Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480 | Hacker News Reader

Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

maxrozen.com

377 pointsrozenmd618 comments

I've owned an upgraded T480 since they were released, run archlinux on it. It was a decent computer, but despite having upgraded the battery to the largest possible configuration and using all the tricks in the book to maximize battery life in linux - it sucked. The reality is these Intel processors are just a big inefficient hot mess.

I ended up upgrading to the 14" M1 Max, and there is literally no way you can make a comparison of these two machines, they are worlds apart, build quality, screen quality, weight, battery life, single core & parallel processing, speakers, trackpad - everything.

The only thing the TP wins is bang-for-buck on the second hand market, and getting head turns from neckbeards, thats about it.

> and getting head turns from neckbeards

Where is all this hate coming from? It seems unjustified.

I take the remark more benignly. I think it's meant in an affectionate manner.

yes, with this post sitting comfortably on #1 on the king neckbeard forum, it is as certainly getting head turns from us as it is certain never to become more than a passing bemusement

*neckbeard used affectionately as an equal opportunity mindset that has evolved from its origins like many words have; there are women neckbeards too, as are neckbeards with no beards or for that matter no neck

> with this post sitting comfortably on #1 on the king neckbeard forum

I'll have you know my beard is full, luxurious and grey, as befits someone with 20+ years of Unix experience.

Now here’s a nickel, get yourself a better computer

> or for that matter no neck

Are you referring to our robot overlords? Or corporate personhood?

> there are women neckbeards too, …

Colloquially known as legbeards …

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=legbeard

Don't we have "greybeard" for that? My meme game isn't as good as it once was, but I do remember the horrible "neckbeard nests" pictures…

Neckbeard means a sexually creepy anti-feminist nerd. Basically someone socially awkward who is unable to connect with other humans romantically and has channeled that into a combination of hatred towards their desired sexual partners and a love of computers or other "nerdy" endeavors. Which is both weirdly specific and extremely common in both males and females.

I don't think there's any way to use the term affectionately. Unless there's another meaning?

Your proposed meaning is a more recent interpretation. Searching online I see the mysogynism angle becoming more prominent in the 2010s: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-neckbeards-have-...

here's from stackexchange from some years prior: https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/3173/whats-the-non-l...

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23545/Neckbeard-is-this-a-wo...

I've seen it used as a synonym for "unix beard". https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24

Receiving headturns from neckbeards is a whole lot better than getting headturns from youngsters sipping latte at Starbucks.

Resorting to silly Mac user stereotypes that were barely true when they dropped in 2008 is a good way to tell people you’ve never used a Mac or been to a Starbucks in a decade.

This is the comment where I now get offended that you said that as if not using a Mac or not going to Starbucks are shameful.

It's rare to see such a flame war on hn

As a coffeebeard I wouldn't be caught dead (nor alive) in a Starbucks.

No, they said it as if GP had no idea what they were talking about.

That's actually a 2000s political stereotype rather than a tech stereotype (he's just said "Mac users" instead of "liberals"), but I think Starbucks is more associated with suburban soccer moms now.

You know I've run Arch on Thinkpads forever and I never got one head turn from even one neckbeard. It's one of those dreams that never comes true.

It happens! Whenever I see a Thinkpad I start thinking I should buy one even though I have an M1 MacBook Pro.

I'm sure I'm not the only neckbeard lusting after Thinkpads.

I like the Carbons but I also have a Mac/use all three OS's

It's hard for me buy a brand new device though idk... What sucks about used devices is the battery and replacements are usually fake.

Funny M1 has been pretty good (cool) but with rider it was getting warm, open up htop and all cores working.

I'm a fan of the screen the most on Macs.

Eh... the newer models aren't what they used to be. They used to have arrow keys you could feel. Now it's all flat cost-savings.

I have some thinkpads privately and an M1 MBP at work. Bang-per-buck is best with the MBP, no doubt. The absolute number of bucks for a used thinkpad is super low and they live for a long time, so I have old thinkpads for light home use. The fact that anyone would go back to a thinkpad is surprising to me, but if you need win10/11 (or insist on no-VM linux) I guess it begins to make sense. On every other point they seem objectively much worse. (And I have a beard!)

They have a trackpoint, so there's basically no other option. Sadly the build quality and repairability has gone down, which used to be the other big selling point. Also Macbooks are way uglier, but that will probably be disputed :P

I use my Thinkpad everyday for more than 2 hours on the train, with a big Arch and GNU stickers on the cover. I was never successful to grab anyone's attention.

tips fedora in jarenmf's general direction

Highly relevant: https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/10w3ke1/the_lif...

> screen quality

> battery life

> speakers

> trackpad

All things you can replace with the T480. Which I've done, and can just recommend. There's much better options than the ones shipped by default, including trackpads rivalling the M1, a screen that beats the M1, and a battery that has 20h+ capacity and can be swapped with a second one to double the capacity in seconds.

> a battery that has 20h+ capacity and can be swapped with a second one to double the capacity in seconds.

And which basically doubles the size and weight of the laptop.

Yep, it ain't pretty, it's just possible. If you're a function over form kind of person, the ability to work for several days in a camp site or road trip without plugging it in is a terrific accomplishment and well worth the extra bulk. If you're the latter (form over function) then in the case of batteries, the cure is worse than the disease.

Does that actually matter? Seriously, it's less that some of the text books I used to lug around at school.

I thought the same until I developed shoulder and back pain from carrying around too much stuff all the time. Be thankful that it still doesn't matter for you.

Of course not. While not strictly a ThinkPad, IBM used to make some very loud "communication devices" that Americans famously toted around the European continent in the 1940s; the largest batteries available for them still didn't push its weight over 6 pounds.

They seemed to manage that just fine. You can carry a computer across the office.

That aside, the extended battery on the T480 is still bad- it raises the bottom of the laptop and prevents the laptop from sitting flat. This was avoided on the older models by designing the hinges and lid properly such that the 100Wh battery would simply stick out the back but they don't make them like that any more.

Why is raising the laptop bad? I have a few ThinkPads of that era - having the back raised is quite nice. The battery also provides a convenient carrying lip/handle.

> a screen that beats the M1

By what metrics?

By whatever metrics you want, you can choose which panel to install.

You can beat a 224ppi P3 display with working auto brightness and auto whitepoint (truetone)?

Auto brightness and auto whitetone aren't features of the panel, but of the OS. Apple just mosattributes that, as always.

And yes, 200+ ppi P3 displays are easily available, Apple just buys their panels from the same suppliers that are available to you.

They are features of other hardware associated with the panel like light sensors.

And no, just because a contract manufacturer makes the panels doesn't mean they also designed them.

Is it even possible to buy a panel with higher ppi than the mac pros? Genuinely asking here. I guess if you value 240hz you could run with that.

Apple usually buys their panels from LG, most of the time you can get better price/performance if you buy the same panel directly or in other assemblies.

Where at? Do you have a link?

I'd recommend modding a panel from a different thinkpad, like from the newer X1 models: https://www.ebay.com/itm/354162731881 This should, with slight modifications, fit any thinkpad with a non-touch 40-pin eDP. Not all T480 will have the right connector, so make sure you've got the right one before buying.

This panel will get you full DCI-P3 color gamut at 3840x2160 in 10-bit, but only 500 nits.

Thanks for the link, this is definitely a "nicer" panel than MBP ones. Maybe it is time to jerry-rig my t420 :)

Well, it definitely beats the MBP at resolution (290 vs 220ppi), has the same colorspace, same brightness, and is much cheaper and easy to replace :)

Right, but "If you upgrade the screen, batteries, trackpad, speakers, RAM and SSD and then it's a pretty good laptop" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

A 38-horsepower 1980s Mini 1000 is a fast car, if you install the engine and drivetrain from a Toyota Celica GT-Four.

Did you... just quote my favourite car of all times, the GT-Four?!

The best things in life can't be bought ready and require thought and even sacrifice.

Ikea furniture requires you to build it.

The best beds on the planet are pre-assembled.

Not saying the exact thing you're saying isn't true (IE; the best things in life are actually not things but relationships and experiences); but it is categorically untrue that "the best products require you to build them".

Messing with a few screws and latches is not exactly "building". "The best bed" depends on who's asking, and it would have to be built for you.

Similarly, you could hire someone to build a laptop for you if you categorically object.

Rather than a bed, a better analogy is a home - even the best ready plan can be improved for a particular family. Apple just doesn't allow that.

At what point is it building then?

Assembling could be considered the right term I would suppose, but equally I wouldn't say that the author "assembled" his laptop, since it involves disassembly.

> isn't exactly a ringing endorsement

Why not? Consider it a DIY kit, not a product, and you'll be happy. People build their own IKEA furniture with countless mods applied to it, why not do the same with a laptop? The framework is popular for a reason.

They are popular around here but I'm not sure they're popular in general.

I discuss laptops with a fair amount of people in real life and none have heard of the Framework laptop. They do, however, know what a MacBook Pro or ThinkPad is, and some even know they can customize the latter.

Binky!

Erm, I believe it's spelled "SillyCar".

Thinkpads are traditionally scoring high points at repairability and durability. It almost become a must-go step for battery swaps right after getting an used Thinkpad model.

> a battery that has 20h+ capacity and can be swapped with a second one to double the capacity in seconds

Any computer that can be charged with a usb-c connection doesn't need additional proprietary external batteries, you can just use a generic battery pack, which is why the T480 was the last TP with an external battery.

If you want to a) have a huge external device connected all the time, b) destroy your battery with constant charge cycles so badly that you need to replace it every few months, and c) want to be unable to charge other devices from your laptop.

> c) want to be unable to charge other devices from your laptop.

You just charge them with battery pack.

The whole point of a laptop is that I can use it on my lap, on public transit. That's not possible with your recommendation.

Having a cable go from my laptop to a battery in my bag isn't the biggest issue, even on my lap, but maybe things are different for your use case. Granted, since my laptop lasts >12 hours, I never really worry about battery life too much anymore anyway.

The question I replied to was about charging other devices from laptop. You can charge your other devices in your bag with battery pack, not dangling from your laptop while you're charging them.

can you actually link to the ones you recommend then?

Because I am quite interested then in figuring out the economics side of obtaining one

I’ve modded mine with 16 GB DDR-3 3200MHz RAM [2], a 2 TB NVMe SSD [3], a Wi-Fi 6AX card [4], the Innolux N140HCG-GQ2 1080p 100% sRGB 8-bit 400 nits panel [5] (based on the T14 display), and the Lenovo 61++ battery [6].

Depending on region and local pricing, all mods together should be around 300$.

[2] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08LQG2SDS/ [3] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07MLJD32L/ [4] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B097TQ7HBF/ [5] https://www.xelent-store.de/Innolux-N140HCG-GQ2-400cd-Low-Po... [6] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B06WGMPFCD

Which battery is required for 20+ hour capacity?

And which track pad are you referring to?

The track pad has always been the hardest part about moving away from a MacBook. Love my XPS, but I HATE it’s track pad. Battery life is another reason, but swappable batteries would be amazing (not on XPS)

Same, but I think he might refer to an external trackpad.

I haven't ever encointered people upgrading their trackpads.

Does anybody even use the trackpad on a thinkpad?

It can be done in this case. Tho I’m unclear if the X1E is ‘Macbook equivalent’.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/j0mrh5/t480_with_...

Hence the question. Love to know a trackpad (even external) that is of a similar feel and quality as the MacBooks.

Personally, I prefer the X1E trackpad over the feel of the trackpad on my dell XPS on or my friends' macbook M1s.

Apple offers one if i'm not mistaken.

Can you link these things?

I’ve used T series Thinkpads for years (mostly to mimic the environment of most of my clients), there are definitely better computers out there if you plan to swap out most of the parts. https://frame.work/

Tbh, if I could put the framework's AMD motherboard in my T470, that'd be amazing. I love the thinkpad keyboard, I enjoy the X1E glass touchpad, the T14 Gen2 screen is amazing, my battery life is 13h of work in IDEA, and I got all of it combined for less than 600$.

But I really dislike the hardware of the framework :/

There is no AMD yet

Can you run Arch Linux on the M1 Max natively?

Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-6-2-the-first-mainstream...

So, no. The headline is clickbait and basically just wrong.

Asahi is based on Arch already, it's been about the only thing you can run until recently. But maybe you're dissatisfied with how well things work at this point.

Trackpoint? Keyboard quality? Linux support for most/all components and features? Easily salvage data if some other part fails or is physically damaged by removing the SSD? Price and availability of replacement parts?

But... Steve Jobs... Think different... Aluminium with laser holes!

> "Easily salvage data if some other part fails or is physically damaged by removing the SSD?"

Fair point. But important to remember you're just as likely to lose the whole laptop if your bag gets stolen or something, or maybe the SSD will itself fail. Regular (cloud?) backups are indispensable.

I can not speak about how it would work with an MBP but the SSD replacing is a huge factor if you need it.

4 weeks ago we had to deliver a build of our game to Meta and 2 days before the deadline my laptop died out of the blue. I scrambled to buy a new one (didn't care which as long as it had enough oomph and I could source locally quickly).

I went for a Lenovo Legion 5 ( or 7, I am actually not sure, it doesn't have a sticker on it and I don't have the box anymore :) )

First thing I did was void the warranty by popping it open, installing the ssd from the other laptop and 30 minutes after unpacking the whole thing I continued working where I left off when the other one broke ( not literally since it was not suspended to disk but you get the meaning)

The machine is actually quite nice and I am, so far, happy with it, but the whole experience was so incredibly easy that I would not want to go for any non linux machine.

With a MBP, you'd just restore from a Time Machine backup. If you don't have one, that would be on you.

That's some Apple-sanctioned gaslighting right there.

How is that gaslighting? I've done this multiple times when returning a lease to Apple and setting up a new machine. I was up and running in less than an hour.

Restoring from a backup is of course something I would have resorted to if it would have been necessary, but the point I tried to make was that it was not necessary because there was a much quicker way to get back up to speed.

Also not sure if the time machine backup would reinstall all the apps and settings exactly as they were before, but maybe it would, I honestly don't know the Apple ecosystem well enough for that.

All I know was that a friend of mine had a very similar issue recently with a Macbook (don't ask me which one) and she had the problem that not all data was on the time machine, some recent stuff was there, some not so recent stuff was missing and some even older stuff was there again. That's probably some user error but she was expecting everything to be backed up correctly so she did not even know that there was a problem.

It's definitely user error. We have a lease program through Apple and we get new machines every few months. Getting back up and running is simple and every new Mac computer asks if you want to transfer from an existing machine or a Time Machine backup. Transferring from machine to machine is a 1-cable or WiFi affair that takes less than an hour for most of our machines and any hardware issue is done from a Time Machine backup that takes a few hours at most. I don't see the advantage to being able to swap an SSD from one machine to the next since only the most technical users would even attempt that.

Is it appropriate to blame non-"technical users" for "user error" in such a case?

I think so. The default configuration for Time Machine is to back up everything. There's not really a way for a non-technical user to prevent it from backing up everything on the machine unless an admin changed the options in Time Machine to exclude specific folders/data.

>, build quality, screen quality, weight, battery life, single core & parallel processing, speakers, trackpad - everything

Strangely mac fanboys always make sure to carefully avoid the subject of their crappy keyboard.

It is worth using a lenovo over a Mac for the keyboard only. Who cares about a trackpad one barely use on a decent desktop. Mac users overly rely on a good trackpad because their desktop is terribly user-unfriendly. I spend all my time on the keyboard, not the trackpad.

The butterfly keyboard was by all means crappy. The 17” M1 keyboard is really good though. Granted that I am not a keyboard expert but I use a mechanical keyboard with my iMac.

The newer Thinkpad keyboards are getting worse unfortunately: I have a T480S which I really like the keyboard of (other than the annoying positions of the pageup/down keys), but I tried the T14S Gen 3 and preferred the M1 MBP 14's keyboard, so went with that (battery life and screen quality also played a part)...

The 2016-2021 Butterfly keyboards were bad, but in my usage of the M1 MBP macs they're good again now.

The crappy "butterfly" keyboard that Apple put on Mac laptops for years was indeed very crappy, but that ended when Apple redesigned the keyboard before the M1 came out. The current keyboard is great.

T480 weighs 3.6lb vs. 3.5 for a 14" M1. I'm surprised you noticed.

MBP doesn't have a trackpoint. Still can't run Linux as well, lacks USB A so still requires constant dongles despite improved port selection.

I moved from a 2018 15" MBP to a P14s Gen 2 AMD. The speakers, screen, trackpad are worse. But I don't care. I'm not stuck using a horrible OS with miniscule amounts of storage to keep the price down. The machine doesn't go from frigid to boiling in 3 minutes either. I can't imagine I'd be happier with a 14" MBP, I just don't care enough about saving 5 minutes to put up with macOS and locked down hardware.

The only thing I miss from the 2018 MBP is the ability to charge from the left or right side.

> MBP doesn't have a trackpoint. Still can't run Linux as well, lacks USB A so still requires constant dongles despite improved port selection.

I've never wanted a nipple mouse, but to each their own and I know some people love them. What I have wanted is a giant 6" diagonal multi-touch trackpad.

Linux is very much a non-goal for me, and if I want to, I can always SSH into a remote instance or run a VM.

I don't miss type A at all, and the 14/16" M1/2s have a much broader variety of ports which largely solves the dongle issue. [edit] the only place I have a lot of Type A devices I also have a thunderbolt dock with gigabit ethernet too.

> The machine doesn't go from frigid to boiling in 3 minutes either.

That's a feature of the Intel CPU on the 2018 15" MBP. You will not find the same on an M1/2. In fact I'm not sure it even warms up?

> You will not find the same on an M1/2. In fact I'm not sure it even warms up?

My M2 does quite regularly with only Chrome, Slack, VS Code and a few docker containers running.

I hate that sub downvotes facts that they don't like

You’re confusing facts with anecdotal evidence.

I know from extensive debugging of this issue that docker is the problem. You basically can't run docker (as of 6 months ago...I hope this will eventually be false) on an M1/M2 without causing significant heating and battery drain. Since this is the fault of the OS, maybe Asahi will eventually be the solution.

Yes, same conclusion.

I wonder if people using it for writing code are running docker at all, you read so many comments on HN of how the battery life is incredible (on any thread about comparisons between any Mac and any other laptop) while in my experience a full charge Macbook Air M2 lasts about 6 hours with Docker running instead of the usual 15 it lasts when its off.

I use my company-provided M1 Pro MBP for mobile dev (Xcode, Android Studio) and battery life and heat are both great for that use case. Very rarely run Docker, but when I have it's seemed more resource hungry than anything else running.

Can't you run Docker on a remote host? I always have a 64GB memory EC2 instance near if required.

Run arm64 ubuntu in a VM and use arm64 images and it should be very fine?

I have a 256GB (with easy/cheap room for 768gb) 28c haswell-e server sitting in my basement though too. Costs like 1/3 of a macbook pro if it comes down to it.

I write code full time. I run Docker as little as possible, preferring to run everything “natively”. It’s so much simpler than figuring out how to get whatever shitty webstack working with reloading etc. It’s faster. Battery life is better. There’s no downside in my experience as macOS is a good enough *nix that almost everything Just Works™.

The only time I run Docker is to test an image locally, which is in general only to debug my Dockerfile.

I switched to using Podman when the licensing terms came out and it was clear we weren’t going to be able to get a procurement through. The move was generally painless and the battery life is great - no noticeable impact unless I’m actually hammering the CPU in a container.

Are you running arm64 or amd64 images? I switched from docker to podman, mostly due to other issues (e.g., the weirdness with the Docker VM seemingly growing infinitely in size and refusing to trim automaticity), but running arm-native containers has never really made my battery life significantly worse.

The 12+ hours, though, I’m not sure how people are getting that consistently. I feel like VS Code and some LSPs alone make that impossible for me.

I can’t imagine if I were doing some web dev stuff and needed Chrome installed of Safari too.

You could also launch a Linux VM and run your docker containers in there. That ought to work better than just running docker in Mac OS and letting it manage VM instances on its own.

You shouldn't pay more money for a top-shelf laptop, then need to do this.

Can confirm.

By the time you have a giant 6" trackpad, then a touchscreen just absolutely makes more sense, but oh, yeah, right, Apple insists on being a decade+ behind the times on laptop hardware features while insisting they're better.

It does not. Touching the screen requires moving your hand even further away from the keyboard and requires getting your screen all smudged up. I abhor touch screen laptops. They make much more sense in convertible laptops with pen input.

I actually disagree. It's all about ergonomics. Holding your hand/wrist up to the screen all day is unnatural and tiring - not to mention smudgey and annoying. The large trackpad being planar with the keyboard allows you to use without physical stress for extended periods of time.

Their position is if you want to fing on something, fing on an iPad.

If you want to type, point and gesture, get a MacBook.

I'm very ok with that and personally satisfied that Apple didn't jump on that bandwagon.

moving my fingers on a trackpad is way better than stabbing my meat stick on a screen in terms of accuracy and personal energy use

Using still an ThinkPad X220 here with Archlinux. There two important things in any laptop, the built-in keyboard and the built-in screen. This is the I/O-Interface! Customers often do the mistake and doesn't invest in the best available screen. You cannot make this mistake with Apple, because they offer no options for the screen. Regarding keyboards, selecting a ThinkPad is always safe.

I had to buy the X220 from a shop, not directly from Lenovo:

    * TN-Panel -> IPS-Panel
    * ISO-Keyboard -> ANSI-Keyboard
    * Bluetooth 3.0 -> Bluetooth 4.0 LE

All with original replacement parts. I bought it because I wanted to remain the the seven row keyboard, which provides better layout/grouping. The X220 will reach it 10th year in next winter. The keyboard provides excellent tactile feedback and concave keys. Bonus, TrackPoint. The TrackPad is superfluous for me. The frame is made of polycarbonate (feels nice on skin contact) and reinforced with magnesium.

Apples keyboard doesn't provide a good feedback on press and the keys have no shape guiding the fingers. They make superiors chips through TSMC, especially the M1/M2 without any PRO/MAX which allows passive cooling. But I don't want use MacOS. And while aluminium is a nice material for cars, bikes and planes it doesn't feel good with skin contact. We don't use keyboards or mice with aluminium because it doesn't feel well. I know, the aluminium frame makes it shiny and sturdy and allows to glue in stuff (cheap) but I don't like that. I even don't like it with my smartphone.

PS: Battery replacement is a bless. Yes, built-in batteries allow for more sturdy frames but it is bad in long term. It would be enough the provide replacement batteries with a low-weight cage and screws instead of glue.

> PS: Battery replacement is a bless. Yes, built-in batteries allow for more sturdy frames but it is bad in long term. It would be enough the provide replacement batteries with a low-weight cage and screws instead of glue.

I agree with this. That said, an all-in battery replacement by Apple is $199. Once every 3 years isn't going to break the bank vs. like $50 for an X220 battery.

Especially when an X220 gets like 7h of juice vs 17-22h for an M1/2 MacBook Pro.

Yep. We should mention here improvements within the last decade? The X13 Gen3 (AMD) also should allow run theoretically 17 hours[1]. I think a peak was reached with the MacBook (Polycarbonate Body) or T430s which allowed to replace the battery at the device bottom with a coin, easy maintenance and sturdy frame. And good balance because the weight counteracted the open display.

With "peak" I mean the situation that a thing reached a point where it was actually good and then get impaired. Sometimes because another feature was added but didn't fit. Or just for the sake of change. The seven vs. six row keyboard layout is such a thing. The 16:9 screens where everyone immediately wanted the 16:10 back (happening right now). The MiniSD-Slots replacing the SD-Slots...

[1] https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X...

How does one achieve 17 hours of battery life with an X13 Gen3 AMD? I can manage maybe 6.

Do you have a discrete GPU? Disable it. Run TLP and powertop to see what uses too much power and to adjust tweakables.

I do not have a discrete GPU, have run TLP and Powertop and have adjusted the tweakables. Maybe it's my 1440p display.

If you use zenmonitor, what is the package power on a typical workload? It should be 2-3W maximum normally. If it's too high, it's a too common case of manufacturers setting insane tweakables, and can be remediated using amdctl/ryzenadj/zenstates (or in some BIOSes using the PBO2 setting). Otherwise, it can sometimes be a bad SSD using a lot of power.

I'll try those out, thank you for the tips.

The big problem with newer AMD ThinkPads from what I've heard is use of some second-rate (mostly Realtek) components in places, which in comparison to those used on Intel models don't perform as well and are more likely to cause trouble under Linux.

I just swapped the realtek wifi of my P14s amd gen 2 with Intel ax210. Cost was around 10€.

I think since around one year ago upstream kernels do support the realtek wifi card properly.

Actually they use four different. You can swap them yourself (15 - 20 EUR):

    * Qualcomm (Atheros) -> GOOD (or even best?)
    * Intel              -> GOOD
    * Realtek            -> It works okay for average users
    * MediaTek           -> Bad or lack of reputation

The X13 is currently shipped with Qualcomm. Older T14 seem to use mostly Intel. On a P14 Lenovo we got a MediaTek (no reliable after Resume from Suspend) replaced by Realtek.

I would be happy if AMD and Qualcomm team up together again. The questionable ARM-Deal with Microsoft also didn't worked out well for Qualcomm.

> Once every 3 years isn't going to break the bank vs. like $50 for an X220 battery.

My Apple laptops haven't gotten frustratingly-low battery life—but, hell, still better than any PC laptop I've ever owned at purchase, even when "degraded"—until ~5 years, historically. Including the Intel ones. IDK what Apple does with their batteries (extra, "stealth" capacity? Just way, way higher-quality batteries than any other laptop or phone manufacturer I've ever used?) but they hold up better than any others I've seen. I expect the Silicon devices will fare even better, having truly stupid-long initial battery life (people who are like "LOL who the hell needs 14 hour battery life?"—this is why, if you want 8 hours of battery life after owning the device for five years; it's not just some niche oddball thing, it's about device longevity, in addition to being handy surprisingly-often in the meantime)

I think it's the "way higher quality battery". There are a lot of very low-quality non-OEM batteries, I've rarely had those last more than 6 months and they were wildly unsatisfactory even then. I managed to source a NOS OEM thinkpad battery off ebay and that was significantly higher quality than the usual junk but still, I think Apple is picky about batteries.

While on the whole I'm not overly fond of the non-serviceable battery model on laptops, I do believe Apple when they say they lose money on their repair service as a whole. I just had my iphone 8+ battery replaced after 4 years (yeah it was starting to get real bad lol), I made a point of having it done at the apple store knowing that 4-year-old glue might not want to let loose, it ended up having a different problem and they ended up replacing the whole phone with a refurb, for the $49 cost of the battery repair. Sold, absolutely came out ahead on that, was starting to get glitchy anyway and it was a refurb phone in the first place, honestly was crossing my fingers they'd break it anyway.

If you have an expensive MBP I think it'd be a hard sell to not take applecare, if you end up needing even 1 display replaced you come out ahead. That's the model, Apple really wants you on Applecare and they lose money doing it, it's all part of the package deal of ownership (which of course is not offered to secondhand owners, that's where they make the money).

It's more of a mixed bag on the cheaper models... display replacement still has a decent service charge plus the applecare fee and it's not all that worth it on a say $700 laptop. You're gonna have paid a total of like $500 anyway if you need to use it, at some point the laptop is just totaled and you get a new one. Also probably not worth it on desktops (with the possible exception of imac). But on a $3000 macbook pro? Yeah I'd do it there for sure.

The Apple Silicon models will probably also benefit from being the first(?) ones to run their entire life with Apple's new optimized charging behavior. E.g. my laptop spends most of its life plugged in running a display, and so it has its battery charging kept on hold and is occasionally charged up to ~80%. I can only assume this'll help the battery life in the long term...

Check out the application "aldente" for a tool that lets you manage this behavior directly... it can stop charging at a specific battery level regardless of what "optimized charging" wants to do, it allows "sailing" mode where it won't start recharging until the battery is discharged to a specific level, and it allows halting charging when the battery is above a certain temperature.

It does what it says on the tin in terms of system behavior at least, no idea how much it will actually help in terms of battery life.

This is not an Apple-specific feature, though. Windows 11 has a similar mode on Thinkpads, although I don't recall if it's something Lenovo-specific or it works everywhere.

TLP on Linux or directly:

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0 #

     ...
     charge_behaviour # [auto] inhibit-charge force-discharge
     charge_control_end_threshold
     charge_control_start_threshold
     charge_start_threshold
     charge_stop_threshold
     ...

Too much options for normal users. Actually one button in UI battery panel "[PRESERVE CAPACITY] or FULL CHARGE" would be optimal.

Also still using a X220 (X230 motherboard swapped) with Debian and a T430s (with 1080p swap) with Windows.

Agreed that the X220 form and function is excellent. The 7-row keyboard is amazing. The IPS screen is serviceable. The swappable 9-cell batteries give around 10 hours of battery life each. The i7-3520M is noticeably faster than the i5-8250U in my surface pro 6, even though benchmarks suggest it shouldn't be.

Just tried a new T14. The keyboard is decent. I haven't found any laptops with a keyboard as good as the 7-row.

> Also still using a X220 (X230 motherboard swapped)

Is there any advantage to swapping the X230 motherboard into an X220 chassis vs. putting the X220 keyboard on an X230?

I upgraded to an X230 from an X220 for Vulkan support, but have swapping in the X220 keyboard on my todo list. Curious if there's a good reason to go the other way.

I have a T14g2, and while the keyboard is indeed reasonable, it is a far cry from keyboards TPS used to have, and the front chassis wedge is so sharp it gave me long lasting and very painful CTS-like symptoms after a single long day of coding on a train (I’ve since fixed that issue by padding the corners with Sugru). The camera is also extremely poor, both in terms of image resolution and light sensitivity.

I wanted to like the x220s I found and then upgraded (well only the best one). I think the keyboard is great. I stuck an IPS screen into it (no nitrocaster).

The good one ended up having the power port die on me and while struggling to pull the thing a part to get to it (of course it is possible, but it's tested my patience :) ) the top case basically crumbled apart. I swapped the good parts to the other one, but it sits idle now. I just don't feel like I can be productive with a small 768 screen. I can't avoid the fact 1080 is my minimum.

I think my T430s is really good (with 1080 adapter and the keyboard is fantastic), but it can end up having the same issues with the top case with small cracks in the top case.

The TP I was able to keep from my last job has none of the problems. It is a T470p. Maybe there was some effort into material quality over the years, but it survived a really hard fall with some minor damage on the top and bottom case. It also is much easier to service :) It's the 470 that's the better overall one I have had, with the 430 being the one with the better keyboard.

> “And while aluminium is a nice material for cars, bikes and planes it doesn't feel good with skin contact. We don't use keyboards or mice with aluminium because it doesn't feel well.”

Apple does make (desktop) keyboards and trackpads with aluminium. Not to mention phones, remote controls, and the Apple Watch. No complaints here!

> T480 weighs 3.6lb vs. 3.5 for a 14" M1. I'm surprised you noticed.

Without battery.

The battery itself weights 7oz, which goes up to 13oz with the extended battery (which the parent said he bought)

The MBP running Linux in a VM will probably give you the T480 experience - it will be relatively slow (but still fast enough) and use a lot more battery.

I can tell you now that 2022 was the year of Linux on the desktop with Apple+Parallels! :)

I have a mini datacenter on my desk right now with 5 Debian machines running, 1 Windows 10, 1 OpenBSD machine as gateway for the others. No lag.

Just now I fired up YouTube on 3 of these Debian machines in Firefox as well as one in the Windows 10 VM. All running full screen 1080p videos (a wide second display with 3 VM's, the main display showing the Windows VM). No lag.

Also, I have _never_ heard the fan on this thing. Unsure if it has one! :)

The CPU/GPU combo is of course great, but it's the 400GB/s memory bandwidth that makes all the difference I think.

([edit] oh, and the battery life is nuts.)

Would you mind sharing your machine spec please? Thanks!

Sure; M1 Max, 64GB RAM running Ventura 13.2.1 (and Parallels Pro 18).

like sibling, I'd be interested in the specs. Thanks!

Is the trackpoint really that important when you have a trackpad which doesn't suck with associated drivers and software which doesn't suck? I've never been using a Mac trackpad and felt the need for something trackpoint-like.

I understand the desire for a trackpoint on laptops with non-Apple trackpads though.

Yes, because I have to move my hand off the keyboard to use the trackpad.

Fair. But don't you move your hand off the keyboard to use a mouse when using a desktop PC? Or do you have a trackpoint on your keyboard there too?

I avoid keyboards without trackpoint.

And for the rare case where I have to do something which requires a lot of mouse pointer motion (e.g. CAD modeling or reading schematics) I prefer a real mouse over a trackpad.

Yes? You don't need to move from the keyboard at all, you get physical buttons too. Your wrist is never misinterpreted as a mouse movement either.

It's just better unless your workflow heavily involves the use of 3+ finger gestures. Which I don't personally care about but seems like a necessity to not go insane on macOS.

> "Your wrist is never misinterpreted as a mouse movement either."

This just doesn't happen on Mac trackpads: they have pretty sophisticated and effective palm rejection.

Just spent about 30 seconds there testing this on my m2. Couldn't convince it to move the cursor with anything below the knuckles.

That's definitely not the case in my experience. Has this improved in the recent past?

Nope. It definitely happened to me on my MBP because of the giant trackpad.

As someone with slightly larger than average hands - Yes it does, it happens all the time on both of mine.

I think it depends on your style. I have problems with mine, because I typically type with only my fingertips touching anything. So if my palm hits the touchpad, it registers as a mouse movement. The only solution I've found that works pretty well for me is to rest my palms on the touchpad when I type, which seems to give it a better clue. But this isn't how I type on any other keyboard, so I keep forgetting.

Not sure if that's the case anymore. Had various Apple laptops in the last 15 years and palm rejection worked great. Not so with the 16in M1 MBP. It has trouble with it especially when I wear sleeves. The trackpad might be just a bit too large.

I have small hands and still have trouble with this, to the point where I almost always have an external keyboard/trackpad with me.

Yes, it does. At least to me.

You still need to shift your hand position. One of you hands leaves the home row, or at least that's how I always used the track point (and I started using them in the 90s). Is it as much of a shift as a trackpad? No, of course not. Is it a panacea of speed because your hands don't have to move as much? Not at all. Keyboard shortcuts are still much faster.

You like them or you don't. There's no real need to explain about it anymore than that. Honestly, on my Thinkpads, I used the trackpad just as much as the point. Maybe I'm just not very good at it, but it takes some skill to use the point. The physical click buttons are nice though.

I also don't use 3 finger shortcuts on my Mac either, so maybe I'm just crazy.

>Is the trackpoint really that important

Yes. The arguments for it are the exact same ones Vim evangelists make (ergonomics, speed), but having the TrackPoint there applies those advantages to every other program on the system as opposed to just the one.

I’ve had thinkpads for years, first a T420 and now an X1C (and I use vim a lot) and I can’t seem to integrate the track point into my workflow.

Either it’s too fast and it overshoots, or it’s too slow and it distracts from what you’re trying to actually do.

How long did it take you to become proficient with it to the point you prefer it over a mouse / trackpad?

About 5-minutes into first trying a ThinkPad ever

The trick is to use the stick as a Force sensor, instead of treating it like a capacitive Position stick on console controllers. In other words, you use your skin to "pull" the stick transversely so that the shearing force maximizes the feedback to your fingertip's cutaneous nerves.

The common mistake for those who gave up after 5 seconds of trying is attempting to "push" against the stick which is very difficult to do because there is barely any height to the nub, and in order to reverse directions you'd then need to shift your fingertip to get leverage on the opposite side of the dome.

When you instead use the shearing technique, it enables considerable finesse over not just the magnitude but also rapid modulation of the direction you are applying it in, effectively using the skin itself as both a sensor and a transducer.

Also remember to turn off the operating system's mouse acceleration, and turn up the driver's pressure sensitivity to max.

Thanks for the detailed explanation - you've inspired me to give it another shot.

Yeah, I tried repeatedly with an IBM laptop years ago to get used to the nub, and couldn't get accurate with it without dropping to like 1/20th my mouse-using speed. Even the shit-tastic trackpad was way, way better. But of course I just did what a lot of PC laptop owners do and ended up carting a mouse everywhere (I'd have to have the power brick anyway, and once you're in "I'll need a bag" territory you may as well toss the mouse in)

Are you touch typing? I am sincerely curious. For me, because I am touch typing, the trackpoint was a big advantage over the trackpad - I don't have to lift the hands from the keyboard. This is how I got used to the trackpoint.

Yes, and depending on preference, it's better. With a properly working trackpoint, you barely need to move your hand or fingers at all. Complete screen navigation from slight finger pressure. No swipes, no wrist movement, no carpal tunnel, no RTS. The single best control system ever invented, once you learn to stop trying to use it like a mouse or trackpad. Trackpoint combined with touchscreen is the best.

> they are worlds apart, build quality, screen quality, weight, battery life, single core & parallel processing, speakers, trackpad - everything

Well, depending on your job and work setup, that might matter more or not. If you're tied to one desk or another, battery life is rather secondary – if you're on international flights a lot, 12 hours of battery are a godsend.

Performance is another matter. Plenty of users have systems that are still basically terminal multiplexers. An ancient i3 with 8 gigs of RAM can do that. Others do heavy processing work, where the M2 just wins.

Ergonomics? Well, do you work with just your laptop? Inside or outside? Totally docked? Trackpad ergonomics or keyboard ergonomics? (classic Apple vs. Thinkpad topic, although they're both worse than 20 years ago, keyboard-wise)

(Generally greybeard me thinks laptops are horribly overrated and -designed, but that's a totally different discussion)

>The reality is these Intel processors are just a big inefficient hot mess.

Well that may or may not be the thruth but Linux and the cpu itself has sweepdstep, which can and should clock down to like 800Mhz when idle saving a lot of power. What I found the biggest drain was the display. Dell XPS 15 is a nice (linux) machine, almost everthying works out of the box, BUT the battery life is a joke. The 4k display is the biggest betteryt hog here (check with powertop). Also I do not understand why the manufactures build muxless machines for dedicated GPUs.I want to disbale nvidia complelty, unseen on the PCI bus via bios setting....

A year ago I was given a Macbook M1 at work. Really nice battery and mostly silent. However I couldn't stand macOS so I asked for a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Battery was worst but not by that much, I mean, maybe the M1 would do 25% more actual time.

I really like what Apple has done with the M1/M2, however, I cannot stand the non-mate screens, not having a TrackPoint, the keyboard, the metallic body, and macOS. It also doesn't help the obsession of Apple of making everything thinner at the cost of ports.

The products haven't really been trying to get thinner since, I don't know, 2017? Certainly not since Ive left.

They've even regrown ports again.

I am not a neckbeard and my T480 has 64gb of RAM and 2TB Nvme drive and wifi 6 card. I need a lot of RAM for my workload. I am running Ubuntu and lots of VMs with lots of databases and k8s clusters.

“neckbeards” is quite funny

The battery life (and in some cases, horrifically bad TN panel screens) are what kills these older ThinkPads, Latitudes, etc for daily drivers. If I’m spending so much time at my desk that being tethered doesn’t matter I’d be better off building a desktop with modern hardware, which confers the biggest benefits of ThinkPads while also being vastly more powerful and expandable. If space is an issue, ITX builds solve that pretty neatly.

Really, somebody needs to develop power-sipping ARM motherboard board replacements (much as xyte.ch does with x86) for the various business notebook models.

> horrifically bad TN panel screens

The only 'great' ThinkPad screen is the 14" WQHD (2560x1440)

The others are just...bad. So dim, dull colors, and the low-end screens are sad, terribly washed out TN panels

Newer ThinkPads are a lot better in this regard — my X1 Nano Gen 1 for example has a 16:10 2160x1350 450 nit matte IPS panel that looks excellent. These models aren't that well liked by ThinkFans though.

I mocked Apple's focus on weight and portability and thinness until I got a recent Macbook pro for work. Holy shit they are heavy! Be careful what you wish for, I suppose!

Isn't the apple device 2-3x the price, though? Doesn't seem like it's even fair to compare.

Yeah. M1 MBA owner using it as a cheap daily-driver/thin-client, probably will upgrade to a MBP M1 sometime, I'm not going back to Intel. Maybe a 11th-gen for AVX512 but really I'd want to move onto a 6800U or similar at this point, and the selection of "AMD + good display + good KB + repairable hardware" is not very deep.

I know they've said it'd be a huge amount of effort and they're not planning on it, but I really wish there was a Framework laptop with a 6800U or similar.

> and there is literally no way you can make a comparison of these two machines

This is such a weird thing to say.

> The reality is these Intel processors are just a big inefficient hot mess.

I usually get more than 10 hours out of it, running Ubuntu. I think that's great.

Regarding Lenovo:

I bought an original Macbook Air. It always worked well. As it got on to about 10 years old, I took it in to an Apple Store a couple miles from my house and asked if they could replace the battery. The battery worked pretty well, but I figured.. the machine was going strong and if they still had batteries in stock, I should grab one now and the laptop will live even longer. They replaced the battery for $99 and when it came back (3 days later), they also replaced the motherboard for some reason. I don't know why, but basically, aside from the screen and the keyboard, it's a new machine. I still use it today -- the only thing I can't really do on it is edit 4K video.

Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son. A couple of weeks ago the keyboard stopped working. We bought a replacement keyboard and swapped it out. Still didn't work. So, something on the motherboard. When we called and asked about getting it fixed, they said it wasn't in warranty anymore and the price to diagnose and replace the broken part couldn't be estimated, nor could they estimate how long it would take. We'd have to ship it to a third-party repair center. So my son is walking around his college campus with a Lenovo laptop and an external keyboard, for a laptop we bought 2 years ago for almost $2,000.

So, no. No Lenovo for me. And given my previous stupendously negative experience with Dell (they couldn't repair 2 brand new machines that were shipped to us with broken WiFi and took so long to declare it unrepairable the machines couldn't be returned either -- two machines bought together had to be reported in separate calls to tech support and the third party tech support people who came to the house weren't very knowledgable -- calls disputing the non-returnable declaration took so long to return and were bounced among so many unhelpful people at Dell Headquarters they basically convinced me to give up, buy third-party wifi cards and live without Bluetooth in these machines), no Dell XPS laptops for me either.

On those experiences, I'll only spend my own money on Apple laptop hardware.

In my experience, Lenovo is basically two different companies for their Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad machines. If you have a Thinkpad and have a warranty issue, they'll overnight you a shipping box with an overnight label. I had an issue with mine that needed a motherboard replacement and I was only without my laptop for 3 days. Meanwhile, I had a similar issue with a non-Thinkpad laptop and they emailed me a UPS ground shipping label, expected me to provide my own box, and quoted a turnaround time of several weeks. I ended up buying another of the same model of laptop and returning the defective one instead.

Not only that, even as an individual you can buy on site warranty and they will come to your apartment to fix your ThinkPad if you have any problems.

I consider Apple that they don't sell "non-Thinkpad" products. That's how I can easily pass the spect sheets which promise better-than-apple-for-much-less and pay a bit more and be happy about it.

It's almost as if you get what you pay for.

In Europe, even ThinkPad support is atrocious. It's done through some third-party resellers.

Pricing is also pretty atrocious compared to the US, which is sad as there are not that many alternative laptop brands with good Linux support.

It’s fine in the UK. Not sure about mainland Europe.

Prices in Switzerland are ok, to not say cheaper than elsewhere, but support...Unless in warranty, is atrocious. They asked me to send my laptop for "diagnostic" with unknown cost when I requested how to buy the part (out of stock on their website) to replace it.

Honestly, once it's out of warranty, I buy the part I need on ebay/aliexpress/etc. and fit it myself.

"being able to take it apart and put it back together" covers for a multitude of sins if you're me.

Others may feel differently, and, well, to each their own preferred set of trade-offs :)

By the time it's out of warranty you can afford a fully working parts mule off ebay to leave lying around.

If you trust ebay/aliexpress for battery, good luck. I am lucky enough to have been able to buy what looks a genuine one from a store here as I hope they sourced it from official Lenovo European reseller, which are available only for company (req. Vat number etc)

I've never yet accidentally bought a fake part off ebay (I'm sure I will one day, of course).

Requires a little paying attention to get decent odds, certainly, but it's far from impossible to do so.

My experience in the UK was bad.

Digital River was the third party maintenance company, never experienced such bad service. I'd purchased onsite support. Getting them to listen and actually book the repair was painful.

Ah ok I used them twice. Had no problems.

In US, ThinkPads have been especially popular in the corporate world, with some companies practically standardizing on them as business laptops; e.g. Microsoft used to be like 90% Thinkpads early-to-mid 2010s. I suspect that much of the support infrastructure benefits that we get are derived from it being that pervasive. Are they generally less common in Europe?

Spot on.

Comparing to Apple (I run both Lenovo and apple kit) I’ve lost two bits of hardware with apple for multiple days on repairs in the UK. A friend just got told that there’s a 2 month turnaround on his custom M1 MBP 16 which has a logic board problem.

That scared the shit out of me enough to throw the money in on a Lenovo T14 gen 3 with NBD on site repairs. If I sell my apple kit I can afford to buy another identical machine and stick it on the shelf. I’m still £120 up on my mac and mitigated a whole bunch of risks.

A couple of T490’s is probably good enough for me to be fair.

It's odd to me that Apple has never offered a 24h turnaround (or cross ship) higher tier support package. This was a hold up for businesses using Apple machines for a long time. I guess enough employees started requesting Apple machines eventually getting businesses to offer them anyway.

They offer “express replacements” with applecare, I did it for my broken ipad. They overnighted me a new one and I sent the old one back to them in the included box/label.

> It's odd to me that Apple has never offered a 24h turnaround (or cross ship) higher tier support package.

They used to have an even more exotic AppleCare tier than that for Xserve customers - onsite hardware support within 4 hours if you had a problem during the business day. I don’t remember exactly how much it cost but I want to say it was less than $500.

Remarkably, the old product page for it is still up on B&H: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/283804-REG/Apple_M892...

In relevant countries / locations, that's a fairly standard option from Dell, HP etc for servers.

AppleCare+ does cross-ship in many situations

Maybe it depends where you are?

I have a Lenovo gaming laptop and I have a 4 year warranty with on-site service.

I've purchased a lot of computers from Lenovo and other brands. The service and parts availability difference between the Thinkpad/Station/Centre models and everything else Lenovo makes is vast. The build quality between Thinkpads and other Lenovo models is also stark.

Parts, firmware updates, repair manuals...even warranty extensions for 5+ year old Thinkpads is totally normal.

For computers other than Think branded things that Lenovo makes, they're functionally abandoned ASAP. They make some innovative and well-engineered things, but outside the Think line everything is basically a disposable commodity machine.

>Parts, firmware updates, repair manuals...even warranty extensions for 5+ year old Thinkpads is totally normal.

They still have the hardware maintenance manual online for my 30 year old Thinkpad 350C.

I bought a framework just for this sort of peace. I really long for apple hardware, but given the price, I'd be afraid of breaking things.

+1 to Framework. I self-repaired my kid's laptop twice (spills; once I had to swap the keyboard, and another time - motherboard), and it's being straightforward to fix.

Apple's customer service is really unrivaled in the computer repair space. I had a similar experience with my MacBook Pro in the past, my display stopped working, dropped it off at a store and picked it up a couple days later. They had replaced basically the entire laptop sans the plate on the bottom.

Tried getting HP to fix a monitor with a defective port and was going to have to ship it to them at my own cost with no estimates of the repair time or cost. I just went out and bought a Samsung.

If you have the time and knowledge to repair your own computers like the author it can be a fun hobby, I also have two custom built PCs, but I don't do work on them for a reason.

I've had Lenovo send a tech over within 24 hours and do a repair on my kitchen table. The several day wait typical of Apple in-store-repair is glacial in comparison. And that's assuming the Apple store doesn't ship it out to the depot for a repair where the reimaging-happy techs are likely to impose a couple extra hours of restoring from backup when you get your machine back in your hands.

I've never dealt with or owned a Lenovo but it sounds like they're also good based on others replies.

Do you have to pay extra or have a business plan with Lenovo to get that service tho?

Every single laptop I owned before switching to Apple was a huge piece of shit, in hindsight—like, probably shouldn't have been saleable, just a straight-up lemon by design.

... except an IBM (yes, it's that long ago) Thinkpad that was super-underpowered even for the time. Though, it did have the ~2-3hr actual-in-practice battery life that was typical of laptops at the time, no matter what they promised, so like all the rest the battery was really just for hopping from one outlet to the next (I don't know if Apple laptops were like that at the time, but I do know that no subsequent laptop let me feel like I could leave my power brick behind when getting up from my desk until I got a Macbook)

If I ever go back to PC-land, it'll be to an underpowered device from a business-oriented line. Worked once, so, maybe it'll work again...

> Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son.

This especially is a big part of your problem. Discrete graphics card in a laptop = 2x the problems—and that holds even for Apple (in the Intel days, anyway). Gaming-marketed on top of that? Add another 1x for 3x the rate of trouble over baseline. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

"If I ever go back to PC-land, it'll be to an underpowered device from a business-oriented line."

If I ever need a PC again, it'll be by running Parallels on a Mac Air.

If only they made a Mac air with 64GB of ram. Alas market segmentation department won’t hear any of it.

Supply-chain rumors suggest the launch of a 15.6" MBA in the near future, leakers suggest it has M2 Pro as an option. If so it might offer 32GB (or like the mini vs studio, maybe that will remain a segmentation point). Current rumors are maybe June launch.

I agree though, 16GB is tolerable for casual usage and consumption without massive swapping, but, 32GB would really be nice.

You know what? I’ve only had my Steam Deck for slightly under a year, but I’m honestly astounded at the amount of abuse it has endured without showing any apparent problems. I’m very curious to see how long it lasts.

I doubt it will be competitive with a Switch for durability, which is the closest mirror to a Deck that also has some similarities to Apple-style hardware-quality + lock-in.

But that said, I’ve had problems with Apple laptop keyboards after only a couple years of use, and had a laptop monitor from Apple start to yellow bizarrely after less than a year. Nintendo joycons started having issues after under a year.

Sometimes you’re just at the bad-end of the bell-curve. It’s a shame that online reviews aren’t that helpful anymore; it can be hard to know what’s real with consumer tech, and hard to know how big the lemon segment is.

Maybe Steam will give us a line of gaming laptops with the same build quality...

Wasn't the "Steam Machine" supposed to be an attempt at a gaming PC, but it failed?

IIRC the Steam Machine was a specification and not a product you could buy, so quality varied. I'd bet that contributed to its failure.

The T series Lenovos are still great business machines -- I wouldn't buy any other Lenovo. I prefer my macbook for the most part, but sometimes you need different hardware.

It's out of my wheelhouse, but I am looking for a gaming laptop manufacturer recommendation that is high quality...

> If I ever go back to PC-land, it'll be to an underpowered device from a business-oriented line.

I've had great luck with exactly this--used, midrange Dell Latitudes.

I agree with Apple being the king of the hill... But it really isn't all that bad on the other side. There are some Windows laptops that will last you a work day on battery, albeit none of them can do considerable compute. I've seen some non-Apple hardware last for 5-ish years all right too.

And if all you need from the laptop is Chrome and SSH, then Chromebooks are actually a pretty sweet deal. I still run a 6 year old Pixelbook as the daily driver. Battery deteriorated to the point of lasting only 6-ish hours, but I have nowhere near that many meetings in a day. A new premium Chromebook should reliably last 10 hours and stay good for 5-ish years.

It's crazy how good apples are. I have a 2013 MacBook Air which I replaced batteries now after 10 years. Still as fast and snappy as day 1. It is crazy.

I can't say the same thing about my HP ZBook from 2014. Reason: it's snappier now after I upgraded the RAM from 16 to 32 GB and swapped the HDD for two SSDs years ago.

The Air didn't receive any hardware upgrades though, apart from a new battery.

I didn't check the specs of that Air, but is it upgradeable? If it is, maybe you could make it faster too.

Anyway, there is no reason for your Air to be slower after 10 years. The hardware is the same. Either Apple makes a slower OS for it or it will be as fast as ever.

In my case I moved to Debian two months ago after years of Ubuntu. It was fast enough but it feels faster now. The fan didn't turn on often but it's even more silent now. Maybe less stuff running in background or a newer kernel and graphic driver, who knows.

On the other side, my friend's cheap Windows laptops become slower and slower until they buy a new one. I'm not sure to know somebody with a 2000 Euro Windows laptop. Maybe it's different.

I use my 2011 13" MacBook Pro daily, though the OS is so out of date I don't log into my Apple ID with it or even Chrome. Media consumption, ssh to servers, web browsing is all super fast still. I even use Parsec to game on it connecting to my PC in the basement, it does so perfectly. I replaced the battery twice, but otherwise it's been issue-free. 16gb ram and an SSD gave it a new life.

Some stuff the dual core i5 just can't handle anymore, but it won't be e-waste any time soon.

Everyone has their own unique experience. I bought an IdeaPad in 2012 and to this day it is working well enough that I haven't replaced it (though when I'm home I have a modern tower I built 2 years ago). I could not be happier with the build quality and longevity. I must have 10 000 hours absolute minimum on that device, I really wish there was a counter in the BIOS I could check.

I have a ThinkPad R61 from 2007 that still works. It's a core2duo 1.83ghz with 4gb of DDR2 and GMA950 graphics so even with a really lightweight Linux install it's basically useless-- but it boots right up and the battery still works.

Regarding Lenovo:

I only ever bought T series laptops from them and they all still work flawlessly, the oldest being a T420 currently used by my mom who needs a computer about once a month to visit a website.

On those experiences, I'll only spend my own money on Lenovo laptop hardware. ;-)

Opposite experience for me. Had a MacBook for ~10 years and I had various hardware failures, every time you have to book an appointment at the genius bar first to try and convince them that it's really an issue. Go into the shop, then you have to wait for 7-21 days for it to get fixed for an unknown price and because it's all connected replacing the rubber feet means changing the whole bottom case etc. Then you have to go in and pick it up again. This is in Germany where a Apple Store might not be around the corner.

And yes, because I relied on it for business I spent the money on their Joint Venture program to get faster service and a replacement laptop (but only if the Apple Store in question had one available which was never the case for me which is ridiculous). Until they canceled the program.

Lenovo instead: Bought premium support, had an issue, someone physically came to my house to replace the memory at my kitchen table the next day.

Apple - in my experience - is not great for freelancers and small businesses. It might be good for private people and large businesses.

I hate the ceremony and the Apple Store experience.

> I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son

These are not comparable. There are wildly different quality of laptops under the Lenovo brand. A ton of them are complete crap. Apple simply doesn't sell anything like that. The author is comparing to a Thinkpad specifically.

Additionally, the 10 years old Apple that made your macbook is a very different company from today. Although they are still a premium brand, the reliability and replaceability of parts is completely different. I have one of the first unibody MBPs from 2009, and ran it for almost 10 years (although I had to switch to freebsd and linux by the end because of Apple). That laptop was incredibly sturdy, and parts were reasonably replaceable, keyboard lasted 10 years before getting squishy. Battery was a terrible hot pocket but replaceable without screws! back then it was all SATA so I upgraded to an intel SSD from before they sold their controllers to samsung - also in a user serviceable compartment next to the battery.

None of these things are true of Apple laptops today.

The Legion 5/5 Pro/7 are very solid as workstations in my experience, and with the exception of the keyboard, everything I would want to service is accessible. I've switched the memory, added new SSDs and even repasted my Legion 7 Gen6. I've even been able to run VFIO virtualized Windows on these machines.

You're also exempt from the Lenovo panel lottery.

I’ll give you the user-serviceability point, but not the longevity point. I would bet lots of money that my 2021 14” MBP will still be very usable in 2031.

(Maybe not by me, but that’s only because I’ll succumb to the urge to buy something new and shiny and tax deductible in a few years.)

Maybe, if you are lucky. Not so sure you will be running MacOS though, max version support seems pretty arbitrary with Apple historically.

IDK, the last Thinkpad I had, I used for a decade, then passed it on to a relative who used it for a few more years before something finally broke. Have also owned a Lenovo Yoga series laptop, and it's absolutely not in the same category at all as a Thinkpad.

> I’ll give you the user-serviceability point, but not the longevity point.

I just replaced my 2012 Thinkpad T430s (which I bought second-hand!) with a 2019 x390. Part of it is that the T430 became a loaner that I have gifted to a friend who needed a laptop for light paperwork, but also the battery on it (and any replacements I could find) had a pretty short lifespan, about 2.5 hours at best. The laptop was still very usable, but I've become too tied to my desk and my desktop lately and I wanted to be able to work with more mobility and not worry about having an outlet constantly available.

All that is just to say that Thinkpads, even post-IBM era ones, have the longevity you expect from a Macbook. Unfortunately, the user-serviceability has also gone downhill, with soldered-on memory being common and now the charging port is a USB-C that is built onto the motherboard.

But the T430 us legendary like that. I have written many scrapping and alerting bots, but the only one still running is the 'find me any new refurbished T430 trove nearby' and haul ass to buy some. I love this machine so much I'd like to retire with a stock of them, praying I'll still be able to browse whatever the slow web will be then and code the night away as I've always done with this beauty.

tax deductible ?

Self-employed. Business expenses essentially have a 20-40% discount built in.

Yeah it's sad but the butterfly keyboard generation of MBPs had such issues. Keyboard aside, USB-C ports burned out / stopped working all the time. Battery life was just OK on Intel.

The latest gen is better thanks to MagSafe and Mx chips help yield much better battery life.

I will agree that it's not quite as easy to fix/service/upgrade as it used to, but I bought my Macbook Pro (Intel i9) in 2020, used it daily since then, thrown it in a backpack and had to thrashed around in airports repeated, and the thing still works about as well as when I purchased it.

I really do think Apple does a reasonably good job at making sure stuff lasts. It hurt to pay nearly 4 grand for a computer three years ago, but I suspect I'll get at least another five years out of it.

If Lenovo put their name on it, it's absolutely reasonable to blame them.

I didn't say anything about blame, only that the category of laptops being compared by the parent are not in the same class as what the author of the article was comparing.

You know what they say. Windows for your gaming desktop, Mac for your laptop, and Linux for your servers.

Agreed on the Linux for your servers bit, for sure.

Really? I thought it was Arch for your desktop, Arch for your laptop and RHEL for your servers? /s

There are some people in Arch communities that use Arch on servers too and think that stability is not necessary.

Well, if you're doing immutable infrastructure, it's probably perfectly reasonable. Not sure about rolling releases on production gear though.

have you seen WSL ? Windows is very compelling for your laptop

But the hardware options aren’t great

I’m now using a Macbook Pro (3 months give or take) after being on windows HPs and the hardware is excellent but macOS itself… not great by any means. Windows+WSL2 is a better developer experience and I’m honestly surprised as I expected it to be the other way around. Granted to make windows usable I had to install tons of tools, but the same is true for the Mac!

Not so much anymore.

WSL2 under Windows is very good these days, you can run ML tasks without much overhead, and Windows 11 has an x server that allows graphical applications to run from WSL2. So for home development, all you really need is Windows (if you game, if you don't or run games that work well under Linux, Linux is the better choice).

For laptop, it very much varies by use case. For general higher level coding and web browsing, M1/M2s work very well. For more specialized use cases, Linux is simply better than OS X.

I had Apple quote me $900 to replace a failed screen (no visible damage, but no image either) and tell me that they weren't sure it would even work because of "liquid damage" to the mainboard. I can assure you that the computer never got wet. I bought a replacement screen from ifixit for less than half the price and installed it myself in an hour.

I've owned a few MacBook Pros and I now use a ThinkPad X1 Extreme. I paid for the support plans on all of them.

The Macs were generally very good until the generation prior to the M1. That was the worst laptop I've ever owned. I had to repair it multiple times - keyboard multiple times and also a motherboard that went bad - and I was without it for days each time. Not to mention, I also had to make an appointment, often days away, just to drop it off. The AppleCare experience with laptops was pathetic. To be fair, they've done a fantastic job on the phones and iPads I've had to bring in.

My ThinkPad's touchpad started flaking out so I called about a repair. They had someone at my house the next day and I was only without the laptop for about 15 minutes. It was a night and day difference between AppleCare and Lenovo's premium support. There's nothing sexy about this ThinkPad and the hardware isn't as good as the latest Macs, but the Linux support is flawless and I know I can count on Lenovo to provide good service.

It all comes down to what you want and what you buy.

I've had my 11" MBA in service since it launched. I did have to pull off OSX because (it became garbage); but the hardware has been solid for a decade+ now.

My 2019 rMBP lasted ~2.5 years before an OSX update came in and cooked it ~1w outside of corporate Apple Care expiring on it (see: I was told to scrap it).

I've also had a Dell tech sitting at my kitchen table replacing a bad motherboard the same day the laptop failed to post; ~8h turnaround 'Dead' to 'Working fine'.

You get what you buy and what you pay for to a large extent. Much of Apples reputation is that they simply don't sell a cheap gaming laptop.

I switched from a Macbook to PC laptop a few years ago. I'd say there are two rules to making that switch comfortably.

Rule #1: do a ton of research and comparison shopping to be certain you're making a good PC buy. These huge brands like Lenovo, Dell, Acer, etc churn out so many laptops, and the build quality varies wildly between them. For my process, I completely factored out most brands: absolutely no shopping for Acer, MSI, Dell, Toshiba, etc. They're just too much of a roulette, unless you know a specific model that fits your needs (like the Thinkpad!). At the time I was shopping I was only looking at Asus, Alienware and Gigabyte (not sure if they're all still good brands in 2023).

Rule #2: be able to do basic small maintenance. I ended up buying a Gigabyte laptop that's still running perfectly 5 years later, and it IS a gaming laptop with all the heat / cooling issues that implies. I've had to replace the SSD, the battery (heat degradation), didn't replace but had to oil and reseat the fans, repasted CPU / GPU, and make various software tweaks. A computer shop could do the same, just like the Genius bar, but it just makes things so much less stressful when you can do the kind of quick maintenance that Apple so strongly discourages.

>Lenovo gaming laptop

No.

Thinkpad laptop for work, gaming desktop @ home.

I think you got exceededly lucky with your MBA repair. And honestly it's a bit tough to believe they replaced the motherboard for free 3ish years after they typically refuse to stop servicing the device entirely for anything besides the battery and have declared the device obsolete. Had it hit the 11 year mark they probably would have offered to recycle it and maybe give you $50 off a new one.

I've had extremely bad luck with Apple support and products. The last time I had to do some ridiculous process to prove it was still under warranty and they still tried to pawn it off on the retailer.

Had an OLD iPhone that needed a battery. Apple ended up replacing the whole thing with a refurb, as apparently the replacement battery process went sideways and broke the circuit board.

They broke it and made it right.

I was in the same situation with a Macbook Air 2011. At about 9 years old I needed to replace the battery, but got turned away from the Apple Store because it was 'too old'.

I tried buying a replacement battery online but it only worked for a short time before it stopped charging all-together.

Left a really sour taste in my mouth because the battery was the only thing stopping me from using an otherwise perfectly fine piece of hardware.

I disagree. My office have me 15 year old Lenovo E440s when COVID hit and we all worked from home. Some of them are going on close to 20 years and I've had few problems other than slowness. A few had WiFi fail but other than that ran strong

> Dell (they couldn't repair 2 brand new machines that were shipped to us with broken WiFi and took so long to declare it unrepairable

Didn't they use socketed WiFi cards? On every non hair thin laptop I could crack open, I always found the WiFi card to be mounted on a MiniPCI or newer socket, so unless that problem was due to the mainboard, it was just a matter of replacing the WiFi card and install the relevant driver.

Also, if you know how to solder and have a really thin laptop with one available internal USB port, you can fit a small module such as this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225197524670 Complete it with a small pcb antenna and you have a new WiFi card. Very useful also for small SBCs which beside the usual USB sockets usually have internal USB ports pins.

Socketed with a piece of conductive metal resting on at least one of the antenna leads. Quality stuff. (It's possible I just had bad luck.)

Do they make laptops with internal USB ports? I've never heard of one, but that doesn't mean much.

I've seen the feature on servers for the same reason they can come with (dual) internal SD cards, but I can't imagine a manufacturer putting in a full-size USB-A port in an ultrathin laptop. I'd really like to see an example if I'm wrong however.

I'm a self-confessed Thinkpad fanboi so very happy to contribute my story. I bought the laptop I am typing on now (P51s) on eBay 4 years ago for ~£600 with a couple of years of warranty remaining. During a covid lockdown it developed a motherboard fault and they sent someone out the next day to my house to fix it onsite. With Apple I was always told to take it to a service centre. I mean, that's what I signed up for I guess, but the damn thing cost me £2000. I think there is not enough emphasis on the price differentials in these conversations. In fact, my repair story is kind of irrelevant to my point which is that for me the availability, cost and repairability(?) of these machines is key. I have an IT cabinet with spare parts, PSUs, clonky docking stations, and have managed to get most of my family onto Thinkpads so we have a pretty robust setup whereby if somebody has a problem we can probably sort it within an hour or two, either with a replacement part or a replacement machine. I am a bit envious of recent Apple silicon for battery life but stubbornly sticking with my old Thinkpads for now!

A personal anecdote, I've had the the complete opposite experience with Asus and Lenovo laptops lasting forever, not even needing any sort of repair, while my 2007 MacBook pro died because of a known flaw on Nvidia GPU after less than 4 year and the fix costed as much as a new laptop

I bought a t470s on ebay for 100 dollars during the holidays and I’m blown away that its mostly an intel era macbook air (was there a 2017 model?) with upgradeable ram 16gb (for 35 dollars), nvme, and a replaceable battery.

Gaming pcs, until about a year or two ago, are pretty much desktop replacement pcs.

It's been 11 years since Apple first released non-upgradeable laptops. Can we get over it already? If you want a laptop that you can upgrade then don't buy an Apple. If you don't like Apple's ecosystem then don't buy an Apple. This has been the advice for over 10 years now.

There's nothing new here.

But as it’s bad for the environment it’s even more important in 2023 to keep complaining about it.

But as it’s bad for the environment

Is it? Thanks to the increased reliability that non-upgradeability confers I'm still using my 2012 MacBook Pro as my daily driver. I suspect there's a lot of minutia to tease out to verify whether this claim is actually true in the global case.

I agree with you. My computing requirements haven't changed significantly in a decade, so it is easy to pick a laptop that will meet them. Display technology is pretty much perfect; there is very little that is going to change in the life of your laptop, so you don't need to worry about the display becoming outdated. Laptop keyboards have been terrible since the first laptop ever, and that will remain true forever. CPU / memory / storage is also pretty easy to predict, and modern laptops are very competitive. (I would want 16 CPU, 64GB RAM, 4TB storage. Apple is happy to sell such a laptop, though I guess the CPU maxes out at 12 cores.)

For that reason, I don't see why you would expect to upgrade your laptop. I currently use a home-built workstation and rarely upgrade it. By the time the CPU is outdated and tired, you also want to swap the GPU. My 128GB of DDR4 is useless in the world of DDR5. So it's not like I get a ton of upgradeability by having a workstation. I can keep the case and the fans for the next build, saving me $150. Woo. (I have kept my NVMe SSDs forever, though. But they are inexpensive and "rsync" after the upgrade is not too onerous, so it's pretty reasonable. But, technology improves there too. I have PCIe-4, but my SSDs don't take advantage of it. So keeping them just gives me slower storage.)

The only thing you have to be careful about is sticker shock vs. future needs. Upgrade is pay later, but laptops are pay now. It hurts to price NVMe SSDs on Newegg and then pay Apple $2000 for it. That might be what people are talking about with "upgradeability"; "Apple is too expensive".

Exactly. My Apple products out-last non-Apple stuff by an order of magnitude (as much as I want to be on Android and Linux desktop).

That's because they are more expensive, not because Apple is slower on innovation.

2012 MVP was a solid computer. I've been supplied MacBooks at work that have all been newer and less reliable.

2012 MBP was indeed my final reliable Apple product. I "upgraded" away from it unfortunately (because jobs always paid for these things) which resulted in me throwing away at least 3 newer models, which simply stopped working. I'm gladly off Apple for 2 years now!

My work-issued 2015 MBP is still going strong. But I have heard there have been models where they had more issues.

That's an apt typo!

> the increased reliability that non-upgradeability confers

I'm skeptical of those being connected; my 2008 thinkpads and 2011 desktop (that I'm writing this on) are extremely upgradable and still work fine (I mean, the thinkpads are slow by modern standards, but that's not a reliability issue). And non-upgradeability in this sense also means that it's not reparable either, so when it does have problems the whole thing is dead rather than, say, just swapping out a faulty RAM module or replacing the worn-out SSD or whatever - to say nothing of the battery degrading.

Theoretically, having to design the product to be modular means you'll have connectors, modules, and other parts that you have to ship on every product. At scale, you could imagine that adding 0.1 grams of weight and material to every unit nets out to be more wasteful than throwing away 1 in 100,000 entire units due to a fault.

Theoretically, maybe, but we'd need real numbers to even start to evaluate that.

Sure, I'm just pointing out from an environmental/waste standpoint it's not obvious that repairability is a win.

How often have you had the sockets fail, compared to the components themselves?

Based on highly unscientific observation, people tend to keep using old Apple laptops much longer than random Not Apple laptops.

Old Apple laptops, like the 2012 mentioned, yes. Newer ones don't really last long anymore.

His 4th point in the conclusion at the end:

> I wanted a cheap travel laptop I could replace without blinking an eye at the price.

It's pretty easy to get ~10 years out of a good laptop from Apple. I'll be shocked if this guy is still using his Thinkpad in 10 years, and even if he does, that he didn't create more e-waste by swapping parts that he wouldn't have had to sticking with the MacBook.

Hello there. I'm writing this on a Thinkpad x220 from 2011.

Obviously anyone will get the computer they want, well at least when you can. Sometimes you get stuck with a choice someone else made, like a company device. However, it is still useful to voice and especially to listen to criticism. Apple should be thankful that a lot of people are voicing their opinions. Getting this kind of feedback is priceless if they want to appeal to more people and grow their user base.

It's the same feedback Apple has been getting for 11 years now. There's nothing new here. I think Apple is well-aware that there are people who prefer an upgradeable laptop and not having to participate in the Apple ecosystem. I suspect Apple has data showing even more people prefer having a more reliable laptop (upgradeability tends to decrease reliability) and the perceived benefits of the Apple ecosystem - otherwise why would they have continued on this path for 11 years now whilst having very vocal critics of this approach the whole time?

> I suspect Apple has data showing even more people prefer having a more reliable laptop (upgradeability tends to decrease reliability) and the perceived benefits of the Apple ecosystem

I wouldn't assume. Most Apple users I know conform with their devices one way or another (I used to be one of them myself). This could be just one more thing they can live without but would still rather have than not.

Apple won't decide something based on criticism alone or even based on what people want. They decide based on what will net bigger profit. In this case, you can just as easily guess that Apple has data showing that while overpriced parts, hostile repair policy and lack of upgradability bother everyone, all of these contribute massively to the bottom line and are not enough to drive people away en masse.

However, criticism is still important since it can help in some decisions where it can be the determining factor or the missing nudge towards one direction over the other.

I skeptical that non upgradability increases reliability. I have never heard this claim before. I have heard it decreases thickness and weight, both of which people might like, but increasing reliability? How much of that can just be attributed to improved components as manufacturing gets more sophisticated?

I think this is just down to most people not caring. I like the idea of upgradability as an abstract concept, but didn't necessarily use the options when available.

I used to work for an industrial automation company, building custom-designed computers (the entire system, including the motherboard) that control manufacturing lines. The units we used to design, being field upgradeable, were far less reliable than the units where the memory and CPU were soldered to the motherboard. That wasn't an option for mass storage at the time. Vibration and heat do amazing things to components that are removable. Also, components that are soldered on the mainboard, by not using a socket, generate less heat. The interconnect can also be faster. So yes, upgradeability does tend to decrease reliability. By the time I left that company they had switched to entirely non-upgradeable units because they were far more reliable.

Every socket is another potential point of failure. When shipping millions of units it’ll be noticeable.

Never had a memory stick get jarred a bit loose, eh? Sometimes it even keeps kinda behaving normally....

I don't see posts like this as "feedback for Apple", but as encouragement for people to look into alternatives. Sure, lots of people do indeed prefer Apple's laptop-as-a-service model, but others do not. It is this latter group that posts like this targets.

What you're saying here is more like - yes, everybody knows fast food is bad, so let's stop creating YouTube channels about cooking.

"IMPORTANT: BY USING YOUR MAC PRODUCT, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THE APPLE 1 YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY (“WARRANTY”) AS SET OUT BELOW...."

If the product is that reliable, why not offer a 3-5 year warranty?

They do, it's called AppleCare and you would be nuts not to get it. Just factor it in for the price of the Macbook you want before budgeting and purchasing.

If they actually believed in the product they wouldn't charge you extra for the warranty.

Hey I'm not the guy setting pricing and policy, I'm just trying to be a smart consumer that has found that getting AppleCare is worth the price many times over. If someone doesn't want to get AppleCare and save a few hundred dollars on their MacBook, fine by me too.

In New Zealand we have an excellent piece of legislation called The Consumer Guarantees Act. Things are supposed to last a reasonable amount of time. You’ll easily get 3 years warranty if you cite the law when you call Apple. It’s Sort of like free apple care.

There are a lot of cost, marketing, and legal considerations that go into setting warranty durations. They're not intrinsically linked to the expected service lifetime of the product.

Why do you feel the need to defend apple in this case?

My read wasn’t a defense of Apple and in fact I agree with the criticism. My read was that it’s tired and dull to keep harping on exactly the same feedback for a decade as though it’s unique.

Clickbait headline “I replaced my MacBook with a thinkpad gasp” then people click thinking there will be something interesting, but it’s the same old stuff.

> My read was that it’s tired and dull to keep harping on exactly the same feedback for a decade as though it’s unique.

I hear what you are saying but just because something is bad for a long time doesn't make it acceptable just because its been a long time.

Will Apple ever change? Nope, their share price depends on it not changing.

The validity of the feedback doesn't change with the times necessarily - it's still just as stupid to not be able to extract a drive out of a laptop now as it was 10 years ago. If so, the author of the post hasn't put forward higher priority qualms to complain about, so to me it definitely sounds like they are just defending Apple. And if they were, I just want to know why.

Who says it has to be unique to be bad?

The complaints will go away when the issue is fixed, presumably. If Apple doesn't want to fix it then that's on them, not on the people highlighting that Apple are, indeed, still being pricks.

I think it's also psychological. When buying a Mac, you have this warm fuzzy feeling that you are taken care of, you have been given the best, there is nothing to improve and nothing to worry about.

I agree it's psychological. Upon entering an Apple store, I feel like The Dude stumbling into the lair of the pretentious nihilists in The Big Lebowski.

Jeez, I don’t think I’ll ever understand the american thing with Apple. It must be a social thing, I’ve seen people humiliate and even shun people who have Android (“the green bubble”) or other non-Apple devices.

I feel that they're always very biased in these comparisons.

Apple is the world's most valuable corporation, they can deal with some criticism.

It isn't Apple who's suffering the criticism, it's us who has to wade through low value, uninteresting, repetitive comments on HN which won't make a blind bit of difference to how Apple does anything, who suffer from it.

Is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34879574 worth upvoting because "Apple can take the criticism"?

As long as everyone else has to suffer through the endless parade of praise Apple gets on here, yes.

You don't have to, you can close thread. Instead of shitting in thread, then closing it.

Just because Apple wants to increase their profit margins, by enforcing planned obsolescence and creating e-waste on scales that are beyond comprehension, does not mean that everyone else should just ignore it and shut up about it.

It's not Apple's way or the highway, there is room for criticism and change.

There are also millions of Apple customers who have no idea that Apple is actively going out of their way to ensure that the devices they own can't be upgraded. Pretending that everybody knows how strict Apple is about planned obsolescence is not a given.

>by enforcing planned obsolescence

Their support for software updates and security patches in older models is actually quite good. They've also made a ton of strides in the right direction when it comes to repair-ability of their phone line.

I can run Windows or Linux on any computer for decades if I want to, and I have. Software is not the issue. The issue is that Macs are artificially limited by hardware, not the software that they run, although macOS deprecation can be a limitation. Computers generally become obsolete because of hardware limitations, and Macs have had had limitations imposed by soldered components like memory for more than a decade, now.

Non-Apple laptops have also been slowly moving to more soldered components. This will likely continue as memory timings and power consumption requirements continue to tighten. I remember when you could replace the CPU in laptops, however the benefit to doing so didn't keep many systems out of landfills.

Can you run modern windows on a machine from 2003? I doubt it would install.

Can you run winXP on a modern machine? Possibly, but most people probably shouldn't as there's no support for it any longer.

>I can run Windows or Linux on any computer for decades if I want to, and I have.

That's super cool, if that's what you're in to, but other than a small percentage of geeks, there's limited utility to do that for the majority of Macbook users. If you want to run a decades-old computer, then absolutely yes: there are much better computers to choose from, and at a good price (mostly free).

They do provide decent support. It's not perfect, but it far outpaces most hardware vendors out there.

As for repair-ability of devices. Let's be real here. Repair-ability is garbage all around and every major vendor (including Apple) is doing token gestures at best to make the situation easier. Take one look at the last minute changes Apple/Google/Microsoft forced into the recent New York right-to-repair bills and it's obvious they have absolutely zero interest in furthering repair-ability of any of their devices.

Any positives you hear in the media about repair-ability are all a song-and-dance so they can sneak another "security measure" into their devices that makes it impossible to order parts online and fix your phone yourself.

I might disagree here on some points.

Most Apple users aren’t power users, and they will run their computer to the ground or close too. I have entourage still using their 8-year-old iMac daily.

For power users that buy Apple, they tend to keep it for a few years, but they don’t throw it away. They resell it, and Apple laptops keep their value well over time. So it’s lifespan is extended, and the new owner didn’t buy a new laptop. And we’re back into my first point.

I have family/friend to whom I sold/gave Apple computers, and they’re still using them even on 10-year-old laptops (MBA core i5, MBP core i5).

So yes, you’re right, but it’s not all in absolutism.

How do they create more ewaste though? Like many others report my experience is that apple products routinely last multiple times longer than other tech.

I only just last week retired a MacBook bought in 2013, and it still worked just fine. Now someone else bought it and is using it.

Things like PCs and android phones usually have some combination of cheap materials, bloat/crap ware or poorly designed software stacks that don’t age well.

I used to own PCs, buy android phones, etc and the difference in longevity is incredible.

This is the main reason I only buy Apple hardware as well. The moment you open the box on a PC desktop, it's basically worthless beyond what you could part it out for. A Mac will maintain >50% of it's retail price for years.

A quick glance at the market for clamshell g3 iBooks shows how irrationally well Apple computers can hold value.

In theory, Apple could still offer products that last many years AND are upgradeable, so that they only get partially converted to waste.

That's not really true, there are no sockets for LPDDR4X or LPDDR5.

I have an early 2013 15" MBP now running Ubuntu and a late 2013 13" MBP and it is running the latest macOS that is supported on it and Windows 11. I have a new M1 MBP but those other two machines are just slow compared to this. They are otherwise going strong in their new roles.

> How do they create more ewaste though? Like many others report my experience is that apple products routinely last multiple times longer than other tech.

Compared to some other tech, you're correct that the e-waste is comparable or better. However, the comparison above is Apple to Apple. The other tech companies are irrelevant for this. Apple has full ability to dramatically lower the amount of e-waste their products by making them more upgradeable/repairable, and they choose not to in order to maximize profit at the expense of everyone else. It absolutely doesn't have to be that way, but it is, and IMHO calling this out and being critical is 100% fair, much like you would call out an oil and gas company who was intentionally generating waste to maximize their profit, regardless of how they compared to other oil and gas companies.

But it's also very fair to point out what you've pointed out, that compared to others Apple is pretty good, so this is not a compelling reason to avoid buying Apple products if you're going to buy a different one that generates just as much or more e-waste.

The only things that are easily repairable in most laptops are the SSD and RAM, but those very rarely fail anyway so it makes essentially no difference to e-waste.

It's annoying. But that's about it.

It's a double-edged sword. Macbooks are sturdy in some areas (bottom case assembly) but fragile in others (display assembly and keyboard). The e-waste partially stems from a lack of repairability; common issues like a cracked display or shorted Logic Board capacitor will run you upwards of $500. Not because those individual parts are so expensive, but because the entire display/motherboard assembly has to be replaced. Perhaps that does get salvaged with Apple's first-party reclamation programs, but that just means the wastefulness is passed on to the customer in the form of a surcharge. It doesn't fix the vast majority of devices that will never return to Apple either.

Apple's absolute authority over the platform ruins it in the end. Simple regulation like forcing them to add user-servicable storage would prevent M1 devices from getting bricked after hitting their TBW limit. It was a no-brainer for John Deere, so why not the largest company in America?

You're conflating right to repair with ability to repair. The issue with John Deere was the farmers were able to repair the tractors, but the licensing prohibited them from doing so. The right to repair laws say nothing about making products being repairable. In fact right to repair might drive more things to be non-repairable - if the manufacturer still has to honor their warranty even after your repairs then they have an incentive to make it not repairable in the first place. That's a hard position for a tractor costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to make but it's a simple position for a maker of devices in the $1k-$3K range.

I'm using a 2014 MBP and an iMac from 2013. Feel no reason to upgrade at all on those machines. I'm less happy with my 2G (2018?) iPad Pro, which...while it still works great, the battery is clearly discharging too quickly.

I've never had a Lenovo (at work) that was good past 2 years. Which one is creating more e-waste?

There are also millions of Apple customers who have no idea that Apple is actively going out of their way to ensure that the devices they own can't be upgraded.

I think it’s way more likely they’re trying to create devices that are lighter and more reliable.*

Does anyone here really believe that the vast majority of users would ever upgrade a laptop? I don’t mean the folks here, we’re outliers - although I think this is true of _most_ of us too.

They get one that does what they need, and buy a new one when modern software won’t run on it well. It’s really unlikely that they even could upgrade it sensibly, because at that point most every component in the new laptop will be noticeably better and so it’ll be better to get a new one with all-better components.

If what I said above is true, the non-upgradable laptop is the more responsible option - it’s less resource-intensive to produce, lighter to transport, and probably more energy efficient in use.

*Edit: and cheaper!

> enforcing planned obsolescence and creating e-waste on scales that are beyond comprehension

Last time I saw someone study it, the average ownership time for a Macbook was double the average for a PC laptop. Anecdotally, I spend a lot less money on electronics when I'm in the Apple ecosystem (phones & laptops) than I do when I'm on an Android/PC kick. The mild savings in capital outlay is quickly dwarfed by the absolutely abysmal resale value and quality.

> by enforcing planned obsolescence

This simply isn't true, as Apple supports their devices from phones to laptops far-far-far longer than their competitors. It's why iPhones last longer in the wild. They have demonstrated clear support to their customers through their actions.

GNU/Linux-supported devices receive updates far-far-far longer, both laptops and phones.

Then run Linux on your MacBook when you no longer have an Apple-supported Mac OS, which is 10 years. Lots of people have.

I heard it's not always reliable, since the proprietary drivers cannot be easily reverse engineered.

It's actually more reliable than on PC's because there's far fewer hardware combinations to support and Apple doesn't use particularly exotic hardware.

Is suspend working reliably on Linux for MacBooks?

That's a global issue with Linux. There are people having problems with Linux sleep/suspend on a wide variety of makes of laptops, include Apple's. But not everybody is having a problem with every make of laptop which means it's either a distribution issue, user error, or some combination of the two.

This is not a global issue with Linux. My Librem 15 has 100% reliable sleep. Devices designed for Linux work flawlessly. Devices with closed specifications and not providing any drivers don't work reliably, unsurprisingly.

Google "linux laptop sleep suspend problem" and have fun reading all the problems people are having with sleep/suspend with a variety of makes and models of laptops. Meanwhile, sleep/suspend has been worked out for MacBooks, for some time actually. Presumably even on the M2's since that's the machine Linus uses for his development.

The suspend problems only occur on hardware not designed for Linux, which is most of the available hardware. Therefore I'm not surprised that it affects a variety of laptop models. Meanwhile all devices specifically targeting Linux have a reliable suspend.

The same thing is happening with Macs: Hardware designed for MacOS has a reliable suspend on MacOS.

Suspend and hibernate have worked on a variety of laptops I've owned over more than a decade. You can also easily build a custom desktop and never run into issues with either. Issues with suspending stem from manufacturers' bespoke components, firmware, configurations and/or non-standard handling of any of those.

That used to be a good solution in like 2015, but there are generations of Macbooks whose Linux support never includes working WiFi, audio or other components: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

The vast majority of upgradeable machines are never actually upgraded. Basically no laptop can have its CPU or GPU upgraded to begin with.

Upgradability is not free. It has a weight and volume cost. Depending on implementation it can also have a performance cost - for example a user-swappable battery means a 30-40% reduction in battery capacity OR a corresponding increase in weight+volume. For another example SODIMM slots take up space and are larger than surface mount soldered DRAM chips... I mean that should be obvious right?

Conspiracy theorists are gonna see conspiracy theories.

Engineers look at ancient "luggables", imagine a future where Star Trek pads exist, then incrementally iterate reducing power consumption on 200 different individual components, shrinking the volume of 27 different assemblies, and making thousands of difficult choices - all of which has to yield a sellable product today so there will even be a chance to improve in the future. There is no magic. You can't wave your wand and make the future week-long battery life laptop that weighs nothing appear out of nowhere. Somewhere along the way you have to decide if you are going to keep the space for the extra connectors and SSD controller or if you're going to integrate everything to shave off some weight and reduce volume, along with cut power consumption by removing a single chip. The nay-sayers claim the gains are minimal for those specific changes but you can make that claim for most of the changes made along the way to get from a luggable to the modern MacBook Air. Some people really needed SCSI ports and are still angry they're gone. If everyone listened to those people laptops would have the weight of bricks and get 20 minutes on battery.

History has proven those with the engineer mindset are more likely to be successful than those with the conspiracy mindset but it's up to each person to choose.

(Of course you can also make a living filling a niche - the world is large)

I get people preferring upgradeable hardware, but find the notion that Apple went non-upgradeable to squeeze more money out of people to be among the sillier ideas people have about Apple. There are so very many other ways they could be doing that, but are instead doing the opposite.

I don't think they cared enough about capturing a little more business from the surely single-digit percentage of people who ever replaced anything on their laptop, including the battery, to radically redesign the whole product line. Especially when there are other plausible reasons they might want to do that.

I don't know how people get these ideas so stuck in their head, with such confidence, that they post about them on Web forums. Whatever evil Apple may in-fact get up to, this one doesn't even pass the smell test.

"Ignoring" it means you buy an alternative product. As OP states there are plenty of alternatives. Capitalism works and money talks. Put your money elsewhere. If someone provides a better alternative than apple, the problem fixes itself. This is best course of action for you to change apple.

Unless you're talking about some forced government legislation to make apple do things the way you want... and that's fraught with all sorts of other issues.

These companies aren't going to listen to your whining. They just want your money. Give it to them or don't. Not everything is some social justice activity.

> a laptop that you can upgrade

When you want to "upgrade" from a broken SSD to a functional one, you still need to replace basically the whole device. So yeah, we need to continue to complain until companies stop being anti-user and anti-repair.

> I felt like it? I'm not telling you what to do here, I'm just telling you my experience.

Also, it was news to me that the screen and trackpad are so easily replaceable/upgradeable, that there's such a community around it.

It's your comment that isn't adding anything.

What does non-upgradable mean? It has been even longer since Intel discontinued socketed mobile processors. LPDDR has advantages, and it is not socketed per the spec. It seems silly to blame all of this on Apple when the entire industry is going that way, and for a reason.

And 11 years later they are still non-upgradable and it still sucks. Just because we're a few years later doesn't mean it's still a huge drawback.

Practically, I agree with you. If you don't need upgrade-ability, buy an Apple. These are the market options, choose and get on with your life.

Ideologically, I disagree with you. If we keep allowing the removal of upgrade-ability to retain a foothold in our devices, we will be worse off in the long-run. My gut says we need to keep beating the drum and taking a stand or it will be bad for our future.

But then again, I typed and wrote this on an M1 MacPro, because I've "chosen" and am "getting on with my life" like a true hypocrite.

IDK. I think Apple's take is these are appliances. Do you worry about upgrading your refrigerator or microwave? That's where computing has gone. Back when every 3 years or so there were significant performance improvements necessitating an upgrade then the ability to upgrade was important. Now you can go 5-10 years before you find your performance lacking - which is also the lifetime of the hardware. Apple has made computers appliances.

There may still be niche cases where such an approach is undesirable and that's okay - other vendors are filling that niche.

If it's an appliance, it should last as long and not become obsolete the same as my appliances do. Examples include:

- Kenmore Dishwasher (12 years of age, still running perfectly)

- Danby Deep freezer (9 years of age, still running perfectly)

- Whirlpool Washer & Dryer (21 years of age, still running perfectly, minor self-service repairs)

- Kenmore Refrigerator (11 years of age, still running perfectly)

I have barely had to service these items, but when I did (washer and dryer) the parts were readily available and I was able to do the repair myself.

When I compare this to my iPhone X, it is quite different:

- 1 year in, needed a screen replacement due to a factory faulty digitizer

- 3 years in, needed a battery replacement

- 4 years in, phone is starting to get slow, heats up a lot when in use

If I had to compare this to a "device" I own and use regularly, I would say it feels a lot more like a car and a lot less like my refrigerator. Based on what I'm reading, it would appear the lawyers and courts see it similarly and the only folks disagreeing are Apple/Microsoft/Google/John-Deere. Folks who don't want right-to-repair, which funnily enough, we have for cars and most appliances.

Odd that all the sudden they want it otherwise when it's a "computer" but also... is now an "appliance".

I wonder why they're so keen to make seem like it's an appliance? Is it perhaps advantageous for them to do so?

The main problem is that e-waste is an ever increasing problem and companies like Apple are just creating more e-waste. Every single time a new Apple device is created, so is more e-waste. With a fully user serviceable device (of any category), less e-waste is created, and the time period of use is longer for many of those components. Personally, I do not care what people choose to buy, but everyone needs to become more aware of the true cost of their iTrinkets.

Not sure about that, there is a huge market for refurbished Apple products.

I'm still not sure why.

The section doesn't really answer the actual question. It's cheaper, good enough, replacement parts are cheap, and I understand that argument; I myself use alternatively some kind of very old Thinkpad (that I don't remember the specs of), a 2011 Macbook Air, or a recent Macbook M1 and for what I do with them (little more than running Firefox and ssh) the only difference that matters in practice is their screens.

But replacing a Macbook M1 with a Thinkpad only makes sense if the Thinkpad is better in some aspects, not if it's just good enough. Otherwise you would just keep your somewhat better laptop and replace it later if you ever have to, right?

It didn't say so in the post but I suspect 8GB RAM were just not enough and an upgrade was necessary anyway? And future upgrading was mentioned. In my opinion this is a valid point actually and should be very much considered when buying any of the modern all-fixed-no-upgrades machines, I mean its not just the Apple machines.

I've used an 8GB M1 Air for the past 2 years and it's totally fine. My brother got the 16GB and there is no noticable difference in performance for any of my usual apps.

Going from 8GB -> 16GB in an M1 just doesn't make much difference, except perhaps for a few specialised apps that require a ton of VRAM.

Thanks I've been debating this. 8GB just feels wrong but I hate to pay that Apple upgrade premium.

He was tired of Apple's shit, it sounds like a divorce to me. It's better in all of the aspects the author stated: price, ability to repair etc. All valid points, that are more or less or not at all important for other people.

I think it's very clear. The article clearly states that the hardware is objectively worse, but not in a way that matters to the author.

The software and Apple's business decisions are the problem it seems. That's actually the same reason I would prefer a Thinkpad to a Macbook myself. The author wants to be able to upgrade or repair their laptop when it breaks.

That does make the Thinkpad a better product for the author.

> But replacing a Macbook M1 with a Thinkpad only makes sense if the Thinkpad is better in some aspects, not if it's just good enough. Otherwise you would just keep your somewhat better laptop and replace it later if you ever have to, right?

Being able to remove the SSD (to recover data), to easily replace parts and repair the computer (especially when travelling a lot), to keep control and ensure a long-tife to your machine (rather than being stuck with no software upgrade when Apple decides the machine is too old), having better connectivity (hdmi, ethernet, sd...), etc. All of those are aspects where the Thinkpad is better than the M1 and can effectively be considered as upgrades ! Raw CPU horsepower and battery life are not the only criteria that matters. (and maybe once the author realized that, he also considered it was worthwhile to sell his M1 while it still had some value on the 2nd hand market rather than keep it and lose all the value if anything happens to the machine that is not easily fixable)

To be fair, it’s not like thinkpads would get that “up-to-date software” ever - their intel CPUs are full of throttling bugs and there are plenty of unanswered forum posts left with hacks like a python script going on every other second fixing the issue..

I like Macbook hardware, but I left because MacOS is only getting worse. It's not hard to sympathize with others who feel the same. Nevermind the downward spiral of design trends and wasted screen space, Apple has made no efforts to improve MacOS as a compatible dev platform. UNIX certification means very little when the most popular open source software is broken out-of-box on your OS, and your hardware vendor actively avoids implementing open APIs like Vulkan. There's no point for me to buy a laptop that Apple owns.

For many people, it's less about the hardware and more about telling Apple to fuck off. I'm among the latter, getting kicked off MacOS when Apple made the overnight decision to depreciate 32-bit software. Onwards to greener pastures, I suppose.

It's not made by Apple, but MoltenVK is free, open source, actively developed/maintained and works well on M1/M2 hardware. It's used by many commercial game ports to Mac/iOS devices.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

It's a nice project, but more of a testament to how high the demand for a standardized graphics API is. If Apple could commit to an open graphics API stack, a lot of industries could start depreciating DirectX.

He wanted a large SSD, 32GB RAM, sturdy build, many ports, and Linux. How does it not make sense?

My experience has been that there is only two reasonable ways to buy a laptop for personal use:

1. Buy an Apple device new.

2. Buy a Lenovo Thinkpad or Dell Latitude refurb/used via their outlet stores from their business line-ups

With #2, you know exactly what you're getting, but you're getting it cheap, and the parts are possible to find (e.g. eBay) to fix it yourself.

With #1, you know exactly what you're getting, and you're paying for a premium experience that you'll actually receive and isn't a sham or bait n switch (like it is with "premium" PC products).

I have a stack of laptops on my desk because I physically separate the different types of work that I do (for many various reasons). 2 are Thinkpads, 2 are Apple, and one is a Dell Latitude. All of have been solid for years. My newest laptop in the stack is an M1 Macbook Pro 14" with the M1 Max, and it's FANTASTIC, it's easily the best laptop I've owned since I retired my /IBM/ Thinkpad T60p.

There is no reason anyone should ever subject themselves to the torture that is buying a laptop "intended" for "consumers". There is no reason anyone should ever pay full price for any non-Apple laptop, because they all make annoying trade-offs that are only acceptable when you buy them cut-rate.

>"There is no reason anyone should ever pay full price for any non-Apple laptop, because they all make annoying trade-offs that are only acceptable when you buy them cut-rate."

I buy gaming laptops from ASUS. All are solid, last forever and even though I bought those new were very reasonably priced. Other than not being paper thin I see no trade offs but I will not pay extra for thin laptop anyways. I use those as portable desktops so the size does not matter. What does matter is that they have proper cooling and can work at 100% performance for hours non-stop without thermal throttling.

I agree. In my experience, trying to balance "thin" and "gaming power" together in the same device is a recipe for disaster.

Are you me?

I have 3 refurb linux laptops strewn around the house, and my last 3 workplaces have always provided a macbook of some sort.

One difference: For gaming/GPU heavy stuff, I still have the good old windows, full-tower desktop kicking around. Repairing/upgrading desktops is honestly easier than ever, so I've been happy to keep one in service for the odd game or two.

I did the same for desktops too. I finally retired the last desktop I built that was 12 years old. It could still do most games, but it was loud, power hungry, and annoying. I've replaced it with a Steam Deck and a Steam Dock, and at some point I might build a proper replacement gaming / workstation, but not any time soon.

For personal use, most of what I want to do is possible on a laptop now. I really don't feel as much need for a desktop as I once did. I still use a "dock" and a mechanical keyboard when I'm not on the go, though.

With the exception of the Steam Deck, I don't use Linux, though. The reason I have the Thinkpads is they work perfectly in FreeBSD & OpenBSD "out of the box". The Dell is running Windows for doing automotive tuning.

I love thinkpads but the T480 is basically objectively worse in every single aspect except price and repairability. I don’t think I can go back from all day battery and quiet CPU during high loads.

I could definitely use my T450 for however long I need and know I can replace parts, but I’d rather have macs for 5 years and upgrade for another performance bump. Some things are just nicer

Lenovo warranty is fantastic.

What makes you think the Thinkpad in the linked article is still under warranty?

It might be. I used to order them for the business I worked for with 5 years on site warranty. Where I live that transfers with sale. T480 was sold into early 2019, so that would end the last warranty around early 2024.

Would you really replace the screen yourself on a laptop that's still under warranty?

They provide you with instructions, I don't think it voids warranty.

Be that as it may, the author is in Australia. All MacBooks have minimum 2 years warranty.

Display recently died on my MacBook Pro (M1 Max). Having to talk to a Genius rather than being able to book in the service online or via phone was infuriating. However, aside from that, warranty repair process was a breeze. They confirmed with me that all replacent parts have a minimum of three years warranty from the date of replacement.

I get that consumer protection laws suck or are nonexistent elsewhere in the world, but since the author is in Australia this laptop replacement makes even less sense.

was* in Australia.

That depends entirely on where you are in the world. In Canada, for example, the (consumer) Lenovo service centre used to be notorious for taking weeks (three was common, I've heard as much as seven) to return machines, and for providing essentially no feedback on the machine's status until they handed you the tracking number for the return shipment. Their warranty may be fantastic, but it's utterly pointless if they won't act on it in a timely fashion.

(I say “used to be”, because between this and Superfish, I've been telling everyone I know not to buy new Lenovo products for years, so admittedly, I have no recent data points.)

Their everything is covered enterprise warranty does not cover roadside bombs in war zones :) That was an interesting call with some of our auditors in Bagdad... Thank goodness for online backup software.

> ...except price and repairability.

And keyboard.

And trackpoint. And running your OS of choice, free of "call home" crap if you want.

But apart from that, what did the Romans do for us?

Trackpoint is very divisive, you either love it or hate it. I come on the hate side, so moving to trackpoint from Apple's trackpad feels like a huge drawback.

>implying M1 MacBook Air has bad keyboard

You would have a point if he was replacing something like 2019 Macbook Pro with the butterfly switches

Disagree. The M1 keyboards are just as good as any other keyboards now that they ditched the bad butterfly keyboards. I've used a Macbook with the older keyboards and they were certainly inferior to every single other laptop but the new keyboards I really can't complain about

> The M1 keyboards are just as good as any other keyboards

But ThinkPad keyboards are not "any other keyboards". For me, ThinkPads are the only laptops where I don't feel the need to connect an external keyboard. I'd say ThinkPad keyboards are as superior to typical laptop keyboards (including the MacBook keyboard) as Apple trackpads are superior to typical laptop trackpads (including the ThinkPad trackpad).

Thinkpad keyboards have been pretty bad for a few generations now. My old T470's keyboard flexed in the corners.

The last Thinkpad with a usable keyboard was a t420.

Am I crazy? The author writes

> It's not as insane of a downgrade as it sounds.

And then goes on to describe assembling a Frankenstein laptop that has specs and ergonomics that pale in comparison to the MacBook's.

This sounds like a truly awful computer to me, but if your only goal is to spend as little as possible and get user-serviceability then I guess this is one way to go.

On the bright side, he did avoid spending $200 for the 16gb RAM upgrade.

For RAM that's around 3x slower. I mean, if it works, it works, but it's hardly something to boast about.

RAM speed does not make up for capacity. If you need a lot of RAM for VMs or Docker or loads of tabs, getting lower capacity, but higher speed RAM is not a substitute.

For loads of tabs it does. For docker or VMs maybe not. Requiring a large amount of fully allocated RAM, like 8G+ seems like a deficiency in the software/dev environment, and definitely an edge case. In my whole career I've not needed that, but seen some poorly done dev environments configured with 4G+ VMs, so I don't doubt it can happen.

I think he means the experience of using it. And the price was much cheaper.

Yeah I don't think anyone would disagree that with time, know-how, manual labor, and a 50% performance degradation, you might save money.

1440p screen, an i7, 32GB RAM, glass trackpad + sturdy thinkpad body and ports = awful computer? What is awful about it?

Im using a 3 year old 490s for work. Great machine. Wish they gave it more RAM and SSD but other than that Im happy with it.

The biggest contrast here and what we should be concerned about is the fact that this old Thinkpad can be upgraded and still be used vs an old macbook that if speced too low is now useless and ends up on a landfill. Not even considering that new macbooks if locked are unusable on the secondary market and get tossed even if the hardware is perfectly fine.

It's as if we have given up on "solving" climate change in favor of short term profits...

In practice old MacBooks tend to have a much longer useful life in my experience. I'm working on a 12" Macbook and I love it. It's still decently fast for.the lowest specced Macbook from 6 years ago.

It supplements a 2017 Macbook Pro that's still overkill in 2022. Both have excellent battery life. If it wasn't for the nearly free upgrade I got in 2017, I'd probably still rock a 2012 model.

I've got a 2012 MacBook Air which I bought second hand (maybe third or fourth hand, or more?) for $300 a couple years ago. The hinge is floppy probably due to being dropped several times, the FaceTime is busted, I replaced the battery but it still runs out in less than 2 hours, and I don't think macOS even gets security patches for the version it's running - but install Linux and it's _fine_, plus it's tiny.

I could probably run it as a rudimentary media server if I didn't already have one, or palm it off to a young kid who doesn't care that it's a bit banged up, or use it as a machine of last resort. I don't use it like I use my M2 MacBook Air and would never suggest someone daily drive it unless they had no other choice, but I can't justify throwing it away because it's completely solid and still works. I could also probably get $100-150 out of it if I really wanted to sell it - if anyone can tell me of another 10 year old laptop with resell value like that I'd like to know.

I don't think I've owned a non-Apple laptop for more than 3 years, with the exception of a particularly long-lived Lenovo laptop I got in 2013. Every other one has had critical hardware die that I didn't feel inclined to replace mainly due to costs outweighing benefits. Except for a few weird years in the late 2010s, Apple makes stunningly reliable and long-lasting hardware in my experience.

You can fix the hinge with a screwdriver. It’s a bit of a pain but not a terribly hard fix.

Basically it's unusable but it still turns on? Is this what apple users consider as "durability"?

To add a counterpoint, my Macbook Air from 2011 (model A1370 IIRC) running Linux is totally usable and I do use it as a daily driver (well, not daily but I use it on the days when I need a small laptop, which is several days a week). I suppose macOS cannot be upgraded on it anymore but I never liked macOS and never really used it.

I replaced its battery three times now, and the fracking awful magsafe 1 cable countless times, but other than that everything works, including the camera, and I took enough care of it that it's basically as good as new. The hinge is a bit weak indeed, but it's only noticeable when I'd like to almost close it without totally closing it. I think it's acceptable for a 12 year old computer. It runs about four hours under Linux on a 4680 mAh battery.

I replaced the battery with a non-OEM so the battery situation isn’t unexpected. It’s very usable, it’s just banged up. I was even running Ableton Live on it before I got a new MacBook. How many other 10 year old laptops treated with the same care as a school textbook still work?

Old MacBooks used to be more upgradable. I did upgrade my old MacBook and did prolong it's life. Current MacBooks have 0 upgradability. Once the specs are too low, that's that.

Also, current MacBooks used in corporate environments do not reach the second hand market because the SSD is no longer an independent component. They get shredded. Perfectly good barely old computers get shredded because one component is no longer separate.

I agree; used a 2015 Macbook Pro until last year when I purchased the M1. 7 years of life for a laptop is exceptional and I expect to get similar out of my current one. You'd be hard pressed to find laptops with that level of longevity.

In practice my old macbook fell apart after 4 years and I've since stopped buying them.

Now I also don't need dongles, nor a dedicated charger.

The T480 they just got is already 5 years old.

Maybe other manufacturers don't have long lifespans, I can't say, but Lenovos tend to hang around forever and are easy to sell when you want to upgrade.

See all the people commenting here about their 12 year old x220. I still use an 8 year old x250.

>It's as if we have given up on "solving" climate change in favor of short term profits...

That is such non sequitur. Old hardware gets old that is nothing new. All of us _could_ do our work with laptops from early 2000s, but we don't because we want the benefit of 20 years of hardware improvement.

Why is upgrading an old laptop any better than buying a new one? The parts had to be produced anyway and unless you are upgrading frequently your old laptop will still be noticeably behind in performance.

Sure on some metrics they are fine, browsing hackernews and sending emails is solved and can be done with pretty much every computer.

>Not even considering that new macbooks if locked are unusable on the secondary market

I also don't get what you mean by this. At least my macbooks aren't "locked" in anyway. I can reset them and resell as I see fit.

>Not even considering that new macbooks if locked are unusable on the secondary market and get tossed even if the hardware is perfectly fine. It's as if we have given up on "solving" climate change in favor of short term profits...

Making this argument without acknowledging the impact it has on the market for stolen Apple goods makes it an intellectually dishonest one I think.

Please recycle your old computers, don't throw them in landfills.

I also do all of my development on various ThinkPads I've owned throughout my life: T480, T490, P51..

I like cheap, upgradeable laptops over Macs since:

* I can put what I want in them. I don't want to pay Apple 200 euros for 8GB of RAM.

* It's not a treasure. I take care of it because it would be annoying to have to replace it, but my wallet wouldn't cry over a cheap second-hand machine

* They run Linux well

* My P51 has a Quadro dGPU that can play basically all games before 2018, which is enough for me (and better than what a M1 can do)

I literally don't see an advantage to owning a M1 besides better resolution (why people want a trillion pixels on their screen I don't get also. I can see perfectly fine without 4K) and build quality.

The main advantage is the CPU. The M1/M2 are blazingly fast, and basically never get even warm. I have to _really_ crunch the machine to even hear the faintest hum of the fan. Battery lasts for ever, it's like a phone, charge once a day if that.

In an ideal market, you could buy a T480 with an M2 CPU. Which would be a much better laptop, for a much better price. It's only due to market distortions due to big players trying to be anticompetitive that we're stuck with this choice.

Before getting my 2021 16" MBP with a M1 Max, I'd read comments like yours and get the idea that I'd be able to encode video without it getting warm :-P This is not the case, at least not with the M1 Max.

It does get warm if we push it hard for a few minutes. This could be easily avoided if Apple started the fans at low speeds earlier, but instead they let the SoC run at 80-90ºC for 2 or 3 minutes before the fans kick in at low speeds and that heat needs to go somewhere. There are 3rd party apps that let you control fan speeds, which is what I do.

With this said, coming from a 2019 16" MBP (Intel) it was a huuuge improvement. The damn thing would get warm doing basic tasks. At full power, it would throttle even with the fans at 100% and because the Intel processor was allowed to use more than the 100W the computer could take, any very long tasks would drain the battery. M1/M2 macs are nothing like that.

I would consider video encoding as "really crunching the machine" though.

According to apple themselves the M2 is slower than current intel or amd chips, though not by much. And you are much more limited on RAM and on storage and on GPU performance.

The power consumption under load is impressive though (about half).

Modern CPUs are more than quick enough for my purposes. If you're compiling huge amounts of C/C++/Rust, I see why a powerful CPU might be nice -- still, at my job we have a lot of CI pipelines that just run in the cloud, sidestepping the issue completely.

For normal text editing, shell use, web browsing, IDEs, etc. my i7 is barely even challenged. And any game that can run with my Quadro GPU won't use more cycles than my CPUs got in it.

I do agree the battery life of M1 is quite nice though. I basically keep my laptop plugged in all day so it's not really an issue for me.

> I literally don't see an advantage to owning a M1 besides better resolution (why people want a trillion pixels on their screen I don't get also. I can see perfectly fine without 4K) and build quality.

I don't know how the TP screens look, but for me, I'd want a mac because text looks much, much better than on my laptop.

Note that I'm comparing an almost 10 yo MBP (late 2013 15" retina) to a late 2021 HP. The latter's colors and viewing angles are comically bad, but even leaving that aside, text is not as sharp as on the MBP. And actually, shitty colors do make it less comfortable in the long run. I have to pump up the contrast on screen elements to tell them apart. Plus, the current trend of ulta-skinny fonts doesn't help either, and produces an ungodly rainbowy mess, especially on darker backgrounds.

And don't even get me started on that HP's cousin, an almost 2000 € computer (with middle of the road specs, not some ridiculously specced beast) that has a 6 bit panel, and is basically unable to display darker oranges.

The main reason I love my M1 is that it's cool to the touch after switching from an intel based mbp to an m1, I went from an average of 90 degrees Celsius (there was definitely an issue in the factory with thermal paste I think) to an average of 40-50 degrees Celsius.

I can't imagine ever going back to an intel based laptop because of this (and in my experience, thinkpads don't run that cool for my uses with arch linux)

Haha my cat would sleep behind the 2019, not anymore with the 2021.

I did prefer the 2019 design more though (thinness). When I first got the 2021 it seemed cheap/hollow to me.

It probably is a bit hollow.

tbf it is a design consideration from intel: they openly consider that they are leaving performance on the table if they're not running close to 100C.

Which, while great for a desktop, is very uncomfortable (and loud) on a laptop.

So far I haven't seen a way to configure it, turbo boost is commonly not an option to disable in laptop bioses (at least not the Dell Precision I had).

Yes, I won't begrudge them that choice on desktop but given the fact that most of the consumer market as switched to laptops, it's not a great strategy...

Apple intentionally used terrible cooling, letting the CPU passively heat up rather than spinning up the fans because they didn't want or couldn't figure out how to deal with fan noise. The chassis got hot because Apple decided that was the better alternative.

Intel's approach of "just send more power through the chip to make it faster" is definitely worse than Apple's own chips, but Apple has neutered their laptop CPUs for years. Had they gone with a modern cooling solution, the difference in heat wouldn't be so noticeable.

I had a 2019 i5 MacBook and the fans would be blasting and the thing still roasting hot. It’s incredible how just one year later they released something revolutionary

I'll scream about Apple's bad practices any day of the week, but I used to go out of my way to configure my Macbook Pro's with max RAM, upgraded SSD, and an i5 specifically because that meant my fans were never audible.

Yeah, everything i7 was a thermal problem, but that wasn't unique to Apple. And the i9 systems were laughable. However, with an i5, I never had noticable thermal issues.

If you're having thermal issues with an i5, something specific to your computer is broken.

Now, my daily driver is a Lenovo Carbon X1 7th Gen. I'm quite happy, but I did the same thing. Big RAM, big SSD, and a reasonable i5. I never hear a fan.

I don’t think anything was broken with this MacBook. It was the 13” one and I had to run docker which just made it hot all the time. Now I do an even heavier load on the 13” m1 and the thing is cold while being so much faster.

My macbook was basically unusable as a laptop in hot summer days because it would be too hot to put on your lap.

> upgrades will cost you around $150 total on AliExpress

I'm upgrading a thinkpad (x220) with new monitor and battery and a few more upgrades, so I have an idea of the cost of upgrading

I'm sorry but the price of the upgrades is not that low, how do you get to that total upgrading:

- monitor

- wifi card

- trackpad

- battery

that does not add up

that said, I like the end result, and I'm really curious about the trackpad

ah I didn't count the battery in the $150 - apologies

I do own a T480 and Lenovo has stopped manufacturing batteries for it. You can get existing stock for horrendous prices or knock-offs.

Can confirm… just bought a thin battery for my x270 and paid about 100€ for an original one, brand new.

Worth it though, the x270 is very slim and still featureful.

I've upgraded my x220 as well and it's good enough for basic dev work with about 8hrs battery life on the big battery. For the screen, are you using the Nitrocaster mod? I have it sitting here and the new IPS 1080p screen but I kind of regret not going for a 16:10 aspect ratio (which requires cutting the frame around the screen)

Be careful grabbing it by the corner like in the picture, it can flex the motherboard and cause the RAM to unseat https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/mh974q/for_everyo...

this is driving me NUTS with an old one i have. I never bothered to check why, i don’t use it often enough. It’s always been on my todo list to check into why.

Thanks for the lead!

I had that problem for so long with a T490, I thought I was going crazy until I noticed the crashes always happened when I grabbed the computer. Luckily just re-seating the RAMs with some tough love made the problem disappear...

It doesn't always happen. I learned that the Thinkpad I just bought is prone to that behavior, but after months of not-so-delicate use it never actually happened.

I "fixed" this by using kapton tape to secure my RAM. Never had a problem. The mod in the link seems...risky.

Kapton tape is the coppery-looking tape that tapes other stuff down inside a lot of electronics.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=kapton+tape

This is replacing an old M1 Air, with an old T480 and upgrading bits.

As a cost efficient way of getting a good computer this is a reasonably good reminder that other options exist and old ThinkPads were produced in unreasonable numbers and can be obtained easily on eBay (businesses selling off their old stock).

For me, I've a work 3y refresh cycle coming up and a dilemma - an M2 Mac vs a ThinkPad X1. I just don't like MacOSX at all, and I do love Linux, and once in a blue moon because I'm a Director I need to delve into large Excel sheets that even an M2 struggles over but Excel on Windows does great at. I find myself seriously considering Windows 11 Pro on an X1 with WSLv2 for my Linux daily driver (it's not like I'm doing eBPF work and need a specific kernel capability). And this dilemma feels, weird. Because all I see is everyone with Macs. Still, the ThinkPad is likely to win - I have another 6 weeks to decide.

When you spreadsheet app struggle, tou know it is time to convert to a database. You'll work much faster with an sqlite database anyway. Even converting csv + perl/ruby/python is more convenient than that piece of shit of excel anyway.

By the way libreoffice calc seem to handle better large spreadsheet files.

Spreadsheets are owned by Finance and Accounting - I'm in Eng and wouldn't be able to get them to let go of Windows + Excel.

You can still convert back your data to csv or xlsx once you finished your work on it. Most db clients actually support that.

Why is it such a point of developer provide to pretend that Excel doesn’t provide any value? Are we still not past this blind spot? I write Python every day and there’s still plenty I’d rather do in Excel, even on macOS where it’s absolute hot garbage.

I am not a dev.

There are tons of non developers who actually learn to use python or R to manipulate large dataset. Why couldn't a accountant or manager do that as well?

Excel is not especially easier to learn than sqlite if you start doing funky things with multiple sheets/documents relations and all. It is actually programming without giving it the name.

Depends if these are really spreadsheets or specialist "applications" made of excel formulas by "non-technical" users.

If you are really looking at large file based table data and are similarly unable to persuade the author to produce a sensible format, I've had a good time with VisiData

Funny how quickly people lose all sense, and just start quoting personal anecdotes as something relevant, especially when argument is something global like environmental effects, or when comparing brands.

Yeah, Bobby is using his $2k Macbook Farty Air for 10 years, and poor Johny got his $300 Lenovo Shittop broken after 1 year and couldn't get a replacement in 1 day overnight eco shipping.

At least compare somehting relevant, like return % numbers in e-shops or some actual research/data published by repair centers. Something with N > 2.

I'm all for pushing back on the idea that just because it's "old", that it's useless and needs to be replaced. Lots of old machines are still perfectly good at a lot of stuff, and can be had and upgraded for cheap, which is awesome!

However, there's no way to slice going from a M1 MacBook Air to a ThinkPad T480 as anything but a downgrade. The screen is worse, the CPU is worse, the battery is MUCH worse, it's thicker, heavier, the list goes on. If the author of the post is happier with his new laptop, that's great, but this isn't really a path it makes sense for anyone else go follow him down.

Heavier? A 14 inch macbook pro is 1.6kg. The t480 is 1.3kg and the non-s weighs the same as the macbook. So what are you talking about?

The T480 with a battery is 1.6kg, or 1.8kg on the extended pack. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...

Yes, that is why I wrote "same as macbook". And a T480s is 1.32kg https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...

The M1 MacBook Air is 1.29kg

Then you would be comparing with the X models of the same size, which start at 0.9kg

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Nano-Laptop...

I’m comparing the two laptops the person mention in the article, the M1 MacBook Air and the ThinkPad T480

And I am saying the author obviously does not care, but if you do care then the macs are the heavier ones or same (e.g. t480s weighs as much as the air despite being 14 inch). Rule of thumb: non-apple weighs about 70% of apple, e.g. X1 Nano vs air or X1 vs pro.

> I'm tired of Apple's ecosystem, Apple ID, not being able to change any individual part of my laptop, being charged $200 USD for 8GB of RAM, being charged $200 for 256 GB of SSD, and so on

aleluya

So in other words, just like most "switched from X to Y" stories: it depends on a lot of factors and there is no one-size-fits-all.

In this specific case however, the issue is much easier: author wanted a collection of components, not a packaged experience. So in other words: if the device is the goal (or having a collection of components), you might not enjoy an Apple product. If you want a specific experience, then a product that is just a collection of components (and experienced as such), then you might enjoy an Apple product.

Semantics would suggest that 'anything is a collection of components', but that is not the point, the point is how the experience is different. Some components are experienced as a group/list/collection while others are experienced as a product. Which one fits you best varies from person to person and job to job.

I thought the basic summary at the end said a lot: "I wanted a cheap travel laptop I could replace without blinking an eye at the price."

Oh yeah, it definitely did. But as someone else here posted, even a 10 year old MacBook Air would work out, it reminds me a bit of the netbook days, but without the hardware being so hobbled by Intel requirements (i.e. only 1 DIMM allowed in NetBooks).

But from the general comments you can glean that people still seem to think in terms of "one has to be absolutely better than the other". At best one could argue that the mass-market enjoys one thing more than the other, but even that depends on where you are located in the world and what skills you have. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the OLPC project had a western version where kids start out with one of those, that would make both cases even clearer (i.e. some would not enjoy doing work 'for' the device instead of doing work 'with' the device).

> for contrast, a little bit of dust can break an Apple butterfly keyboard

I might be wrong, but weren't these discontinued prior to Apple Silicon macbooks being released? If so, why is it noted if he's talking about an M1 Macbook Air?

You know why.

Elaborate.

I think it's more about Apple's hardware frequently being very fragile in certain ways that higher-end thinkpads usually aren't. They've had the crumbs-in-the-keyboard thing, that may have been resolved now, but Apple's laptops seem to have had an extreme sensitivity to moisture going back to at least 1999.

There are many advantages to Apple's laptops compared to others, but I think it's worth considering areas where they fall short when you're choosing your next machine.

It's generic Apple-bashing from someone who mistakenly believes that x32/x64 laptops with 6-7 hour battery life were the pinnacle of computing.

The keyboards in the M1/M2 mac laptops are among the best ever shipped in any computers. They are absolutely not the janky butterfly ones Apple shipped some years ago.

Mankind has not made a better machine than the M2 MBA, seriously.

Definitely a subjective opinion and not a matter of objective fact. I dislike the keyboard, personally, and macOS does not meet my needs for personal use (I use an M1 Pro Macbook Pro 16" for work and find it to be fine).

Nothing forces you to run macOS on these machines any longer. I am speaking only of the hardware, anyway.

I've replaced a Macbook Air with a ThinkPad T480, which I've upgraded with a 250 GB SSD and 16 GB of RAM, and a bigger battery.

It's just the perfect laptop for me. The keyboard feels super nice (I don't like those arrow keys though), battery life is excellent, and the screen is sharp enough. Its only drawback are the speakers, but that doesn't bother me much tbh.

Amazing laptop, couldn't recommend it enough.

I don't think so. Time to recompile the newest p7zip (using this as an example because it dropped yesterday):

- My M1 Macbook Air, 16GB RAM: 11s

- My M1 Ultra Mac Studio, 128GB RAM: 6s

- My HP DevOne (AMD Ryzen7 PRO 5850U, 64GB RAM): 51s

- My home server (HP Z2 Mini G4, Xeon E-2176G , 32GB RAM): 17s

- my Gigabyt Aorus 17G gaming laptop (i7-11800H, 64GB RAM): 35s

On GeekBench the DevOne should be faster than the Z2:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/16189462?baseli...

and comparable to the M1 MBA:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/6428909?baselin...

Two conclusions:

- GeekBench is an incredibly flawed benchmark

- The M1 MacBook Air is an incredible machine, even more so when you consider it's a laptop.

Now that M1 support is in the official Linux 6.2 kernel, I hope running Linux on Apple Silicon will soon become mainstream and usable.

If the rumored M2 15" MBA comes out, I am totally getting one.

How are those the only two conclusions you came up with?

If all other independent benchmarks and data points to the 5850U being roughly comparable in performance to the M1 - yet for you it appears to be 5x slower, then surely that suggests an anomalous result, or at the very least, an edge case that is not indicative of real world performance.

The third, much more plausible conclusion:

- Your testing method/setup is flawed or broken in some way.

Different OS (macOS Ventura vs. Pop-OS), different compiler (LLVM/clang vs. GCC), different storage (internal SSD vs NVMe M.2), different filesystem. Running with full CPU parallelism in both cases, however. In fact the test was biased against the Mac because the M1 MBA was running on battery power and the HP DevOne was plugged in.

Still, 5x worse performance at a real-world task that most closely approximates my use case is a significant difference.

Different OS, different storage, different filesystem are all fair as you can say you are testing the laptop as a whole, so what was preconfigured matters. Also generating totally different code (compiler outputting x86_64 vs aarch64) is fair, because that's part of a real-world task.

However, LLVM/clang vs GCC is too far and made the benchmark result completely nonsense. How can you make sure it isn't just that LLVM/clang is faster than GCC? Or even makefile detected clang so turned on different compiler flags.

Of course the parameters are different, but even if it were GCC or clang on both sides, the compiler back-end for arm64 vs x64 are also different. If we followed your argument to its logical conclusion, no cross-platform benchmarks should ever be performed since there will always be something different. I am approaching this from the perspective of the end user (how long does it take me to get a working p7zip executable?).

That said, I attempted to make the comparison as close as possible by timing the time it takes to cross-compile Hugo for Windows/x64 (taking care to run it once to load the sources into the package cache, while clearing the object file cache each time). Thus using the exact same Go 1.20.1 compiler, the same code generator back-end, the same platform source code being compiled, and the results are much closer:

- Mac Studio (M1 Ultra, 128G): 9.7s

- Macbook Air (M1, 16G): 16.7s

- HP DevOne (5850U, 64G): 18.7s

- HP Z2 Mini G4 (Xeon E-2176G, 32G): 20.7s

- Gigabyte Aorus 17G (i7-11800H, 64G): 16.5s

So you are right, somehow GCC's optimizer at the -O2 level is much slower on x64 laptops than x64 desktop or arm64. Not sure why compiling p7zip is so much faster on the Xeon than on the Ryzen or Aorus, gcc is 12.2 on both and the optimizer setting is -O2, no -march=native. The only explanation I can think of is thermal throttling, since both slow machines are laptops, and somehow GCC is triggering that in a way Go's compiler is not (nor apparently clang).

> test was biased against the Mac because the M1 MBA was running on battery power and the HP DevOne was plugged in

That does not matter at all for the M1 MBA. So no bias.

All you've accomplished then is to test LLVM vs GCC, not an M1 vs the 5850U.

Apple Silicon strength is in efficiency and low power draw, they're mostly slower than high end AMD/Intel chips (which admittedly, use a lot more power). In no world is the 5850U 5x worse than the M1, it's just absurd to suggest so.

When I run Docker containers on my M1 MBP, tasks are 15-20x slower than my Linux laptop. Obviously it would be ridiculous of me to suggest that therefore the M1 is 15x worse than my laptop's 2020 Intel chip.

See my revised comment above. Yes, GCC is much slower at compiling p7zip on x64 laptops specifically because it is apparently triggering thermal throttling, on both Intel or AMD. It builds much faster on my old Xeon where thermal throttling is much less of an issue, and of course on the M1s.

I needed a new laptop and due to that, I've recently spent quite a lot of time browsing reddit, various forums and this sacrosanct place, trying to find information about experiences with laptop's brands and configurations. I ended up purchasing a Lenovo P15v AMD due to its upgradability and internal ports (RAID capability, non-soldered RAM memory) but was very close to get a Mac M1/2 laptop. I ditched the idea in the end because I want a fully functional Linux system on it. I don't like MacOS at all (I have enough having to deal with it on my company assigned computer) but I have to admit that the quality of their devices is beyond anything on the market, also the simplicity of their product lines.

Anyways, if one day Linux reaches the point where it's fully compatible with the M* series I am not gonna have second thoughts on purchasing one, right away.

I think I saw something about kernel compatibility just the other day. No idea what the other pieces are the puzzle are.

The Linux 6.2 kernel released yesterday has official M1 support. It takes a lot more than just the kernel to have a functional machine: GPU and (W)LAN drivers, power management support, etc. But we are getting closer.

Regarding the non upgradable battery, one thing a lot of people don’t know is that you can charge your MacBook with a USB power bank. The typical phone power bank only puts out 10W, but this is usually enough to maintain the internal charge while you use it on an Air, and to at least very significantly extend the lifetime on the Pro. This has come in handy for me on a long flight where I unexpectedly didn’t have power at my seat.

For a little bit more money, there are a good number of of power banks that output just as much as normal Air wall charger.

15W at 3A 5V actually is the maximum over usb-a. USB-PD powerbanks are a thing these days but it's useful in a pinch.

This is actually enough to power the laptop and trickle charge! I’ve had a M1 Pro and now have an M2 Air plugged into my weirdo USB-C monitor that only provides 15W power(!), and unless I’m heavily compiling all day (like change-compile-change trial-and-error), the laptop does slowly charge. Even on the heavy use days its never actually run all the way down.

This is cool, but I think you lost me when you said “it just works out of the box” about your OS. I mean, sure, but you’ve had to order a new screen, touchpad, battery and RAM. That’s a lot of boxes to work out of

> for contrast, a little bit of dust can break an Apple butterfly keyboard

Butterfly switches have been discontinued by Apple in 2019, Macs with Apple Silicon do not have them.

Last year I finally put my old 2012 13" MBP to rest. I have been using it for 8 years for work, commuting with it to work. 8 years of plugging it in and out at the office and at home. Then it was used by my daughter for another two years for home school during the pandemic, Zoom + Chrome. 10 years of daily usage. Could not ask for better machine. After that brief period with 2016 15" MBP and now base M1 Pro that I plan to use for at least another 3 years at least. Sure, HDD upgrades would be nice, but I can live with the Transcend card in the SD Card slot as an expansion for file storage.

Every now and then I think about getting second-hand X1 carbon as a machine I don't need to care about when travel. But then again, MBP + iPad Pro with universal control works so well it's like having a second screen on the go. I don't think there's another system that be near this level of integration.

This thread has been very good source of information. It confirms my conviction that the Apple ecosystem of devices is unparalleled. No need to think about TP's

The thing that annoys me the most about M1 Macbooks is the lack of gaming ability. Even a basic windows laptop can play games like DOTA, Age of empires etc and so did the older macbooks. With M1, almost none of my games work.

While this is true, it's not really Apple's fault, most game makers just don't care about making their games Mac compatible. They don't even have to be Apple Silicon compatible, Rosetta does a surprisingly good job making Mac games for Intel playable on M1.

It annoys me that I have a bunch of games on my Steam account for 32bit only macOS (Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2 etc) that just cannot be played on a modern mac. To be fair, Apple have gone through two CPU architecture changes since I bought them (Intel 32bit -> Intel 64bit -> ARM). Is this Valve's fault for not rebuilding the games, or is it Apple's fault for not making it work through Rosetta?

Didn't apple also drop opengl support? It's not just a matter of recompiling the same source. It needs platform specific changes.

Probably the investment isn't worth it for game makers, since apple might require them to do it all over again next week, potentially.

It is most definitely Apple's fault. There might be a chicken-and-egg problem, but it mostly stems from Apples really poor support for backwards compatibility.

There's been a few times when it seems like mac gaming could be making a comeback only for something like 32bit support to get removed.

Rosetta will not be around forever, and when it goes, game developers for the most part won't be rebuilding their old games for a new platform.

The lack of good high performance graphics also deters "serious" gamers, and gamers are generally trying to get the most performance out of every dollar, which is just antithetical to everything Apple.

No? Whose fault it was when apple removed the ability to run i386 binaries on CPUs that could run them just fine?

It's really annoying given the fact that hardware is more than capable of running some oldies. Hell there is an official WoW build which runs super well, but no other blizz games are ported.

Starcraft 2 works very well

You’re dishonestly miscategorising the issue, even if only by implication. It’s not it being a “basic” laptop. It’s about the operating system it’s running.

I've had pretty good luck running most older games via Windows with Parallels on my M1 Macbook Pro.

Microsoft now officially supports Windows via Parallels as “an authorized solution” on M1 & M2 Macs. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/16/23602718/microsoft-window...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-usin...

I use my M1 pro to play Dota 2 all the time. On medium settings I get between 60-100fps at 1440p.

I probably game on it more than my gaming PC and consoles at this point.

I suppose it depends on your 'good enough' threshold. I'm quite happy on a stock Thinkpad X220 (7 row keyboard) but I don't do anything especially demanding.

Many here would find that machine limiting.

> Intel® Core™ i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz × 8

this is only 4core/8thread

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/124969/...

And Intel's multithreading is notoriously weaker than AMD's SMT.

The only reason I elect Apple is because it has an OS that isn't Windows and isn't Linux. I spend a lot of time fixing other people's operating system problems, I don't want to do it at home.

There is no way I will ever again run Linux as a daily driver. I had to do it a decade ago, and it was fine. It isn't fine now.

The newer models are called the Thinkpad T14, I believe. The T14 gen 3 has moved to 1920x1200 resolution, 16:10 ratio. One sodimm is soldered though, with one slot for memory upgrades.

I've been running Linux laptops for years now and have been enjoying using (well, mostly poking around) with a Framework laptop, however, recently I've been doing a lot of long-haul travel and it turns out that the battery life on the Framework was really not cutting it on the road.

I'd been meaning get an Apple Silicon Mac to play around with, and ended up picking up an M2 MBA before another long flight. Battery life was good in regular use (~9-11h so far), but what was surprising to me was how fantastic battery life was on the plane. On plane wifi, with much lighter use (lower brightness, mostly browsing, no file transfers or compiles), I used the Mac for 6-7h, and still had 50% battery life at the end of the flight. Also, it has had basically zero battery loss when suspended.

I'm still using Linux on my desktop machines, but I guess I'm a Mac user again for travel...

I would never buy a Apple laptop.

You don't know what it does as its a closed system. But even heavier for me counts the fact that you can't replace its hdd which will fail after years of usage no matter what. Also you will not receive any security updated after seven years.

Don't give up your freedom just because of laziness!

You can replace it now.

Officially? Would be surprised as its soldered to the motherboard!

Well, you can still replace it. You just have to replace the parts attached to it as well.

Which is the logic board aka the computer itself... that's not very sustainable for sure.

Indeed. I was being facetious

> "I once spilled an entire can of beer onto a Thinkpad X220. The fix involved a screwdriver, a sponge, a $50 replacement keyboard"

I once spilled half a glass of red wine all over my M1 MacBook Air keyboard. The fix involved quickly turning it upside down, sponging it off, and letting it dry out. OK, some of the affected keys were rather sticky afterwards and required popping off the keycaps and cleaning underneath. Some of them are still not perfect and I need to have another go with some isopropyl alcohol. But it certainly didn't require buying a replacement keyboard!

As a counter point, I spilled a gigantic can of energy drink on my t420 and my fix was literally doing jack shit, not even shutting down the computer because the laptop had drain holes. A key was sticky a bit I guess.

Also Aussie, also won't be buying another Mac. Issues I have include: crapstore, refusal to upgrade XCode which makes the hardware soon-useless (at least brew is complaining), and three different upgrades that killed third party USB drivers (one killed my favourite keyboard, one killed my non-Apple branded USB network adaptor, and one killed connectivity with some CHxxx UART driven microcontrollers). I would say quite seriously that Apple is no longer suitable for development. I will be focusing on Linux desktops again from now on.

> I wanted a cheap travel laptop I could replace without blinking an eye at the price. I live in Europe, Thinkpads are the most common enterprise laptops I see while travelling. I might even slap an asset tag sticker on the cover to make it even more inconspicuous.

Fair enough - this seems like the key rationale.

But given the amount of effort tinkering to get to an acceptable machine, I’d wonder if there isn’t a machine that can be replaced at short notice ‘on the go’ that would represent a better compromise?

I bought a framework laptop 1 year ago, and trust me when I say I tried everything out there to improve the battery life on Ubuntu. It was still so bad I was always worried about the battery draining out, not to mention, just closing the lid doesn't work. Eventually switched to an m2 mac air. I barely have to think about the battery now, so I can focus on the actual work, and when work finishes I just close the lid.

Last year I upgraded to a Thinkpad Carbon. Almost immediately, I couldn't stand the keyboard. This sent me down a rabbit-hole of what was wrong with the keyboard (as it looked almost identical to my previous Thinkpad).

The answer is that Thinkpad has slowly evolved their keyboards to be slimmer. Reducing the travel on the keys with each step.

Some of the new ones are down to 1.3mm of travel. I realize this is a personal preference, but I noticeably make more errors under anything less than 1.8mm of travel.

Hence, I got rid of the Carbon and bought a Thinkpad T14 Gen 2 which is pretty much the latest model with 1.8mm. The Gen 3 was available, but they trimmed it down to 1.5mm.

I realize this is a pretty picky hill to die on, but I can't express how significant it is for the reliable use of keyboard for me. I'll be buying T14 Gen 2's until I die it seems from here on out. Everything else about the laptop is just fine. Runs any linux I throw at it, 4k screen if desired, all the upgrade-ability I might want.

(If you get lucky, you can even find one with a proper Ethernet port. Some come without because apparently during the chip-shortage, they removed that feature)

Is the Gen3 keyboard compatible with Gen2? If so you could upgrade to a Gen3 and swap out the keyboards.

Where did you get the info about the key travel? I have an X1-Carbon Gen 6 and I feel that the key travel is good, but I wouldn't mind a better "click" feeling when I hit the keys, like in a Macbook or a Surface.

I don't really use laptops so have no horse in this race; but during the pandemic I was forced to set up a separate WFH desk and I used a Windows laptop and an (i7) MacBook Pro side-by-side, hooked up to 2 external monitors and sharing a keyboard / mouse with Barrier.

Despite the machines having similar specs, I find the Windows machine snappier (even with all the Intune / VPN / spyware bullshit built-in) and really only use the mac as a browser box.

Anecdote: browsing was super slow on the mac even though it's sitting right next to the Asus laptop and using the same WiFi network, so I bought a couple of USB Ethernet dongles. I found it surprising in 2021 that I need to download drivers and reboot the macOS machine to install an USB Ethernet dongle; Windows just picked it up in seconds (yes, it wasn't an Apple branded Ethernet dongle, just sorted by most popular on Amazon and with advertised macOS support).

If I ever need to purchase a laptop for myself (though I don't have a reason for it), it will most definitely not be a mac.

I got a refurbished ThinkPad T470 for £200 and it is like new. May need to add more RAM (came with 8GB), but that's it.

I don't really need to upgrade my hw often, only when it breaks and it is clear it was so outdated is not worth repairing it. OK, it all depends on your requirements, but I don't see myself buying a new laptop ever again. Both because price and cost to the environment.

I feel torn here between FOSS principles and the quality of MacBook ux. Also the amount of performance you get per dollar

It used to be, you bought an Apple product and got less performant hardware for a higher price. Now it's the opposite.

I have no idea how they do this so well. Maybe by vertical integration of hardware, OS, and user level services all under the same roof

I think the design philosophy of Apple Silicon is probably the future.

I wonder if vertical integration of software and hardware is also the future

It all depends what your use case is.

Also, rant on how Apple was once my favorite, and now I hate them as much as 90s Microsoft. (M$ is no angel either with all their telemetry...)

I manage macs at scale, and I notice they are getting worse and worse. After managing 150 Macs as MDM admin, I want Mac to get off the train they're on and start being predictable again.

Intel macs run like crap now, while the M1s chug along nicely. I'm convinced Apple bakes engineering obsolesce into their old products to keep you on that 3 year device renewal period. They got sued for it more than once for the "Battery throttling" on the iPhone, and likely one of the only times they will ever get caught doing it. And they had an excelent PR push of "Battery health = performance, not my fault"

We've had to straight-up replace fully-decked-out 2019 i7s with 32GB ram because they run so badly with modern software. Our graphic designer has a $3000+ laptop that is useless for their job. Massive fuckery is going on, because these are powerful machines.

Why suspect malice when you can suspect incompetence? Apple has a track record of lying about their throttling, so I assume there's a culture of it and it pads their bottom line.

The T480 is looking great, other than the bad keyboard they adopted after they killed-off the last genuine thinkpad keyboards. An optional video card would have been great for the T line, but you'd have to go with W or P for that I think.

I don't trust big companies in General, but Apple makes too much money for just a computer and software company. Their ecosystem's walled garden and "we know better" settings are repellent to me, and I've since given up my iOS device for LineageOS so I can use my hotspot without it automatically turning itself off (They surely know better about my hotspot practices).

I have both T480 and M1Pro 14", and let me tell you once you go Mac, you don't want to go back. I am keeping the T480 for some Linux/Windows workloads, but that is it. MBP is just better in every regard. And even though I have maxed out batteries (plural) with 98% health on '480, MBP has twice the battery life.

Exactly, build quality and noise levels of mac are so much better. Not to mention the OS.

Because these are not exactly comparable. I have Thinkpad X1 Carbon which is more comparable and I'm easily getting 8+hrs of battery life.

But the real benefit is that it runs Linux. It's just a more productive environment for a power user. Docker uses little CPU, tools are the same as on my server, desktop environment is actually better and much more configurable.

Last but not least I'm not supporting a walled garden, which is a deal breaker for me in the first place.

I was a ThinkPad maximalist in my personal computing life for the last 5ish years.

This year, I needed to interview for jobs without having access to a "work" laptop for the task (i.e. an overspecced MacBook Pro).

Faced with the prospects of subjecting my ThinkPad/vim machine to video calls, I more or less immediately decided to fork over the money for an M2 MacBook Air.

Unfortunately for my identity as a person invested in my principles, it's been a delightful experience. I'm glad that I have my ThinkPad (and its stack of batteries) in the closet – it'll always be there, and work exactly as I want it to. But I can already tell I'm going to drive this MacBook into the ground over the next 10 years.

I know that I won't be able to repair it when it (eventually) degrades, but the diff of convenience in day to day ops pays for that inconvenience, in my experience. YMMV.

It's such a consistent experience I don't think you even need the YMMV qualifier.

Source: I also own an M2 Air and have been blown away by it's performance in "day to day ops" as you call it. It is by a wide margin the best laptop I've ever owned (previous 6-7 laptops were all personal/work macbook pros)

I mainly attached the qualifier to account for the cost of one's "inability to repair when [the MacBook] eventually degrades".

For some people, meditating on this reality causes them a great deal of consternation. As somebody who consternates on that topic myself, I empathize with it deeply.

For people possessing a will more galvanized than my own, no improvement in day to day ops is worth the pain of working on a platform like this. I don't think my experience speaks to them.

For people like you and I, who are willing to seriously consider the trade-offs, and for whom the up-front money isn't an immediate concern, I agree it's almost a no-brainer.

I think it speaks equal volumes on Apple's ability to produce world-class hardware at scale, and on software vendors' collective inabilities or unwillingness to produce quality videoconferencing software that works gracefully on older technology.

These days, the hardware of the laptop rarely matters for me. Battery life and screen legibility is what matters above all else because I do little to no compute on the actual device itself. To that end, I like the Mac M1 Air and the Framework laptops.

Nothing beats the battery life of an M1 Air that I have found. What really sold me was my first trip with it, flying from Amsterdam to SFO. Left hotel 3 hours early, 2 hours in airport, entire plane ride (10 hours), uber 1 hour home. Constant use, 60% battery life used.

However, my usage is probably atypical. All of my machines, even my phones, belong to a big tailscale vpn. That means everything is accessible everywhere, no matter where I am. Remote development is a simple as VS Code Remote SSH. Files/media/etc are also readily available.

This is a thin client approach, and really opens up my options.

Do you ever find yourself without reliable internet connection and unable to develop/watch media/etc.? Any issues with data caps?

Not really. I am very far away from home right now - live in SF bay area, on a trip in northern Alaska. Have 2 cellphone providers, Google Fi and Verizon. Between the two even when in Denali national forest I had cell reception. Spent the afternoon yesterday writing code, had zero issues.

Airplanes are hit or miss, but can take advantage of HN/reddit reading time or read a book (preferred) if access is limited.

As for data caps, no issues at all. Family of 5 on unlimited internet plan. The 5gbps internet I have is mostly underutilized in terms of 95% usage, but fully saturated when transferring big files between different devices.

Fate is funny. I just received an alert that there's a power outage at home. UPS is keeping things alive for a bit, but given PG&E's track record.......

Annoying!

> ...alt-tabbing doesn't lag (it did on my Intel-based MacBook Pro 2019), ...

Yeah, unfortunately this is by design. cmd-tab behaves different depending on how long you hold the cmd or tab key.

cmd-~ is instant, and with stage manager it switches through apps. He could've also just installed windows arm preview on the M1, or asahi

If I have to replace components to get a baseline usable machine (and am not able to buy one off the shelf), that is a hobby project and not something I can depend on to daily drive.

As I've gotten older, that is not something I care to futz around with anymore. (also applies to the periodic OS reinstall)

My work laptop is an M1 Macbook, if I could, I would happily move to my personal Thinkpad x230 running Kubuntu.

I do a lot of development work on a tiny Acer with 8GB of RAM and an Atom-class processor. Not fast, but fast enough. I rarely need to wait more than a couple seconds between editing something and seeing the results.

And making it impossible to open lots of browser tabs is actually nice for productivity.

Surprised you get downvoted for this comment...

I've an insanely powerful (and expensive) laptop from work. But looking back, most of the work I'm actually proud of was done in really cheap laptops. Maybe success is more about being comfortable with the tool you have than having the most expensive tool??

It was a 600x1024 netbook screen that persuaded me to re-learn Emacs. Of course I'd prefer a ridiculously fast computer, with a fast CPU with dozens of cores, an insane amount of memory (not swapping is kind of important with SSDs) and a very fast SSD, but, in the end, I don't need that much of a computer.

Would I turn down a 4th-gen Xeon or EPYC Genoa workstation if someone offered me one for free? Of course not! In fact, I like retro computing and I wouldn't turn down a TRS-80 (and, in fact, would be delighted to give a home to a VT-230/330 terminal or an ASR-33 teletype).

Lenovo's anti-consumer behavior makes Apple look like a charity with a perfect rating on www.charitynavigator.org.

It doesn't matter that he's running Pop!.

Strong aftermarket sales lead to value retention which drives new sales, and Lenovo's 2023 position seems to be to generate as much ewaste as possible, especially in their workstation and server lines.

Between secure boot "oopsies", rampant (and ongoing) GPL violations, constant spyware campaigns, and vendor locks for CPUs every time I see someone at a FOSS conference with a Lenovo festooned in stickers I chuckle inside because they're oiling the same machine they're raging against.

The Lenovo spyware is what made alarms go off in my head, even when I wanted a Linux laptop. I decided on a Framework instead; happily use a Framework, a 2015 Macbook Pro 13", and a 2020 M1 Air 13". All have their uses and all work pretty well; but Framework has the worst battery life of them all -- but at least it's not an evil company like Lenovo.

I have a t480s i7 24gb ram 2tb ssd, bought it used about 3 years ago, added all the components for i think <300, used it for work for about a year. Used it for everything from compiling big projects, to image and video editing, usually with 10s of tabs of firefox open, even played a few light indie games on it. Maybe it's just the Arch Linux factor but I've always considered it a reasonably capable laptop especially when compared to macs of the same age that are dead and useless by now, or comparably priced new laptops like the chromebooks.

Just got myself an X13, love the screen ratio and the keyboard is almost as good as my old T42 which finally died. Not thrilled about everything being soldered on but every TP I have owned has outlived its own usefulness so I am not too concerned, even my $250 e11 is still going strong all stock and just shy of 10 years old. First computer with AMD and first computer with a remotely decent GPU which is kind of fun but I don't really need it. So far my favorite TP since the T42.

I do wish they would release another e11 that is not a yoga, going to miss that computer when it finally dies.

Welcome to the dark side.

After enduring a decade or more of Apple, tasting the modicum of control and self determinism you gain from a cheap x86 + linux as a developer, makes it hard to look back. People getting over the threshold of trying is understandably hard due to how easy it is to become entrenched in the ecosystem. Also bad past experiences of getting linux running probably don't help, but it's a very comfy place to be as a dev these days, and pretty much guaranteed to be smooth with certain hardware like a TP.

What not to like about T480, the 'Last Mohicans' of the ThinkPad laptop generation with replaceable components i.e. battery, RAM, etc. The most glaring weakness probably the screen come by the default 1080p but that can be upgraded as well.

I recently bought a used one around USD$250 and with further USD$200 it will be 64GB portable workstation beast. When working at the office simply connect it to to the docking station and you have access to all the wonderful display of 2K and 4K monitors.

I too got myself 2nd hand T480 + upgrade (for a 2nd work laptop). Mostly b/c I need the 64GB RAM. Other than that put 4TB SATA SSD + 512GB NVME in the WLAN M.2 slot, new batteries to 72Wh. May change the screen now I read this - the original really is bad. Usually I put Xubuntu LTS b/c "it just works", but may try PopOS next time. Want my laptops cheep & cheerful, don't particularly fancy thinking of/them expensive, irreplaceable and in need of complicated warranties/support.

I am uisng T520 as my work computer, used also wife's brand new T14 and honestly besides the thickness of the body the experience was underwhelming, there is pretty much zero reason for me to upgrade to newer much more expensive Thinkpad which will save me what maybe <5% of my time by being hardly any faster at anything I do. Now she got some new company Macbook and man that's one horrendous keyboard and lack of connectors, I think you cant even plug there regular USB (A) key.

Macs don't have butterfly keyboards anymore. I don't want to know the amount of crap that has drifted or fallen into my M1 MBA keyboard over the last couple of years.

I currently use a ThinkPad T480. I switched from a Macbook after they started using those godawful butterfly keyboards. The keyboard was my primary motivation for switching.

But apart from the keyboard, the rest of the laptop simply doesn't hold up. The battery is mediocre, the trackpad doesn't even fall in the same league. Windows is a hot mess and Ubuntu, while good for dev work, is just too user-unfriendly and filled with tiny annoyances.

I'll be switching back to the newer MacBook soon.

It’s an interesting fight which Apple is taking on with the ARM chips. Basically everybody else, including Microsoft, Dell, HP, and Intel, would like to see Apple Silicon disappear to not lose market share in their x86 devices. For example, GitHub to this day still does not support GitHub Runners on Apple Silicon. In turn, this makes it way harder for developers to compile aarch64-darwin binaries.

I am doing development on a T550 for the exact reason that it is not very fast. It is fast enough to develop my project, but the app that I am working on is quite resource hungry, so I want to make sure that it runs smoothly on the user's machine. There is no point in enjoying a super fast development environment when you later realize that there is a massive performance problem for your users.

Anyone with a T480 or similar gen Thinkpad should make sure the thunderbolt drivers are up to date, there was a firmware bug that caused the USB-C chip to be overwritten everytime a new device was plugged in, causing premature failure. The thunderbolt/c port is part of motherboard and not replaceable by itself.

I own a T480 and only one of the C ports is usable even to charge due to this.

I wouldn't be able to do it. I spend a significant part of my day in front of the computer and having to deal with a poor ergonomic of a budget tool would drive me very frustrated. I also have no desire to tinker with my computer or the installation.

But I think it's great to hear these stories and to know that there are people for whom these kind of decisions work.

This is how I think. People go crazy over these laptops and all I can think is "how the heck do you work on a laptop all day?"

I don't upgrade my computers (or my phones) as much anymore so serviceability isn't as important to me. I have both a MacBook Air M2 and a T480 and I love the flexibility. Most of what I do is on the M2 but every once in a while, I run into edge cases such as printer drivers that only work on Windows or upgrading video production firmware.

My biggest complaint about Macs is the lack of backwards compatibility of the OS and apps. It always comes to a point when the OS won't support your hardware and then the apps won't be supported on the older OS. This has a much bigger effect with the advent of cloud services.

Crazy how much hate this post is getting.

If you lack a personality, what computer you use is a good replacement :)

I don't understand the thought process where a laptop has insufficient battery life (the author tripled the size of the battery to compensate) but the user also added 16GB of memory they did not need, just in case. Do people not realize that RAM uses energy?

This is kinda rad — I am primarily a "desktop" user (well, iMac), but I have the occasional itch to have a laptop that I barely care about, that doesn't need to be fast, just more capable than a tablet on the go. Maybe I pick up a used T480.

I have to use an M1 for work with 32GB of RAM. While I have no doubt that the hardware is quite powerful, it is the slowest FEELING machine that I have ever used in my life.

Every personal device of mine runs Linux on much older / weaker x86 hardware; one of those systems dual boots Windows 10, and they all provide a snappier user experience than just spinning up a web browser on the M1 that I use for work.

I have no idea why this is, and when I complained about it we ran benchmarks and non-scientific tests (i.e: let's see how long it takes to compile something) to compare my system with my coworkers to rule out something defective - they had the exact same numbers.

I suspect it's software related. The difference between Linux and OS X is night and day, but even Windows 10 on a ~5 year-old desktop (can't remember the CPU off hand but it's an Intel) feels much snappier.

It's an interesting post but i guess at the end it all ends up because the Author got tired of Apple and wanted to use Linux. Through the post its difficult to find another reason, specially when the Mac is clearly superior in nearly all the points mentioned: screen, battery, CPU, etc...

Regarding MacOS i use it for years (I do have machines with Windows and Linux at home) as my main Desktop OS and im also getting frustrated with some Apple decisions lately. But for a plain Desktop/Workstation OS MacOS at the end does everything Linux does at the end of the day its a matter of taste.

With Laptops i think Apple still has the edge, on Workstations, you can build a damn good PC with a Ryzen 7x and an NVIDIA/ATI GPU and have lots of advantages compared to a Mac Studio for example.

I have various dells and think pads from work that i just install Linux on and use for personal stuff. I want to buy a m1 mac, but given that my free handmedowns keep humming along, i cant justify the upgrade

Sometimes I wished Apple would make macOS available to other manufacturers or able to buy it as a customer. I would be happy to pay $200+ to get a license of for it on a non-Apple hardware.

Yeah. I would have done the same and would skip buying the M1 MacBook Air, or just replace it with a M2 MacBook instead one rather than downgrade to a ThinkPad.

> I've had quite enough of Microsoft's constant nagging to upgrade to Windows 11

I’m surprised he’s seeing a lot of nagging. That machine can’t even run Windows 11.

You think that stops Windows 10 from showing popups? I get those every time I boot Windows on my 7700k. At first I thought they relaxed their requirements and clicked the ads to see what it'd do but then it would just tell me my machine is incompatible.

I think they've fixed their detection recently but there are still references to Windows 11 all over the place.

Better still - I upgraded my gaming desktop with a new CPU the day Microsoft messed up the upgrade detection for Windows 11. The first time I booted it with the new CPU it showed me the "Upgrade to Windows 11" screen for the first time. I though "Oh, cool, my CPU must have been the bottleneck. Sure, go for it."

Turns out, it was just coincidental timing and my desktop lacks TPM. It's still running Windows 11 and I've not run into any issues, but AFAIK I won't be able to re-install it if I ever format the drive.

If you ever need to reinstall there are ways to disable those checks entirely and run Windows 11 on unsupported hardware. No guarantees in terms of stability or security (who knows, Microsoft may just assume that certain modern instruction sets are available), but it's not entirely impossible.

I've fought Windows enough that I'm not going to upgrade to an OS Microsoft tells me won't run stable on my hardware, but plenty of others have tried and succeeded in ignoring the limitations without a hitch… for now, at least.

M1 to T480? Odd. I plan to go thinkpad to M series once all the Asahi Linux work is complete and upstreamed so I can run Fedora on it just as well as on x86.

I'd rather stick with 2X perf, 15+hrs of battery life, better trackpad, keyboard, webcam at not so different price point after all the upgrades OP did..

No picture of the actual ThinkPad hardware, likely more IBM ThinkPad DNA loss by Lenovo. The Apple MacBooks have had a design change back to the future.

Hi, author of the article here, what do you mean by "likely more IBM ThinkPad DNA loss by Lenovo"?

and thanks for the feedback - I've added a photo of the actual laptop now.

I think most of us use Mac because it's the breed standard. If it was something else, then we'd all use that.*

* Obviously not Windows though. A linux flavor

aside the hardware, when I changed from macbook (2019) to thinkpad, the biggest advantage and source of happiness is to never need to touche Finder again! It is horrible! the desktop, gui, cmd-tab, and whole user experience with 2 monitors (could not get 3 monitors to work) is just awful. With win 10 latest update it's a breeze

Interesting.

I've switched from Win10 to Mac for work last summer and it's been great so far. IMO Finder and Explorer are both garbage with different colored glitter mixed in, but general experience of working on MacOs is so much better than everything my Windows and Linux boxes offered.

This laptop has 16 gigs of ram (my windows workstation has 48), can run on one charge whole work day and then some, emits zero noise and is very responsive no matter how many tabs and live-reloading applications I have running. Super impressive to me.

I'm in the same boat, I just got on it earlier.

My first Mac was a mid-2012 MBP. I loved it, and it lasted until my then-two-year-old poured a glass of milk into the keyboard in 2016. I used various Windows machines for a while, then bought a new MBP in 2018. I had that one for less than a year because I realized I just wasn't using it much - I always had laptops issued to me for work, and a Linux box on Linode that I could SSH/RDP into.

When the M1 came out I bought a 14" MBP. It's only got 8GB of RAM, but it's faster in actual usage for anything but graphics-heavy gaming than my (admittedly, aging) gaming desktop.

I used to be fine programming in Windows, and that was before WSL/WSL2. These days the experience is much better but it's still easier just to dual boot or SSH/RDP.

macOS, OTOH, has gotten a ton better in that time. There are a few nagging things I don't like but it generally just stays out of my way and lets me treat it like a Linux box with a nice, relatively consistent WM.

I still have my Windows desktop because it's better suited for gaming and has better support. If not for that I'd be full macOS.

I too don’t value my time very highly.

Care to elaborate?

Ok here's the thing. I used to build PCs, and I'd tinker with linux distros on laptops. Things would be flakey, need maintenance and upgrading and that was fun.

That's fine when you're laser focused on your career and are in 'career as personality' part of your life, which is essential imo and I'm not sneering at it by making reference to it in that way.

But ultimately, I now need to get to my desk just on time, know my machine will work and not just be an opportunity cost sink, and get what I've scheduled done and then clock off when I need to.

Now, that can happen with custom bits and tinkery bobs, but I'd much rather have the insurance policy of using what I personally have experienced as the most solid and reliable hardware/software combo in the business and not concern myself with the other stuff, even if sometimes it's more fun. I work on a 13" 2013 mbp i7/16g ram and 2021 13" m1 / 16gig ram and have never had a single issue with either that cost me work time. Having to install more stuff to then claim "it just works" isn't just working, it's adding more "oh it now doesn't work for some esoteric reason" to the chain.

and I totally agree, I used to work on macOS because everything would just work.

Except Pop!_OS 22.04 worked entirely out of the box. I didn't need to even open the terminal to do anything except clone my repos.

For a sizable segment of Apple's power users, this is really the core issue.

Apple clearly has no love for power users for over half a decade, and thinking of going to windows after MacOS is a nonstarter, which really leaves the obvious choice being migration to linux until you start to seriously evaluate PC laptops along with realizing you're taking the onus of OS configuration on yourself ALONG WITH your work, as the previous commenter mentioned. That said, Ventura is such a bad MacOS release (and sign of things to come) that Apple has finally made it the pull off the band-aid moment for a lot of power user folks like the writer of the article, issues be damned. good -enough- will have to suffice.

It's so tiresome that every single release of MacOS has fewer features professionals actually care about.

and on mac nothing works:

- worst window management than on any other OS

- mouse scrolling works in a different direction and requires additional software to be fixed.

- unlike windows, cannot even connect to Android without some additional software to copy pictures.

- docker is extremely slow

- my M1 already crashed 4 times in the last 6 months since I started using it - worse than any other OS/hardware.

- poor multi-monitor support

- poor support of monitors with lower resolution

- non-standard keyboard shortcuts. All other OSes use the same shortcuts.

- brew is very buggy when used with multiple users on single laptop

- no way to configure a global variable on startup. You can use .zprofile etc. but this will not work with GUI applications started via spotlight.

this is only a small portion of issues I had with macos.

> mouse scrolling works in a different direction and requires additional software to be fixed

You can change that in system preferences easily with a checkbox.

> non-standard keyboard shortcuts. All other OSes use the same shortcuts.

You could also argue that these shortcuts are standard to apple computers for decades and so are standard for their ecosystem.

Not disagreeing with most of your points, but thought i'd just point those out.

....and yet, here you are, posting comments

hurry up, you'll keep the President and Secretary-General waiting!

Depends on how valuable you think your time is. Benefits of not going Apple include not having to figure out which Docker containers are compatible or fast enough on your new hardware, not having to deal with macOS, not having to upgrade the entire machine when components fail or when you run into SKU limits.

The author says he lives in Europe, taking the laptop out fir repairs can easily take an entire afternoon of travel that could be spent more productively elsewhere.

Pick the best tools for the job. Sometimes that involves spending a couple thousand extra for a shiny Macbook, sometimes that involves spending an afternoon setting up a Thinkpad.

>The author says he lives in Europe, taking the laptop out fir repairs can easily take an entire afternoon of travel that could be spent more productively elsewhere.

I'm not sure if you understand how urbanised Europe is.

Linux is now ready to run on modern Macs. Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-6-2-the-first-mainstream...

At least a ThinkPad with type-c Power supply, all old types are passed.

my laptop is plugged into a docking station at home as well as in the office. i only ever use it bare while in meetings, or travelling. So definitely no need for a mac in my case

I got an M2 MacBook and the battery life is insane.

As for any maintenance issues, get AppleCare and live a happy life. I run my macs for 6+ years and only retire them when apple stops releasing OS updates for them.

I’m in the same mindset. My 2009 MacBook got regular OS updates until 2017, then security updates until 2019. I replaced that one with an M1 Air and it’s been smooth sailing.

I then get those macs put linux on them and use them another 6+ years :)

Remember you are only hurting yourself, not Apple.

Plus, now you can use Excel hotkeys like a boss.

Where do you get your knowledge about spare parts?

Upgrading RAM and storage is obviously trivial. The battery as well, that just requires buying a bigger one for the same model.

As for the screen and trackpad, Lenovo has extensive documentation on their website detailing how to replace components, all the way down to the type of screws you need should you lose some. The compatible parts for any of their model can be found on their website. Although the OEM parts are usually more expensive, you can usually find them online in various shops.

If you go for the aliexpress route, just searching "screen for thinkpad t48" will get you a bunch of screens of varying quality.

No mention of insanely fast NVMe on M1?

Isn’t that only because they cheat and make fsync an noop though?

The T480 I got came with a Samsung NVMe w/ 256GB capacity - I don't write enough to disk to notice the difference relative to my MacBook Air M1.

> No mention of insanely fast NVMe on M1?

It's only insanely fast compared to previous Macs. The commonly found Samsung 970Pro SSDs were doing read/write speeds up to 3,500/2,700 MB/s since 2018. And newer SSDs run circles around those speeds (like 10GB/s or more of read/write).

Because it's not insanely fast? The 256GB is pretty slow (why is that even an option though?) the higher capacity ones have are considerably worse compared higher-end WD or Samsung2 SSDs and you can get a 1-3TB one for around $100-$300...

The lenovo also has NVMe.

I use different machines, one with a regular sata ssd, 2 with NVMes and my work environment is on an NVMe enclosed in an usb3 to nvme box that I use on any of these 3 laptops.

Honestly outside of a benchmark the difference is only really noticeable on the nvme + usb3 enclosure when it can freeze the whole desktop for a few seconds when doing a large copy. Difference between sata ssd and nvme exist but only if you are timing your jobs completions, not really on regular day to day use. Difference is definitely much smaller than the spinning to solid state. I guess this is pretty much the same between the m1 NVMe and a regular PC NVMe.

Non-replaceable, when it goes bad then might as well throw away the laptop.

Speed is also, what, 3GB/s?, I'm getting 7GB read, 5GB write speeds on my laptop.

You mean infamously slower? Wasn't that what the whole base model discussion was about?

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/macbook-pro-m2-pro-mac-min...

The upgraded speed is then perfectly adequate, but slower than a standard nvme ssd by a factor 3 or so.

What you are probably thinking of is the RAM instead, which is standard lpddr5 ram but integrated into the chip (i.e. the RAM is not faster, but bandwidth is better). At absolutely ridiculous markup though.

The world runs on old Thinkpads.

I was using T480s for 2 years at previous company, it was the worst laptop i ever owned. throttling, terrible battery life.

That's one awesome and cheap machine you got there, congrats, I'm really glad someone liked it and wrote a blog post about it :)

I too am a Pop_OS user - it works, my reason for using it was nvidia drivers and getting GeForce to f*king work.

As for M1 - I am really glad when people find what they like. But I really, really dislike Apple products. I hate the OS UI. I hate AppleID. I hate the fact I can't swap the SSD inside it. I just generally dislike any piece of hardware that I can't interact with. What if I want to have a RAID array with stupidly overpriced M2's?

The synthetic benchmarks mean nothing to me and I don't feel the "speed" of M1 everyone tend to talk about. It also feels like every single Apple user suddenly became expert the moment M1 was released. It could be because I'm a dev and ex-gamer so I like fast things, so I bought myself an EPYC chip and a ton of other hardware for which everyone I know comment "but why? it's not like you can utilize all of it, why waste so much money?" - because I can.

TL;DR: it's an awesome piece of hardware you got there, there's no need to use the best and the fastest and <insert reason>. It's enough to use something just because you like it or want to use it. This blog post just goes to show how powerful hardware we have, even the "old" hardware is still great.

What’s next, and article about replacing your 2020 Prius with 1995 Chevy Cavalier?

Everyone is aghast

Is not like newer Lenovo's ThinkPads are much more upgradable than an M1 you know?

Yes, they are.

citation needed

Men will literally buy Thinkpads over going to an Apple store.

Self-delusion. Thinkpads and Dells are not good computers…

> 1366x768

that's a really weird choice especially when you want to doa comparison with a macbook.

> Windows

also suboptimal in my opinion. thinkpads are fantastic linux machines. i'm running Mint xfce on my 480 and really wouldn't know what could be better about the experience.

there are only three things i like better about macbooks: screen, switching workspace with 3 finger swipe, speakers

In the article I mention that I upgraded to a 1920x1080 screen, and Pop!_OS...

why do you even mention it then?

Not the OP, but presumably to highlight the upgradeability of the ThinkPad.

+1 Screen resolution is the top reason I stick with Macs. Once you gone retina, there's no going back and modern cellphones only reinforce this. It could be my aging eyesight, but I don't remember the last time I saw a pixel.

Gamer laptops have the resolution but the price & weight are silly.

Would love to be wrong - macos just feels klunky for linux development (slow homebrew, annoying docker, constant reminders to connect to apple cloud, etc).

i used retina and now am back to 1920x1080 on my t480. no problem.

Isn't retina just strictly worse? No oled, lower resolution, lower ppi, lower brightness, worse aspect ratio? They are decent screens, but by no measure the best.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com