Then there's the classic Windows Laptop "goodness" like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface), necessity to emulate Linux/Git/Wsl/Cygwin for any real dev work, having elaborate install.txt procedures for setting up a new laptop.
I wanted to have a "beefy" machine but since I can now do my play things on Google Colab (and my work on company's Macbook), I just ordered the last year's M1 Macbook Air and I'm done with this Dante's Inferno of Windows Laptop ecosystem. Windows 11 just reinforced my disbelief that Microsoft can produce usable operating system before our civilization reaches Singularity.
At the very least based on my own experience you should avoid HP Elitebooks, and Microsoft Surfaces, also Asus Zenbooks, and Dell Inspirons.
...As you can tell from that list I've tried very hard to avoid paying the premium for a MacBook before giving in. They're still not perfect, but they're good enough that I am never going back to a Windows laptop.
Only thing the Macbook does noticeably better is speaker quality which isn't surprising given the size difference.
Macbook now has the M1 going for it.
apt-get is much nicer than brew and all its stupid cask/taps stuff that takes forever for packages to install.
With wslutils installed I have "open" and "pbcopy" equivalents configured which were the only 2 things missing from osx that I use a lot.
Curious to hear more about the keyboard / trackpad issues you're seeing. I have an older XPS model, which has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used (better than any MacBook I've tried) and a great trackpad too (I haven't used a MacBook from the last several years, but it's hard to beat physical left/right buttons).
Has the touchpad changed? Mine is extremely smooth, it does not stick to your finger at all, and has no texturing on the surface like cheap laptops sometimes do.
Furthermore, I'm curious if you've tried Linux on the laptop at all. In the past, most issues I had with "bad" trackpads (other than when the surface itself was bad) were resolved by installing Linux, where the drivers simply worked better than on Windows and were generally more configurable (although the advent of libinput changed that).
Interesting, last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.
And you are actually right that the trackpad surface on XPS in particular is actually one of the better/best ones. However options for tweaking it in Windows settings is non-existent, and so it is much slower than the mac trackpad, and my finger end up fatigued from casual scrolling, which never happens on mac. (This (trackpad scrolling speed) is tweakable eg in VSCode but not in Chrome etc.)
Interesting. On this site, I see nothing but complaints about the Macbook short travel keyboards. I have not used one for more than a few minutes, but I am a fast touch typist and I like the greater travel with my XPS keyboard. It's a whole lot better feeling than the 2014 MBP I have compared it with; the latter has more travel than newer Macbooks but has a mushy, foam-like feel to its switches rather than the firmer, actuator-like feel that I'm used to with the XPS.
> last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.
This depends a lot on the features you're expecting, and also whether you have a touchpad that's compatible with good drivers or not. For a long time the multi-touch story on Linux wasn't great, so users coming from Macs and expecting to use 3, 4 or 5 finger gestures were inevitably disappointed. I find myself not really using these gestures, even when I use a Mac (I bind keyboard shortcuts to my most used functions with Karabiner instead), so it doesn't matter much to me.
Rather, I'm comparing the behavior of a certain class of low quality touchpad that you find in cheap laptops. In Windows, I've seen these touchpads jerk around, not really detect your finger properly, have weird acceleration ramps, and have bad palm rejection - seemingly issues with the touchpad itself, yet become vastly improved when switching the laptop over to Linux, provided that you could use the synaptics driver.
Stuff like trackpad scrolling speed has of course always been configurable system wide on Linux, along with many other features. It's even available in the libinput driver, which (unfortunately) got rid of most of the "knobs" for touchpads.
You may be right; I can't believe it's been 13 years since Microsoft's last go at writing the kernel for it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)). So sad they gave up :(
20% of the time it works.
40% of the time it won't wake and I have to kill it (screen stays dark even though keyboard indicates it is awake)
30% of the time it just immediately wakes
10% of the time it wakes at like 2am and power cycles my monitor every 30 seconds waking me up
My thinkpad does the same. Wtf is up with that?
So the fault is really the Mac's. It should only accept real well formed WoL packets with its own Mac address.
Half the time i have to reboot to make those work again.
My laptop isn't a cellphone, I don't need it periodically waking up to check emails or whatever, it can do it when I open the lid.
Thankfully my laptop has an option to force S3 only in the bios.
Windows has a lot of 3am scheduled tasks for all kinds of random stuff (disk defrag, various update checks, etc). Any of those can cause the system to reawaken.
To my knowledge, it hasn't woken up without my input and Hibernate doesn't eat the battery alive while it's asleep.
Had the sleep states turned on and would randomly die at 60% battery while sleeping. Found out its a long standing bug in dells. Sometimes it just restarts the machine so if its in a bag it will just keep running.
Turned of sleep states in firmware and instead now it goes to hibernate on sleep. No random behavior or shutdown.
Its mind boggling this shit used to work totally fine on older laptops, no idea what changed.
My guess is windows will apparently not let u control such things, as the advertising data pipe has to be alive no matter what. Microsft seems to be both google and apple at the same time, selling ads and hardware.
The Yubikey nano -- the little one meant to be permanently left in a usb slot your laptop -- absolutely nukes the battery in my mac, draining it on "sleep" to zero within a day or so. Infuriating incompetence.
I thought I was being crazy and that maybe something was brushing it, so I let it sit in a moat on my desk immediately after booting. Full battery discharge in sleep in under 30 hours.
Without the yubikey, a full weekend sitting on my desk from a full charge leaves a reported 100% of battery.
Like WTF, if the lid is closed, the hardware should force it to suspend, not get stuck in some software. If the software doesn't respond in time then force the damn thing off.
It heated up like mad, even too hot to touch. Was worried about the possibility of a Lithium battery explosion. If that happened who do you sue, Canonical or the laptop manufacturer?
I believe ARM Macs use the same type of sleep, only with more polished firmware and better vertical integration with the OS.
I knew I wasn't the only one who does it!
Things are just getting worse with Windows and those standard PCs. I never understood why they moved to that S1 idle when S3 was fulfilling basic needs. This family Intel+Windows starts to irritate me. I am seriously considering either fully moving to Linux or to Apple Silicon and Mac OS.