Comment by brikym
4 days ago
I have always found thinkpads to be the most overrated laptops ever. I far prefer Macbooks in all aspects beit ergonomics, aesthetics or performance. I don't get the love for Thinkpads. Maybe it's just nostelgia clouding people's judgement because I just see something which is clunky, ugly, plastic, noisy with a crap screen and crap battery life. The keyboard is the only thing I like more, but the macbook keyboards are okay these days.
I have both and would say that they just have different priorities. ThinkPad is an open platform, so you can run Linux. If you want to run Linux, modern MacBooks are no good. Yes, you could run Asahi on an M1/M2, but things like DP-Alt and Thunderbolt are still not supported. Whereas I could plug in my T14 Gen 5 AMD with Linux to a Thunderbolt display and it worked on day 1.
ThinkPads are also much more upgradable and serviceable than a MacBook. I popped in 64GiB RAM, 2 TB NVMe SSD, and a WWAN modem and it cost me almost nothing. However. doing so requires a less flat, less glued, etc. system, which requires other compromises. Getting a MacBook with similar memory and storage would cost 5300 Euro (compared to ~1400-1500 for the ThinkPad) and I still wouldn't have WWAN (far better CPU/GPU though, but I especially want the RAM/storage).
I fully agree though that for the price MacBooks have far better screens, cooling systems, and the unibody aluminium case is pretty much unbeatable. CPU-wise, AMD APUs have caught up a lot.
clunky, ugly, plastic, noisy with a crap screen and crap battery life
I think that's not really a fair characterization. There is are wide gap between a good ThinkPad and e.g. a cheap Acer (to which your description would apply). My T14 even gets 6-7 hours on Linux (which isn't exactly known for great battery life), so it would probably do 10 hours on Windows. I only head the fan when I load the system a lot and even then it's fairly quit. And the case, even though it's not aluminium is still pretty nice/robust.
I have M1 Pro and M3 Pro MacBooks to compare to. IMO MacBook and ThinkPads are great in different ways. Ideally I'd want to have a MacBook with the upgradeability/repairability of a ThinkPad that can run NixOS with all peripherals supported.
Sometimes, I travel with my nearly-15-year-old Thinkpad T420 in preference to my MacBook Air M1.
The Macbook has a horrible keyboard with no travel. The buttonless trackpad is a pain to use; it's very hard to right-click and even with a 3rd party FOSS app to give me 3-finger middle-click, it's almost impossible to do it precisely. I use middle-click hundreds of times a day, but I have no use for trackpad gestures. It has a wretched 2 USB-C ports, one for power. I can't connect a mouse, keyboard, screen and power without carrying a dock. I can't upgrade the RAM. I recently had to remove Asahi Linux because it no longer had enough space to install the latest macOS 15 update -- the SSD can't be upgraded either.
It feels like a laptop designed by and for a tablet user. I am not a tablet user. I don't like them much.
The Thinkpad is a pleasure to use, and I can work on it all day for weeks without feeling especially cramped or anything. It has 2x the RAM and about 10x the SSD space. I've upgraded RAM, keyboard, main SSD, secondary SSD and battery, and it cost me next to nothing.
The only virtues of the Macbook are that it's easy to carry and the battery lasts a long time. It's very unpleasant to actually work on.
> I am not a tablet user.
It's unclear why you chose the Air then. It's designed as a lightweight entry level portable for people with minimal requirements.
I didn't. It is a work machine.
I smashed my right arm to bits in early 2023. I was unable to use that hand for months. I asked for a machine which could take dictation. This is what I got.
And I have to admit, it's now my go-to machine for remote events, conferences and so on; it replaced my Planet Computers Gemini.
But actually working at a desk using the thing is not very pleasant. I regularly see MacBook fans praising the keyboard and the trackpad, but IMHO they are awful.
E.g. I am often told that macOS includes middle-click support, by people who don't know that their mouse has 3 buttons. The existence of this paid app:
https://middleclick.app/
And multiple generations of this FOSS alternative:
https://github.com/artginzburg/MiddleClick
... effectively falsify that.
The Macbook trackpad beats the Thinkpad trackpad hands down. The Thinkpad trackpad is extremely liquid/oil sensitive. Wipe your hands through your hair, put your fingers on the trackpad and it stops working. Very frustrating.
I use both daily (work/personal) and I've come to agree. My work MBP is just better than my personal Thinkpad in all respects, despite having nearly identical pricetags.
I bought it because I wanted frankly, something different than the Mbps I've had from work for 15 years, and to go Linux-first. OSX annoys me about as much as Linux does, so the software is on par, but the hardware just can't touch Apple hardware. I wish this weren't the case, but it is.