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Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Apple as a company or how they act around locking people out of the devices they buy.

I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.

It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.

So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.

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> I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.

This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.

>> good touchpad, be silent

> This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.

Including those two items I emphasised? This is usually where Apple's competition fail, mostly because they don't even consider it.

I specifically check the touchpad as well, since right now I am on a MacBook running Asahi and I just can't stand other touchpads. I even tried a Thinkpad for a while and had to return it.

However, while ZenBook's touchpad is not haptic, it's at least a glass one and generally praised for being quite good in comparison. I asked a bunch of people. Notably I prefer to double tap than press on my touchpads, so I don't really care about the haptic feedback, but to each their own. Still, I think it's worth trying it. BestBuy should have them in store if you're in US, I haven't tried it myself yet.

And yes, it's surprisingly quiet. It's a bigger form factor (16") despite very low weight, so that helps with heat dissipation and X2 is very efficient.

To add to my other post: just today I saw a report on Zenbooks good touchpad quality from a previous M2 Pro user. And they also specifically cared about it.

Any thoughts on the "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"?

Doesn't meet the same silent or single core perf requirements. probably the closest out there though.

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