Ask HN: What to replace my MacBook with? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to replace my MacBook with?

29 pointsdennisvdvliet47 comments

Seen the recent issues with Apple hard- and software I’m not 100% sure I want to replace my 2015 MacBook Pro with a 2017 MacBook pro. What are your suggestions for a decent replacement?

I’m looking for something the size of a MacBook that can run Ubuntu or something similar. Good boos quality and a good screen.

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I went from a stolen 2015 MBP to an X230 (modified with an X220 keyboard) to a new MBP. With the thinkpads, the smaller screen and lower resolution will take some getting used to. Running a customized window manager in Linux is the best solution when it works but you shouldn't discount the amount of time you will lose to tinkering and random breakages.

My personal belief is that, for a working dev, MacOS is still the best deal running. The fact of the matter is that it will always work and any new software you want to install will have a well documented how to. Even if you don't want to run MacOS, I'd still probably recommend buying an MBP and dual booting linux on it. Thinkpads are great, the x220 keyboard is probably the best keyboard ever put on a laptop, but the screens are horrible, you will notice the RAM and CPU shortage, and battery life was an issue. Further, the form factor is not as small as an MBP.

If you are going down the Thinkpad route, the X62 is an interesting option custom made by an enthusiast group in Shenzhen. [1] Otherwise, Hackaday wrote a fairly modern Thinkpad buyer's guide [2]. One thing I would note is that upgrading the x230 keyboard to the x220 keyboard is trivial and only requires a jeweler's screwdriver and a few new parts (about $70). You can also upgrade the x230 screen to an HD screen but that is a significantly more complicated upgrade.

[1] https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/ [2] https://hackaday.com/2016/10/28/apple-sucks-now-heres-a-thin...

> With the thinkpads, the smaller screen and lower resolution will take some getting used to

What takes getting used to is that Thinkpad screens are trash. :( I’ve been so disappointed in them. They start mediocre and decline rapidly with blotching and ghosting. I’ve used Thinkpads for my personal laptop and my work laptop and refuse to own another. My manager has a recent Thinkpad with an OLED screen which seems pretty good but I’m not willing to try another. I fully expect that in 6 months his OLED will exhibit ghosting or burn in.

Gotta say, I've used a fair number of thinkpads across the last 10 years, and I've never seen any blotching or ghosting.

I will admit that the older models had fairly crappy resolutions (I mean 1366x768 and 1600x800 was crap, and Lenovo held on to those resolutions far longer than they should), and pretty dim (I could barely use my X200t and X201 in the shade outside), but I feel most models in the last 2-3 years have made plenty of progress in that regard.

I have the 25th anniversary model and while the screen is not the best colour wise, it's still much better than the older panels and for programming it's bright and sharp with no ghosting or blotching.

The keyboard and battery life are both best in class. Of course when the battery is worn out, you can buy a new one. This is possible with ThinkPads.

Battery life is not best in class in my experience, either. My manager who loves his new X1 Carbon with the OLED screen admits it’s got terrible battery life.

The keyboards are fine but not better than, say, MBPs from a couple of years ago. (Half millimeter travel on the latest MBPs is not great.)

By installing and running tlp and having the 24 and 48 Wh batteries I get easily 11 hours of use on Linux with my T25. 7 watt average power use reported by powertop, but I mainly run i3, browser and tons of terminals...

T25 has the legacy 7 row keyboard which had no competition currently.

As opposed to glossy displays? In 2017?

I’d definitely take a glossy display over a matte display with ghosting and blotching.

And anyway, Lenovo’s matte display technology consists of a slightly cloudy piece of adhesive-backed plastic sheeting stuck on top of the display. I don’t know why anyone is impressed with this. It’s not as if they actually have textured glass or even a proper screen coating. It’s contact paper that you can buy for pennies per square foot at Staples. It’s really awesome if you have a device that has pen input because the pen scratches up the plastic over time.

If you really want this, you can buy it aftermarket and stick it on any glossy display. You’ll end up with a better result than Lenovo if your laptop is using a decent panel to start with.

If you can get something preloaded with Linux it is probably best. System 76 or the Dell precision line of laptops are good options. In the case of dell I would go precision over XPS - I believe you get better support and a better tested product with the business line. I have an XPS and have had a few QA issues with it. However, once I got it sorted it has been great running Ubuntu - but it was a ..... journey to say the least ;)

EDIT: another good option is probably XPS 13 Dev editions that give you ubuntu preloaded as well

I switched to Dell Precision Develop Edition 15" at the start of the year. It comes preloaded with Ubuntu 16.04.

I have really enjoyed this machine and don't miss my MacBook Pro at all.

The machine worked great out of the box, I made a few minor changes to how I like to work.

The two major changes I made were:

* Install a libinput and get rid of synaptics driver * Install the latest kernel

I run with a bunch of proprietary drivers (nvidia, intel, etc.) and don't have any problems

The only thing that I miss having is Sketch. But I just run a small Windows VM and use PS when I need it.

Majority of my time is spent in Chrome/Firefox, Terminal, gVim and Slack, so I don't miss anything Mac-specific.

If you're looking for help on how to get yours configured, there are plenty of guides if you search for: Dell XPS 15 Ubuntu or variants of that.

How well does the precision work out of the box? I would prefer to run standard Ubuntu with no modifications or proprietary drivers of possible.

It works fine except for the touchpad, hence the switch to libinput.

Keep in mind, it comes with a bunch of stuff enabled by Dell and using their own repos.

I upgraded the kernel as I'm using the WD15 dock and the thunderbolt firmware/drivers are flaky on older kernels and will lock up the system.

If you've never ran Linux as your primary machine, be prepared for occasional snags, especially around suspend.

Overall, it's an easy system to fiddle with with lots and lots of online resources and how-to's.

I have been thinking about getting a XPS 13 and getting Linux on it too. Currently, I repurposed a very old laptop (heavy and poor battery life) by installing CentOS Linux on it, and it runs great and I can do productive dev work on it (just can't carry it anywhere since it's too heavy). Curious, are the issues you had with the XPS bad enough that you'd recommend getting a different line (like Precision) over it? I remember the XPS is lighter and had better battery life, but I might be wrong.

Also, I know most workstation Linux users prefer Ubuntu over other flavors, but I personally usually stick with the Redhat family (like CentOS) since I just know its commands and names better. Is there anything (features) I'm missing concretely, by not using Ubuntu?

In response to the second part of your comment, I don't think so, aside from new features that might be present in newer kernels than the Redhat family distros provide.

Some of the issues I had with 9550 XPS:

- battery swelling

- fan spinning on high speed for no apparent reason (not due to CPU load)

- random wakeups while sleeping (happened in my bag once and the laptop almost overheated :( ). This was eventually fixed via BIOS updates

- lots and lots of BIOS updates to fix all kinds of issues- at least 1-2 every month since its initial release. Although I am glad they are being fixed

- OEM wifi card (broadcom) was a POS in both Linux and Windows (Windows came with the box). I replaced with Intel card and life has been great.

The above may not be a problem in current XPS (9660 I think), but I really don't know. The XPS forums I have been to seem to filled with people with issues and instead recommending Precisions if you are OK with a less gaming based GPU. Plus you get business support and not the craptastic consumer support. If I were to do it again and wanted a 15" I'd definitely go with 5520 precision.

RE: XPS size and weight vs Precision -> If you stick with 5000 series it is almost the same box. If you bump to 7000 series you are getting into supersize land (but you can also fill it with more goodies that of course weigh more). The only downside is that all precision laptops are 15" - if you want smaller form factors you would need to go XPS (e.g XPS 13).

RE: Ubuntu v RH variants - it doesn't matter. Go with what is comfortable and familiar to you. AFAIK Ubuntu may have a more desktop/laptop friendly setup unless you go with Fedora (which is pretty much equivalent to Ubuntu non-LTS versions).

One final thing: the one thing that the Dells have over the Macbooks is user serviceable parts. IN the 15" models, you can replace SSD, WiFi, battery, memory very easily AND without compromising weight or size. I really wish Apple would get off the thin -> super-thin -> paper-thin? ride and offer this kind of modularity again. Hell at minimum allow replacement of SSD, memory.... but that is another rant for another time :)

Thanks - v. informative.

Do you know how well Dell Precision does for international warranty and support?

I have no idea - you would have to check with Dell Support

I too am interested in this.

Not sure what your platform choice is, linux or windows, but this post is all with a linux bias.

I have a 15" macbook pro from late 2013. I do not upgrade computers very often and expect them to last a long time.

Laptops are especially hard because I am also a linux user who has never operated a linux laptop. The departure from Mac leaves me with Windows which I will not ever operate.

I've looked into this before am currently considering these

Thought about getting a super light weight low spec cheap laptop like a thinkpad x220 or even a dell. Most the time my laptops are used as clients, so I do not need too much. Running a web browser is the most intensive need these days.

System76 - Gazelle or better. These look nice and are linux compatible.

Also, an article I saved to read later and still havn't found time https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/11/2/13497094/b...

You can get a refurbished x220 for $200. It won't be the best laptop ever, but probably enough to learn Linux.

Had multiple co-workers going this route and now they are full-time ThinkPad users.

As a programmer, I find going from OS X to Linux to be smoother due to both being *nix derived. I know Windows now has Linux facilities, but from a programming perspective the library situation is still a bit sloppy. Linux ecosystem (I prefer Debian based, e.g. Ubuntu) is far more mature.

Of course if you are looking at playing games and being able to plug in just about any piece of USB hardware, then Windows is always going to be better supported.

I would recommend Thinkpad T470s. I have used both Lenovo T460s, T470 laptops and Dell XPS developer edition with Linux. I personally prefer the Lenovo.

Here is a detailed review of T470s https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T470s-Core-i7-...

Here is ranking of Laptop brands by Laptop mag, Lenovo rank best laptop brand. https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/laptop-brand-ratings

And they still sell the T25 model which is basically a maxed out T470 with the perfect seven row keyboard. A superb laptop with Linux.

Soon though the T480 is out with the quad core ulv CPUs, so maybe waiting is also an option...

I highly recommend a decently modern Lenovo Thinkpad.

The T470 and T470s/p are pretty nice. I managed to get a good bargin on a T460 off Craigslist, and it runs like a dream. After some minute tweaks (mostly installing tlp), it's running Ubuntu 17.10 fantastically.

If you want something a bit smaller, the X series is the line with a 12.5inch screen. Downside is the latest model (the X270) only has a FHD screen, with 1920x1080 max. The T470s and T470p both have a 14 inch WQHD screen with 2560x1440 max. The 15 inch T570 has a UHD screen with 3840x2160 max, which is definitely Retina-like.

I just did this because my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) / 16GB / 1TB machine finally developed a hardware fault they want motherboard replacement money to fix (occasional but frequent hard resets).

After checking the cost of a new MBP (basically almost same specs as the old one, plus touch bar!) and then noticing a Dell sale on before Xmas here in Sydney, I decided to replace it with a Dell XPS 15 9560 (laptop version, not the split-part "2-in-1" version, in black, with max memory and hard disk) for about ½ - ⅔ of the price of a Macbook Pro, but with better specs. The physical build of the machine takes some getting used to but I prefer the keyboard immensely, the black/carbon fiber finish is excellent and the high-grip "don't fall off table" feature is also great. As I have been focusing on family over Christmas and also have a company to run I am time short, so still setting up Gentoo, but set myself the somewhat uncharted goal of ZFS root (achieved!) and am enjoying the setup so far. Yet to finalize optimum video setup as the machine has two chips, X11 does not yet want to function correctly with the closed source nvidia-drivers on super-new kernels, but it works awesome for angband and X does work fine with the open source i915 drivers. Current notes on the Gentoo wiki at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dell_XPS_15_9560

Seriously, you went from osx to Gentoo? It's like going from using computers to designing your own cpus...

Just install Ubuntu and be done with it

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

AFAIK, Gentoo is the best full-control Linux distro out there, possibly only rivalled by arch. It's not for everyone, but I do want that level of control. Using OSX I constantly run up against annoying irritations and have to spin up special VMs, which is tedious. I gave it a good go - almost seven years. Enough. IMHO ZFS root (snapshots and rewind) goes a long way towards resolving the worst irritations in using Gentoo as a desktop OS.

Unfortunately, with Linux "full control" usually means "you'll have to manually edit every single configuration file before your computer becomes barely usable"

That's why I prefer distros that work out of the box, like Ubuntu, or Fedora.

It's a matter of perspective and goals. If I just wanted a browser and access to VMs or cloud environments I'd use a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard. You can't learn things like changes in kernel configuration options, boot processes, graphical environments, etc. simply by using someone else's default configuration, only by reading and configuring yourself. Are these things critical? Not for most people, but they certainly inform my work in many ways and I would not consider time invested since the 1990s to have been wasted. Many people enjoy learning and are able to leverage knowledge for creativity, I am merely one of them.

Along those lines the recent ChromeBooks are also worth consideration. You can even run full Linux using Crouton if you are willing to make a small compromise on the highest levels of security.

I have tried using tablets and BT keyboards, it works well, but I prefer the all in one form factor of a simple notebook. BTW the Lenovo tablets with the flip out stand are terrific on the desk and to hold. That rounded battery compartment makes it feel like a spiral bound book when using it with Kindle.

OT but I used Gentoo since about 2003, the issue for me anyways was Q/A of the packages and migration when updating old systems. I was constantly fixing or working around issues.

Yeah. Often a gentoo root system becomes inoperable because it's out of date or has some weird package configuration. Using a snapshot-capable root allows you to easily swap it out to something known good or freshly installed and keep running.

I recommend checking out the "Galago Pro" from System 76, it comes preloaded with Linux (actually their whole company is built on Linux), Good customer support. They have been recommended various times in another HN threads

BTW: They are currently addressing the Intel ME problem.

https://system76.com/laptops/galago

I'm running Arch on my Surface Pro 3 for work. It works pretty well for me. Some hurdles, but it's nice to have the control.

Did you wipe off Windows and install Arch from scratch? I have been considering that, but haven't yet found any encouraging reviews on how well that goes. Especially: can you use the pen?

I'd look into the Dell XPS. Its build quality competes with the MacBook, it's one of the smallest laptops of it size (either 13 or 15) and the 4k screen is absolutely stunning (although some prefer fhd for the improved battery life). I got mine recently and I'm loving it.

I've got a little 13" XPS Developer Edition and it's a really solid option. The build quality is perfect and I've yet to come across any issues with it. Use daily for web development in work and for personal projects.

With an i7 it runs really smooth. I opted for the FHD option for the longer battery life, but would have gone UHD if I didn't mind about battery life.

It's really nice to see Dell make Linux part of it's line-up. Part of me bought it as a little heads-up to Dell that Linux laptops are a good thing. I've always just installed Ubuntu over existing windows laptops, but it's nice to see it somewhat as a first class citizen with Dell.

I think the Linux version of XPS is also $100 cheaper

Curious if you had a Macbook Pro retina before the XPS? My annoyances with the XPS 9360 (mostly compared to my 2015 rMBP 13"): i7 throttled all the time, coil whine, the hinge pinches your legs on opening, can't open with one hand, terrible trackpad, the webcam position is a joke, one usb slot is misaligned, poor speakers, no graphics port (you need e.g. a USB C to HDMI adapter)

Thinkpad. If you hit the Lenovo outlet you can occasionally find a really good deal.

Buy a used IT laptop from eBay and install your favorite Linux flavor on it.

I have a T470P, Core i7-7700HQ, 32GB RAM, NVMe SSD. 2560x1440 matt IPS (excellent screen) with the larger 72whr battery.

Cracking machine for the price works great with Linux.

.Dell XPS 15 4k with windows 10 pro. MS is all in on developers and releasing more goodies every quarter.

I see a lot of ThinkPads and Dells here, but how about hp? Are they good for Linux?

I've heard decent things about the HP Spectre, but it was fairly new, either a 2016 or 2017 model. Some minor quirks with Ubuntu and older kernels, but I think they got 16.04 or 16.10 working well.

Sounds good. Spectre 360 looks as nice as the Dell XPS, if not better.

I also think they are a bit cheaper, but I'm not sure about hps track record regarding quality and Linux support.

Asus Zenbook works well for me. I'm running Kubuntu.

I'd caution against Asus Zenbooks. My friend and I both got ux303ln's and another friend got a different model with the same body. All 3 of us had broken hinges (fully snapped) in less than a year. They put cheap plastic in their hinges according to some videos on YouTube. Premium laptops should last more than a year.

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