I had several laptops to work with but I have never felt so good since I bought a macbook.

I must admit my oldest ones didn't have an SSD, so maybe that's what is making the difference.

So, what's your setup? Are you an Apple fan? Do you think there are better options and alternatives? How many monitors do you work with?

Share your experience.

Mostly used Lenovo ThinkPads with Linux.
Tried a MacBook 2019 (touchbar) everything from the keyboard layout to the system architecture felt thought through and cohesive.
Things works well, but tweaking quickly turns out to be a nightmare..

The whole Mac os design never suited me.

About 5 months in flexgate hit me, and because I didn't buy extended apple care, the repair is to be for my own bill...
It'd be more value to buy a M1 than to repair. Lol.

For now ima stick with trusty ol' ThinkPad.

Might reconsider when M2 eventually launches.

I wouldn't recommend Apple's M1 because they solder the SSD instead of using an M.2 slot just so that they can shut out market competition and demand three times as much as upper class Samsung SSDs would cost. Then there's the current problem with the M1 that causes excessive SSD wear - and the SSD cannot be replaced.

Apple in general is usually overpriced because they charge premium prices for mediocre hardware, i.e. deliver bad value. That's what they are known for so that I treat the Apple logo as a "don't buy this shit" warning sticker.

I have a Ryzen 4700U laptop with Linux and am quite happy with that.

ThinkPad with Linux. No external monitors. Great keyboard. Awesome trackpoint. Mediocre screen 乁(ᴗ ͜ʖ ᴗ)ㄏ.

Was running a ThinkPad, till I got a MacBook Pro 2019 32gb i-7. Setup bootcamp on the mac, haven't used the ThinkPad since. run 2 external monitors with mac open in the center. Partitioning the 500gb ssd kinda sucked for bootcamp so I got a 2tb external.

I'm considering buying myself a ThinkPad, currently on a shitty old laptop I'm looking to replace. I mostly want to go for thinkpads because I've found some that seem like they'd be value for money and I've heard good things about their Linux compatability (Foss freak here)

@Tonnoman0909 ThinkPads are great and I would recommend them to anyone who wouldn't want to get a Mac. If you can swing it, get one with at least 16gb or ram, and a 500gb ssd.

@Tonnoman0909 there's also Purism & system76 maybe tuxedocomputers :)

@wackOverflow I'm currently considering a 500gig ssd and 8 gigs of ram because of limited budget and needing something that is quite small

I use macbook pro i7 provided from work. Works pretty smooth with one external monitor. I also use it to iron my clothes and warm my house in winter.

M1 MacBook Air user here, thing is awesome and easily my favourite laptop ever. Fast, fanless, amazing battery life, and runs everything I care to run on it (I have a Windows desktop and Linux work server for other stuff) (it actually goes toe to toe with the Xeon based server in some stuff lul). I've been spending multiple hours a day on it regularly since I got it and it's been great.

I hate big noisy gaming/work laptops that are portable desktops in disguise and had a terrible experience with Dell XPS. The Air is basically a stretched, more powerful iPad with an OS that does more than open apps and that's exactly what I want in a laptop.

Plus the MacBook's touchpad absolutely destroys every other laptop touchpad out there. It's a legitimate joy to use.

MacBook Air 2020 i5 (pre-M1) here, and I'm happy with it. It's not a power machine, but I have a desktop for it. The touchpad and macOS integration is awesome.
It's getting quite loud when doing video conference though (I mitigate that with Noise Cancelling headphones)

@RememberMe damn... Sounds like apple actually made something good. I mean I still hate the UI and general workflow and feel of the OS, but damn those specs sound like they give value for money

@Tonnoman0909 the base model is definitely worth it. I don't like the upgrades so much, it starts getting expensive real fast (maybe one SSD upgrade because 256GB is not a lot). Otherwise yeah, so far it's been a brilliant machine for me. I don't think it's good for everyone yet though.

@RememberMe it sounds like it would be something for me hadn't it been so expensive while shipping with a lot of features I wouldn't really need, but I can see how it might work for others

Dell xps 15 and pc both runniig NixOS Linux which makes it so you can rollback and configure your computer with nix language. The most stable system I have ever run while adapting system to your liking. From software perspective emacs is super confi once you adapt it to your preference. I love software which is text base, Magit, rest client, org mode, postgrest and much more. and top it of with sway as desktop manager. Running one 4K display is more than enough. It is faster to switch workspace than it is to look from left to right.

The SSD is most likely skewing your perception of the increased performance. Replacing a HDD with a SSD is the single most best upgrade anyone can do to their old laptop.

My girlfriend couldn't believe that her almost a decade old laptop could and would boot up in under 15 seconds (as opposed to almost 2 minutes before having a usable state).

That being said: I am definitely no apple fanboy. I had to work with it for 1.5 years and the experience was annoying (homebrew mess, docker slowness due to virtualization layer) and stupid defaults that made customizing the window manager a necessity (that stupid fullscreen button since Yosemite requiring extra tools like Specacle / Rectangle).

I am much happier working on a Linux machine and gaming on a Windows PC.

I used to have one 30-inch monitor, now I working in a combination of 15" Thinkpad, plus 30" monitor, and my old trusted 22" monitor as a sidepanel that I can pivot by 90 degrees.

Still using my old Lenovo G40-80 with i5 and no SSD. Everything works fine actually (only IDE and database software exist in my laptop).