This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
i know a laptop that’s amazing in almost every aspect except that it doesn’t run Linux. the Macbook Pro. to me there’s barely any real comparison to be made unless Linux or Windows or the keyboard layout is a hill worth dying on to you.
i have servers and my gaming PC on Linux, but i wouldn’t trade my Macbook with its unified memory, incredible battery life, best in class touchpad, and top notch screen for anything else. Windows is dying, and chip designers (outside of Apple) seem more interested in cashing in on AI than providing a user experience. i was excited to see what Qualcomm would do, but it doesn’t seem like OEMs or Windows are particularly interested in supporting that platform as a next leap forward, while Intel is bleeding on the side of the road and AMD is constantly side-eyeing Nvidia. i think it would be peak irony for Nvidia to come out of left field with a desktop class ARM processor that’s Linux native, but that’s a pipe dream. what the ecosystem needs is a real competitor to Apple that is more focused on desktop machines than enterprise contracts. maybe RISC-V Frameworks will break out in a meaningful way. but it just seems like anything else these days in a compromise based on some biased preference or moral judgement.
anyway all that said i’m glad there’s an ecosystem of people who are stubborn enough to work on this platform. i have my own stubbornness, but i just don’t have the motivation to apply it here
Hehe… top notch screen.
I agree with everything you said, and I use a MacBook Pro for the same reasons. I made a similar comment but you have articulated the points much better.
I agree. About 10 years ago I had a some unstable dependencies hit in the middle of a major crunch/product release at work. When it was vital I was productive, I was instead trouble shooting my laptop. I moved to mac the next day and was surprised how far the OS had come, and that I could run zsh, nvim etc. Not to mention since apple silicon its rare I need to take a charger with me anywhere.
I still have a linux thinkpad for personal use, and all my personal servers are linux. My heart is linux, but a lot will have to change to take me away from a macbook.
The macbook pro is the perfect laptop except for the Linux hill that I must die on. Every time I look at other offerings, they all fail just like Nate is saying in some regard. Screen. Speakers. Keyboard. Touchpad. Thermals. Battery life. The MBP is truly best-in-class hardware. But I just want to use Linux…
i completely understand. as a Rust developer that uses Neovim, i have some hills like that too. and if i was more of an OS dev and/or had the time i might be interested to help improve the platform. my last attempt was a Thinkpad, but i had to have an external mouse for that thing, the fans were causing me to fail stealth checks, and the battery was basically a UPS.
Is MacOS no longer supporting terminal apps? I imagine you could use neovim in macOS.
no it totally does. i use Ghostty even
how do you find the keyboard? I’ve tried typing on a few macbooks but my fingers could never get used to it
it’s fine as far as laptop keyboards go. i’ve pretty much given up on laptop keyboards being really satisfying. i use a mechanical when possible
I agree… I love my Macbooks for how well the hardware works, and I love how I can open up terminal and do pretty much anything I want. What I don’t like is how consumer hostile it is when it comes to being able to upgrade or repair. I also don’t like Apple’s insistence on telling me what I do and do not want in a product. According to Steve Jobs no one wants a touchscreen on their laptop, and even though he’s been dead for over a decade and the market has shown otherwise, they still don’t have a touchscreen Macbook (and if they ever do release one they’ll fawn over how innovative they are for doing so).
$500 option
Oh, it’ll be more than that!
Anecdotally, I had a touchscreen convertible laptop before my current MacBook. I even got the pencil for it that let me draw on the screen, which I wanted to use for taking notes. The pencil sucked in practice (this was a >1000€ laptop, not much less expensive than my MacBook! maybe that’s just what I get for buying HP though.) and sooner rather than later I got an iPad for taking handwritten notes, and the touchscreen itself turned out to be a gimmick that I used in the beginning but eventually turned off.
Sometimes, they’re right. For example, kind of the reverse: people wanted floating windows on the iPad for years. I always said this would be incredibly awful to use in practice without a mouse. Now they added windows on the iPadOS 26 beta and I tested it and it was exactly as finicky as I expected it to be. Hopefully they’ll still polish it so that it’s at least as good to use as the old side-by-side view (which they unfortunately removed), but this really isn’t it right now.
People might want a device with all the input methods and the most versatile multitasking, but I don’t think this is reasonably doable in a way that’s as polished as devices built with a main input method and UI purpose-built for that input method. In the past I might have said that Apple are the only people that could do this correctly, and only by investing a significant amount of resources, but after the iPadOS 26 situation… oof.
I have had touchscreen laptops at work, and I’ve had touchscreen chromebooks for personal use and I love the option of the touchscreen, but it isn’t something I use exclusively. Sometimes, while typing it’s much easier and faster to ‘click’ on a link, or new field, by tapping my screen rather than grabbing my mouse or going to a touchpad. I agree that trying to use the screen on a laptop while it is in ‘laptop mode’ is difficult, but there is a use case where it’s preferred, and I end up with fingerprints on my non-touchscreen screens when I forget which computer I’m on.
Yeah using it for quick tapping something on the screen I can see being faster than the touchpad. I don’t know if it’s worth the fingerprints on the display though personally :^)
The article actually shouts out Apple as doing things really well, which was surprising considering he’s focused on Linux which is only barely an option on current Mac machines.
Look into Asahi Linux. Its a community driven project Fedora (and other distros) to run on newer Silicon Mac’s. I have it on my M2 MBP and its amazing. It may not be for everyone since it runs AARCH64 / battery isnt great (6+ hours). But its my best looking Linux install due to its screen
I was going to grab an M2 MBP for this reason! Why such a battery life difference? Can you expound upon that AARCH64 reasoning? Does the hardware work as claimed on the project website? Do you have a sense of what the future holds for asahi?
it’s not worth it to me. the battery life is a huge feature, and it does feel like Asahi development has slowed. i have enough computers to tinker with. i bought my Macbook specifically to be an entry point into my other machines, i.e. from the airport or brewery or coffee shop.
maybe when it makes sense to buy a new laptop i’ll find some time and motivation to contribute, but just using Asahi doesn’t really appeal to me.