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Comment by user00012-ab | Hacker News Reader

I need the state of the art hardware so I can .... open a terminal.

More like I need hardware that Just Works (a lot of Windows laptops that are of similar quality to MacBooks were nearly the same price, go figure) a native POSIX-like environment that works mostly with my Linux-centric tools and don’t like dealing with any more differences from my server than I have to but would rather not fight for hardware compatibility constantly.

But what definitely is bothersome with the MacBooks is that I can’t use CUDA worth a damn without an nVidia GPU so if I work with most machine learning toolkits I have to ship the code off to some expensive cloud just to see a quick run for prototyping or port all my code to support Apple APIs specifically instead of the open source ones primarily centered around nVidia tooling.

> a lot of Windows laptops that are of similar quality to MacBooks were nearly the same price, go figure

Those exist? I’m not being facetious. Are there really examples of non-Apple laptops that are as nice of hardware? (I primarily care about screen and trackpad.)

Trackpad no, but the IBM / Lenovo X1 Carbon series were pretty solid laptops for a while and also quite expensive for years. And more recently the Surface Book models have been really nice to work with if it weren’t for pesky power management issues. If the Surface Book 2 ran macOS and had the same suspend / resume experience as Macs all do I’d have been quite happy with Microsoft. Before the Surface line most OEMs have been primarily about driving costs down in the face of commoditization and races to the bottom rather than trying to compete head on with Apple from the hardware and consumer experience side and it appears that Microsoft is still going at the gargantuan task of making PC laptops sexy alone.

What does using a terminal as your UI have to do with the demands you are placing on your hardware?

Run Slack.

Run Chrome.

(ignoring the extra battery back that I really should have attached to my MacBook Pro compared to just running Safari)

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