12 Years ago I had a Sony Vaio. I quite liked it. Then in my next job, 2017 or so, I went for a Toshiba Portege, and absolutely loved it.
Guess what the above two have in common? Yup, they stopped making laptops for the professional market. So now I’m a bit at a loss. Any recommendations?
Requirements:
- Lightweight and easy to carry around.
- 13-15" display, preferably
- Decent battery life
- It absolutely must have an RJ45
- Works well with linux
- Good keyboard quality
- ISO keyboard availability
- Touchpad. Bonus points if it has the touchpad buttons ABOVE the pad itself.
I’ve used Macbooks in networking / programming and construction environments for over fifteen years. They’ve been incredibly solid in my experience. In fact, the first week I was given a Thinkpad, I broke it because it was so much more fragile than a Mac. I always used USB adapters for Ethernet and serial connections without issue. They also run Windows and Linux.
Premium product experience at a premium price. Whether the cost premium is worth it is a judgment call for the user.
The hardware is pretty premium, but the software is such a pain. As a result the overall experience is just “okay”.
They no longer do (since the switch to ARM) - unless you count running under a VM.
Windows supports ARM https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/overview
But nothing supports windows arm
Their Linux support is so bad it might as well be unsupported.