Yeah, feels the same here. And I made a much bigger investment, the iMac Pro I got was $8000 at the time I bought it (2019).
As a programmer I get it, you want to move on to the good stuff and stop fighting legacy problems and whatnot but as a user I canāt excuse Apple. People canāt just buy a new machine every year, most canāt anyway. And even if they can, itās a huge e-waste problem. Whatever happened to sustainability?.. Itās only touted when it profits the corps, thatās what happened ā and thatās how it always was.
If it was only that. Opening system settings takes two full seconds. Makes me angry every time. In 2025 this is simply shameful.
Thisā¦ is just sad. Apple we knew practically no longer exists and is the same in name only.
And it only confirms my gut feeling thatās been building up for 2 years now. Time to spec a good (if not absurdly overpowered) Linux workstation, go all-in, learn all the kinks ā subreddits like this one can inspire and help people, I reckon ā and just forget about Apple. They are ruled by a logistics expert and an accountant.
Never understood what is the point to get a expensive machine for development, especially if you donāt plan on doing more exotic stuff like running or training models. If you plan on investing such a large sum, then I think you will get better value by getting a proper server and placing it in a datacenter in your country.
I personally have used for the last year the cheapest air m1 and itās more than enough to work on elixir projects, it usually doesnāt even get warm. I have a setup with a docking hub, where I can connect it to proper keyboard/mouse and monitors. The only limitation I donāt like is that m1 chips support only 2 monitors in total.
Iām not much of a gearhead and blindly just buy Apple stuff, although being Canadian Iām second guessing this atm (Iām hoping this changes, but I wonāt be needing a new laptop for a long while). I got a new job recently so I have a M3 MacBook Air from last year. I use the track pad and keyboard that comes with the laptop Iām using. I once tried getting into mechanical keyboards but, believe it or not, I actually like chiclet keyboards (well, except for the awful butterfly era, those were horrendous). I also go between working at a desk and on my couch, so an external keyboard never really made sense.
Software-wise Iām not very fancy. Iāve been using solely Vim for the past 15 years, I havenāt fully jumped on the AI train yet (Iāve used copilot a bit but donāt love it) and what elseā¦ Recently Iāve been trying to find a browser I actually like that isnāt Chrome but itās been tough. Iām probably forgetting some stuff.
Yep. Also it has a memory leak, at least on macos, where after a while you notice a delay that keeps getting long and long every time you switch to it. At least that was happening for me.
I tried Zen for a bit and donāt much like it. Arc is decent. I really, really, really want to like Orion. Iāve been using it a lot lately but itās still so buggy. They recently released a whole bunch of patches (as in, not even 24 hours ago) so Iām all this stuff gets sorted out soon.
But I plan to do a lot with it actually. Plus I hate slow machines in general. Not like I stress my machine 24/7 but (1) I have ideas for project that would do that and (2) I work in a flow state and can absolutely have my productivity destroyed if I have to wait 7 minutes for something.
Plus, future-proofing. I donāt want to buy machines every few years. As we chatted with you before, I want to get something that will last me good 10 years or more. Computers are tools and they have to be reliable and durable. So Iāll do my best to find one such machine.
I know you are kind of joking (or youāre not? ) but I honestly give zero fraks about prestige. At my last companyās meetup I was one of the few people with Linux laptops and was actually pretty proud of it. And as said above, it was and still is pretty damn fast, often faster than Macbooks, even the M series.
If you are buying enterprise-grade parts that are certified and have long-term support then I can agree with the price of 8k you mentioned above.
If you are buying consumer-grade electronics, there is simply no guarantee on how long it will last, and the saddest thing is that everything is made disposable these days, so you most likely wonāt be able to repair it, this is especially true if we talk about laptops.
I simply donāt see why you would pay 3x-4x the price for the hardware to last 10 years instead of upgrading every 4-5 years.
That was a one-time investment that Iāll never repeat again. It was an informed decision as I was ramping up my efforts in contracting back then. Which is a thing I want to put behind me now. Iāll be finding a stable job and will be holding on to it for a while. Not because of the world markets or anything else ā we the programmers will always have a job no matter what the passionate LLM advocates say ā but because I need a more peaceful phase in my life with much less turbulence. Anyway, off-topic but still a needed context.
It will not be 3x-4x though. It will be just be a high-end consumer-grade PC with carefully selected parts to make it professional i.e. with a motherboard that has more PCIe lanes. Should be no more than +20% price compared to a high-ish end gaming PC, for example. So definitely no more than 3000 EUR I think. If even that.
Yeah, agreed, this is why I am not interested in modern laptops. The one I have Iāll use until it breaks. Laptops should just be terminals to more powerful machines anyway.
Iāve seen it, itās a pretty interesting concept and I hope they will be successful, so they can drop the price more in the future.
Back in the day it was very pricey for the specs, but looks like itās getting there. If they ever release a version with a ARM CPU that can at least last closely to 7-8 hours on battery(while doing work), then this most likely will be my next choice of laptop for many years to come.
Who need a fast computer. I once make do with this setup for a few days. No brand El-cheapo Android tablet + mechanical keyboard. I still use it to test websites: if it usable on here, it is usable everywhere.
It is a badly lit picture. The keyboard has backlight, and the tablet screen, while not the brightest, is plentiful bright. And I wear reading glasses.
Itās not only the brightness and contrast though. They are important, yeah, but most cheap screens have bad text legibility ā the letters are not clear. Combine that with the smaller font and/or bad refresh rate and I guarantee Iāll be tired in 3 hours max.
Thereās a reason I went for a very expensive Mac. It was the first display in my life that legitimately did not torture my eyes. After that I discovered others, of course, but Mac displays just have some dark magic behind them that apparently nobody else wants to duplicate.
Be careful what you wish for. Iāve been hoping for years that Linux would catch up and become as reliable and usable as MacOS even 3-4 versions behind, but I still donāt think itās there yet. Iāve been through about 4 distros over the past couple of years and I donāt think Iād take any of them over MacOS for general purpose use as a desktop. Iāve run into frustrating problems with all of them and the companies/devs managing these different distros donāt particularly inspire confidence either. If youāre motivated you can certainly make it work, but itās like adding another thing you have to manage and become expert in. Iāve got too many of those already.
Yeah thatās part of the research. I use Manjaro for several years now and only had an issue twice I think. They are not perfect but do pretty well. I also heard good things about Void.
So these two at the top of my list of candidates.
You got any other recommendations? And donāt say Ubuntu ā thatās the Windows of the Linux world. Very bloated. I want something extremely lightweight but still very functional and not having to assemble everything like you have to do with a raw Arch Linux.
Depends on what you want to do with the ādesktopā. Iāve been using Linux full time on the desktop since circa 2011, for development at least. I always have a Mac laptop around for anything too unwieldy on Linux though. Only since circa 2019, I moved my Linux PC to the basement and retired my last Linux laptop and went full Mac on the desktop.
My current job is unrelated to development and I have a company issued windows laptop for office work. So, to move to Linux on the desktop/laptop again, it is just back to pre-2019 situation for me.
I got frustrated the last 4 times I broke my debian installation in less than 2 months trying to update some incompatible drivers and I switched to nixos + plasma6.
I can say that for me it checks all the boxes, love the immutable configuration and ability to do rollbacks, love the declarative nature, the package manager has all the packages I need. Plasma covers all my UI needs, not that I care a lot about advanced functionality in this regard.
Nix shells are also a cool thing, you basically can create declarative isolated shells with specific dependencies and the versions you might need.
Unless I get into some hard limitations, I will most probably use this distribution on all my linux devices for years to come.
Your fault for using Debian really. Their packages model is hopelessly outdated but they are clinging to it with a death grip.
Here I am a bit envious. I really want that but hate Nix with all my heart and am still waiting for Manjaro to have their own immutable distro variant. Which they already have, come to think of it, Iāve been too lazy and sick to try it though. But thatās definitely how it should have always been. No idea what took the collective world so long to figure out elementary good practicesā¦
And I made a much bigger investment, the iMac Pro I got was $8000 at the time I bought it (2019).
(well, except for the awful butterfly era, those were horrendous). I also go between working at a desk and on my couch, so an external keyboard never really made sense.
) but I honestly give zero fraks about prestige. At my last companyās meetup I was one of the few people with Linux laptops and was actually pretty proud of it. And as said above, it was and still is pretty damn fast, often faster than Macbooks, even the M series.
Their packages model is hopelessly outdated but they are clinging to it with a death grip.
