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The build quality still usually is a narrow miss. Namely, non-apple manufacturers LOVE to cut corners by using plastic on the bottom or more fragmented case design. Touchpads are always iffy too.

Does anyone know of any non-apple machines that truly are at parity in build quality? The new Thinkpad X1 looks nice.

Try the Asus UX305. No seams, completely aluminum body, no fans, large nice touchpad, and matte wide gamut IPS display for $600 or so when it's on sale. It's similar in design to a 13" MacBook Air but a little smaller/lighter and with a far superior display.

At first I thought the Core M processor would be slow, but it's comparable, maybe 15% slower than an i5, once it reaches the full thermal throttle.

(And the keyboard isn't backlit but I always thought that feature was kind of lame anyways.)

Traded in my UX305UB (so i7 instead of Core M, 940m instead of integrated, and 4K) for an 2015 i5 RMBP.

By all accounts a strict downgrade right?

Except by the end of ownership I had grown so tired of Windows and Linux that I had to Hackintosh it to be bareable. That disabled the 940m (which I didn't miss anyways) and messed with power management so aim guessing the i7 wasn't turbo boosting anymore but it was still worth it to get an OS that supported all my monitors without fuss, had developer mindshare, didn't crash from sleep and had a bash shell without compatibility layers and VMs.

I posted about it on here in another comment and realized how silly that was and looked up someone selling a RMBP and asked for a trade the very next day (I'd have bought a 2016 MBP but I want to see the what next model will bring). Tellingly enough, the i7 UX305ub has depreciated so much faster than the i5 MBP that I should have owed the guy.

The supposed "exodus" from Macbooks has the strangest timing to me.

6 months ago if you asked what the best hardware for a development machine was, you'd get some Thinkpad answers, but the mainstream was a 2015 MacBook Pro.

Suddenly the 2016 comes out and isn't what people want, so everyone acts like the 2015 ceased to exist...

Now people are recommending laptops that they used to recommend the 2015 RMBP over as where to head! Is it a need to have the shiniest new MBP? 2015s went on sale in most retail outlets so the prices are even better now. It's not like the hardware degraded because there's a new model either.

Or maybe there's less substance to all the commotion than HN comments and posts would imply?

Can't touch Lenovo given their spyware antics and even more recently it was revealed a couple of their mobiles have secret backdoors. Not saying Thinkpads do. It's a vote of no confidence on the whole

That and their sales worm insisted I could run Linux on a t400 I bought new and have no problems with support (paid for NBD repairs.) Screen flakes out and their tech team insisted i reformat to Windows before they're replace an obviously hardware defect

So spying issues and BS salesmen == no more Lenovo for me

Dell developer 13" and 15" can be beefed up pretty nicely. That and Dell is officially supporting Linux through and through; have heard first hand stories of calling in and getting help with Arch related issues. They ended up fixing it in new drivers.

That to me makes Dell the only alternative to Apple (these days I get by fine with a maxed MB Air, running Ubuntu only booting off a tbolt disk into OSX)

Samsung Series 9 notebooks are rock solid, with a thin alloy chassis and rank anecdotally among the best keyboards out there. You can even upgrade/replace your SSD, which simply isn't possible with modern Apple machines.

Mine runs Xubuntu beautifully (I prefer the minimalism of XFCE).

Surfacebook and Surfacebook pro are as good or better. The track pad is just as good as the one on the mac, and there's a touch screen as well. Plus it turns into a tablet.

Was looking at the XPS13/15, unfortunately they have 16:9 glossy hidpi screens I find suboptimal. (Not interested in a low-res screen.)

Surface Pro 4 / Surface Book, their build quality is amazing. (actually better than Mac's probably)

Is Surface Pro 4 build quality amazing? Don't they have those keyboard cover things that are encased in a vinyl. How is that comparable to an aluminium unibody?

The surface book is closer - I like its features/specs but still find it very ugly - I can't get over that huge gappy hinge.

I want to like MS products but they are not the quality I want yet. Surface Studio really turned my head though.

Both the surface book and surface pro are fully made of magnesium. The keyboard cover is actually amazing. I'm using it daily, no idea what it's made of, the texture is really nice to the hand. Anyways, I really prefer this keyboard over the MBP one (this one is more clicky).

Regarding the ugliness, that's matter of taste.

> The keyboard cover is actually amazing

It makes me really wonder if we can be talking about the same thing. After similar comments, I looked at one in a store looking forward to being impressed but it turned out to be a flimsy thing with no key travel. It reminded me of a cover of ring binder. The sort of thing that if it bounces around a bag for a couple of months it would become dog-eared and split at the edges.

> Regarding the ugliness, that's matter of taste.

I don't know... I really feel I can make the case that its ugly! It looks like its not properly closed and that it won't be protecting the screen properly. If a metal pen gets loose in a bag its going to love bouncing around scratching up the screen.

Originally there were two versions, but I think there is only one now. The touch cover looks more like a ring binder cover. (random link I found, no connection) http://www.alphr.com/features/378001/microsoft-surface-touch...

MS Surface bang for your buck seems pretty much the same for comparable specs to Apple machines. It's great there's viable high quality alternatives to Apple on the market finally, but they don't really seem like a compelling reason to switch based on price and quality alone.

10 years ago, there was no MacBook Air ;)

> 40" curved screen iMac

why?

> MacPro replacement that looks something like the Razor Blade Stealth where a full powered GPU attaches via USB-C.

oh god why?

both of these just seem like gimmicks instead of just making a top notch dev machine.

Lots of ram, good CPU, discrete GPU option, fast SSD, decent port selection, great battery life (tweak machine options to get a bit more or less, but always good).

That's why the 2013 was such a great machine. Mine is still easily good enough today.

Now we have gimmicky touchbars, the ram hasn't increased, the CPUs are older models, they have dropped a bunch of useful ports (HDMI, magsafe power supplies), and the battery life isn't even what it used to be.

A big discrete GPU box that works over thunderbolt is just a gimmick. Windows laptop makers do stuff like that but their touchpads are still pretty much meh.

> A big discrete GPU box that works over thunderbolt is just a gimmick.

A valid use case for this could be someone travels a lot who wants a thin, lite laptop but when they are home, they want to play AAA game titles.

How heavy are gaming laptops with enough GPU grunt to play the latest AAA titles on ultra settings?

I have still yet to find a trackpad that is even close to as good as Apple's. This has been the main thing keeping me on Apple's hardware for about 5 years now.

There's always "something", for most of us.

For me, it was the unibody and screen hinges - they were just way more durable than anything else out there, at almost any price. Now I share your affinity for the trackpad.

I think I'm at the end of wanting a full-function laptop at this point. Once my 2015 rMBP dies I'll likely replace it with a powerful work/gaming PC at home and a convertible tablet PC like a Surface Pro.

>better battery life

If we're comparing those laptops running linux with macbooks running macos, I highly doubt it.

And why the curved screen?

Mainly because my primary monitor is a 40" curved 4k TV these days. When you sit an arm's length away, the curve helps your peripheral vision. It also makes 3D games really pop.

Anything else feels tiny now and multimonitor setups are just plain annoying in comparison.

> XPS13 and UX305

> And they're significantly cheaper.

I tend to disagree, when I shopped around I found the zenbook and xps 2 to 3 times the price of a mac air.