Dell XPS 13 or 15. Some will recommend ThinkPads, but in a side-by-side comparison two years ago, the XPS 13 won hands down against the Carbon X1 they had on display at the shop, for its much better display alone (and it's cheaper, too). ThinkPads keyboards are held in high esteem, but I found the XPS keyboard to work better for me. Didn't get a chance to play with the retro ThinkPads with old-school, non-chiclet keyboards, though. Dell last week introduced the XPS 13 developer edition with Ubuntu 16.04 preinstalled and officially supported. That would be the notebook I'd be buying in a heartbeat if mine stopped working or if I needed 16gb RAM (combination of 16gb and non-glare screen is only available in EU for now it seems).
I have a similar problem to GP. Going to try to make my late 2015 MBP last another year, but not sure what to do next.
Problem with the Dell XPS is it still only supports 16GB of RAM, which is getting to be aggravating for me.
The reason I keep buying Macs though is OSX - I just like it. Linux would be a good fit in many ways, but you can't run Office 365 on it, which is unfortunately a deal breaker. (I know there are alternatives, but I don't really like them - the real killer for me is the loss of Excel.)
A friend of mine holds on to an even older MBP. Due to Apple's generous replacement policy, he's recently got all parts save for the chassis replaced for free or for relatively little money, so sits in front of a brand-new 2012 MBP.
But surely it would be appreciated if Apple could get over their design fixation. For me, there's nothing "Pro" with the MBP. "Pro" doesn't mean "bad-ass", but having (display, keyboard) options for me, a characteristic the MBP lost years ago when the current MBP line was introduced, with the design/aesthetics of the unibody chassis only working with a glare screen. The Touch Bar thingy, and it's mandatory-ness on higher end MBPs is as non-Pro as it gets. It can't be in Apple's interest that real pro users long for the days of old MacBooks/PowerBooks/Snow Leopard, can it?
The 16gb limitation is something the MBPs suffer from as well, and is dictated by Intel chipsets, isn't it?
I think you're correct there, although it's very aggravating, regardless of who's fault it is.
I still have a late 2011 17 inch MBP equipped with quad core i7 and upgraded to 16GB RAM plus a 1TB SSD. I still use it fairly regularly, in particular for Ableton Live. It's really the last MBP you could plug enough peripherals into without needing a separate hub and, key point, still has Firewire, which I need for my audio interface (USB always sucked for this because it chews CPU, whereas Firewire doesn't).
Honestly, as a machine to tote around all the time, I prefer the 15 inch form factor, but the 17-incher is great for working with a lot of tracks simultaneously, and it has all those wonderful ports:
- 3 or 4 USB ports
- 1 Firewire port
- 1 Mini display/Thunderbolt port (two would be nice, but I'll live)
- Line out AND line in (something sadly missing from newer models)
- Digital audio out and (I believe) in (using same ports as line out/in)
For the use cases I needed and still need it's a much more useful system than the current line-up. And, of course, OSX has much more capable audio handling built in than Windows (no messing around with ASIO, no app exclusivity over access to audio hardware).
I switched to a Dell XPS-15 after 2 MBP’s. It’s been pretty decent.
I don’t use the keyboard or trackpad so I can’t comment on that.
There is no real dock for it. The $200 one they sell as a docking station is really more of a port expander; it doesn’t charge your laptop and didn’t work with my monitors so I gave it away.