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Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

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Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#491

Post by wilg »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #337
taylodl wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as it’s bad for the environment Is it? Thanks to the increased reliability that non-upgradeability confers I'm still using my 2012 MacBook Pro as my daily driver. I suspect there's a lot of minutia to tease out to verify whether this claim is actually true in the global case.

> the increased reliability that non-upgradeability confers I'm skeptical of those being connected; my 2008 thinkpads and 2011 desktop (that I'm writing this on) are extremely upgradable and still work fine (I mean, the thinkpads are slow by modern standards, but that's not a reliability issue). And non-upgradeability in this sense also means that it's not reparable either, so when it does have problems the whole thi…

Theoretically, having to design the product to be modular means you'll have connectors, modules, and other parts that you have to ship on every product. At scale, you could imagine that adding 0.1 grams of weight and material to every unit nets out to be more wasteful than throwing away 1 in 100,000 entire units due to a fault.

Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#492

Post by BanazirGalbasi »

mwint wrote: post #452
tomxor wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rel…

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.)

> 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.

Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#494

Post by sandGorgon »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #426
browningstreet wrote: post #329

Regarding Lenovo: 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…

You know what they say. Windows for your gaming desktop, Mac for your laptop, and Linux for your servers.

have you seen WSL ? Windows is very compelling for your laptop

Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#495

Post by yamtaddle »

stinkytaco wrote: post #296
taylodl wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same feedback Apple has been getting for 11 years now. There's nothing new here. I think Apple is well-aware that there are people who prefer an upgradeable laptop and not having to participate in the Apple ecosystem. I suspect Apple has data showing even more people prefer having a more reliable laptop (upgradeability tends to decrease reliability) and the perceived benefits of the Apple ecosystem - otherwi…

I skeptical that non upgradability increases reliability. I have never heard this claim before. I have heard it decreases thickness and weight, both of which people might like, but increasing reliability? How much of that can just be attributed to improved components as manufacturing gets more sophisticated? I think this is just down to most people not caring. I like the idea of upgradability as an abstract concept,…

Never had a memory stick get jarred a bit loose, eh? Sometimes it even keeps kinda behaving normally....

Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#496

Post by Vrondi »

arcticbull wrote: post #140
goosedragons wrote: post #117

Earlier 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…

> 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've never wanted a nipple mouse, but to each their own and I know some people love them. What I have wanted is a giant 6" diagonal multi-touch trackpad. Linux is very much a non-goal for me, and if I want to, I can always SSH into a remote instance or run a VM. I don't miss…

By the time you have a giant 6" trackpad, then a touchscreen just absolutely makes more sense, but oh, yeah, right, Apple insists on being a decade+ behind the times on laptop hardware features while insisting they're better.

Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#497

Post by Vrondi »

zozbot234 wrote: post #365
ghc wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know from extensive debugging of this issue that docker is the problem. You basically can't run docker (as of 6 months ago...I hope this will eventually be false) on an M1/M2 without causing significant heating and battery drain. Since this is the fault of the OS, maybe Asahi will eventually be the solution.

You could also launch a Linux VM and run your docker containers in there. That ought to work better than just running docker in Mac OS and letting it manage VM instances on its own.

You shouldn't pay more money for a top-shelf laptop, then need to do this.

Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#498

Post by biftek »

wl wrote: post #395
biftek wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's customer service is really unrivaled in the computer repair space. I had a similar experience with my MacBook Pro in the past, my display stopped working, dropped it off at a store and picked it up a couple days later. They had replaced basically the entire laptop sans the plate on the bottom. Tried getting HP to fix a monitor with a defective port and was going to have to ship it to them at my own cost with…

I've had Lenovo send a tech over within 24 hours and do a repair on my kitchen table. The several day wait typical of Apple in-store-repair is glacial in comparison. And that's assuming the Apple store doesn't ship it out to the depot for a repair where the reimaging-happy techs are likely to impose a couple extra hours of restoring from backup when you get your machine back in your hands.

I've never dealt with or owned a Lenovo but it sounds like they're also good based on others replies.

Do you have to pay extra or have a business plan with Lenovo to get that service tho?

Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#499

Post by trieste92 »

I feel torn here between FOSS principles and the quality of MacBook ux. Also the amount of performance you get per dollar

It used to be, you bought an Apple product and got less performant hardware for a higher price. Now it's the opposite.

I have no idea how they do this so well. Maybe by vertical integration of hardware, OS, and user level services all under the same roof

Re: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

#500

Post by nehal3m »

zinxq wrote: post #401

Last year I upgraded to a Thinkpad Carbon. Almost immediately, I couldn't stand the keyboard. This sent me down a rabbit-hole of what was wrong with the keyboard (as it looked almost identical to my previous Thinkpad). The answer is that Thinkpad has slowly evolved their keyboards to be slimmer. Reducing the travel on the keys with each step. Some of the new ones are down to 1.3mm of travel. I realize this is a perso…

Is the Gen3 keyboard compatible with Gen2? If so you could upgrade to a Gen3 and swap out the keyboards.
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