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> I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son These are not comparable. There are wildly different quality of laptops under the Lenovo brand. A ton of them are

by tomxor 4y ago

> I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son These are not comparable. There are wildly different quality of laptops under the Lenovo brand. A ton of them are complete crap. Apple simply doesn't sell anything like that. The author is comparing to a Thinkpad specifically. Additionally, the 10 years old Apple that made your macbook is a very different company from today. Although they are still a premium brand, the reliability and replaceability of parts is completely different. I have one of the first unibody MBPs from 2009, and ran it for almost 10 years (although I had to switch to freebsd and linux by the end because of Apple). That laptop was incredibly sturdy, and parts were reasonably replaceable, keyboard lasted 10 years before getting squishy. Battery was a terrible hot pocket but replaceable without screws! back then it was all SATA so I upgraded to an intel SSD from before they sold their controllers to samsung - also in a user serviceable compartment next to the battery. None of these things are true of Apple laptops today.

_cenw 4y ago
The Legion 5/5 Pro/7 are very solid as workstations in my experience, and with the exception of the keyboard, everything I would want to service is accessible. I've switched the memory, added new SSDs and even repasted my Legion 7 Gen6. I've even been able to run VFIO virtualized Windows on these machines. You're also exempt from the Lenovo panel lottery.
mwint 4y ago
I’ll give you the user-serviceability point, but not the longevity point. I would bet lots of money that my 2021 14” MBP will still be very usable in 2031. (Maybe not by me, but that’s only because I’ll succumb to the urge to buy something new and shiny and tax deductible in a few years.)
- tomxor 4y ago
  Maybe, if you are lucky. Not so sure you will be running MacOS though, max version support seems pretty arbitrary with Apple historically.
- Vrondi 4y ago
  IDK, the last Thinkpad I had, I used for a decade, then passed it on to a relative who used it for a few more years before something finally broke. Have also owned a Lenovo Yoga series laptop, and it's absolutely not in the same category at all as a Thinkpad.
- BanazirGalbasi 4y ago
  > I’ll give you the user-serviceability point, but not the longevity point. I just replaced my 2012 Thinkpad T430s (which I bought second-hand!) with a 2019 x390. Part of it is that the T430 became a loaner that I have gifted to a friend who needed a laptop for light paperwork, but also the battery on it (and any replacements I could find) had a pretty short lifespan, about 2.5 hours at best. The laptop was still very usable, but I've become too tied to my desk and my desktop lately and I wanted to be able to work with more mobility and not worry about having an outlet constantly available. All that is just to say that Thinkpads, even post-IBM era ones, have the longevity you expect from a Macbook. Unfortunately, the user-serviceability has also gone downhill, with soldered-on memory being common and now the charging port is a USB-C that is built onto the motherboard.
  - touisteur 4y ago
    But the T430 us legendary like that. I have written many scrapping and alerting bots, but the only one still running is the 'find me any new refurbished T430 trove nearby' and haul ass to buy some. I love this machine so much I'd like to retire with a stock of them, praying I'll still be able to browse whatever the slow web will be then and code the night away as I've always done with this beauty.
- gofreddygo 4y ago
  tax deductible ?
  - mwint 4y ago
    Self-employed. Business expenses essentially have a 20-40% discount built in.
kajecounterhack 4y ago
Yeah it's sad but the butterfly keyboard generation of MBPs had such issues. Keyboard aside, USB-C ports burned out / stopped working all the time. Battery life was just OK on Intel. The latest gen is better thanks to MagSafe and Mx chips help yield much better battery life.
tombert 4y ago
I will agree that it's not quite as easy to fix/service/upgrade as it used to, but I bought my Macbook Pro (Intel i9) in 2020, used it daily since then, thrown it in a backpack and had to thrashed around in airports repeated, and the thing still works about as well as when I purchased it. I really do think Apple does a reasonably good job at making sure stuff lasts. It hurt to pay nearly 4 grand for a computer three years ago, but I suspect I'll get at least another five years out of it.
danielfoster 4y ago
If Lenovo put their name on it, it's absolutely reasonable to blame them.
- tomxor 4y ago
  I didn't say anything about blame, only that the category of laptops being compared by the parent are not in the same class as what the author of the article was comparing.

by tomxor 4y ago

_cenw 4y ago

The Legion 5/5 Pro/7 are very solid as workstations in my experience, and with the exception of the keyboard, everything I would want to service is accessible. I've switched the memory, added new SSDs and even repasted my Legion 7 Gen6. I've even been able to run VFIO virtualized Windows on these machines. You're also exempt from the Lenovo panel lottery.

mwint 4y ago

I’ll give you the user-serviceability point, but not the longevity point. I would bet lots of money that my 2021 14” MBP will still be very usable in 2031. (Maybe not by me, but that’s only because I’ll succumb to the urge to buy something new and shiny and tax deductible in a few years.)

tomxor 4y ago
Maybe, if you are lucky. Not so sure you will be running MacOS though, max version support seems pretty arbitrary with Apple historically.
Vrondi 4y ago
IDK, the last Thinkpad I had, I used for a decade, then passed it on to a relative who used it for a few more years before something finally broke. Have also owned a Lenovo Yoga series laptop, and it's absolutely not in the same category at all as a Thinkpad.
BanazirGalbasi 4y ago
> I’ll give you the user-serviceability point, but not the longevity point. I just replaced my 2012 Thinkpad T430s (which I bought second-hand!) with a 2019 x390. Part of it is that the T430 became a loaner that I have gifted to a friend who needed a laptop for light paperwork, but also the battery on it (and any replacements I could find) had a pretty short lifespan, about 2.5 hours at best. The laptop was still very usable, but I've become too tied to my desk and my desktop lately and I wanted to be able to work with more mobility and not worry about having an outlet constantly available. All that is just to say that Thinkpads, even post-IBM era ones, have the longevity you expect from a Macbook. Unfortunately, the user-serviceability has also gone downhill, with soldered-on memory being common and now the charging port is a USB-C that is built onto the motherboard.
- touisteur 4y ago
  But the T430 us legendary like that. I have written many scrapping and alerting bots, but the only one still running is the 'find me any new refurbished T430 trove nearby' and haul ass to buy some. I love this machine so much I'd like to retire with a stock of them, praying I'll still be able to browse whatever the slow web will be then and code the night away as I've always done with this beauty.
gofreddygo 4y ago
tax deductible ?
- mwint 4y ago
  Self-employed. Business expenses essentially have a 20-40% discount built in.

kajecounterhack 4y ago

Yeah it's sad but the butterfly keyboard generation of MBPs had such issues. Keyboard aside, USB-C ports burned out / stopped working all the time. Battery life was just OK on Intel. The latest gen is better thanks to MagSafe and Mx chips help yield much better battery life.

tombert 4y ago

I will agree that it's not quite as easy to fix/service/upgrade as it used to, but I bought my Macbook Pro (Intel i9) in 2020, used it daily since then, thrown it in a backpack and had to thrashed around in airports repeated, and the thing still works about as well as when I purchased it. I really do think Apple does a reasonably good job at making sure stuff lasts. It hurt to pay nearly 4 grand for a computer three years ago, but I suspect I'll get at least another five years out of it.

danielfoster 4y ago

If Lenovo put their name on it, it's absolutely reasonable to blame them.

tomxor 4y ago
I didn't say anything about blame, only that the category of laptops being compared by the parent are not in the same class as what the author of the article was comparing.