The Carbon X1 is made from carbon fiber. It super-robust and light-weight at the same time.
It feels light years ahead of the super-heavy aluminium-nonsense Apple is trying to peddle. Count me happy my laptop doesn't double as a bench-press.
I wonder if it's the Valley culture? There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad [2] for programmer productivity: the keyboard, the UltraNav, the swappable batteries (you can fly around the world with a x260 + spare battery), a nice docking station, upgradeable storage/memory and a trouble-free Linux distro. Plus, they don't burn you with ice-cold aluminum every morning.
The gap is huge! If a Thinkpad is a 100, the prev. gen Macbook Pro would be 60 and everything else lingering in misery under 10.
Full disclosure: I am 100% Macbook right now because Photoshop/Sketch, the struggle is real, I miss everything about Thinkpad, hence this passionate comment.
[1] Another 100% Linux, 100% Thinkpad company was http://www.acunote.com
[2] Properly configured, i.e. IPS, Intel graphics, etc.Cut the bullshit and just run Linux on the bare metal, your program will run faster, and your laptop battery life won't be halved.
You will have to claw my x201 out of my cold dead hands, I've not found a single notebook (even the newer ThinkPads) that are as comfortable to use. I've got no crummy trackpad wasting space and a 16:10 display that's designed for work, and not watching cat videos.
Spare parts are dirt cheap, and since the magnesium alloy rollcage is on the inside I don't have to worry about ugly dents, I just swap plastic panels out on the cheap when I think they are getting a bit too worn.
I run Linux on Linux via vagrant, it's not about my program running faster it's about isolating a client projects dependencies from each other so when I have to work on that system that is still in production on PHP Current-1 or Ruby-1 I don't have to fuck with my host OS at all.
In fact I have very few developer bits and bobs installed on the host (mostly just JetBrains stuff) and all the actual tooling is run in the VM, this makes for far easier deploys for myself since my process is
pull projectname/(site||name), pull projectname/vagrant, vagrant up.
It takes me less than 30 minutes from reinstalling to having half a dozen projects with all their weird dependencies and cruft installed and I never have to worry about breaking something else or needing to blow away a machine for some reason.
I'm happy to trade some performance for running damn near everything in a guest OS for that.
I have a Vagrant/Virtualbox workflow (on Windows host, so Docker not a great option yet) but curious: does Docker have shared folder support - via NFS or other?
It's been the getting stuff into & out of the VM that's most painful IMO.
Oh awesome, thanks! I looked when Docker for Windows came out and (thankfully) spotted the "After Hyper-V is enabled, VirtualBox will no longer work" (?!) warning before trying it. I didn't dig any deeper.
but I really miss the UltraNav.
(And here I thought the P-series was "just" what the W series morphed into...)
I've never really quite understood why, as I though ACPI is meant to handle this. But I'm not terribly au fait with this interface, so there might be good reasons, I know Torcalds criticised it early on as a "design disaster" and there were and I think still are concerns about the way that bytecode has unfettered access to the system.
the X201 has a trackpad. The X1 carbon (and several other models) have 2560x1440 displays.
What kind of working environment requires setting up Vagrant on OSX? It's a Unix-based OS, if you're doing any web development you can do it on the host system.
For one thing, you want the development environment to be as similar to production as possible – same OS version, same webserver version, same DB version, same dependencies, no unwanted extras that differ between environments.
For another thing, you don't want to have to solve conflicts between project A and completely unrelated project T if you need to work on them both.
MacPros have two descent AMD FirePro GPUs but much cheaper to rent.
yea. ok
edit: Why not watch cat videos?
Your criticisms are pretty almost all a matter of taste, and we're in disagreement just about throughout.
> I wonder if it's the Valley culture?
I'm not in the valley. I've never found any non-apple laptop with a good (or even decent) trackpad, and I like that OSX has a community of indie developers who actually care.
> the keyboard
I don't enjoy thinkpad keyboard.
> the UltraNav
Same as above but much stronger, I absolutely hate this thing, and I love Apple trackpad. In fact the trackpad is one a huge reason for remaining on Apple laptops despite other shortcomings: I can and even enjoy using MBPs without a mouse.
> the swappable batteries
have never been something I've needed, plus that requires carrying additional batteries.
> a nice docking station
Meh. "nice" is in the eye of the beholder, the thing's ugly as sin. And with type C/TB3, you can actually replicate it without being beholden to Apple (!).
> upgradeable storage/memory
That is indeed a really annoying "feature" of Apple over the last few years. Though of course you can get a maxed-out MBP.
> Linux distro
and I don't see that as an advantage.
> The gap is huge! If a Thinkpad is a 100, the prev. gen Macbook Pro would be 60
If you like thinkpads more power to you, but all my experiences with them were disappointing, I'd put the 2015 rMBP at 70 and the average thinkpad at 40, maybe 50.
Personally, I have a ThinkPad W540 for work and while it weighs like a brick man is it easy to work with. The UltraNav isn't as nice as the trackpad on my XPS 13, but I usually work with the TrackPoint on ThinkPad's anyway (killer feature for me to be honest, even Apple's awesome trackpad disappointments in comparison to a good ol' TrackPoint in my opinion) - upgrading the RAM and SSD required a couple screws for the appropriate bays in the base cover instead of needing to take the whole thing off like my old 2012 MBP. Also, while USB Type-C and ThunderBolt 3 "work" for a dock, being able to plop by ThinkPad down on my desk at home and have it start charging and connect all of my peripherals is still easier than plugging in a cable (even if it's just one cable).
Also, as far as Linux support I guess that all really depends on the individual. Most of my workflow is heavily dependent on Linux (Java/Python dev in JetBrains products, ansible stuff, administering a couple dozen Linux VM's) with the exception of our .Net apps (where I run Visual Studio in a Windows VM) - there's not a whole lot of benefit to me running macOS, and in fact, I'd really rather run Fedora (call me an oddball I guess) since anything not getting deployed to a Windows server goes to a CentOS VM, makes moving from development to production a lot easier.
Er… yes that's quite literally my entire point, and specifically spelled out as my first paragraph.
I have an older Retina Pro, and I have a dock that works exactly like this. I stick the MBP in, and it's charging and connected to a keyboard and mouse, two displays, and my printer, along with speakers.
Today's Dell and Lenovo laptops are good Linux dev machines. I've never had a problem with putting Linux one one, either my Dell Inspiron at work or my XPS at home. My old first gen carbon can even run FreeBSD-11 fine. Everything worked straight off with a stock kernel and the current linux-firmware package.
At one time, Macs were more cost effective for the specs you got. But with all the ram and SSD storage you can pack into modern laptops, they're really good dev machines.
This box, with a i7-6600U, routinely idles with the screen on at 5.5-6W with a current kernel (spending almost all of that in PC7 per powertop). Your ideas about Linux power management are just plain misinformed.
Tiny almost weightless (feels lighter than current-gen Macbook Air) laptop, and it runs between 10 to 11 hours on the battery when doing normal work (programming, mail, web, spreadsheets etc..) on wifi with pleasant screen brightness ...
Linux power management is fine today on modern hardware... (Powertop reports 5.2-5.5 watts)
Beyond that, run a current kernel (my measurements are on Fedora's 4.8.12 kernel). Also recognize that recent Intel SoCs have gotten a lot better at idle power draw. The "X1 Carbon" brand started with (I think) Ivy Bridge boards which obviously aren't going to perform like this.
I remember when Apple released it saying, 'no new features'. Just bug fixes and speed improvements.
We need one of those again.
I'm also a tiling WM fan. I found amethyst a resonable comprise when using macOS though.
Keyboard and UltraNav are more taste than anything else. I have a T450s for work and a 15" rMBP and vastly prefer the keyboard/touchpad on the latter. It doesn't help that Lenovo's QA is shit. My T450s keyboard is bulging in the bottom right of the keyboard deck, and several of the keys stick for a millisecond on the way down. As if they're not quite seated properly and hitting the key causes something to click into place. I suspect it's temperature related, because it goes away after typing for awhile, but comes back after a bit of non-use.
> upgradeable storage/memory
Programmers are expensive. No reason not to buy a maxed-out machine to begin with.
Also, it's hard to get over Lenovo's penchant for shit displays if your job is to stare at text all day.
Anyways, the 5th gen Yoga was just announced at CES 2017!!
It is pretty impressive and is my new dream machine, http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-yo...
And MacBooks have the best touchpad of all laptops.
More specifically, the stuff I don't want to mess with just works: peripherals and GUI stuff work without intervention, and the thing goes to sleep when I close the lid. And the stuff I want to mess with is still good old familiar Unix. I haven't tried out desktop Linux in awhile, but the Free Software model only seems to work for things coders like to work on in their spare time, like terminals, text editors, and command-line programs. For the rest, I'm willing to pay my fellow coders so I don't have to deal with it.
I read your first sentence and was like "wow, this guy hasn't used Linux in a while." Then I got to your second sentence.
So, yeah, maybe give it another go. In my experience most of the complaints I had 4-5 years ago are gone at this point, and the convenience gap has closed substantially. OS X is still more user friendly of course, and there's a little bit of configuration required to make everything work smoothly under Linux, but it's a lot better than you remember.
Importantly, I've seen some devs using OS X, and they spend way more time dealing with dev tooling issues than I spend dealing with printers, devices, and gui stuff.
For example I hate Finder, I dont like that I am not able to run lots of software, I dont like that its running an ancient version of OpenGL/there is no Vulkan.
Every long time Mac user I've asked says they just don't use those buttons. Maximising windows is a mess in mac. Multi monitor support is also rather poor.
Over all, I've had no real problems with OS X (at least after installing my own terminal program and own version of bash and such) and everything worked smoothly, which is great, but I certainly wouldn't hold OS X up as some example of perfect design because there are lots of things windows and Linux do better.
I just spent my entire workday struggling to figure out why `kernal_task` was constantly using 16gb of RAM. Whenever people say macOS "just works" I assume they do nothing but web browse. It's great at that.
I agree with your comment. Generally, OSX often means I am using more resources to do the same task than when I use my archlinux. But in the era of 16g+ ram and terabyte Harddisks, I find it simpler to just let OSX use extra resources so I can spend less time thinking about low level processes.
For that we have to go back about a decade:
http://betanews.com/2006/06/02/adobe-to-sue-microsoft-for-pd...
http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server/microsoft-strips-key-...
The long and short of it is that Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft for including PDF support as a feature in Office (despite allowing it on OS X and OpenOffice at the same time) so MS stopped doing anything PDF related. Adobe was widely derided in the software industry over the incident.
So we all can thank Adobe for that.
Well, except for all those dongles you need to drag around with you.
Right now I'm the only programmer in my department that has a Thinkpad (and the only one that has Linux on a Thinkpad). Which is a strange thing for me, I always thought that Macs are more for designers or endusers not programmers/hackers (as you mostly are very limited at hacking on Mac, quite the opposite of Linux).
For myself, instead of a laptop I ask for a custom workstation. For the same price, I get four fast cores, lots of RAM, lots of ports, huge monitors and lots of (fast) disk. I have a good sound setup there and developers usually don't do meetings or when we do it's whiteboard only and quick. I think it's very satisfying to use a minimal xmonad setup with a proper workstation, then running cmake and seeing your CPU and RAM is used in stuff that actually matters.
If I need to do home office, I use my own laptop. But I prefer to be in the office, otherwise some of my time goes to the cats, who want attention the whole day. :3
Maybe they are better these days, but I need to spend more time with one. But they changed the keyboard, the trackpads were almost laughable, and the battery life was an utter joke - not even enough juice for a MSP-LAS flight. Not to mention (at the time) laughable resolution, and miserable build quality compared to the IBM nameplate T-series.
I'm looking for a nice 14-15" laptop like an old T60 that is built like a tank with amazing battery life.
It's tempting for me to try the T-series line again, especially if they bring back the classic keyboard they so stupidly did away with. But for some time it was utterly stagnant and more or less unusable trash.
I want to like the X1 Carbon
Isn't this one of those YMMV kinda things that really depends on the person, though? It seems equally wrong to say that no one could be productive on a MBP as it is to say that no one could be productive without a MBP.
the Carbon X1 doesn't have swappable batteries.
Macs are beautiful, hermetically sealed devices that work perfectly until they explode.
Linux (or thinkpads) are like M1 Abrams tanks you can service yourself, run forever on a nuclear battery, and people think you're weird if you have one.
You completely missed the most important productivity tool for a programmer, the display and no thinkpad can compete with a macbook in that regard.
In addition new Mac keyboards are better than new thinkpad keyboards. Mac trackpads are better than thinkpad trackpads, the ultranav is not good, battery life on macbooks are better than thinkpads and you don't need to carry extra batteries, and macbook docking solutions are better than thinkpad docking solutions.
Also why would you want to use linux when that will 100% give you shorter than 4 hours battery life along with a host of other issues when you can use OSX and get good battery life along with a fully posix compliant os?
If I'm honest I have no Idea why there is an ad for the X1 on hackernews today. The page itself is 404-ing for me.
That said, I held an X1 carbon last september when shopping for a new laptop with my girlfriend. It was a fucking glorious machine.
In the end we wound up buying the lenevo yoga because it comes with an i7, SSD, & 8gigs ram (the three checkboxes I need on a laptop) - this was the cheapest with all my boxes ticked.
X1C was a lot more expensive, but you could feel why when you held it. What a beautiful machine.
(Again, why is it listed as a link on HN? Just so we can moon over it? Fair I guess)
It has been my main laptop since release and it is by far the best laptop I ever owned...
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-yo...
There's still some give when I pick it up one handed. I'd happily trade some weight and thickness for a more durable feel, but I might be in the minority.
ThinkPad X1 Carbon: Starting at 2.6 lbs (1209 g)
MacBook Pro 13: Weight: 3.02 pounds (1.37 kg)
I think that's a pretty stone-age point of view given modern material technology.
One of my friends has dropped his Air out of his lofted dorm bed numerous times and you couldn't even tell by looking at it, it's totally fine. One of my other friends has a ThinkPad Yoga and the fancy hinge was fucked within two weeks of purchase.
My X1 yoga has no trouble what-so-ever and I dropped it a few feet.. (and it rattles along unprotected in a leather bag every day)...
You may have dropped it a few feet, but I drop my MacBook Pro all the time because I'm a terrible person. This dorm-bed fall has happened several times now too. The durability is simply off the charts, and I can't say the same about ThinkPads. They just feel so flimsy, everything bends or flexes on them.
In all seriousness four comments:
- I bend my X1 fully around all the time, not problem with the hinges
- all X1's I have ever seen have 3-year ON-SITE warranty, your friend should call support and get it fixed next business day (where s/he is).
- Strength and "flexiness" are not related, often materials are allowed to flex to keep them from breaking. The X1s are made of carbon fibre and have sufficient strength even if our ape-brains prefer something that does not flex...
- and even if not, there is always next-day onsite warranty (mine is upgrade to 5 years - not having the option of onsite for Macs is alone a disqualifying trait for me)
ThinkPad X1 Carbon: 2.51 lbs (1.14 kg)
MacBook Pro 13 ......: 3.02 lbs (1.37 kg)
or about 17% lighter
The light weight actually makes it feel flimsy / cheap at first, but having used it for the best part of a year, I realize there is a stiffness to it that you don't get with cheap plastic.