I’m operating on a Macbook Pro 15 from mid 2010. I upgraded the hard drive to SSD, upgraded the memory to 8 gigs (max supported), and the mobo has been replaced twice (fried from overheating .. the thing gets really hot). This has prolonged my machine for a bit but it’s starting to getting long in the tooth. They also just dropped my model from being able to install the newest mac OS (for a 2010 that might make sense). Seems being able to upgrade modular pieces of your tech is a thing of the past. It has saved me some really time and money being able to remain on the same machine for 9 years. If it weren’t upgradeable that probably be a totally different story.

Biggest features that I would miss from my macbook:

--Touchpad with BetterTouchTool - I heavily use custom gestures and it’s insane how much this drives my daily work flow and speed

--Unix environment is super nice

--Reliable and quick resume from hibernate or suspend

--Never really lags at the OS level .. but individual apps might get a little bogged

I would use a windows notebook as my daily driver if the experience were close and it had a solid build (weight and slimness is not a huge deal to me). Laptop + linux would be fine as well but I don’t know about the user experience with the newer touchpads in linux.

Does anyone have any success stories with notebooks that mirror my experience and isn’t OSX?