty till 2017ish.

I've had over 10 Apple laptops in the past decade, and wifi is one of the things that has always been rock solid. Whenever buggy wifi showed up, it was usually the cheap wifi router to blame, since buggy wifi would affect all the wifi devices.

> Wifi connection has all sorts of problems - access hangs for ~30 seconds every couple of minutes or so. This is very intermittent, and seems to be a problem with our home connection, but other devices don't appear to suffer.

Which macOS version? Did you check /var/log/wifi.log?

Strangely my MBP 2010 has a similar issue, while my new MBP 2015 doesn't.

Still on Mavericks. I didn't know anything about /var/log/wifi.log so I'll check that later to see if I can spot a problem - thanks.

Did you try the solutions at [1]? Have you considered upgrading? Be careful you don't get into issues with DNS related to [2] in 10.10

[1] http://howtoapple.com/mavericks-wifi-issues-fix/

[2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-i...

I recently bought a XPS 13 Developer Edition and threw Fedora 25 on it without any issues. Now that there's a market for developer laptops, the chances of Linux working fine are much better.

Compared to my previous laptop (MBP 15" 2011) the trackpad sucks but it's small and fast. GNOME Shell has massively oversized window borders but the extensions platform makes it easy to fix with "Pixel Saver". Having the system package manager handle everything is nicer than each app having its own autoupdater + app store + homebrew.

I don't regret the switch.

That really gets me... They complain about macOS shipping old versions of git and vim (solved by `brew install git vim` during the first 2 minutes with any new system). But then are completely unconcerned about having to shut down/boot X times a day. But then again I've see to many friends with Windows notebooks habitually do that as well, and I may be special with an uptime that closely tracks the last OS update.

Could you make a (short) list of the apps (for devs?) missing so we could help you perhaps to find alternatives if there are any?

I... agree.

Many of the recent articles that have been posted about Apple's new Macbook Pro line have been very low-quality compared to the rest of HN. The comments here provide an order of magnitude more value than the articles themselves.

They're more or less serving as a "discuss this currently controversial topic" thread; the articles are irrelevant. While I think they could be easily replaced with a new feature in HN itself, the current solution is working. I'm OK with the article spam.

Apple hardware does suck (now) AND its over priced. The OS and apps are starting to suck too (IMHO). I switched a month ago from MBP. I commented elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13318525) on this thread with more details and my reasons and new hardware specs.

A several-sentence anecdata blogpost from someone too inexperienced to realize people were switching FROM Linux TO OS X in the first place?

And that steps on its own thesis by admitting he still uses Apple hardware, so he'll be one of the "90%" you see using Apple systems?

How did such a terrible "article" get upvoted in the first place?

>These rants are typical but would be much better if people identified the glorious PC hardware they are using.

Razer makes really nice hardware. Visit a Microsoft store or Fry's electronics to see some in person. Aluminum build, current generation CPUs and GPUs. NVidia GPUs not the garbage Apple ships. 32GB RAM and RAID 0 available on the Pro. Hands down superior hardware. Good value for the money.

>He then does not identify a single OS X flaw or a reason he loaded Linux onto his Apple hardware.

I can easily install developer software on Linux that is blocked by Gatekeeper and SIP on Mac OS X. Every time I update, I have to delete /usr/bin/git again because it's just an Apple stub and I have no intention of installing Apple's developer tool package that is gigabytes large. It's bad enough that the last OS X system update was 1.7GB.

Furthermore, you can't even install Linux on a new MacBook or MacBook Pro. Apple transposed digits in the PCI class ID for the SSD so it's not even recognized as an SSD by the installer.

Then there's Docker. Docker == Linux.

Lots of other things suck too, lets not discriminate against particular things that suck.

It's the same people who participate in various "challenges" and play Pokemon Go claiming that it's good for your health. Many people just need some hoaxes to consume their free time.