But what's a good alternative? I really don't like the new MBP but it looks like I'm going to have to suck it up and buy it anyway because it's time for an upgrade.
I wish there was a slim Linux compatible laptop out there with decent battery life, display and trackpad.
Just chiming in to suggest the Asus UX305F laptop or similar. Mine is very portable (important to me in a laptop), works great with my linux install (everything out of the box goes great except brightness keys which require re-assigning to work), is passively cooled and has a nice SSD.
Perhaps it has been replaced by a newer model with more RAM (mine only has 8GB) which would be good for VMs, but I don't keep up with the Jones' so I'm not sure. The thing works great for me at a fraction of the cost - it was $499 on one of the bit online shops when I got it.
I think laptops are quite a personal choice, and finding the 'perfect' one is very difficult. I couldn't quite justify spending as much as a Carbon X1/X3, or the top MBP, and a year down the track I'm very glad I didn't. YMMV etc : )
I use one (2015 model), it's ok. The 2560x1440 screen works well (using 1.5 scaling) with unity, a bit less so with cinnamon, as it Cinnamon only supports integer scaling. Chrome has a scaling flag that is independent, that's a bit extra work. I regularly connect an external 4k screen over DP, works fine and runs at 60Hz.
The touchpad is ok, but wish it was larger and dealt with palms better. Over time I adapted and now am careful to not touch it while typing (or maybe some update fixed it).
I use an older Ubuntu version and there are a two bugs - it doesn't always lock when closing the lid and the touchpad is sometimes disabled on wakeup. Switching to a terminal (ctrl-alt-1) and back reenables it.
Overall, I'm happy - great keyboard, decent HiDPI screen and all in a very light machine. 16GB RAM and longer battery life would be nice, but I'm happy with the weight tradeoff.
Fairly hassle-free. I have both the 2015 X1 Carbon (with Debian Jessie) and 2016 X1 Yoga (with Debian Stretch). I needed to install an extra xserver-xorg-input-* package for the touchscreen on the latter to work nicely and Firefox Aurora to get gesture support, but everything else just works.
The keyboard on the X1 Yoga is sort of meh, though.
Dell used to have a Linux version of their XPS line called "Developer edition", really great form factor on that one and they also have an extra battery as an accessory. Looking at their webpage I'm not sure if they discontinued it though, maybe one can find a used one
I'm in a similar situation. I want to get myself to like it but I just don't. I don't like this direction and am actively looking into something else even though I really like Mac (and FCPX).
A surface maybe? A intel UltraBook? How about a Ultrabook-Hackintosh? I'm sure there must be something.
I currently use my company device for everything. As long as I have that I'm good, but if I were short on time, I'd probably buy it again if I know myself correctly.
I have a Surface Pro 3, and love it to death, but a word of caution would be that the keyboard on it is "adequate" but certainly not suited for development. The surface book, I gather, is better, but you could probably find better specs for less if you don't really need a convertible.
I am a bit lost myself : for me OsX is the best mix where I have a nix like terminal, great design tools and general software support, good UX, and I don't have to spend too much time maintaining and configuring the machine.
Both Linux and Windows are inferior in some of these aspects, so I have been sucking it up for the past couple of years.
Coming the next time I have to change my machine, I am not sure what I will get.
Are you on insider preview? They make a good progress. For example now you can have Ubuntu 16.04 and be able to call windows executables from bash.
In my opinion it is now much better experience than macOS offers
I use Ubuntu in production and having the same tools on the dev machine natively is great. When I was using macOS it was a bit clumsy to get tools set up. I find apt superior to brew also compiling from source etc is less of a headache.
Windows really nailed that department.
I had the XPS 15 for a few months. I found it very fast, gorgeous 4k screen, great keyboard - but heavy and with abysmal battery life. The touchpad was also meh under Linux.
I wish there was a slim Linux compatible laptop out there with decent battery life, display and trackpad.