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Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

My Dell M3800 has everything a MBP has, including the aluminum enclosure and Thunderbolt port, and more, such as 15.6 4K touchscreen and multiple USB ports. Oh, and it's also repairable.

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It looks very nice! How's the battery life? This review seems to indicate it sits at under two thirds of the MBPs:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458699,00.asp

Also, just for clarification, do you mean self-repairable? The review said it, like the MBP, has non-standard screw heads making repair difficult. Thoughts?

I don't know about self-repairable...yet. Mine's still under warranty, but that's almost up and I haven't had to use it.

I do use it plugged in most of the time, but I suspect that the review is spot on with the battery life. I maybe get a little more since I don't do much in the way of video, and I have my screen dimmed and my CPU in passive cooling mode.

You can buy whatever screwdriver you need for a few dollars. It's an annoyance, but not a real obstacle to repair.

Maybe not important for you but crucial for me; the M3800 has dismal battery life. And probably with Linux that is even worse.

I'm running an M3800 with Mint Linux 17.3. I can squeeze 2 hours out of the battery if I really need to; suspend/hibernate is currently completely broken, requiring that I cold boot the machine each time I open the lid; bluetooth has never worked properly, even after extracting the proprietary firmware from the Windows drivers.

And this is on a machine that shipped from Dell with Ubuntu 14.04 installed, so supposedly all the hardware is open-source friendly.

I could never accept ~2 hours on a $2000-ish machine.

I get 5-6 hours with Windows 8.1. I have a dimmed screen and passive CPU cooling when on battery, and I don't do much video.

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