morning folks

morning

so I may need to finally replace my 2013 MBP at some point

what's the current state of play for decent laptops?

tempted by mac again b/c of logic, etc

but not being able to replace the battery etc worries me in terms of its longevity

Morning

@alex.lynham I would highly recommend the Dell XPS 13 (budget dependant of course)

well so my 2013 is 512GB SSD & an i7... the new MBP with those specs is £2550 😱

Money well spent if you've had it for 5 years 👍

Oh wait, misread that

Thought you spent that and your laptop lasted 5 years

I always find that Apple is way overpriced (IMO)

It's like buying into the religion (opinions expressed here area purely my own 🙂)

Having used different brands I would totally buy another Mac IF the new ones were as good quality as the old ones

Which they are not

that's what one costs now, I think they cost that back in the day. I bought it off the company I worked for when I left for £1k, best deal evarrrr

(Direct comparison with people at work: whatever you do, don’t buy a new Mac.)

> Having used different brands I would totally buy another Mac IF the new ones were as good quality as the old ones this is my worry

I was going to get a Huawei matebook pro, but realised I can get a used mbp for the same price, so will do that instead

Given Huawei’s recent reputation

That said everyone says Dell XPS is awesome, and I also heard great things about Surfaces. I’ve been warned to watch for touchpads on Linux though because apparently Apple put a lot of work into drivers to make theirs work just so.

(New Mac problems that I’ve observed include keyboards breaking and screen leaking/pooling liquid. That’s rather high on the scale of “basic functionality unusable”)

the XPS looks good

the lenovo thinkpad carbon also looks good (similar price)

but I guess I'm stuck with the fact that I need a DAW and I know Logic best

@bronsa is a big fan of the xps iirc

yeh

I quite like my MBP 15", before that I always had Thinkpads (of course) and they were great as well and I didn't have any issues running Ubuntu on them.

But I wouldn't buy a MBP with my own money.

On the other hand, if you buy a macbook you get to run officially certified UNIX. And the main reason I’ll probably get one is because you can tweak the touchbar to display the keys dependent on your application. And emacs fork has the support for it, so you can tweak to add “slurp” “barf”… if in clj(s) mode or some other mode dependent shortcuts, say (git rebase -i, fixup the last commit) for magit.

£1986 for an equivalent spec'd thinkpad carbon... hm.

What about equivalent spec'd xps?

1,468.99, and you can get 15% off until tmw so... ~£1248

Work bought me an MBP 2016 with touchbar (only because to get the higher spec you had to get a touchbar). Overall the hardware is great; and far superior to just about anything else however: - Touchbar is a total gimmick and far worse than a row of physical keys - Two or three keys on the keyboard aren’t pressing properly unless you mash them a bit — this is a common known fault due to specs of dust getting under the keys; and is IIRC a £800 repair to fix if you can’t dislodge the dust. Also this aside the new keyboard isn’t that great to type on in my mind. - Battery life is far worse than on my previous MBA I should add that I hate macOS though; and would much rather a Linux desktop if I could guarantee good hardware and compatibility and less time futtzing around with various issues. (I used to love this - but now not so much).

(that's w/o windows, shipped with ubuntu)

Wait, the 2016 MacBooks already had the touchbar? I didn't think it was that old

It is a total gimmick though. Laura has one, and has also already had a sticky key (hooray for air dusters though...)

I'm not a fan of the feel, but it does make the laptop marginally slimmer

it does; but the previous generation keyboards felt better to type on in my mind

these bottom out far too soon

Oh yeah, I agree. I'm just saying that's the only reason I can think of Apple had for using it

yeah I could imagine the slimness saving might save a hundred grams or so in weight too

love my xps13. I don't have problems with it

A colleague has one of those… If I was in the market for a new one, I’d be tempted by it… though IIRC last time I looked I’d wished the spec could be bumped a bit more… more SSD & RAM IIRC would’ve been nice… but I also wouldn’t mind it being 15"

there's a 15" XPS with more options

good to know

might be worth getting one — just so I can troll my coworkers with nostril cam footage 🙂

nostril cam is the only drawback on the xps13s

these are all of the ones available from the US at http://dell.com/developer

if you ask nicely I think they'll do them for the UK too

ah, here is their UK page: https://www.dell.com/learn/uk/en/ukbsdt1/campaigns/dell-linux-ubuntu-en

nostril cam?

prolly a cam placed in your keyboard, shows a view up your nose

(huawei has the same problem)

ahh

haha yeah you get really big hands on the webcam when you are typing

This might be interesting to some, a free and open source laptop: http://mntmn.com/reform/

morning

Morning All 🙂

https://starlabs.systems/ They make nice Ubuntu light weight laptops . They are based in Surrey . I still have the MK1 version and it's pretty decent . Not sure about them lasting 5 years though .

needs MOAR RAM and SSD, but looks nice

I guess if I'm spending 1979 Les Paul Custom money on a laptop (~£2k, my ebay fu is wild) I'm expecting at least 4-5 years of use

pretty sure there's EU consumer law supporting that as well... as in 'reasonable expectation of use', gonna have to google

aha, anything up to 6 years... https://www.theguardian.com/money/2006/mar/25/consumernews.howtocomplain

whoa that Star Labs laptop is decent for the price

…are they moddable?

as in, are there any unused slots for ram?

…some research, and apparently star labs are reselling stuff from these guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clevo

if you want something from resellers, Novatech is really solid

I still use a tower I bought from them after like … 6 years? (custom parts though) and a friend had a very solid gaming quality laptop

Get this one @alex.lynham https://system76.com/laptops/bonobo

Once they actually come out here, I'd probably get a Matebook Pro X and install Linux on it (I doubt I'm important enough for the Chinese to spy on)

Wow, that system76 bonobo look like some sort of torture device.

haha yeah

it looks like you could kill with it

At least you can kill your back transporting it

at this point might as well get a Razer

I had a System 76 "ultra notebook" for several years. Great battery life, extremely portable. Wasn't quite powerful enough to do real work on the go (I only used it for conferences really). Other than that, I was very impressed with System 76.

@alex.lynham <<I guess if I’m spending 1979 Les Paul Custom money on a laptop>> I’d be buying the Les Paul…..

🙂

Haha I have an 89 classic so probably no need for now :)