Does anyone know of any non-apple machines that truly are at parity in build quality? The new Thinkpad X1 looks nice.
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.)
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?
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)
Mine runs Xubuntu beautifully (I prefer the minimalism of XFCE).
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.
Regarding the ugliness, that's matter of taste.
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.
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 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?
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.
If we're comparing those laptops running linux with macbooks running macos, I highly doubt it.
Anything else feels tiny now and multimonitor setups are just plain annoying in comparison.
> 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.
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.