The things I would do (and pay) for 2010-Apple tier hardware built for CentOS in both laptop and phone form factors...
Isn’t it remarkable this still doesn’t exist? Build quality still does not compare in the PC world.
Yet, I’m on a MBA3,2 (late 2010) and it’s great. Still running Yosemite. It’s got 4gb ram but handles running 10 JVMs with modest heaps for development no problem. Stable and runs for months without issue. I’d love more RAM and more cores but none of these computers seem worth it.
I considered buying a 2015 MPB the other month only to learn that Apple glues the battery to the top case. So to replace the battery you need to replace the whole top case. Insane.
Razer comes close, though I wouldn't buy them because of the compensating-for-something #branding on the machines. The Alienware 13 I can personally vouch for as being better than my last MacBook Pro for sure. And the keyboard is like an old ThinkPad's but not quite so heavy. Still not a fan of the alien logo, but at least it's tiny.
I have the same hardware but unfortunately my experience is the exact opposite. It’s barely usable. I literally can’t browse JavaScript-heavy websites (e.g. Gmail).
I wonder if having kept up with the OS releases has anything to do with it (I’m on High Sierra).
I'll admit some of the really heavy websites are crap, but that's mostly because the websites are crap and wont be smooth on anything than the latest i7. Generally I have no problem with gmail or google maps which are reasonably heavy.
Depending on what version of OS X you are using that might be the culprit, OS X is a pretty heavy OS, especially post 10.6. For me 10.6 was o-k but changing to linux and a tiling window manager freed up a lot of resources, I never end up paging out with web browsing even though it's only 4GiB, additionally I find graphics are faster on linux but that may be GPU and driver specific due to Apple's underclocking tactics. If I hadn't switched I would probably have ditched this hardware by now.
Alternatively the GPU difference between these machines may explain web browsing speed considering how much stuff is hardware accelerated these days.
I think this era of hardware is pretty linux friendly if you wanted to try it, you don't have dual GPU which is the biggest pain for linux too... there is no issue with mac EFI from grub anymore so should be zero configuration install for you, at the most you might have to manually select the proprietary drivers for your GPU for reasonable performance.
Can't blame them. Ultimately, it's productivity that pays the bills.
Librem? https://puri.sm