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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 poss

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.

me551ah 4y ago
Can you run Arch Linux on the M1 Max natively?
- dontbesquare 4y ago
  Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-6-2-the-first-mainstream-linux-kernel-for-apple-m1-chips-arrives/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-6-2-the-first-mainstream...
  - diffeomorphism 4y ago
    So, no. The headline is clickbait and basically just wrong.
    - opan 4y ago
      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.
noja 4y ago
> and getting head turns from neckbeards Where is all this hate coming from? It seems unjustified.
- scandox 4y ago
  I take the remark more benignly. I think it's meant in an affectionate manner.
  - swyx 4y ago
    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
    - michaelt 4y ago
      > with this post sitting comfortably on #1 on the king neckbeard forum I'll have you know my beard is full, luxurious and grey, as befits someone with 20+ years of Unix experience.
      - steve1977 4y ago
        Now here’s a nickel, get yourself a better computer
    - danuker 4y ago
      > or for that matter no neck Are you referring to our robot overlords? Or corporate personhood?
    - implements 4y ago
      > there are women neckbeards too, … Colloquially known as legbeards … https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=legbeard https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=legbeard
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
scandox 4y ago
You know I've run Arch on Thinkpads forever and I never got one head turn from even one neckbeard. It's one of those dreams that never comes true.
- bogantech 4y ago
  It happens! Whenever I see a Thinkpad I start thinking I should buy one even though I have an M1 MacBook Pro. I'm sure I'm not the only neckbeard lusting after Thinkpads.
  - ge96 4y ago
    I like the Carbons but I also have a Mac/use all three OS's It's hard for me buy a brand new device though idk... What sucks about used devices is the battery and replacements are usually fake. Funny M1 has been pretty good (cool) but with rider it was getting warm, open up htop and all cores working. I'm a fan of the screen the most on Macs.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Eh... the newer models aren't what they used to be. They used to have arrow keys you could feel. Now it's all flat cost-savings.
  - pletnes 4y ago
    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!)
    - qu4z-2 4y ago
      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
kuschku 4y ago
> screen quality > battery life > speakers > trackpad All things you can replace with the T480. Which I've done, and can just recommend. There's much better options than the ones shipped by default, including trackpads rivalling the M1, a screen that beats the M1, and a battery that has 20h+ capacity and can be swapped with a second one to double the capacity in seconds.
- ihateolives 4y ago
  > 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.
  - freedomben 4y ago
    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.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    Does that actually matter? Seriously, it's less that some of the text books I used to lug around at school.
    - dnh44 4y ago
      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.
    - qball 4y ago
      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.
prvc 4y ago
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?
- jojobas 4y ago
  But... Steve Jobs... Think different... Aluminium with laser holes!
- Reason077 4y ago
  > "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.
- blensor 4y ago
  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.
  - dkonofalski 4y ago
    With a MBP, you'd just restore from a Time Machine backup. If you don't have one, that would be on you.
prmoustache 4y ago
>, build quality, screen quality, weight, battery life, single core & parallel processing, speakers, trackpad - everything Strangely mac fanboys always make sure to carefully avoid the subject of their crappy keyboard. It is worth using a lenovo over a Mac for the keyboard only. Who cares about a trackpad one barely use on a decent desktop. Mac users overly rely on a good trackpad because their desktop is terribly user-unfriendly. I spend all my time on the keyboard, not the trackpad.
- atmosx 4y ago
  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.
- pixelesque 4y ago
  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.
- Reason077 4y ago
  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.
goosedragons 4y ago
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.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > 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?
  - niclo 4y ago
    > 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.
    - ChrisRR 4y ago
      I hate that sub downvotes facts that they don't like
mhd 4y ago
> 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)
paines 4y ago
>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....
kwanbix 4y ago
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.
- astrange 4y ago
  The products haven't really been trying to get thinner since, I don't know, 2017? Certainly not since Ive left. They've even regrown ports again.
manishsharan 4y ago
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.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
“neckbeards” is quite funny
kitsunesoba 4y ago
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.
- bluedino 4y ago
  > horrifically bad TN panel screens The only 'great' ThinkPad screen is the 14" WQHD (2560x1440) The others are just...bad. So dim, dull colors, and the low-end screens are sad, terribly washed out TN panels
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    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.
blindriver 4y ago
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!
abrouwers 4y ago
Isn't the apple device 2-3x the price, though? Doesn't seem like it's even fair to compare.
paulmd 4y ago
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.
megablast 4y ago
> and there is literally no way you can make a comparison of these two machines This is such a weird thing to say.
timvisee 4y ago
> The reality is these Intel processors are just a big inefficient hot mess. I usually get more than 10 hours out of it, running Ubuntu. I think that's great.

me551ah 4y ago

Can you run Arch Linux on the M1 Max natively?

dontbesquare 4y ago
Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-6-2-the-first-mainstream-linux-kernel-for-apple-m1-chips-arrives/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-6-2-the-first-mainstream...
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  So, no. The headline is clickbait and basically just wrong.
  - opan 4y ago
    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.

noja 4y ago

> and getting head turns from neckbeards Where is all this hate coming from? It seems unjustified.

scandox 4y ago
I take the remark more benignly. I think it's meant in an affectionate manner.
- swyx 4y ago
  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
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > with this post sitting comfortably on #1 on the king neckbeard forum I'll have you know my beard is full, luxurious and grey, as befits someone with 20+ years of Unix experience.
    - steve1977 4y ago
      Now here’s a nickel, get yourself a better computer
  - danuker 4y ago
    > or for that matter no neck Are you referring to our robot overlords? Or corporate personhood?
  - implements 4y ago
    > there are women neckbeards too, … Colloquially known as legbeards … https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=legbeard https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=legbeard

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

scandox 4y ago

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

bogantech 4y ago
It happens! Whenever I see a Thinkpad I start thinking I should buy one even though I have an M1 MacBook Pro. I'm sure I'm not the only neckbeard lusting after Thinkpads.
- ge96 4y ago
  I like the Carbons but I also have a Mac/use all three OS's It's hard for me buy a brand new device though idk... What sucks about used devices is the battery and replacements are usually fake. Funny M1 has been pretty good (cool) but with rider it was getting warm, open up htop and all cores working. I'm a fan of the screen the most on Macs.
- danuker 4y ago
  Eh... the newer models aren't what they used to be. They used to have arrow keys you could feel. Now it's all flat cost-savings.
- pletnes 4y ago
  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!)
  - qu4z-2 4y ago
    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

kuschku 4y ago

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

ihateolives 4y ago
> 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.
- freedomben 4y ago
  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.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Does that actually matter? Seriously, it's less that some of the text books I used to lug around at school.
  - dnh44 4y ago
    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.
  - qball 4y ago
    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.

prvc 4y ago

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?

jojobas 4y ago
But... Steve Jobs... Think different... Aluminium with laser holes!
Reason077 4y ago
> "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.
blensor 4y ago
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.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  With a MBP, you'd just restore from a Time Machine backup. If you don't have one, that would be on you.

prmoustache 4y ago

>, build quality, screen quality, weight, battery life, single core & parallel processing, speakers, trackpad - everything Strangely mac fanboys always make sure to carefully avoid the subject of their crappy keyboard. It is worth using a lenovo over a Mac for the keyboard only. Who cares about a trackpad one barely use on a decent desktop. Mac users overly rely on a good trackpad because their desktop is terribly user-unfriendly. I spend all my time on the keyboard, not the trackpad.

atmosx 4y ago
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.
pixelesque 4y ago
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.
Reason077 4y ago
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.

goosedragons 4y ago

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.

arcticbull 4y ago
> 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?
- niclo 4y ago
  > 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.
  - ChrisRR 4y ago
    I hate that sub downvotes facts that they don't like

mhd 4y ago

> 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)

paines 4y ago

>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....

kwanbix 4y ago

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.

astrange 4y ago
The products haven't really been trying to get thinner since, I don't know, 2017? Certainly not since Ive left. They've even regrown ports again.

manishsharan 4y ago

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.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

“neckbeards” is quite funny

kitsunesoba 4y ago

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.

bluedino 4y ago
> horrifically bad TN panel screens The only 'great' ThinkPad screen is the 14" WQHD (2560x1440) The others are just...bad. So dim, dull colors, and the low-end screens are sad, terribly washed out TN panels
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  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.

blindriver 4y ago

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!

abrouwers 4y ago

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

paulmd 4y ago

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.

megablast 4y ago

> and there is literally no way you can make a comparison of these two machines This is such a weird thing to say.

timvisee 4y ago

> The reality is these Intel processors are just a big inefficient hot mess. I usually get more than 10 hours out of it, running Ubuntu. I think that's great.