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Comment by welly | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling a bit on what my next laptop will be. Apple owner since I don't know when, currently on a late 2013 MBP. It's still going but I suspect it doesn't have a vast amount of life left. Every few months I lose another pixel.

I certainly wouldn't upgrade to the current range so they're going to have to do something special in the next 12-18 months or I'll be taking an Ubuntu desktop crash course and getting a Lenovo or similar.

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I'm in a similar situation, except that mine is from the initial 2012 retina batch. I hate so many of the changes Apple has made to the MBP line in the latest incarnation, so I'm currently leaning towards getting one of older batch that has real ports and real function keys. They can still be bought new from Apple starting a few hundred less than the touchbar variety and you can even save another ~$350 going the refurb route.

I do wish other laptop makers would start to offer hackintosh-friendly models, because at this point it's only macOS that I really want.

Finding a suitable replacement was difficult. For some reason instead of taking advantage of Apple's missteps with the MBP, competitors decided to copy with all USB-C.

I ended up with getting a LG Gram. 2 normal USB 3.0, 1 USB-C, HDMI, SD card, 8th gen CPU. Affordable, very light. Great battery life (marketing materials say 22.5 hrs). I run dual-boot Kubuntu and Win10 on it. Really like it.

I’m in the same boat and use the same MBP.

The MBP is by default already booting into Debian and its so much better than macOS. Every time I go back, it’s a nightmare.

My best bet (after looking around a lot) is the newest Lenovo x1 Carbon.

Same MBP here too. I recently replaced the hard drive with a SSD and I feel like it's going to last forever (meaning until the screen dies).

Do you miss the macOS shortcuts? I’m in the same boat as you (early 2013) and starting to looking more and more to X1 Carbon. The emacs-like system wide shortcuts is what I’m afraid of missing mostly.

hihi, funny that you would mention that you're afraid of the emacs-like shortcuts, because I gave this week a talk called "Play Emacs like an instrument"[1].

Honestly, under Linux, I'm using i3wm[2] as a Window Manager and Emacs (with evil-mode) for mostly everything else. Everything is accessible with shortcuts. I don't miss macOS for those and not for a whole lot of other things. The only thing I haven't found a better (that's subjective, of course) alternative, yet, is HDR photography editing.

1. http://200ok.ch/posts/2018-04-27_Play_Emacs_like_an_Instrume...

We just bought the Lenovo Ideapad 720S and it is competing directly with a lower end Macbook Pro. Stunningly beatiful as well. Not the retina screen but there's more expensives ones if you like that.

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