Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

Clickbait headline “I replaced my MacBook with a thinkpad gasp” then people click thinking there will be something interesting, but it’s the same old stuff.

The trick is to use the stick as a Force sensor, instead of treating it like a capacitive Position stick on console controllers. In other words, you use your skin to "pull" the stick transversely so that the shearing force maximizes the feedback to your fingertip's cutaneous nerves.

The common mistake for those who gave up after 5 seconds of trying is attempting to "push" against the stick which is very difficult to do because there is barely any height to the nub, and in order to reverse directions you'd then need to shift your fingertip to get leverage on the opposite side of the dome.

When you instead use the shearing technique, it enables considerable finesse over not just the magnitude but also rapid modulation of the direction you are applying it in, effectively using the skin itself as both a sensor and a transducer.

Also remember to turn off the operating system's mouse acceleration, and turn up the driver's pressure sensitivity to max.

I bought an original Macbook Air. It always worked well. As it got on to about 10 years old, I took it in to an Apple Store a couple miles from my house and asked if they could replace the battery. The battery worked pretty well, but I figured.. the machine was going strong and if they still had batteries in stock, I should grab one now and the laptop will live even longer. They replaced the battery for $99 and when it came back (3 days later), they also replaced the motherboard for some reason. I don't know why, but basically, aside from the screen and the keyboard, it's a new machine. I still use it today -- the only thing I can't really do on it is edit 4K video.

Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son. A couple of weeks ago the keyboard stopped working. We bought a replacement keyboard and swapped it out. Still didn't work. So, something on the motherboard. When we called and asked about getting it fixed, they said it wasn't in warranty anymore and the price to diagnose and replace the broken part couldn't be estimated, nor could they estimate how long it would take. We'd have to ship it to a third-party repair center. So my son is walking around his college campus with a Lenovo laptop and an external keyboard, for a laptop we bought 2 years ago for almost $2,000.

So, no. No Lenovo for me. And given my previous stupendously negative experience with Dell (they couldn't repair 2 brand new machines that were shipped to us with broken WiFi and took so long to declare it unrepairable the machines couldn't be returned either -- two machines bought together had to be reported in separate calls to tech support and the third party tech support people who came to the house weren't very knowledgable -- calls disputing the non-returnable declaration took so long to return and were bounced among so many unhelpful people at Dell Headquarters they basically convinced me to give up, buy third-party wifi cards and live without Bluetooth in these machines), no Dell XPS laptops for me either.

On those experiences, I'll only spend my own money on Apple laptop hardware.