Something like a Dell E6430 would be a good bet.

https://www.dellrefurbished.com/laptops/dell-latitude-e6430-...?

Keep in mind that raw stats/specs aren't everything. I've seen countless people held up by hardware issues that have nothing to do with the speed of the processor.

As someone else mentioned, the T4x0 series are also very good. I have a personal T420 that I have upgraded to 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and Blu Ray that has held up very well over the years. To be honest, aside from the screen resolution, there is nothing pushing me to upgrade to a newer machine, and this thing was released in early 2011.

When I am looking for something thin and light, I use an Acer C720 Chromebook which has been reloaded with a full Linux install. It is perfect for SSHing into a more powerful machine if I'm just going to be in vim / bash all day. I get 8-10 hours of battery life in this mode. I picked this machine up for $130 a year or so ago (refurbished).

Have you had this issue?

  Section "InputClass"
      Identifier "touchpad catchall"
      Driver "synaptics"
      MatchIsTouchpad "on"
      MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
      Option "FingerLow" "5"
      Option "FingerHigh" "10"
      Option "VertScrollDelta" "-25"
      Option "HorizScrollDelta" "-25"
      Option "CoastingSpeed" "5"
      Option "CoastingFriction" "20"
      Option "TapButton1" "1"
      Option "TapButton2" "3"
      Option "TapButton3" "2"
  EndSection

[1] https://galliumos.org/

Edit: We're also carrying an iPad, and it's the least-used piece of electronics we have. For planning our trip, booking, programming, email etc the laptop is way better, and for everything else we use our phones. Unless you're sure you want a tablet you might just want a normal laptop. Also, weight matters a lot (this might be an argument back in favor of the Teclast)

I've had the odd transient problem with the keyboard (keys swapping or not working) but that's always resolved itself, and actually it hasn't happened for a while. What problems are you having?

In general, nothing runs Linux quite like Last Year's Model.

Just make sure you double check the wireless card support on Linux. The Latitudes use a variety of different chips.

I usually buy my stuff from the Dell outlet (Catch them during a sale and you can save a crapton of money on a refurb).

tl;dr, it's the best ultrabook/notebook I've ever had and run Arch on it.

I was looking for a light notebook also for programming for a long, long time (and I wanted this time Linux because of tiling window managers like i3). I finally got this Chinese model and what can I say, inside it's all Intel (Wifi, BT), Arch works flawlessly, touchpad is a glass trackpad and is for a non-Macbook just great, smooth and responsive and with Synaptics generic Linux driver you can really configure every tiny piece. I like the keyboard very much and the 176ppi screen is fantastic. It's also fast for a passive cooled device (it has a Skylake m3), and I get with Arch and 'powertop --autotune' easily 11 (!) hours surfing, sshing and coding. Only drawback it the 4GB RAM but it still works surprisingly well with the 4GB. And it has two SSD slots and one is even with the fast NVMe protocol. There's also a 13 inch model with 8GB and an i5 but way less battery time and it's slightly heavier (I always wanted a real ultrabook which also stays cool).

I got it directly from a Chinese shop for €450 in an xmas sale. I think now it's around €530.

However, it was so hard to find a notebook in this space. I you want a really light but somewhat powerful notebook you look at the Thinkpad X1C which is in some countries priced ok but in many, especially Europe super expensive (as the X260). But the X1 is still a great piece of hardware and as light as the Xiaomi at 14". Then we have the Macbook which is light, powerful but super expensive and runs well with macOS and Windows but people have mixed experiences when running Linux on that device. I looked also at HP (not really bad but also not exciting, the last gen Envy 13 is ok though), Acer have some new light ones but they are expensive and ASUS has the light Zenbook series which is ok but not that cheap.

So considering that this was Xiaomi first gig in the notebook space they did it quite well.

I presume you can get every component into powersaving states (which you can monitor with powertop).

Tricky question, do you get battery discharge events via ACPI (run acpid, and unplug)? That's the gold standard for uber good Linux support, and allows for neat udev rules to be written.

What material are keycaps made of?

Yes.

> Tricky question, do you get battery discharge events via ACPI (run acpid, and unplug)?

I got this:

  $ acpi // plugged in
  Battery 0: Unknown, 100%
  $ acpi // unplugged
  Battery 0: Discharging, 99%, 83:38:49 remaining

Plastic.

Edit: Just saw that you meant acpid. With acpid nothing happened:

  $ acpi
  $ acpi -f // to run in foreground
  $

However, suspend on lid close and wakeup on lid open works very good and fast (much faster than with the prior windows installation, tried with i3). I don't know if this is related to the acpi events.

Run sudo acpid, will start the daemon in the background.

Then run acpi_listen. It will block waiting for events. E.g. if you press media keys, un/plug the adapter, etc you should start seeing events. One per line.

Just leave it running on battery for a while. Hopefully it has events at 1% or 5% discharge intervals. Or at least for critical battery levels, when you cross the 10% or 5% level. Emergency thresholds can be usually controlled through a variable in sysfs.

These events are needed to write udev rules that get fired by the kernel. Thanks!

  // Notebook was at the beginning unplugged

  $ acpi_listen
  ^[[14~^[[15~^[[20~ac_adapter ACPI0003:00 00000000 00000001 // I pressed three media keys and plugged in the power adapter
  battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001
  battery PNP0C0A:00 00000081 00000001
  processor LNXCPU:00 00000080 00000005
  processor LNXCPU:01 00000080 00000005
  processor LNXCPU:02 00000080 00000005
  processor LNXCPU:03 00000080 00000005
  processor LNXCPU:00 00000081 00000000
  processor LNXCPU:01 00000081 00000000
  processor LNXCPU:02 00000081 00000000
  processor LNXCPU:03 00000081 00000000
  ac_adapter ACPI0003:00 00000000 00000000 // unplugged the power adapter again
  battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001
  battery PNP0C0A:00 00000081 00000001
  processor LNXCPU:00 00000081 00000000
  processor LNXCPU:01 00000081 00000000
  processor LNXCPU:02 00000081 00000000
  processor LNXCPU:03 00000081 00000000
  ^C

But it seems that the system emits charge and discharge acpi events.

Plug n unplug events are more common. Battery ones are quite infrequent.

I don't have a chance to play with one yet.

The glass trackpad has the same build quality as an Apple device without the 3D force thing. The keyboard as said excellent, it's similar to to last gen Macbook Pros but still different, it's clicky and nice to write on, good spaced keys.

The screen excellent, the lid when opening a bit less stiff than a Macbook. I don't know if they did this on purpose to let the device open with one hand...

Comparing to the Zenbooks: same build quality, case is much less fingerprint prone than Zenbooks and the trackpad is better since it's glass, I don't think the Zenbooks have glass trackpads. I'd also say that the keyboard of the Xiaomi is better than the last gen Zenbooks, they had mushy/shallow keyboards. I think they solved this with the new slimmer gen.

Edit: Linux support on Lenovo laptops is pretty good overall, and if you're a Windows person, they ship with that by default. If you're a student, they offer discounts as well, I believe. I got mine from a local seller without an OS and put Linux on it.

T series and X series sure. I'm not sure that the same applies to Lenovo's consumer laptops. For example, some of last year's models initially only supported Windows, although a separate Linux BIOS was issued later.[0]

[0] http://www.pcworld.com/article/3139812/laptop-computers/afte...

Typing this from a ThinkPad E545 running Slackware. Works like a charm (though OpenBSD was far less successful; the installer kernel panics pretty much immediately after the bootloader).

I've been using this for a couple of years now and was quite happy. It's a good trade-off between performance, weight and size in my opinion. Except some minor inconveniences[1], my Linux/Windows dualboot setup works quite well.

Heads-up: If you consider it's successor, the Yoga 900, make sure you don't get one of the series not supporting Linux (Google is your friend).

[1]: The biggest issue I've faced is inaccuracy of yellow colors on the display; they're dark and pale. Lenovo published a BIOS fix for Windows, but this doesn't work for Linux. However, if you don't plan to do any visual work like photo editing or designing color palettes, you should be fine.

Myabe you can also find a used Yoga or use two devices; a cheap laptop and a cheap tablet?

I feel like a hybrid laptop/tablet is a bit cumbersome as just an e-reader anyway? Not sure...

And the terrible buttonless trackpad

I get around that with a little synaptics hackage in the x.org vicinity to minimize palm touches and give me three buttons.

No, I can't recommend an equivalent to the T series. I did some research about laptops before deciding to buy the T460s, and my conclusion is this: all laptops are terrible and laptop-makers are consistently moving in the wrong direction.

The T460s is the least bad laptop I could find. That's why I bought it. And I actually like it a lot more than I thought I would, but a few things still aren't the way I want them, like being unable to easily (hot-)swap batteries, which was possible in the 450 generation. And the T460s still has two batteries. Just not easily removable. See what I mean?

Anyway, honest recommendation: get a Thinkpad. Don't put Windows on it. After you do your own research of course; maybe look at Dell XPS laptops?

I am running linux on it, but getting it up and running was a bit of a chore (you have to futz with the bios, close lid to suspend does not work, resume from suspend only works 90% of the time).

However, Acer rates it for 8 hours under windows 10. With "sudo powertop --auto-tune" it consistenttly exceeds that under linux.

The screen is passible for a low res tft, and there is no fan. Keyboard is fine (unlike most ultrabooks I have used). The touchpad really wants you to set up libinput instead of the synaptics drivers (palm detection isn't great under synaptics, but even with that, the touchpad is better than many ultrabooks I have used)

It is based on a braswell soc, which is probably why the Linux compatibility is so good (most of the peripherals are in one standardized chip...)

However it is a netbook. I'm not sure how android emulation would perform.

Screen is great (make sure to use the HiDPI one)

Touchpad works very well (better than Windows)

Not a tablet, but I recently bought a factory reconditioned ASUS Zenbook 305CA (8GB, M-5Y71 CPU) for a similar purpose. So far so good. It seemed to me to be at the bottom end of the premium ultrabook market and about half the price of a XPS 13, much cheaper than an X1. Also, Linux support is good.

Windows 10 memory management seems better than Windows 7. You might get away with 4GB for some things but my gut feeling is that 8 would be preferable. My Win 10 desktop is currently sitting at 7.3 GB with Visual Studio and a bunch of Chrome tabs open.

It boots up for a long long time. Win10 uses about 2.8Gb in idle state (which is good and bad both). Any significant drive activity locks the system for good - antivirus scan firing up, overloaded browser etc. Battery lifetime, despite having a 6 Watt SoC with integrated video and DDR3 memory, is average - maybe 4-5 hours top, doing nothing. My big old 15" laptop with 45 Watt cpu, geforce video and other older stuff lasted for 3 hours while it was new.

I used Visual Studio on it - it is possible but painful. Building code takes significantly slower, all actions are slow. But it can cope with MSVS, open browser, books, iTunes and some other stuff simultaneously. Development in lightweight editors should be way better.

64Gb of storage for Win10 with IDEs should be just barely enough and I would not recommend that.

If possible you should put inside 128Gb or bigger ssd and more RAM, I plan to do that at some point.

It's nice as a gimmick, but not a great one for development. If you're on a budget, I've seen fairly cheap but great second-hand hardware on ebay or craigslist. Maybe check those out. A few years ago I bought a Thinkpad X240 for around 200 dollars, it was an i5 with 8 GB RAM and I bought my own SSD to put in it. That laptop has been fairly solid for me especially with the expanded battery pack I purchased.

None of the Atom chips is decent for anything that requires heavy lifting. You really need a Core processor.

> 4Gb of RAM, 64 Gb of ROM

4GB is workable but 8GB is obviously better. However, I think you mean 64GB of storage. This is usually in the form of an eMMC chip soldered to the motherboard. The performance is similar to an ordinary SD card. It's nowhere near the performance of an SSD.

If you want the tablet functions, your best bets are a second hand Surface Pro 2, one of the Lenovo Yoga's, or an Asus ZenBook -- they're all available with SSDs and 8GB or more RAM.

The Surface Pro 2 keyboard isn't good and the touchpad is awful, but you can get a nice portable Microsoft Bluetooth mouse instead.

If you can live without the tablet functions, go for a refurbished ex-corporate ThinkPad X range with an i5 or i7, and fit your own SSD. The X220 was the last model with a "real" keyboard, but the newer keyboards are not too bad. (Most of the alternatives are worse.)

Battery life isn't great but look for a model where you can buy a second extended battery. I spent many years with a ThinkPad X and two extended (9-cell) batteries and I could outlast anybody ;-)

I shared your doubts about Lenovo products but you should get over it: I've bought three in the past 18 months and they've been fine. It's the highest-volume PC manufacturer today and nobody else is competitive at the really cheap end of the market. Also, you can often pick up sale bargains when it's clearing out overstocks, which is what I've done.

This is something to watch out for, but hasn't been done commonly for years. Those are the most likely parts to fail and manufacturers hate replacing an entire mobo under warranty just to replace a flash chip.

Buy something like a refurbished Dell Latitude series instead. Keyword here is you said "long trip'. When you buy something that made a lot of tradeoffs to achieve that price point, you are going to be frustrated.

As for testing apps, If you wish to simulate the user experience on a cheap Atom, this would be the thing for your. Else, you're bound to be frustrated.

* I bought it thinking that this would be a cheap Win10 based Netflix / Comic Reader. Windows 10 is not really a touch friendly OS. You will end up booting into Android and installing apps. Even then, there are frequent crashes / Some apps won't work because the Tablet does not meet DRM requirements.

* Netflix on Android only runs in HD with certified devices. Else you're going to be getting streams in 480p max.

* I apologise for the Caps. I got burnt by 2 of these tablets. (My fault, because I was expecting an iPad like experience without paying the price). I'm hoping that I can give you what to expect if you decide to buy one.

I went in thinking that the specs on paper would turn out to be great value for money. That was my biggest mistake.

From the WSL FAQ (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/faq):

Can I run ALL Linux apps in WSL?

No! WSL is a tool aimed at enabling users who need them to run Bash and core Linux command-line tools on Windows.

WSL does not aim to support GUI desktops or applications (e.g. Gnome, KDE, etc.)

Also, even though you will be able to run many popular server applications (e.g. Redis), we do not recommend WSL for server scenarios – Microsoft offers a variety of solutions for running production Ubuntu workloads in Azure, Hyper-V, and Docker.

Battery life is great -- no problem charging it overnight and not worrying about charging during the day.

In my case, I'm not a commercial developer, but I do "scientific programming" using primarily Jupyter/Python. It works comfortably on the little Windows 10 machine, but is noticeably slower.

Perhaps a bigger issue than horsepower for me is the screen size and attachment of the screen to the keyboard. Those things make it hard for me to spend long amounts of time doing really detailed or complicated stuff.

You can always adapt to lower processing power by using simpler tools, but trying to program on a 10" screen may end up being the main issue.

Yes, it would require a "free" wall, but maybe that's OK. A bigger problem might be power consumption. So overall likely not very viable, but maybe someone has some experience with this?

Using a cheaper system, if possible, is my "protection plan." I like to stay within what I could afford to replace out-of-pocket if something happens like the device gets stolen or I crash my bike.

But your point is well taken, and a developer should consider the typical system for their own preferred environment, which is likely to be more sophisticated than mine.

On choosing the model for a portable -- IMO the #1 goal is to get one with physical characteristics that work for you (size, weight, monitor, keyboard, ability to be a tablet, etc.). CPU/Memory/storage is a very distant second. Go to a store and hold many models in your hands. If you work next to other techies, ask to see their travel computer option; ask for advice. This will likely give you a lot of honest info and demos.

Extra 25% of CPU speed will get you little benefit if your ultrabook is not comfortable for you to work on.

Might be worth a look?

Reasons:

  * keyboard is too small for me (I find T430s keyboard much more comfortable);
  * Windows performance was terrible (again, compared to 2nd or 3rd gen i5).

Oh, and the stock RemixOS software was buggy to the point where it was unusable: crashes when using SD card and about 12 hours of standby time when keyboard is attached. CM build fixes these issues.

Also, if you're wondering: Chuwi's active stylus is not worth it- it's laggy, has bad palm rejection and needs too much pressure.

If you are able to be connected, maybe consider going with a physically small but well built machine but with specs inline with your budget and then remote to a development PC (ie at home) that has the kind of ram and specs you need. This will probably not be good for more GUI heavy development but command line stuff would be largely okay. Clearly you mentioned some tools that are GUI heavy, so YMMV, but thought it worth weighing up too

The ASUS is tiny for travel. The X2xx is larger, still pretty mobile, and built like a tank (military spec moisture and dust resistance).

As a side-note, the ASUS died on me during my India trip due to moisture.

The X205ta is not robust and not recommended if you want to run Linux, unless you enjoy painful noodling to get anything working.

It's a nice machine for what it is (A windows 10 machine for Youtube video and social media).

With this disclaimer: Please pay attention: both versions of Mi Notebook Air will be run on Windows 10 Home Chinese Edition

They are pretty reliable. But in my honest opinion, That kind of money should just be spent in the Dell Outlet. Get something like the Latitude 7270 / 7470 or the Latitude 7275 (Sort of a surface clone). At least warranties would be easier and you have Dell's support.

I remember the time years ago when I was programming with 1Gb of RAM (that was the normal for computers at the time) and it was a painful experience with Eclipse and other tools. As computers evolved with Moore's Law, 2Gb was a better experience and I think 4Gb was fine at the time. Then 8Gb should definitely be good and 16Gb is plenty even to run VMs.

Thinking that it would not be for a full time developing environment, just to be able to do some work while travelling in a long trip where I don't want to bring an expensive laptop like a Macbook Pro, I thought 4Gb might be enough, so your feedback is really appreciated.

If you are planning to run IntelliJ (or other JetBrains IDE's for that matter) I'd go for at least 8GB or memory though.

I wouldn't recommend running Android or other mobile oriented OS's for development, getting the tools up and running will be a pain.

Yeah it is expensive and yeah it definitely had its quirks in the beginning. However performance is crazy, I'll get easily 6hrs+ battery life on programming workload (in energy saving mode of course).

I have no experience with passively cooled Core M processors or the cheapo tablets you are currently considering, but having a full Intel CPU inside this horse is definitely noticeable.

If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer

It's basically a MacBook but stronger and with decent file and window managers and pc keyboard.

Here's what I think I'll, and let me know if you think that would work for you, I am thinking of buying a slightly used lenovo X1 Carbon. So it would cost less, but has great battery life and very decent specs, specially for such a small footprint. I'll then install linux (probably Ubuntu) and run that as a dev machine.

I programmed just fine on a single core idk-what older celeron with 512MB of RAM and a.. idk ~1000x700 resolution (and even all that was waaaay too much). Next time say what you want to program, as for web and such programming you need a ton of RAM (and probably cpu) while some things/languages you can program just fine with 256MB and a weak cpu.

Bdw cherry trail has a sound card in the cpu that doesn't yet work under linux.

edit: ".. IntelliJ IDEA?" Requirements are clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliJ_IDEA . And you can just open your task manager and see how much memory or cpu it uses.

It is doable though if you are willing to spend some time tuning your device, e.g. set the priority for some tasks lower than they want, so they don't hog the system resources while doing something. http://www.wikihow.com/Change-Process-Priorities-in-Windows-... I ran a 2gb ram, 10", dual core atom for 4ish years by doing this and using a lightweight browser, like opera or ie.

I paid around $225 for my Chromebook on Amazon.

This particular model will is slated to get Android app store support sometime this year.

- Java: Eclipse and the actual application running that I am working on, or

- JS: Sublime, a server for running and testing, a few Chrome tabs + Chrome Dev Tools.

While both of those would work fine with 8Gigs, if I ever happen to have to run more things (as in, the aforementioned things at the same time or a VM next to any of them) at the same time, things slow down considerably.

I can't recommend it enough.

You're a little bit in luck as Windows machines are considerably cheaper. Go for at least an i5/16GB/256GB SSD.

I use an identical i5 model with Android Studio (think IntelliJ with more resource usage), an Android emulator/VM, a Gradle daemon taking up 2-3GBs for builds, Safari with umpteen tabs, Slack, Outlook and Spotify open and don't have issues with disk thrashing (or at least, none I can tell based on usage and the Activity Monitor memory pressure).

I don't know how you're forced to use Vim.

I've noticed that OSX will do what I'd like any modern OS to do and use the majority of my ram with a few things running things running. But adding more of a workload when it's using nearly 8GB doesn't instantly make it "run out of memory", more paging occurs but not nearly enough to cause disk thrashing (or be easily perceptible)

I use a 2010 MBA with 4GB of RAM and run WebStorm or PyCharm just fine.

I'm not sure what's happening with your system, but maybe it's not happening properly.

I just replaced a Mid-2012 MBP's hard drive cable. It hadn't failed outright, but the system would take a very long time to read/write anything from the drive, constantly freezing apps.

Once I installed a new cable ($12 off amazon), it's speedy again.

Are you browsing with Chrome?

While waiting for that to be fixed I got one for double the price, but 2x-4x the specs.

Another option is the brand new Chromebook pros by Asus and Samsung at $499-$550 powered by the Skylake i3. These are higher quality Chromebooks than previously. The Samsung has a nice IPS 2400x1600 resolution. They are Chromebooks though.

Only downside is the TN screen. In the US it's probably even cheaper.

Furthermore, the latest chromebooks from Asus and Samsung are a bit more expensive but have a touch screen and impressive battery life (15-25 hours)

General observations - Windows was sluggish, no way you're going to be happy with IntelliJ performance on it. I installed VS Code but did not attempt any real work on it. Yes you can install any Windows app on it. The keyboard attachment is really heavy.

Get a 12" MacBook or similar laptop. They are more reliable, powerful and seemingly less likely to catch fire due to cheap electronics.

In what language?

Do you need to be able to code while offline?

An iPad with the keyboard case could work, particularly if you'll always be online. You can just use it as a dumb terminal to ssh into a more powerful remote server.

Another idea is the old MacBook Air 11". It doesn't meet your requirement of being a tablet but it's just as portable and would give you a lot more grunt. You can probably get a refurb or used one fairly cheap. 8GB RAM, SSD, good battery life...

Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1. Perfect Linux support, great battery, well built solid chassis, thin.

Negatives: Costs a fortune, and some people simply don't like Thinkpads.

Also, the rigidity of the keyboard and connection to it will be super important. Most detachable keyboards will cause trouble (especially the cheap ones.)

I'd recommend going for more ram, as big a screen as you can stand, and solid keyboard.

Not that big problem. I own Chuvi HI12 & Teclast X98 AIR and it's almost impossible to make WiFi work on these.

But there is a custom ubuntu distro with all fixes

http://linuxiumcomau.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/first-2017-1704...

https://techtablets.com/forum/topic/linux-mint-on-a-chuwi-hi...

It runs pretty well with Ubuntu out of the box. I got some additional power savings with installing TLP and etc for Thinkpads.

(edit) Found:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3017182/hardware/usb-c-chargi...

https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-laptop-manufacturers-use-usb-...

I've since upgraded to an Intel i3-based system which is much better (for a total budget of $450 including doing my own SSD upgrade). Both machines are Asus.

If you want to use an IDE, make sure you also get a big enough screen for it.

If all you need from Linux is Bash, Cygwin will be enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

But if by programming you mean learn python or C#, most likely yes.

P.S. Couple months ago bought Acer V3-372-34W8. Not an ultrabook, but weights under 1.5 kg, not too large, thanks to its Iris GPU has 64MB of L4 CPU cache, and unlike real ultrabooks this one is upgradable.

The keyboard is terrible, IMO, compared to prior models. The keys are shallower, and give less; compared to e.g., a Lenovo Thinkpad (I also bought recently), it's like typing on the desk itself. No give. My "a" key gets stuck, and it's not two weeks old. Before you buy one, go by an Apple store and type on one for yourself.

The adapter situation is nuts. the MBP 13" w/o touchbar has two USB-C ports — that's it. You're effectively using one for power, leaving you with a single port that basically won't plug into anything you have. If you have a pre-existing dual monitor setup, AFAICT you're expected to sink ~$200 into adapters and hubs. (Note that most hubs seem to come with a USB-C port, so you can get a USB-C hub that will add several USB-A ports, w/o losing any USB-C ports.)

Otherwise, it seems like a MBP. Apple did finally start putting a decent amount of RAM in them. This one has 16GB compared to my last MBP's 8GB (which Chrome just devours…)

It ironically has a headphone jack though.

I got a 13" TB in Novemember, and I just had to return it to an apple store and have the keyboard replaced because the shift/enter key was stuck. The TB (100 % gimmick) also sometimes randomly looses light on some of the buttons (which re-appear when I touch them)

I thought I would get used to the keyboard, but I dislike it so much that I am selling it and getting a 2015 MBP instead. This proved to be one gigantic time-wasting, expensive, and annoying experience.