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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of laptops, what brand has the best quality besides Apple? Or does the price for "quality" equal a MacBook?

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I'll be the guy to recommend/shill Lenovo's Thinkpad range, I've been using my T480s for three years now, struggle with a reason to change to anything else.

The trackpad isn't as good, goes without saying as Apple have a faustian deal on their trackpad tech, but apparently some folks have replaced the T480's trackpad with the glass one from the the X1 [1] with great results - something I'm thinking of once my T480s goes out of warranty.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/fo6hrc/i_replaced...

I am a person who did that swap on my T480s with the glass trackpad. It is glorious. Easy to do and cannot recommend enough. Also very much satisfied with the T480s and I am a notorious laptop hopper. Although the System76's with Coreboot are starting to creep into my mind, but I know the quality will not be near that of the Lenovo.

IMO, post like 2016, Apple had no such monopoly on ‘premium’ laptops in any capacity. There were better trackpads and keyboards in some, better screens in others, more compute in some, more ability to expand and repair in some, options for touchscreens, etc. …and most laptops were cheaper with flagships from any brand checking a majority of those boxes. Some laptops are even more expensive going well beyond MacBook capabilities if you needed the most color-accurate screens or the most CPU cores or the biggest GPU.

Pick any major brand and they probably have something great.

The only things you really don't get in alternatives is a) the Mac OS and software software & b) better resale value because Apple sells lifestyle products.

Agree. They are working hard to kill all the good stuff in macOS and if they have a way to close it, as iOS and replace it with iPadOS with some xcode implementation, it is over. Better to invest in multi-platform software and run VMs. Luckily for me I have seen the writings on the wall and switched this year. On a harware level, instead of giving Apple ton of money I now run in the office custom pcs with water-cooling and laptops are Thinkpad X1 Carbons.

I guess I've always looked at weight & battery life first, trackpad / keyboard & general build quality second, and then actual specs/performance third. As far as I can tell, Macbooks have always been the best choice for that. Especially once retina displays came out. And even now with the crazy performance of M1 Macbooks, that's gonna be hard to beat.

weight, battery life, retina display (or 4.5K/5K display), great trackpad, snappy

You may have already bit too hard into the ecosystem when you use Apple marketing terms like "retina display" instead of hiDPI.

There are more than one better laptop across all of those metrics as a whole.

One thing Apple does do significantly differently is moving along tech (for better or worse) because the other OEMs can be timid in their experimentation until a generation after a big switch in Apple hardware.

I bought an ASUS Zenbook last year and I can thank Apple for setting trends for hiDPI, DCI-P3 displays, Thunderbolt, and big trackpads. But on the flipside, I can lament Apple for bad trends and it not having a 1/8" headphone jack and soldered RAM. And because it wasn't Apple I have a touchscreen+stylus and saved a lot of money.

The newest trend of using ARM (and RISC) processors in laptops (could care less about what Apple brands it as) is a good one though. There have been attempts at good ARM chips, like Samsung's flagship ultrabook, but too many applications didn't run on it to make it feasible. I had an old Chromebook I slapped Linux on and it was a mess because certain applications, namely anything leveraging Electron or just having a .deb file, wouldn't run. For better or worse, people have to cater to Apple making such switches. Now you have started to see projects actually release binaries outside of x86.

The Framework laptops are intriguing but only offer 13" version currently. [0]

[0] http://frame.work

Huge fan of my LG Gram 17"; Good batt life, big screen with the weight of a MacBook Pro 13

Only downside is the built-in spekers do not work in Linux, so I have to use headphones on zoom

System76 is the best Linux-only vendor: https://system76.com

The only problem recently is they keep running out of stock on the cheaper spec'd versions of laptops so everything was $1200+ when I last checked.

Indeed! They are selling like hotcakes. You can sign up for notifications for when a model comes back into stock. But this doesn't extend to individual specs (i.e. if the i5 spec is sold out on the Pangolin model) https://system76.com/laptops/pang11/configure

Aren't they rebranded Clevo?

Dell XPS seems to occupy the best sweet spot for HN types at the moment.

I'm using an HP Elite x2 G4 (now G8) Tablet running Ubuntu and have been pretty happy with it - my goals were more about ergonomics (using on a stand detached with nuphy keyboard + apple trackpad.) Basically like having a Microsoft Surface but with a larger 13" screen and better repairability (ssd is removable, spare wwan slot if you go without LTE)

Biggest weird thing I had to do was tune the speakers with PulseEffects. Think only the fingerprint reader isn't supported.

The XPS 13 is my macbook replacement and so far happy with it. Got everything working under ElementaryOS with minimal fuss.

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