I also think the new MacBook Pro is the worst laptop I've ever had. I hated it so much I switched to a Thinkpad. Thankfully these are company issued laptops and I could do this pretty easily. Had I bought a personal one I'd be quite distraught.
I love, love love my Windows desktop (home built BEAST for gaming) but anytime I'm doing work, I have my Macbook at my palms. Unless Apple continues to tank the Macbook (I currently have the Pro 2014 model) I'll never buy a Windows laptop again.
Apple designed the MacBook to make a good first impression with the tablet crowd (shiny touch new touch bar, big battery, light-weight...) while ignoring a market segment that uses laptops as productivity workhorses. Maybe they feel MacBooks aren't really suited as workstation replacements the way most software developers use them. They defiantly convinced me that that I'm better off not owning one.
I'd actually prefer to be the other way around; Apple laptops are superior to anything else I can buy, but I hate the operating system.
The Macbook Pro I have issued from $work is far superior in comfort speed and usability to my expensive Ryzen Thinkpad that I purchased in the summer. I just don't particularly like developing/working on OS X.
Interesting; I have basically the exact opposite experience. I had a T460P (running Linux) that I loved as my work computer, and then my company got acquired and I had to choose between a gigantic brick of a Dell or a Macbook, so I decided to try a mac for a while. I absolutely hate it: the keyboard needs to be blown out with compressed air all the damn time, plugging in external monitors is a total crapshoot, the touch bar thing just sucks, having only USB-C ports is a pain, and every fuse filesystem is insanely slow.
I bought an m1 macbook pro not too long ago and I love it. But if I got a job where they offered me a choice between a macbook vs a windows laptop for work purposes, I'd take the windows laptop.
I just find if I need to get work done, PC/Windows is a slightly better option.
I disagree. Currently I have a company provided Macbook Pro (butterfly keyboard) and a Thinkpad. I very much prefer to work on the Macbook. Software issues aside - Macbook is less preloaded with company snake oil crapware, also gives easy access to Unixy commandline tools. Hardware - I much prefer the Macbook. It's completely quiet 99% of the time, whereas the Thinkpad has it's fans blazing as soon as I open Chrome. The build quality feels much better on the Macbook and I love how sleek and thin it is. Meanwhile Thinkpad feels like a brick.
I buy Mac Mini because OSHA once demanded (and I find it’s not a bad idea) that I use screens instead of laptops to avoid employees spending 7hrs bending to neck. So they have 2 displays at work and 2 displays at home, and a Mac Mini, total 2300€, better than a 2800€ Macbook Pro + screens.
What is the state of the art, do all of you simply buy a top-notch Macbook Pro and work on it all day?
I owned a Macbook Pro from 2009 till 2012. Though I initially liked it, I found much of it annoying, and by the end spent nearly 100% of my time on it in Windows. I just prefer non-Apple.
The number of people recommending MacBooks makes me cringe a little. Sure the build quality is good, but I can't live with the keyboard's crippling lack of keys and the need to constantly use the mouse in OSX. Lenovo isn't fairing much better these days - I have a T440p, and the lack of the 'menu' key (between right-alt and right-ctrl) drives me nuts. The lack of Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Delete on the Mac also drives me crazy.
For those of us who live on the keyboard and hate to touch the mouse (too slow and inefficient), these days are dark times..
Also: why aren't we seeing >16 GB of ram in laptops yet? I realise workstation laptops are at 32, and possibly 64 GB now, but why are some brands going backwards from 16GB down to 12 and even 8?
As for my recommendation? There isn't a single laptop on the market that I like, I'm sad to say. Lenovo dropped the ball, and dell's build quality isn't up to par. I'd look at an HP workstation, or maybe one of the Lenovo W541's, although the keyboard isn't much better than on a MacBook.
The Chromebook Pixel 2 (the top spec one) is such a tantalising glimpse of what could be - just shoehorn in more hard drive space, add a mini-DP port and an RJ-45, and most people would be good to go...if they fixed the keyboard.
Sorry for the rant! Just overly frustrated with the state of the market.. Won't someone just release a standard workstation laptop without following all the keyboard/mouse trends?!?
Although I find your post a bit too harsh here and there, I generally agree.
"Getting the job done" is the pretty important aspect for me here. And the reason why I've (again) bought a new MacBook. I am a freelance software developer. I can use all the tools I need on a Mac and they work fine. I generally don't care about hardware or software failures - maybe I was lucky, but my previous Macs never disappointed me in the last years. I don't have to spend time configuring drivers or fighting updates.
Another aspect is the look and feel of a Mac. When I am onsite at clients, giving presentations or acquiring jobs, it makes a huge difference if I have a Mac or Dell/HP/Lenovo/whatever notebook standing on the table. People, especially managers, mostly value appearance more than competence - sad but true.
I used PCs for decades before transitioning to Mac based laptops for work which I continued to use for the last 6 years. Due to the M1 laptops being poorly suited to my workflows, I have now changed back and am on a Linux powered Dell Precision laptop and am overall happy with the decision - though I had to compromise on a few things.
I dislike Apple and find a lot of their choices distasteful - but I just haven't been able to find a laptop that I could use portably that feels as nice (I like to work from cafes/libraries, so the docked experience doesn't matter - the Dell crushes in that context).
It's mostly the trackpad that does it, I can use a MBP trackpad for a full 8 hour work day and never think about reaching for a mouse.
By contrast, my Dell is better for my workflow in every way. Aside from the battery life, it compiles things in literally half the time, IO bound tasks are, no exaggeration, an order of magnitude faster.... but it feels so horrible to use.
The trackpad is physically exhausting to use and the speakers sound tinny like I am losing consciousness. The power adapter is enormous, heavy and essential.
I wish someone would just make a shameless 1:1 rip off of the MBP with first class Linux support. Haha, why is it so hard for OEMs to get the hint?
At the very least, OEMs like Dell could try using a MacBook and mimic the trackpad. Don't they have QA teams that tell them how bad it is?
My work gave me MacBook 16" 2020 and probably the worst business laptop I have ever had. The screen is smudgy and glary, the keyboard is awful, touch bar is a meme, no ports and finally it literally cuts my wrists because it was designed to be looked at not used.
As someone who has been buying MacBooks since 2006, I'm starting to feel envious of the various PC laptops out there - in particular the XPS 13 and the Surface Book. With OS X not proving itself to be a fantastic OS in recent revisions I'm wondering how long it'll be before I give into temptation.
Maybe when someone finally gets a trackpad that's as good as the Macbook. Almost every PC laptop I've tried has paled in comparison.
As someone who likes to keep at least one machine dedicated to each major OS around at any given time, the thing that’s frustrating about non-Apple laptops is that just about all of them, including machines costing well in excess of base Macbook models, make big tradeoffs somewhere or another. Very few are good all-rounders, even if many are better than Macbooks in one or two aspects.
I would kill for a version of ThinkPad X1 Nano or X1 Carbon for example that had the battery life, silence, and unplugged performance of a Macbook Air for example, but no such machine exists even if I were to spend twice as much as the cost of a MacBook Air.
I have honestly, earnestly tried. I have tried to find a laptop that is for my needs and purposes truly equivalent to an Apple Macbook Pro. Or better. I always end up going with an Apple machine. There has always been a significant part of the assembly that just isn’t as good. It’s often disk speed or display quality. Build quality too.
I want to underline that this is true for what I need out of a laptop.
The opposite has been true in desktops. I have a Ryzen 3900X box and there still isn’t anything from Apple that I would replace it with. Not even to run macOS on it (which I do on the AMD box, using GPU passthrough).
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