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.
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...
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
+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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 :/
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?
> "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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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..
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 483 ms ] threadand thanks for the feedback - I've added a photo of the actual laptop now.
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).
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.
Speed is also, what, 3GB/s?, I'm getting 7GB read, 5GB write speeds on my laptop.
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.
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
Worth it though, the x270 is very slim and still featureful.
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
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.
(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.)
And keyboard.
But apart from that, what did the Romans do for us?
You would have a point if he was replacing something like 2019 Macbook Pro with the butterfly switches
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).
Thanks for the lead!
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
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
hurry up, you'll keep the President and Secretary-General waiting!
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.
I'm not sure if you understand how urbanised Europe is.
Probably the investment isn't worth it for game makers, since apple might require them to do it all over again next week, potentially.
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.
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 probably game on it more than my gaming PC and consoles at this point.
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.
Where is all this hate coming from? It seems unjustified.
*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
I'll have you know my beard is full, luxurious and grey, as befits someone with 20+ years of Unix experience.
Are you referring to our robot overlords? Or corporate personhood?
Colloquially known as legbeards …
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=legbeard
I don't think there's any way to use the term affectionately. Unless there's another meaning?
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
It's rare to see such a flame war on hn
I'm sure I'm not the only neckbeard lusting after Thinkpads.
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.
> 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.
And which basically doubles the size and weight of the laptop.
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.
By what metrics?
And yes, 200+ ppi P3 displays are easily available, Apple just buys their panels from the same suppliers that are available to you.
And no, just because a contract manufacturer makes the panels doesn't mean they also designed them.
This panel will get you full DCI-P3 color gamut at 3840x2160 in 10-bit, but only 500 nits.
A 38-horsepower 1980s Mini 1000 is a fast car, if you install the engine and drivetrain from a Toyota Celica GT-Four.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You just charge them with battery pack.
Because I am quite interested then in figuring out the economics side of obtaining one
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
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)
I haven't ever encointered people upgrading their trackpads.
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.
But I really dislike the hardware of the framework :/
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.
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.
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.
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 2016-2021 Butterfly keyboards were bad, but in my usage of the M1 MBP macs they're good again now.
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.
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?
My M2 does quite regularly with only Chrome, Slack, VS Code and a few docker containers running.
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 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.
The only time I run Docker is to test an image locally, which is in general only to debug my Dockerfile.
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.
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.
I had to buy the X220 from a shop, not directly from Lenovo:
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.
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.
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...
I think since around one year ago upstream kernels do support the realtek wifi card properly.
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.
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)
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.
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.
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0 #
Too much options for normal users. Actually one button in UI battery panel "[PRESERVE CAPACITY] or FULL CHARGE" would be optimal.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.
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.
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.
Apple does make (desktop) keyboards and trackpads with aluminium. Not to mention phones, remote controls, and the Apple Watch. No complaints here!
Without battery.
The battery itself weights 7oz, which goes up to 13oz with the extended battery (which the parent said he bought)
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.)
I understand the desire for a trackpoint on laptops with non-Apple trackpads though.
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.
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.
This just doesn't happen on Mac trackpads: they have pretty sophisticated and effective palm rejection.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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....
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.
They've even regrown ports again.
Really, somebody needs to develop power-sipping ARM motherboard board replacements (much as xyte.ch does with x86) for the various business notebook models.
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
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.
This is such a weird thing to say.
I usually get more than 10 hours out of it, running Ubuntu. I think that's great.
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.
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.
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.
By the way libreoffice calc seem to handle better large spreadsheet files.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
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.
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.
And making it impossible to open lots of browser tabs is actually nice for productivity.
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??
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).
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.
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 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)
I did prefer the 2019 design more though (thinness). When I first got the 2021 it seemed cheap/hollow to me.
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).
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.
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.