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Caveats: 32 GB RAM is enough for me and I don't need a powerful GPU. Also battery life is average, but there's a way to optimize the system for minimum power draw which I never did.
What is important for you? Web surfing and watching Netflix? They are all pretty much equivalent. Running Linux? I don’t think the M chips are well supported, and last I looked it appeared the M3 and 4 are not supported at all…though, I did not look at Arch. Equivalent in price, aesthetics, or brand identity? For Gaming? Programming? Training LLM’s? Editing Video? Battery Life?
Not really. Many laptops still come with 1080 hd screens and $1 speakers. You would want an upgraded screen, ideally oled along with multiple speaker drivers.
Its not what you asked, but on the off chance you use local LLM’s for anything, getting a macbook with unified memory is a great price/performance ratio without spending tons on graphics cards. Personally if I was in the market for a new laptop I would be upgrading my 16gb M1 macbook pro, to whatever the latest MBP is with as much RAM as I could afford. 16gb can run 14b models slowly and they are semi usable, good fo…
Anecdotal but I have all of my Apple laptops going back to the late 90s all still in working order. The only machines I can think of with a similar build quality was the IBM era ThinkPad range. I’ve never used a Dell laptop that didn’t have something off about it.
Anecdotal but I have all of my Apple laptops going back to the late 90s all still in working order. The only machines I can think of with a similar build quality was the IBM era ThinkPad range. I’ve never used a Dell laptop that didn’t have something off about it.
The non ibm era thinkpads are great too. Screens are mostly hd on most models and speakers are average but otherwise perfect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The non ibm era thinkpads are great too. Screens are mostly hd on most models and speakers are average but otherwise perfect.
The keyboards are way worse now and they all have a trackpad now instead of just the traditional trackpoint that was common to the ThinkPad.
What is important for you? Web surfing and watching Netflix? They are all pretty much equivalent. Running Linux? I don’t think the M chips are well supported, and last I looked it appeared the M3 and 4 are not supported at all…though, I did not look at Arch. Equivalent in price, aesthetics, or brand identity? For Gaming? Programming? Training LLM’s? Editing Video? Battery Life?
> “Web surfing and watching Netflix? They are all pretty much equivalent.” Not really. Many laptops still come with 1080 hd screens and $1 speakers. You would want an upgraded screen, ideally oled along with multiple speaker drivers.
Have you considered getting a MacBook and running a Linux VM on it? I do this using UTM, which is an excellent macOS front end for Qemu and Apple’s own Virtualization framework. https://mac.getutm.app/
what’s the performance of the vm? can you use it for medium heavy tasks?
Also, depending upon your needs, a lot of software that you would typically run on Linux has a native port to macOS.
https://frame.work
Looks rather competitve: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-vs-amd-ryzen-... Their website improved significantly. I remember I interacted with one of them 3 or 4 years ago and they were rather bulky. I wonder how much they have improved since then?
However, you can tweak some kernel params to keep them mostly silent.
Plus, some of their AMD offerings are really good for running local LLMs.
A Framework that runs Nix and some tiling WM is a very nice experience TBH.