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Comment by urthor | Hacker News Reader

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urthor

The words you are using are not true about modern Thinkpads sadly.

Apple's screen, lower power management, chassis, touchpad, are all dramatically superior.

The stereo on the Macbook Pro 16 inch is absolutely absurd. It's the stereo for my HOUSE.

Apple's killed supply chain that delivers more for less.

Modern Thinkpads have been ruined by the pivot to the ultrabook-esque approach.

Thinkpad's are like models.

There's simply no reason for them to be that skinny.

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Yeah, and that's kinda sad. However, old Thinkpads are still totally usable. I was using T420 until a year ago and the only thing that I hate about it was the absolutely awful screen. It was 1600×900 with absolutely horrible colors. There's a few ways to install a better display but it might be tricky [1].

Otherwise it was a decent “daily driver” laptop, in many aspects superior even to current gen MacBooks, particularly repairability, ports, keyboard quality. I'm using a 2020 MacBook Air now which I bought to try out the M1, and some aspects where it excels are screen (obviously!) and speakers, but I think those are comparable to a little more modern ThinkPads (xx40 maybe?).

[1]: https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Replacing_T430_screen_with_a_... (ThinkWiki got some terrible ads since I last checked it, get your ad blocker ready)

I have T420 (and T430s) as well, but I think at this point it no longer qualifies as a daily driver. Even with 16GB of RAM there are times when the machine is just slow. Even with a replacement battery I only really get a couple of hours. Performance is just not there for anything serious. I've used linux and BSD's on it for about 5 years. It's true you can repair it fairly easily, but after getting my hands on a refurbished M1 MBA, there is a huge difference in quality, performance, battery life, etc.

Yeah the speakers in the newer macbook pro models (even the late intel ones) are really impressive. I almost never use them and when I happen to play audio through them I nearly always catch myself thinking "wow, those are really good".

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