Ask HN: Are there any reasonable alternatives to MacBook Pro for developer?

I'll be in Japan later this month, and I'll probably buy an HP Envy. The XPS doesn't come in the aforementioned configuration and the Carbon X is considerably more expensive (and I can't make heads or tail of their Japanese site).

(portability is pretty important to me).

I looked at Macbook Pro, Dell XPS15 and Thinkpad T470P.

In the end I went for the T470P (i7-7700HQ (4 core/8 thread) w/ 2560x1440 screen, 16GB of RAM (upgraded myself to 32GB)) and the bigger battery (pretty much no optional with a 35W TDP processor).

I tried the XPS15 but the keyboard was bad and the fit and finish wasn't awesome.

I've had zero issues with linux support or the machine generally, build quality is excellent, I personally like the styling but many don't.

It's so fast that I held off building a new desktop (and packed the old one away) and battery life is very good if you aren't maxing out the CPU, I've had over 8 hours of actual work time, screen is good, sharp and decently bright.

In the UK it came with a three year warranty as standard vs 1yr for the Dell.

It was also 300 quid cheaper than the Dell.

I ruled out the Macbook Pro on price and the fact I couldn't put 32GB of RAM into it.

At work I have a Ryzen 1700 with 32GB RAM and a SATA SSD, Intellij with a bunch of plugins loads faster on my thinkpad than that machine (NVMe SSD vs SATA SSD basically, the Ryzen should demolish any laptop processor with threaded code).

It's a solid little machine.

The new higher core count lower TDP intel processors look interesting, I suspect the T480P (if they do one) will have those, 35W TDP is a lot compared to 15W, I suspect that the 7700HQ will still beat them handily and extreme battery life wasn't an issue for me, anything over 5 hours is fine I'm never away from AC for longer than that.