Respectfully I disagree. In fact MacBooks are slowly become the LEAST viable option, at least for me personally.

It's all about personal requirements and I suppose, taste.

Don't get me wrong, the MacBook is a fantastic laptop, especially for the creative professional and laypeople.

For me, as a Linux user and enthusiast, MacBooks have slowly become less and less viable each year.

I bought my first MacBook in 2007, in college, and have used MacBooks as my primary choice of device until 2018. I still use a MacBook professionally, as it is what my company distributes for development machines.

They are beautifully crafted, well integrated, and optimized for a good amount of use cases.

What they are no longer good for is openness. They are slowly migrating away from being able to access low level things, and when you can it's highly limited. Each year, I feel like the OS and hardware creep toward iPad levels of openness.

A lot of open source software will stop being supported for M1 (MX moving forward) chipsets if they choose to ditch backwards compatibility with current architectures. Powerful tiling window managers are all but extinct on macOS, with the exception of yabai, which you need to disable a lot of security features just to use.

I bought my wife a MacBook for Christmas in 2020 and I was very jealous. The hardware and the OS are simply beautiful. However it simply doesn't work for me anymore.

I bought an XPS developer edition in 2018, slapped Arch Linux on it and never had any serious issues.

My next laptop will be another XPS, ThinkPad, Systemic, or a Star book, but I will continue to look at MacBooks with envy.

That being said, if MacBooks meet your requirements, it's hard not to argue that it's a good machine, if not the best, possibly lending to your feeling that it's the "only choice".

user:	hahuang65
created:	January 30, 2012
karma:	21
about:	[ my public key: https://keybase.io/hahuang65; my proof: https://keybase.io/hahuang65/sigs/Wcw46yhqm6VKqA4DB7-thjKLz022BUKK1anGhiXA6Qo ]

1.	Beginning OpenGL Development: Abstracting Shaders(blog.hwrd.me) 2 points by hahuang65 12 years ago \| 0 comments
2.	Beginning OpenGL Development on OS X(blog.hwrd.me) 22 points by hahuang65 12 years ago \| 5 comments