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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: what's the alternative? I've got a 2013 rMBP 15 inch. What's my next machine? I'm not willing to regress on display (220 ppi or better), screen size, or battery life (8-9 hours real use). I might regress on quad core to dual core if everything else is perfect.

EDIT: The XPS 15 gets more like 5-6 hours with the high res display by my understanding. The Surface Book has the right combination of resolution and battery life, but 15.4" to 13.5" is a big step down if you're used to working with side by side windows. Is there anything out there I've overlooked?

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Depends on your budget:

$2000 - A loaded Dell Precision workstation. Wait for Kaby Lake quads though. If you like the Surface Books that's an option too.

$1500 - Dell XPS.

$1200 - ASUS UX501VW. (Only one RAM slot is upgradable, though)

If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards.

All of these machines run Linux well (with an occasional driver compile). The biggest tradeoff will be the touchpad. I find the trackpads on par with my 2009 unibody White Macbook. If you prefer a mouse like I do, it wouldn't be that much of an issue. On the plus side, you can get much better specs for the price of a Mac. Xeons, lots of ECC RAM, beter displays, better battery etc etc.

The precision 5510 looks great, but: http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/dell-precision-5510.

> This workstation can get some serious work done, but its battery life of 5 hours and 34 minutes means you likely won't be taking it far from your desk.

The 13" rMBP gets 12 hours on the same test: http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/all-day-strong-longest-las....

I don't feel like I'm being unreasonably picky here. I've been using a laptop with a great display and 8-9 hours of actual battery life for the last two years. Everything on the market right now (including probably the new MBP) is a downgrade from that.

> Why can't anyone else?

OS X vs. Windows?

Maybe. I think Apple sticking to 2.5K and 3K displays, instead of rushing to 4K has something to do with it.

The only issue I have with the 5510 is they keyboard. Compared to my 2011 MBAir, this thing is really sub-par.

There is a lot of trackpad jitter as well - which is easy to disable when a mouse is plugged in, but still.

edit: the camera is also in a stupid place.

> If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards

Meh. The one on my 2015 X1 Carbon is okay, but the keyboard and trackpoint are the worst parts of my X1 Yoga – the trackpoint only allows the "soft dome" caps (i.e. the convex ones, not the nice concave ones which save you a bunch of stress in the fingers) and the keyboard just feels very cheap and weird. The keypress is still well-defined, it’s just that the keys are incredibly shallow.

I have had macbooks for years. I got sick of the really poor performance, constant spinner, etc.

Now, I have a Dell XPS running Ubuntu. It is considerably faster. Far better battery life. Far high spec. Extremely slick display.

Agree on the speed. I routinely run a bunch of VMs and docker images without any sort of impact.

Forgot to mention the other reason... The magsafe charger is ridiculously poor quality. I've had several of them fail. They all burn the casing off the wire just outside the plug, and then it stops working. The advantage of a magnetic connector isn't worth spending another ton of money to replace it every year.

How did you manage to get better battery life? Is power management in Linux that much better than Windows?

Far better than a macbook I meant.

I "defected" a few months back and I am now using a Dell XPS 15 Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz × 8 16GB Ram running Ubuntu 16.04. It is a beautiful machine, very sturdy, fast and an excellent keyboard. It is available with a 238ppi screen, but I chose 141ppi because I don't care about the extra pixels on a dev machine.

What about the trackpad? Most Windows laptops I've tried recently still have trash trackpads.

The trackpad is excellent, highly tunable (I just use the standard settings) with very good precision.

I own a ZBook 15 first generation, Ubuntu 16.04. The trackpad is large and works well. It has 3 physical buttons (actually two pairs of them, on the top for the mouse stick and on the bottom for the trackpad). I'm using it as a mouse (single finger) or to scroll (two fingers). It's probably multi touch up to 10 fingers but I can't remember.

I understand that OSX has gestures and maybe Windows too. Maybe there is some package that brings gestures to Ubuntu as well (apt-cache search gesture|grep gesture returns some) but the keyboard is good enough. Alt left to go back (it works in Nautilus too), etc. Sometimes I'd like pinch to zoom in Gimp like on the phone and tablet and some day I'll try those gesture packages, but I'm in no hurry.

On the other side, I find the push to click trackpads I see on Macs and some PCs very difficult to operate, especially when I don't want to move the mouse pointer when clicking (graphic programs) and especially the trackpads that actually move. That's why I bought a laptop with physical buttons and disabled push to click (it had that too).

TL;DR the Mac trackpad is almost a reason not to buy a Mac for me.

>On the other side, I find the push to click trackpads I see on Macs and some PCs very difficult to operate, especially when I don't want to move the mouse pointer when clicking (graphic programs) and especially the trackpads that actually move.

That was a concern I had when upgrading to a MacBook with no physical button, but it hasn't actually been an issue. You can treat the trackpad as though it has a separate physical button (leave your thumb at the bottom the whole time, and use it to click instead of the tracking finger), and it's smart to detect that and ignore the thumb except for clicking.

I don't understand why any dev would want to use a touchpad of any kind?

They're not nearly as precise as a mouse. They cause you to rotate your cuff even further than a mouse. Dragging and dropping things is more difficult with a touchpad.

Touchpads all stink, including Apple's.

Evoluent's vertical five button wireless mouse is where it's at. Everything else is second rate.

Because sometimes you need to work on the move? I like to get things done on flights, and there's no space for a mouse there.

> Touchpads all stink, including Apple's.

Couldn't disagree more. I've actually ended up getting a Magic Trackpad for my desk - the gestures etc are genuinely useful.

> Because sometimes you need to work on the move? I like to get things done on flights...

Uggh. That sounds like a terrible way to work. If open floor plans are bad, working on a flight has got to be even worse. I guess I'm lucky that I don't have to do any of that.

> I've actually ended up getting a Magic Trackpad for my desk...

Well, you're a rare bird then.

I also use a Magic Trackpad instead of a mouse at work as a dev. I also do music production exclusively with my Macbook's trackpad. I'm definitely more comfortable with it than a mouse for my normal work habits.. and I was able to beat people online in Starcraft pretty handily with a trackpad. I don't doubt that I couldn't become more precise with a mouse over time, but I really prefer scrolling and gestures to what's available on a mouse.

See if you can find sales numbers for your elitist 5 button vertical mouse vs. the trackpad.... Then we'll talk about who the 'rare bird' is. Grow up.

> Uggh. That sounds like a terrible way to work.

Welcome to the real world- sometimes we have to do things in environments that are less than ideal!

Given that Apple have iterated and released multiple versions of the Magic Trackpad, I doubt I'm that rare of a bird.

No, no, no. Travel distance is supremely important, and if you're working on a MacBook the trackpad is right there! I loathe all trackpads except MacBook's. In fact, I have a Magic Mouse and Keyboard that I use when I place my MacBook on a stand, and it feels tiring to move my hand so far to move the mouse.

I use a Mac Pro primarily, but I actually have a mouse, trackpad, and Wacom tablet attached. Each get used for the things they work best at with the trackpad getting the most use.

How are the trackpad and the battery?

Trackpad is excellent, not as large as the Macbook Pro but works very smoothly under Linux with excellent precision. Re battery I get a solid 8 hours of work from it.

Especially for people who are tied to macOS for iOS development reasons. I guess it is time to look into Hackintoshes again.*

Apple really seems to loath their developers either through active malice or passive indifference. I've wasted too much time reverse engineering Xcode/LLDB/MobileDevice.framework to get automated iOS testing to work (no, XCTest is not adequate). Of course, once my company wanted to move from physical hardware to virtual, we were screwed again by the near total lack of virtualization products for macOS guests. VMWare ESXi seems to be the only player in town for server deployments and that still requires Apple hardware. Sure, go ahead and spend well over $3,000 on their laughable Pro/"server" products that cannot be reasonably placed in a server room. Apparently Apple hasn't heard of the whole "cloud" thing.

* But not really, I would never dream of violating the macOS EULA by running it on non-Apple hardware...

I see a lot of people choosing the XPS (including Linus).

I tried it and for those who prefer Linux it's pretty great!

The one issue I have with the XPS is that the camera is in the bottom corner instead of at the top. Although the slick bezel looks great, I just don't think the trade off was worth it.

I think the trade off of small bezel for the camera being at the bottom really justifies it. I am commuting and bringing my laptop around more than I am on the camera.

If I am skyping and the person I am skyping with has upward view of me, I don't really see an issue with that.

Ok, I'll put in a word for the HP ZBook Studio.

You can have i7 quad-core, dual 1 TB SSD, 32 GBytes RAM (maybe more), backlit keyboard, thin(ish) form factor, and a fantastic 3840 x 2160 screen. Graphics are NVidia M1000M which is desktop class and runs CineBench 11(?) OpenGL test at 93 fps (faster than my NVidia GTX 970).

This is by FAR the nicest and thinnest portable workstation-class laptop I've ever used. It's easily carryable-around, which is more than I can say for any previous laptop such as the larger Dell Precisions, HP Elitebooks I've previously used in this class.

In particular, fast Samsung NVM SSDs and fast laptops are a match made in heaven.

I would say for a machine that is only three years old, just wait? I mean, if it's working well for you now, why are you considering upgrading?

I'm sitting here on a 2008 Mac Pro, and was hoping to move to a mobile solution. But 16GB of RAM just isn't going to cut it for the VM's and what not a run. So I guess I'll just be running this into the ground.

I think the Dell XPS15 or the HP Spectre x360 15t are both solid choices for a 15" at this point.

Why do you need a new Macbook when your machine probably does everything? The specs between a 2016 and 2013 are negligible for web browsing and programming. Unless you're doing heavy video editing or 3D rendering..

So many people upgrading notebooks when they don't need to.

I think that's the point of the article -- developers have little reason to upgrade -- if they want more memory, faster CPU's or more cores, then they need to go with a non-Apple laptop.

Microsoft's Surface Book.

Surface boook is just as gimped - 16gb ram, about same cpus, same expensive storage, and other gimmicks (detacheable screen won't do you much good in helping to develop stuff)

Escape key included

> about same cpus

That's charitable. It has a dual-core 15W TDP CPUs, the 13" touchbar uses a dual-core 25W CPU and the 15" uses a quad-core 45W CPU.

Incidentally, all Kaby Lake laptops use either 4.5W duals or 15W duals, there's nothing else out yet.

16GB of RAM and a mobile i7 has been perfectly acceptable for my day-to-day development needs. As for expensive storage... that's unfortunately true of basically all laptops.

Doesn't help for development per se, but I do enjoy having the flexibility of the "gimmick" screen. I still prefer paper, but it's a viable alternative for note taking.

I'm testing out a strange setup that is working surprisingly well: I have a beefy desktop: 64GB RAM and 32 cores. Then I carry an Intel Compute Stick, portable laptop and mouse with me. I just plug into any HDMI monitor to do basic work, or RDP/TeamViewer into my desktop for real work. Surprising how well this is working...

Latency, even as low as 30ms if you're right near your desktop, is simply unbearable to me.

I've been working with remote desktops for a few years now, and I don't feel the latency, if any. Plus, I'm not gaming, I'm writing code.

I guess you're lucky, or generally have a good connection. There's a dev in my office who's bluetooth keyboard has a latency of around 100ms. Two of us get instantly sick when trying to type on it, but no one else in the office can detect the latency.

That won't work if you can't get a reliable connection everywhere you go.

Ive been wondering about doing something similar with a compute stick and a nexdock http://nexdock.com/

Those look really nice. I just might try them too. :)

Lots of discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815472

I'm looking at the Asus Zenbook line at the moment.

I also have a late 2014 macbook, and it's been a really great workhorse. I won't buy this new one though, and am considering the XPS.

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