Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook replacement
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen-10-(14-inch-intel)/21cbcto1wwus2
Physically, it's fantastic. Hats off to the engineers and designers for investing in the tactile experience. They made it lightweight but simultaneously substantial-feeling via rigidity and weight distribution. I now understand why Thinkpad keyboards are so well-regarded. Its trackpad matches Apple's, which is the highest praise I can give. The brilliant screen has an aspect ratio that's as good for building things as for consuming content. And battery life supports hours of binging netflix after compiling a bunch of code.
I've been even more pleasantly surprised by the software experience. This is a Linux workstation that "just works." Close the lid, it goes on standby - open, and it resumes instantly. Plug it into a 100Mhz ultrawide monitor via a lightning cable, and not only does it seamlessly extend the desktop at native refresh rates, but it also mounts all the devices that are connected via the monitor's integrated USB hub. I'm able to log in via my bluetooth kinesis keyboard consistently, without hassle. Updates are fast, easy, and tested on the exact hardware I'm using. I've been using it as my daily driver for a week and I've yet to dive down a rabbit-hole of outdated forum advice to get something basic to work.
Finally, and more subjectively, Fedora's out-of-the-box experience handily outshines both OSX and Windows. Window-snapping, global search, software installation via a package manager, resource efficiency, containerization support, configuration, etc.
I wanted to share here for any others who have tried, and failed, to find a legitimately better-than-Macbook development machine for the past few years.
224 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadThere was a time when I felt like what Windows had going on with Windows 7 was much better than what Apple had going on and I spent a few years primarily using a PC.
However, I’ve been back on Mac for years, and I feel like “advertisements in the start menu” indicates that Windows is going down a dark path.
I do have to keep a second PC around to use Windows as a lot of our engineering software is Windows specific, but I do most everything on the Mac.
The performance per watt is insane, and given the ML/AI thing has blown up recently, I'm happy to have the neural engine.
The Apple screen is likely still much better ( colors, variable refresh rate ), the trackpad and it's integration.
Honestly, if AMD had access to the same silicon Apple does, there probably wouldn't be any comparison. I'd argue their processes are half a generation ahead of Apple's designs.
Though of course there are other comparison issues like the ANE and video decoders making certain tasks significantly more efficient, so testing the whole package does become much more complex to represent.
And now we have the M1, sorry but I don't want to know on the hardware front unless Intel get anywhere near it.
Man Mac iOS and osx are cooked af in workflows. Had a client recently run out of space on phone due to photos. Lol turns out apples sync is all or nothing. She couldn't free up space by telling iPhoto to not sync ancient ass shit, also extra iCloud storage. Can't use it while syncs on as your old phone only has 10gigs of space. Lol complete joke, told her to go rant at the local apple shop about it.
Predatory af and shite from apple. She can't even just plug phone in and strip the photos to a usb or external cus lol iPhoto/iTunes/apparently you should only do stuff how apple wants you to do stuff. Apple products are cooked af.
On and trying to find or free up space on the phone? Ahahhaha good luck, apple happily grouped 30% of the devices storage to "other apple apps" to with zero descriptors or indicators to what they were or how to delete them. Products a joke.
But the provided means are gross.
You shouldn't need to go out to the internet, consume a cloud service, and come back, just to go from your phone to your laptop, and all of these big service providers shouldn't be making it so that that is the path of least resistance, or even damned near the only possible path.
It's a great example of how the incentives of the companies are opposite to those of the users.
The internet and the cloud are great and super convenient. But that is a seperate issue from companies steering everyone into actually requiring good internet speed and lots of bandwidth cap, and the consumption of subscription storage space, or worse free storage space where ypu are the product, not because ypu choose to but because no other option is even presented.
The critique was not about some preferred sequence of buttons to click no different from any other sequence. I decline to believe you didn't understand that when you said "workflow".
Got so fed up I deleted windows and run Linux... it's working OK. It's not Mac OS X, but at least it doesn't crash.
I tried, I really tried.
With how diversity and customization are such highly vaunted qualities of Linux desktops, it's disappointing that the most fleshed out DEs are all built around a Win9X-type paradigm, with the only outlier being GNOME which is what one might get if they tried to turn iPadOS into a desktop OS. Where's the DEs inspired by macOS?
This is terribly inadequate as a MacBook replacement. It's noticeably slower than any Apple Silicon machine, it has terrible battery life, the screen has the same absurdly-wide aspect ratio common to so many PC laptops, which makes them useless for so much real work, and the heat management is a complete joke. Fan runs, loudly, if you even breathe on the machine.
And of course, the trackpad is vastly inferior to Apple's.
I don't think that's right - pretty sure that the X1 Carbon has a 16:10 screen rather than the typical 16:9 one.
But the heat issues and the terrible fan noise would be disqualifying for me.
...but the Gen 10 X1 with out-of-the-box Fedora, the topic of this post, was released just a few months ago.
> It's noticeably slower than any Apple Silicon machine
Given how fast it feels, this claim sounded unlikely, so I just ran Geekbench 5, yielding 1769 (single) and 8385 (multi-core):
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19092431
The 2022 MacBook Air gets 1932 and 8919, respectively, so the X1 matches 92% of its single-core performance and 94% of its multi-core performance. You and I may have different definitions of "noticeably slower" and "terribly inadequate."
> Fan runs, loudly, if you even breathe on the machine
Ironically, the first time I've heard the fans is running geekbench just now, and even then they were quiet.
Given all this, I think it's unlikely we're talking about the same machine.
It has all the right buttons in all the right places, except for Home/End/PgUp/PgDown being hidden behind the Fn key, as is unfortunately the trend these days.
ARM Macintosh Book has better battery life, but it does not run usefully run Linux (yet).
Another consideration was having a company that cares about Linux running flawlessly, and Red Hat gives their employees Thinkpads. That dogfooding means that if I'm having a problem, it's likely some Red Hat employee is having the same problem, so it ought to be fixed soon :)
I run Ubuntu or Fedora on my laptops and desktops.
I was looking into MacBook Air, for battery life, weight and keyboard, but don’t want this MacOS black box.
How is Linux on a MacBook Air?
I've had a few freezes on my recently-purchased 12th gen running NixOS, but I've juste applied the documented workarounds for the issue and am waiting to see if those resolve it.
Other than that, it's been a surprisingly solid experience. Sleep on lid close, wake on open, Bluetooth just recognized my ear buds, fingerprint scanner just worked after I enabled it... not a bad setup.
In my experience, older (pre-T2 and Apple silicon) models are relatively easy to get working.
I'm currently running Linux Mint 21 on an Air 2017 that was excruciatingly slow when running mac OS, and it got a lot snappier on linux. The drive is still slow, and I'd love to replace it, but the adapter that supposedly lets you connect an M2 NVMe to that silly we're-so-so-special-and-you-can't-have-an-M2 port didn't work with the spare drive I had on hand.
Oh, and due to restrictive licensing (on Apple or Broadcom's part) the wifi drivers and webcam firmware can't be included in the Mint installation media, so I had to bluetooth tether my mac to my phone to download and install the correct wifi drivers, and also had to download and install the webcam firmware manually.
Carbon is a great material though - apple needs to stop with aluminum.
If I were looking to use something other than Macs (which I'm not), there are more good options now than there have ever been. Even though everything is still compared to the benchmark of Mac Laptops, which isn't an accident.
Has there been any instance of you preferring a dedicated Linux box to WSL2?
However, it slows down if you do any type of cross-os file system communication. So you need an IDE that knows how to work around this (eg: VSCode with WSL2 plugin runs a server in the VM to avoid cross-os fs comm)
USB passthrough isn't yet supported, so it's necessary to make use of something like VirtualHere[1] or some another TCPIP tunneling daemon running on the windows depending on what you're trying to do.
There seems to sometimes be issues with resuming from S0ix sleep where the VM process is still "running" but it gets stuck in a state where new processes just will not spawn. It's been a while since I messed with it, but my "solution" was disabling a VM security measure, launching Process Hacker 2 as admin, searching for "lxss" in the process list and terminating the corresponding svchost.
The actual linux kernel running inside WSL2 is interesting, it's microsofts own custom kernel[2] with some magic sauce for making everything play nice. Unfortunately, it (still?) lacks a fully-functional SystemD so making some programs work can be a chore. Also all the kernel modules compiled in, and it doesn't allow loading them dynamically with modprobe. There are some alternative kernels out there that solve some of these issues, though I haven't bothered to try any since whenever I run into these sorts of issues it's less of a hassle to just switch to a dedicated linux box.
For all of the issues that come with Windows 11, having WSLg make running graphical programs "just work" out of the box with rock-solid copy/paste, alt+tab, etc., really makes it a joy to work with.
[1] - https://www.virtualhere.com/
[2] - https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/systemd-support-i...
For example, USBIP is great in many situations, and MS has worked to make it robust, but what I really need is the ability to assign a hardware device directly to the WSL VM - this is possible with Hyper-V, but WSL2’s hyper-v.
Until something like this is possible, for me it’s simpler to have a tiny linux box under my desktop and just use that.
For WSLg, I've played around for 15 minutes, tried gnome-terminal, xeyes and may be something else and disabled it - literally have nothing I'd want to run from Linux gui apps.
I feel like the people who claim that don't understand why people go with either linux or macOS
> If I were looking to use something other than Macs (which I'm not), there are more good options now than there have ever been. Even though everything is still compared to the benchmark of Mac Laptops, which isn't an accident.
That's a very opinionated point of view
- trackpad - your two sentences are very vague. Can you navigate with two fingers in a web browser? How is text selection? Or selecting a sentence out of a long paragraph, etc? In my experience nothing matches Apple in terms of precision and accuracy, but maybe Lenovo finally caught up recently.
- screen: I use the built in display quite a lot. The color on a MacBook Pro is really nice. How does the Lenovo compare?
- battery life: how many hours do you actually get? Your description is vauge and can be anything from 3 hours to 40 hours.
I use the LG Gram 2022. The trackpad is nothing short of Amazing on Linux -- everything you expect works 2/3/4 finger gestures, panning; the scrolling however can use some tuning on Gnome.
> Can you navigate with two fingers in a web browser?
On Firefox, two fingers to the left does previous, two fingers to the right does next (if you are not in a horizontally scrollable area, in which case it scrolls). Two fingers to the top or the bottom scrolls (pixel perfect). Kinetic scroll works. Pinch to zoom works (at long last!! I think it started working a year ago or something).
> How is text selection? Or selecting a sentence out of a long paragraph, etc?
I select whatever I want to select with ease. I go to the first word I want to select, double-tap, move to the last word. The text autoscrolls if I go to an edge if it's a long chunk of text. Triple tap to select entire paragraphs. D&D works quite well too.
I'm very happy with the precision with both my HP Elitebook 840 G6 and My Carbon X1. They both have a huge, reliable touchpad. I've never tried a Mac seriously though.
> how many hours do you actually get?
10-11h if I pay attention. 6-7h easily. (i7 and 32G of RAM). I hope it will improve.
The touchscreen on both machines is surprisingly usable and useful. Both machine are quiet, and they are totally silent if I'm just typing or browsing the web. The fans can spin up during a video call or compile something for a long time, but that can be prevented if needed by forcing the powersave mode using KDE's UI for this.
The default trackpoint accel is a bit much for me, so I just have this set to run on login:
> xinput set-prop 'TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint' 'libinput Accel Speed' -0.55
It’s stunning how far apple is ahead of the pack right now, I really hope the others catch up
Linux also tends to be quite a bit worse for battery life than Windows.
With a manual stock distro installation maybe, as the defaults are very conservative. But just install the "tlp" package (the laptop project) and the situation flips. At least that's my experience at work based on Dell Latitude laptops and Thinkpads T before. My battery life is way above my Windows using colleagues, and my fans are mostly off (unless big compilation or test runs) instead of mostly on. Of course it's very likely due to the anti-virus, but that's part of the corporate Windows experience nowadays.
Given the appalling and deteriorating state of desktop OS's, it seems unlikely I'll ever use anything other than Linux again. But I don't believe it will ever catch up with either Windows or MacOS on battery life. I just accept that as something I"ll have to live with.
The battery is half the size of the lastest MacBook sure. But much less than half the battery life.
I don't have suspend issues. I am probably lucky.
I wouldn't code on anything else than Linux. But I got myself to enjoy CAD work on my gaming computer running windows. Not that windows is great. It's horrible. But because on windows the GPU and mouse acceleration works flawlessly and feels like an extension of my mind. On Linux somehow it is not as smooth. Mac feels sluggish too. As if there is some lag? But moving the mouse on windows feels just right (and yes I tried same hardware on windows / Linux).
I hate macos. It's buggy and slow. The touchpad is stupidly big. But precision is fantastic. It's an insult to everybody else really. Thinkpad touchpad is an insult of insult. People designing that crap should go to jail for the amount of time they waste on humanity.
> I really hope the others catch up
When was the last time you tried a Ryzen laptop? Any AMD APU made in the past 5 years should perform pretty admirably relative to the M1.
I bought the hype and it was miserable. (Not to speak of S3 suspend-resume not bringing back the trackpad half of the time and S3 suspend draining the battery overnight.)
MS has to work with Intel, Nvidia, AMD, etc. Dell the same.
With Apple owning the entire design their results should make it clear communication overhead is what creates the market fragmentation. In order for all the bean counter fiefdoms to be appeased a laptop gets released that is great BUT 9 hour battery life (out of the box, 6 in 12 months), or 1080p screen, or bad thermal design, or nose camera…
It’s hard enough to align goals in one behemoth let alone half a dozen.
A whole lot of tech products then are designed as Beanie Babies looking to capture attention in the short term, boost quarterly sales, earn bumps for a VP.
Apple is the only consumer gadget company taking the approach of linearly designing the entire stack over time. Everyone else is just looking to get through the holidays right now, respond to the metrics in 2023.
The only time I have battery issues is if I am working in a tree and a linter gets over aggressive or something like that where the constant load makes the CPU fan spin.
Normally I go an entire day on battery and just don't think about it. Fairly bright screen, Amphetamine running to prevent sleep and display from turning off.
Teams specifically is horrendously badly engineered on top of being an Electron app. Technically speaking it's like the polar opposite of VS Code despite being made by the same company.
However, Chrome is the most popular browser by far. Does that mean that all the people bragging about their MBP's 10+ hour battery lifes aren't doing what probably the majority of users are (browse the web in a Chromium-based browser), and thus their anecdata isn't a representative sample?
That said, it’s not that uncommon for Mac users conscious about battery life to be using Safari where they can instead of Chrome, keeping Chrome instances down to a minimum. From what I’ve seen in discussions across the web, battery friendliness is one of the most cited if not the most cited reason why people use Safari.
I wish Google would pause feature development for a while and focus on efficiency, because that’s easily where Chrome is weakest, but that’s never going to happen so long as it’s the dominant browser. It makes Google more money to instead develop whatever they think will push more people towards Google services.
I've never used a laptop with Linux that could stay unplugged for more than 3 hours, using a tlp configuration as well. (ignoring any laptop that can have an XXL battery which sticks out of it's standard frame).
May I please ask, are you on Wayland or X11?
In my experience that variable makes the biggest difference in touchpad behavior on Linux.
This frustration once led me to search for turning off the acceleration setting, which, last I searched, wasn't easily tweakable.
Anyone shares similar feeling when it comes to the trackpad?
Can you navigate with two fingers in a web browser? Yes. I've also been underwhelmed by non-Apple touchpads until using this. I'm not sure how much of the experience is hardware and how much is Fedora 36.
How is text selection? Identical to my Macbook: move to start of selection with pointer finger, press on touchpad with thumb, move to end of selection with pointer, release thumb.
Screen: I'm not sure exactly how to answer this; I have several Macbooks and I agree their screens are nice. I like the Thinkpad's screen more for development (it seems to be less glossy/give better contrast independent of external light) whereas I think the Macbook screens look better at broader angles (for example, a couple of people watching a movie, looking at the screen diagonally).
Battery life: I'll have to run it off charger for more than a day to see when it finally dies. So far I spent one day roaming around without connecting it, during which it was under constant use: programming during the day and streaming at night. Something on the order of 8 hours.
I develop software on it no problems at all. We are way past targeting one platform. Linux can be the destination for sure but like hell I'm going to do the dev work on it. Years of attempting to run Linux on a laptop or desktop have left a very unpleasant flavour in my mouth. It might work today but it probably won't tomorrow and I'm getting too old to waste my time futzing. It has to work right now, properly, today with no risks.
Note: I have a mandated Dell Precision 7670 for some work, one of the most ridiculously stupid computers ever made and far more expensive in this config than a high end MBP M1 Max and it's absolutely a pile of shit from a hardware and software perspective. If you ran Linux on it, it'd be worse than if it ran windows on it, which is already terrible.
And that doesn't include some of the problems with the desktop software I've had.
On the server, zero hassle.
I tried everything, dove semi-deep into systemd settings, spent hours online and pouring through logs and journald and forums and bug reports. Tried rolling back versions of damn near everything only to then break things I had installed after other upgrades. I tried doing some half-assed custom shell scripts that felt janky.
After several nights of losing all my free time after work only to wake up the next morning to a dead laptop battery, I treated myself to an m2 13” mbp.
No ragrets.
Google about "modern standby".
It's driven by a software change in Windows, but it affects Linux too because all mamufacturers made bios changes to support the Windows change.
The point I'm making is, Windows machines have the same problem for the last 2 or 3 years. Even macs have an essentially the same problem, just that on mac it's easy to change a setting to fix it.
It's not a Linux problem, and by that I do not just mean the usual that it's not Linux's fault that hardware manufacturers cater to Windows. I mean everything has the same problem right now, and the fix is to A: hope both your hardware has a bios that still provides support for S3 standby, B: use it.
Seperately, I personally have just never used standby or hibernate. It's true that aside from the current industry-wide issue caused by "modern standby", it's always been a bit of a problem on linux. Especially since I dual boot and also just never know how long the machine will be turned off or how much charge it will have when I close the lid, or rather I don't want to have to worry about it. So I just decided decades ago that the entire suspend and hibernate concept was a bad idea and I don't use them, on any platform. My machines shut down and boot up every time on battery. Plugged in they merely go idle and turn the monitors off. No swap or hiberfile even cpnfigured on linux or windows. Ever since ssd's booting from scratch has been fast enough. Standby and hibernate are just fundamentally not good ideas IMO. I don't care how popular and how they work 99% of the time. I opt out of that whole idea, on any platform.
And everything else works great. My daily life on linux is all in all, less grief than Windows.
LTT just did a video on something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHKKcd3sx2c
tl;dw: It may not be a OS problem, but rather a problem of which sleep states are supported by your firmware, which would explain why nothing you did helped. Possibly suspend never really worked and Ubuntu just got meaner on the battery. Getting a MBP is valid fix if you disable "Wake for network access" on it.
I do feel your pain, though. I remember things being brittle and finicky for a long time back in the aughts. But these days, almost all of that disappears if you give Linux the same kind of hardware commitment you'd give macOS, and just buy hardware that is made or sold with it in mind. You do still have to pretty much stay entirely away from NVIDIA, though. Unfortunately Linux vendors still sell hardware with NVIDIA's shoddy components and drivers because CUDA dominates GPGPU applications.
This is true and good advice for those of us who are primarily committed to using Linux. It is however a significant disadvantage compared to Windows. It is quite a joy just not to have to think about precise hardware specs (& not to have to continually read up on their changes). Buy just about anything, from a top end laptop to some weird gadget from Alibaba, to vast scads of second hand machines and parts from ebay, and you can be near certain it will work with Windows. There's no point pretending that's not terrific.
It's also a real but lesser disadvantage against MacOS, because Apple do the hardware curation for you (part of what you're overpaying for of course).
On balance I still find Linux the best choice for my purposes.
There are some vendors where (for a premium) you can defer hardware curation to them, but too few of them provide laptops comparable in quality to a MacBook Pro or an X1 Carbon. System76 has some really top-notch desktops of various form-factors, and their firmware work on their laptops is awesome, but the chassis and design aren't on par with those top brands imo. Maybe the HP Dev One is on a par with an X1 Carbon?
> On balance I still find Linux the best choice for my purposes.
It's the same for me. The freedom, flexibility, control, and predictability I get out of running a Linux system make using a computer feel really good to me. Using Windows or macOS feels chaotic, confining, unreliable, intrusive, and alienating to me. Consequently I find that overall, choosing Linux gives me the smoothest, highest quality experience.
I am actually using Linux (Mint flavor) and use it for development. My main reason is that I hate Docker in Mac: The emulation layer uses a lot of RAM and high CPU, by necessity. While having Docker in Linux is transparent and requires pretty low resources.
I like Linux in general, but yeah, it still has A LOT of rough edges. The one that just bit me is the lack of Hibernate out of the box (it's 2022 ... come on!). And the process to enable hibernate is so fucking long: * create large swap, * edit some random files, * restart some random service. are they kidding me?
Macs have hugely nonstandard firmware implementations, from EFI to SPI to Thunderbolt. You should always treat running Linux on Apple hardware like building a Hackintosh. It's not remotely in the same category as support for normal PC hardware.
Initially your hardware is likely very new, so some things won't quite work out of the box.
Then, assuming you bought a popular piece of hardware, things get progressively better for you: improved driver support land in the kernel, distros get better at auto-configuring for your hardware, etc.
Finally, 3 years out, upstream development has moved on, your specific hardware configuration is no longer actively tested, and things start to break left and right.
All in all, you have a small window of optimal Linux support for your hardware.
The most painless Linux laptops are those that use integrated graphics only and for the best experience, use Intel networking instead of Realtek (Realtek often works, but it working well is highly dependent on the specific chipset).
Apple has burned me too many times for me to feel comfortable paying them again. I much prefer choosing my hardware and software as opposed to suffering through whatever Apple says is right for me. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
The only problem I had was with a Qt app that would not run on it and that turned out to be a problem with Qt rather than macOS.
I'm sure it's a great tool for creatives who want to loathe Windows with the rest of us, but for development MacOS has become more of a hindrance than a help. Even WSL2 feels nicer to use than baremetal Darwin deployment.
https://pilky.me/apples-technology-transitions/
But essentially storage and memory savings, maintainability savings and some issues with the ObjC runtime.
I assume part of the issue too is being able to enable pointer authentication, which afaik uses the higher end bits to store data, and being able to do that allows them to secure the OS better. So 32-bit support likely was a security risk factor as a result too.
Then install Linux on the Macbook? Two setups ago I was running this config and it was pretty great.
It was released 2 years ago.
> It has to work right now, properly, today with no risks.
There's still lots of desktop software that doesn't support AArch64, optimising for "just works" it seems a strange choice. Perhaps "just works (with a limited subset of programs)" seems more apt?
https://isapplesiliconready.com/for/unsupported
Incidentally I’ve got an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and use that for digital art and photography.
And all the detritus doesn’t fall out of the keyboard down my trousers.
I prefer developing on the Linux gaming laptop, but anything outside of web browsing and raw development (listening to music, Bluetooth, share audio on video conference, gaming, accounting / office work, etc.) is horrible compared to MBP.
The gaming laptop has an RTX 2080, but I play games on the MBP, because Steam works better. I enjoy Steam better on Linux than on Windows, but not enough to waste hours just to relax.
https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
> Integrated Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics
No Nvidia, nice, may work with OpenBSD
> 8 GB LPDDR5-6400MHz (Soldered)
Why Soldered Memory, not good. And who sells 8gb memory with a serious look :)
> 256 GB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe TLC Opal
Fine by me
> Intel® Wi-Fi 6E AX211 2x2 AX vPro® & Bluetooth® 5.1
Should be fine
> 14" WUXGA (1920 x 1200)
Edit, not bad I think - seems even better than 16:9, more vertical resolution, nice.
All in all, sorry, I will pass due to the Soldered Memory. But looks like a nice machine that could be used with a BSD
The specs are configurable, OP just linked to a specific configuration. Though the soldered memory is an unfortunate compromise to the conventional ThinkPad experience.
But just 8GB in a non-upgradeable package is not for me.
LPDDR5 does not exist in DIMM for technical reasons. Laptops with discrete RAM sticks use slower and more power hungry regular DDR5. There are pros and cons both ways.
The T series thinkpads usually have a soldered module and SODIMM slot, if you prefer that route. And of course there is the Framework with two SODIMM slots.
And as far as who sells 8 GB RAM laptops seriously... Lots of vendors, including Apple (and they charge $200 to upgrade that to 16 GB). Frankly I think 8 GB is fine for a lot of use cases, although maybe not in 5 years or so.
That i7-1280P only has 6 performance cores on "Intel 7", when the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U as in the Gen3 X13 ThinkPad has 8 performance cores on "TSMC 6nm-FinFet".
* Just because the node is slightly newer/better doesn't necessarily translate to overall better battery life. AFAIK 12th gen Intel is very competitive with even the newest AMD chips.
* Possibly a price premium on the AMD models? I'm not sure.
* The AMD models sometimes come with realtek WiFi chips with poor Linux support, so you might have to swap for a mediatek/qcom/Intel chip which is better supported. Extra 20 bucks and the hassle of having to pop it open. Also I think you might have to fiddle with the BIOS to disable the WiFi card whitelist, but I'm not sure on this specific thinkpad style/gen/model.
Using the same hardware that Lenovo ships with linux out-of-the-box, as well as the same hardware that Red Hat employees use, is worth more to me than a couple of extra performance cores. CPUs have been "fast enough" for my use cases for years.
The amount of time and energy I had spend fixing silly problems and integrations could've be better used somewhere.
In contrast with mac, I open it and do work and close it knowing it won't explode next time I open it.
PS: If anyone has any ideas about my USB device, I'm all ears. A colleague advised the system report from the Apple menu, but it's a snapshot in time, so useless for my problem.
While it's true that every device can have problems, my experience with Linux was that the problems I encountered were frequent and time-consuming to fix. In contrast, my experience with Mac has been much smoother and I have had fewer issues to deal with.
I don't see how "Linux bad, Mac good" experience would help anyone without providing any specific details. There are already millions of such "experiences" on the Internet. By the way, I have the opposite experience.
Also, you again provided no value with your comment and it's not just my subjective opinion, it's a fact. Your both comments look like ChatGPT.
Fell free to continue using linux on your workstation.
Even though it's built with the lowest spec Tiger Lake CPU that was offered at that point in time, it can't keep its fan off doing anything more intensive than web browsing. Even plugging in a rather pedestrian 2560x1440 60hz monitor is enough to keep its fan running. The CPU also sucks more power than it should given its performance, even in "Power Saving" mode under Windows 10/11 and Fedora.
I wish so much that in place of its Intel CPU there was an M1. That alone would increase its appeal dramatically. The ARM-based Thinkpads Lenovo now offers are a nice step in that direction but sadly their performance trails far enough behind the two year old M1 that it isn't an ace in the hole either.
Honestly depending on how things go I might just trade the Nano in for an Air at some point and do Windows Things™ through a Parallels VM running Windows for ARM or even just an RDP session to my custom build tower.
X1 series is sadly Intel exclusive though, with the closest thing with AMD being X13, but that isn't quite the same. There's also the Z series but those are weird to say the least and decidedly "un-thinkpaddish". Might just have to settle for X13.
One day I hope Lenovo will figure it out, and I'll easily leave the macbook behind.
But I do agree they are the best option if you hate or can’t pay or aren’t allowed to use apple products.
However, the feeling of speed is made up of much more than just the hardware's capabilities. The OS you use, the toolchain you have access to, impacts your experience as well.
This X1 matches 92% of a 2022 MB Air's single-core performance and 94% of its multi-core performance (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19092431). I'm happy to wait an extra 100ms for something to compile in order to have a nicer daily experience of the machine and operating system.
It's almost like when hardware has special bits that make benchmarks scream because they know exactly what the benchmark software does, yet normal work is the same or worse than anyone else. It's not exactly that bad. M1/M2 does perform a lot of real work a lot better. But it's "a bit like that"
It's just that it only works if your usage matches what Apple targeted as what most people will ever need to do.