I just bought a brand new AMD ThinkPad with 64GB of memory for a good deal less than the 8GB Mac. No thank you.
Personally my machines have 16 GB of ram. If I ever need more I will ssh into an actual server (in my basement or cloud-hosted) and run a ram intensive workload there.
That depends on the definition of "better". Mac laptops' screens are ultra brittle. To me the first quality of a laptop's screen is how sturdy it is.
My laptop (LG Gram) has a screen which I can literally bend/deform and whose previous owner (I bought it from a friend) stepped on it when he woke up. People love to make full of "MILSPEC" (MILitary SPEC) because "that means nothing" but my LG Gram can literally be thrown down concrete stairs and it'll still work, like this dude (not me) on Youtube tried (skip at 0:35):
Try that with a Mac laptop.
To me that's a "better screen" than my Mac M1's screen that broke after 13 months, overnight for no reason, just out of warranty (because I didn't pay the 20% additional Apple tax to have an extended warranty).
Me - running a Lenovo Legion with 5Ghz i9, 32GB, 2TB, 16GB 3080RTX and comfortably running large LLMs 34b, at a push 70b, at a 2K price point, whilst using a Mac Pro with M2 and 16GB at work that can't run any AI whilst working. Apple is the same price, but in my experience poorer performance with build time and lacks hardware features.
Only benefit I've seen is the Mac lasts 2.5x on battery, but as it's a work machine it's nearly always plugged in :shrug:.
However, running LLMs is still very niche and also with your system there are still big limitations.
I'd be careful extending one anecdotal experience to an entire class of computers.
Given how much scrutiny Apple goes under, for example the heat-gate fiasco on new iPhones and the many other "gate" events they have endured, I think that if this was widespread we would have heard about it.
There were 26,000,000 macbooks and macs sold in 2022. You are using a sample size n=1 to extend to 26 million devices.
In my anecdotal experience. I have never had a screen die on me or known someone who has had it happen. My family all has macbooks and I have had them for ~15 years. I've purchased about 5 personally over that time, averaging about 3 years per device. I have owned 4 additional macbooks through company device programs. I have watched ~30ish macbooks go through the hands of various family members over the same time period. I have never seen a screen just die randomly. My sister is terribly rough on computers and phones and she destroys computers but has started buying Macbooks because they are the only ones that last with her. So she has an opposite experience.
That's not to say it doesn't happen. It is a tech product. I am sure it happened to you and has happened to others. But it isn't common. As ubiquitous as macbooks are, Apple would be under a lot of scrutiny if this happened to even 1% of their devices.
I'ved spilled a lot of things on my keyboards in the past, even killed one or two on laptops that way. In the past it was a few screws and the keyboard could be removed from the top panel and swapped, rarely was the replacement keyboard more than $50. Even recently on some cheap acer with the keyboard glued to the top of the case the entire case+keyboard was like $20 used from ebay.
So, macs = throwaway for me these days.
Thinkpads usually have multiple screen options with base < mac < premium. That is, resolution, dpi, ips vs oled, refresh rate,.... .
That said:
- X1 Carbon with 32GB ram, 2 TB of storage and OLED screen (only 2.8k instead of 4k) is about 2600€
- MacBook pro is 3600€. The air you flat out cannot get with that much ram.
So color me unimpressed that 1000 more gets you something better.
Night and day, Thinkpad was a joke with thermals, noise and battery life.
No thank you
You can get any number of the "low end" thinkpads, which have socketed ram, and put 64G in them for ~$100. And, of course, as other people have mentioned, if you are not getting 50% off the MSRP on a Lenovo you're doing it wrong. Wait a couple of days, and it will go on sale. </wisper>
I tend to like the L14 line, because while they are a bit chunky, the parts are relatively easy to come by, and its built like a machine from a few years back, meaning everything can be swapped/upgraded. Swap the parts you don't like for something better. I've changed the ram and battery in mine for more capacity and find its nearly the perfect device for me now. I've been considering if one of the older t450ish timeframe keyboards will fit in it after noticing the older keyboards are much, much nicer than what is shipping on the more recent laptops.