DHH on Escaping the "Apple Bubble": Why You're Allowed More Than One Computer
The Pragmatic Engineer
In this conversation, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) argues that many developers, himself included for years, have been living inside an "Apple bubble." They assume one machine is enough, that Apple will eventually ship anything worth having, and that liking Apple means dismissing everything else. He describes leaving that mindset about two years ago. Since then he has enjoyed a wider range of hardware, cheered on competitors' chips, and tested Linux laptops that he says now outdo the MacBook in some respects.
You're allowed more than one computer
DHH opens with what he calls "the beautiful realization": you don't have to own a single machine. He points to the OpenClaw phenomenon as evidence that people are already coming around to this. Many people went out and bought a Mac Mini just to run their "claw" on it. He says a Linux developer can do the same, and that this is his own approach. He has "more computers than I care to count," and some of them are still Macs.
The host describes a mental block of their own. They used to get a new laptop every two or three years, through their company or out of pocket. Their current MacBook Air dates from 2020, six years ago, and still works well. When they saw a new model in an Apple store recently, their first thought was that they shouldn't buy it because the old one still works. After weighing the price against their hourly rate as a developer, they concluded the purchase was "such a no-brainer." They still feel the pull of that block, though. They have thought about trying Windows or Linux, but they are uneasy about a laptop sitting unused, and they wonder whether that is conditioning they need to let go of.
DHH agrees firmly. He calls it a "poverty mindset," while admitting he is pushing the point partly for comedic effect. The idea that you are "only allotted the one CPU" is nonsense to him, especially for web developers. Anyone using ChatGPT or any other web app is already drawing on huge numbers of machines. "That's not magic. That's computers," he says, and you already have a slice of them. So you can have more than one computer at home.
Computers as a hobby, not just a tool
His second argument is that computers are fun, and people who care about them should own a variety. He compares it to watches, which he also likes. You could find the perfect watch and be happy with it, but the hobby would be dull if you were only allowed one.
He says he only saw this after leaving Apple's walled garden. He had been inside so long that he had "kind of forgotten that different kinds of computers existed." When his relationship with Apple finally broke about two years ago ("the final straw finally broke the camel's back"), he compares it to walking out of a dungeon into bright sun.
His example is a big screen running at 240 Hz. He says Apple offers nothing at that refresh rate, so for someone who likes competitive gaming, seeing it for the first time is startling. He had believed that if Apple didn't have something yet, it would get there eventually, and if it never did, the thing probably wasn't worth having. He now calls that "a very deprived mindset where you fall in love with the cave you're in."
Cheering for competition, including Apple's
DHH stresses that none of this means Apple doesn't make good products. He says he loved the MacBook Neo announcement. He likes it when a company pushes an angle hard enough to worry its competitors, and he calls the Neo, "this really cheap Mac that's still quite good," a welcome arrival.
He is equally excited about what he calls Intel's comeback. He finds Pat Gelsinger's five-year plan to reach the 18A process node inspiring, because its goal was to build a chip, Panther Lake, that could compete with Apple's. He is disappointed by how partisan the reaction has been on X. He finds that people who like Apple feel they must dismiss PCs and "poo-poo" Panther Lake, even though it is a major achievement for a proud American institution whose chips are built in Arizona. (In the recording he says "like Apple" at this point, but from context he is clearly talking about Intel.) He thinks everyone should cheer for that success whether or not they plan to use it.
He links this to bikeshedding: people argue most fiercely when the stakes are lowest. For an Apple owner, the stakes are low. It is easier to avoid thinking about better alternatives and simply declare that "Apple can't be beat."
He separates Apple's engineering from its business conduct. He respects what the company has built, but not its gatekeeping, its App Store policies, and "all the other nonsense." On the technical side, he says he was "the biggest cheerleader for the M chips," because they "completely reset the board" for mobile computers. If you love computers, he says, you should love CPU progress.
He extends the same argument to Qualcomm, another American company that he says powers most of the world's computers if you count Android's dominance on phones. He says the Snapdragon X2 Elite, an ARM chip, has caught up with Apple's offerings even more than Panther Lake has. Even if you want none of these products, you should welcome competition because it makes things better and cheaper. After what he calls "five meager years," he says the rest of the industry is finally challenging Apple, and that deserves celebration. He notes that many people don't celebrate it.
Metacognition and the "base model"
DHH describes a habit he tries to keep. When he reacts to a piece of news, he asks whether the reaction comes from genuinely disliking what is happening or just from which team is doing it. He says he often catches himself being partisan. When he does, he returns to what he calls his "base model": he loves computers, loves playing with them, being productive with them, and even wasting time on them. He calls sitting at a "deliciously creamy thocky mechanical keyboard in the morning" a joy.
He adds a speculative note. This form factor may disappear within a few years, and people may one day look back at pictures of someone typing at a keyboard the way we now look at old typewriters. He says he plans to enjoy every remaining moment of it.
The Framework Laptop 13 and the IKEA effect
The host asks for recommendations, whether for gaming, for fun, or for work, beyond the machines people tend to dismiss because they don't use them. DHH says laptops have been the most fun for him recently.
When he first moved to Linux, he used a Framework Laptop 13, which he calls a great machine. Most configurations arrive as a kit you assemble yourself, somewhat like Lego. It takes only about five minutes, but he says it gives you a sense of ownership, an IKEA effect that makes you like the computer more because you built it. He still considers it a great machine, especially for productivity, and likes its 3:2 aspect ratio for coding. It is not built for gaming, though, and he says it is far from the only good machine for running Linux. He has tried many others in recent months.
Discovering OLED
Much of that exploration came from his excitement about OLED screens. He admits the technology isn't new. But he had spent years on Macs and then on the Framework, all of which used IPS or (as he puts it) microLED panels. Seeing an OLED laptop screen for the first time "was astounding," and he says he didn't realize game colors could look that good.
He finds this odd because he owns an OLED TV. His explanation is that you sit far from a TV, while playing on an OLED display about 30 cm from your face is a much more vivid experience. He mentions Fortnite and Arc Raiders, and singles out Fortnite in particular. He says he has played hundreds of hours in squads with his kids and now plays alone too. He calls it "such a vivid game" and "a beautiful test case for OLED."
The ASUS Zephyrus G14 and theme-synced keyboard lighting
The first OLED laptop he bought was the ASUS Zephyrus G14. He contrasts it with the Framework, which feels like "a home built shed." He calls the shed "adorable" and says he can appreciate it. The Zephyrus, by comparison, is polished, and he praises its case and its gaming aesthetic "without going overboard." He calls that a fine line to walk, since many gaming machines have lights pulsing so constantly that "you're like, 'Am I tripping or is this just a machine?'" He adds that he is not a big fan of ASUS's 16-inch model.
He mentions two lighting features. The first is the "slash" on the back, an LED strip that can be programmed with different patterns. The second is the RGB keyboard backlighting, which can be synced with other things. After getting the laptop, he built support for this into Omarchy, his Linux setup. Changing the system theme now changes the keyboard lighting too: Tokyo Night gives a purple backlight, and Nord gives a light, cool gray and blue. He calls it a lot of fun and a great machine overall.
Getting a pre-production Dell XPS from Michael Dell
His most recent machine came through a personal connection. DHH met Michael Dell during his company's cloud exit a few years ago. His company had long used Dell servers, and when it left the cloud it bought "like two pallets worth of Dell servers" to run everything itself. DHH talked about the cloud exit publicly and it drew a lot of attention. He says, unsurprisingly, Michael Dell also thought buying servers for your own data center was a great idea, and the two started talking.
When DHH saw Dell's new XPS line, with Panther Lake chips and a new tandem OLED screen, he "completely shamelessly" revived that old conversation and asked if Dell would send him one. He wanted to try the Intel chip and was eager to try tandem OLED after his experience with the ASUS.
He has used it for the past couple of weeks. It is still a pre-production unit and not all Linux compatibility is in place yet, but he enjoys being part of that process. Dell's response, as he describes it, was immediate: here's a machine, and here's an engineer currently working on Linux compatibility, do you want to help? He jumped in, working on diagnosing problems, getting things working with the Linux kernel, and getting every component to behave. He calls the driver work "still frontier stuff" and "a blast."
He contrasts this with Apple, where he says such a relationship would be unimaginable. He calls Apple, "to all their credit," an ivory tower that doesn't collaborate with outsiders this way. He says it's wonderful to have that "gleaming tower on the hill," but wishes the company behaved better in other matters so people could admire it without reservation. As things stand, he says, his admiration comes "with quite a lot of asterisks."
Weight, thinness, and Jony Ive
DHH is most enthusiastic about the XPS's weight. He says the 16-inch model weighs 1.6 kg, while his 16-inch MacBook Pro is "well over 2 kilos." Holding the two side by side changed how he thinks about weight. A 400–600 g difference sounds trivial in the abstract, but in the hand he says they feel like different categories of device.
This leads him to reconsider Jony Ive's pursuit of thinness and lightness. He says Ive probably pushed it too far. He calls the butterfly keyboard a "debacle" that troubled MacBooks for about five years with an "incredible failure rate," and a product of "maniacal optimization" aimed at shaving off another millimeter. He notes that technical circles have universally criticized this. The typical nerd position, he says, is to accept something twice as heavy and twice as thick in exchange for a bigger battery or CPU. His response to that position is "Shut up, nerd," and he aims it at himself as much as anyone, since he used to complain about Apple shipping a bad keyboard to save 2 mm.
He now thinks that was the wrong question. The better demand, as he puts it, is to keep shaving every millimeter, because every 100 g really matters, but to keep the keyboard functional while doing it.
The XPS keyboard: not a favorite, but not a dealbreaker
He says the XPS comes much closer to that ideal, though he doesn't fully love its keyboard. The keys sit flush with the panel, so if you ran a finger across it in the dark you couldn't tell where the keys were. He says it has a surprising amount of satisfying travel, but it feels strange to rest your fingers on what is almost a flat table and press down into it rather than onto raised keys.
He expected to hate it, and his first reaction on seeing it was "Ugh." Then he realized he didn't. It isn't his favorite keyboard, but he doesn't hate it. For him, this shows that aiming for a lighter, slimmer computer was never the problem; "it's all in the execution."
Conclusion: the MacBook is now the bulky one
DHH ends by praising Ive for his focus on thinness and lightness. He acknowledges there were misses along the way ("So freaking what?"), but says that path is how today's computers came to exist. What strikes him most is how things have flipped. For years the MacBook was the thin, light option, and now, to him, "the MacBook is the bulky one."
I think the beautiful realization these days is that you're allowed more than one computer. You don't have to have a single machine. And in fact, this is what the whole OpenClaw phenomenon has spurred on, that a bunch of people just went out and bought a Mac Mini because they specifically wanted to run their claw on that Mac Mini. You could do the same thing as a Linux developer. That's certainly what I do. I have more computers than I care to count. Some of them are still Macs.
It's wild because there's, I think, there's a mental block. I used to buy, or get through my company, or buy for myself every two or three years a new laptop. And I just look back. I have a MacBook Air that is from 2020, that's 6 years ago, and it works great. And I walked into the Mac store the other day and I thought, huh, there's this new computer, like, oh no, immediately my first thought was I shouldn't get it because it works.
But when I did the maths of how much this thing costs and, you know, my hourly rate as a dev, it's such a no-brainer. And there's still this mental block. And I was thinking of trying out Windows or Linux, and I think there's a mental... but I'm not sure if I'm alone with this, but I'm not used to my laptop not being utilized. I think I've been conditioned for this for so long. So maybe it's something we need to let go a little bit.
We do need to let go of that. In many ways, it's an... I'm not just going to push it to the point for the comedic effect, but it's a poverty mindset. It's a poverty mindset to think I am only allotted the one CPU and that's all I'm allowed to use, which is of course nonsense, because if you are developers, certainly one working with the web, you're already using a million CPUs. All these computers are already working for you, whether you're in ChatGPT on the web or you're running some other web app. Like, that's not magic. That's computers. And you have a slice of that, so you are allowed more than one computer in the home.
The other thing I find is computers are just fun and you should have a variety of them if you care about them. Like, I like watches, and if I thought that I was only permitted a single watch, that hobby would be a little boring. You could find the perfect watch and you could be happy with that watch, but it's a little more fun if you're allowed a degree of variety.
And I think that's what I actually had to escape the Apple walled garden to realize, because I'd been inside the Apple bubble for so long that I'd kind of forgotten that different kinds of computers existed that I could own and use. So when, 2 years ago or so, the final straw finally broke the camel's back on my relationship with Apple, it was just like the doors had been opened to a much broader world. And at first the sun was a little bright, like I was stepping out of some dungeon, and I realized, oh my gosh, there's all these different things.
And just as a fan of technology, to realize, for example, you can have a big screen that runs at 240 hertz. Like, that technology does not exist in the Mac world. Apple does not offer a product that has 240 hertz. So if you like competitive gaming, seeing that sort of for the first time is a little startling, because you are under this, or I was certainly under this illusion that, well, Apple, if they don't have it right now, they'll eventually get to it, and if they don't get to it, it's probably not worth having at all. Which really is a very deprived mindset where you fall in love with the cave you're in.
That's not to say that Apple doesn't make cool stuff. Like, I loved the announcement they did with the MacBook Neo. I love when companies are pushing certain angles to the point that all their competitors get a little worried. And the Neo to me, this really cheap Mac that's still quite good, is a wonderful entrant into the party.
By the same token, I've been so excited about the comeback of Intel. Gelsinger's 5-year plan to get to 18A, their new production node, just so that they could produce a competitive chip with what Apple is doing, with Panther Lake, is really inspiring to see.
And it's actually a bit sad, I find, that when I talk about this on X, the partisanship is so close to the surface that if you like Apple products, it's almost like you have to hate a PC. You have to poo-poo on Panther Lake, for example, even though it's a major achievement for a proud American institution like Apple. They built the chips in Arizona. Like, we should all be cheering for the success of what they've accomplished, regardless of whether we're going to run it or not.
But it's funny because it's also one of those things like the bike shed, where when the stakes are the lowest, we argue the most fierce. And the stakes are very low when you have an Apple computer and you don't want to think about whether there's a better alternative for you or even other people, and then you just go like, let me just close my eyes and say Apple can't be beat. Again, I say that as someone who has tremendous respect for what that company has built, even if I don't have so much respect for how they conduct themselves as a business today when it comes to gatekeeping and the app stores and all the other nonsense. But just as a technical achievement, I was the biggest cheerleader for the M chips because they completely reset the board of what was possible in a mobile computer.
And we should all be excited about that. If you love computers, you should love CPUs. You should love CPU progress. I find the same thing now with Qualcomm. For some reason... again, an American company doing amazing things, powering the bulk of computers in the world if you just count the fact that Android is the dominant platform on mobile computers, on pocket computers, then why are we not excited about that? Again, what? Because you see some petty rivalry with your favorite brand? That just seems stupid to me. And the X2 Elite is another chip that's caught up, even more actually than Panther Lake, on an ARM architecture with Apple's offerings.
And shouldn't we be excited? Even if you don't want any of the stuff, you should love competition, because competition makes things better and cheaper. So Apple feeling a little bit of a heat that the rest of the industry, after five meager years, finally starts giving them some challenge is something we should all celebrate. But we don't. A lot of us don't. A lot of people don't.
I try to. I try to have some metacognition going whenever I have a reaction to something one way or the other and go like, is that just because it's my team doing this, or is it because I genuinely dislike what's going on? And then oftentimes I'll catch myself in the same kind of partisanship that's playing out here and go, you know what? No. I am not going to fall into that trap. I'm going to revert to my base model here.
My base model is I love computers. I love playing with computers. I love having fun with computers. I love being productive with computers. I love wasting time on computers. Just sitting in front of that deliciously creamy thocky mechanical keyboard in the morning is a joy. And we should be eternally grateful that this is still a thing we're able to do. Which may come to an end in a few years, that, like, that's just not the form factor anymore. We look at these pictures of old monkeys typing at the typewriter and go like, remember when computing used to be like that? I'm going to enjoy every last moment we have of it.
One thing that we might be just... you know, it's popular to hate on other computers that you don't use because we don't use them. So what are some computers that you found, laptops or other ones, that you like? Just give us some ideas, like if you want to go around shopping, either for something for gaming, to have fun, to see that it's not just the console that you can do it, or for work?
The computers I've had a lot of fun with recently have been laptops. When I first got into Linux, I had a Framework Laptop 13. It's a great machine.
Where you can assemble it, right?
Assemble it. You actually have to assemble it. Most of the offerings you buy is a DIY package and you have to put it together yourself. So it's a little bit like a Lego kit. It only takes about 5 minutes, but there's a sense of ownership and a sense of IKEA effect. Did you like this computer a little more because you put it together yourself? And I think it's still a great machine, but it's not the only great machine that you can run Linux on.
And in the last few months, I've tried a bunch, and partly because I've been really excited about some new technology. One of those things, which is actually not that new, but again, to a person who'd been using first Macs for a long time and then that Framework computer for a long time, all have either IPS or microLED panels, seeing an OLED screen for the first time to me was astounding. I did not even realize that colors for games could look that good. Which is a little weird, because I have an OLED TV. And OLED TVs look great, but you sit quite far from them. The vivid nature of sitting, I don't know, 30 centimeters from an OLED display and playing Fortnite or playing Arc Raiders or playing one of these other games.
Actually, I would call out Fortnite here. I've been a mega fan of Fortnite for a long time. I've played literally hundreds of hours with my kids in squads, but now I even just play by myself, even without the kids. It's just such a vivid game. It is such a beautiful test case for OLED.
So I got first the ASUS Zephyrus G14, which is a beautiful laptop in all the ways that the Framework feels more like a home-built shed, which is adorable, right? Like, I put this shed together myself. It's really nice. I can appreciate it. Great machine, especially for productivity. I like the 3:2 aspect ratio and all that stuff just for code. But when it comes to games, it's not the greatest machine. It's not meant for that. They have another offering, not the biggest fan of the 16 they have, but for that Zephyrus, with that OLED display, with that beautiful case, with that sort of gamer aesthetic without going overboard, which is a very fine line. There's a lot of gaming machines where all the lights are just constantly pulsating and you're like, "Am I tripping or is this just a machine?"
But ASUS really have found a nice way to toe that line. They have this, they're called the Slash, on the back of it, which is this LED strip that you can program to have different patterns. I'm like, "That's pretty cool." And then it does have the LED or RGB keyboard backlighting, which you can sync with other things. So, I actually built it in, after I got that machine, I built it into Omarchy. Then when you change your theme, the keyboard backlighting will change with it. So, you change to Tokyo Night and it's a nice sort of purple background. You change to Nord and it's a light, cool gray and blue. So, that's been a lot of fun. It's been a great machine.
And then just very recently, I had the good pleasure of bothering Michael Dell, because I got connected with him when we did our big cloud exit a few years ago. We've been a Dell shop on the server side for... And then when we moved out of the cloud, we bought like two pallets worth of Dell servers to run everything ourselves. And I was quite public about our cloud exit and it got a lot of attention at the time, and not surprisingly, Michael Dell also thought that was a great idea, to buy a bunch of servers and stick them in your data center. So, we struck up a conversation, and now that I saw their latest line of laptops, the XPS, with those Panther Lake chips, with the new tandem OLED screen technology, I just completely shamelessly reached out on an old conversation from back at the cloud exit thing, like, "Hey Michael, could you send me one? Could I get one? I really want to try this new setup because I'm excited about that Intel chip," as we talked about, "but also just really excited about the tandem OLED screens," given the fact I'd had that great experience with the ASUS.
So, that's been the machine I've been running for the last couple of weeks. It's still a pre-production unit. Not all the compatibility's there, but it's also fun to be part of that process, in a way I could never dream of having a relationship like that with Apple. Apple, to all their credit, is very much the ivory tower, right? Like, they're locked in there. They don't really collaborate with others in this way. They're just themselves. And that's great. That's wonderful, we have that gleaming tower on the hill over there. I wish their behavior in other matters would be a little more admirable and we could, without reservation, just have admiration for that company. Now it has quite a lot of asterisks next to it.
But either way, with Dell, they just immediately like, "Hey, yeah. Here's a machine. Here's an engineer who's currently working on Linux compatibility. Do you want to help?" And of course I want to help. So, I'm instantly diving in. How do we diagnose this? How do we make it work with the Linux kernel? What do we have to do to get all the different things working just right? This is still frontier stuff in terms of driver compatibility and so forth. It's just been a blast.
And then the machine is just amazing. It's a 16-inch, that XPS, that weighs 1.6 kilos. It feels like... it's funny, because I still have a MacBook Pro 16-inch as well, which is well over 2 kilos. You hold these two things next to each other and you get this appreciation for weight. That is quite funny, because you think in your head like, "400 g, how much is that? 500 g, 600 g." It's like, "That's not a big deal. This is a computer." No, it's a big deal. The difference between that, it just feels like they're different categories of devices.
And it's funny to me because this is what Jonathan Ive was always all about. He was about thinness, he was about lightness. And he probably pushed it a little too far. That butterfly keyboard debacle that plagued the MacBooks for literally 5 years with an incredible failure rate, that came out of that, was a reflection of that maniacal optimization. Can we shave a millimeter? And in technical circles, that has been universally panned, right? Like, "Just give me something that's twice as heavy and twice as fat if you can give me a bigger battery or a bigger CPU." Shut up, nerd. Like, there are other things that matter. And I say that to myself as much as anyone, right? Because I could hear myself say that, like, "Why did you put in such a crappy keyboard to just shave off 2 mm?" And you realize it's actually the wrong question to pose. The right question is, "No, no. Please keep shaving off every millimeter because it really does matter. Every 100 g really does matter. But do it while you keep a functional keyboard, please. Thank you."
XPS with Dell's new tech, you're seeing much closer to that. I still don't 100% love that keyboard. It's flush with the board. I should actually have brought it so you could see it. So, it's flush with the panel. The keys go straight across. So, if you turned off the lights and ran your finger across, you wouldn't be able to tell. Which is a little odd. It has a surprising amount of satisfying travel, but it's a little strange getting used to your fingers laying on almost like a table and then you're pushing down into the table rather than slightly raised. I thought I was going to hate it. To be perfectly honest, when I first saw it, I thought like, "Ugh." And then I realized, "Oh, I don't." It's not my favorite keyboard, but I don't hate it, and it was just an illustration that having a goal like getting the keyboard or getting the computer to be lighter and slimmer, that's not the problem. It's all in the execution.
So, I actually want to commend Ive for being so focused on it. Yeah, there were some misses along the way. So freaking what? Now we're here today and these computers exist. And now the weird thing is that for me, the MacBook is the bulky one. Like, it was always the inverse.
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