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Much the flak that's been posted about the new MacBook Pros implies there are better offerings from PC manufacturers, and certainly there are plenty if your pri

by comex 10y ago

Much the flak that's been posted about the new MacBook Pros implies there are better offerings from PC manufacturers, and certainly there are plenty if your priorities are very different from Apple's (e.g. you care more about upgradeability than sleekness). My personal priorities are pretty similar to Apple's, but not quite the same: I'm skeptical about anything that reduces key travel. So I browsed around to try to find something that could compete with the new 15" MacBook Pro for my next purchase. To my surprise, I couldn't find a single model from the major vendors that had all of the following: - 15" or close - In the general "thin and light" category (ideally at least as thin as my 2012 rMBP at 1.8 cm; latest is 1.55cm) - Higher than 1080p screen resolution (old and new MBP are both 2880x1800) - At least 7 hours of battery life (advertised battery life of my 2012 rMBP; latest advertises 10 hours) It seemed to generally come down to 1080p and good battery life, or high resolution (usually higher than the MBP) and crappy battery life. I think the Surface Book was most tempting, but it has a significantly smaller screen. If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them. But for now my plan is to suck up the reduced key travel and buy a new MacBook Pro...

voltagex_ 10y ago
At least go try out the latest Dell XPS and HP Spectre, possibly at a Microsoft Store if you can. To be fair, I probably should have got a Macbook as my last laptop upgrade. The laptop before that was the Lenovo X1 Carbon - slow, memory constrained and expensive to repair. I've got a Dell XPS 9350 at the moment, and it was more expensive than the top end Macbook at the time (!). It's quite good, but I can't recommend it against the last gen MacBook - there's still a coil whine issue that Dell refuse to really fix (or can't), there's issues with Broadcom wifi cards, and then there's this fun issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_randomly_wakes_up_when_lid_closed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_ra... It gets ~6 hours of battery life in power saving mode, but closer to 4 if I'm doing dev work. It could be so good, but it's just not there yet. For $3000AUD I expect utter perfection.
- rjzzleep 10y ago
  Am i the only one that cares about 16GB ram? HP Spectre doesn't have 16gb ram. The xps only has it in offering with their QHD touch screen which has less battery than the FHD screen, which I guess is fine because apparently the FHD screen is crap. Macbooks have significantly better thermal zone than the dell alternatives(e.g. the 7370 is significantly slower than the macbook 12" even though it has the same specs + 16gb) and don't get me started on the touchpad. There's so many threads on reddit about who seemingly fixed the touchpad issue. Bash on windows by the way is nice, but it's no way near production usable.They use a custom file system that resides in your AppData. Until recent insider builds you could neither use inotify(which means most node apps would have some sort of issue) nor would it keep your Ubuntu when during an update. Now the system is somewhat usable, but I've spent so much time whitelisting different folders so that random windows tools don't eat up CPU and I/O that make this 2016 device feel like something from 2011 that I wonder what the hell microsoft is thinking. The recent windows insider build also fixed an issue with windows defender eating up all CPU. You can forget about the surfacebook if you want a decent terminal running on it. WsL isn't there yet and linux support is flakey. So yeah the only contender if you care about both battery AND performance AND a proper terminal right now is the dell xps. The thinkpad x260 is nice, but they don't have nvme, only supports sata express(and i'm not sure i wanna gamble on the intel dc 3500 drives to get me the performance).
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > Am i the only one that cares about 16GB ram? XCode and Visual Studio are pretty happy "just" with 8GB.
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      16 is great, but 32 would be perfect if I wanted a few more VMs running.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        That is the thing, I don't run any VMs on my computers besides the iOS and Android emulators.
- asadkn 10y ago
  Consider upgrading to Dell XPS 15 when it releases with Kaby Lake (expected December). The Dell XPS 13 went from 12 hours to 14 hours battery life in the Kaby Lake update.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Unfortunately I don't have that kind of cash. I also wonder how anyone was getting close to 12 hours with the 13.
  - temac 10y ago
    The problem is also we don't know the quality we will get with a new model... I would be more than annoyed by a laptop that has coil whine, screen flicker, and sleep issues, especially an high end laptop with that kind of price tag...
ogeidix 10y ago
I am in the same boat. Right now I am looking into 1. Asus Zenbook Pro UX501VW 2. HP Spectre x360 3. Dell XPS (but I really really don't like the webcam position)
- flohofwoe 10y ago
  I cannot recommend the Spectre: - touchpad requires a third party driver, has really bad recognition and the driver needs to be reset from time to time because it stops recognizing multitouch gestures (there's even a button for reseting the driver in the control panel), this is on Windows10 - keyboard is really mushy and when typing fast, keys sometimes register twice or not at all (first laptop where I ever had such a problem) - the WIFI didn't connect out of the box with my router, I had to revert to a one year old driver (Windows 10) I have now a Zenbook UX330 which doesn't have most of these problems (it also needs a third-party touchpad driver though), but has an Optimus NVIDIA/Intel GPU setup which at least on Linux is basically useless. Can't comment on the Dell XPS :) [edit: typos]
  - pilif 10y ago
    > there's even a button for reseting the driver in the control panel thank you for once again reminding me why I've never looked back after switching to Mac hardware back in 2006. I'd much rather "cope" with hardware that isn't absolutely top-of-the-line spec-wise than dealing with buttons to reset a f'ing input device driver. I think our perception of the Mac slowly losing its "it just works" status is somewhat shifted as we're forgetting how bad the alternatives were and obviously still are.
parimm 10y ago
The Thinkpad T560 [1] -Slightly thicker at 22.4mm -With the largest battery you should get 16-20hrs of real world battery life -Available with a 2880 x 1620 screen [1]http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t560/ http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t560/
acabal 10y ago
I've been using a 2015 Razer Blade and it's a great machine. 14" 3200x1800 screen, 16GB RAM, decent battery life, very thin, great trackpad with click buttons, which I like. Excellent Linux support; I run Ubuntu on it as my daily OS. However it's expensive, and has a pretty tacky color scheme. Parts are proprietary and repairs are expensive, though compared to Apple that's a wash. At the time I bought it they were for sale in Microsoft stores, so you could try it out in person too.
- albertzeyer 10y ago
  http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro I haven't really seen this before. But this looks like a decent MacBook Pro alternative. Except maybe battery-life. And not sure about longevity / overall quality.
  - ropiku 10y ago
    It would be hard to consider that really "portable" at 7.8 lbs, it's almost 2x as heavy as the MBP. You do get a lot of power for that though.
    - temac 10y ago
      The pro is 17". They also have a 14", which weights 1.89kg.
- samastur 10y ago
  How many hours is "decent battery life"?
caconym_ 10y ago
This is the thing. I was as bored by the new MBPs as everyone else, but they really do still seem to have a combination of power, screen quality, portability, and battery life that isn't matched elsewhere (not to mention the more intangible benefits e.g. great touchpads). Every time someone tells me about a PC laptop that supposedly beats the Apple equivalent, the PC ends up either not being a reasonable equivalent or falls flat in at least one of the areas I mentioned. Maybe if the price is right then making sacrifices is fine, but that's up to the individual buyer. Speaking for myself, a boring computer that's quietly excellent is exactly what I want. My biggest problem with the new MBPs is that i think the Touch Bar is a gimmick and losing the physical escape key is a real bummer.
- draugadrotten 10y ago
  > great touchpads That's it. I could live without most of what Apple laptops offer, but the touchpads are the selling point for me. I just love them. They actually WORK. I haven't found a single Windows laptop that have an equally great touchpad. The Dell touchpads certainly don't, they are very sensitive to "palm" presses. Are there any good ones out there?
  - temac 10y ago
    Touchpads of Thinkpads is OK, although a little buggy (they insist in breaking your middle button being the middle click, unless you restore some registry key to historical values, but then this now unsupported function seems to degrade with time and mandatory driver updates...) and using remote desktop sometimes break two finger scrolling for 5 minutes... (I would really want to know what happens technically, this seems only a truly horrible design would yield that behavior...) I just tested palm rejection (I don't need it 99.99% of the time) and out of 2 tries it failed once and produced zooms commands. So yeah, it's probably worse than a mac, but stays usable enough for me. (Warning: I'm more specifically talking about a T530, some Thinkpad like T440/T540 have extremely terrible touchpads, and I don't now much about the very last models) For the recent laptops maybe precision touchpads are good, but IIRC sadly not every vendor are shipping in that mode. On my side I'm extremely annoyed by the current tendency of most 15.6" to have a keyboard with a numeric keypad. That shifts your default position to the left, which is not ok for my taste on a 15.6" (would be ok on a 17"). When looking at powerful recent laptops around 15", I only found the MBP (but I don't like the last one for various reasons), the XPS15 / Precision 5510 and the HP ZBook Studio G3. But the last one seems to have heat problems, and XPS15 have had QC issues. OTOH at least with PC you still sometimes have the option for matte screens. So yeah choosing a laptop is kind of difficult, especially if you have criteria on lots of point. I doubt I'll ever get the one I really want (ex: I found 16:9 aspect ratio idiotic, but I don't like glossy screens...). I can live with my T530 for a few more years, given it has 16GB of RAM and a SSD.
Phait 10y ago
XPS15 has 1080 to 4k display, up to 32GB RAM and is 17mm thin (in the base, the screen adds up a couple mm). Battery is rated at 17 hours on the 1080, and this is a number that I've actually confirmed while working with a friend who owns one. The 4k should get you to 10 without big problems. Also, you do know that you are limited to 1200p scaling on the 15" MBP, don't you?
- momo-reina 10y ago
  I heard that the 4k versions get 5, 6 hours at best of battery life, which is what's stopping me from buying one. Have you had a better experience? This is doing dev work.
- comex 10y ago
  Anandtech's review[1] measures 7.5 hours on their lightest test with the higher-resolution model. That's certainly not bad, and in fact is over my stated 7 hour cutoff - I think the number I found yesterday was a bit lower. And of course I get considerably more pixels in exchange. But when Apple advertises 10 hours, and reviews in the past have typically found their advertised battery figures pretty much on the mark (sometimes even an underestimate), that's still a significant difference. Maybe I shouldn't worry about this too much, because as a developer I tend to feed a lot of battery to the CPU anyway, draining it much faster: the increased battery drain from a higher resolution screen stays constant, so it becomes less significant as a fraction of a larger overall drain. On the other hand, for the same reason, I'd like all the battery life I can get. And yes, I'm aware of how the Mac resolution scaling works. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10116/the-dell-xps-15-9550-review/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/10116/the-dell-xps-15-9550-rev...
  - ant6n 10y ago
    On my three-year-old macbook the battery is dead, it lasts maybe half an hour. Replacement costs 350$ or so, ouch. Maybe the bigger question is whether the better can be replacement relatively cheaply, not whether it lasts 10 or 7 hours.
sytelus 10y ago
I use Lenovo P50 - 64GB RAM, 4K display, nice keyboard, card reader, Ethernet port(!), and Quadro M2000. Especially nice thing about is that it supports 2 SSDs + 2.5" harddrive (all easily removable and upgradable). This means I can keep my Linux installation completely separate from Windows on separate drive without having to partition anything. All these at a fraction of price. I can keep old MBP around for iOS stuff but these days much of the computer vision and deep learning development happens in Linux so configuration like about works great as main machine.
rorykoehler 10y ago
That's the most frustrating thing about the situation is they have no actual competitors. We know they can ship a better mbp but they have zero incentive
epimetheus 10y ago
I use a 2013 MBPro and own a 2015 Mac Mini, but wanted something portable to play video games. I had all of the main requirements you had too, with the added requirement that it could power a 2k monitor on Fallout 4 at the highest setting. The only thing I found that let me configure it online, and met the requirements (would have preferred more than 16GB of RAM though), was the HP Omen. Edit: It comes with a 4k screen, which I downgraded to 1080p (Mostly used on monitor), but also wish it had a 2k downgrade option. Mac's Retina resolution is just about perfect, and not really a fan of 4k yet, also on a 15 inch screen it seems a waste.

by comex 10y ago

voltagex_ 10y ago

At least go try out the latest Dell XPS and HP Spectre, possibly at a Microsoft Store if you can. To be fair, I probably should have got a Macbook as my last laptop upgrade. The laptop before that was the Lenovo X1 Carbon - slow, memory constrained and expensive to repair. I've got a Dell XPS 9350 at the moment, and it was more expensive than the top end Macbook at the time (!). It's quite good, but I can't recommend it against the last gen MacBook - there's still a coil whine issue that Dell refuse to really fix (or can't), there's issues with Broadcom wifi cards, and then there's this fun issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_randomly_wakes_up_when_lid_closed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_ra... It gets ~6 hours of battery life in power saving mode, but closer to 4 if I'm doing dev work. It could be so good, but it's just not there yet. For $3000AUD I expect utter perfection.

rjzzleep 10y ago
Am i the only one that cares about 16GB ram? HP Spectre doesn't have 16gb ram. The xps only has it in offering with their QHD touch screen which has less battery than the FHD screen, which I guess is fine because apparently the FHD screen is crap. Macbooks have significantly better thermal zone than the dell alternatives(e.g. the 7370 is significantly slower than the macbook 12" even though it has the same specs + 16gb) and don't get me started on the touchpad. There's so many threads on reddit about who seemingly fixed the touchpad issue. Bash on windows by the way is nice, but it's no way near production usable.They use a custom file system that resides in your AppData. Until recent insider builds you could neither use inotify(which means most node apps would have some sort of issue) nor would it keep your Ubuntu when during an update. Now the system is somewhat usable, but I've spent so much time whitelisting different folders so that random windows tools don't eat up CPU and I/O that make this 2016 device feel like something from 2011 that I wonder what the hell microsoft is thinking. The recent windows insider build also fixed an issue with windows defender eating up all CPU. You can forget about the surfacebook if you want a decent terminal running on it. WsL isn't there yet and linux support is flakey. So yeah the only contender if you care about both battery AND performance AND a proper terminal right now is the dell xps. The thinkpad x260 is nice, but they don't have nvme, only supports sata express(and i'm not sure i wanna gamble on the intel dc 3500 drives to get me the performance).
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > Am i the only one that cares about 16GB ram? XCode and Visual Studio are pretty happy "just" with 8GB.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    16 is great, but 32 would be perfect if I wanted a few more VMs running.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      That is the thing, I don't run any VMs on my computers besides the iOS and Android emulators.
asadkn 10y ago
Consider upgrading to Dell XPS 15 when it releases with Kaby Lake (expected December). The Dell XPS 13 went from 12 hours to 14 hours battery life in the Kaby Lake update.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Unfortunately I don't have that kind of cash. I also wonder how anyone was getting close to 12 hours with the 13.
- temac 10y ago
  The problem is also we don't know the quality we will get with a new model... I would be more than annoyed by a laptop that has coil whine, screen flicker, and sleep issues, especially an high end laptop with that kind of price tag...

ogeidix 10y ago

I am in the same boat. Right now I am looking into 1. Asus Zenbook Pro UX501VW 2. HP Spectre x360 3. Dell XPS (but I really really don't like the webcam position)

flohofwoe 10y ago
I cannot recommend the Spectre: - touchpad requires a third party driver, has really bad recognition and the driver needs to be reset from time to time because it stops recognizing multitouch gestures (there's even a button for reseting the driver in the control panel), this is on Windows10 - keyboard is really mushy and when typing fast, keys sometimes register twice or not at all (first laptop where I ever had such a problem) - the WIFI didn't connect out of the box with my router, I had to revert to a one year old driver (Windows 10) I have now a Zenbook UX330 which doesn't have most of these problems (it also needs a third-party touchpad driver though), but has an Optimus NVIDIA/Intel GPU setup which at least on Linux is basically useless. Can't comment on the Dell XPS :) [edit: typos]
- pilif 10y ago
  > there's even a button for reseting the driver in the control panel thank you for once again reminding me why I've never looked back after switching to Mac hardware back in 2006. I'd much rather "cope" with hardware that isn't absolutely top-of-the-line spec-wise than dealing with buttons to reset a f'ing input device driver. I think our perception of the Mac slowly losing its "it just works" status is somewhat shifted as we're forgetting how bad the alternatives were and obviously still are.

parimm 10y ago

The Thinkpad T560 [1] -Slightly thicker at 22.4mm -With the largest battery you should get 16-20hrs of real world battery life -Available with a 2880 x 1620 screen [1]http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t560/ http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t560/

acabal 10y ago

I've been using a 2015 Razer Blade and it's a great machine. 14" 3200x1800 screen, 16GB RAM, decent battery life, very thin, great trackpad with click buttons, which I like. Excellent Linux support; I run Ubuntu on it as my daily OS. However it's expensive, and has a pretty tacky color scheme. Parts are proprietary and repairs are expensive, though compared to Apple that's a wash. At the time I bought it they were for sale in Microsoft stores, so you could try it out in person too.

albertzeyer 10y ago
http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro I haven't really seen this before. But this looks like a decent MacBook Pro alternative. Except maybe battery-life. And not sure about longevity / overall quality.
- ropiku 10y ago
  It would be hard to consider that really "portable" at 7.8 lbs, it's almost 2x as heavy as the MBP. You do get a lot of power for that though.
  - temac 10y ago
    The pro is 17". They also have a 14", which weights 1.89kg.
samastur 10y ago
How many hours is "decent battery life"?

caconym_ 10y ago

This is the thing. I was as bored by the new MBPs as everyone else, but they really do still seem to have a combination of power, screen quality, portability, and battery life that isn't matched elsewhere (not to mention the more intangible benefits e.g. great touchpads). Every time someone tells me about a PC laptop that supposedly beats the Apple equivalent, the PC ends up either not being a reasonable equivalent or falls flat in at least one of the areas I mentioned. Maybe if the price is right then making sacrifices is fine, but that's up to the individual buyer. Speaking for myself, a boring computer that's quietly excellent is exactly what I want. My biggest problem with the new MBPs is that i think the Touch Bar is a gimmick and losing the physical escape key is a real bummer.

draugadrotten 10y ago
> great touchpads That's it. I could live without most of what Apple laptops offer, but the touchpads are the selling point for me. I just love them. They actually WORK. I haven't found a single Windows laptop that have an equally great touchpad. The Dell touchpads certainly don't, they are very sensitive to "palm" presses. Are there any good ones out there?
- temac 10y ago
  Touchpads of Thinkpads is OK, although a little buggy (they insist in breaking your middle button being the middle click, unless you restore some registry key to historical values, but then this now unsupported function seems to degrade with time and mandatory driver updates...) and using remote desktop sometimes break two finger scrolling for 5 minutes... (I would really want to know what happens technically, this seems only a truly horrible design would yield that behavior...) I just tested palm rejection (I don't need it 99.99% of the time) and out of 2 tries it failed once and produced zooms commands. So yeah, it's probably worse than a mac, but stays usable enough for me. (Warning: I'm more specifically talking about a T530, some Thinkpad like T440/T540 have extremely terrible touchpads, and I don't now much about the very last models) For the recent laptops maybe precision touchpads are good, but IIRC sadly not every vendor are shipping in that mode. On my side I'm extremely annoyed by the current tendency of most 15.6" to have a keyboard with a numeric keypad. That shifts your default position to the left, which is not ok for my taste on a 15.6" (would be ok on a 17"). When looking at powerful recent laptops around 15", I only found the MBP (but I don't like the last one for various reasons), the XPS15 / Precision 5510 and the HP ZBook Studio G3. But the last one seems to have heat problems, and XPS15 have had QC issues. OTOH at least with PC you still sometimes have the option for matte screens. So yeah choosing a laptop is kind of difficult, especially if you have criteria on lots of point. I doubt I'll ever get the one I really want (ex: I found 16:9 aspect ratio idiotic, but I don't like glossy screens...). I can live with my T530 for a few more years, given it has 16GB of RAM and a SSD.

Phait 10y ago

XPS15 has 1080 to 4k display, up to 32GB RAM and is 17mm thin (in the base, the screen adds up a couple mm). Battery is rated at 17 hours on the 1080, and this is a number that I've actually confirmed while working with a friend who owns one. The 4k should get you to 10 without big problems. Also, you do know that you are limited to 1200p scaling on the 15" MBP, don't you?

momo-reina 10y ago
I heard that the 4k versions get 5, 6 hours at best of battery life, which is what's stopping me from buying one. Have you had a better experience? This is doing dev work.
comex 10y ago
Anandtech's review[1] measures 7.5 hours on their lightest test with the higher-resolution model. That's certainly not bad, and in fact is over my stated 7 hour cutoff - I think the number I found yesterday was a bit lower. And of course I get considerably more pixels in exchange. But when Apple advertises 10 hours, and reviews in the past have typically found their advertised battery figures pretty much on the mark (sometimes even an underestimate), that's still a significant difference. Maybe I shouldn't worry about this too much, because as a developer I tend to feed a lot of battery to the CPU anyway, draining it much faster: the increased battery drain from a higher resolution screen stays constant, so it becomes less significant as a fraction of a larger overall drain. On the other hand, for the same reason, I'd like all the battery life I can get. And yes, I'm aware of how the Mac resolution scaling works. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10116/the-dell-xps-15-9550-review/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/10116/the-dell-xps-15-9550-rev...
- ant6n 10y ago
  On my three-year-old macbook the battery is dead, it lasts maybe half an hour. Replacement costs 350$ or so, ouch. Maybe the bigger question is whether the better can be replacement relatively cheaply, not whether it lasts 10 or 7 hours.

sytelus 10y ago

I use Lenovo P50 - 64GB RAM, 4K display, nice keyboard, card reader, Ethernet port(!), and Quadro M2000. Especially nice thing about is that it supports 2 SSDs + 2.5" harddrive (all easily removable and upgradable). This means I can keep my Linux installation completely separate from Windows on separate drive without having to partition anything. All these at a fraction of price. I can keep old MBP around for iOS stuff but these days much of the computer vision and deep learning development happens in Linux so configuration like about works great as main machine.

rorykoehler 10y ago

That's the most frustrating thing about the situation is they have no actual competitors. We know they can ship a better mbp but they have zero incentive

epimetheus 10y ago

I use a 2013 MBPro and own a 2015 Mac Mini, but wanted something portable to play video games. I had all of the main requirements you had too, with the added requirement that it could power a 2k monitor on Fallout 4 at the highest setting. The only thing I found that let me configure it online, and met the requirements (would have preferred more than 16GB of RAM though), was the HP Omen. Edit: It comes with a 4k screen, which I downgraded to 1080p (Mostly used on monitor), but also wish it had a 2k downgrade option. Mac's Retina resolution is just about perfect, and not really a fan of 4k yet, also on a 15 inch screen it seems a waste.