Comment by lproven
4 days ago
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.