Lenovo Thinkpad is another popular line, seems conspicuously absent from your list. They're known to have good resale value, and to work well with Linux. If you're getting up to the Precision line, the Lenovo P series workstations are also worth considering, though given they're actually professional-grade machines with Xeon and Quadro parts they'll be more expensive than a Macbook Pro.
There are also boutiques like System76, that white label, upgrade, and manage driver compatibility for Clevo laptops which may be worth considering, they just came out with a new Lemur Pro like yesterday.
Check Thinkpad screens carefully as a lot of the new amd ones come with terrible 'business class' screens that I don't want to use as a developer, let alone as a designer .. and a repairman told me they are glued on these days so you can no longer swap them as you used to be able to.
Lenovo P series workstations are also worth considering
I have a P72 and it is garbage. Plugged into a docking station it works OK as really expensive mid-range workstation. Trying to use it as a laptop causes the fans to spin like crazy, performance throttled to shit and the and battery life of maybe 90 minutes for even fairly modest workloads. The similarly specced Dell Precision I had before was much better in every way and was actually usable as a laptop.
The P5X series that many of my colleagues have seem much better.
The P4X series is also working quite well - I went with that for the smaller footprint. Since I mostly dock it, the smaller screen is acceptable for the limited amount of time I use it undocked.
I’ve also had tremendous Thunderbolt-related firmware issues that could only be fixed in Windows. If you use Linux, there are much better options than Lenovo. I still use my T480 daily but I miss my old XPS 13, which gave me no issues ever.
Exceptionally bad is a bit harsh. Windows is first tier support with Linux coming in as a second. In my experience they are pretty good about fixing remaining issues in firmware updates, which can be installed using fwupd (I don't have a Windows partition at all). I belive there's even a GNOME Software front-end if you prefer things being very easy.
I don't need to use throttled on my X1 Carbon 7th and they recently added mainline support for the fingerprint reader. All I had to do was enable it in GNOME Settings.
I love my X1 (also 7th). This is the laptop which made me retire my actual desktop. Bought a docking station and a MOTU 8A for sound connectivity, and have no need for a classical desktop since.
I am not into gaming or graphics though. Still, with my (unusual) usage pattern I get almost 10 hours battery life time on the road, and all the CPU power I need locally. For heavy stuff, I compile remotely anyway.
I can't stand the (lack) of brightness on my X1 7th gen. Is that not a problem for you?
I can't for the life of me get it to be bright enough to use in a lit room. A bit of hyperbole here, but I basically have to hide in a closet and stuff a towel under the door to see the fucking screen. I love the keyboard, but I basically won't use the thing now because it's such a drag to use.
I am blind (no joke), I couldn't care less about brightness :-) Well, actually, no, I execute a script after boot which basically does:
for backlight in leds/tpacpi::kbd_backlight backlight/intel_backlight; do dir="/sys/class/${backlight}"; if [ -d "${dir}" ]; then echo 0 > "${dir}/brightness"; fi; done
I had similar thoughts after purchasing my X13 AMD, not sure if you're experiencing the same thing I did. I was extremely disappointed with stock brightness when I first turned it on.
Turned out windows power saving and battery settings actually capped my brightness. So my user-controlled "100%" (via keyboard) actually becomes more like 60%, depending on the power profile.
As soon as I got a new m2 ssd, I shelved Windows and installed Fedora WS, which has no such issue. That is, if I say I want 100%, it obeys.
You can quickly test with either a live USB, or tweaking your power profiles.
This is the only screen I've ever had to fight with to get something bright enough, and I'm nearing 40 so I've been through a metric buttload of computers and screens. It is hands down the worst screen I've ever had (and I still have a couple ~ 2006 20" acer lcds pressed into service in various comms closets and shop space in my house). The brightness on these is appalling and it doesn't help that Mint insists on resetting the brightness to 60% on every boot so I feel like I'm trying to walk through a house of horrors with only a single birthday candle for light.
Edit: the joke is that the house of horrors is my code
Thinkpad was one of the first laptop series which supported Linux explicitly.
Their competitor was Compaq NX series (HP EliteBook of today). Dell was late to the party and closed the gap by actively developing software for Linux (DKMS, Privacy Drivers, etc.).
Are they doing anything to prevent Linux from running well on them? As far as I can tell, since all big three (XPS, EliteBook and Thinkpad) are considered enterprise devices and their BIOS, IO tables and hardware layouts are crafted with Linux compatibility in mind.
They're explicitly sold with FreeDOS option to imply that you can directly install Linux on them.
Even my run on off the mill desktop shows more soft-errors about IO layout and memory mapped devices on board.
When IBM didn't like the panels they could source for Thinkpads, they started a new company called International Display Technology to manufacture panels they did like. Thinkpads used to be special.
While it's entirely possible there's a connection between decisions like that and IBM's PC division being unprofitable enough they sold it to Lenovo, it might be reasonable to hope that Lenovo would make the effort to offer competitive panels when it's obviously possible for their competitors to source them.
Piling on to say I cut on teeth on Linux installing Breezy Badger on a Thinkpad T20. Since then I’ve never struggled with a Debian based OS on Thinkpads.
Not sure about Carbons, but for T-series there are aftermarket IPS displays that you could swap for the original TN ones. Could be done in 30 min, with no previous experience, just with the service manuals from Lenovo and enough dexterity to handle a screwdriver.
I sent my Lenovo in for warranty service for a faulty SSD ribbon cable and... they lost it. And they haven't replaced it. They've told me four times over the course of the last five months that I'll get a call in 3-5 business days. It has never come of course.
I know I'm not alone; even just in my circle there are two other stories of horrible mishaps with this company.
Lenovo makes some decent machines, sometimes, but their warranty service is not to be trusted.
Lenovo took around 100 days, within warranty period, to replace my motherboard of my Ideapad Y500 because the parts were not available. I am never buying any Lenovo product ever again.
It uses low-power components (U rather than H CPUs for example) and isn't capable of generating nearly as much heat, regardless of what you're asking it to do.
Switching from a core H to core U will cut your perf in half. I like my xps 13 but in all fairness it struggles to run Firefox with youtube+gmail+slack and Office open all at the same time. As someone who primarily uses beefy desktops, it feels about as snappy as a Core 2 Duo machines with DDR-400.
Big bonus of the proper "business" laptops also is support. Wouldn't want a work machine I rely on without on-site support anymore (of course ideally you want a machine that never needs support, but since you can't rely on that from anybody...)
Indeed. Worth looking at the Thinkpads with this as well. A lot of the 3 year old discarded corporate units still have a couple of years of warranty left on them and Lenovo actually honour it!
There are also boutiques like System76, that white label, upgrade, and manage driver compatibility for Clevo laptops which may be worth considering, they just came out with a new Lemur Pro like yesterday.