61–70 of 173 posts
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M1 and M2. But those are in an entirely different price bracket. I’d go so far as to say those are not comparable.
You can buy refurb M1s for $379 at Walmart.
Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it wa…
> Things I learned to look out for: Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in. When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chip…
People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.
If you have an old Intel MacBook Air, they work beautifully with Linux as well: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200
I did this with the 11”, which was one of the greatest sized laptops for travel IMO, just had to replace the explody looking battery!
In my opinion, touching anything made by Fujitsu is not ethical. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Plus, the Post Office Scandal had a lot of input from the PO itself and the British legal system.
It was a very British failure overall.
Tossing Linux on used enterprise laptops is maybe the best bang for your buck machine you can get. They're often time a great value and within three years old. Used multiple Thinkpads and Dells over the years that were fantastic and gotten sub $400. Things I learned to look out for: - Locked BIOS - Look into the manufacturer's repairability reputation. I replaced the entire keyboard on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon and it wa…
My daily driver for several years now has been an AMD Ryzen 7 powered ThinkPad t495. $120 used. After upgrading the RAM to 64gb it felt very snappy and usable. I run NixOS / Hyprland with rofi/waybar. When an accident happened and the first t495 was damaged, I bought a second for $80, swapped the parts and was back in business. I use it for coding, web research, and a bit of CAD design via FreeCAD. Very happy with th…
So, my daily driver is an oldish dell latitude (8th gen intel) running openbsd. Not for the faint of heart, but for a tinkerer, it's a dream.
If you have an old Intel MacBook Air, they work beautifully with Linux as well: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/11/05/2200
For example, the fan did not work out of the box. I had to install something called 'macfanctld'.
Sleep did not work, it would wake up as soon as it went to sleep. I had to install something called a 'suspend-fix.service' hack.
Brightness control was flaky. It would always wake up at the lowest brightness setting. Disabling auto-dimming caused it to wake up at the highest brightness.
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How did you upgrade the soldered storage?
There’s a guy who offers it for a very reasonable fee in USA. I’ve used his services a few times with great success! Email me, I wouldn’t want to post someone else’s contact info publicly.
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I did this with the 11”, which was one of the greatest sized laptops for travel IMO, just had to replace the explody looking battery!
I'm down to ~10m of battery life on my i7 11" - any pointers on battery replacement? Laptop worked great otherwwise (retired it last year due to battery life)
I finally bought one from iFixit.com. Far more expensive than eBay, but the battery actually worked great for about a year. Then about a month after the 1-year warranty expired, it degraded noticeably (maybe to 80%) with only about 100-200 charge cycles. Even iFixIt cannot source a battery as good as the original Apple.
Right now, it's at 65% capacity after 584 charge cycles, after 4.5 years of service. I will probably go back to iFixIt. At least I'll get one year of full capacity from them, instead of the fake or DOA ones from eBay.
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You can buy refurb M1s for $379 at Walmart.
Has a proprietary bootloader that Apple can lock in an OTA update. Also doesn't support Linux as well as Intel or AMD chipsets, unfortunately.