7 ms·
Ask HN: Disappointed by the new Macbook, what alternatives do we have?
I've been very happy with my 2012 Macbook Pro Retina and was looking forward to a worthy successor. However the unveiling of the new Macbook was a big letdown for me. Everything that made the Macbook "Pro" seems to be removed. Enough has been said about the topic already what I want to do here is look at what alternatives there are.
So my question for you is; Which laptops, around the price point of your average Macbook Pro, come close to the build quality of the Macbook and use hardware that's greatly supported in Linux.
Extra kudos if somebody can recommend me a terminal on-par with iTerm. Out of all my apps I think I would miss iTerm the most.
- wyclif 10y agoI'd also miss iTerm. Have you looked at the Dell XPS 13 Dev edition, the Razer Blade Pro, the Lenovo X1 Carbon, Lenovo T Series, or the Asus UX305F?
- adamnemecek 10y agoI'm in the same situation and right now leaning towards a beefy hackintosh desktop + maybe one of the small macbooks. It's such a pain though.
- dwightgunning 10y agoThis looks to be the direction I'll be heading too.
- jftuga 10y agoWould using one effect your Apple Developer status if you are seen using one of these?
- ohazi 10y agoLenovo T or X series, ASUS Zenbook series.
- jsiepkes 10y agoI bought a HP zbook studio G3, looks nice, not heavy and can deal with 32GB RAM ;-).
- chillacy 10y agoYou might want to be more specific, about the "pro" part that you want which is no longer in the MBP. For instance others have pointed out that the 16GB limitation is in all notebooks which use the same intel chipset and low voltage ram, so you'll have to sacrifice battery life for more memory. That's fine for some folks but not for others.
- icebraining 10y agoyou'll have to sacrifice battery life for more memory Or get a bigger battery. Not all laptops are stuck with a non-removable battery that must fit a certain size.
- chillacy 10y agoThen you're sacrificing space. Look, that's a perfectly fine tradeoff, but OP didn't mention what tradeoffs he was willing to make. For me: I would rather have a smaller and lighter computer since I travel. The battery doesn't have to last more than 5 hours since I'm either out and traveling or at home and plugged in, but if it is plugged in it has to be able to drive pixels on an external monitor.
- viraptor 10y agoIf you want more power Lenovo T. If you want something closer to air, Lenovo X.
- alfanick 10y agoIf you want absolute power - Lenovo P50 (though P50s is closer to MBPr)
- wyclif 10y agoI used to be a big ThinkPad guy, but I'm spoiled now. The thought of having to work with a Lenovo trackpad depresses me.
- dom0 10y agoUse the trackpoint instead? Honestly the trackpoint on TPs has been a major, maybe the biggest, deterrent for me to abstain from ultrabooks.
- jpalomaki 10y agoP50s is just dual-core. P50 is quite thick, 24-29mm. I'm using T440p and the height is a bit annoying when typing. In addition to the missing quad-core slim models, another annoyance with Lenovo is that at least the online configurators are still offering just 512GB SSD. It is of course possible to throw in what you want, but if it is not official Lenovo stuff, then it is not covered by the onsite warranty.
- NietTim 10y agoI'm really skeptical about Lenovo because of the proprietary software issues they've had, even read things about bioses with sketchy stuff in them which couldn't be flashed and such.
- pritambaral 10y agoLenovo has (at least) two lines of laptop products, one consumer and one enterprise. The consumer line is shit. It's branded just "Lenovo", but Lenovo themselves call it "IdeaPad". The enterprise line is good. It's branded "ThinkPad", or "Lenovo ThinkPad", and every unit in this line is bound to have the label "ThinkPad" on its body prominently displayed. The two series of laptops your parent referred to are both ThinkPad series. And the sketchy stuff you refer to all happened in the IdeaPad line, no ThinkPads were affected. Lenovo has historically run the ThinkPad division separately with some autonomy granted.
- k__ 10y agothe zenbooks look like a good alternative a
- idlewords 10y agoWhat about a 2015 MBP? I also have a 2012 model, with a little water damage, and am seriously thinking of upgrading to 2015 and then giving Apple one more upgrade cycle to come to its senses.
- x0x0 10y agoMy guess is there may be decent sales around thanksgiving as vendors look to clear last year's stock. I'm mostly hoping saner people prevail at apple too. Or you could learn to type on an ipad, which is clearly the future of computing!
- threeseed 10y agoSaner people did prevail at Apple. That's why for a laptop that typically lasts 5+ years they went with USB-C to replace the other dozen antiquated ports.
- idlewords 10y agoSome of us were using those antiquated ports.
- threeseed 10y agoI know. I'm one of them. But I will always applaud Apple for when they do things like this because through sheer attrition they will move the industry forward. The iMac is largely what made USB a success. And I am hoping this will make a single connector world a success.
- idlewords 10y agoA single-connector world is not an end in itself. The reason anyone finds it appealing is because it means people won't have to carry a forest of adapters and connectors, or worry about incompatible devices. But that's what Apple is now forcing us to do if we buy their new laptop. USB-A is going to be around for years to come, as is HDMI. I'm not going to throw out my extremely expensive Thunderbolt display because it uses a heretical connector. I am not going to refuse to speak at a conference because the projector doesn't work with my new machine. The basic requirement of a professional machine is that it let us get our work done. This is just design wank.
- douche 10y agoDamn near anything. For the markup on equivalent specs that Apple commands, you can often get two laptops from other manufacturers.
- vetinari 10y agoThat's not really true, if you configure equivalent rMBP and Thinkpad, the Thinkpad is going to cost you more.
- et-al 10y agoWhat's the use case? If it's just for general web development, my plan is to buy a used 2015 MBP, but with AppleCare until mid-2018 or later, and re-roll the dice in two years.
- jetbeau 10y agoWhoever builds an easy hackintosh with metabox level specs will have my business
- JazCE 10y agosee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815183
- Philipp__ 10y agoNo terminal is on par with iTerm. I was using Linux and *BSD for years, used many terminals, and of all iTerm is bread and butter (and with that font rendering and retina screen, nothing comes close). I would recommend to evaluate your needs, but be objective! If you can live with 16GB of RAM (I can, I do not do anything that would require me to use 32GB of RAM) then buy last year model. I have it, amazing machine. And maybe it would be better to hold on to your MBP, and buy Chromebook, at least to test the water with Linux (or whatever OS you want to use). Install them on small machine, setup few essential programs to you and use them for few weeks. Why am I telling you this? Well I really appreciate some things on macOS, which will keep me glued to it for few more years at least. (iTerm is one of those things)
- mananvaghasiya 10y agoYou should checkout hyper https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/
- Philipp__ 10y agoWhy should I, iTerm is native app, this is JS.
- acchow 10y agoI use iTerm daily but I don't think I get it. What makes iTerm so great?
- Philipp__ 10y agoAfter I used many of dated terminals, everything from xterm to urxvt (was ok), to more modern ones like termite (this one I liked very minimal), I really appreciated everything about iTerm. The amount of GUI customization is insane, plus you can configure everything about from key bindings to mouse, arrangement, etc etc. I really liked it how it doesn't get in your way. Splits are amazing, it is the only terminal where clipboard has worked perfectly with tmux,zsh,vim/emacs combo out of the box. I was really impressed how little configuration it required.
- 10y ago
- akerro 10y agoWhat's wrong with your current laptop?
- Faaak 10y agoMy first thought. Do you really need to change because you broke your macbook, or do you want to change because its "trendy" ?
- Maran 10y agoFew problems: CPU is slowing down lately, even switching tabs in Chrome sometimes takes a 1sec to actually render the page. Disk is getting too small. I use a lot of VMs for work and I never have enough space to run them all. Laptop is dead, if I replace it I will be without a laptop for weeks according to Apple. I let it drop once making the fan very noisy, not really a problem just annoying.
- mikhailt 10y agoSo, you've dropped the laptop and the fan became noisy, which would also lead to CPU throttling because if the fan isn't working right, CPU is going to overheat and your laptop is going to suffer as the result of this. Did you even take the back off to try to reseat it or clean up the laptop? You can try to take it to an authorized Apple repair shop to see if they can re-seat the fan/clean up the fans for you. I have same '12 rMBP and the performance is just as snappy as it was back in '12 and I've never reinstall OS either, so it's all consistent and snappy. I have no plans to upgrade this because there's nothing else that comes close to replacing it right now, not even '16 rMBP. As for the disk, I put my VMs on external SSDs, works great. Certainly cheaper than replacing the laptop and easier to upgrade every year to more storage.
- lewich 10y agoI find Razer Blade laptop as a good replacement for Macbook pro. Also Pc Specialist has custom laptops - https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/ https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/
- alex_hitchins 10y agoDell XPS 15 (With touch screen retina style display).
- petewailes 10y agoI'm running a HP Spectre 13. Couldn't be happier
- aorth 10y agoThey look great actually. Are you running Linux or Windows? I've been a Mac user for the last few years, but spent the few before that as a ThinkPad + GNU/Linux guy. I could see myself going back to GNU/Linux on the desktop one day.
- petewailes 10y agoI'm on Windows 10, with a VM linux (when it launched, driver support was buggy to say the least, and I've not been bothered enough to try adding linux again)
- pedrocr 10y agoJust got a Thinkpad T460s. Practically the same dimensions and specs of a X1 Carbon but with replaceable memory and disk. Can easily be made to have 20GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, and if someone makes a 32GB DIMM could potentially go up to 36GB of RAM although that's not advertised as supported. Everything works in Linux just fine and the 2560x1440 screen looks great.
- creshal 10y agoT460s only has partially replaceable memory, some of it is soldered on. And god help you if that fails outside warranty, spare Thinkpad mainboards usually cost more than a new laptop.
- pritambaral 10y agoThe '-s' models are all designed to be slimmer counterparts to the non-'-s' models. Apart from that, the T460 should be identical to the T460s; and I'd recommend the former instead of the latter for the same reason you mention.
- creshal 10y agoShould, but isn't: The T460 has for inexplicable reasons no high-resolution (WQHD) display option, unlike the T460s and T460p. Lenovo's model policy (23 different Thinkpad models this year with dozens of options each) is really insufferable.
- pedrocr 10y agoRAM is pretty reliable so I'm not really worried. One thing I just realized though is that 20GB is probably the absolute max for this machine. Since there are 4GB on the board and the chipset can only do 32GB it's pretty likely that 4+16GB will end up being the maximum. I've opened the machine and it's a shame they don't just give us 2 DIMM slots and 2 (or 4) M.2 slots so you can just splurge on some more RAM+SSD goodness.
- creshal 10y ago
- rimantas 10y agoSo what made MB "Pro"? SD card slot? Height? Weight? Absence of TouchBar? People complain about 16GB RAM. Does your current MPB has more?
- nicky0 10y agoThis is supposed to be a discussion of MBP alternatives. There are plenty of other threads to discuss the merits of the new Macs.
- uniclaude 10y agoWhat made the MB "Pro", if memory serves right, it was filled with components that represented the state of the art when it was released. Best screen, latest generation of CPU, PCIe SSDs, etc... The best you could possibly get, in a sturdy, well designed machine, coming with an OS that just works. In 2013, some company even found that the best performing Windows laptop was a MBP (!). [1] [1]: http://www.zdnet.com/article/want-the-most-reliable-windows-pc-buy-a-mac-or-maybe-a-dell/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/want-the-most-reliable-windows-...
- pjmlp 10y agoThe GPUs were never state of the art on Mac laptops, and they don't matter for those that just use iTerm + Emacs/Vi.
- vetinari 10y ago> People complain about 16GB RAM. Does your current MPB has more? That's the point - the new generation should allow for more than previous. Why would be your motivation for purchase, to get exactly the same thing you have now?
- eknkc 10y agoI asked the same question and read replies to others. Just a quick summary; - Lenovo has decent laptops. Personally, I'd not touch anything from Lenovo after their shady stuff. (Maybe not an issue on Linux, maybe it is. I don't trust them) - Dell XPS series are really good but people complain about coil whine, worse battery life compared to MBP and hit/miss trackpad. It might not be that big of a problem. And if you are running in clamshell mode, these are generally no issues. I don't run clamshell though. - The Razer Blade stuff seems to be great too. They are mostly aimed for gamers but look decent. Someone mentioned about huge display bezels being really huge in person. Gotta see. I can't find any info about them here, maybe they only sell in USA. - I skipped Asus due to past support experiences with them. Also some smaller vendors due to possible support issues I'd have especially since I'm out of US.
- AsyncAwait 10y agoIf you don't mind Linux, https://system76.com/laptops https://system76.com/laptops has some great machines - the Oryx Pro is a pretty slim, aluminium laptop with much more performance per buck than the MBP.
- dom0 10y agoPC Specialist, Schenker and Tuxedo sell machines based on the same barebones. These are probably cheaper for !US people.
- AsyncAwait 10y agoYeah, in the UK I'd go with SCAN Computers[1] or PC Specialist[2] (SCAN I can personally recommend). [1] - https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom [2] - https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/ https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/laptops/
- tmikaeld 10y ago500 internal error, seems the server couldn't handle hackernews
- iworkforthem 10y agoLenovo... works really well. Ubuntu + Lenovo can last many years.
- beatpanda 10y agoThe Dell developer edition laptops are really excellent machines. I've used the M3800 and the XPS13 and found them both to be great.
- pknerd 10y agoI have March 2015 MB 2.9GHz with 8GB Ram. Working cool and I don't guess I'd need up-gradation
- x0x0 10y agocopying my comment from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12832547 You can buy a dell xps 15 today that comes with: 3840 x 2160 display / 1tb pcie solid state disk / nvidia gtx 960m (crucial for developing cuda programs and prototyping deep learning on your laptop) / 32g ram. For $2340 (ten percent off coupon at the top of the page). I'm not sure if this link will work: http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/productdetails/xps-15-9550-laptop/dncwx1609h http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/productdetails/xps-15-9550-la... And this thing comes with regular usb ports and an hdmi port instead of usb-c nonsense so I don't have to immediately drop $250 in dongles just to keep the capabilities I already have. (And one usb-c port). here's a detailed guide to getting with ubuntu from a year ago: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071 https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071 it appears that it only works modestly well. So if you buy this, you're probably going to have to live with Windows or the issues in the above thread. ======== My personal plan is to buy a 1-ish year old mac and cross my fingers that someone builds a well-supported powerful linux laptop by 2018. Good sleep/power management support seems to be a common problem.
- threeseed 10y agoMassive tip if you decide to stay with a < 2015 MacBook Pro. Open up the laptop and reapply the thermal paste on the CPU with something high quality like Arctic Silver. It really needs redoing after 1-2 years. This will result in a significant improvement to overall performance. Why ? Because when OSX detects that the laptop is overheating it schedules a dummy task e.g. secd or kernel_task to throttle the CPU. Cool the laptop and the throttling stops. Use iStat Menus or top to check for the process. Takes all of 10 minutes and iFixit can guide you through it. As much of a performance difference as going from HDD->SSD. The other most vital thing to do on OSX since all of the daemons result in lots of random reads (check fs_usage).
- 72deluxe 10y agoIs this specific to certain years only? I have a 2012 non-retina and it is great, but apparently certain years had more problems than others. Would you recommend it for my 2012 model too?
- dom0 10y agoThis is a general issue affecting lots of notebooks from all vendors.
- threeseed 10y agoSure. But what I haven't seen on Windows or Linux is the deliberate high priority scheduling of a dummy process designed to throttle the CPU.
- dom0 10y agoThe CPU will throttle itself soon enough after that anyway. The only difference would be that without the kernel throttling it earlier, it can get a bit hotter and last a bit longer before throttling.
- threeseed 10y agoNot sure. But I suspect it is in the more recent years where the thinner unibody has been required to take on more of the cooling duties. So if you are like me and use your laptop on the bed, on your lap etc then you are by design preventing the laptop from cooling properly. Everything I've seen says thermal paste is only effective at most a couple of years. It is harder to replace on your 2012 model but not difficult: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid+2012+Heat+Sink+Replacement/10380 https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid...
- dothis 10y agoOne thing I never liked about my Macbook is that there is no option for a matte screen. So I consider switching and finally getting a matte one now: http://www.productchart.com/laptops/sets/1 http://www.productchart.com/laptops/sets/1 I will replace Windows with Linux. I heard Thinkpads are good for this. But the Dell XPS series looks very compelling too.
- cerved 10y agoI'm absolutely loving my SP4 as my main laptop for a couple of months. It has enough juice to be able to do most things well, amazing display and weighs like nothing.
- joefreeman 10y agoI mostly used Macs for about ten years, but I don't like the direction the ecosystem is taking (cloud, app store, etc.), so recently switched to an XPS 13 (developer edition) running Ubuntu. (I actually also gave an SP4 a good chance for a few months, but couldn't get on with Windows.) It's pretty decent (both the laptop and Ubuntu) - sometimes wish the display was brighter or speakers louder, but depends on the environment. Nice size, bit heavy, but feels solid. Wifi was a bit dodgy before updating to 16.10 - seems fine now though. The HD screen is nice (once you change the scale setting; there's a problem with the touch screen not working after sleep though). I've never been much of a keyboard snob, but this keyboard is so much nicer than a MBA.
- sjnair96 10y agoJust making sure you meant to say what you did; did you say the xps13 was a bit heavy? I thought it was rather light.
- joefreeman 10y agoI think this is more about feeling heavier than it looks. Pretty sure it's heavier than my 13" MBA though (despite being smaller, area-wise).
- szatkus 10y agoActually the keyboard is one of things I don't like in XPS 13. Feedback is too weak, escpecially for shift and ctrl. I don't expect mechanical keyboard from laptop, but I liked it in Vostro more. I've never used Macbook for a longer time, so I don't have a comparision.
- baio_trg 10y agoJust will left it here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-book https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-book
- jaxondu 10y agoOpportunities: - A Thunderbolt 3 dock that has all the missing ports in new MacBook Pro - Lenovo, HP, Asus release properly supported notebook with Linux similar to Dell XPS Developer edition. Makes desktop Linux available across PC industries. - Microsoft release Surface Pro and Surface Book with Mubuntu (MS version of Ubuntu, since MS already has working relationship with Canonical) - Cloud service via emulator that allows developer to build, test and submit iOS apps without actually owning a Mac - Google release Pixel Book which runs a brand new OS that is ChromeOS+Android hybrid. We need: - Adobe releases Photoshop & Lightroom for Linux - Microsoft releases Office for Linux - A few major games for Linux. Makes Linux a game platform. - One or two major Mac developers develop for Linux - More developer using Electron and React Native for Ubuntu But we will be back to the same by spring 2017 when Apple refreshes MacBook Pro with new CPU and cheaper price.
- baio_trg 10y agoJust will left it here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-book https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-book
- noyesno 10y agoWhat is so special about iTerm? Features, font rendering? For features and portability, I can warmly recommend SecureCRT[0], you won't find a more capable terminal app anywhere. [0] https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html https://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html
- CalRobert 10y agoI like the ability to easily have multiple panes without having to learn tmux.
- howlinbash 10y agoI find that Terminator solves this problem. You can control it with the mouse and the keybindings are much closer in simplicity to iterm than tmux. https://linux.die.net/man/1/terminator https://linux.die.net/man/1/terminator Check it out :-)
- pareidolia 10y agoTry Byobu (http://byobu.co/ http://byobu.co/) it's a convenience package on top of tmux or screen, your choice.
- gjulianm 10y agoThe problem with that terminal (and lots of other with 'loads of features) is that it tries to reinvent the wheel. Why would I need SSH, file transfers, command editors, etc, when all of that is done by the shell itself? If I need ssh I just run 'ssh' on my terminal, and that's it. If I need to edit a command I press Ctrl-X + E and bash/zsh shows me a command editor (vim or emacs or nano, whatever you want). What, in my opinion, makes iTerm good is that it doesn't try to redo all the things that shells do, but instead tries to give you better access to that shell. For example, one thing which is surprisingly difficult to find in terminal programs: a drop-down terminal. In iTerm, I press Cmd + Shift + 1 and a terminal appears in the top of the screen. Quick access, quick hide, and always there to do whatever quick thing I need to do. Another feature: no space waste. iTerm does not have toolbars, buttons or anything, it's all terminal because that's all I need. Only a tab bar with multiple tabs, and if you want a title bar on split mode (optional, I personally have it disabled). It also complements the shell in system integration: one thing which is incredibly useful is the trigger system. For example, when I'm waiting for a host to come up, I just run "ping whatever" and hide the window. When the text "64 bytes from... " appears, a trigger I configured fires and shows me an OS X notification. You can also highlight text in the terminal or do any other custom action, which can be very useful.
- ctvo 10y agoI've been struggling with the same question, ending up sticking with the MBPs. Resell value, build quality, battery life, weight are all factors that other manufacturers can't match. I really wish they'd released something better though.
- andyfleming 10y agoThis isn't really a recommendation, but if I could have it my way, I'd take this computer, except with OS X: https://system76.com/laptops/oryx https://system76.com/laptops/oryx • 15.6" 1080p IPS LED-backlit Display • NVIDIA GeForce 1070 8GB • 3.5 GHz i7-6700HQ • 32 GB DD4 at 2400MHz (upgradeable to 64 GB) • OS Drive: 512 GB NVMe (PCI with 2600MB/s read and 1600 MB/s write) • 2nd Drive: 2.5" 1 TB SSD • 1080p HD Webcam • Kensington® Lock port • 1x Gigabit Ethernet • 1× HDMI • 2× Mini DisplayPort • 2× USB 3.1 Type-C • 3× USB 3.0 Type-A • Stereo Speakers • Stereo Mic • Headphone Jack • Mic Jack • S/PDIF • SD Card Reader • Ubuntu 16.04.1 $2,870 Obviously the dream would be for it to look like a MacBook Pro, but I would give up the sleek case if I could run OS X reliably on that sucker.
- kilburn 10y ago* off-center trackpad (of unknown quality) is right there a no-go for me...
- liviu 10y agoDisappointed by the new Macbook? Try the old Macbook.
- vilya 10y agoI love my Aorus X3: http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X3%20Plus%20v6 http://www.aorus.com/Product/Features/X3%20Plus%20v6 Portability, power and build quality are all excellent. Battery life isn't up to MacBook standards, but you get a good 4 to 5 hours on a single charge which is still fairly usable. The trackpad isn't as nice as a MacBook either, but it's good enough. Everything else about it has the MacBook Pro completely outclassed in my opinion.
- Veus 10y agoRecently bought an Entroware Apollo (https://www.entroware.com/store/laptops https://www.entroware.com/store/laptops). Amazing device, if you don't mind Linux and are in the UK.
- koehr 10y agoI'm not a Mac User but I know that the Dell XPS 15 is a decent notebook with a very good keyboard and all the connectors you need.
- siphr 10y agoI am a Lenovo Thinkpad user x230 specifically. Heavily criticised by people who love their X220's but it works great for me 12" form factor and packs a punch, separate slot for SSD if you want one and loads of ports. I have 2 actually. One runs my home server. I dropped out of the main stream sphere mainly because of this carrot donkey driven eco-system (Who knows where they are taking us). I am quite happy with my Arch Linux deployment. Its decent for gaming too.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tired_man 10y agoFor most things, my C720 Chromebook runs Ubuntu and handle any tasks I need. Don't equate price with utility ;-)
- fgblanch 10y agoThe options I am considering as substitutes for the new mbp 13" are: - The new razer blade stealth: Great built quality, kaby lake, usb-c/thunderbolt 3, great screen, reasonable price, although im not sure Ubuntu would work out of the box. - Xiaomi Air 13: This is not really a competitor but im really tempted to try it. It is cheap (less than 1k) it looks like having a nice built quality, fast ram, good i5 processor, dedicated nvidia GPU ( so may be some acceleration for training small deep learning models). USB-C, USB3, HDMI, Ubuntu works out of the box. CONS: you have to import it.
- wsloth 10y agoI've been using an HP Spectre X360 15" with a 4K touchscreen which is truly amazing. The only downside is that the one USB 3 port is not a thunderbolt port, making it not all that useful unless you get a dongle that allows you to plug in a regular USB cable. Other than that, I've been enjoying it immensely and it made me stick to Windows at a time at which I really wanted to switch to Linux or MacOS.
- trapatsas 10y agoXMG ( https://www.mysn.de https://www.mysn.de ) offers custom, fully configurable high-end laptops. Take a look if you really want high performance without compromises.
- kevlar1818 10y agoI honestly don't know what everyone is complaining about WRT the Dell XPS line. I have a refurbished Dell XPS 13 (Skylake) -- NON-Developer Edition even -- and I'm very happy running Arch Linux without any headaches. It's a great laptop with excellent battery life and performance. I don't experience coil-whine at all. (Although, I've heard the rumor that the coil whine is a bigger deal on the XPS 15.) Naturally, the Arch Linux community has an extremely helpful wiki to help you get set up: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_(2016) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_(2016)