
Ask HN: Anyone want the old Apple deal? A premium dev machine for professionals? - Folcon
I&#x27;m currently looking for a new dev machine and I&#x27;m looking at what&#x27;s currently being offered by Apple which was my vendor of choice and I&#x27;m worried.<p>It looks like if I go with a new Macbook Pro for the next decade, I&#x27;m signing up to a device that will increasingly get locked down.<p>The direction of development appears to be iOS in a laptop form factor.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I like having a phone, but I want a general-purpose computer too.<p>It&#x27;s a bit sad in a way, I picked up my current machine because the sentiment at the time was that the Macbook Pro was a professional&#x27;s machine and one of the groups of professional&#x27;s that it would cater to was developers.<p>What Apple expected for that was those professionals being willing to pay at a higher price point to get that power. That expectation seems to be bearing out less and less these days.<p>I still want that deal. Just a little bit of shiny, but all the power that gets out of my way and I pay for it...<p>So I&#x27;m wondering, am I in a minority here? What do others in this ecosystem want? (and yes I&#x27;m fully aware that this ecosystem isn&#x27;t very big)<p>Are people ok with their main dev machine being a more locked-down system? I see some people jumping into developing on iPad&#x27;s in the cloud.<p>So I&#x27;m wondering am I the minority of a minority?<p>Or is there a chance that there are enough people who feel like I do that some company out there can serve our needs and make a decent bank doing it?<p>Or perhaps I&#x27;m mistaken =)...
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user_agent
I went thru that like 8 years ago when after launching a great first unibody
MBP, Apple stopped producing pro equipment altogether (a pro sticker doesn't
means something is really pro). It took some courage to get back to using
effectively other platforms, but it's been easier than I thought.

If I would be about to make that choice now, I can tell you that seeing what
Apple does, I wouldn't be worried. I would be terrified.

There's a well known phenomena called "vendor lock-in". Consider a consequence
of teaming up with someone you don't trust. Yeah, nothing good is going to
happen because of that...

Linux is great this days. Even Windows is OK-ish. Apple was a big deal in the
era of Windows XP. In those days it was a huge difference. Now they IMO have
nothing to offer to a tech savvy customer. There's so many reasonable options
out there that only a person enslaved by Apple ecosystem for years can think
that there's going to be an issue with going with anything else than Apple.
Yes, I was that person too. The truth is that Apple has nothing to offer
except of shiny overpriced hardware and a fairy tale about user's superiority
because of "think different". Nowadays I don't even care about what Apple
does. The world is a huge place and too beautiful to look at it thru the
lenses of Apple's gay-ish UI ;P Not that I have anything against gays, but how
am I supposed to think seriously about a company that produces its widgets for
the sake of making non-tech-savvy people satisfied? Go to an Apple store and
for 1 hour observe who buys their products. That was an epiphany for me when I
had doubts! Clearly not (usually) people who know what they are doing...

Writing this on a Lenovo Legion Y530, a great machine 50% of the price of a
new MBP. Booting Linux and Windows. I have no artificial limits enforced on me
by anyone. I'm happy.

Nothing of the above is going to work for an iOS developer, etc. Those people
have no choice. Ups. Who the hell puts himself in an "I have no choice"
situation willingly?

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mkj
It looks like thinkpads are the only real competition. Also they have
removable SSDs which are good for device longevity.

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user_agent
Please, tell me that you're joking...

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mkj
I was looking for a laptop to replace this here 2013 13" retina macbook pro.
The only high res display 13 or 14" machine readily available in Australia
seems to be a Thinkpad x1 carbon. I was hoping there would be more options in
laptop brands.

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user_agent
Gotcha. I hope that you're going to find more reasonable options in your
location. In Europe there's no problem with that and never has been. X1 is a
rather expensive machine (and not that great to be honest - I have one
provided by my employer), so maybe even a MBP with other OSes might be an
option in your case. I know a couple of people who went that way (although
it's kind of funny ;-).

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jki275
Apple's not going that way.

They've done nothing to make the Mac more of a locked down platform or more
like iOS, except for security things, and those you can disable quite easily.

