Not a developer but have found the T14s AMD Gen 3 to have significantly better real world (i.e. browsing) battery life than my X13s had.
The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
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Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#12> Chrome is slow and frustrating to use, with delayed animations and noticeable input lag, it's such a frustration that I entirely gave up on Chrome in favor of Edge which runs natively
I use native Chromium on my Windows-on-ARM laptop (a couple of generations older than the one reviewed). It runs really well and the only drawback is missing DRM stuff so some videos won't play. YouTube almost always works, but most other non-youtube videos don't. For those I can fall back to Edge. I'm looking forward to Google releasing a native build of Chrome.
Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#13Like the author, I also do a lot of Kotlin development and use intellij and pycharm a lot. This sounds like an awful laptop to do that on. Kotlin is great but it's compiler is rather slow and you end up waiting for that a lot. So, faster is better.
I noticed about a 2.5x build speed improvements when I upgraded my cheap Samsung i5 laptop (a temporary thing I used for a while) to the M1 14" Mac Book Pro. On a typical day, I run full builds quite often so this really matters to me. The difference between waiting 5 minutes or 1.5 is really important to me. During this build, 250 integration tests run with 20 threaads maxing out all of the cpu cores.
This windows laptop is being described as a lack luster i5 sounds like it would be a hard no for me. That and all the other issues (the usual meh touchpad, the underwhelming GPU, etc.) makes for an overpriced laptop that just isn't worth having. You can probably get something way nicer for the money. Including a mac.
Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#14> Luckily (or perhaps shadily), you will rarely ever pay the full price for the Thinkpad x13s. As is tradition, Lenovo seems to be perpetually running deals, taking up to 40% off (at time of writing, 45% time of purchase), bringing the laptop to a much more reasonable $1479.60.
If something has a $2500 price tag but always has a deal where you can take it only for $1500 then the real price is $1500, not $2500.
Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#15Like the author, I also do a lot of Kotlin development and use intellij and pycharm a lot. This sounds like an awful laptop to do that on. Kotlin is great but it's compiler is rather slow and you end up waiting for that a lot. So, faster is better. I noticed about a 2.5x build speed improvements when I upgraded my cheap Samsung i5 laptop (a temporary thing I used for a while) to the M1 14" Mac Book Pro. On a typical…
Silly question ; am I the only person who still uses a desktop / tower machine? Feels like I'm a huge minority these days, but when it comes to needing processing power and juice it still feels it provides budget and upgrade flexibility no laptop can match.
Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#16I can't wait for proper high end ARM laptops with Microsoft's backing and support. I'm like the author, I consider the M MacBooks very impressive but I dislike the OS itself. And it was very unexpected that Chrome underperform so much, without it it's a complete deal breaker for me.
Why? Chrome is such a terrible browser to begin with. How is it a deal breaker?
I can't speak to the GPs reasons, but Chrome has a large enough user-base that anyone building for the web is going to want to at least test their work in it.
Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#17Like the author, I also do a lot of Kotlin development and use intellij and pycharm a lot. This sounds like an awful laptop to do that on. Kotlin is great but it's compiler is rather slow and you end up waiting for that a lot. So, faster is better. I noticed about a 2.5x build speed improvements when I upgraded my cheap Samsung i5 laptop (a temporary thing I used for a while) to the M1 14" Mac Book Pro. On a typical…
Silly question ; am I the only person who still uses a desktop / tower machine? Feels like I'm a huge minority these days, but when it comes to needing processing power and juice it still feels it provides budget and upgrade flexibility no laptop can match.
I notice a lot of people using desktop in the office an having a personal laptop.
But also there has been a shift to cloud instances that provide the flexibility you say at the price of renouncing ownership of the machine. Especially for GPU-based computations.
Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#18Like the author, I also do a lot of Kotlin development and use intellij and pycharm a lot. This sounds like an awful laptop to do that on. Kotlin is great but it's compiler is rather slow and you end up waiting for that a lot. So, faster is better. I noticed about a 2.5x build speed improvements when I upgraded my cheap Samsung i5 laptop (a temporary thing I used for a while) to the M1 14" Mac Book Pro. On a typical…
Silly question ; am I the only person who still uses a desktop / tower machine? Feels like I'm a huge minority these days, but when it comes to needing processing power and juice it still feels it provides budget and upgrade flexibility no laptop can match.
I’d love the power of a desktop but I can’t leave my house with it
Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#19Like the author, I also do a lot of Kotlin development and use intellij and pycharm a lot. This sounds like an awful laptop to do that on. Kotlin is great but it's compiler is rather slow and you end up waiting for that a lot. So, faster is better. I noticed about a 2.5x build speed improvements when I upgraded my cheap Samsung i5 laptop (a temporary thing I used for a while) to the M1 14" Mac Book Pro. On a typical…
Silly question ; am I the only person who still uses a desktop / tower machine? Feels like I'm a huge minority these days, but when it comes to needing processing power and juice it still feels it provides budget and upgrade flexibility no laptop can match.
I use a desktop that I can remotely access. So I can do development on my fast computer from anywhere. It’s always on so it’s easy to run long jobs.
Since my laptop is basically just a thin client used for ssh, vnc, and a web browser, it’s super easily replaced.
Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Silly question ; am I the only person who still uses a desktop / tower machine? Feels like I'm a huge minority these days, but when it comes to needing processing power and juice it still feels it provides budget and upgrade flexibility no laptop can match.
I’d love the power of a desktop but I can’t leave my house with it
Wireguard+SSH+VNC works wonders for me.