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You could buy a 2015 MacBook Pro and upgrade to rock solid keyboard, sane-sized trackpad, MagSafe, hdmi, USB ports and an SD card port. It’s not thin enough to
by andrei_says_ 7y ago
You could buy a 2015 MacBook Pro and upgrade to rock solid keyboard, sane-sized trackpad, MagSafe, hdmi, USB ports and an SD card port.
It’s not thin enough to slice salami but I am a vegetarian so that’s not a big deal.
- rayiner 7y agoBut the bulblet and bought a used 2013 15” MBP after a year in Lenovo exile. Cost me $600 for a six year old computer, but it feels great.
- robdachshund 7y agoMan you guys really have Stockholm syndrome.
- rayiner 7y agoI gave it a serious go for a year. Spent $1,600 on a Lenovo X1 Carbon. Wiped the disk and installed LTSC. The one feature it had that Apple didn’t (the built-in LTE) never worked properly. Stability was good, but lots of odd nits. (Auto-hiding taskbar would sometimes stop hiding.) Battery life was a crap-shoot. Rage quit and ordered the MacBook when it went from estimated 30 minutes remaining to dead in 5 minutes. Speaking of which: Do you want to buy an X1 Carbon 6th gen? i7 8650U with 16Gb RAM and 256GB SSD.
- woah 7y agoI use both a 12” MacBook (for Go and JS), and a Dell XPS13 with Ubuntu (for Rust). The UX on the MacBook is better in every way. Gestures, the window and desktop management, touchpad, Bluetooth, WiFi and printer drivers, etc. The screen, speakers, and other hardware components are much better as well. The fast XPS 13 with Ubuntu also seems to really be taxed pretty heavily by electron apps, while the MacBook that is 8 times slower does just fine. When I switched, I finally understood why so many people on hacker news complain about electron. Everything on the Mac feels like someone thought really hard about how to make it as good as possible, even if they were wrong in the end (like the keyboard). Everything in Linux always feels like someone said “ehhh... good enough!”.
- mrep 7y agoI've got a late 2013 15" MBP with a 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB of ram, 512GB SSD, and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, and have been using it for 5 years now it and it is a great laptop. Can run chrome, mysql server, web servers, and personal programs without breaking a sweat. The only thing it cannot run are new video games or if you are deep into ML but old games still work great (I played GTA V on it ok when that came out). Only downside that happened is part of the trackpad stopped clicking and one of the fans starting running crazy loud. Took it in to the apple store and they diagnosed it as a swelling battery (seems like a problem for macs so if it looks like your case is fat, get it checked out). Ended up getting the battery, keyboard, trackpad, case, fans, and potentially the monitor (it looked new or was cleaned extremely well) for $300 which isn't too bad to make it feel like new. I'm probably going to keep this computer for another 5+ years unless it dies. Would totally recommend and I would definitely not sell it for $600.
- in_hindsight 7y agoJust add eGPU to it and it will be more or less capable of modern ML and games
- andrei_says_ 7y agoMacOS is amazing in many ways, and is spyware-free, which makes it the only choice for privacy-savvy users who also want to use adobe products. Unless you go the Hackintosh route, you’re locked into Apple hardware.
- Razengan 7y agoCould say that just as well for people who willingly put up with Microsoft. For many of us, Apple is an escape from that hell.
- electrichead 7y agoI did exactly this a year ago but one caveat to note is that if you're using an external monitor, the video card in this one doesn't support a good resolution. I'm stuck with 1080p.
- dmos62 7y ago1080p is not fine enough? How much information are you used to having on screen at a time? How much text, for example?
- wildrhythms 7y agoI have a 4K display. Mac OS scales things to look nice. 1080p looks like garbage in comparison.
- TheCoreh 7y agoIt's not about real estate, but rather about sharpness. At 3820x2160 ("4K") you can double every pixel, when compared to 1080p. That means that text at the exact same "size" is twice as sharp, producing less visual strain and improving readability (especially for fonts with complex strokes) The difference is absolutely striking: I will never go back to a non "retina" display if given the choice.
- jen729w 7y agoIt’s also real estate. I have the LG 5K 27” monitor—which I like, by the way, I don’t know why people give it crap—and routinely wish it was just a touch larger. My screen is filled with Excel and some sort of online database, usually. I’m also using my 13” MBP screen below this one for chat windows, email etc. I would hate to go back to the lo-res 1080 days.
- dasKrokodil 7y agoYou quadruple each pixel...
- shrimpx 7y agoI cant deal with 1080p anymore, and large (27"+) 1080p monitors make no sense to me. Maybe they're good for people who need to have physically large text etc. but I find it useless for fitting information densely on the screen. I for one would rather use my 13" MacBook pro laptop screen than a large 1080p display. (I use a 24 inch 4k monitor and it's pretty great.)
- zachberger 7y agoWhat's wrong with the large trackpad?
- fallensatan 7y agoNot OP but my problem with larger trackpad was unwanted mouse movements. Maybe it was the way I rest my palms while typing but I never had this issue with previous mbp models.
- geuis 7y agoYeah I dislike the bigger trackpad. There’s nowhere to comfortable rest my hands on it. At work they gave me a 2018 MBP and after 2 weeks of suffering I returned it for a 2015 version.
- sooheon 7y agoI prefer to rest my hands on either side of it, simply to prevent ulnar deviation style wrist angle.
- SkyPuncher 7y agoI personally find it unnecessarily large. My thumbs/palms are constantly touching the corners. The 2015 touchpad is plenty large enough to accomodate my needs.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y agoYep, the large trackpad is another design blunder. The heels of your hands are resting on it much of the time, resulting in the cursor suddenly jumping off to another part of the screen while you're typing. Even dumber: Apple didn't make it work with the Pencil. WTF? Now THAT would be far more useful than the emoji bar.
- hnjim 7y agoPencil does work with iPad and sidecar which is a much better experience for editing vs what would amount to a very small Wacom tablet on the trackpad (vs effectively an iPad sized Cintiq).
- Matthias247 7y agoIn the meantime I regretted so much that I bought my 2015 model with 8GB of RAM, which seemed like a reasonable decision back then. Everything else is still great and better than the newer model I got from work - but nowadays I seem to run out of memory all the time.
- Scoundreller 7y agoBuy a 16gb board off eBay and do a board swap? Or buy a 16gb and sell the 8gb? The former shouldn’t set you back much. The biggest cost on the latter would be the commissions, but you may be able to find a forum with a decent buy/sell section.