Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonyfox | Hacker News Reader

Macbook pro retina, 13"/15" dependend on your pockets. You won't get the same quality cheaper and the battery can easily last through the entire work day. It's a productive environment, though, so if you really want to tinker with the hardware pieces, this may not be the right choice for you.

View on HN

There are tradeoffs, but the 11" and 13" Macbook Airs are also worth considering imo. I personally greatly prefer them, mainly for the lighter weight and better battery life (also, they're cheaper). I especially like the 11". Downsides are slower CPU and lower-res screen.

Non retina here is the dealbreaker for me. :/

What about the 2015 macbook? I own one and it's been great. (can't remember the last time I needed any ports on my laptop anyway.)

I couldn't get the hand on one yet, so i honestly don't know how well it performs on a daily basis. I went with the new 13"pro for now, and so far its been excellent.

I've been using one for almost a month now. Solid device as long as you're not doing anything super demanding on the hardware (A couple of VMs work just fine).

My only complaint is that it's not very waterproof.

The MBAs are nice for the battery life and especially the weight, but I find the 11" is too small for me. I can't be productive with so little screen real estate. Some of my peers really regretted getting the 11".

The 13" MBA I had was nice, but I ended up replacing it with a 15" MBP for the power and higher resolution.

I originally replaced an insanely heavy 17" MBP with the 13" MBA, so the weight of the 15" MBP doesn't really bother me even though I carry it around everywhere.

I thought screen-size might be an issue, but I've settled into a workflow of mostly working inside a full-screened iTerm2, which I'm really enjoying. For that it's plenty big; with the font size I use, you can fit two 95-char editor windows side by side (or an editor window and a prompt, etc.). Obviously that particular work style won't suit everyone though.

The weight difference between my old 13" MBP (4.5 lbs) and the 11" MBA (2.4 lbs) is big enough to make a difference for me since I constantly have it slung over my shoulder. It looks like they've since lightened the 13" MBP to 3.5 lbs, though, so it's not as big a difference now.

My Chromebook can run Ubuntu in a Chrome tab for 10 hours. ~350 bucks.

What do you mean run Ubuntu in a Chrome tab? Is this a full virtual machine?

He is probably using Crouton : https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

Google Products are a no-go for me and for an increasing number of people i know. Be it hardware, software or languages/frameworks, it actually doesn't matter how good they are. The exception is search itself for now, because the competition often doesn't cut it (yet). This is of course just my stance/view.

Why are Google products a no go for you and people you know?

This is a long story of issues mixed with political reasons and sprinkled with european anti-google stances. While this may be interesting to discuss with others, my experience is that it would end in fundamentalisitc flame wars... This doesn't belong into this thread.

Somebody with a nickname like ANONYfox clearly cares about privacy more than average. If you care about privacy, Google (or Facebook or or or...) is a no-go.

I have come to like duckduckgo instead for search. Even when I do want to use google for a search, it's as simple as typing "!g search term" in the bar. I find it nice for searching and then if I don't find what I want I can switch quickly to get google scholar results "!gsc search term". There's a rather large list of "bang" search options[1].

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Yet, Kevin Mitnick (yeah really) endorses them to people who answer his question "Would you spend $300 to amp up your security"

I don't pipe sensitive data through the Google cloud, but as far as hardware prices go, the Chromebook has ABSOLUTELY got Apple beat.

Furthermore, Google makes efforts to fight back against NSL's, and even have canaries implemented.

I don't use Google products when there is something better, obviously but refusing to use something of a superior quality for some reason you can't actually articulate seems ridiculous to me.

I have no sympathy who are afraid to use things because someone might be watching, especially not when that person can't be bothered to consider just using something else for sensitive data, but instead whine and moan about how SuccessfulCorp is ruining everything, blah blah, etc.

Too many 'anons' are obsessed with security, yet oftentimes they are the most security-ignorant demographic on the market.

The funny thing is, that I actually never mentioned privacy concerns here, my "anon" name comes from funny times on 4chan several years ago.

I just don't want to build anything of value ontop of their products, either because work customer contracts demand privacy policies, or work today must be maintained the next 20years to come (non-startup environment) and my experience with google is that they don't care about these scenarios.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com