I wonder who found this out the hard way....
498 karma · joined October 10, 2018
The reason for this, of course, is that the C-suite is trying to get rid of you, and a subset of engineers, as soon as it becomes reasonable.
What type of hardware is it?
There are many cheaper options than the Lenovo, depending on where you are located.
There will be a reckoning - and it may originate from the most unexpected place.
Notifications should be non-blocking. ALWAYS.
The best analogy I can find, if not a tired one, is the equivalence of software engineering to tool-and-die making.
In prior generations where manufacturing was king, it was a necessary operational skill set in order to produce things at scale, yet is much less (if no longer) relevant in the age of additive or subtractive manufacturing, where quantities can be varied according to immediate requirements.
Along the same lines, a skill set in traditional software engineering is less enamored in the age of AI agents that can better regurgitate boilerplate code.
The corresponding next-level-up analogy is the tool-and-die maker that learns 3D modeling + additive manufacturing, with FE analysis and CNC skills as a fallback. For software engineers, it's AI agent prompt engineering and data modeling, according to use cases defined by business needs.
You need to put on your entrepreneurial hat and figure out how to do things faster, with greater accuracy, relevant to business needs - not navel-gazing at package management and build automation exclusively.
This is, of course, an extremely naïve view of the state of things, though I cannot imagine, as a generalist, how one could survive with increasingly niche skills that, a decade ago, would have commanded six-figure salaries.
Good luck!
My factory-seconds F13 (using 11th-gen Intel, still the best in terms of power savings) shipped with the older glossy display, which had a known, disclosed-as-cheaper LUT issue at lower brightness settings. After a couple of calibration rounds, it is spot-on and my go-to PC laptop.
Decent keyboard, too.
Of course, things are often more expensive in Europe (compared to the US) for zero good reason, so the F16 will always be at a proportional disadvantage compared to the F13. You may find that a much better fit.
Turning off nearly everything iCloud- or Spotlight-related is a pretty good start; disable network access and you may find even more pearls of wisdom.
I'd focus on the underlying service provider APIs first, in the same manner as any other cloud resource.
Setting aside the political side-effects of throwing support behind Intel and its US government-backed investment, we've seen movement on modem chip development and low-end SoCs for sub-MacBook Air and iPhone Air / SE / other models.
Perhaps this is the classic low-end / high-performance bifurcation problem (i.e., Srouji is focused on high-performance chips while the greater executive class is focused on service of the Walmart demographic, e.g., Made-In-USA, inexpensive, wider market acceptance).
That said, it feels as if the fragmentation in the non-Windows space ends up being worse for non-Intel/AMD platforms, both commercially and from a devrel perspective. Qualcomm and Apple still have the best arm64 platforms above a Raspberry Pi.