Ask HN: What brand of laptop do you use?

Windows from my experience is preferable because:

- WLS as a development environment

- better multi monitor support

- better window management

- more configurability

- less likely to crash

- has tons of useful features baked into the file explorer like being able to explore zip files, cast media, et cetera

I love the design and feel of the MacBook Pro, but the OS just doesn’t match the hardware unfortunately

I don’t use laptops anymore, because the attachment of the keyboard to the screen creates an ergonomic disaster: there is no position that works well for the eyes, arms, back, and neck. For portable computing (and most everything else) I’m using a Surface Pro 3 with a wireless keyboard and Debian installed. Being able to independently position the screen and keyboard is nice! (Of course you could do the same with laptop and a wireless keyboard, but you’d be carrying extra dead weight.)

The fact that it’s a tablet with a touchscreen is a bonus: I can take it to the couch to recline while I read PDFs, etc.

14" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro for "everything". I know the M1 love has been nothing short of annoying at this point, but I am constantly surprised by how good this laptop is. Even with dozens of tabs in Brave, a couple of power-hungry webapps open all the time, a 4K external display plugged in and pretty heavy use I usually get at least 12 hours of battery life. Even the best windows laptops in battery life I'd used before this wouldn't get close to 8 with this setup, with 6 being the average.

You might think: what even is the point of 12 hours of battery life? You can just carry a charger around! And well, at least to me, the point is that I get to treat my laptop as if it's a phone: I charge it for an hour every morning and for the rest of the day I'm charger free. That's incredibly powerful for me.

I also have a Ryzen 5800X machine sitting as a homeserver - it used to be my primary desktop, then I made it in to a jellyfin server for anime and block storage and maybe the occasional x86 thing that just doesn't run on arm. Except... I haven't even sshed into the homeserver in a long time. Constantly surprised by how good this laptop and rosetta are.

Clevo NL51MU, 32GB of RAM, 1TB nvme, 1TB SATA SSD, running Arch Linux. If I were to buy a laptop again, I'd probably pick something with a nicer screen, but overall I've been pretty satisfied.

Which laptop has the best keyboard? This is a huge deciding factor for me.

I've had Thinkpads with beautiful, solid keyboards and they are joy to use. But they tend to be pretty old models and I want to try to update if possible.