I wouldn't buy the DELL XPS 13 due to my experience with the Samsung Series 9 and seeing other people use Macbook Air.
All these classes of laptop are not really durable - they last maybe 2-3 years with heavy use - so unless you are ready to shell out a huge amount of money every 2 years for a laptop it it not worth getting these shiny laptops.
My current laptop - Thinkpad X1 Carbon is like a wife - durable and I can have some garantee of failure tolerance.
# There is a reason NASA only approves thinkpads in space - ask yourself why your laptop is not being used by astronauts ?
[1] '.. Bryan is a writer and works as the Social Media Marketing Manager of SUS ...'
how does this person know this laptop is good for developers without being a developer ? It says right there that his job is marketing ! wake up sheeps !
That's amazing, I never knew that. I loved my old Thinkpad T42, got a good 4 years out of it before the hinge on the screen broke.
I thought that was impressive too, given how poorly I treat my equipment. It fell out of my bag numerous times but never had any problems except for the screen hinge finally wearing down at a corner from overuse.
Then I got a 2010 MacBook Air. I'm still using it today. It's got numerous dents on top, bottom and all corners, and a small crack at the bottom of the screen (which strangely hasn't resulted in any dead pixels), but otherwise it's still in full working order. I remain hugely surprised at how well it's lasted.
Despite the general consensus of Macbooks being very well built, and Thinkpads being built like tanks, this anecdote is definitely the opposite way around.
Now if I could get a nipple on a Macbook, or a decent trackpad on a nippled-Thinkpad, I'd have found my perfect laptop!
Mac hardware is lovely, pity it's such a struggle to get control over it (ie install linux :)
I just nearly choked looking at the price of the x131e, how is it nearly 3 times the price of comparable machines?
Also you can watch how the markets values second hand laptops, generally you will see that second hand thinkpads retain more of its original market price then second hand any other laptop.
Having said that thinkpads usually do not have the best screens - but even though its slightly brutal to not have a good screen anymore, I am more comfortable with the fact that I do not have to worry too much about my laptop not working or overheating.
I remember this being true in the IBM days, but has is it still accurate after the Lenovo-fication of the Thinkpad line?
Some of the key features that would make them great (e.g. ease of field repair) seem to have been greatly diminished - especially on the lighter models.
Makes sense—Superfish can't breathe in space.
Its choosing the lesser evil - like the american elections.
He talks about editing video on the machine, Thunderbolt should allow for high capacity/speed external storage. I'd prefer the options Thunderbolt provides over HDMI.
I have a few expensive firewire audio equipment that I can no longer use. Sure, they were faster than USB when I first bought them but now they are just paperweights. So next time I am buying high-end equipment I am going to "think different" and go with the majority (i.e. USB 3.0)...
I live in the anxiety of Thinkpads getting not worth the investment anymore, and having to opt for another machine without this so efficient keyboard/trackpoint combination...
(I've been 100% on a 12.6" screen for the last year; and was 11" for 3+ years before that (and only moved to the 12.6 because I couldn't find anything smaller that was as powerful as I wanted).)
I'm always hoping for more A4-paper-sized (or smaller) powerful laptops (and I think this is the best option at the moment (just over, but close enough :-) )).
I mean, sure it is doable but is it worth the shoulder and back ache it will eventually give you?
The QHD version has a nice screen but it's hard to use it at its best in Linux, especially when using an external monitor (you can't configure different PPIs on the two monitors because of limitations on X; I know you can try to use Wayland but it's not what it's being shipped; YMMV).
This said, it's obviously a very nice laptop.
About that, what should one do if one wants to run Linux on a computer with a high-resolution screen? For example, does it work well on the Ubuntu that this computer comes with?
The main problem comes when you connect to a (normal-resolution) external monitor, because in X, different monitors (which are just views onto the same underlying X screen) can't have different DPIs. To solve that I set the system dpi correct for the external monitor, and use xrandr screen scaling, ie `xrandr --output eDP1 --scale 0.5x0.5`. (Which means I'm not taking advantage of the high res then, but when I'm using my giant external monitor, it and my laptop are pretty far from my eyes, so I don't care so much. I use a fork of xrandr which uses exact pixel quadrupling when you set a scale of 0.5x0.5, by default it blurs to antialias everything even when it doesn't need to, ie reciprocal-integer scaling values). I have a pair of scripts[0] that run when I plug and unplug my external monitor that make the change reasonably seamless (except for having to restart firefox).
[0] https://github.com/SimonWoolf/dotfiles/blob/master/.useHighD... and https://github.com/SimonWoolf/dotfiles/blob/master/.useScree...
I found that this affected only the rendering of pages, not buttons and stuff belonging to the Firefox UI. Did I do it wrong?
I read somewhere that is a lot glossier than the Full HD non-Developer Edition and is nearly useless with a lot of light in the room or outside.
