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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

And here I am switching to Mac after a lifetime on Windows.

All the things you say about Apple might be true, but the alternative is substantially worse. Microsoft dropped the ball way more than Apple ever did with Windows 10. And hardware quality among laptop manufacturers is frustratingly inconsistent, even within the same brand.

My last Lenovo worked great for 5 years despite being a low end machine. My much more expensive new Lenovo has had a keyboard replacement and significant performance issues in one year.

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This is my fear. I'm holding onto my 2015 MBP really hoping Apple starts making laptops I want again, but I don't know where else to go. My last Windows machine was a very expensive Samsung Ultrabook machine that cost much more than the equivalent Apple machine. It was a mess in terms of OS and hardware. So I feel like I'm running out of options.

You're in good company in my household. We have four MBPs (2015, 2012, 2x2011). Not getting rid of them until, as you said, Apple starts making laptops I want again.

> the alternative is substantially worse

There’re other alternatives than Windows. I’ve been using Linux near-exclusively on my personal machines for almost two decades now, and I’m quite happy with it. Then there are the BSDs.

What about Linux laptops? Are you considering that alternative?

Not OP. For home, I'm using a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu on it, for office I use a MBP 15.

There are upsides and downsides to either of them. The Ubuntu is super snappy low latency desktop, it's a pleasure to type on it (running i3 as window manager); but the sound randomly disappears so much that I'm forced to use bluetooth speakers; and the backlight / network managers controls randomly stop working on upgrades. When I'm tinkering with stuff, I can hunt what's wrong and fix it, but when I'm working, I want stability.

So the MBP is the workhorse. But it struggles a lot with a high res external monitor connected via DisplayPort, and even worse, the UI starts to hiccup when I'm running a heavy load, like executing the test suite in parallel. The Linux scheduler is much better in this regard.

In my case, one of my core use cases is music production. Linux is as good as useless for that - no major DAWs support it.

My other use case is writing. A LOT. I really need a good keyboard for it. The older MBPs had great keyboards. The newer ones, not so much. Outside of Apple, the only competent keyboards I've seen are on Thinkpads

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