The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS in both laptop and phone form factors...

Isn’t it remarkable this still doesn’t exist? Build quality still does not compare in the PC world.

Yet, I’m on a MBA3,2 (late 2010) and it’s great. Still running Yosemite. It’s got 4gb ram but handles running 10 JVMs with modest heaps for development no problem. Stable and runs for months without issue. I’d love more RAM and more cores but none of these computers seem worth it.

I considered buying a 2015 MPB the other month only to learn that Apple glues the battery to the top case. So to replace the battery you need to replace the whole top case. Insane.

Razer comes close, though I wouldn't buy them because of the compensating-for-something #branding on the machines. The Alienware 13 I can personally vouch for as being better than my last MacBook Pro for sure. And the keyboard is like an old ThinkPad's but not quite so heavy. Still not a fan of the alien logo, but at least it's tiny.

I have the same hardware but unfortunately my experience is the exact opposite. It’s barely usable. I literally can’t browse JavaScript-heavy websites (e.g. Gmail).

I wonder if having kept up with the OS releases has anything to do with it (I’m on High Sierra).

I'll admit some of the really heavy websites are crap, but that's mostly because the websites are crap and wont be smooth on anything than the latest i7. Generally I have no problem with gmail or google maps which are reasonably heavy.

Depending on what version of OS X you are using that might be the culprit, OS X is a pretty heavy OS, especially post 10.6. For me 10.6 was o-k but changing to linux and a tiling window manager freed up a lot of resources, I never end up paging out with web browsing even though it's only 4GiB, additionally I find graphics are faster on linux but that may be GPU and driver specific due to Apple's underclocking tactics. If I hadn't switched I would probably have ditched this hardware by now.

Alternatively the GPU difference between these machines may explain web browsing speed considering how much stuff is hardware accelerated these days.

I think this era of hardware is pretty linux friendly if you wanted to try it, you don't have dual GPU which is the biggest pain for linux too... there is no issue with mac EFI from grub anymore so should be zero configuration install for you, at the most you might have to manually select the proprietary drivers for your GPU for reasonable performance.

Can't blame them. Ultimately, it's productivity that pays the bills.

Librem? https://puri.sm

It's not ideal, but our environment is rock solid for what we need, and newer software that we need still supports us just fine.

You can have my 2015 MBP when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

But yes. We recently sold off a bunch of hardware resulting from workforce reductions; I clued a friend in on this and he was begging me to nab him a 2015 MBP. The obsession is real, it is the last truly great Macbook in a while, in my own opinion.

One of the shops was an open source shop, so all 150+ of us ran some Linux distro (mostly Ubuntu/Debain, some Arch, some Mint .. I was the only Gentoo) except for the graphics people who got Windows or Macs. But I was surprised at the other two shops, there were very few Linux users. There were some here and there around the company, but I'd usually be the only one on my team who ran Linux naively with Windows in a VM.

I know there are reasons this can't happen at large corporations such as security... more to do with contracts and culpability than measurable security improvement AFAIK.

I can't quite imagine _not_ having control over my work environment in this way in a job anymore and do greatly appreciate it. It's not all about familiarity, there are many objective reasons using certain proprietary OS can be a significant drain and inefficient, even more so for development work. This freedom would be a significant factor in considering a new job for me, even over pay because it's a big part of my "happiness" and "sanity" factor in the job.

Hehe