Have you looked at Thinkpad? You could run linux on Carbon X1 and have ultra-mobile package with i7. $1500 but you have one of the best laptops in the market in my view - keyboard, screen, size, weight, feel, specs, battery life, etc. I own the latest Macbook Pro 15 and Carbon X1 6th gen. I want to pick up my thinkpad more than the MacBook. I find Aluminum not a good material for laptops - it is uninviting, heavy and cold to touch. Thinkpad Carbons use magnesium and carbon fiber body thats light and coated with soft touch paint. It is just fantastic.
The new X1 Carbon is not a good Linux machine. Some hardware just doesn’t work (built in LTE). Then there is a bunch of manual configuration required to fix various things, e.g. throttling. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...
I'm seeing $2182 Thinkpad vs $2599 MacBook Pro--choices driven by WQHD display, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. Processor on the Pro is significantly faster, the display on the Mac has slightly higher resolution. Maybe not $400 worth of difference, but certainly almost $200 or so.
And I still can't buy an i5 laptop with 32GB of RAM.
Lenovo, like Apple, charges a ridiculous markup on SSDs. However, unlike with a Macbook Pro their laptops are user serviceable.
If you want a 1TB SSD and know how to use a screwdriver, you can save $250 by buying the SSD yourself. If you're willing to start with a 256GB SSD and hold off on upgrading until you actually outgrow your storage space, you could save even more.
The question is for how long will the serviceability stay this way. Lenovo is switching to one soldered RAM slot and o in the new ThinkPad generation. [1]
I own a ThinkPad X1 Yoga (2016) and except the battery life I'm extremely happy with it. Maybe I will switch to a MacBook in the future but the keyboard is a turn off (No F-keys and no Home, End, Insert and Delete keys). On the other hand I like that Apple has only Thunderbolt 3 connectors and I like macOS.
> And I still can't buy an i5 laptop with 32GB of RAM.
Sure you can. Just buy a slightly older gen that's on par with an i5 on benchmarks, and max out the RAM on it. It's silly to limit yourself to new devices, when the best deals by far are found on the market for used/refurb ones.
Mac comments aside, ThinkPads are fantastic for Linux. I'm running Arch on my T460. You can find a used ThinkPad in pretty much every price range on eBay.
I also opened the chassis and added Liquid Metal (Grizzly) TIM. The little i7 stays pegged at 4 GHz without throttling and presumably also improves battery life.
