Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

So the result is... three notebooks with the same processor and SSD capacity as the MBP, two of which also max out at 16GB?

I mean – the "reasoning" at the start is:

    With every passing year, the latest and the greatest in
    software is becoming more CPU hungry and memory intensive. 
   Therefore, it is important to have at least 16 GB memory 
   and the latest processors in my machine.

But it appears the real differences are simply price[0] and his preference for cheap plastic housings?

Also:

    Lenovo has a long tradition of making laptops that last
    for many years. Their ThinkPad flagship line of laptops
    is targeted at developers and business users and has a 
    cult following among this user base.

No. IBM had a long history. Lenovo has a long history of preinstalling crapware, and making enough money off it to buy the Thinkpad line.

    Made for professionals on the go...

Oh! This is a Lenovo PR effort. Sorry for disturbing, please move on.

[0]: Possibly. Considering the whole article boils down to nothing but price, it's surprisingly laking any information about the prices

You're spot on here.

I've been critical and bitchy about Apple of late, but they make the best laptops in the world, period. Just the touchpad alone tells the story.

People claim that they need to do all sorts of things to justify 32GB laptops or running a dozen VMs. I don't see any evidence that these people really exist in significant numbers.

Especially since memory paging is no longer an issue. The solid-state drives in these laptops are fast enough to read and write several gigabytes of memory per second.

You're making the mistake of trying to translate individual people's unmet needs with some kind of marketing scoreboard. If you need those things, it doesn't really matter to you if there's one of you or a million, it's still a problem.

Not at all. Hell I work with some poor souls toiling with some Oracle monstrosity that need 64GB of RAM to work. I get it. My employer is massive, these guys literally are 7/200000 people with that need. Even GIS people don't really have it -- most of them are using circa 2012 MacBook pros with windows virtualization.

The teeth-gnashing and stream of navel gazing blog posts that you see on many tech forums on the topic is 98% nonsense.

If you are in fact the mythical creature who needs a 32/64GB workstation on your laptop, you have a problem unless you make some very significant sacrifices. You need a "mobile workstation" from Dell/Lenovo/HP, and you're essentially giving up major aspects of portability to do so.

Would you have said the same about 8GB three years ago?

Because that's how long these machines have to last, realistically. And I'll bet that 16GB in three years will feel pretty cramped for a lot of higher end users.

> People claim that they need to do all sorts of things to justify 32GB laptops or running a dozen VMs. I don't see any evidence that these people really exist in significant numbers.

I agree. Especially for programmers, I understand needing beefy specs if you have super heavy compiler workloads and/or do heavy GPU work, but how many people is that really? And wouldn't most such people prefer a desktop anyway?

I am a software engineer and my personal machine is the supposedly ultra-wimpy 12" Macbook, and I love it. It legitimately handles every workload I throw at it (including running multiple VMs) and it's so tiny and portable that it's basically a zero-cost proposition to take it everywhere I go, which is amazing. To me, sacrificing convenience for spec-sheet wankery is just silly, but I've met a lot of people who I think would probably disagree with that, like it's some badge of nerd honor to be walking around with a 5 lb brick of RAM that's rarely if ever going to be more than 1/4 utilized.

I am not super stoked about the touch bar business, though. It seems like a solution in search of a problem; the main draw of Apple laptops for me has been their refined execution and lack of gimmickry. I am glad that my machine dodged that bullet.

And wouldn't most such people prefer a desktop anyway?

Well yes in terms of specs and performance, but you can't take that with you. If you do GPU work you'll really want a discrete GPU with a complete featureset. Some people were complaining about the new MacBooks having AMD cards, I presume because most DL frameworks perform best with (or in some sad cases only support) CUDA libraries.

I tend to agree with you, until you start using Scala and IntelliJ. That will use every ounce of processor and memory it can put its grubby mits on. For normal web development (favorite editor + running some framework) even a MacBook will do.

"his preference for cheap plastic housings?"

Well, speaking at least for the Dell XPS I'm typing this on, it's not a cheap plastic housing. I'm sure there are people who would outright prefer the XPS to a Mac, if you prefer the carbon fiber over aluminum.

Like me... A dell xps 13 with ubuntu 16.04... The xps is gorgeous and no cheap plastic at all...

XPS user here, I really love this laptop (L502x) but I will "never" buy Dell laptops again.

Because, this laptop is 4 or 5 years old (work like charm) but the problem with all Dell laptop models are, their adapter has worst quality ever. Simply, Dell adapters are not built to last long.

When Dell adapter is broken (a.k.a the chip inside doesn't send signal that it's genuine one) Dell laptop stops charging the battery, shows annoying adapter not recognized message.

And most annoyingly it drops CPU speed, I have Sandybridge 2630QM cpu i7 with 2.5 Ghz but failing adapter makes it speed 900 Mhz and it doesn't get any faster. IF you plug out the adapter then it turns back to normal but putting back on "not recognized" adapter causes the same issue.

So simply, Dell kills your laptop completely if the adapter is broken. So now I either have to buy a new laptop or find a used adapter to replace my current 4 year one.

The XPS 13 with USB-C (current and previous generations) at least can charge via USB-C, so you can ignore the Dell adapter if you wanted.

This is inaccurate. Lenovo is shit for their $500 level consumer level laptops, but their professional Thinkpads are still top tier and were never affected by the crapware incidents.

The current T4x0, X2x0 and Px0 series Thinkpads are still top of the line machines for anyone from corporate businesspeople to kernel hackers who run BSD on their primary machine.

You might prefer the X220 or T420 which are the last models before they messed up the keyboard and touchpad starting with the 30's. I'm very happy with the *20's, is there any reason to go for newer ones?

The T450s and the T460 seem to have decent keyboards once again. At least, all they keys are there, and they don't have the weird layout of the 2nd generation X1 Carbon. Also, they've brought back separate physical buttons for the TrackPoint, which is nice, since the pseudo-buttons they had on the touchpad wouldn't recognize right-clicks about 10% of the time.

Thinkpad X1 is a great machine, have you used one?

One word. Samsung Series 9

its hard to find under the radar but its amazing.

light as a feather, 15 inch and can run linux well and overall a fantastic machine.

Doesn't the XPS 13 come with Kaby Lake? My understanding is that the new MBP does come with the previous generation.

Yea, altough I'm not sure that is going to make much different in a practical sense.

Yes, but the CPU and GPU performance of those are worse than the Skylake chips in the touchbar MBPs.

> cheap plastic housings

The X1 is made of magnesium and carbon fiber, definitely not a cheap feeling housing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com