Some stuff to remember:<p>- thinness does not matter that much. If you want your stuff to look cool, then it does, but for portability it doesn't.
- thinness affects cooling. You don't want your battery get ruined, your CPU throttled and your lap burned.
- expandability matters on the long run<p>I just replaced my 2013 rMBP. I needed the following:
- expandable storage -- I can put 3 SSDs in this<p>- expandable memory - 4 DIMM slots, up to 64G RAM<p>- dockable<p>- trackpoint<p>- can drive UHD screens @ 60 Hz<p>- as Linux friendly as possible<p>- good keyboard<p>- good cooling<p>- IPS screen, min. fHD<p>I ended up buying the HP Zbook 15 G2. The only issue with that is UDH external screens and Linux-friendliness don't go together, because those displays require discrete GPU (Broadwells can drive UHD screens through MST, but most displays don't support that). The other alternative was the Thinkpad W550s, but I could get the G2 at half the price (and it's much more powerful).<p>I didn't buy:<p>- smaller devices because I'm working on this 10 hours a day sometimes, and portability itself wasn't enough to compensate for less power, less memory, worse cooling
- Thinkpad .40 series because of their clickpads<p>- Dell Precisions because they're extremely bulky and HPs have better keyboard<p>- Macbooks because OSX was not an option for me after using it for 2.5 years, also they don't have a trackpoint and their cooling is really abysmal<p>- anything from smaller vendors like System76, etc. because they all use OEM chassis and they're a far cry from top-end HP, Dell, Lenovo and Apple chassis<p>I personally don't understand how could anyone recommend a 11" MBA to someone who wants to do serious work on it. A 11" screen is extremely uncomfortable for all-day coding; if you keep it docked all day then might make sense though.