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Comment by gonvaled | Hacker News Reader

Which thinkpad model? Screen size? Weight? I must carry three (!) laptops with me: shitty windows that I nearly never boot, macbook pro for webex (!) and not to get in trouble with bosses in meetings, and my beloved 17" asus, with ubuntu, which I kind of hide, and which is getting too heavy for me. In all over 10kg. I work remote, so this is only a problem for the occasional gatherings.

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I use a P50 with 64GB of RAM, and an i7-6700HQ Intel processor. It is not light by any means, but it is certainly less than your 10kg (the specs I'm looking at say it's about 5.6 pounds, which sounds about right). It's got a 15.6" HD display, though I could have (and probably should have) opted for a 4k display. Also has a 1TB HD and a 1TB SSD. At my workplace, we're using Zoom, which works flawlessly on Linux. I have worked at a place that used Bluejeans, which did not work so well on Linux, and so I actually ran that inside of a Windows VM in Virtualbox. I would highly recommend one of these Thinkpads. It seems you would greatly benefit from buying one. They are packed with enough specs for you to run whatever combination of virtual machines you could possibly need in your everyday work.

Holy cow! The closest I could find in Amazon.de [1] is selling for 2200€, and it has only 8 GB RAM. Do you mind sharing how much did it cost you, and where did you buy it?

[1] https://www.amazon.de/Lenovo-ThinkPad-2-6-GHz-6700HQ-1920-x/...

Sure, I bought mine through Amazon, but like with any of these machines, you will save a lot of money by purchasing a machine with the lowest specs possible, and then buying the upgraded parts (RAM, CPU, drives, etc) and installing them yourself. I bought mine for about US$1700 altogether, including the new RAM and storage options. It is not cheap, but it is absolutely worth the money if you work with computers professionally at all. The only thing you can't really swap out is the display, so you'll have to buy that in the base model. These Thinkpads are not cheap, but it's easily some of the best hardware I've ever bought. Better even than all that old phenomenal Asus hardware! Thinkpad models seems to be hit or miss, and so I would research beforehand which ones are not great. I've previously used for example a W530, which is definitely a hit, along with the P50.

Why not install windows and linux on virtual machines (or dual/triple-boot) on a single highest-end macbook pro?

But I'm genuinely curious why people want to pay this huge price for merely okay hardware? You can get a lot more power out of a non-Apple product for a lot cheaper. I am not trying to start a flamewar here, I've just never been able to wrap my head around this idea.

Can not get used to keyboard / mouse of macbook

i used to have the same problem, but i found after a week of using only the mac I got used to it :)

Since my main development environment is Linux, having to work inside the VM is actually making this problem more difficult:

1. I have problems getting used to the Mac keyboard

2. I have problems getting used to the keyboard mappings inside the VM running in the Mac, which is different to the keyboard mappings in my barebone Ubuntu machine, and different to the mappings in a VM running in my barebore Ubuntu machine

3. Integration of host OS (macOS) and VM is another source of pain (copy-paste, file sharing and so on)

If I was able (or willing) to ditch Ubuntu and do everything in the Mac, without VMs, this would be easier to achieve.

As a software developer, I find the lack of dedicated home/end/page up/page down keys almost impossible to get used to. The new Touch Bar makes things even worse.

You would get into trouble using Ubuntu around your boss? On what basis?

Only windows pcs with corporate software packages are officially allowed into the VPN. Macbooks are tolerated, anything else does not exist.

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