That depends on your taste. I bought my first retina macbook pro last year and I really don't like it compared to my Air. Actaully it's rotting in a cupboard now because of the ghastly battery life. I agree with the premise; computers are locked down and cheap build quality in general. But for me only battery life matters, so I bought a stack (from a broker; it was very cheap) of Lenovo X220s with a 9 cell batteries and i'm happy as a clam. It costs a fraction of the Macbook Pro (10% actually) and it actualy just chugs along with Ubuntu installed for 12 hours after which I just swap batteries for another 12 hours. I was never that bothered with the whole lock-in thing before but now that i'm back working in Linux (2009 was my first Mac, before that I went from DOS to Unix in the early 90s and after that straight to Linux until 2009) I really don't want to touch anything else. But YMMV.
If the battery life is the only thing that matters then a USB-C charged laptop (Macbook one, pixel, some new stuff) + some heavy duty battery pack is probably a good option as well.
Yes, agreed. I had that for a while, but it was one of those cheap things from Asus. I did not know the Macbook can do that via USB... Maybe i'll sell my Pro and get me one of those... Thanks.
