I run my own small business and in the last 2 years we've bought 4 macbooks. 3 of them have been in the shop for 3+ days getting their keyboards replaced. While I'm glad they replaced them, "shockingly appalling" is pretty much how I felt as well.

I don't really get the dongle complaint though. I have the USB/USB-C/HDMI dongle and I bring that if I need it for a presentation or something, but when I travel I generally just bring a usb-c wall charger and that's it.

>I don't really get the dongle complaint though.

The dongle themselves, yeah sure whatever.

The fact that they placed the fucking WiFi antenna next to the USB-C port? That's just downright hostile. I'm stuck with this laptop (2018 MBP, non touch bar) for a while but I'll be replacing it the first chance I get.

I find it impossible to believe that this issue isn't known about to Apple, it most definitely came up in testing yet they continue to sell them anyway. It's a much bigger issue than the keyboard for me, because at least I can work around that with an external one.

I can't workaround not having WiFi because I want to use an external monitor.

You're lucky they fixed them. I have a MBP still under AppleCare with 2 almost completely defective keys and they refuse to replace it because of an unrelated scratch on the rear of the top case. It's clear they don't feel any responsibility for their poor design choices.

Both of my newer model Mac keyboards had to be repaired in about a year of usage for the keyboard issue. Obviously glad Apple extended the warranty for this, but only after a lot of pressure. The 2016 and 2017 models should be recalled.

When I go to the Apple store they immediately try to get a compressed air can out to “solve” my issue. It is both hilarious and incredibly insulting.

Why would you waste precious start-up budget on overpriced hardware?

Probably because software engineers who themselves are expensive are used to developing on Mac OS.

Probably cheaper than staff spending time moving, or rewriting code, tools to a new OS, as wages, ie. time, is going to far more expensive than a laptop.

For most the main reason is probably that they like macOS.

i have a mid-2015. i just like it. aluminum body, good screen, i don't mind the keyboard, the trackpad is fantastic. I really want a physical escape key. I've thought about, and can readily afford, a newer model. the 32g memory would be nice.

It has been a long time since i felt like i need to start searching for a linux capable laptop. i've felt like that for a long while though. i consciously know it's not that hard to find quality hardware. I still have some subconscious apprehension. Trying to find a pcmcia network card to work with my thinkpad was such a pain back in the day. i have not so fond memories of trying to compile tulip.c into a kernel module.

MacOS was a breath of fresh air. everything just worked, and i had a real unix to work with. darwin isn't the greatest thing ever, but the hardware was nice. The air is getting kinda stale though. i need to find some hardware and make it right. the apple heyday made me complacent.

I’m transitioning from Mac->Linux laptop. I bit the bullet and bought one with Linux pre installed (statem 76). The hardware is not as good as the Mac book pro but it’s decent. And I was happily surprised that everything just works out of the box. Battery life isn’t great (3 hours with the intel graphics half that with ).

The jetbrains ides work and with so many tools being web based. I miss sequel pro and transmit but not that much(the alternatives aren’t that great). The thing I find is there are fewer options to buy software on Linux which means using the free slightly sub optimal solutions.

I think you can happily do software development on a Linux notebook these day (provided you have a power outlet)

yeah. If I could purchase macOS and run it on another laptop (eg ThinkPad) I would. I'm loving my MBA 2013 (8gb ram, 256ssd)... but it is 6 years old and nothing from Apple makes me want to a hw upgrade.

I gotta be honest here, I get pretty good mileage out of Docker on Hyper-V inside Windows.

I don't bother much with Linux sub-system anymore as I'm almost always pulling in containers anyway these days so I might as well just run real Linux in Docker.

Obviously there's a bunch of reasons why you'd use OSX outside of being Posix-y, but just wanted to share that it's not the same picture as it was (if you've got Hyper-V on your laptop).

> so I might as well just run real Linux in Docker

you mean you'd rather run a HyperV VM which hosts a docker daemon and configure your local docker client to use that VM. (all done automatically with docker for windows/mac)

the downside of that is higher power consumption.

I should clarify - I am using Docker for Windows, which in turn requires and is using Hyper-V, in preference to using WSL.

Arguably the hardware is still worth it. But then there’s the software...