Comment by setquk
7 years ago
Yes unfortunately that's about it.
At this point, for me the best option is charge more and put up with windows being a dick periodically.
7 years ago
Yes unfortunately that's about it.
At this point, for me the best option is charge more and put up with windows being a dick periodically.
We really thought the future was great right around 2007 didn't we? You had nicely put together Macbooks that could run all the software you wanted, including from Windows and Linux land, they had pretty good support and overall decent hardware. Then they released the iPhone, SJ died, and everyone else in their management just started hunting either quarterly numbers or pretty&stupid design that works well for TV ads. It's a wonder that their software departments have actually turned around and started producing decent releases again. Here's to hope their Mac department will recover as well.
I'm not sure I ever liked the Mac hardware. I thought I did. TBH the old white plastic MacBooks running 10.4 was my last good experience. After that I bought a top end 2011 15" rMBP with 16Gb of RAM and 1TiB SSD.
What do I use now?
A second hand i5 T440, because it's more productive.
I started with a Powerbook 12inch. Totally fell in love with that thing. By far the best trackpad at the time, plus a very decent keyboard. It even had CD burner and expandable RAM in an incredibly tight package. From then on their hardware became worse with every iteration in some way or another - either it was graphics driver issues, thermals, faulty boards, or now completely crap I/O and keyboard. But IMO till 2016 they still had overall the better package than windows PCs, mostly thanks to a far superior OS.
Try to install Fedora Linux on it. It should work okayish on such hardware, if you switch it to Mate desktop (Gnome 2 fork): https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/ .
Look, it sucks to find out there are thousands of devices, but none with the specific attributes you want. (I'm currently looking for a phone.)
However, the (sad?) truth is for most people, MacBooks works just fine, but they aren't vocal about that. Personally, I thought I'd hate the new ones, but was given one for work, and it's fine - to the point where I bought one for home, too
I think I could live with the 2018 iteration of the keyboard, although I‘d want to wait another 6M at least to see about reliability. But the dongles man, they‘d just give me headaches. Using a Thinkpad just reminds me of how great it is to have all the ports built-in.
1 reply →
Stick some distros on a USB stick and give them a go. Your 480s should be fine with it if you're on Intel graphics. I'd recommend Ubuntu in whatever flavor appeals...