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Comment by quantgenius

4 years ago

Get a Thinkpad. I replaced a 2015 MacBook Pro with a Thinkpad P1 Gen2 and love it. The trackpad isn’t as nice. The keyboard is better. Running WSL2 you have a great Unixy development environment in Windows. Or just install Linux. As thin and light as a MacBook Pro. Much better thermals, though still not awesome. Other, somewhat larger Thinkpads have better thermals. You can upgrade your RAM, add 2 SSDs and other peripherals like a 4G card etc if you like. Thinkpads come with fantastic service. Next business day on-site repair including for accidental damage and they mean it. Looks: It’s the design Apple copied for their very first laptops and is IMO better looking. They got it right the first time and haven’t changed it materially. Built like a tank. Not quite a tough book but they will take some abuse.

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quantgenius

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sgerenser  4 years ago

I have that exact laptop (work provided) and I’m not a fan. Trackpad is OK but not nearly as good as my Mac. 4K display sometimes looks amazing but the color accuracy is terrible and there’s a weird speckle texture that I assume comes from the touch overlay. I have a thunderbolt dock that supplies 85w of power but the machine refuses to charge from it and requires connecting the huge external power supply. But the worst part is I’ve gone through several incidents where some update occurred (never could narrow it down to one in particular) and I started getting multiple blue screens a day.

Edit: forgot one more annoyance. The laptop seems to frequently power off completely overnight even though it should just be sleeping/hibernating.

  • syshum  4 years ago

    I am still suprised by the number of people that want trackpad's

    If lenovo would come out with a laptop with no trackpad I would be the first to order it, I normally disable the track pad completely..

    Traditional mouse or even a trackball are far far better

    • dragonwriter  4 years ago

      > I am still suprised by the number of people that want trackpad's

      I occasionally have need to use a laptop in conditions where a mouse is inconvenient, so i prefer to have a trackpad, but I find that even the best trackpad is far inferior to a mouse. (Trackball, at least the kind that gets integrated into a laptop, isn't an improvement, IMO over a trackpad.)

    • sgerenser  4 years ago

      On my Macs I have always used both mouse and trackpad. When I use a PC like the thinkpad I usually ignore the trackpad.

  • quantgenius  4 years ago

    Never had a blue screen. Haven’t had the power off problem though there is a distinction between regular sleep and deep sleep. When coming out of deep sleep it boots up like normal and restores RAM from disk. Don’t have a touch screen but have the highest end, non-touch 4K screen Lenovo offered. They also offered a very good HD screen and a not so good 4K screen. Display is not as good as on a Mac but this is more a Windows problem than a hardware problem. If color calibration is an issue, you could have had them calibrate it for you for 25 bucks when you ordered it. I believe Lenovo support can send someone to calibrate later on too for a somewhat higher fee.

xxz223  4 years ago

If I got a Thinkpad I'd switch to Linux. I absolutely can't stand the Windows UI.

  • zelly  4 years ago

    Linux UI is far worse than Windows. It's not even close. I use Linux but definitely not for its UI.

    Windows can out-of-the-box do HiDPI, multiple monitors, multiple desktops, trackpad gestures, hardware accelerated UI rendering, facial recognition logins, and more. It was designed as a desktop OS.

    On Linux some things are getting better if you stick to the Wayland+GNOME stack, but it's still so bad I can't recommend it to people on technical grounds. Use it if you believe in free software, not because you think it's "better" (it's not).

    • prox  4 years ago

      I am seriously wondering why Linux UI development is lagging so much considering it’s at the forefront of many developments, and probably with the worlds best devs using Linux. I can only come up with that it’s console centered approach doesn’t attract a lot of UX designers of caliber to take it to a new level.

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  • skuthus  4 years ago

    My thinkpad works very well with linux, I recommend Zorin or Arch

    • Sunspark  4 years ago

      Arch is only a recommendation for people with a fair bit of experience. I have some experience, and I still needed to check some webpages to find out what I was missing when I tried installing Arch as the official manual doesn't spell out every step that is needed.

      For "easy" for people who don't have time or experience, I would instead recommend Pop!_OS https://pop.system76.com/ flash a liveusb stick and you can try it out on your hardware without needing to install it first.

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