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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

If anything, there's plenty of alternatives in laptop space. From Surfaces, Lenovos, Dells, Huaweis to bunch of other really good hardware that is only marginally different. Even the OSes have converged to the point where they differ in mostly in the keyboard shortcuts and types of annoyances you deal with.

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I tend to disagree on this one. Even if PC hardware has caught up to a certain extent, software has not. Windows is a nightmare from my perspective (usability, privacy, developer tools, lack of good shell, package management, etc.) and Linux is not a viable alternative when you need certain commercial software.

A commercial Linux alternative focussed at desktops with appropriate support for commercial software and an easy transition path for users coming from the Mac would be great.

Speaking of hardware: I recently got a Lenovo for Linux testing. Multi-touch trackpad frequently stops working after standby. Boot time and wake-up time is a lot worse than on my MacBooks. Sometimes it doesn't wake up and needs a cold reboot when I open up the lid. I never experienced any of those issues on my Macs. Not even in 2006.

shrug I regularly use all three and I'm always baffled by posts like yours. Yes, macOS might be marginally more polished, but it's pretty much a matter of few days to get used to new patterns of the OS and that's it.

But yeah, if you decided that you will never in your life ever use anything but Apple operating system, then you just don't have a choice in the market. You'll have to buy what they serve you.

I agree with starbugs, for the record. I'm not married to Mac laptops (I used PCs for many years) but even with the new great ultrabooks out there (which I keep a close eye on), I still haven't seen something that adequately replaces the Macbook. It's gotten a lot closer but I don't think the market has quite caught up yet.

What do you use them for? It’s hard to imagine a power user or developer not having a moderately strong preference one way or the other. If that fits your usage, I am a bit envious of your flexibility!

I develop software for mobile systems (with some backend work too). Why is it hard to imagine? I have bash on all three. I have VSCode on all three. I have vim on all three. I have chrome on all three. I have IntelliJ suite on all three.

Most of the developer stuff is pretty much cross platform these days. What's the big deal if you're typing into bash on Linux, macOS or Windows?

There is no Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Illustrator, ... on all three.

If all you need is a text editor and a web browser, you pretty much could have been using all three systems for 20 years already.

at least a couple years back using a surface pro 3, windows apps was clearly not up to handle hi-resolution displays: the majority of apps I was using that wasn't VS Studio (7zip, notepad++, eclipse, etc) was completely unusable (especially by means of touch) without screwing around with scalability settings, and swapping it to various percentages depending on the app I was using. I vaguely remember firefox being acceptable but poor as well, but I'm not too sure about that one

Dunno the state now, but that experience makes me reluctant to look at higher end laptops with windows. Otherwise its just generally clunkier and weaker integration of the terminal, but those don't hurt nearly as much as the inconsistent rendering for using a daily driver

It's refusal to tell me what file/program is stopping me from safely removing my hdd is also absolutely infuriating

I am not sure about this. I have always worked with Windows professionally and until 4 years ago also had Windows laptops. Then on whim I bought a 2014 MBP for personal use and I think the software and hardware are much better than anything I have seen in the windows world. At work I can use Surface Book, Surface Pro and HP laptops and in my opinion they are far away from the level of quality of my MBP.

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