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This is the thing. I was as bored by the new MBPs as everyone else, but they really do still seem to have a combination of power, screen quality, portability, and battery life that isn't matched elsewhere (not to mention the more intangible benefits e.g. great touchpads). Every time someone tells me about a PC laptop that supposedly beats the Apple equivalent, the PC ends up either not being a reasonable equivalent or falls flat in at least one of the areas I mentioned.

Maybe if the price is right then making sacrifices is fine, but that's up to the individual buyer. Speaking for myself, a boring computer that's quietly excellent is exactly what I want. My biggest problem with the new MBPs is that i think the Touch Bar is a gimmick and losing the physical escape key is a real bummer.

> great touchpads

That's it. I could live without most of what Apple laptops offer, but the touchpads are the selling point for me. I just love them. They actually WORK. I haven't found a single Windows laptop that have an equally great touchpad. The Dell touchpads certainly don't, they are very sensitive to "palm" presses. Are there any good ones out there?

Touchpads of Thinkpads is OK, although a little buggy (they insist in breaking your middle button being the middle click, unless you restore some registry key to historical values, but then this now unsupported function seems to degrade with time and mandatory driver updates...) and using remote desktop sometimes break two finger scrolling for 5 minutes... (I would really want to know what happens technically, this seems only a truly horrible design would yield that behavior...)

I just tested palm rejection (I don't need it 99.99% of the time) and out of 2 tries it failed once and produced zooms commands.

So yeah, it's probably worse than a mac, but stays usable enough for me.

(Warning: I'm more specifically talking about a T530, some Thinkpad like T440/T540 have extremely terrible touchpads, and I don't now much about the very last models)

For the recent laptops maybe precision touchpads are good, but IIRC sadly not every vendor are shipping in that mode.

On my side I'm extremely annoyed by the current tendency of most 15.6" to have a keyboard with a numeric keypad. That shifts your default position to the left, which is not ok for my taste on a 15.6" (would be ok on a 17"). When looking at powerful recent laptops around 15", I only found the MBP (but I don't like the last one for various reasons), the XPS15 / Precision 5510 and the HP ZBook Studio G3. But the last one seems to have heat problems, and XPS15 have had QC issues. OTOH at least with PC you still sometimes have the option for matte screens.

So yeah choosing a laptop is kind of difficult, especially if you have criteria on lots of point. I doubt I'll ever get the one I really want (ex: I found 16:9 aspect ratio idiotic, but I don't like glossy screens...). I can live with my T530 for a few more years, given it has 16GB of RAM and a SSD.

For what it's worth, my 2012 MBA touchpad is glitchy as shit. I don't really consider this a computer I control, so much as I make gesture suggestions and then wait to see what the computer thinks it should do.

That said, if you have a good one, I do agree Apple touchpads are great.

This 100%. I use a Razer laptop on the regular and as good as the trackpad is (and it's better than a lot of PC trackpads) I still regularly encounter issues with it or just notice little shortcomings everywhere.

>> I was as bored by the new MBPs as everyone else, but they really do still seem to have a combination of power, screen quality, portability, and battery life that isn't matched elsewhere

A laptop is a tool. Does a carpenter want the newest saw even though his works fine? Does an auto mechanic want a new wrench just because?

Do those people also spend the rest of their time using those things for personal use? Probably not.

And while metaphors are nice, you can't really compare a laptop to a piece of metal attached to a handle.

I've been using a 2015 Razer Blade and it's a great machine. 14" 3200x1800 screen, 16GB RAM, decent battery life, very thin, great trackpad with click buttons, which I like. Excellent Linux support; I run Ubuntu on it as my daily OS. However it's expensive, and has a pretty tacky color scheme. Parts are proprietary and repairs are expensive, though compared to Apple that's a wash.

At the time I bought it they were for sale in Microsoft stores, so you could try it out in person too.

How many hours is "decent battery life"?

http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro

I haven't really seen this before. But this looks like a decent MacBook Pro alternative. Except maybe battery-life. And not sure about longevity / overall quality.

It would be hard to consider that really "portable" at 7.8 lbs, it's almost 2x as heavy as the MBP. You do get a lot of power for that though.

The pro is 17". They also have a 14", which weights 1.89kg.

I use Lenovo P50 - 64GB RAM, 4K display, nice keyboard, card reader, Ethernet port(!), and Quadro M2000. Especially nice thing about is that it supports 2 SSDs + 2.5" harddrive (all easily removable and upgradable). This means I can keep my Linux installation completely separate from Windows on separate drive without having to partition anything. All these at a fraction of price. I can keep old MBP around for iOS stuff but these days much of the computer vision and deep learning development happens in Linux so configuration like about works great as main machine.

XPS15 has 1080 to 4k display, up to 32GB RAM and is 17mm thin (in the base, the screen adds up a couple mm). Battery is rated at 17 hours on the 1080, and this is a number that I've actually confirmed while working with a friend who owns one. The 4k should get you to 10 without big problems.

Also, you do know that you are limited to 1200p scaling on the 15" MBP, don't you?

Anandtech's review[1] measures 7.5 hours on their lightest test with the higher-resolution model. That's certainly not bad, and in fact is over my stated 7 hour cutoff - I think the number I found yesterday was a bit lower. And of course I get considerably more pixels in exchange. But when Apple advertises 10 hours, and reviews in the past have typically found their advertised battery figures pretty much on the mark (sometimes even an underestimate), that's still a significant difference.

Maybe I shouldn't worry about this too much, because as a developer I tend to feed a lot of battery to the CPU anyway, draining it much faster: the increased battery drain from a higher resolution screen stays constant, so it becomes less significant as a fraction of a larger overall drain. On the other hand, for the same reason, I'd like all the battery life I can get.

And yes, I'm aware of how the Mac resolution scaling works.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10116/the-dell-xps-15-9550-rev...

On my three-year-old macbook the battery is dead, it lasts maybe half an hour. Replacement costs 350$ or so, ouch. Maybe the bigger question is whether the better can be replacement relatively cheaply, not whether it lasts 10 or 7 hours.

I heard that the 4k versions get 5, 6 hours at best of battery life, which is what's stopping me from buying one. Have you had a better experience? This is doing dev work.

At least go try out the latest Dell XPS and HP Spectre, possibly at a Microsoft Store if you can.

To be fair, I probably should have got a Macbook as my last laptop upgrade.

The laptop before that was the Lenovo X1 Carbon - slow, memory constrained and expensive to repair.

I've got a Dell XPS 9350 at the moment, and it was more expensive than the top end Macbook at the time (!). It's quite good, but I can't recommend it against the last gen MacBook - there's still a coil whine issue that Dell refuse to really fix (or can't), there's issues with Broadcom wifi cards, and then there's this fun issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_ra...

It gets ~6 hours of battery life in power saving mode, but closer to 4 if I'm doing dev work.

It could be so good, but it's just not there yet. For $3000AUD I expect utter perfection.

Am i the only one that cares about 16GB ram? HP Spectre doesn't have 16gb ram. The xps only has it in offering with their QHD touch screen which has less battery than the FHD screen, which I guess is fine because apparently the FHD screen is crap.

Macbooks have significantly better thermal zone than the dell alternatives(e.g. the 7370 is significantly slower than the macbook 12" even though it has the same specs + 16gb) and don't get me started on the touchpad. There's so many threads on reddit about who seemingly fixed the touchpad issue.

Bash on windows by the way is nice, but it's no way near production usable.They use a custom file system that resides in your AppData. Until recent insider builds you could neither use inotify(which means most node apps would have some sort of issue) nor would it keep your Ubuntu when during an update. Now the system is somewhat usable, but I've spent so much time whitelisting different folders so that random windows tools don't eat up CPU and I/O that make this 2016 device feel like something from 2011 that I wonder what the hell microsoft is thinking. The recent windows insider build also fixed an issue with windows defender eating up all CPU.

You can forget about the surfacebook if you want a decent terminal running on it. WsL isn't there yet and linux support is flakey.

So yeah the only contender if you care about both battery AND performance AND a proper terminal right now is the dell xps. The thinkpad x260 is nice, but they don't have nvme, only supports sata express(and i'm not sure i wanna gamble on the intel dc 3500 drives to get me the performance).

>The recent windows insider build also fixed an issue with windows defender eating up all CPU.

Were you getting this on the Anniversary build? It's driving me insane - between that and Windows Search Indexing my machine becomes unusable.

> Am i the only one that cares about 16GB ram?

XCode and Visual Studio are pretty happy "just" with 8GB.

16 is great, but 32 would be perfect if I wanted a few more VMs running.

That is the thing, I don't run any VMs on my computers besides the iOS and Android emulators.

I'd run VMs more often if I weren't in a constant disk space crunch, even with a 512GB SSD. VMs not only take up space for the OS, they have the annoying property that free space in the virtual disk still takes up space on the real disk once initially dirtied. Especially annoying since in theory, TRIM/discard should be exactly what's needed for the virtual OS to inform the VM software what parts of the virtual disk file it can throw away... yet as far as I can tell, VMware Fusion doesn't support this at all, and VirtualBox only with a hidden, possibly-broken flag.

In fact, I've been looking into NixOS partly because in theory I should be able to wipe the entire system partition whenever I haven't used it for a while, then regenerate it from a handful of config files. Neat - but NixOS partly "compensates" for this by being rather disk hungry when it is in use.

I suppose I should be more diligent about cleaning out junk in general. But these days at least, half the time I have more free RAM than free disk. My next laptop will have 1TB, even with Apple's ransom-level pricing for disk upgrades.

"I'd run VMs more often if I weren't in a constant disk space crunch, even with a 512GB SSD

"I suppose I should be more diligent about cleaning out junk in general."*

You and me both. I generally "reclaim" space when I do a clean install during OS upgrades. Looking at mine, the three biggest chunks are music, videos, and email, most of which I could get away without if I were satisfied with relying on an internet connection.

What do you find takes up the most space on your system?

A variety of things; taking inventory now, the biggest chunks include:

80GB - Boot Camp partition I almost never use but is too useful to get rid of

48GB - /usr/src (hmm, I can probably cut this down, but it includes >700 source trees and I don't remember which of them I care about); biggest individual offenders are:

-> 2.5GB - linux source tree

-> 15GB - chromium source tree

25GB - /Applications

20GB - ~/Music

20GB - anime

20GB - Windows VM (XP!)

9GB - /usr/local, mostly Homebrew

8GB - ~/Pictures, and that's with the Photos app's option to only store thumbnails and stick the rest in iCloud. (Though the preference says: "Originals will also be stored on this Mac if you have enough storage space." Annoying that this isn't more customizable.)

Is there any option to store the source trees in a compressed filesystem? It won't help with the .git directory but on my ZFS NAS I get a 20% saving on that kind of content.

The newly refreshed HP Spectre x360 13" convertible has a 16GB option.

Consider upgrading to Dell XPS 15 when it releases with Kaby Lake (expected December). The Dell XPS 13 went from 12 hours to 14 hours battery life in the Kaby Lake update.

The problem is also we don't know the quality we will get with a new model... I would be more than annoyed by a laptop that has coil whine, screen flicker, and sleep issues, especially an high end laptop with that kind of price tag...

Unfortunately I don't have that kind of cash. I also wonder how anyone was getting close to 12 hours with the 13.

That's the most frustrating thing about the situation is they have no actual competitors. We know they can ship a better mbp but they have zero incentive

The Thinkpad T560 [1]

-Slightly thicker at 22.4mm

-With the largest battery you should get 16-20hrs of real world battery life

-Available with a 2880 x 1620 screen

[1]http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t560/

I am in the same boat. Right now I am looking into

1. Asus Zenbook Pro UX501VW

2. HP Spectre x360

3. Dell XPS (but I really really don't like the webcam position)

I cannot recommend the Spectre:

- touchpad requires a third party driver, has really bad recognition and the driver needs to be reset from time to time because it stops recognizing multitouch gestures (there's even a button for reseting the driver in the control panel), this is on Windows10

- keyboard is really mushy and when typing fast, keys sometimes register twice or not at all (first laptop where I ever had such a problem)

- the WIFI didn't connect out of the box with my router, I had to revert to a one year old driver (Windows 10)

I have now a Zenbook UX330 which doesn't have most of these problems (it also needs a third-party touchpad driver though), but has an Optimus NVIDIA/Intel GPU setup which at least on Linux is basically useless.

Can't comment on the Dell XPS :)

[edit: typos]

> there's even a button for reseting the driver in the control panel

thank you for once again reminding me why I've never looked back after switching to Mac hardware back in 2006. I'd much rather "cope" with hardware that isn't absolutely top-of-the-line spec-wise than dealing with buttons to reset a f'ing input device driver.

I think our perception of the Mac slowly losing its "it just works" status is somewhat shifted as we're forgetting how bad the alternatives were and obviously still are.

I use a 2013 MBPro and own a 2015 Mac Mini, but wanted something portable to play video games. I had all of the main requirements you had too, with the added requirement that it could power a 2k monitor on Fallout 4 at the highest setting.

The only thing I found that let me configure it online, and met the requirements (would have preferred more than 16GB of RAM though), was the HP Omen.

Edit: It comes with a 4k screen, which I downgraded to 1080p (Mostly used on monitor), but also wish it had a 2k downgrade option. Mac's Retina resolution is just about perfect, and not really a fan of 4k yet, also on a 15 inch screen it seems a waste.