Not only are they better built, they also run macOS.
In this case, but there are plenty of examples of a sub-par performance from Apple. Broken keyboards, display cable issues, shipping with overheating CPU profiles, removing buttons, useless touch bar display, removal of ports - to name a few. As Rossman says: "the only part on a MacBook that doesn't blow are the fuses".
> they also run macOS
Again, not been a fan of their recent work. I can get a very macOS-esque experience in Linux. It's not always a seamless experience granted, but it's really quite acceptable.
The problem is the “can get.” If you value your time at, say, $200/hr, how long can you spend learning about Linux distros, repos, software, and troubleshooting issues etc before you’ve spent the savings from buying a non-Mac-native laptop?
This is not a fair comparison because there are a lot of benefits of troubleshooting, most of them intangible. If you don't like it fine, just get a Linux "certified" laptop or a Mac.
I don't see how buying a Linux "certified" laptop figures into this - they aren't "mac-like." And I agree with you, just buy a Mac if that's what you're looking for.
I wouldn't want to overstate the effort, we're talking a day at most. The reward is a machine that you have a high amount of control over.
A lot of software people already understand linux; obviously if you have to learn everything from scratch it's not the ideal productivity choice.
But if my two options are buying a Mac native laptop or spending the time trying to set up a "mac-like" experience on a Linux distro installed on an Acer laptop designed for Windows (the comment I was replying to), I'm going with the Mac native laptop.
You propose it's costing you $200 per hour, but actually you're also gaining real skills too that you may have otherwise paid for. Once you have a decent setup you really don't spend much time learning anything additional.
If you run into issues, there is a wealth of help out there and if you really get stuck you can simply peek under the hood, even make some changes.
This could be true about some models some time ago. The unibody design is now common among other brands and is not a particularly good thing - the two components that wear out most on laptops is the battery and the keyboard, and traditionally on non-Apple laptops you could at least replace the former yourself.
I had a recent fun project where I needed to install Python and a bunch of Python tooling and libraries (Jupyter, matplotlib, numpy, pandas, etc). Setting PATH on Windows is one of the most bizarre things. And even then I could not get everything to work. There were weird version conflicts, and this was all trying to use the Linux Subsystem for Windows which was insanely slow.
Why can’t I just update one file on my file system from a text editor to update path configuration?
You have benchmarks for this? I’m running a Windows Pro installation with a Core i7 4790K and 16GB memory. My 2015 MacBook is much faster. I honestly thought the WSL thing was just a gimmick and some online searching told me that there are IO performance issues.