John
John
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

Actually these are not optimal choices either and these 3 are on the top 5 I’m still debating on moving to from my 2012 Macbook Retina 15 inch.

Galago Pro — while awesome and I was so close to buying this, 3K display (13.3″ 3200 × 1800 HiDPI) is going to kill your battery life and the scaling and high dpi support in Linux support is still iffy at best. For that small a display in Linux could be problematic. Also the build quality may not be all there yet.

Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition — for the last at least 3 itterations of the XPS 13, it has had a horrific coil whine issue that you can read about in the forums. I’ve gone through 2 returns and a revision motherboard has been done and it still is a problem. Dell says its normal, its litterally nails scratching a chalk board. Until Dell seriously addresses this and build quality I’m not going to continue to be their lab rat

MacBook Pro — The touchbar and the butterfly switch activated keyboard is a total deal breaker. I cannot tell you how angry I get when manufacturers try to mess with my workflow and tell me how they know better how I should work. Sure I could remap the ESC key but why should I? The added cost of they keybar is $300 dollars alone, if I’m never going to use it, why do I have to pay that $300 tax to get their higher CPU (limited to 2.5 GHz vs 3.5 GHz of touchbar equiped model)/RAM/and increased number of ports (limited to 2 thunderbolt only ports on non touchbar)? In addition to being a developer, I’m also a Systems Enginer / DevOps. Sure I can remap “my” VIM, but I manage 3500 servers and cant exactly just propagate “my” profile accross it just for my single laptop and me alone.

    John

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    John