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Comment by raxxorraxor | Hacker News Reader

I use a Mac Book from time to time and the keyboard alone is special... I don't think Mac is a good universal machine for development to be honest. The devices overall are nice, out of the question, but a Linux machine is ultimately more powerful.

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"Ultimately more powerful"

As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion.

Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations.

My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running.

Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.

Well, you might be able to make it work, but the OS simply leaves you less freedom compared to a Linux machine.

And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way.

I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here.

Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.

Unique devices is definitely a concern! I wasn't sure when I got my Garmin watch if I'd be able to update it from my mac. Thankfully I can.

I had to connect a work Macbook to Ethernet. It didn't have a port so I bought a no-name brand USB-to-RJ45 adapter off Amazon. Come to find macOS doesn't have driver support for the adapter even though Windows and Linux are both plug and play. And I wasn't willing to do some backdoor process to install drivers on a work laptop. I had to buy a Apple branded adapter, which was 2x the price and only USB 2 vs the other one being USB 3.

I have a random off-amazon 2.5gbps usb ethernet adapter on my M1 and it works great. I did specifically make sure someone said it worked on a mac, but wasn't sure about on ARM.

I too have an M1 MBP and XPS 13. I pretty much always use the XPS. Side by side, there is no noticeable difference in speed for my everyday work. The MBP is more efficient for sure, but I get 8+ hours of battery from the XPS which is good enough - and I can run Linux without jumping through hoops.

Edit: Missed the 'z', sorry, possibly explains different experiences.

I had to jump through a few hoops to get Linux working right on my XPS 15, and it was actually a major reason I switched to a MacBook. The backlight didn't work with the original kernel released with Debian Bullseye. That got fixed with the next release of Bullseye, but I still only got something like, 4 hours of battery life? I'm almost certain it wasn't properly switching between integrated graphics and the Nvidia GPU, but there are only so many hours in the day to set this stuff up.

I really liked my XPS when I got it, but I'm pretty jaded about Linux support for laptops ever being good enough to compete with something like Apple. And at the end of the day I care a lot more about having a high quality Unix based OS than whether or not that OS is libre (sorry to say).

8 hours is amazingly good for an XPS13 in my experience.

My XP13 9370 running Fedora lasts maybe 2 hours at a push. I'm actually considering moving back to a 14" MacBook Pro because of the battery life.

Rumours of an imminent M2 upgrade are about the only thing stopping me now.

Same boat as you, waiting for the second generation, I don't event want to jump to the apple ecosystem but the battery life + performance at that price range makes it a almost a non-brainer for me

I got the 14" Max when they first came out and it's an absolutely fantastic laptop. I love it. The Max battery life is quite a bit worse than the regular M1, if thats your main concern go with the non-Max.

Mine is the ultrabook, the XPS 13z 2n1. It throttles nonstop, I've even gone so far to rip it open and attempted to re-paste everything inside of it. Unfortunately the ultrabook CPU can't be de-lidded and pasted without breaking things, I was actually the first person on /r/dell to rip this laptop open..

The XPS 13 is a much larger device (better cooling). The 13z ruined me ever buying another Dell. I really wanted to love that laptop and NOT buy a $3k macbook. I really want the 2n1 feature.

My wife has one of those things for work. She had to downclock the CPU in order to prevent it from running the fans at full speed for her workflows. After that, it was OK, slow, but at least no longer too loud to have a conversation next to it.

Different strokes for different folks. My Macbook collects dust whenever I'm home because I'd vastly prefer to do my work on a desktop Linux box. I don't have to spend my time updating coreutils, fighting Homebrew, fixing my screen sharing permissions for the 6th time this month, or really much of anything. My desktop and the systems we deploy to have almost complete parity.

> fighting Homebrew

I switched to MacPorts when Homebrew moved on from macOS Mojave... now I wish I had done so much sooner!

MacPorts is pretty unstable (in my experience). Felt like 2011-era Arch Linux all over again...

Honestly, Nix is the only package manager I really like on Mac.

Appreciate the anecdata! Have they straightened out the issue(s) with a read-only root directory, and installation / uninstall?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917354#30918593

> seems to be an issue of macOS and the root dir being read-only

> Took me a month to finally remove Nix from my macOS

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6206#issuecomment-105938...

I believe that's fixed upstream. Afaik, those issues stem from some strange FileVault/APFS inconsistencies, and have patches coming to fix it (in it's current incarnation). I don't dev on Macs unless I have to though, so I really couldn't say for sure.

How does M1 play with an external 4K monitor?

I have a 2020 Mac with the highest fucking configuration (32GB RAM and i7 8-core 10th gen) and the fans on it are always going off.

I figure a laptop with a discrete GPU can handle external screens and graphics much better than integrated, but was wondering what your take on the M1 mac for this would be.

I use a 49" Samsung monitor that does 4k and like you mentioned my Intel work macbook pro is constantly spinning fans/hot. The M1 I honestly haven't noticed it making any noise while plugged into it. It also runs a lot better, less graphic glitches and weirdness. I don't like having to use my work mbp at all anymore.

To the commenter above this, is the M1 able to handle a 4k resolution on well its own ground?

I had an M1 MBA and it ran my 4k monitor fine. I would use it and the laptop screen at the same time. Great machine. I ended up giving it to my wife and getting an M1 MBP because I needed more than 16gb RAM for my workflows.

I think you misunderstood "more powerful". I don't think they were referring to the hardware being more powerful, but the OS in terms of its flexibility.

If I pay for shipping, would you part with the XPS?

I'll sell it for cheap, ie 1kish but it's going to my mom next week otherwise

I'll pay you 5$ and shipping for that XPS.

It's being sent to my mom this week, if you make that $1k I'll do it. It's barely 2 years old and has been awful since I got it. I think I just had higher expectations out of its form factor which can't keep itself cool at all.

I'm always in support of donating laptops to relatives in need. Good on you.

Apple keyboards are miserable. I don't know why people keep saying that it's so wonderful.

I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.

As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive.

And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.

Agreed. I can't stand the feel of the MBP (16" 2019) keyboard. For one thing, it's too far to the right. But I also agree with you on the weird flat keys and soft F keys. At least mine has a real esc key. And this is purely habit & preference, but the control/option/command nonsense is infuriating. Everybody else does this the right way, get with the program Apple.

>Apple keyboards are miserable

> I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.

You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.

The keys on the new ones still have pretty short travel though. Much shorter than the pre-butterfly generation, which wasn’t very deep in the first place.

I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.

I hate the butterfly keyboard too, but most importantly the worthless touchbar is gone and the physical escape key is back.

Am I the only one who thinks the touchbar isn't that bad? I have a MBP that has the touchbar and a real escape key. I'm a little sad they ditched the touchbar, I wish they had kept it but put it above the row of function keys. There are some things for which it's handy.

I can't stand the touchbar. Aside from having to look down to know what I'm pressing and Monterey introducing bugs causing it to disappear forcing me to restart my computer, when it does work an entire row of keys shouldn't be able to "go to sleep". My media controls disappearing because I haven't touched my computer in 60 seconds or however long it takes is ridiculous. There's no way to disable it without hacking together a script[1]. It's one of the most frustrating designs of any product I've ever used.

1. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/269174/disable-the...

edit - I just timed the sleep functionality. After 60 seconds it dims, and then 15 seconds later it goes to sleep completely....such a horrible implementation

Having the touchbar and the function keys would have been nice (e.g. if they had kept the function keys half-height, possibly with the exception of the escape and touchid keys).

However since apple decided that only "either" was an option, I'm much happier with having the function keys back.

The new macs are (for me) a return to the pre-2015 era but on steroids. My M1 Macbook Air is a blazing fast dev machine for what I do (dockerized full-stack web dev). I do sympathize with all the mac hate during the dreaded 2016-2020 era. I'm glad I held out and skipped that era entirely.

I had a pre-2015 macbook for a while and I can honestly say that I've never had a worse keyboard. It hurt my fingers and it felt like Apple was trying to destroy my hands. A cheap $10 keyboard felt better.

They fixed the esc key on the 2019 models.

I like the key travel of my (personal) 2015 MBP compared to the 2019 MBP I have for work. I put a keyboard cover on the 2019 and it feels less bad.

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