So why not simply get a MacBook Air, which is a completely capable, awesome coding device?
Sadly, nope. And I'm not even on a MBP M2, just a maxed out MBA M1, The best laptop I ever had. Processing power is more than enough for what I develop, and after more than two years I can still easily work my day with a single charge. Meanwhile, coworkers suffer with Dell laptops running different Linux distros: power management problems, battery life is tiny, fans blowing like they're hoovers. Oh... and they all have more expensive laptops than me.
But Apple bad. Not professional. Or so they say.
But if 10 hours is enough I think ASUS Zenbooks and the ProArt line are pretty good Linux machines. They have faster GPUs and betters screens (OLED) too.
I just like using / writing code on macOS more than windows, not much else to it.
Not to mention the fact that a Mac laptop won’t fry your nuts when you put it on your lap.
I'm sure there are great laptops out there, but at least in my company the other Dell or Lenovo (including Thinkpad) machines just don't stack up to that.
Overall I'm happy with my Windows laptop considering that the competition for a Windows laptop is not better, but MacBooks are really a lot better with battery life, screen quality and fan noise.
If you pay for the Nvidia card you could even outperform the M2 Ultra for kicks and giggles.
The T15 isn’t available so I’ll look at the T16. The cheapest T16 is $1,570. The comparable MacBook Air is $1,500. The T16 has a 300 nits low resolution screen, slow DDR4 RAM (didn’t know they made RAM this slow these days), and is made of cheap plastic. And again, no worldwide network of stores to support your device.
So you’ve really failed to come anywhere close to the specs, build quality or support system of a MacBook. And this is without considering the huge advantages you get with Apple silicon over intel.
No one is “forgetting” about the i9. It sucked like every other x86 laptop sucks.
But this is 2023 not 2020.
I'm aware it's uncomparable to the ARM-based ones, but people were saying the same BS back when it was only Intel.
> x86, a 2019 model (and I had this behavior from the start).
> Lol. My MacBook Pro loses battery even when plugged and is constantly at 100% fan speed no matter what it is doing (or not doing).
If I was a heavy gamer, perhaps I would consider Windows.
There’s one thing I miss from Linux though: Native support for cgroups. I can live without it, but it sure would be convenient.
Real ruggedized laptops, e.g. those sold by Panasonic or Dell, look very different. It's like the glass-versus-plastic question in phone screens. Glass looks nice, and withstands day-to-day abrasion better. But the stress necessary to shatter glass is way less than that of plastic.
Glass and aluminum are ruggedized materials?
But "undisputed leader"? No there are plenty of more rugged devices used in construction, the military etc.
They're machines that hold up well in backpacks, but hearing "rugged" used to describe them is funny when a cup of coffee could decommission the whole thing in seconds.
All kidding aside, the (lack of) ports and the non-upgradability can be meaningfully criticized, but then again a lot of competitors are copying those anti-features. But to say there is nothing special about these machines... well, maybe not to you. Some people hate noisy laptop fans, and this total silence is a game changer.
endless battery, fanless design, excellent performance for the kinds of tasks a developer does.
only downside is the m2 is probably faster in cpu/compilation times for certain things because of how fast it is
In any case, the claim that any ARM laptop before the M1 had excellent performance is new to me and I'd be interested in knowing what non-Apple ARM laptops exist that are competitive with M1/M2 Macbooks in battery life, heat generation, performance and utility for developers. I'm in the market for a new laptop.
its $500 and includes the kickstand and keyboard
I did mention in my previous comment that the m1/m2 are still faster than other arm64 devices but for the web development tasks that I'm doing a chromebook is better suited anyways due to the less locked down environment and the ability to run full linux apps.
macos is okay for development but I'm not targeting iOS so its benefits are wasted on me. (I still got an m2 Pro mac mini with 32gb of ram to play with machine learning but its turned out to be too slow to compete with even a rtx3060)
a joy to use! I hope to see something similar from apple in the future, I've heard whispers of oled ipads?
I'm not saying that OP fell for that marketing and is gullible, but Apple marketed the iPad Pro as a replacement for a computer, so it may not be completely unreasonable to expect a reasonably similar experience on an iPad after 6 years and the n number of iPad generations that went by.
Extrapolating that to Linux server gearheads… sorry, your use case isn’t the same as that 13 year old in the ad.
I am still mad my iPhone didn’t make me a rock god.
Nah, they were using an extremely narrow definition of computer, one where you can buy and consume stuff and do "cool" social media with the device. If that's not your use case you want a different kind of computer.
"Get things done — all on one device. Take notes, collaborate, and work seamlessly between apps. From pie charts to pie recipes, iPad is designed for all kinds of productivity."
and from the iPad Pro site:
"Enhanced ways to work. iPadOS 16 gives you powerful new ways to do more than ever. New desktop-class apps make your workday more productive. Resize and overlap apps to multitask like a pro with Stage Manager. And hook up an external display, with resolutions up to 6K, for even more room for all your apps"
They are clearly marketing these things as do everything productivity devices even though in practice it's pretty bogus especially if you need any sort of programming functionality. Heck they even show an image of Swift Playgrounds being used!
†Apart from, I guess, any really bad social media things that only exist as apps. I think there's one or two.
There’s now iPad and iPad Pro. If you want media consumption then just use iPad.
That’s not what people in the thread suggest though. They’re talking about MacBook Air. Which is also a nice point, good luck bringing your beefy desktop Mac anywhere with you.
(To address the downvote: I consider a phone to be a different class of product, in the context of this discussion. Nobody is seriously talking about coding on their phone.)
I don't quite know why Apple doesn't see the iPad as a developer machine. Being able to program the machine that you're working on is a, if not the, meaning of a general purpose computer and we all want it to work So Bad. But, this blog really echos what any of us who have really tried to untether ourselves from the traditional keyboard/monitor or mainframe programming have discovered: The iPad (and the iPhone) are appliances and not actual computers.
Coding intricate data structures is like teaching the computer chess. It helps if you understand chess. I can't imagine understanding what I want my code to do, without an involved process of drawing everything repeatedly in many variations.
Someday there will be an iPad drawing editor like Emacs, arbitrarily scriptable using further drawings, never putting down the Apple Pencil. We're still at the earliest stages of "word processing" technical art; this evolution is still to come.
I settled for an iPad Mini and a 12” MacBook and I’m reallY happy with that combo. I just wish they made a faster M2 version.
A Macbook Air doesn't fit in that category and is sub-par to read A4 formated docs. Arguably a Surface Pro (or Z13 Flow) would be a better choice if programming is also something you want to do.
This sounds like a person caught in the hype