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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

The two things that Macbooks have had over Windows laptops, in my opinion, is high resolution screens and a fantastic trackpad.

Windows laptops, even on the high end, still tend to screens no better than 1080p and crappy touchpads. My wife hates the touchpad so much she always uses a mouse and has the trackpad disabled.

I just got an HP Elite x2, which is basically a Surface Pro and I really like the pen and touch input. Apple pioneered touch on the iPhone, but continues to refuse to add it to <del>OS X</del> macOS.

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There are a lot of subpar Windows laptops out there, but there are at least some good ones to choose from.

Last year around Christmas, I picked up an Asus Zenbook for under $700CDN on sale. 3200x1800 touch screen, 8GB RAM, and a trackpad that works as well (to me, at least) as the one on my MacBook Air.

I was a little concerned that the Skylake Core m3 would be underpowered, but it hasn't felt slow during any of the dev tasks I've thrown at it. Benchmarks aren't always accurate, I know, but the ones I have run on both the Zenbook and my MBA show them to be about equal. It's not as fast as my 8 core, 32GB RAM desktop machine, but I don't expect it to be.

The HP Elite looks pretty neat. I'll have to try one next time I'm at the MS Store if they have one on display.

So I've not tried enough windows touchpads to comment on that, but from what I've seen there's quite a few Windows laptops with higher res screens than 1080p

e.g.

Dell XPS 13 - can have a 3200x1800 screen

Lenovo Carbon X1 - can have a 2560x1440 screen

HP Elitebook G3 - Can have a 2560x1440 screen

Microsoft surface book - 3000x2000 screen

Microsoft Surface Pro 4 - 2736 x 1824 screen

I didn't mean to imply that there are none. I meant that they are incredibly rare if you consider the number of Windows laptop models available. The vast majority have either 1366x768 (low end laptops) or 1920x1080.

sure, it's just that you said that even "high end" windows laptops didn't usually have better screens when from what I've seen pretty much all the top Windows laptop brands have high-end models with better screens.

A couple of years ago, sure Windows laptops tended to have terrible screens, but that problem seems (to me) to have largely been resolved these days, for high-end devices anyway.

But you can't compare Macbooks to $500 laptops. You need to compare them to ultrabooks like the XPS 13, where you'll see that the gap isn't so big.

> Windows laptops, even on the high end, still tend to screens no better than 1080p and crappy touchpads.

Touchpads is true since most manufacturers don't use precision touchpad.

But the screen issue is definitely not true in the high end. Too many touch-enabled 4k displays when you max out a high-end config from dell/hp/lenovo.

Surface Book has 3000x2000 resolution screen and a fantastic touchpad. Touchpad is on par with MacBook Pro IMHO.

Battery life.

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