It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. I have the first gen MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (ok maybe they’re not winning the naming game), and it’s a perfect computer. Battery life is literally all day, every single action is instant, I have zero regard for many apps or tabs I have open. It’s just perfect.

I have literally traveled with just a 30 watt anker brick for my phone and used it to trickle charge my MacBook overnight and I’m good to go.

I have both a latest generation Thinkpad P1 Gen5 and Macbook Pro 16 inch M1 pro and while it is true that Macbook comes pretty close to being a perfect laptop, I still miss the productivity of a Linux laptop (for backend dev work).

From what hardware POV you are correct, I wish though Apple would adopt Carbon Magnesium chasis that thinkpad uses. For same 16inch size, Thinkpad is noticeably lighter. I can happy lug my P1 Gen5(16 inch) model anywhere, whereas 16inch macbook pro is hefty.

Could you elaborate what is preventing it from being the perfect backend dev laptop?

I’m not the person you asked—but a ton of developer tooling just runs better on Linux. Installation is usually easier too—on a Mac, there’s Homebrew, but Homebrew doesn’t have the best user experience.

All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.

What specific developer tooling runs better on linux? If you're one of those Nix masochists I hear that runs on the Mac as well.

Fwiw you can use nix (the package manager) and the nixpkgs package repository without ever learning or writing a single line of nix (the language).

My introduction was to use nix instead of brew and ignore the whole "declarative configuration" aspect. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with that part of the ecosystem, but that's irrelevant to my point.

Give nix a try, use it like you'd use brew. Ignore the declarative configuration stuff for a bit.

My brew list is intentionally very short and my faffing about desire is limited.

Generally I use brew to pull in asdf (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) to install programming languages/tooling, it works flawlessly.

I use Pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx) to install python thingies (such as yt-dlp) as a cli.

Go and Rust handle binaries in their languages beautifully and without issues.