Years ago, I switched to a Surface Book, and while I'm tempted to go back for this MBP I reckon that a Surface Book update would be enough to kill any desire for the Mac range. While Apple stagnated, many of the high-end manufacturers caught up.
Windows is fine for day to day casual use, but the moment you attempt to peek under the hood you encounter a hostile and alien landscape.
Linux is usually consistent, well organized, and highly configurable when you are under the hood, but is a pain in the ass for day to day use. Edit: Illustrator and Photoshop still aren't available for Linux as I just discovered.
MacOS is Unix under the hood, but it has software support near that of Windows, and it also adds a layer of convenience and thoughtfulness on top that isn't matched elsewhere. Ffs, It is still the only OS that recovers basically flawlessly from running out of batteries.
I find I enjoy my Linux laptop a lot (the i3 Window Manager is amazing). However, there are two things I really miss from MacOS: iMessage and AirDrop.
In terms of overall quality, I'd say that MBP is now behind some of the other high-end devices. The Surface Book knocks the latest MBP versions out of the water in every department, except for the track pad. It's not difficult to argue that the keyboard, screen, durability, or even the OS is superior to Apple's (current) offering.
Apple build quality isn't even close to being good. Hardware failures are common, they had the shitty keyboards in previous gens that started failing after dust got stuck in them, e.t.c.
For example, Amazon gives most of the devs Macs. However, they still use Amazon Linux (RHEL based) VMs for building and testing services, because the EC2s that run these services in prod are all RHEL based. Half of my time is spent in an ssh shell, because either half the shit doesn't work on Mac because of some native dependency, or because I don't want to run into some weird bug like I had due to the case insesitivity of the MacOs system where the code reads a file, but the same code doesn't work when its deployed to EC2.
And as such, there are issues galore with the computers. External display over usbc for presentations sometimes don't work and require a restart of the laptops, which takes 2 minutes for some reason even with ssds. Some USBc hubs fuck up SMC controllers, which then requires a reset, and others straight up fry computers. Copy and Paste on websites often doesn't work as intended. Wifi randomly drops out.
I dunno how the old Macbooks held up, but modern ones are a complete ripoff for what you get if you are spending your own money on one.None of these issues are present on my personal $300 laptop running Linux Mint with minimal customization.
The biggest group that I've seen move away from the MBP range aren't developers, but are creatives - either in design or in sound/music. I know a few DJ's in my local area that have largely switched to Windows laptops because they feel tools like Ableton work better, and because they feel that for the price they're paying they're not getting value for money from the MBP range.
It's also huge, which I kinda like now...but that huge comes with the ability to have 3 disks, a huge replaceable battery, 8 cores and 64gb of RAM.
There's a slight learning curve to using Linux as your daily driver but it's hard to go back once you figure it out.
Even just little things like being able to charge USB devices while the laptop is closed make a real difference in my life.
Although I'm in the market for a new laptop this isn't an instant buy for me, starting to feel I should move all my computing away from Apple because although this is a step in the right direction, we've had years of them not caring about computers.
