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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I bring my desktop on a plane? To meetings at my client's offices? No? Isn't that an interesting bit of nuance that you so blithely elide.
If you have $1000's to spend on airfare you can afford to have a good desktop machine and a good laptop.
True, there should something to rival Apple in the laptop arena. Unfortunately there isn't. Apple just makes hardware that's so sexy and intuitive to use. Example, Apple TV. I never used one before but I demo'd one at Best Buy the other day and in 10 seconds I knew how to operate it. Apple does this best, their earnings prove that. Just buy a Macbook Air, sturdy as hell, long battery life, and great Unix-enough-y OS.
I was a lifetime mac owner (since OS 9) and my 2010 Macbook Pro finally broke down this year. It made it that long because I doubled the RAM, replaced the battery, and replaced the HDD with a hybrid drive. Finally the battery puffed up and exploded. I brought it to the Apple Store and they were beyond useless. The new MBPs are not modifiable in any way, and Apple's customer service is not what it used to be. So I decided to get a non-Mac for the first time in my life.
I ended up with an Asus Zenbook UX305LA. It's a 13" 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Core i5 processor. Cost me $749 and I dual-boot WIndows 10 and Ubuntu (spending 95% of my time in Ubuntu). It costs about 50% what a similar specced Macbook would cost and is similar size/weight to the Macbook air. Build quality is fantastic (open with one hand, good keyboard, glass trackpad, etc). The battery life is not quite as good as a 13" MBA but better than a Macbook Pro. Overall I am extremely happy with it.
Considering that my last MBP cost me $2200 up front plus ~$300 in repairs over time and lasted me ~4.5 years. That's about $500 a year. This machine cost $750. If it lasts over a year and a half, the experiment is a success. So far it's been nothing but great.
It seems like you should really just buy a MacBook Pro. Sure the software isn't perfect, but it's an order of magnitude closer to perfect than Windows has been lately. You buy it, boot it up, and it works wonderfully. Of course the one day out of the year that it doesn't you go rage comment on how it sucks and it scares Windows users away from Mac, but the rest of the time you'd never consider going back to a typical…
After I bought my MBPr 2014 I started looking around at similar machines. In my mind, the only competition is with the Surface Book, but even that's debatable given the screen size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I bring my desktop on a plane? To meetings at my client's offices? No? Isn't that an interesting bit of nuance that you so blithely elide.
If you have $1000's to spend on airfare you can afford to have a good desktop machine and a good laptop.
Past that: it costs me three hundred dollars, round-trip, to fly from Logan to Reagan. Where does "thousands" come into it? Why would somebody who occasionally fly for business necessarily have the cash to burn on redundancies? Why would having that money imply that one should?
It seems like you should really just buy a MacBook Pro. Sure the software isn't perfect, but it's an order of magnitude closer to perfect than Windows has been lately. You buy it, boot it up, and it works wonderfully. Of course the one day out of the year that it doesn't you go rage comment on how it sucks and it scares Windows users away from Mac, but the rest of the time you'd never consider going back to a typical…
For developers OSX will almost always be worse than a Linux distro, if only because of package management.
Honestly if you get a Mac you can install rEFInd on it and boot Linux just fine, or run Linux in a VM. The hardware also almost never breaks and especially if you have AppleCare they frequently replace it for free. Yes, it may be difficult to upgrade yourself. That's entirely true and if it's a deal breaker there's not much else around. You might do well to look at https://puri.sm if you're a Linux user, they seem to…
never brake? :))) Apple hardware is build to fail, 35 years and they still make computers like we are living on Arrakis and moisture doesnt exist.
It also has yet to slow down.
But that's just my anecdotal experience. Think of it what you will.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have $1000's to spend on airfare you can afford to have a good desktop machine and a good laptop.
In which dystopia does it cost you $1000's to fly locally, as many would do? I can cross my goddamn continent for $600 return and that's over 4000km away. Going interstate costs $200 return on a good day.