[mschuster91]

Then again, I have yet to witness any laptop that is as quiet as a MBP. Every Windows laptop I've encountered, no matter if at university, at work or at home, had its fans spinning even at idle - while it takes a 2015 MBP to do a full recompile of all Macports packages to noticeably heat up, much less engage the fans.

It's a side effect of both Apples unibody aluminium cases which are way better at heat dissipation than any plastic based case and Apples extreme level of control - they can optimize every tiny chip as well as the OS to be as power efficient as humanly possible, which avoids creating heat to dissipate.

It's fair game to compare Windows laptops for their noise level but seriously, comparing anything with Apple for noise is unfair.

[heipei]

Yes, noise and battery runtime are the only two things keeping me with a MacBook. I'd be willing to compromise on other things (resolution, CPU, aesthetics), but there is still no alternative. But currently still happy with my 2015 MBP Retina.

That's the thing that people don't understand if they've never owned a MacBook. Build quality and noise are not in the specs, so they only compare it on price / power. Also some people just don't care that their fans are running constantly...

[tracker1]

I'd add the touchpad to that... second to none imho... my logitech keyboard for my htpc feels about as good, but the fixed (not able to be adjusted) right click region is irritating over two/three finger clicks.

[mschuster91]

The biggest problem I have with Apple is that they've completely lost track when it comes to their core user group.

A modern MBP still can't have more than 16GB RAM, it has 0 legacy ports, and cannot be upgraded at all.

Yes it might be a perfect laptop for hipsters who just want to show off their MBP and do the occasional Photoshop, but without developers who create programs for OS X or professional users who make their entire company buy MBPs there will be no ecosystem to lure in said hipsters... more sooner than later.

[AlphaSite]

How many developers actually need >16gb for normal work? They exist for sure, but I would posit that its only some vanishingly small portion in practice.

[tracker1]

Anyone running a handful of VMs for DBs/apps/services while also developing Java or .Net "enterprise" (fat-stack) applications. It's pretty easy to hit very high usage.

I do mostly web-stack stuff with node, and chrome is probably my biggest offender... But I've also got multiple tabs in firefox open, not to mention VS Code and other desktop-ified apps (spotify, slack, etc). I do okay with 16GB... but I know when I fire up a windows VM with Visual Studio, man does it get tight.

[mschuster91]

For example when you work with dockerized enterprise CMSes on a Mac - you'll need 8GB RAM at minimum for the Docker VM, 4+GB for your browser, 4GB for the IDE (although IntelliJ can eat even more RAM easily!) and suddenly there is no more RAM.

Basically, you can easily use 32+ GB of RAM as soon as anything Java is involved. For what it's worth I usually don't do Java stuff but my Chrome RAM usage alone easily exceeds 8 GB. I could really use more than 16 GB.