4 ms·

I don't understand the obsession with the new apple hardware. How is it worth this much trouble? My XPS13 works perfectly with Linux straight out of the box for

I don't understand the obsession with the new apple hardware. How is it worth this much trouble? My XPS13 works perfectly with Linux straight out of the box for half the price... and never in my entire life have I needed more than the eight hours of battery life it reliably delivers for me. I do most of my work over SSH on big metal machines, maybe that's the disconnect? But seriously, there are few things in the world that matter less to me than how fast my laptop is. I did some real work a few weeks ago on a ten-year-old Celeron POS and it didn't bother me at all.

pankalog 1y ago
> I do most of my work over SSH on big metal machines, maybe that's the disconnect? Yeah, I believe that's where the disconnect is. I moved from a Thinkpad to the 16in Macbook Pro with the M3 Pro chip, and I am able to reliably build and write code that runs locally on 5 different Docker containers, for at least 10 hours. I once did a 48hr hackathon with this laptop and I only had to charge it I think 4 or 5 times. I need to be very mobile as I'm going to different locations to attend meetings or write code, and it's able to do everything reliably for a (very extended) workday. I would have to move from wall socket to wall socket on my old Thinkpad, but something to note is that I was using Windows 10 at the time. The Macbook's best-in-class (in performance-per-watt and per-kg) hardware combined with the software was something that became unbeatable for my workflow. That being said, my next laptop will be a reliable, non-Apple, but Apple-like performance, ARM64 laptop, and I'll be using some Linux distribution on it.
- jcalvinowens 1y ago
  It's not that I actually write code over SSH (I usually work with wifi disabled), more that I just push things to big machines for building and testing them, rather than doing that locally. My pair of 32-thread Ryzen machines are worth their weight in gold for the amount they juice my productivity. No laptop can ever touch that, for obvious physics reasons. I can do everything you're describing with my XPS13. I regularly go days without plugging it in.
morshu9001 1y ago
I do most of my work over SSH on a Mac. Keyboard, trackpad, screen, battery life, video call peripherals.
TimTheTinker 1y ago
I suppose for folks here, they like being able to do dev work (as well as web browsing) on a fast laptop with low power draw. Sounds like that's not exactly your use case.
- jcalvinowens 1y ago
  > they like being able to do dev work (as well as web browsing) on a fast laptop with low power draw. I guess that's hard for me to understand... do you just not have to compile things? Or do you just not mind waiting? No matter how exceptional the laptops are for laptops, a real computer plugged into a wall is always going to vastly outperform them...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jcalvinowens 1y ago
    To add a bit (I wrote this in response to a deleted comment): The yocto build I'm currently working on takes about six hours to complete on my biggest machine. Yes, it's an incremental build, but warming up a laptop would require several days of 100% CPU :) It's also not really possible to test locally, even a VM of the right architecture is insufficient without doing a bunch of work to make it match the target hardware. Often you can build a quick little ad hoc thing that lets you test some piece of it locally, but sometimes it's too much work. Frequently I need to compile test several dozen Linux kernel configurations with different cross compilers, each of which takes half an hour to run on the huge box. I can't imagine doing any of this locally on a single laptop, I would get 1% as much done as I currently do.
  - piperswe 1y ago
    Most of the compilation I run is Go, which isn't really a resource hog. My editor always takes significantly more resources than compiling.

pankalog 1y ago

> I do most of my work over SSH on big metal machines, maybe that's the disconnect? Yeah, I believe that's where the disconnect is. I moved from a Thinkpad to the 16in Macbook Pro with the M3 Pro chip, and I am able to reliably build and write code that runs locally on 5 different Docker containers, for at least 10 hours. I once did a 48hr hackathon with this laptop and I only had to charge it I think 4 or 5 times. I need to be very mobile as I'm going to different locations to attend meetings or write code, and it's able to do everything reliably for a (very extended) workday. I would have to move from wall socket to wall socket on my old Thinkpad, but something to note is that I was using Windows 10 at the time. The Macbook's best-in-class (in performance-per-watt and per-kg) hardware combined with the software was something that became unbeatable for my workflow. That being said, my next laptop will be a reliable, non-Apple, but Apple-like performance, ARM64 laptop, and I'll be using some Linux distribution on it.

jcalvinowens 1y ago
It's not that I actually write code over SSH (I usually work with wifi disabled), more that I just push things to big machines for building and testing them, rather than doing that locally. My pair of 32-thread Ryzen machines are worth their weight in gold for the amount they juice my productivity. No laptop can ever touch that, for obvious physics reasons. I can do everything you're describing with my XPS13. I regularly go days without plugging it in.

morshu9001 1y ago

I do most of my work over SSH on a Mac. Keyboard, trackpad, screen, battery life, video call peripherals.

TimTheTinker 1y ago

I suppose for folks here, they like being able to do dev work (as well as web browsing) on a fast laptop with low power draw. Sounds like that's not exactly your use case.

jcalvinowens 1y ago
> they like being able to do dev work (as well as web browsing) on a fast laptop with low power draw. I guess that's hard for me to understand... do you just not have to compile things? Or do you just not mind waiting? No matter how exceptional the laptops are for laptops, a real computer plugged into a wall is always going to vastly outperform them...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jcalvinowens 1y ago
  To add a bit (I wrote this in response to a deleted comment): The yocto build I'm currently working on takes about six hours to complete on my biggest machine. Yes, it's an incremental build, but warming up a laptop would require several days of 100% CPU :) It's also not really possible to test locally, even a VM of the right architecture is insufficient without doing a bunch of work to make it match the target hardware. Often you can build a quick little ad hoc thing that lets you test some piece of it locally, but sometimes it's too much work. Frequently I need to compile test several dozen Linux kernel configurations with different cross compilers, each of which takes half an hour to run on the huge box. I can't imagine doing any of this locally on a single laptop, I would get 1% as much done as I currently do.
- piperswe 1y ago
  Most of the compilation I run is Go, which isn't really a resource hog. My editor always takes significantly more resources than compiling.