As for the so-called "Apple tax", I just don't buy into this. I mean I miss the glory days of the 2011-2012 Macbook Airs. These were so cheaply priced they destroyed the competition because no one could produce a similar spec laptop at that price point. But then the numbers men decided dropping the average ASP for Macbooks was "bad" so they had to invent new features nobody needed or wanted to drive up the cost (Touchbar being the poster child) but for the hardware you get, it's actually pretty good. Or it was.

> Is it impossible to make a laptop better than Dell or Apple?

It's clearly not trivial.

> Google: how much goodwill would you receive through developer love?

Based on the bubble that is HN the answer is clearly "absolutely none". Just look at Chrome adding DDG as a search engine option. Where in that thread do you see people saying "this is great"? No, the top comments are littered with theories about how this is just an effort to avoid antitrust or other such ulterior motives.

I guarantee you that if Google produced the laptop that you and 22 other people would buy you'd hear nothing but complaints about it.

Counterpoint: I know plenty of happy developers that own multiple Nexus and Pixel products, without bagging them. Engineers want good hardware and many are willing to pay for quality.

> As for the so-called "Apple tax"

For as close to equivalent as I could get (specification, reliability, etc) the equivalent Apple cost 50% more than the XPS 15. Paying 50% extra for an OS I don't need makes no sense for my situation. Paying for an unused Windows license for the XPS was unavoidable (I have our own licenses for the Windows VMs we need for testing).

> It's clearly not trivial [to make a laptop better than Dell or Apple]

The Google hardware I have experienced has mostly impressed me (even if third party, they have mostly enforced quality constraints). Although I have owned a Nexus with a design flaw, I would consider buying a Pixel (although at present I find the Nokia gives me better bang for my hard earned buck).

It'd be really nice to have a well-made laptop where Linux is a first-class citizen. It's not even about the $whatever it costs to ship it with a Windows license, though that's significant for some/most - it's more the principle of it for me. I don't want Windows to be the default OS and I just couldn't live with myself supporting that. I also don't want a Windows logo key to have to see every day.

The website gives you the option to save $90 if you have them install linux on the XPS 13. I suspect you may be able to call and get the same deal on the XPS 15. At least when I was buying from them 20 years ago you could do that...

But that's nothing compared to the new stuff. It runs containerized linux with a great abstraction layer that connects GUI calls from linux into the beautiful hi-dpi Chrome OS desktop environment (I think it's still called "Aurora"?)

It's still in beta, but they're almost ready to add: - USB support (obviously important here, but they want you to be able to develop android apps on it) - Sound from linux container -> hardware speakers (I believe this is in beta channel now though?) - graphic acceleration (also is in early testing, canary branch maybe?) - backup/restore functionality (lose your laptop? get a new one and restore your container)

All of this in one of the sexiest laptops with the best keyboard of any of the ~5 machines I own for $999

I've been using it as my main development machine (a complicated electronJS app that windows substate on linux choked on) and all the backend/database work for over a year and I love it. You could get it on sale for $699, too.

Main complaint? If you need to do a lot of work in VM's. You currently can't spin up a Windows VM or anything very easily, but rumor has it they're working on letting you dualboot in the future.

I freaking love this machine. They should pay me to evangelize but I promise they don't :)

Prior to this, I gave my mom Chromebooks after she kept calling me for tech support for virus infestations, and it worked well.

Working with the Pixelbook, I totally agree with the VM bit. I would love to run Vagrant, MiniKube, KubeFlow, etc. The Linux emulation is good, but It's Google. 'We' can do it better. They probably did, but missed the adoption / backwards compatibility curve.

I hung out with a ChromeOS dude last weekend and he told me about how the Linux emulation is controlled by 'vsh' using their own replacement for QEMU, and inside that is an LXC container. Great for security, and I believe him. I entered one of the system vm's and saw LXC/LXD. The security seems great, but again, I can't do what I want to do. I felt dumb asking him about my 'emacs' in the ChromeOS Linux emulation. It always had a huge title bar on the top that took a bunch of the little screen real estate available. His answer was 'hit the full screen' button. I felt dumb. Usability for us dumb engineers will sell your product. Apple has abandoned the engineer market. The XPS flexible, but the Pixelbook is still sexy. I can't get my son to take my daughter's Pixelbook though, so maybe I am just old.

I would love a Pixelbook, but I need a laptop if I want to work while travelling - I often end up with poor cellular data (or none at all!).

Does having both a laptop and a pixelbook make sense?

Work also bought a device to get satellite data - so that we can do operational support while in "remote" areas in New Zealand (plenty of areas we go to that lack mobile coverage) or when travelling overseas.

I don't follow. Pixelbook is a laptop! It's actually the only one I travel with

1) The docking station is horribly buggy. If I unplug it to take my laptop somewhere and then plug it back in, I have to do a full reboot or none of the USB peripherals on the docking station get power. Monitors, power, ethernet all still work through the docking station after being plugged back in. Dell support took 4hrs of my time installing/uninstalling drivers and firmware updates before finally giving up and sending me a new one. Which suffers the exact same issue. So I can buy a different brand of docking station, not take my laptop anywhere, or constantly reboot my machine.

2) Rebooting takes forever then fails. Every single time. After 8-10 minutes of sitting on the blue "Rebooting" screen it finally crashes and tells me something went wrong while rebooting. Every single time.

3) Sleep still doesn't work about a third of the time. If I put my machine to sleep through the Windows start menu and wait for all the various indicators to power off before closing the lid, there's a good chance that when I boot up tomorrow, the battery has fully drained and the machine has to boot back with all my applications closed down and context lost.

It makes me miss my Thinkpad.

To answer your question, I don't switch OS because the machine belongs to my employer and they set the rules. They say everyone runs Windows so I run Windows. It's actually a very usable OS.

You also seem to have missed the part where I spent 4 hours on the phone with Dell support already. Why would you expect that will be more successful with a different OS?

I've (sadly) heard similar reports for Linux on Thinkpads (eg https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9fos6i/x1_extreme... - and plenty of other reports on other models).

Ubuntu 18.04 has been rock solid for me on the XPS, and it has been getting BIOS updates (and Linux has been getting device driver updates if I want to reinstall).

Linux worked perfectly on the Toshiba I had for the previous 4 years (I didn't buy it with Linux in mind, it just worked).

In my experience, Windows laptops often get "driver rot" over time (amongst other issues). As a developer I can usually fix the Windows issues, but it certainly is not a painless task.

Dell's XPS Windows drivers were particularly bad considering the sticker price - Windows blue-screened two clicks into the install after opening the box - and I had some other blue-screen problems that took me a while to resolve when I first got the laptop. I haven't booted into Windows after installing Ubuntu, and Ubuntu has given me far less trouble than Windows (on this machine).

Ultimately, I gave up and bought an intel nuc with an M2 SSD and plenty of ram. It just works.

Run Manjaro with gnome-shell (actually gnome-shell-performance until 3.32 is released). Its lightening quick, reasonably stable, good battery life.

I also tried KDE, which works quite well, but the battery life was quite poor and I find the general KDE experience abrupt.

Now my 2017 mbp just gathers dust, never going back.

I'm seeing $2182 Thinkpad vs $2599 MacBook Pro--choices driven by WQHD display, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. Processor on the Pro is significantly faster, the display on the Mac has slightly higher resolution. Maybe not $400 worth of difference, but certainly almost $200 or so.

And I still can't buy an i5 laptop with 32GB of RAM.

If you want a 1TB SSD and know how to use a screwdriver, you can save $250 by buying the SSD yourself. If you're willing to start with a 256GB SSD and hold off on upgrading until you actually outgrow your storage space, you could save even more.

I own a ThinkPad X1 Yoga (2016) and except the battery life I'm extremely happy with it. Maybe I will switch to a MacBook in the future but the keyboard is a turn off (No F-keys and no Home, End, Insert and Delete keys). On the other hand I like that Apple has only Thunderbolt 3 connectors and I like macOS.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-2019-leak-Data...

Sure you can. Just buy a slightly older gen that's on par with an i5 on benchmarks, and max out the RAM on it. It's silly to limit yourself to new devices, when the best deals by far are found on the market for used/refurb ones.

That was the extent of the reason why I talked about MacBook Pro.

Also I bought my Thinkpad refurbed almost fully specced our for $1499 on eBay. i7, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, HDR 2.5k display, etc.

I also opened the chassis and added Liquid Metal (Grizzly) TIM. The little i7 stays pegged at 4 GHz without throttling and presumably also improves battery life.

An old laptop will run any Linux distro flawlessly and be equally snappy (as in, low-latency disk reads, fast boot times, many applications open) as a current-gen one if you put in a fast SSD and max out the RAM.

I know that this topic is controversial, but it strikes me as odd how many people seem to equate software engineering with a monster laptop, when many of us get lots of work done on smaller, less beefy client devices, offloading the real heavy lifting to a machine that can handle it.

For the $1000 it costs for a faster laptop, work gets many thousands of dollars back due to more efficient development.

I could waste time optimising disk space, waiting for compiles (the developer tools we use need single-core CPU performance), enchancing the performance of development tools, waiting for VMs to boot, waiting for Windows VM to update, waste time shutting down that VM I am not currently using. Yes, I could waste time switching to other tasks while I am waiting for whatever it is I am waiting for.

I travel, and while travelling work gets some development time out of me because it is a laptop and not a workstation. A terminal is no use when I am in an area with poor cellular data connectivity (e.g. most planes).

Work definitely wins on this whole equation.

In that case, why are you looking for a “reasonably priced” laptop? The Apple tax is indeed 50% or more, but it should be a straightforward decision if it fits your other requirements.

Sure, there are diminishing returns; but I don’t see why you wouldn’t spring up $3000 for a maxed out Macbook, considering the cost is still orders of magnitude less than what your business brings in. Unless you really hate the touch bar?

I don't care about the tax. But I can't buy a tool built for aliens by aliens. I could adapt to all the crazy keyboard changes all manufacturers tried over the years. But removing Esc key makes it completely unusable.

I use emacs/intellij and almost never have had the need to use the Esc key for anything at all.

At home I’m still on an i5 13” 2013. It’s still running great for everyday uses. Probably aiming for a 2015-ish era 15” i7 or so with double the RAM.

They run in the neighbourhood of $1400 or $1900 CAD. I imagine there are even more resources for that kind of purchase in the US.

I might bite the bullet yet for a newer machine but the Touch Bar is honestly a big turn off for me. Or rather the Touch Bar is fine but the lack of dedicated function keys is a turn off. Have considered adapting by remapping some keys but the price is also a factor.

I spent a few hours looking, and I did seriously consider buying the top-spec Apple available. I do use MacOS at work sometimes, although I prefer Linux, and I came from a Windows background.

The Dell appeared to have better drivers for Linux than the Macbook Pro, and the XPS has been a good purchase (rock solid so far, no issues).

I built my first desktop computer to do this recently. I can definitely recommend it, even for local server development. It's nice to be able to have a version of a codebase running on the remote machine so my local laptop stays cool while I'm testing.

* I once started a set of experiments, drove off for a short 3 day vacation, and returned to see everything was still running smoothly. Which frankly I hadn't expected.

https://system76.com/laptops

(I wrote another comment for why I use a high-spec laptop: basically multiple VM's and greedy development tools).

I don't know about impossible, but they've both been building laptops for a long time and they have large market shares, so if it was easy to build better laptops than theirs someone probably would have done it by now so it's probably really hard.

Thinkpad Carbon X1 6th gen (or 7th now?)

I only wish it was sold without Windows so I can save $30-40 on the win license.

Other than that, freaking perfect laptop that rivals a macbook (I will admit that the mac trackpad is slightly better... but this one is pretty damn good)

I needed a laptop (I try to refresh every 4 years in time with Ubuntu LTS releases), and the Dell met my requirements at the time, so that was what I got.

I looked at getting an Macbook Pro, but I was worried about the keyboard issues (I do use the laptop keyboard), and I had read about Linux driver issues.

My dream is Thinkpad keyboard + macbook trackpad... I can dream...

I don't think either of us are getting one for Xmas. If I had become founder of a unicorn I'd have had one custom made by now...

You can get the Precision 15" with Linux. However I was quoted a price 2 times as much as the XPS 15 with a lower spec, less community support, and I was quoted it with 16.04 installed in Jan 2019 (presumably only 16.04 officially supported? Hard to get information when we are only a small business).

https://liliputing.com/2018/05/dell-introduces-2018-precisio...

Don't Chrome books provide you what you need for software engineering?

The ones available are not hitting the mark.

Why?

XPS sort of does that, but you're still dealing with Dell which has it's own hiccups (variable build quality, archaic sales methods, etc.), also the XPS line isn't quite commercial grade. Thinkpads typically have good Linux support, but sometimes as with these last 6th gen X1's it takes some work to get it right.

The hard part is ultimately enterprise reliability. I want to confidence I can buy 2000 of these for my army of engineers and not overload IT with issues. This kind of support is common enough, but not necessarily for Linux laptops. Hell it'd probably be easier with Linux, the issue is more if the market is big enough to support the operational costs of enterprise support.

For those who just wanted a machine that "just worked" Windows based and Apple laptops would suffice, the latter having the power of a unix based OS underneath.

This is absolutely not the case. I can't emphasize it enough.

I don't mind Macs and OSX, but I would like some different options. I like Ubuntu (run it on my desktop) but I refuse to play the driver/customization game.

I want everything to just work.

For one thing, Linux-based OS's like Debian GNU/Linux absolutely follow the "it just works" mantra - if the OS installs properly in the first place and does what you need it to, you can expect it to be rock solid with few or no future issues. Plus, they tend to work for a lot more time than the 5 years max that Chrome OS does (or Mac OS, for that matter). That's simply invaluable in this day and age.

I have two still serviceable MacOS laptops but I don’t think I will buy any more. But, I love Apple Watch and iPhone - probably be a customer of those products for a long time.

For me, wouldn't it be great if laptop shells had a universal connector you could plug the mainboard of choice via an edge connector, be that ARM, X86, MIPS,????. Certainly make laptops more upgradable and save upon production costs with a standard laptop mainboard form factor.

Admittedly it's about 6 years since I interviewed there, but when I did, there were a number of engineers in my loops who were using chromebooks.

They found it more than sufficient for their needs.... I can see that, I guess. I'm assuming the bulk of the "heavy lifting" happened outside of the context of the chromebook.

There are some Engineers who use a Chromebook, but most have a Macbook. I think Linux is more common than Chromebooks.

But honestly, why would you choose a chromebook if you can also get a macbook?

What does 'last' mean? Any laptop should 'last' 8+ years.

> have a high spec (i9 etc);

I really don't see the point of high-spec laptops for development use. Higher end, high power components just make the batter life worse - reducing the entire point of a mobile device. And you're paying a premium for the mobile version.

A much better option is to have a beefy linux desktop that you perform work on remotely. There is very little reason to locally compile code on a laptop. The economics work much better IMHE... If you have a $2000 budget for instance, you can build a $1300 desktop and buy a $700 laptop which gives you much more power and flexability than buying a single $2000 laptop. So yes, I do think many Google engineers just need a portable terminal to connect to beefy VM's remotely. If you are often working on a mobile internet connection, Mosh works very well for high latency connections.

The $2000 laptop makes sense if you want to game while traveling and/or are using Windows where offloading work to a remote machine is a bit more clunky than just using X11 forwarding and/or tmux over SSH.

The 8950HK processor is fast[1] and NVMe is way faster than SATA.

I just use the integrated Intel GPU (I don't play games on my work laptop. If I were to play games, I would use a dedicated gaming rig or console).

I am expecting that in 4 years time I can get equivalent improvements to productivity by getting a replacement laptop (or even better, retire to a pacific island!).

[1] Benchmarks are not the answer, but anyway: https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2145#family-64-sing...

Personally, I can't live without focus-follows-mouse. That way, I can type and click on a window that is under another one.