If I buy a new laptop it will either be a surface pro or a mba however.

Installing Linux with all the customized hardware inside, just get an X screen/GUI is non-trivial, even on old Macs. Check out the Bumblebee Project to get an idea of how painful it is to just leverage the two graphics cards properly. This is not to mention even on Debian Wheezy (stable), you will load without the proper HW-interfacing components to spin up the fan. You can see how that is dangerous for an amateur, and you will know three hours later while configuring when your thighs turn bright red. Not that it happened to me though.

This is just one small thing, go to any Linux distro wiki, how about Debian for example[1] if you cannot tell my bias, and read the MacBook page, then read all the personal blog posts, for old and new Macs and see the pain it takes. Even though it is annoying, I will give them credit as properly the only laptop popular enough to force even barely useable UEFI support. But Macs also half-ass that too.

Seriously, if you are a Mac fan, but like Linux, you will end up in the end saying fuck Apple for all the unintentional pain they inflict on you. But hey, at least they invented cups, so how much can I complain?

[0] https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/

Now it is back to zero, and I can be the Apple contrarian I yearn to be. :-)

First, there's the principle of not giving Apple any more money!

Second, Apple's laptops don't have any form of docking so using them in the office is rather cumbersome.

With TB ports and the like it could have been worked out to one cable instead of an edge connector, yet they seem to have zero interest in the business.

I have run Windows 7 even as primary at times but in the end went back to a Dell for work put an iMac back on my home desktop.

Don't get me wrong, the MBP does look nice. And plenty of people are clearly willing to throw lots of money at Apple for both the real and perceived benefits of the premium price. But if performance per dollar is my concern --and I'm forgoing the operating system, one of the "real" benefits IMHO-- numerous other competitors blow Apple out of the water.

The point of a laptop is good, light, sturdy industrial design, long battery life, and quality interaction features (solid keyboard, responsive touchpad, good webcam, flat SPL curve on speakers, etc.), while optimizing performance given that. That's what you're paying the Apple premium for, not the OS. Those qualities remain when you run Windows on the hardware.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire...

I have a friend who keeps bugging me about how expensive MBPs are. I asked him to find a better laptop for the money. I care about the following, in order: quality of screen, quality of keyboard, tough case, light wight, long betters life, fast hd, fast CPU, good gfx card. So far no results :) I actually kind of wish there was more choice in the high end market. I have seen a few nice ultrabooks, but they cost as much as a Mac, if not more, so what's the point?

For example, $1000 shoes that last 1 year are reasonable when compared to going without shoes - only $3 a day, and you'll save money that you would have to pay to repair damage to your bare feet.

Could you find a better pair of shoes for less than $1000? Where's the gold leaf, and why do they lace up the front rather than snap up the sides? I think not.

Of course, same arguments can be applied to almost anything, but this thread was about premium laptops. You can't have a premium laptop that's also very cheep.

The X1 Carbon is kind of nice. But same thing applies. Low res screen is a letdown, and by the time you load it up to be comparable to say, rMBP, it's about the same price.

https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1

They will also release a Thinkpad Yoga in november, with less attractive specs unfortunately - it'll be a 12.5" 1920 x 1080 display. (Which is unfortunate for me since I can't live without a Trackpoint on a laptop and only the Thinkpad model offers it)

For just a little more money they could've put at least an HD 5100 part in it. While the TDP would be higher, the higher-TDP Haswell parts still idle at very low wattages, so when you're not using the extra power they get similar battery life, but it's there when you want it.

The performance difference between the 4400 and 5100 is huge. It's on par with an older discrete Radeon/GeForce chip.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the X240 to not become an Ultrabook. So far it looks like a downgrade, or at most like Lenovo managed to put in FullHD over a course of two years.

http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-l521x/pd?oc=dncwx18bw7&model... 16GB RAM, 512 SSD, 3rd gen i7, NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 640M with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM

I've had i think 3 versions of the same. It's always tried to break the mould in design. They tried funky designer covers in the past. Lately they've been going with the metallic finish of macbooks on the outside(but better in my opinion). On the inside its the black soft touch finish(which feels so much more warm than an MBP). I also own an MBP btw.

The one thing that PC laptops are getting wrong is the battery. The MBP battery outperforms the dell by atleast 2-3 times. But for me that's not an issue, since i work plugged in most of the time.

Also the first thing i do is remove windows and install Linux. The machine boots in like 3 seconds flat. I've not had any issues with drivers or anything.

Looks nice, I'll compare that to the Mac competition next year when I change my Latitude e5520.

The Latitude has non-glare FHD screen for less money. (Bought an SSD separately.)

Only built in graphics is a feature; I can't play games :-)

I think all those years of churning out bland clones made them lose their expertise. They can't execute on something like a Mac Mini or a high end laptop. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it appears that these are difficult problems that take competence.

Don't own one, but just linking to give an example that there is a pretty decent looking PC Mac Mini clone out there.

Newegg has a category specifically for these form factor machines: http://www.newegg.com/Mini-Booksize-Barebone-PCs/SubCategory...

All of these "mac mini" style machines target the low end market. They all have low end processors & video cards. I have yet to see a premium machine like the mac mini that is available in a small form factor.

That resolution is a dealbreaker.

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/precision-m3800...

I will have to buy server hardware on my next upgrade.

Plus, it looks goofy. I'm not 17 and don't want to carry around a laptop that glows neon green at tech conferences or coffee shops.

One thing to remember is that you are replacing a MBP with an ultrabook, a more fair comparison is to look at the specs in the Macbook Air, to which many ultrabooks compete in terms of thickness and weight.

do you really need that extra bit of performance to justify increased risk of loosing data and inconvenience of a rebuild?

If you buy a 256GB SSD, you're probably buying 8 32GB chips and a controller.

Here, you're buying 16 instead of 8 chips, but two controllers. So they call it "two drives in RAID-0", but it's very little different from one SSD.

It's not 16 times more likely to fail; I think the annual SSD failure rate is about 30% that of a spinning disk. Even if the double controllers means a double failure rate, it's still statistically more reliable than a single new spinning disk.