I have an E320 and it's pretty decent for the price. As far as I know, the E420 is pretty similar, but 14" rather than 13" and having the option for a discrete GPU.
So far, my E320 has been pretty good, though I did screw up my headphone port via accidental shear stress; I don't really blame the laptop for that. The "O" key is a little messed up, but I should be able to get a replacement key.
I'd avoid going overboard on configuration options, though; they're almost always a ripoff.
I just realized, that if I had no laptop already, and I had to buy one soon, The Retina MacBook Pro 13" probably wins even though I hate OSX. Right now you can still get a Lenovo X230 with Windows 7 Pro, but very soon it will be Windows 8 or nothing. That means that no matter which you choose, you get a bad OS. So far the score is even. Oh, it looks like Lenovo has a chiclet keyboard now, so they both have shit keyboards. Score is still even.
Mac has superior touchpad, and dat screen. Mac is winning.
Lenovo doesn't need an adapter to have VGA out. That's points, but Mac still winning.
Ok, Mac loses on gaming, but I don't play any games on my laptop that are 3D or for serious. Maybe I'll play FTL, SpaceChem, or those kinds of games. Oh, those both run on OSX. Also Boot Camp.
Yeah, everyone has been trying so hard to make tablets, and failing at it, that there aren't any good laptops anymore. Even Mac haters picking Mac. At least for now. We'll see what the story is in 3+ years when my Lenovo is no good anymore.
I hope by then all laptops have Retina-standard screens. Not sure how long it'll take people to catch up with trackpads though. In three years time gaming will have progressed on Mac, I'm sure. It'll probably need even more adapters though.
If I were to buy a laptop now, I'd probably get the MacBook Air, but that's only because I plan on switching my desktop over to Windows (7, hopefully) and still want to keep a Mac around for iOS development and whatnot.
I don't get the OS X hate, other than not liking how things on Windows and Linux that use the Ctrl key usually use the Command key on the Mac (and I'm not going to get into another flame war over the pros and cons of that). Okay, I remember you mentioning how you didn't like the Mac when it's "non-standard Unix," but that's a load of crap as it's actually "non-standard Linux." Linux, while the most common of the Unix clones out there, is actually very different in many ways from just about every other Unix system out there, including ones that pre-dated it (and that would include OS X, as it's derived from NextStep, which pre-dates Linux).
In terms of Retina displays, OS X is the only good software. You can change the DPI setting in Windows, but it's up to your applications to obey it. OS X is the only way to do full-on pixel doubling Retina.
If I were to buy a laptop now, I'd probably get the MacBook Air, but that's only because I plan on switching my desktop over to Windows (7, hopefully) and still want to keep a Mac around for iOS development and whatnot.
I don't get the OS X hate, other than not liking how things on Windows and Linux that use the Ctrl key usually use the Command key on the Mac (and I'm not going to get into another flame war over the pros and cons of that). Okay, I remember you mentioning how you didn't like the Mac when it's "non-standard Unix," but that's a load of crap as it's actually "non-standard Linux." Linux, while the most common of the Unix clones out there, is actually very different in many ways from just about every other Unix system out there, including ones that pre-dated it (and that would include OS X, as it's derived from NextStep, which pre-dates Linux).
The OSX kernel may indeed be a more pure UNIX. OK, so what? What does that actually mean for the every day usage experience for a user or developer?
It means nothing. What does mean something is that the userland surrounding that kernel is a unique snowflake that makes life miserable for someone developing on an open source platform, especially someone like me.
Ever notice how every open source project has a separate set of documentation for installation and configuration just for OSX? If it was such a standard UNIX, wouldn't you be able to follow the same instructions that you follow for the other *NIXes? BSD and Linux, as different as they are, both usually have the same user experience. Running Apache on any Linux or BSD distro is pretty much the same process. Just change the name of your package manager. On OSX good luck even finding the configuration files!
You're lucky if the open source project even has OSX instructions, or it's available in HomeBrew. I've run into a few projects that don't run on OSX at all. Nobody uses OSX as a server, so why do they need to build on it? I also can't tell you how many times I've installed something with HomeBrew only to have it print out a bunch of instructions on how to complete the installation myself by hand. HomeBrew is better than Fink or MacPorts, but it's 10 years too early to compete with any of the real package managers.
My favorite time this happened is when I did brew install memcached. It printed out instructions to manually configure memcached to start with launchd. Is that some kind of joke? launchd? Seriously? HomeBrew is a marvel of engineering compared to launchd. Old school System V init would be preferable to that monstrosity.
Somewhere deep down inside OSX may just be a pure UNIX. But when it comes to actually using it and working with it, everything is unique and different from every other major *NIX. They may as well have just built it on BeOS.
Scott, your Unix worldview is incredibly limited. You really only have experienced BSD and Linux. You've probably never worked with AIX, Solaris (which is probably the closest to BSD and Linux among the commercial Unixes, admittedly), HP-UX, or Tru64. Those Unixes, especially AIX, are as different from Linux and each other as OS X is.
Now, you're talking about open source projects. Well, guess what, most open source developers write their stuff for open source operating systems, so of course their documentation, code, etc., would be best for the systems the actually run on. It's almost as bad as saying something originally written for Windows is a pain to port to Linux. Well, of course it's a pain to port to Linux, because it was never written for Linux. At least with OS X, the POSIX APIs are mostly the same, so it's not as difficult to port as it would be from Windows. However, if you were porting a Linux program to AIX (or vice versa, as I have done in the past), for example, it's just as rough as porting it to OS X.
Linux and BSD are not standard Unix. They are standard Linux and standard BSD, respectively. The only things that are standard Unix are those specified by POSIX, and OS X (and AIX, and HP-UX, and Tru64, and Solaris) meets the POSIX specifications at least as well as Linux and BSD do.
Scott, your Unix worldview is incredibly limited. You really only have experienced BSD and Linux. You've probably never worked with AIX, Solaris (which is probably the closest to BSD and Linux among the commercial Unixes, admittedly), HP-UX, or Tru64. Those Unixes, especially AIX, are as different from Linux and each other as OS X is.
Now, you're talking about open source projects. Well, guess what, most open source developers write their stuff for open source operating systems, so of course their documentation, code, etc., would be best for the systems the actually run on. It's almost as bad as saying something originally written for Windows is a pain to port to Linux. Well, of course it's a pain to port to Linux, because it was never written for Linux. At least with OS X, the POSIX APIs are mostly the same, so it's not as difficult to port as it would be from Windows. However, if you were porting a Linux program to AIX (or vice versa, as I have done in the past), for example, it's just as rough as porting it to OS X.
Linux and BSD are not standard Unix. They are standard Linux and standard BSD, respectively. The only things that are standard Unix are those specified by POSIX, and OS X (and AIX, and HP-UX, and Tru64, and Solaris) meets the POSIX specifications at least as well as Linux and BSD do.
I'm not saying OSX is not UNIX. I'm saying it is BAD TO BE UNIX. In college all the machines ran Solaris. It was painful to use those! The smart students all worked on their own Linux machines because Solaris was so horrendous. It is right now the year 2012, almost 2013. All of Amazon web services runs Linux. Google runs almost entirely on Linux. The only places you still see true UNIX are on old servers at big slow companies and on OSX. Excuse me that I don't see developing on a decades old outdated platform as a positive.
Bah, those "smart" students aren't that smart. Solaris has a superior kernel and superior native code development tools to Linux (Solaris's dbx beats the snot out of gdb as a debugger). ZFS also beats the crap out of any file system Linux currently offers as well. Now, I love Linux, and I do all my current professional development on Linux, but Linux still has its flaws when compared to other Unixes (admittedly, it also does a lot of things better, though). Oh, and Solaris's kernel scales to something insane like 256 cores. Linux doesn't approach anywhere near that scalability -- the only way to achieve that scalability is to cluster hundreds or thousands of Linux systems together like Google does -- and deal with the added complexities of that distributed architecture (though it also has some benefits in redundancy).
Actually, IBM still makes brand new, state-of-the-art AIX servers. Oracle is still churning out state-of-the-art Solaris servers. Amazon and Google may run entirely on Linux, but they're also entirely web-based businesses. Maybe that's why your opinion is so colored since you also work in the web-based business area.
Also, if you think OS X is bad because it's Unix and not Linux, that same argument applies to Windows. However, I don't see the same hate for Windows (at least for the same reasons) as for OS X from you.
You are a low level programmer. You are very rare. Nobody I know personally EVER uses dbx or gdb except you and James. Also, ZFS did not exist when I was in college. This was not the Solaris that exists today. It was a horrible user experience involving CDE as the gui and csh in the terminal. You had to know magic to switch to bash and KDE (1.0) to avoid risk of suicide. We were primarly writing Java apps on those machines, so none of the Solaris stuff actually mattered.
My hate on Windows is equal to that of OSX as a development environment, except for one difference. I know you hate VirtualBox, but it runs beautifully on Windows. a Linux distro in a VBox on Windows full screen may as well be running natively except for 3D graphics. On OSX VirtualBox is a dog. The other VMs on OSX cost money, and are not as good (Fuck you Parallels!)
Also on Windows PuTTY actually works properly for SSHing into said virtual machine. On OSX you've got the shitty OSX Terminal app or the slightly less shitty iTerm. Both with their fucked up keyboard shortcuts! Other apps all use cmd instead of control, but not the terminals! At least the OSX terminals have tabs, which PuTTY does not, but screen/tmux takes care of that.
So as far as development goes, Windows only wins because it runs VirtualBox with Linux inside of it.
As far as everything else goes. Windows wins because it has a vast library of games going back to the DOS days. If I didn't play games, I would run Linux on the bare metal. There are other things to hate and love about OSX or Windows be they keyboard shortcuts, font rendering, virtual desktops, hardware support, relative openness, quantity of free (beer) software, etc. But if it were not for games, I wouldn't bother with either one. They are relative equals if you do not compare the game libraries.
On a laptop, everything changes because there is not much game playing and Linux on laptops is not the greatest. Every laptop has specific weird hardware quirks, and you want the OS to exactly match that hardware so that battery usage and such are all optimal. For example, my old laptop had a g-force sensor that would unseat the magnetic hard drive in case of a drop. That shit obviously does not work in Linux. And laptops that are designed for Linux to work perfectly have always been godawful.
You are a low level programmer. You are very rare. Nobody I know personally EVER uses dbx or gdb except you and James. Also, ZFS did not exist when I was in college. This was not the Solaris that exists today. It was a horrible user experience involving CDE as the gui and csh in the terminal. You had to know magic to switch to bash and KDE (1.0) to avoid risk of suicide. We were primarly writing Java apps on those machines, so none of the Solaris stuff actually mattered.
Fair point on me being a low level programmer. FWIW, when I used Solaris in college, it was before KDE even existed on Linux. FVWM was where it was at back in the day (on both Linux and Solaris) and our Solaris sysadmins did make FVWM the default desktop environment for all new accounts instead of CDE. KDE 1.0 did come out right around my last semester, though, but it was a pain to set up even on Linux as the distros hadn't started including it yet. I'll also concede your point on writing Java apps -- the Solaris-specific features wouldn't matter there except for the massive core scalability, but odds are your assignments wouldn't include apps that would actually need to run on 256 cores.
My hate on Windows is equal to that of OSX as a development environment, except for one difference. I know you hate VirtualBox, but it runs beautifully on Windows. a Linux distro in a VBox on Windows full screen may as well be running natively except for 3D graphics. On OSX VirtualBox is a dog. The other VMs on OSX cost money, and are not as good (Fuck you Parallels!)
Actually, I come off harsher on VirtualBox than I really am. It actually works reasonably well for me until I actually start pushing it via lots of snapshots, VM cloning, and whatnot. The latest releases in the 4.1 series actually have been relatively stable for me, although there are issues with our product running under 4.2 for some reason.
Also on Windows PuTTY actually works properly for SSHing into said virtual machine. On OSX you've got the shitty OSX Terminal app or the slightly less shitty iTerm. Both with their fucked up keyboard shortcuts! Other apps all use cmd instead of control, but not the terminals! At least the OSX terminals have tabs, which PuTTY does not, but screen/tmux takes care of that.
Check out SuperPuTTY for tabbed PutTTY. I've started using it fairly recently and it's been working well. It's just a tabbed shell around PuTTY and requires PuTTY to be installed to even work, so you get all your PuTTY goodness with tabs. I actually use a combination of SuperPuTTY tabs and screen for what I do -- one tab for each machine I log in to and one screen session within each tab. That's just the way I work, though. It's probably not any better or worse than how you go about your job.
Actually, with respect to a terminal, I honestly prefer Cmd to Control as a shortcut. You see, by using Cmd to control the Terminal window (such as Cmd-T for new tabs, Cmd-N for new window, Cmd-C/V for copy/paste, or whatever), it passes all the Control keystrokes to the shell inside the terminal without either disabling them for the Terminal window or making then unavailable to the shell session. This may just be a personal taste here, though, but I consider it an advantage.
So as far as development goes, Windows only wins because it runs VirtualBox with Linux inside of it.
Depends on what you're developing, of course. In your case, where you are theoretically able to run the same software you're developing on your developer box (or on a VM on said box), you do have a point there (although I thought that VirtualBox also ran reasonably well on a Mac too, but I never pushed it much). Hell, when my wife wanted to set up a local Wordpress installation to test a site she was developing for a customer, I set up a Linux VM on VirtualBox on her Mac as it would be much closer to what the customer would actually be running.
In my line of work as a low level developer, though, most of the time my developer workstation is only useful for editing the code. Sometimes I can't even compile on it, depending on what the target OS is. More often than not I'll either put the source/compiled code on an NFS mount or have to scp/sftp it over to a test machine in order to actually work with it once I'm done editing.
As far as everything else goes. Windows wins because it has a vast library of games going back to the DOS days. If I didn't play games, I would run Linux on the bare metal. There are other things to hate and love about OSX or Windows be they keyboard shortcuts, font rendering, virtual desktops, hardware support, relative openness, quantity of free (beer) software, etc. But if it were not for games, I wouldn't bother with either one. They are relative equals if you do not compare the game libraries.
Another good point here, and one that I think is more valid than [at least my interpretation of] your earlier points. Back when I got my first Mac, I was heading away from computer gaming and focusing more on console gaming, hence why I felt like ditching gaming on my computer would be fine. Now I feel myself being drawn back more towards computer gaming and, with that, I'm planning on switching back to Windows on the desktop. I also agree with you that if I didn't need/want to run apps (whether games or otherwise) that only run on Windows or OS X, I too would probably be running Linux on the bare metal.
On a laptop, everything changes because there is not much game playing and Linux on laptops is not the greatest. Every laptop has specific weird hardware quirks, and you want the OS to exactly match that hardware so that battery usage and such are all optimal. For example, my old laptop had a g-force sensor that would unseat the magnetic hard drive in case of a drop. That shit obviously does not work in Linux. And laptops that are designed for Linux to work perfectly have always been godawful.
No disagreement here.
To be honest, if I didn't want to get into iOS development, I would strongly be inclined to ditch OS X completely next time I upgrade my hardware as many of the advantages I perceived for OS X at the time I first made the switch are either non-existent or moot due to other issues with it at this point. I'd probably still go with my big honking desktop and barely-better-than-a-netbook laptop model that I'm currently using. However, if I'm only using it for iOS development and not as a main machine or anything else requiring heavy lifting, I'll probably just get a MacBook Air and optionally purchase a 3rd party Thunderbolt hard drive if I don't think its SSD will be sufficient for my purposes.
I also want to try iOS development, but the cost of even the cheapest Mac is not worth it if that is the only purpose.
I think I remember you saying something to the effect on one of the podcasts. Fair enough. To be honest, if I didn't already have Macs to begin with, I'd probably also feel similarly. At least I still have some Mac apps to justify having the Mac for stuff other than just iOS development. Although, I think the MacBook Air is price competitive with some of the other SSD-only Ultrabooks.
It has to be a new enough Mac to run Mountain Lion as well as some future cats. Also, how does VM or Hackintosh handle connecting an iPhone and sending apps to it and such?
What do you mean? There is nothing special about Macs that let them connect to iOS devices, it's just done through software. Or am I wrong here? Does it require some hardware authentication chip for apple to sell you a dev account and let you sync your iOS device with it?
Oh wow, I didn't know that SuperPuTTY existed. My life has gotten instantly much better, considering I do practically all my schoolwork SSH'd into my department's computer lab.
Oh wow, I didn't know that SuperPuTTY existed. My life has gotten instantly much better, considering I do practically all my schoolwork SSH'd into my department's computer lab.
I only discovered it myself a couple months ago. Didn't take me long to become a big fan.
On the bright side, SuperPuTTY is just a wrapper around PuTTY, and it's hosted on Google Code, so it does bring down the sketch factor somewhat, given how PuTTY is well-vetted.
I just ended up scoring an X201i on ebay for $70. It should get here today. It looks like the only difference between in the "i" version is that its an i3, but its still 2.4ghz so I think it should be plenty. Scott, you still using your X201, and if so how is it holding up?
My current MacBook Pro is almost SEVEN years old, and I'm in the market for a new one. Of course I was waiting for the new announcement, and I've now got time to properly look at prices and configurations and OH FUCK THOSE PRICES.
€3000 for a model I'd probably want? Seems a lot.
Then I looked at my accounts, and I paid €2,903 for my 2010 MacBook Pro, and that lasted me until now.
However, while it's the most expensive thing I've ever bought that isn't a car, I felt like I was getting a lot for my money, as I upgraded to the highest RAM, a bigger SSD, and the hires screen.
This time, for the equivalent model, it'll be more money, and I won't be able to upgrade the SSD in the future, nor the RAM. I got the max RAM last time (8GB), and thought I'd be able to go way higher this time, but the max is only 16GB.
I hoped my 2010 MacBook Pro would last my 3 to 4 years, and because I swapped out the internal DVD drive for a 1TB internal HDD, it lasted almost 7 years, so I've been super happy with it. I can't help but feel a new MacBook Pro, totally lacking upgradability and higher RAM options, won't have the extended life of my previous laptop.
Before anyone jumps in, I've researched some non-MacBook options. At this point, I'll consider the lack of stress of switching operating systems, software, workflows and lifestyle the "Apple Tax" in my calculations and purchasing plans.
I was considering asking the new Mafbook to replace my Lenovo X220 at work. That's a 5 year old laptop. It has a 2.7GHz i7 and 8GB of RAM. The new Macbooks aren't faster or better than a 5 year old Lenovo.
You can pay a fortune to get a maxed out 15" model And then the Mac will be slightly better. At least you'll get an amazing screen and the best touchpad. Youll also get qn entire desk full of dongles.
I think I'm going to ask work to let me build a desktop instead. I can use the Intel integrated video card. No gaming at work. Should be really tiny. I'll need a second screen, though.
The SD card slot on my current laptop broke last year, and I need an adapter for the micro SD card anyway, so I'm getting used to the dongle lifestyle.
I've been keeping track of cables and what I plug into my laptop, knowing dongles will be part of my future life, and it turns out all I'll need is an SD card adapter, and I was planning on getting one with a micro SD slot anyway, a USB C to USB B cable... and that's about it! And I guess a USB 3 to Lightning for transferring data to and from my phone, but most of that happens over wifi now anyway.
And I just compared the weight of this laptop to a new one. I can't WAIT to get such a light laptop.
Still, to get the best one that makes sense for me, it's still about €500 more than I was budgeting, all in (including dongles and cables and cases).
Comments
So far, my E320 has been pretty good, though I did screw up my headphone port via accidental shear stress; I don't really blame the laptop for that. The "O" key is a little messed up, but I should be able to get a replacement key.
I'd avoid going overboard on configuration options, though; they're almost always a ripoff.
Mac has superior touchpad, and dat screen. Mac is winning.
Lenovo doesn't need an adapter to have VGA out. That's points, but Mac still winning.
Ok, Mac loses on gaming, but I don't play any games on my laptop that are 3D or for serious. Maybe I'll play FTL, SpaceChem, or those kinds of games. Oh, those both run on OSX. Also Boot Camp.
Yeah, everyone has been trying so hard to make tablets, and failing at it, that there aren't any good laptops anymore. Even Mac haters picking Mac. At least for now. We'll see what the story is in 3+ years when my Lenovo is no good anymore.
I don't get the OS X hate, other than not liking how things on Windows and Linux that use the Ctrl key usually use the Command key on the Mac (and I'm not going to get into another flame war over the pros and cons of that). Okay, I remember you mentioning how you didn't like the Mac when it's "non-standard Unix," but that's a load of crap as it's actually "non-standard Linux." Linux, while the most common of the Unix clones out there, is actually very different in many ways from just about every other Unix system out there, including ones that pre-dated it (and that would include OS X, as it's derived from NextStep, which pre-dates Linux).
It means nothing. What does mean something is that the userland surrounding that kernel is a unique snowflake that makes life miserable for someone developing on an open source platform, especially someone like me.
Ever notice how every open source project has a separate set of documentation for installation and configuration just for OSX? If it was such a standard UNIX, wouldn't you be able to follow the same instructions that you follow for the other *NIXes? BSD and Linux, as different as they are, both usually have the same user experience. Running Apache on any Linux or BSD distro is pretty much the same process. Just change the name of your package manager. On OSX good luck even finding the configuration files!
You're lucky if the open source project even has OSX instructions, or it's available in HomeBrew. I've run into a few projects that don't run on OSX at all. Nobody uses OSX as a server, so why do they need to build on it? I also can't tell you how many times I've installed something with HomeBrew only to have it print out a bunch of instructions on how to complete the installation myself by hand. HomeBrew is better than Fink or MacPorts, but it's 10 years too early to compete with any of the real package managers.
My favorite time this happened is when I did brew install memcached. It printed out instructions to manually configure memcached to start with launchd. Is that some kind of joke? launchd? Seriously? HomeBrew is a marvel of engineering compared to launchd. Old school System V init would be preferable to that monstrosity.
Somewhere deep down inside OSX may just be a pure UNIX. But when it comes to actually using it and working with it, everything is unique and different from every other major *NIX. They may as well have just built it on BeOS.
Now, you're talking about open source projects. Well, guess what, most open source developers write their stuff for open source operating systems, so of course their documentation, code, etc., would be best for the systems the actually run on. It's almost as bad as saying something originally written for Windows is a pain to port to Linux. Well, of course it's a pain to port to Linux, because it was never written for Linux. At least with OS X, the POSIX APIs are mostly the same, so it's not as difficult to port as it would be from Windows. However, if you were porting a Linux program to AIX (or vice versa, as I have done in the past), for example, it's just as rough as porting it to OS X.
Linux and BSD are not standard Unix. They are standard Linux and standard BSD, respectively. The only things that are standard Unix are those specified by POSIX, and OS X (and AIX, and HP-UX, and Tru64, and Solaris) meets the POSIX specifications at least as well as Linux and BSD do.
Actually, IBM still makes brand new, state-of-the-art AIX servers. Oracle is still churning out state-of-the-art Solaris servers. Amazon and Google may run entirely on Linux, but they're also entirely web-based businesses. Maybe that's why your opinion is so colored since you also work in the web-based business area.
Also, if you think OS X is bad because it's Unix and not Linux, that same argument applies to Windows. However, I don't see the same hate for Windows (at least for the same reasons) as for OS X from you.
My hate on Windows is equal to that of OSX as a development environment, except for one difference. I know you hate VirtualBox, but it runs beautifully on Windows. a Linux distro in a VBox on Windows full screen may as well be running natively except for 3D graphics. On OSX VirtualBox is a dog. The other VMs on OSX cost money, and are not as good (Fuck you Parallels!)
Also on Windows PuTTY actually works properly for SSHing into said virtual machine. On OSX you've got the shitty OSX Terminal app or the slightly less shitty iTerm. Both with their fucked up keyboard shortcuts! Other apps all use cmd instead of control, but not the terminals! At least the OSX terminals have tabs, which PuTTY does not, but screen/tmux takes care of that.
So as far as development goes, Windows only wins because it runs VirtualBox with Linux inside of it.
As far as everything else goes. Windows wins because it has a vast library of games going back to the DOS days. If I didn't play games, I would run Linux on the bare metal. There are other things to hate and love about OSX or Windows be they keyboard shortcuts, font rendering, virtual desktops, hardware support, relative openness, quantity of free (beer) software, etc. But if it were not for games, I wouldn't bother with either one. They are relative equals if you do not compare the game libraries.
On a laptop, everything changes because there is not much game playing and Linux on laptops is not the greatest. Every laptop has specific weird hardware quirks, and you want the OS to exactly match that hardware so that battery usage and such are all optimal. For example, my old laptop had a g-force sensor that would unseat the magnetic hard drive in case of a drop. That shit obviously does not work in Linux. And laptops that are designed for Linux to work perfectly have always been godawful.
Actually, with respect to a terminal, I honestly prefer Cmd to Control as a shortcut. You see, by using Cmd to control the Terminal window (such as Cmd-T for new tabs, Cmd-N for new window, Cmd-C/V for copy/paste, or whatever), it passes all the Control keystrokes to the shell inside the terminal without either disabling them for the Terminal window or making then unavailable to the shell session. This may just be a personal taste here, though, but I consider it an advantage. Depends on what you're developing, of course. In your case, where you are theoretically able to run the same software you're developing on your developer box (or on a VM on said box), you do have a point there (although I thought that VirtualBox also ran reasonably well on a Mac too, but I never pushed it much). Hell, when my wife wanted to set up a local Wordpress installation to test a site she was developing for a customer, I set up a Linux VM on VirtualBox on her Mac as it would be much closer to what the customer would actually be running.
In my line of work as a low level developer, though, most of the time my developer workstation is only useful for editing the code. Sometimes I can't even compile on it, depending on what the target OS is. More often than not I'll either put the source/compiled code on an NFS mount or have to scp/sftp it over to a test machine in order to actually work with it once I'm done editing. Another good point here, and one that I think is more valid than [at least my interpretation of] your earlier points. Back when I got my first Mac, I was heading away from computer gaming and focusing more on console gaming, hence why I felt like ditching gaming on my computer would be fine. Now I feel myself being drawn back more towards computer gaming and, with that, I'm planning on switching back to Windows on the desktop. I also agree with you that if I didn't need/want to run apps (whether games or otherwise) that only run on Windows or OS X, I too would probably be running Linux on the bare metal. No disagreement here.
To be honest, if I didn't want to get into iOS development, I would strongly be inclined to ditch OS X completely next time I upgrade my hardware as many of the advantages I perceived for OS X at the time I first made the switch are either non-existent or moot due to other issues with it at this point. I'd probably still go with my big honking desktop and barely-better-than-a-netbook laptop model that I'm currently using. However, if I'm only using it for iOS development and not as a main machine or anything else requiring heavy lifting, I'll probably just get a MacBook Air and optionally purchase a 3rd party Thunderbolt hard drive if I don't think its SSD will be sufficient for my purposes.
€3000 for a model I'd probably want? Seems a lot.
Then I looked at my accounts, and I paid €2,903 for my 2010 MacBook Pro, and that lasted me until now.
However, while it's the most expensive thing I've ever bought that isn't a car, I felt like I was getting a lot for my money, as I upgraded to the highest RAM, a bigger SSD, and the hires screen.
This time, for the equivalent model, it'll be more money, and I won't be able to upgrade the SSD in the future, nor the RAM. I got the max RAM last time (8GB), and thought I'd be able to go way higher this time, but the max is only 16GB.
I hoped my 2010 MacBook Pro would last my 3 to 4 years, and because I swapped out the internal DVD drive for a 1TB internal HDD, it lasted almost 7 years, so I've been super happy with it. I can't help but feel a new MacBook Pro, totally lacking upgradability and higher RAM options, won't have the extended life of my previous laptop.
Before anyone jumps in, I've researched some non-MacBook options. At this point, I'll consider the lack of stress of switching operating systems, software, workflows and lifestyle the "Apple Tax" in my calculations and purchasing plans.
You can pay a fortune to get a maxed out 15" model And then the Mac will be slightly better. At least you'll get an amazing screen and the best touchpad. Youll also get qn entire desk full of dongles.
I think I'm going to ask work to let me build a desktop instead. I can use the Intel integrated video card. No gaming at work. Should be really tiny. I'll need a second screen, though.
I've been keeping track of cables and what I plug into my laptop, knowing dongles will be part of my future life, and it turns out all I'll need is an SD card adapter, and I was planning on getting one with a micro SD slot anyway, a USB C to USB B cable... and that's about it! And I guess a USB 3 to Lightning for transferring data to and from my phone, but most of that happens over wifi now anyway.
And I just compared the weight of this laptop to a new one. I can't WAIT to get such a light laptop.
Still, to get the best one that makes sense for me, it's still about €500 more than I was budgeting, all in (including dongles and cables and cases).