My kids are very happy with their Razer laptops, which they say are an upgrade from the Apple laptops they have used.
But I raised 'em to be OS-agnostic, if operating system matters a lot to you that can be more important than hardware.
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More like “if you’re not going to have any ports anyways, why not go all the way?”
Besides, I get the feeling there are more devices that use the Lightning connector than use the USB-C port, and that they are more reliable.
Apple seems to have, for whatever reason, been using the freedom afforded to them by their control of their slice of the market to go in problematic directions of late.
Historically, any given PC was in serious danger of being brutally corner-cut rubbish because it was in a knife fight over tiny margins with every other interchangeable Wintel out there; so the price was good but getting genuinely nice features could be surprisingly difficult even if you were willing to pay; because there often just wasn’t anyone catering to that niche market.
In this context; Apple’s “our lowest price is set by how much a computer worth using costs” approach did lead to a bit of sticker shock; but (mostly) ensured that you wouldn’t run into all the ugly gotchas of the cheapest laptop at Best Buy; and that if 16:10 panels were better than 16:9 the fact that the latter were cheaper would not drive the former from the market, because Apple just had to decide that something wasn’t worth touching to guarantee that no mac would stoop so low.
At present, they retain the “well, if you want a mac, yes you will have to buy what we are selling” leverage; but seem heavily distracted by being a phone salesman and, when they can be bothered with PCs, seem to have veered into the territory of questionably sensible(if usually impressive on whatever metric they decided to mono-maniacally optimize) tech demos; along with some products that haven’t yet been seriously maimed because they haven’t been refreshed in ages.
I’m not sure if this is actually value-rational behavior; and they’ve determined that doing what customers ask for simply isn’t as profitable as doing what they do; or whether it’s at least myopic, quite possibly actively destructive; but shielded by the fact that mac users have to really be pushed to flee to Redmond; and the phone division brings in essentially unlimited money so success in personal computing is somewhere between ‘hobby’ and ‘distraction’ rather than existential priority.
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Except Lightning is an Apple-exclusive tech. USB-C is an open standard, as far as I understand. That’s like saying you expect 30-pin to be more common than Micro-USB.
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Knew it. Shiny gewgaws. Pre-teen spacey dreams. Rubbish addition.
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My 2009 MBP 17 incher going strong, although the left-hand speaker seems to have blown.
Now on Dell XPS15. Nice machine.
The Apple still has the nicest screen I’ve used, bar my standing LG monitor, which is fab. I suspect full on iMac displays might be better, but they can pay me to find out.
And not even an original idea, various hardware makers have dabbled with similar additions to keyboards and laptops for years now and all of them figured out it was a pointless addition customers did not really want or use much.
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What’s a computer?
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One of my students recently used a iPad Pro (12.9") exclusively for a MEAN stack development course. He’d take notes with the pencil, marking up PDFs or in a notes app, and did his coding via VNC into Linux machine at his house. He got quite proficient in bouncing back and forth between the remote, a local browser, and his notes, and would do split-screen work with the remote code on one side and the browser on the other. At the end of the semester his verdict was that it was quite doable but not as easy as using a laptop.
I have the MBP 13" with the touchbar, and am one of the minority who really like the new keyboard. I do a lot of writing, and the reduced travel and tactile feedback just feel right to me. I do use the touchbar or scrubbing through video, and sometimes in Keynote for working on elements, but not for much else. I’ll likely upgrade next year and won’t buy another machine with the touchbar.
Coupling the iPad Pro with a keyboard that you like gives you essentially a 13" laptop with a touch screen, and with handoff you can do any heavy lifting you need on a desktop and drop the result onto the iPad.
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2012 MBP batteries come with the top plate, which includes the keyboard and trackpad. I got a new one after my battery failed completely for $270 installed at CityMac in Kirkland, WA. New keyboard, new trackpad, new battery. Make sure they swap the old headphone jack audio board out from the old top plate and put it on the new top plate… junior tech failed to do that and now I have to go back to get a new audio board put in (for free).
I am a jewelry designer and metalsmith by trade and the iPad Pro has replaced 90% of my sketching and designing processes.
Just out of curiosity, what do you find is the best app for that sort of technical sketching? I’ve used Concepts and Procreate, but they both feel slightly off.
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Still using a late 2011 17"… it’s definitely heavier than today’s models, but the extra real estate is easier on aging eyes. Upgrading with lots of memory and SSD makes it super useable by today’s standards. 
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Apple needed a full week to see my not powering on at all 4 month old 2016 15" Macbook Pro. Phone support suggested an Apple certified repair place, which I took a lyft over to, which then proceeded to take a full 15 days to do a warranty repair where they replaced my mainboard. I ended up buying another one from B&H while waiting. The backup of the laptop on the Apple time capsule I bought a little before then also failed. I thought it was just that particular system backup, but now the time capsule is just flashing with an orange light. I’ve been meaning to troubleshoot it, but I think it is completely broken now too… I realize I need to just take the damn thing into the apple store or a lawyer, thoughts anyone? Apple’s terrible quality and service is basically fucking up my ability to do work.
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And Windows 10 spies on you like a mofo like you’re in China or something.
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Just FTR, no time right now, but I will try to comment the hell out of this thread tomorrow afternoon. Got a MbP for a current project, and I’m in a it’s-complicated relationship.
Especially this touch bar. I don’t. Then I do. Then I don’t again, but with verve.
Also, anyone else seeing QGIS 3 causing the whole bloody system to fatally crash, or is this just me? Hey, I thought Mac’s were hard to crash?
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I use Procreate for initial design sketching occasionally because it’s just so natural feeling, but I live almost entirely in Concepts. It’s the interface I like: pre-configured tools, great color picker, good layering, very good precision mode, and an infinite canvas make Concepts the best app for me. I make templates on my desktop using Affinity Designer, but as an artistic OOAK designer, I’m not really making technical drawings of my designs.
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like give an iPad Pro a try as my main computer. Am I crazy?
Yes.
I always have a problem where they spent their money. Apple has always had their design blind spots and would love to sell you a solid block of comutanium that was impossible to look inside. A kind of make it look good but fill it with dental cement sort of attitude.
Thermals and actual performance were kinda of secondary to their design. I worked for several years at a mac based software company in the early 00’s and I remember watching the support people spend a lot of money for powerbooks only to have to rube-goldberg cooling setups to prevent them from crashing. Spending that time around the mac culture really turned me off to the products. That and I game so Macs have been really kinda bad in that area even with bootcamp.
I hear it’s getting … better-ish:
Dell’s XPS machines have been nice for a long time – I had an old Vista one back around 2008 that I wiped and installed Ubuntu on, until it got dropkicked and died. I’d be interested to get my hands on a newer model!
I’ve owned (and own) lots of non-Apple laptops, and the one thing Apple does amazingly well, hardware-wise, is the trackpad. I’ve never found one in any non-Apple laptop that was as responsive … it’s the other thing, along with Logic, that I’d have trouble giving up.
I had an XPS laptop back in the late 00’s and it worked like a charm but had severe cooling issues. Thankfully i decided on day 1 to splurge and get the best most robust laptop cooling pad i could find and it kept my laptop working perfectly for years.
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