Its butterfly keyboard design has failed, but Apple has yet to admit its mistake

I have a T460, and after typing on my work laptop (2015 MB Pro, by office policy), it feels heavenly going back to it at the end of the day. That keyboard is lightyears ahead of the Apple chiclet keys. I still fondly miss the actual scissor style keys of yesteryear Thinkpads, but I'll still take any Thinkpad keyboard over an Apple keyboard any time.

I wish...

macOS is its own thing, where some functionality is provided by some very old versions of BSD tools. But using it feels pretty different from using a modern BSD variant.

The malware was only found on the IdeaPad series (their consumer line). From reporting on it, the management team is separate from their business (Thinkpad) line, and the malware came from the 3rd party software packages that were included to subsidize the production of the low-end lines.

Those 3rd party packages are not a concern for the Thinkpad lines, since the higher business price point supports the lines without the need for subsidizing.

> Windows never has shipped with a lot of built-in apps.

But the ones it did ship with were pleasant to look at and were actually designed to get work done, not waste space (see Vista’s Windows Mail, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Media Player, or even the legacy Control Panel).

Now it feels like the developers were given the task to fill up the entire screen, but no budget remained when it was time to actually develop features, so they increased font size & padding on the very little they had developed and called it a day.

> Calc used to start slow, not an issue anymore. It is also open source now and seeing more and more features being added to it.

It’s still the “new” calc which has the overhead of their awful UWP platform. I mean UWP makes sense for some stuff but a calculator? What was wrong with the legacy calc.exe? Not to mention the new calc has telemetry (yes, in a calculator, you heard me right) and they rejected the PR which removed it.

> free as in beer apps (Spotify) or free as in speech apps (Notepad++)

Seems like a perfect fit for the Store? They could have a team that reaches out to freeware/open source developers and packages their apps for the Store. If anything, that would help offset the amount of garbage that’s currently in there.

> I remember that the initial screen being shown is actually there for some good technical reason.

Mac and Linux (using LightDM) don’t seem to have that reason, so whatever it is, it’s more about laziness (not wanting to work around the supposed limitation)... oh and the fact they can use the lock screen to shill their sad search engine and/or ads.

> It, honestly, doesn't suck anymore.

Is the start menu fast? That’s another thing I noticed compared to Windows 7, the start menu on 10 has a slight delay while it was instant on Windows 7. That’s another issue when you’re used to pressing the Windows key and then typing whatever app you wanted.

> My Mac keeps asking me to sign me up for a bunch of paid cloud services though. That is annoying.

Haven’t noticed them myself (I am logged into my - free on the 5GB tier - iCloud account so maybe that’s why) but I heard Windows 10 trying to push OneDrive & Office 365... oh and I think they also try to push their browser if you attempted to install a third-party one.

> I've had Linux package managers run update and leave me with an unbootable system

Not surprising, but then again I’m not bitching about Linux (and nobody should) because it is free. However, when a paid, commercial OS like Windows 10 falls down to the same standard as Linux distributions (built by enthusiasts in their free time) you’ve gotta start asking questions.

Agreed about the hardware choices, but personally I’ve never felt the need for top of the line hardware anymore - my 12” MacBook (with dual core CPU and 8GB of RAM) is sufficient for my development work. In the rare cases I need to do CPU-intensive stuff (like compiling OpenWrt the other day) I get a beefy machine off a cloud provider and build it there - still more pleasant than dealing with Windows or Linux full-time.

The T series still has the removable batteries, and the newer model years (T460 and up) have weights equivalent to the older X240 and below.

My T460 is within 0.5lbs (~0.25kg) of my work-issued 2015 MBP 13in, and from my quick searches, that seems to be generally consistent up to the modern T490 & 2018 MBP 13s.

I don't have a modern Thinkpad or MBP to compare, but my T460 still gets ~4-5hrs of normal usage, or 2-3hrs of heavy usage (strategy gaming like FTL or Rimworld, running VMs and python dev work, etc). My 2015 MBP 13 gets fairly similar times.