Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

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I just gave up on Apple ever shipping you are MacBooks and received my custom order HP two days before they announced the October 27th event. My (magnesium unibody) ZBook is as slim as my retina MBP, has a higher-PPI display, also comes with a glass trackpad, has user-replaceable battery, 2x M.2 PCIe SSDs, and upgradeable ram. I was able to pay a bit extra and get it with a mobile Xeon CPU (E3-1545m with Intel's top-of-the-line Iris Pro integrated GPU) which is the equivalent of the i7 6920HQ only with more cache and better graphics, meaning I was able to buy 32 GB of ECC RAM for only $200. It has a 4GB nVidia Quadro and still manages to weigh less than my rMBP.

The only thing that sucks is the noise. It's quite even with the fan running at its highest RPM, but the frequency of the resulting noise is very distinguishable and it has a tendency to rev up and down quite suddenly (and often). It doesn't help that there are two fans, one on each side, which turn on and off independently - meaning you can suddenly feel like you've lost hearing in one of your ears until you realize the noise level is imbalanced. I don't know if Apple will introduce Xeon workstations, but even if they did, I'm not sure I'm ready to give up my three USB 3.1 (non-C), three thunderbolt 3 (/USB-C), power, gigabit Ethernet, and 3.5mm ports in exchange for a more-pleasant audio profile.

Did I mention I've been a faithful Mac user for over a decade?

The magic word "ECC" got me very interested. Do you have the model number to check the specs? Is 32GB the max? (That's what I already have on a thinkpad)

Thinkpads are interesting: 4 years ago they CPU slightly faster than yours: i7 3940XM.

HP charges an arm and a leg for customizations; I bought it with a 120 GB M.2 SSD and 16GB of ECC then swapped those out for a Samsung PCIe NVMe M.2 950 Pro and 2x16GB ECC RAM. It has 2x SODIMM slots and each can take up to 32GB, so you could do 64GB if you wanted to.

That upgrade would have cost me around $1000 preconfigured from HP, but since these are real machines that let me actually do what I want to them, I was able to swap them out for myself for $350 - and that's before recuperating the costs by selling the parts it came with.

btw, I think the 3940XM is only faster on paper. The E3-1545m has 8GT/s vs the 3940XM's 5GT/s, ~33% more memory bandwidth, and an L4 memory cache.

I've been looking for a similar machine. Wish there were more available with the E3-1545m which is an awesome CPU. In the past I've shied away from HP due to quality concerns. Have the addressed that issue?

So you had to self-upgrade and sell the original parts? That's sad that that is necessary. Did you try contacting HP to see about purchasing a bare-bones machine to avoid getting parts you don't want?

Are both M.2 slots gen3 x4? I was looking at the Dell workstation and was dismayed to find out that only one of slots can work at that speed.

There must be more to Xeons than being an i7 w/ ECC surely.

Sure, SGX, bigger L3, some virtualization features thrown in. But ECC is the only one that matters (the 6920HQ doesn't have virtualization support which I live and die by, but other i7 chips do). There are servers running i3 chipsets because for some bizarre reason, Intel has allowed using ECC RAM on i3 machines but not on i5 or i7.

In practice? I don't know. i7 means IOMMU. That I care about. But it may be useless to most - like ECC.

We have niche interests, and a few things that matter (IOMMU, ECC)

Most people care about TDP or prices.

Won't you miss macOS? It is not just about the hardware, it is the combination of the macbook with the OS.

I used Mac because it gave me a great UX with access to all my favorite command line tools and a posix API I could build against. With Windows 10 finally shipping a real, supported posix target (Ubuntu for Windows - what an unfortunate name) vs the years of Interix (R) which was discontinued and replaced by "Linux subsystem for Windows" which was discontinued without a replacement until Nadella's "Ubuntu/Bash for Windows", I now no longer have need for OS X.

Plus, Apple doesn't care about macOS. HFS has bitrotted away, the OS itself has taken backseat to mobile, and Apple doesn't know if it cares enough about its enterprise and power users to even release "point releases" of their products - how much engineering tech does it take to replace a Haswell CPU with a Broadwell with no fanfare or ado? Just do it and make it available?

> Plus, Apple doesn't care about macOS. HFS has bitrotted away

HFS is already being replaced with APFS which is excellent feature-wise, and is available in Sierra for testing purposes. I expect at this time next year we'll be seeing them use it by default on new macOS and iOS devices.

Having used Windows 10 + the Ubuntu Linux subsystem for a while now I think it's safe to say that the only reason I'll ever use a Mac again is if I am developing for iOS.

Macs are still shipping with 10-year-old GNU utilities. LOL

Having used the "linux" subsystem under Windows 10 with all of its problems, issues and limitations it is now clear that there is never going to be decent/smooth and reliable UNIX-dev experience under windows. No matter how much the Microsoft marketing guys try to feed us that BS.

Maybe if one day Windows goes 100% UNIX.

Hackintoshs are a thing.

hackintoshs are a giant, giant pain in the ass. I've been building hackintoshs since the close to the beginning of that scene (2009 or so) and have built around 5-6 hackintoshs, as recently as 3 months ago. It always has been and always will be a sucky experience that is a pain even for people who know what they are doing, ESPECIALLY for laptops. Most people who are technically inclined are better off just going to *nix

For laptops I agree, lots of pain, but for desktops I've never had any major issues with the last 3 Intel+Nvidia PCs I've had over the years, always worked really well.

For me the only downside really is the extra reboot after an OS update every 2 months to update nvidia driver and repatch sound kext.

The question then must be … why do you do it?

I stopped. I kept going back to it because I love hacking on things and I love mac os and hate apple's markup on hardware, but I've learned my lesson at this point and will not attempt another hackintosh build.

You running Windows or Linux? How much did it set you back? I was looking at the Lenovo P50/P70 in order to get an ECC RAM laptop, nice to know that HP is an option as well. Manufacturers might start making workstation-level linux laptops for devs which would be sweet. It's interesting that laptops run all the way from €300 to, what, €4000(?) nowadays. There's a huge amount of variety. Definitely would like to go Xeon + ECC + 32 gigs for my next purchase.

Windows, though I spend more time in Windows 10's well-implemented Linux subsystem than in Windows itself. See my other reply about getting this device much cheaper than its specs would normally go for.

What is the battery life like? What are the thermals like?

I couldn't honestly say because I haven't properly tested the battery life when I'm not stressing the device. But I can tell you that Windows 10 has a new "battery saver" mode akin to iOS 9's, and that I'm not worried about Apple telling my battery which holds less than 50% of its capacity a couple of years later despite half their guaranteed charge cycles will tell me "too bad" because - their guarantee aside - I didn't experience this behavior in the first year of owning the device. Even HP's 3 year "no questions asked" battery warranty aside, I can just buy a battery off of NewEgg and stick it in myself when this one kicks the bucket.

It runs much cooler than my MBP ever did (no more burning my fingertips typing) - but note the caveat about fan noise in my initial post.

Sounds good! This might be my next machine. My T440 is now beginning to show its age after years of faithful service.

how is the trackpad?

It's OK. It tracks as well as my rMBP's did/does, but does not recognize multiple simultaneous touches (hard to explain, but best example is holding down the keypad (yes, the whole thing clicks like the real MBP trackpads before this force touch garbage used to) with one finger than dragging with another to click-and-drag - this would work on an MBP but does not on the ZBook Studio).

It's an alps trackpad, which is unfortunate because their drivers suck. I have basically two or three configurations possible for the gestures. Synaptic would be way better, but I can't find any glass synaptic trackpads (the Dell Precision 5510 - a beefed up XPS 15 - had an even crappier Elantech).

that gesture does work on the glass surface book trackpad

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