> 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.