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Comment by chjohasbrouck | Hacker News Reader

I have both, and I find the things that Macs have that everything else is missing just aren't articulated on a spec sheet.

The display on the Macbook Pro Retina is just flawless. The colors, the anti-glare, and the picture quality from all angles, it's just really well done. The brushed aluminum chassis makes it very cool and lightweight, great to travel with and keep on your lap. Excellent battery life. It's just a great machine to live with overall.

Most of the PC options are steel and plastic, so they're hot and heavy. They'll burn your legs, they have comparably poor battery life. The screen looks terrible if your viewing angle isn't perpendicular. The hardware I've had has tended to die faster, too.

I do spend most of my time in Linux on this old Dell, though. The OS is more important to me and I prefer Linux. But Macbooks are great, and I wish I could find something as good to install Linux on.

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> Macbooks are great, and I wish I could find something as good to install Linux on.

You can install Linux on a Macbook if that's what you want. Despite the marketing a Macbook these days is just an expensive, well-designed PC with particular software.

> Most of the PC options are steel and plastic, so they're hot and heavy. They'll burn your legs, they have comparably poor battery life. The screen looks terrible if your viewing angle isn't perpendicular. The hardware I've had has tended to die faster, too.

Not my experience for machines from the last couple of years, particularly if you look at similar price points.

You can install Linux on a Macbook, but you'll fight with drivers and end up with less machine than you would using OS X.

Matter of opinion. I've seen better OpenGL performance on Linux on the same hardware, for example, and better filesystem performance too. (I'd also be much less productive without the customizability of Linux window management, but that's getting into more subjective territory).

On Apple hardware? Which?

It was a work-issued Macbook, can't really give you anything more specific than that.

I just put Ubuntu on my 2010 Air and gained battery life and a lot of responsiveness. No driver issues.

Aside, ticks me off to no end that Ubuntu removed the reverse-scrolling option (at least with a desktop) ... On windows, I use an autohotkey script to reverse the scrolling, and for media shortcuts (non-media kb). Ubuntu is the odd one out there for me now.

If you mean "natural scrolling", you can do it at a lower level in linux by remapping the "buttons" with xmodmap. Gnome ignores the system setting for this (or used to, at least; I don't use any Gnome stuff now, so maybe they've fixed it), but pretty much everything else in X will obey those settings.

Yeah, but it was a checkbox option in settings, and not something people trip over... they didn't need to remove it, at least they shouldn't, without another way to do it relatively easily.

I've got a MBP from around 2012 and a big problem is that when running any OS besides OS X, it runs very hot with very short battery life because it can only use discrete graphics (NVidia) full time. The integrated graphics is disabled in Apple's efi (maybe by Bootcamp?), and I don't know that anyone has ever found a workaround. There's an extremely longstanding Apple support issue still open about it.

So if planning to run anything other than OS X via Bootcamp on a MBP, do beware this issue.

Looks like this[0] should solve your issue. Also, it's my understanding that there's a way to patch GRUB for saner EFI behaviour.

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/systemd-vgaswitcheroo-uni...

I'm not sure, it looks like it just disables the discrete GPU? If so, I've tried that - the problem is there's no other graphics to fall back on, Apple's proprietary EFI doesn't let non-OS X systems see that the integrated graphics are present at all (currently running only Windows 10 on it since I need Visual Studio). Maybe the patched Grub might be the start of a solution (could run Windows with a VM in Linux) but I'm not sure I'm that brave - last time I tried messing around with Apple's EFI for multi-booting it didn't end well :)

You'll need an older Mac Pro then. There is quite a bit of proprietary hardware in the new ones that I'm pretty sure have no open source drivers (ie: SMC controller, force touch pad, etc).

Not that the community couldn't find a way to reverse-engineer and build an open source version... but a straight up Ubuntu install on a current-generation Mac Pro is probably the fastest way to kill a battery, processor, flash drive and miss out on taking advantage of the ambient sensors.

To use an unfitting analogy -- you might as well buy a sports car to retrofit it into a classic gremlin.

I know that you know but i read this so often i might as well state it: You mean Macbook Pro, Mac Pro is a different product.

Just out of curiosity, would a Mac Pro booting Ubuntu have similar effects on hardware? Minus the battery

On the latest Macbook Pro everything works under Linux except for the webcam and maybe the brightness sensor (it's hard to tell because it doesn't seem to do anything under OSX either).

It really is about the details - sometimes you don't notice them until you really need them. Examples:

- MBPs have the best wifi of any notebooks - to my knowledge, they still are the only ones to have 3 MIMO streams. Right now, my TX rate is 585 MBit/s.

- Thunderbolt and I/O: we recently started to stream our tech meetups to Youtube. The two thunderbolt ports are processing two 1080p streams from BlackMagic Mini boxes - other laptops simply don't have the necessary ports or enough PCIe lanes to do this reliably.

- We just got Dell 4k/60Hz monitors. Most of our MBPs can drive them just fine via DisplayPort, others can only do it at 30Hz, if at all.

Intel claims that the i5-5200U included in the Zenbook UX305LA is capable of driving 3840x2160@60Hz over DP.

I have an i3-5010U hooked up to a 4k display (spare pc), and it tends to stutter a bit in actual use... is the 5200U much better? been thinking of moving to an i7-6600U brix, but concerned that I'll still have trouble with driving the display.

You seem to have only looked at the older PCs. Have you looked at the Dell XPS 13 or Microsoft Surface Book? They may dispel your complaints. You can even buy the XPS with Ubuntu.

Worthless battery life for such costly machines. I would've bought the XPS 13 with Ubuntu otherwise.

Edit: I read reviews like this http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/dell-xps-13-is-a-major-dis... cannot find the other ones though. It is better than I remember; I thought it was worse. Still; 6 hours is not really usable in my book.

I googled around and found this:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/dell-xps-13-2015-review-batter...

which gives a rated battery life of 18 hours and a real-world use battery life of 9-10 hours

http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/dell-xps-13-battery-life-f...

This article suggests a battery life of 12 hours.

What kind of battery life are you expecting?

Ah my bad; I read somewhere it was much much less. Maybe that's outdated information. But when people say 9 hours, basically I get 3-4 out of them... Usually.

What are you doing, compiling a kernel or rendering graphics?

Probably not an atypical use case on here :)

It depends a lot on screen brightness and the power settings. The XPS13 has a bright screen....

Just one more thing to add to the list of things Apple do well - quote realistic battery life figures.

I probably get 6 hours on arch Linux full back light. Battery life seems better on Windows (my friend's machine)

My XPS 13 on Debian lasts around 8 to 10 hours without difficulties for long trips.

Is this with Jessie on the XPS 13 9343? I'm only getting around 6 hours on mine.

No. Sid

My XPS 13 with Arch Linux lasts 10+ hours of continuous use on a single charge. Mine is the non-HD non-touch model though. I suspect the model with the beefier resolution and touch screen wouldn't do as well.

I second this. I've been a long-time fan of Lenovo (the X1 carbons are particularly good), but recently got a Dell XPS 13. Aside from the camera (which looks up your nose), they are really great machines.

My XPS 13 with Ubuntu (dual booted) is a nice machine but still has problems (track pad, wifi, kernel panic waking from sleep).

I really want to buy a surface book. But it seems like everyone on /r/surface is having the same recurring issues: battery drain/overheating during sleep, tablet failing to undock, computer mistakenly thinking tablet is undocked, graphics driver crashes, slow SSD writes, etc.

It's also ridiculously expensive. The cheapest option with 16GB of memory costs $200 more than a 15" Retina MBP.

I'd like to buy Microsoft Surface Book or Microsoft Surface Pro 4 but after a glance at https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/ it seems like people who dual boot may be having trouble with Ubuntu failing to boot after system updates (either Windows or Linux updates, anything which re-runs GRUB or whatever the Windows equivalent of that is; there are work-arounds eg https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/43an26/repair... but i'm scared of them because i don't understand them well enough to know if future system updates will break it again), and with getting either of the touchscreen or the cameras to work at all. I may be wrong, though, I didn't read too closely.

Macbook Pro is the first laptop that I've ever owned that was so hot on the bottom that you can't rest it on your lap. If anyone is doubting this, please try to do something that involves all cores for 10 minutes. Any kind of non-trivial parallel task would do that.

One thing that sucks about the display is the "glossy glass"-style which makes it very sensitive to sunlight or strong indoor lightning

You can have professionally applied an anti-glare film on the screen.

The application is perfect and resilient, and although it's "not the same", I will never ever go back to a glossy screen.

So, Apple used to ship the matte screen as standard, and upsold the glossy one as "movies! colours!". Then they shipped the glossy screen as standard, and upsold the matte one as "no glare!"...

They realized they were monetizing the wrong way. Make customers pay for a better customer experience always rubs me the wrong way.

We're the odd folks out in wanting the matte screens.

Glossy looks way better in stores (especially since Apple controls the lighting to make glare incredibly unlikely) and in pretty much any case where you do not have direct light. It's what the public wants.

2015 Macbook user here. Still possible to burn legs.

Have to agree. It's always the small details that aren't obvious at first blush.

Here's another one that always gets me about PC laptops: Air vents on the bottoms so I can't safely rest it on anything soft that would block them. On my MBP I only have to worry about the very back.

My favorite thing about the air vents is that when the Macbook is in use (opened), the backs of the keyboard and display close in against the vents, creating a natural barrier to prevent most things (like bed sheets) from blocking the vents.

It seems really minor, but it's seriously prevented my Macbook from overheating probably dozens of times by now. I can't say the same for my PC, which has the flat ventilation panel on the side and has been killed by bedsheets many times.

A minor detail, but a really clever one. I like it.

YMMV; my Thinkpad and my HP DV2 before that both had side vents.

Side vents are better than bottom vents, though macs have vents from top border of the keyboard. That's pretty ingenious design.

Without even passive vents? Which exact models?

I might need an additional laptop soon and would love to know about anything comparable to a MBP 13 retina but doesn't have any vents on the bottom.

The Thinkpad is the X201, and the HP was a DV2, an old model. They might have some small bottom vents, but they didn't have any problems cooling while sitting on my bed. Neither are probably comparable to an MBP 13, though.

Hmmm

https://support.lenovo.com/at/de/documents/pd025709

Don't think I'd be comfortable blocking those for extended periods.

Must be the tablet version, mine doesn't have those.

I use my W530 on my couch frequently, with no issues. The main cooling happens in the back corner, where there are vents on both the side and the back. I'm not sure what the bottom vents are for, but blocking them doesn't cause issues even when I'm gaming.

None of those are vents? What are you afraid of blocking the docking connector or the speakers?

And it is pretty amazing that Apple packs in quad core CPU to the very slim package. Of course the drawback is that you don't get onsite repairs with this construction, but still. Compare this to for example Lenovo quad core models which are quite rare and thick.

On the Wintel side the more powerful machines seem to be more or less targeted to very specific use cases, like CAD and these computers are more like portable workstations than laptops.

Not to mention that the entire casing of the MacBook acts as a heatsink, which is really just awesome design.

Except for the bizarro people that seem to use their Macbooks on their bare laps (doing sauna?)

Or you know... sitting outside in 30C summer in shorts. That 80C chasis temperature then somehow isn't as fun anymore. Current rMBP is unusable outside in summer due to hot chasis... my previous Dell XPS didn't have this issue.

>Or you know... sitting outside in 30C summer in shorts.

Well, anyone that wears shorts and sandals and is over 20, deserves it.

>Current rMBP is unusable outside in summer due to hot chasis...

Maybe sit on a table? I use mine in a country that frequently gets 38-40 oC, and in a country that is constantly Lousiana-summer level heat and humidity (Singapore) and never had much of a problem.

Or one could use any kind of towel or pad below their laptop.

Kind of reminds me of the Louis CK routine about people complaining about trivial things (e.g. the food) while flying, sitting on a chair in the sky, across thousands of miles, in a few hours (something that just 3-4 generations ago took days or even months, discomfort and a few deaths along the way).

We now have undreamt-of power in our PCs or even mobile phones (power which used to take a device as big as a house and with its own cooling infrastructure), and we complain for them being uncomfortamble to have on our bare laps...

> and we complain for them being uncomfortamble to have on our bare laps...

"lap"tops.

Isn't that why they started marketing them as "notebooks"?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/22/man_burns_penis_with...

Heat, definitely. Also, that was the time you started seeing 17"+ notebooks on the high end. One of my wife's friends bought a 20" "laptop" for her electrical engineering work. It looked comical on her lap, but was awesome for bringing work home on.

People also wear "wifebeaters" but we don't expect them to beat their wives in them.

Also "laptop" is an american term. The rest of the world calls them something closer to "portable".

"laptop" is what they're called in Polish too

Only if you mean, "they sometimes use the american term".

Because otherwise the polish term is "komputer przenośny" (portable, movable, etc computer).

> Well, anyone that wears shorts and sandals and is over 20, deserves it.

He only said "shorts". You know, adults can wear shorts as well.

Yes, if they have juvenile clothing sense. They can also wear baseball hats and other things -- after all it's a free country.

Sorry, I felt the need to respond to this. Why are shorts juvenile? They are a perfectly rational and sane climatic adaptation of clothing, allowing decent airflow over a human body.

To decry shorts as juvenile is sympotmatic of simple minded attitudes that lead to people in warm climates spending the hottest part of the day wearing full suits in fully glazed boxes which need to be energy intensively air conditioned so that they don't die.

This is not a sensible path for society to take

I don't live in the "free country" (I'm guessing you mean the US).

There's more to shorts than this:

http://www.sandalandsoxer.co.uk/linus+andrew.jpg

I'm from Europe and especially during the summer you can see people dressed like this:

http://www.menfashionhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/men-...

Some of them even go to work like this, especially if they don't work directly with customers and their companies don't have business attire requirements.

The latter is barely better though. Gives the "still lives with his parents" or "just out of college" vibe...

Or if you're are resting your palm. Cold on winter, hot on summer, not really great UX.

My MBP is the hottest machine I've ever owned. Run any game on it and not only is it too hot to put on my lap it's too hot to touch the keyboard. It actually stings my fingers

The XPS13 may fit what you're looking for, if you want a PC. Amazing screen (touchscreen even). Solid, great build. Not hot and heavy. They even have a special one built for linux.

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