4 ms·

I am very much not interested in the MacBook, despite wanting to like it. The weird keyboard, smaller screen, Mobile/slower Processor, 2 hours less battery life

I am very much not interested in the MacBook, despite wanting to like it. The weird keyboard, smaller screen, Mobile/slower Processor, 2 hours less battery life, Just a single port; other than being lighter, zero value and they are charging an extra $300 for it. I moved from a 13" MacBook Air (Core i7, 8GB RAM) to a MacBook 12". I absolutely love it, it's much lighter, the keyboard is great once you get used to this, I prefer retina, and not having fans is great as well. Force touch is a nice gimmick, but I haven't used it much. The Core M CPU is not a problem for me in practice. Since buying the Air I have been doing more and more deep learning and anything without a CUDA GPU won't be practical anyway. So I work on a server with an nVidia Tesla card. For all may daily work and most development, the Core M holds up absolutely fine.

tedmiston 11y ago
> the keyboard is great once you get used to this I tried the keyboard but after a decade of using MacBook chiclet keys, the abbreviated keystroke was frustrating.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Tried for an hour, or for 2 weeks though? There's a difference.
  - dopamean 11y ago
    Wouldn't you have to buy one to try it out for two weeks?
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Can always rent one, try the one your spouse uses, borrow one from a friend, etc. Even buy and then sell, slightly used, for mostly the same amount of money 2 weeks later. Heck, can even buy it and then return it for a refund, no questions asked, in some countries.
douche 11y ago
How in the world do you do serious work on a 12" laptop? Even if I wasn't cursed with sausage-fingered, basketball-palming hands to type with, I'd go stark raving mad having that little screen real-estate.
- jsolson 11y ago
  At work I use exclusively an 11" MacBook Air. One terminal, ssh'd into one tmux session. Typically running emacs in two column mode among many other tmux tabs. I don't get distracted much :)
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  I switched to a 12" X series ThinkPad 5 years ago, coming from 15"+ laptops. It's actually great. Instead of trying to fit so much, I just focus on the task at hand. No doubt, in-editor docs/autocomplete help a lot. Plus I stopped doing web work which has been a huge boon overall. Note I started with a 1280x800 but now all screens are 1080p or other 16:9. That ratio is the real killer. It also provided incentive to get a proper tiling window manager.
  - douche 11y ago
    I think I'm ruined... I got used to a quad-27" monitor desktop with a full-sized mechanical keyboard and a nice wireless mouse. Going back to a single screen, weird laptop keyboard, and touchpad is excruciating
    - ghshephard 11y ago
      I live in tmux on my 13" MBAir. For a while, at work, I had a 30" monitor, but I realized that after a few months, I never bothered to plug in my laptop, and, those rare times that I did, I rarely looked at it. About the only exception was when working with Visio. The large monitor is pretty handy then.
      - Symbiote 11y ago
        Do you (and the parent commenters) not find it uncomfortable and unhealthy to work crampt over a laptop all the time? It's certainly not compliant with European health and safety regulations. Here, we have to provide an external keyboard, monitor and mouse for anyone that uses a laptop for more than an hour. (British regulations, since they're obviously in English, laptops on page 50 http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/books/l26.htm http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/books/l26.htm )

tedmiston 11y ago

> the keyboard is great once you get used to this I tried the keyboard but after a decade of using MacBook chiclet keys, the abbreviated keystroke was frustrating.

coldtea 11y ago
Tried for an hour, or for 2 weeks though? There's a difference.
- dopamean 11y ago
  Wouldn't you have to buy one to try it out for two weeks?
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Can always rent one, try the one your spouse uses, borrow one from a friend, etc. Even buy and then sell, slightly used, for mostly the same amount of money 2 weeks later. Heck, can even buy it and then return it for a refund, no questions asked, in some countries.

douche 11y ago

How in the world do you do serious work on a 12" laptop? Even if I wasn't cursed with sausage-fingered, basketball-palming hands to type with, I'd go stark raving mad having that little screen real-estate.

jsolson 11y ago
At work I use exclusively an 11" MacBook Air. One terminal, ssh'd into one tmux session. Typically running emacs in two column mode among many other tmux tabs. I don't get distracted much :)
MichaelGG 11y ago
I switched to a 12" X series ThinkPad 5 years ago, coming from 15"+ laptops. It's actually great. Instead of trying to fit so much, I just focus on the task at hand. No doubt, in-editor docs/autocomplete help a lot. Plus I stopped doing web work which has been a huge boon overall. Note I started with a 1280x800 but now all screens are 1080p or other 16:9. That ratio is the real killer. It also provided incentive to get a proper tiling window manager.
- douche 11y ago
  I think I'm ruined... I got used to a quad-27" monitor desktop with a full-sized mechanical keyboard and a nice wireless mouse. Going back to a single screen, weird laptop keyboard, and touchpad is excruciating
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    I live in tmux on my 13" MBAir. For a while, at work, I had a 30" monitor, but I realized that after a few months, I never bothered to plug in my laptop, and, those rare times that I did, I rarely looked at it. About the only exception was when working with Visio. The large monitor is pretty handy then.
    - Symbiote 11y ago
      Do you (and the parent commenters) not find it uncomfortable and unhealthy to work crampt over a laptop all the time? It's certainly not compliant with European health and safety regulations. Here, we have to provide an external keyboard, monitor and mouse for anyone that uses a laptop for more than an hour. (British regulations, since they're obviously in English, laptops on page 50 http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/books/l26.htm http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/books/l26.htm )