Switching from MBP to Windows - Jumping Ship

[kjvmartin]

I've been looking forward to a new laptop to replace my older 13" MBP, waiting on the press release.

I'm sad that I've hitched my wagon to the Apple ecosystem. iPad, AppleTV4, 2 iPhone 7s, MacBook Pro, Time Capsule, and about 70 iTunes movies. This is going to be expensive to undo, but it needs to be done now before this gets even worse. At least the Disney Movies are viewable on any platform (love that Disney Movies Anywhere option).

I'm just looking for a 15" screen. It's not that the 15" Macbook Pro wouldn't meet most of my needs, but I just can't justify the pricing. I also do not like the "TouchBar" at all - how it looks, the idea behind it, or the thought of using it. I'm angry about the removal of the SD card slot, the USB changes, and the Magsafe. It seems like Apple has gone out of their way to make things more difficult for the average user.

Looking for recommendations on a good 15" laptop with discrete graphics and an IPS/gloss screen, any suggestions? I do light gaming, a lot of word processing, and store and process/edit a lot of photographs. Currently at 60gb of personal photos/home videos on the MBP. I have them in the Google Cloud (compressed) as backup as well as on my Time Capsule. Is there a Windows option similar to Time Capsule? thanks

kjv

 

[UnclePaulie]

I went through a similar thought process as you, although I'm currently coming from the 1st gen retina MacBook, although I did have a 13" MBP in the past. I've also used a Surface Pro 3 but never the Surface Book.

Regarding Time Capsule backup - the easiest way to replicate this functionality is to use the built-in Windows backup software and point the backup folder to a directly connected external drive or a NAS drive.
If you use Office 365 you'll also get included 1 TB storage on OneDrive (Microsoft's cloud service).

This is the list of laptops I considered, and I do like Windows just as well as macOS, and I'm very drawn to pen & touch input, but for me the new 15" MBP checks off all the boxes I was looking for other than the pen/touch input which I may or may not use. For the little photo retouching I do, I can always use a mouse or my iPad Pro with pencil and Astropad.


-Dell XPS 15" Signature edition (the only one close to as thin/light as the 15 MBP)
-Surface Book (if you're willing to go down to 13.5", but still higher res screen than the 13" MBP and different 3:2 aspect ratio, fast dGPU, pen input would be great depending on how much photography you're doing)
-Razer Blade (14" 16:9 screen with wide color gamut, nice dGPU)
-Alienware 15" Signature (this one is heavier but gets a nice dGPU)