> Intel® Core™ i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz × 8 this is only 4core/8thread https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/124969/...
And Intel's multithreading is notoriously weaker than AMD's SMT.
Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
211–220 of 634 posts
Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to elaborate?
Ok here's the thing. I used to build PCs, and I'd tinker with linux distros on laptops. Things would be flakey, need maintenance and upgrading and that was fun. That's fine when you're laser focused on your career and are in 'career as personality' part of your life, which is essential imo and I'm not sneering at it by making reference to it in that way. But ultimately, I now need to get to my desk just on time, know…
For a sizable segment of Apple's power users, this is really the core issue.
Apple clearly has no love for power users for over half a decade, and thinking of going to windows after MacOS is a nonstarter, which really leaves the obvious choice being migration to linux until you start to seriously evaluate PC laptops along with realizing you're taking the onus of OS configuration on yourself ALONG WITH your work, as the previous commenter mentioned. That said, Ventura is such a bad MacOS release (and sign of things to come) that Apple has finally made it the pull off the band-aid moment for a lot of power user folks like the writer of the article, issues be damned. good -enough- will have to suffice.
It's so tiresome that every single release of MacOS has fewer features professionals actually care about.
Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> "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.
Just spent about 30 seconds there testing this on my m2.
Couldn't convince it to move the cursor with anything below the knuckles.
Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#214Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> "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.
That's definitely not the case in my experience. Has this improved in the recent past?
Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#216I'm still not sure why. The section doesn't really answer the actual question. It's cheaper, good enough, replacement parts are cheap, and I understand that argument; I myself use alternatively some kind of very old Thinkpad (that I don't remember the specs of), a 2011 Macbook Air, or a recent Macbook M1 and for what I do with them (little more than running Firefox and ssh) the only difference that matters in practic…
I think it's very clear. The article clearly states that the hardware is objectively worse, but not in a way that matters to the author.
The software and Apple's business decisions are the problem it seems. That's actually the same reason I would prefer a Thinkpad to a Macbook myself. The author wants to be able to upgrade or repair their laptop when it breaks.
That does make the Thinkpad a better product for the author.
Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 machin…
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.
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.)
Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Does that actually matter? Seriously, it's less that some of the text books I used to lug around at school.
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.
Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heavier? A 14 inch macbook pro is 1.6kg. The t480 is 1.3kg and the non-s weighs the same as the macbook. So what are you talking about?
The T480 with a battery is 1.6kg, or 1.8kg on the extended pack. https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...
Yes, that is why I wrote "same as macbook". And a T480s is 1.32kg https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...
Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480
#220I don't think so. Time to recompile the newest p7zip (using this as an example because it dropped yesterday): - My M1 Macbook Air, 16GB RAM: 11s - My M1 Ultra Mac Studio, 128GB RAM: 6s - My HP DevOne (AMD Ryzen7 PRO 5850U, 64GB RAM): 51s - My home server (HP Z2 Mini G4, Xeon E-2176G , 32GB RAM): 17s - my Gigabyt Aorus 17G gaming laptop (i7-11800H, 64GB RAM): 35s On GeekBench the DevOne should be faster than the Z2: h…
How are those the only two conclusions you came up with? If all other independent benchmarks and data points to the 5850U being roughly comparable in performance to the M1 - yet for you it appears to be 5x slower, then surely that suggests an anomalous result, or at the very least, an edge case that is not indicative of real world performance. The third, much more plausible conclusion: - Your testing method/setup is…
Different OS (macOS Ventura vs. Pop-OS), different compiler (LLVM/clang vs. GCC), different storage (internal SSD vs NVMe M.2), different filesystem. Running with full CPU parallelism in both cases, however. In fact the test was biased against the Mac because the M1 MBA was running on battery power and the HP DevOne was plugged in.
Still, 5x worse performance at a real-world task that most closely approximates my use case is a significant difference.