Thanks @sasajuric. I looked at Tuxedo after looking at your tweets which you lined to in this thread and they might be a good supplier. System76 seem very highly though of too (and the Thelio is beautiful!) but import duties and dealing with a company so far away if there are hardware issues is a small barrier. And the TUXEDO InfinityCube is pretty good looking too (my office is in a corner of my main living area so aesthetics as a partial consideration).
simon
AstonJ
I just looked on their site to compare specs to an equivalent 16" MBP, and this is the closest I could find:
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks/Deep-Learning-AI/TUXEDO-Book-XUX509-Deep-Learning-AI-Edition.tuxedo#!#configurator (i9, 64GB ram, 2TB HD, 8GB GPU - tho they only have that model in 1080p, so no retina style screen)
..which makes me feel a lot better about Apple’s current MBP pricing 
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sasajuric
Author of Elixir In Action
What price difference did you observe? I just tried to quickly compare, and I got 3500 EUR vs 5000 EUR. That said, I personally feel the comparison is a bit of apples to oranges (no pun intended 
).
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AstonJ
I spec’d it as this:
Current Configuration
Product No.: 10900084
- Full-HD (1920 x 1080) 144Hz IPS-Panel non-glare G-Sync
- Intel Core i9-9900K (8x 3.60-5.00 GHz Eight-Core, 16 Threads, 16 MB Cache, 95 W TDP) ( +160,00 EUR)
- 64 GB (4x 16GB) 2666Mhz Samsung ( +170,00 EUR)
- 2000 GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus (NVMe PCIe) ( +410,00 EUR)
- without M.2 SSD ( -140,00 EUR)
- without mass-storage ( -90,00 EUR)
- without mass-storage ( -90,00 EUR)
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 | 8GB GDDR6 ( +400,00 EUR)
- GERMAN (DE-DE) with backlit
- Intel Dual AC 9260 & Bluetooth 5 (up to 1730Mbps)
- TUXEDO_OS Deep Learning AI Edition 18.04 LTS 64Bit
- without Windows
- 24 months / 2 years warranty
- EU power cord | F C14
- Assembled within 5 working days when in stock
- Components in stock
4.069,00 EUR
incl. 19 % Tax excl. Shipping costs
That’s about £3,500, whereas the 64GB, 8-core i9, 8GB 5500M GPU, 2TB 16" MBP is £3,969 here. Not sure how the CPUs and GPUs compare, though the 16" MBP has had some really good reviews (for a change!)
Is your spec anything like that Saša? For linux, you probably don’t need as much RAM I expect..
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simon
I think that Apple’s kit has always been pretty equally priced to similar specs of computers from other manufacturers so I am not entirely surprised that the price you got was comparable. And some of Apple’s hardware elements (trackpads spring to mind) are really, really good. Keyboards may be on the way back up too if they roll out the one from the 16" MBP to other models in that range and other ranges in the future.
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sasajuric
Author of Elixir In Action
Oh I think I see where the difference is. The thing is that my tuxedo account is linked to my personal business, and so VAT is removed. Still, when I tried to configure a similar machine on German Apple site, I got to 5000 EUR, so the price difference is still significant.
The machine I bought is nowhere near this configuration. I took InfinityBook Pro for 1600 EUR. It’s an ultrabook i7 with 32GB ram, a 1TB SSD, and an integrated graphics. On paper it’s less powerful than 2013 MBP I used until then, but in practice it works much better for my needs. In fact, I think I could have managed with 16GB RAM, because my memory consumption rarely goes above 8GB. As I mentioned previously, my biggest pain point with macs was docker, and this definitely works much better and snappier on Linux.
I feel this was the case around 2010-2015, but later I got the impression that macs are becoming overpriced. That said, I think that new 16" MBPs are reasonably priced. Disclaimer: I don’t really follow the hardware market, so my sentiment is not based on any detailed research.
1
AstonJ
Did you max out the CPU as well? Most people are sticking to the 2.3 (rather than 2.4) as the difference is minimal - that would probably bring the price closer to 4K.
But yeah, for Linux you definitely don’t need anywhere near those specs, particularly for what you’re doing (i.e no graphics intensive stuff). Personally I was interested in seeing how much the Apple tax was this year, but comparing the models, it seems it’s not much atm (which is great news for Apple fans!)
That looks like a nice machine! And I bet you can probably upgrade the RAM/SSD yourself as well!
0
sasajuric
Author of Elixir In Action
I did, to make the comparison more fair, since Tuxedo ships with a more powerful Intel Core i9-9900K.
The price diff is 220EUR. Even with 2.3GHZ version, Tux looks significantly cheaper.
This is the key insight. When I was faced with the need to buy a new machine, the top of the range MBP was close to 4k EUR, and I still wasn’t convinced that it would fit my needs, given that I need to use docker a lot.
I bought a Tuxedo which works for less than half of the price. Had I went for 16GB RAM (which in hindsight would have been enough) and dropped the extended 2 years warranty period, it would be about third of the price. That’s a lot of money saved, and still I feel that my needs are better served by this machine, even though it’s specs are weaker than top of the range MBPs.
That said, it should be clear that Tuxes are cheap laptops, inferior in quality to MBPs and other well regarded brands like Dells or Thinkpads. In addition, the UX of Linux is IMO not as good as that of macOS. So comparing just the prices and specs IMO isn’t enough.
In my particular case, I feel that I got a better fit for my own needs, and paid a fraction of the money to get it, so it seems like a good choice so far. But I need to wait for some 2-3 years to confirm this 
Given what I wrote above, it still seems quite large for my own needs.
3
simon
I think that these days the exchange rate plays a big part in pricing differentials too. Particularly since Apple are fairly quick to up prices when the Pound devalues and not so fast then it becomes stronger against the Dollar.
1
dimitarvp
Out of curiosity, why didn’t you just buy a desktop? I personally got sick of trying to do serious work on a laptop – which often enough included importing multi-gigabyte databases – and managed to get enough savings to do one financial maneuver, and just bought a beefy workstation (Xeon CPU, ECC RAM, NVMe SSD). Didn’t regret once!
IMO having a solid Linux desktop machine – or even your own home lab, i.e. rack server(s) – at home and carrying around a MacBook with which you either do casual work or remote into your home machine, is the ideal setup. MacBooks are lightweight, work well enough for most, have beautiful (and bright!) displays, and okay-ish keyboards (at least 2015 models and below, plus the new 16" MBP).
If I was looking into getting back to Linux I’d go with that setup. Unless I am not remembering something and you couldn’t keep your old MacBook so the financial burden would be too big in buying a new MBP and a home desktop?
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