Hello HN peeps,<p>Been debating between the two but wanted to get ideas from folks here who have had experience with both!<p>What are the cons of going with a Windows 10 with WSL2 (i7-1260p) machine as opposed to an M1 Macbook Pro which has the same hardware specs as the Windows but costs twice as much?<p>Is there anything only possible on the Macbook and not possible on the Windows machine? (Except for iOS-specific development)<p>Thanks!
> as opposed to an M1 Macbook Pro which has the same hardware specs as the Windows but costs twice as much?<p>Maybe if you squint the specs look the "same" on paper, but there isn't an Intel laptop out there that will even come close to the M1 in terms of performance, battery life, and thermal management.
I've been on a Macbook since 2015 and have been on an i5 thinkpad for a year now..<p>my experience - on paper the thinkpad is decent. i5 1.8Ghz (upto 3.4Ghz) and 16GB RAM. But in practice its always constrained by power and heat so it never reaches those boost speeds. It frequently gets laggy running a light backend workload (webserver/client/message queue/redis) + IDE. The trackpad and display is also not as good as a macbook. The build quality isn't bad by any means though, everything is solid and works well. I don't like Windows but thats personal preference.<p>On a windows laptop, you have to really do your research on which laptop in particular, look at how much power and cooling that specific laptop can do w.r.t the CPU, because without that the CPU alone does not mean anything. this is the kind of stuff i generally don't have to worry about on a Mac. I would get a Mac..
> an M1 Macbook Pro which has the same hardware specs as the Windows<p>Whatever Windows laptop you get won't have the same hardware specs as the M1 Macbook simply because no one is selling M1 hardware with Windows on it. (Hobbiest have put Windows on an M1 Macbook, but I don't think that's what you're proposing here)<p>In my experience, people buy Macbooks because either they like the build quality, they like something specific about the hardware (i.e. they specifically want an M1 chip), or they like the MacOS system.<p>People buy Windows machines because it's what they're familiar with, or they have a specific need for the Windows OS (generally because of games).<p>(I know both these comments are wide generalizations, but I think they work for the purpose of this post)<p>It sounds like you aren't falling into either category. I can tell you what I would do personally, but you are not me, so I'm not sure that my recommendation is going to be worth anything to you.
I'm using both. My PC runs on Windows (9900XE 18 cores/ 36 threads /w nvidia RTX A6000) and Macbook Pro M1 Max. Both are 64GB ram. Windows crashes too much and needs constant updates (and will update in the middle of the night which messes up everything) while my Macbook rarely needs a restart and it will ask you rather than automatically update.<p>For me, it comes down to the OS and I'm running docker on both. WSL2 runs fine but again... constant updates and restarts. It just too much hassle.<p>Of course, if you go Ubuntu or *nix, sure you can have stability / less restarts on PC. But the developer experience on my Macbook will always be a better experience. Its just less hassle and less frustration/anxiety. I'm on my third Macbook (my first was in since 2006) and so far none of them have had hardware issues other than battery (easily replaceable).