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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

I am genuinely surprised that no good Windows laptop seems to exist. I've been using Apple for the last 4 years and I hoped that finally one of the Windows OEMs had managed to cobble together something that can get cloes to the Macbook Pro in build quality and interface. Apparently not?

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I don't think you've been looking hard enough. Thinkpads are amazing, you also have high end sony vaios, and the Microsoft surface pro 2 is also a really great portable device.

Thinkpads (T series) are great if you want to drop $2,000 on a laptop and wait a month for it to arive from China. Personally I just spent £700 ($1,150) on an Edge series... hasn't arrived yet so I can't determine if it was a foolish buy.

> Thinkpads are amazing

You mean were amazing, until they started removing the TrackPoint buttons and messing with the keyboard.

Serious question: Is there anything resembling the Macbook Pro on the PC front with regards to build quality, overall design, lack of clunkiness, weight, size, lack of annoying half-assed internationalized keyboards, trackpad and wake-from-sleep functionality?

I've owned a high-end Thinkpad, and it was a good laptop. But it didn't come close. That's what I'm asking here. I don't care if it costs > $2,000. Quality doesn't come cheap, but it's embarrassing if Apple is the only player that can do this.

Nope. But you can run Windows (or Linux, if you're a masochist) on a Macbook Pro.

Bootcamp can even install Windows to your macbook pro from an ISO. Works great.

Take a look at the Asus UX301LA and Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus with i7 (just came out in October, upgrade of the original model by the same name). They are both well-built and very attractive, all-metal/glass with no moving parts, thin-and-light, big ceramic-coated trackpads, and wake from sleep faster than you can fully open the lid with Win8.1. 3200x1800 or 2560x1440 touchscreens. I don't know about their internationalized keyboards, though.

ThinkPad Carbon X1

Samsung Series 9. Not cheap though.

No good laptop is cheap. Thinkpads were not cheap (they now have cheap lines, they're crap). Toughbooks are not cheap. Macbooks are not cheap. Design, components and assembly quality come at a price, that's all there's to it.

Indeed, but fat margins are welcome too. It's 2014 and doesn't the MacBook Air ship a TN display?

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