The XPS 17 will be my next “MacBook”.

It should be out this month and it ticks all the boxes for me (great screen, supposedly good cooling, user-replaceable SSD/RAM, acceptable weight and size for a 17" laptop).

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/13/21257006/dell-xps-17-15-r...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRUWM_LOPQ

I've been trying Windows again after ~20 years on Macs (via a borrowed Lenovo Carbon X1 and then a second-hand XPS 15) and — unlike the author here — I'm surprised how much better it has gotten.

Having fully expected to buy a Windows laptop and just run Linux on it, I'm happy enough with the general Windows experience and the new WSL2/Windows Terminal/VS Code improvements that switching full-time makes sense for me.

The perks for me over macOS are the widely increased hardware choice, improved repairability/upgradeability, access to Windows-only software/games, better default desktop environment (window snapping/management, keyboard shortcuts for apps in the taskbar), and being able to boot real Linux images within ~1 second and work out of them comfortably.

The perks for me over Linux are the ability to run Adobe and other Windows apps, lower manual maintenance, fewer rabbit holes (I used Arch for about a year and found I was personally prone to exploring Arch instead of doing pet projects), better general integration with video cards, authentication hardware (fingerprint sensors/Windows Hello), projectors/external monitors, as well as a generally better experience with power management, wake-from-sleep, and connecting/reconnecting to Wi-Fi.

Once there's a terminal emulator for Windows that works as seamlessly as iterm and there's no more weird hacks required like Cygwin / minTTY (I believe the windows subsystem for linux does that) I might start to consider moving; most software I use for development is cross-platform anyway (vs code, intellij, nodejs, go).

But for now my 2017 macbook works well enough. I do think it's overpaid though; outside of the occasional nyan cat gimmick, I've NEVER used the touch pad. At the moment it's closed and to the side while I work on my external screens and the pretty decent Apple keyboard + mouse.

Just missing a Quake mode for me (summon from a screen edge with a keyboard shortcut), but that's being talked about for v2. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/653