Tempted to switch to Windows

I love this laptop. I love the trackpad on the right. Where do I sign?
I love this laptop. I love the trackpad on the right. Where do I sign?

Before you decide my blog is suddenly interesting because I’m a hemi-demi-semi-prominent pro-Apple guy who is switching to Windows, hold your horses. It’s not. I’m not.

The correct, non-linkbaity headline should be:

“WTF Apple?! Macs suck compared to Windows PCs that are more expensive and which you can’t actually buy.”

All users of high-end Macs suffer from PC envy because there’s always a PC out there that scratches a particular hardware itch. E.g. nVidia has just released some insanely nice GPUs and on the Mac if you’re lucky you have a fairly recent mobile version of a mid-range nVidia GPU from last generation. Not even close to the same league. Similarly, the current generation Apple notebooks use Intel’s chipset from last year and are thus limited to 16GB of RAM. 16GB of RAM is so 2012 for fuck’s sake. (Heck, my 2012 Mac Pro has 36GB of RAM, it’s really just a 2010 Mac Pro, and it’s not even trying.)

So this morning I read another “fuck you and your lame-ass hardware and USB-C ports, I’m switching to Windows” post on Hacker News. I don’t remember if it was on the comments thread of the post or HN itself (since I can’t find either anymore) but there was a discussion of what Windows laptop (“other than a Dell XPS”) to get if you want to switch and don’t want a piece of shit (i.e. pretty much any Windows laptop). The replies were illuminating (including quite a few saying pretty much, ‘what do you mean “other than a Dell XPS”, that’s a piece of shit’ — a sentiment with which I can agree based on first person experience), and pointed at the Razer Blade and Razer Blade Pro.

So I took a look.

These are sold as high end laptops — CNC milled chassis, backlit keys with programmable colors, 1080P or 4K displays, (for which they provide an API, so you can have keys light up indicative of, say, the health of your team-mates in a multi-player game) and fantastic specs (e.g. nVidia 1080 in the Pro). In fact the specs were so good I simply wanted to know two things:

  • What is the battery life like?
  • How much?

The answers were:

  • We aren’t going to tell you.
  • More than a Macbook Pro (and, really, fair enough!), and by the way:
  • We don’t have any to sell and can’t tell you when we will.

Aha! Checkmate Apple. I guess there’s a reason why the laptops out there you can actually buy are either worse than Apple’s or cost about the same.