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by asark 2644 days ago
How's the touchpad? What's kept me on Apple is the ability to actually use the MacBook Pro as a portable computer, not just a crappy desktop you can drag between the power and mouse+keyboard stations that you need to get work done without swearing at it constantly or frowning while you watch the battery life indicator plummet.

The keyboard and port situations are both pushing the MacBook far enough out of that "close the lid and go, no worries" sweet spot it used to fall so solidly into that I'm eyeing other options, but I have some very bad memories of both battery life and trackpads on non-Apple machines, and my (limited!) interactions with such more recently haven't made me optimistic.
3 comments
BuckRogers 2644 days ago
Just to offer another perspective on the battery front, that only really matters for casual browsing. Anytime real work is done on a machine, you'll be plugging in within a few hours on everything anyway.

If you're doing CPU/IO intensive development work, they all fall down so quickly that I don't think it matters on the differences. It's really a browsing/videos metric, which is relatively unimportant to me when buying a workstation class laptop. I don't think I'd buy any laptop based on battery life as a primary factor, and the overall usability situation for most stuff on the market isn't as grave as it used to be (which your post accurately recalls).

I've owned the XPS15 with 6-core 8th gen Intel (maxing out the scales at 97Wh battery) and have a Thinkpad X1 Extreme. I've had MBPs in the past too.

For the touchpad on Thinkpads, I think they're pretty good if you're on Windows, most are anymore with MS Windows Precision drivers as the Thinkpads use. For me, a major driver for me towards these is the Trackpoint.

Depending on your usecase, my favorite machines on the market today are the X1 Extreme (development), X1 Yoga (consulting/development), Samsung Notebook 9 Pen 13" (home), and Macbook Air (home).

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devashish86 2644 days ago
I admit that the touchpad isn't as smooth and gesture driven as the mac but I'm not the user those are really meant for. I spend most of my time on the keyboard writing code and living in the "cloud" which makes using mouse a drag anyway. So all I'm looking for is a powerful machine that doesn't hog resources on useless stuff, with sturdy keyboard(physical keys please, none of that touch bar BS), can support dual/multi boot and works with all the peripherals I need. Thinkpads work better than most without the significant price overhead. One of my dystopian future scenarios has no Thinkpad's in it :D
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robocat 2644 days ago
> How's the touchpad

Some opinions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485178 "Linux touchpad like a Macbook: progress and a call for help"

(I recall opinion was X1 was about as good as you get on a PC)

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