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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

Depends on your budget:

$2000 - A loaded Dell Precision workstation. Wait for Kaby Lake quads though. If you like the Surface Books that's an option too.

$1500 - Dell XPS.

$1200 - ASUS UX501VW. (Only one RAM slot is upgradable, though)

If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards.

All of these machines run Linux well (with an occasional driver compile). The biggest tradeoff will be the touchpad. I find the trackpads on par with my 2009 unibody White Macbook. If you prefer a mouse like I do, it wouldn't be that much of an issue. On the plus side, you can get much better specs for the price of a Mac. Xeons, lots of ECC RAM, beter displays, better battery etc etc.

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The precision 5510 looks great, but: http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/dell-precision-5510.

> This workstation can get some serious work done, but its battery life of 5 hours and 34 minutes means you likely won't be taking it far from your desk.

The 13" rMBP gets 12 hours on the same test: http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/all-day-strong-longest-las....

I don't feel like I'm being unreasonably picky here. I've been using a laptop with a great display and 8-9 hours of actual battery life for the last two years. Everything on the market right now (including probably the new MBP) is a downgrade from that.

> Why can't anyone else?

OS X vs. Windows?

Maybe. I think Apple sticking to 2.5K and 3K displays, instead of rushing to 4K has something to do with it.

The only issue I have with the 5510 is they keyboard. Compared to my 2011 MBAir, this thing is really sub-par.

There is a lot of trackpad jitter as well - which is easy to disable when a mouse is plugged in, but still.

edit: the camera is also in a stupid place.

> If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards

Meh. The one on my 2015 X1 Carbon is okay, but the keyboard and trackpoint are the worst parts of my X1 Yoga – the trackpoint only allows the "soft dome" caps (i.e. the convex ones, not the nice concave ones which save you a bunch of stress in the fingers) and the keyboard just feels very cheap and weird. The keypress is still well-defined, it’s just that the keys are incredibly shallow.

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