[keldaris]

> I don't want a sexy svelte fragile expensive luxury status symbol. I want a rugged capital good that will reliably allow me to work for the next half-decade.

Then why are you looking at Apple products at all? You're looking for a ThinkPad or an EliteBook. Fragile expensive luxury status symbols are exactly what Apple makes and always has ever since Jobs. Now they're just more blatant about it.

[JadeNB]

> You're looking for a ThinkPad or an EliteBook.

I've seen such recommendations before, so my first non-Mac purchase in a decade (~2014) was a ThinkPad. I used to love the nub in the '90s, and I got used to it again, but otherwise the keyboard was horrible, and I eventually had to replace it. (A big plus: it was really easy to do.) Right out of the box I had a dead pixel on the screen, and, when I told customer support, they said that they regarded a certain number of dead pixels as normal, and would not replace it.

I'm sure I just had a bad experience, but I have never had either of these problems with any Mac purchase (aside from the fucked-up-by-design modern keyboards).

[keldaris]

Yup, non-corporate customer support is terrible. The bright side is, everything is easily replaceable (or at least used to be until very recently) and if you don't want to do it yourself, chances are you can find a cheap third party tech to replace any screen, keyboard, etc.

Also, for what it's worth, in over a decade of using and recommending ThinkPads, I've never encountered a bad keyboard before. Dead pixels are fairly common, though.

[Bud]

That's just plain nonsense, and reveals that you've never actually supported 100 or 1000 laptops at once and become familiar with real-life failure rates of PC laptops from 2005-2015 vs. Macs.

[keldaris]

If you have good statistics on real-life failure rates between Macs and ThinkPads/EliteBooks that contradict me (hopefully going past 2015, when Mac build quality really went down), by all means share them. I don't work in IT support and never claimed that I did.

[stickfigure]

This seems like a weird question. I like OSX well enough and I would rather not incur the cost of switching to a different software toolchain.

[HeWhoLurksLate]

Thing is, they used to not be very fragile (at least, not in comparison to how they are now.)

Mind you, ThinkPads have arguably gotten less easy to repair since then, too.

[keldaris]

ThinkPads have certainly gotten steadily worse over the years, along with every other laptop, but relative to the rest they still seem to be the most sensible choice. Personally, I just use and maintain a collection of old ThinkPads for laptops, relegating real work to the desktop.