Hacker News Reader

Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

I really hate the keyboard on most laptops. XPS's I don't like and new macbooks seem the worst. Anyone recommend any? Thinkpads seem good, and many HPs.

View on HN

I thought Apple's laptop keyboards were great prior to the butterfly era. They never felt quite as good as their old desktop keyboards—which were and are my favorite—but more than adequate for a laptop.

I had to briefly use a Macbook two designs old a while back—the thicker aluminum kind, that could still accommodate a disc drive—and wow, I'd forgotten how much better that keyboard was than the one after, even, let alone the loud-as-hell, uncomfortable butterfly ones. It felt great—probably about as good as a laptop keyboard could be. I want that kind back. The tiny bit of extra travel and slightly softer action made a huge difference.

I've enjoyed the keyboard on my System76 laptop. Granted that's a special case since they're not for everyone (Linux-focused).

I've found most laptop keyboards at least adequate, the MacBook that I'm forced to use for work is the first one that is objectively terrible. I've been told the ones <= 2015 were better in the keyboard department.

Thanks, they weren't on my radar. Some nice laptops, damn this one's a beast https://system76.com/laptops/serval

I got a Pixelbook last week and have been using it as my everyday laptop for the last few days. Hands-down best keyboard I've used in a long time, probably better than the older Macbook ones.

Yeah I don't know where that Pixelbook keyboard came from (does Google have people engineering keyboards?) but it's crazy good. Thin, too - so no excuse for Apple's new keyboards.

Clearly, whoever designed the Pixelbook keyboard talked to real users. I wish I could dual boot to Ubuntu on this machine.

Dell Alienware - "baller" would be my technical judgement.

Long key travel, large layout. Makes programming comfortable again.

Gaming laptops in general seem to be nearly "no compromise" products. Battery life is as good as it can be - they max-out the watt-hours permitted by airlines. Keyboards can be massive. Screens, sound systems. Recently the weight has been reduced through clever hardware engineering:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-alienware-a...

You know there's something wrong with the "pro" laptop market (and with Apple) when engineers start moving to "gaming laptops" to get serious work done.

It's a marketing term. Many "gaming" laptops are quite well-built and it would be silly to ignore them, even for "real work". (Unless you need the sort of reliability that can only be had by moving to Xeon/EPYC cpus, ECC memory and Quadro/FirePro graphics, of course.)

Oh, I agree totally. That's why I put "gaming laptop" in quotes. I could care less what they're called; as long as it's better as a development laptop than a MacBook Pro I'm interested ;-)

At nearly 9 pounds maybe we should put "laptop" in quotes. :)

Have worked on Mac's, XPS's and HP's in the past but once I got on Thinkpad, never looked back. My current system(for past 5 years now) is a trusty X1 Carbon that has seen some rough times but has never failed me. Thinking of upgrading later this year to a newer version of the same line.

Go for it - I went with an X1C6 as a replacement for my old macbook pro, and I couldn't be happier. Excellent keyboard and no issues running linux. The only setting I've changed from my default ubuntu was to install and use the kde plasma desktop to avoid scaling issues, and it's perfect. You'll love the form factor as well.

How's the touchpad? What's kept me on Apple is the ability to actually use the MacBook Pro as a portable computer, not just a crappy desktop you can drag between the power and mouse+keyboard stations that you need to get work done without swearing at it constantly or frowning while you watch the battery life indicator plummet.

The keyboard and port situations are both pushing the MacBook far enough out of that "close the lid and go, no worries" sweet spot it used to fall so solidly into that I'm eyeing other options, but I have some very bad memories of both battery life and trackpads on non-Apple machines, and my (limited!) interactions with such more recently haven't made me optimistic.

I admit that the touchpad isn't as smooth and gesture driven as the mac but I'm not the user those are really meant for. I spend most of my time on the keyboard writing code and living in the "cloud" which makes using mouse a drag anyway. So all I'm looking for is a powerful machine that doesn't hog resources on useless stuff, with sturdy keyboard(physical keys please, none of that touch bar BS), can support dual/multi boot and works with all the peripherals I need. Thinkpads work better than most without the significant price overhead. One of my dystopian future scenarios has no Thinkpad's in it :D

Just to offer another perspective on the battery front, that only really matters for casual browsing. Anytime real work is done on a machine, you'll be plugging in within a few hours on everything anyway.

If you're doing CPU/IO intensive development work, they all fall down so quickly that I don't think it matters on the differences. It's really a browsing/videos metric, which is relatively unimportant to me when buying a workstation class laptop. I don't think I'd buy any laptop based on battery life as a primary factor, and the overall usability situation for most stuff on the market isn't as grave as it used to be (which your post accurately recalls).

I've owned the XPS15 with 6-core 8th gen Intel (maxing out the scales at 97Wh battery) and have a Thinkpad X1 Extreme. I've had MBPs in the past too.

For the touchpad on Thinkpads, I think they're pretty good if you're on Windows, most are anymore with MS Windows Precision drivers as the Thinkpads use. For me, a major driver for me towards these is the Trackpoint.

Depending on your usecase, my favorite machines on the market today are the X1 Extreme (development), X1 Yoga (consulting/development), Samsung Notebook 9 Pen 13" (home), and Macbook Air (home).

> How's the touchpad

Some opinions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485178 "Linux touchpad like a Macbook: progress and a call for help"

(I recall opinion was X1 was about as good as you get on a PC)

I've been using an X1 Yoga (1st gen) for almost 3 years and it's been great as well. I would probably go Carbon next time as I don't use the yoga function that often. But I don't think I could switch to anything else after using this laptop keyboard (and if it breaks I can just replace it myself).

Thinkpads are great (T series) - Especially like the carbon X1s as they work great with Linux. It has been my primary driver for a while now with zero issues.

I switched to a ThinkPad after many years of using MacBooks, and it has just a lovely keyboard to use. The tactile response is very similar to Cherry MX Brown switches (quiet, but still has that "click" feel).

Try a surface book, surface laptop is pretty good too.

(I dislike the keyboard covers for pro - too much flex and too little travel).

The keyboard on the Surface Book is very good, and is still good even after constant use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com