And have even crappier hardware (thinkpads with screen resolution and disk sizes of last decade, not much cheaper, anyone?) with Win 10 preinstalled...
http://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops-notebooks-and-2-in-1-...
Unless you tell more about what you like in the one and what not in the other it’s hard to get a value from your experience report.
- Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen
- Coil whine
- Shitty battery life
- Shitty touchpad
So as whatever is Apple doing is annoying faddy bullshit, it's still the better option, especially considering the XPS 13 cost as much or more than MBP.
> - Linux applications have a lot of trouble with the HiDPI screen
Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.
> - Coil whine
None of that.
> - Shitty battery life
What's shitty? It lasts 5 hours of me working with VMs. I don't think expecting more is reasonable. It's much less laggy than my collegue's MBP, which leads me to assume that Mac just throttles the CPU down to achieve longer battery life? I don't want that.
> - Shitty touchpad
Not at all. It works nicely. Much better than most touchpads I've used.
And as an added bonus, it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off. And it was like 1.5K EUR vs 3K EUR for a macbook pro.
The latest generation of Macs definitely run cool, fwiw. I've never once noticed the heat
> Honestly haven't noticed a single thing.
I've got a coworker sitting right next to me with a HiDPI main + non-HiDPI secondary screen. X or Wayland, it's a thousand cuts of hell: set native resolution and render scaling to 200% and you get some (most) apps at 200% on the non-HiDPI screen. Drag an app from HiDPI to non-HiDPI and notice how the overflow is wrongly scaled. There's no way to render at 200% on a non-native resolution then downsample to native, you have to set a non-native resolution, upsampled by the GPU/panel, which results in a useless blurry mess.
> it doesn't get burning hot to the touch when doing actual work on it. Nor does it sound like it's about to take off.
Early '13 and mid '14 13" rMBP here, VMs don't lag, slightly warm, but in no way "burning hot". Early '13 is dead silent thanks to dual fan design, mid '14 slightly less so, and only when I peg all cores for long enough.
I don't know any specific macbook models as I'm not an apple user and there is like no visual distinction between them. All I know is that I have two coworkers who use macbooks, and theirs are incredibly loud & warm.
The world became a better place when I swapped ubuntu for Debian and Unity for Gnome. Shit just works now...
Yea, I did have to set scaling at 200%, and tweak font scaling once. But it's been set and forget.
I have quite literally both sides of this problem on my Windows laptop at work. Either the 4K display on the laptop renders everything really tiny, or the 1080p displays make everything huge. I haven't found a decent solution, so I just end up using the 4K display only for Conemu because it's the only thing that doesn't render in some goofy way. Even then, the toolbar icons for it are tiny, and any windows it spawns (e.g. warning that I'm about to paste something with newlines) have tiny icons.
I stick to 1440p displays at home for now. Those work great with everything.
One handy feature you can use though is to place a manifest file [1] next to the exe with a bit of XML in it tellings Windows to render it at a bigger scale.
1. https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/054c1d49-9f24...
I‘m based in Germany by the way, so my choice of products here might be different...
I also agree that the trackpads are very poor, and that's still one of Apple's main strengths. Although quite why the trackpad needs to be quite so enormous on the current models is a mystery to me, so many people catch it when typing.
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