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The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
wraith808:
As for quality of hardware, you can find some wonderfully built laptops that can rival a Macbook, but you won't find Dell selling one and you will pay just as much for it as you did that Macbook Pro.
-Innuendo (June 06, 2015, 06:36 AM)
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Dell XPS 13 (2015) is getting good reviews and being called a MacBook Air and Zenbook killer, at much lower price. The other one that's also looking good is the HP Spectre x360.
-dr_andus (June 06, 2015, 08:44 AM)
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I gave my Inspiron 7000 to my daughter and wife to share... and got one of these. It *really* is nice. I'll post some comparisons of the two. They're both 13", but it's amazing how much smaller the XPS is.
tomos:
As for quality of hardware, you can find some wonderfully built laptops that can rival a Macbook, but you won't find Dell selling one and you will pay just as much for it as you did that Macbook Pro.
-Innuendo (June 06, 2015, 06:36 AM)
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Dell XPS 13 (2015) is getting good reviews and being called a MacBook Air and Zenbook killer, at much lower price. The other one that's also looking good is the HP Spectre x360.
-dr_andus (June 06, 2015, 08:44 AM)
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I gave my Inspiron 7000 to my daughter and wife to share... and got one of these. It *really* is nice. I'll post some comparisons of the two. They're both 13", but it's amazing how much smaller the XPS is.
-wraith808 (September 14, 2015, 07:58 PM)
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I looked at reviews and YT videos about the XPS13 a while back, it's a lovely looking machine :-*
f0dder:
I've been using an Apple PC yes, it's a PC, not some mythological maaaaac with OSX as my work laptop since October last year.
It's way overpriced and I'd never cash out for one myself, but the hardware is pretty good. The screen is amazing, and the build quality is pretty good - it's ~1kg lighter than my old laptop, the way the lid lines up is nice, and the magsafe power cord is wonderful (shame on Apple for patenting something that obvious, bastards!). It's extremely silent most of the time, but if you put a bit of CPU+GPU stress on it, it gets veeeery hot and sounds like a jet engine.
There's a few nice things about OSX. Like, iTerm2 just works a bit better than conEmu or console2. Native *u*x shell just works better than CygWin or MingW - which is an advantage for the software development we do. Homebrew is great. I kinda like the whole app bundle simplicity over Windows installers.
But there's a lot of suckage as well. The kernel is less stable than Windows, for instance - they still seem to run too large parts of the graphics stack in kernel mode. I could reliable grey-screen kernelpanic the machine by trying to make a FireFox window overlap the laptop screen and an external monitor... something that fanboys obviously won't do, if for the simple reason that windows are clipped to a single monitor... :huh: :huh: :huh:
The minimize/maximize/restore functionality sucks, there's no built-in shortcuts to move windows between monitors (even Windows has had that since, what, Vista in 2007?), it doesn't ship with a image editor (and there's nothing like Paint.NET available for free - either you have to suffer The GiMP, or you pay up), dialogs generally aren't very keyboard friendly, and there's extremely low "discoverability". If something isn't readily available from the dumbed-down menus and dialogs, you'll have to visit Google and drop down to a terminal.
Oh, and it creates these annoying .DS_Store files other dot-files all over the bloody place, which you can't turn off without resorting to OS-destabilizing hackery - just how arrogant is that? Especially considering that OSX only lets you mount NTFS volumes as read-only, but still infects the volumes with those dotfiles.
Un- and replugging external monitors is also quirky. For instance, it seems like the window manager doesn't flag windows as "maximized", just maximizes them... which has funny results when combined with the DPI scaling stuff ("retina", blargh, stop with the stupid marketing BS!). So I spent a couple of minutes moving & resizing windows around the laptop screen and two external monitors every morning.
That's off top of my head, from the comfort of my Windows workstation at home :)
wraith808:
Oh, and it creates these annoying .DS_Store files other dot-files all over the bloody place, which you can't turn off without resorting to OS-destabilizing hackery - just how arrogant is that? Especially considering that OSX only lets you mount NTFS volumes as read-only, but still infects the volumes with those dotfiles.
Un- and replugging external monitors is also quirky. For instance, it seems like the window manager doesn't flag windows as "maximized", just maximizes them... which has funny results when combined with the DPI scaling stuff ("retina", blargh, stop with the stupid marketing BS!). So I spent a couple of minutes moving & resizing windows around the laptop screen and two external monitors every morning.
-f0dder (September 16, 2015, 02:38 PM)
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These two really suck. And the fact that you can't get a window over a certain size on your main screen unless you go full screen. That dock isn't all it's cracked up to be. And what are those .DS_Store files for anyway?
mwb1100:
And what are those .DS_Store files for anyway?
-wraith808 (September 16, 2015, 04:05 PM)
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They're basically Apple's version of desktop.ini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store
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