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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

> There is absolutely no way in hell a keyboard like this should be found on a laptop favored by software engineers.

I don't quite get it. Why are software engineers favoring such a laptop? Shouldn't this be worded the other way around? "There is no way a laptop with a keyboard like this should be favored by software engineers"...?

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I no longer do.

My last MacBook was a 2013. It has 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD and I still use it. I'm somewhat desensitised to the price creep because I buy on the business but it just doesn't seem like I'm in the target market anymore.

I really like the aesthetic of a case that isn't a wedge shaped lump of plastic but that only gets you so far. I've bought an Intel Hades Canyon, put Linux on it and moved most of my development over to it. I'll probably get an XPS to put Linux on for when I'm on the move.

I am baffled though; the issues seem to be so widely felt I don't understand why a company with such wealth can't throw us a bone like the slightly thicker dev oriented machine suggested above. I'd have thought it in their interest but I guess not.

> I am baffled though; the issues seem to be so widely felt I don't understand why a company with such wealth can't throw us a bone like the slightly thicker dev oriented machine suggested above. I'd have thought it in their interest but I guess not.

Even if they were interested, are we sure apple can still operate efficiently? A lot of large companies, including HP and Microsoft, hit a point where they have trouble getting even relatively simple things done (like replacing a keyboard).

Yeah, looks as though they've more than doubled from ~60k employees in 2011. I've no idea how you scale a business like Apples at that rate effectively.

In fairness, they’ve purchased a lot of other companies and software. I’ll bet much of the increase is in software or the acquisitions they’ve made.

Meeting with a team this month from Apple on a product purchased from the company I work for that (to my knowledge) had far fewer engineers—or at least engineers who would work with external engineers to the project.

It's tiny, super light, has decent battery, an "ok" CPU, 16GB ram and you can hook up a whole bunch of external peripherals including GPU via thunderbolt 3. It also doesn't have the coil whine the xps has and arguably better worldwide support when you use the premium partners rather than the apple store itself. In general the Macbooks aren't that much more expensive than the alternatives.

Not that I'm directly comparing it to the xps, since the macbook pro is probably more closely related to the xps, but still there's no other device with 16gb RAM in that segment. In terms of CPU the performance is pretty much on par with the Macbook air although it's CPU was last updated in 2015

I don't have one. I still use my 4 year old Macbook air. The only thing that bothers me is that I usually dual boot with linux and the newer macbooks are getting worse to run linux on.

When comparing to dell, I invite you to compare it to the latitude rather than xps. Latitudes are much more functional, not meant to be a fashion statement, have a keyboard with page up/down keys (which few other laptop keyboard have), while being light, powerful and upgradable. The only problem is that the fingerprint reader sucks.

> not meant to be a fashion statement

Is this a polite way of saying they're ugly?

Another way of thinking about this is that Dell made little to no compromises on function for aesthetics.

Don't have anything to say about your comparison, seems fair to me. One thing I personally add to it, though, is the price difference for the replacement keyboard and the difficulty of replacement procedure. Any keyboard may fail due to user spilling stuff on it, and in case of XPS, you could fairly easily splice in another one.

They meant that the MBP in general is favoured by software developers (especially until 2016), and the post-2016 MBP is the successor to that but doesn't live up to the reputation.

Anyone doing iOS app development effectively has no other choice.

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