7 ms·

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

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
    - catchnear4321 4y ago
      You’re confusing facts with anecdotal evidence.
  - ghc 4y ago
    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.
    - niclo 4y ago
      Yes, same conclusion. 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.
      - kitsunesoba 4y ago
        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.
      - zoover2020 4y ago
        Can't you run Docker on a remote host? I always have a 64GB memory EC2 instance near if required.
      - paulmd 4y ago
        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.
      - mariosisters 4y ago
        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.
- Vrondi 4y ago
  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.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    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.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    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.
  - bryceacc 4y ago
    moving my fingers on a trackpad is way better than stabbing my meat stick on a screen in terms of accuracy and personal energy use
ho_schi 4y ago
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.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > 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.
  - ho_schi 4y ago
    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... [1] https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3_AMD/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3_AMD_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X...
dijit 4y ago
> T480 weighs 3.6lb vs. 3.5 for a 14" M1. I'm surprised you noticed. Without battery. The battery itself weights 7oz, which goes up to 13oz with the extended battery (which the parent said he bought)
criddell 4y ago
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.
- thoughtbag 4y ago
  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. ([edit] oh, and the battery life is nuts.)
  - vlod 4y ago
    Would you mind sharing your machine spec please? Thanks!
    - thoughtbag 4y ago
      Sure; M1 Max, 64GB RAM running Ventura 13.2.1 (and Parallels Pro 18).
  - BruceEel 4y ago
    like sibling, I'd be interested in the specs. Thanks!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mort96 4y ago
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.
- rkta 4y ago
  Yes, because I have to move my hand off the keyboard to use the trackpad.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    Fair. But don't you move your hand off the keyboard to use a mouse when using a desktop PC? Or do you have a trackpoint on your keyboard there too?
    - rkta 4y ago
      I avoid keyboards without trackpoint. 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.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  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.
  - Reason077 4y ago
    > "Your wrist is never misinterpreted as a mouse movement either." This just doesn't happen on Mac trackpads: they have pretty sophisticated and effective palm rejection.

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
  - catchnear4321 4y ago
    You’re confusing facts with anecdotal evidence.
- ghc 4y ago
  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.
  - niclo 4y ago
    Yes, same conclusion. 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.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      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.
    - zoover2020 4y ago
      Can't you run Docker on a remote host? I always have a 64GB memory EC2 instance near if required.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      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.
    - mariosisters 4y ago
      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.
Vrondi 4y ago
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.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  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.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  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.
- bryceacc 4y ago
  moving my fingers on a trackpad is way better than stabbing my meat stick on a screen in terms of accuracy and personal energy use

ho_schi 4y ago

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.

arcticbull 4y ago
> 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.
- ho_schi 4y ago
  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... [1] https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3_AMD/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3_AMD_Spec.pdf https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X...

dijit 4y ago

> T480 weighs 3.6lb vs. 3.5 for a 14" M1. I'm surprised you noticed. Without battery. The battery itself weights 7oz, which goes up to 13oz with the extended battery (which the parent said he bought)

criddell 4y ago

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.

thoughtbag 4y ago
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. ([edit] oh, and the battery life is nuts.)
- vlod 4y ago
  Would you mind sharing your machine spec please? Thanks!
  - thoughtbag 4y ago
    Sure; M1 Max, 64GB RAM running Ventura 13.2.1 (and Parallels Pro 18).
- BruceEel 4y ago
  like sibling, I'd be interested in the specs. Thanks!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mort96 4y ago

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.

rkta 4y ago
Yes, because I have to move my hand off the keyboard to use the trackpad.
- Reason077 4y ago
  Fair. But don't you move your hand off the keyboard to use a mouse when using a desktop PC? Or do you have a trackpoint on your keyboard there too?
  - rkta 4y ago
    I avoid keyboards without trackpoint. 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.
goosedragons 4y ago
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.
- Reason077 4y ago
  > "Your wrist is never misinterpreted as a mouse movement either." This just doesn't happen on Mac trackpads: they have pretty sophisticated and effective palm rejection.