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Makes sense. I'm going to use this as a venue to bitch about my experience with MacOS. I have been a long time Windows/Linux user but have long admired MacOS fr

Makes sense. I'm going to use this as a venue to bitch about my experience with MacOS. I have been a long time Windows/Linux user but have long admired MacOS from a distance as it appeared to be, essentially, a polished Linux distro. Bash along side consistent UX, sign me up. I purchased a MacBook Pro 8 months ago. I walked into the experience loving it. I wanted to love it. I wasn't some Windows fanboy who hates on MacOS, it's just that after I got using it for a while, I was shocked at how unintuitive it really was. The good things were really great (trackpad gestures, spotlight, it's aesthetic) but that bad things were silly bad (full screen apps, no intelihide on the dock, no window tiling, battery, finder, garbage filesystem support, etc) I felt betrayed. (NZD, 2017 13" best touchbar model) I paid 3000 of my hard earned dollars for dated specifications so I could have access to what I expected would be the ultimate user experience on a computer. I ended up selling my MacBook after 6 months because every time I looked at it, I remembered how much I paid and how much the UI frustrated me. High Sierra was the tipping point, I was hoping for an improvement to my experience, instead they gave me a new file system and "ES5 support in Safari" - according to Tim Cook. I'm keeping up with MacOS and hope they start caring about their MacBook/MacOS product(s), because as soon as they do, I'll buy one. For the record, Windows and Linux have their own sets of compromises, but I can run them on a Laptop I bought for $800, or a used Desktop I got for $200, being equally as productive. tl;dr - I was happy paying the premium for UX, however I got an incomplete product and I was mad. /rant

sanderjd 9y ago
Honestly, I just pay the money for the trackpad. I've never found a laptop from anyone else that had a usable trackpad. I think the differences between OSes these days are almost entirely superficial, and CPUs, disks, and RAM speeds are all firmly in the "more than good enough" category. The only things that matter are the amount of RAM, the display, battery life, and the trackpad. You can get 32 or 64G of RAM for anything, and higher-end machines mostly all have nice screens and similar battery life. But nobody else seems to know how to make a decent trackpad.
- apatheticonion 9y ago
  Yeah the trackpad is so good. I found myself intuitively using it rather than the USB mouse I had plugged in. Battery was extremely poor on my MacBook though. It was 5 hours (possibly a defect, or maybe the touchbar drained too much of it?). My previous laptop was rocking a gen 4 i7, 4k screen and it gets 7+ hours.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
    Ah yeah, I haven't had one with the touchbar yet, and I hope they figure out the folly of those before I need a new laptop.
legulere 9y ago
Longterm (10 years) Linux User here who bought a MacBook to run Linux on it but switched to macOS. What’s bad about fullscreen modus? You can make the dock hide automatically if you mean that. I haven’t seen any comparable device with such a long battery lifetime. Sure you can buy something with better looking specs for cheaper but everything that’s not on the specs will be worse (keyboard, display quality, ...)
- apatheticonion 9y ago
  You're right on not being able to beat be the build quality of the Macbook. Full screen mode was annoying because you couldn't put windows on top of the full screened app. Might be that I have a particular uncommon use case, but I often use basic utilities like notepad or calculator on top of my main apps. Additionally, the top menu bar would auto-hide. Often, when I would move the mouse to the top of the screen to change what tab I'm on, the top menu would reappear. This is fine, but the animation would take years to disappear and doesn't detect if the user's intention was to show it, leaving me waiting idle for a few seconds for the menu to hide again. Complete dock auto-hide is too much of a nuclear option. I want the dock visible when there is nothing on the screen. I mean, most people aren't as bothered by UX problems as I am. I'm probably a bit pedantic, but I feel it's reasonable to feel this way when the product costs somewhere around twice it's competitor's price.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    I think you might be trying to use some patterns that don't work well on macOS. I used to run into the full-screen issue all the time when I switched to macOS many years ago. The full-screen paradigm under macOS is completely different from what it means on Windows or Linux. You only really want to ever use it for something like screen sharing or movies. What drove me initially nuts is that on Windows you can do everything through the UI. That makes the UI cluttered, but you can find it. Under OS X there was lots more stuff that you just couldn't do via UI and you had to drop to Terminal. It took me a while to get a sense to when I should give up on doing something through the UI.
qudat 9y ago
I understand that the macbook pro is not perfect. Personally, I hate the touchbar. The build quality, dev environment, multiple desktops are all critical to me being productive. I've been using all three major OSs for years and I feel the most productive on the mac and I feel like the UX is the best. I've been investigating other comparable laptops on the market in an attempt to "see what else is out there" because there are some things I don't like about the macbook pro direction (touchbar gimmick). All of this is leading into my question: What laptop competes with the macbook pro in terms of build quality (i feel like I'm holding a hunk of metal and it's really satisfying), screen (1880p), trackpad, keyboard, and battery life? Not to mention on top of all of that I get facetime and imessage which integrates with my phone. My laptop automatically unlocks because I have the apple watch. I have an open mind and would love a linux laptop, but it really feels like nothing even comes close in comparison.
hd4 9y ago
$800? I run Ubuntu LTS on a $150 Dell E6400 (2009~) with 4GB ram and a Core 2 Duo and it flies. As long as you have at least 2GB RAM, any recent Ubuntu should be fine.

sanderjd 9y ago

Honestly, I just pay the money for the trackpad. I've never found a laptop from anyone else that had a usable trackpad. I think the differences between OSes these days are almost entirely superficial, and CPUs, disks, and RAM speeds are all firmly in the "more than good enough" category. The only things that matter are the amount of RAM, the display, battery life, and the trackpad. You can get 32 or 64G of RAM for anything, and higher-end machines mostly all have nice screens and similar battery life. But nobody else seems to know how to make a decent trackpad.

apatheticonion 9y ago
Yeah the trackpad is so good. I found myself intuitively using it rather than the USB mouse I had plugged in. Battery was extremely poor on my MacBook though. It was 5 hours (possibly a defect, or maybe the touchbar drained too much of it?). My previous laptop was rocking a gen 4 i7, 4k screen and it gets 7+ hours.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  Ah yeah, I haven't had one with the touchbar yet, and I hope they figure out the folly of those before I need a new laptop.

legulere 9y ago

Longterm (10 years) Linux User here who bought a MacBook to run Linux on it but switched to macOS. What’s bad about fullscreen modus? You can make the dock hide automatically if you mean that. I haven’t seen any comparable device with such a long battery lifetime. Sure you can buy something with better looking specs for cheaper but everything that’s not on the specs will be worse (keyboard, display quality, ...)

apatheticonion 9y ago
You're right on not being able to beat be the build quality of the Macbook. Full screen mode was annoying because you couldn't put windows on top of the full screened app. Might be that I have a particular uncommon use case, but I often use basic utilities like notepad or calculator on top of my main apps. Additionally, the top menu bar would auto-hide. Often, when I would move the mouse to the top of the screen to change what tab I'm on, the top menu would reappear. This is fine, but the animation would take years to disappear and doesn't detect if the user's intention was to show it, leaving me waiting idle for a few seconds for the menu to hide again. Complete dock auto-hide is too much of a nuclear option. I want the dock visible when there is nothing on the screen. I mean, most people aren't as bothered by UX problems as I am. I'm probably a bit pedantic, but I feel it's reasonable to feel this way when the product costs somewhere around twice it's competitor's price.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I think you might be trying to use some patterns that don't work well on macOS. I used to run into the full-screen issue all the time when I switched to macOS many years ago. The full-screen paradigm under macOS is completely different from what it means on Windows or Linux. You only really want to ever use it for something like screen sharing or movies. What drove me initially nuts is that on Windows you can do everything through the UI. That makes the UI cluttered, but you can find it. Under OS X there was lots more stuff that you just couldn't do via UI and you had to drop to Terminal. It took me a while to get a sense to when I should give up on doing something through the UI.

qudat 9y ago

I understand that the macbook pro is not perfect. Personally, I hate the touchbar. The build quality, dev environment, multiple desktops are all critical to me being productive. I've been using all three major OSs for years and I feel the most productive on the mac and I feel like the UX is the best. I've been investigating other comparable laptops on the market in an attempt to "see what else is out there" because there are some things I don't like about the macbook pro direction (touchbar gimmick). All of this is leading into my question: What laptop competes with the macbook pro in terms of build quality (i feel like I'm holding a hunk of metal and it's really satisfying), screen (1880p), trackpad, keyboard, and battery life? Not to mention on top of all of that I get facetime and imessage which integrates with my phone. My laptop automatically unlocks because I have the apple watch. I have an open mind and would love a linux laptop, but it really feels like nothing even comes close in comparison.

hd4 9y ago

$800? I run Ubuntu LTS on a $150 Dell E6400 (2009~) with 4GB ram and a Core 2 Duo and it flies. As long as you have at least 2GB RAM, any recent Ubuntu should be fine.