Comment by opan

It took me a while and a few regrettable purchases to come to terms with this, but you hit the nail on the head here. I tried to replace an old ThinkPad T440p with a Pinebook Pro at one point. It wasn't even a sidegrade, struggled with video playback, had a very small amount of soldered RAM that made web browsing difficult. I'd love to move away from x86 but maybe it'll be another decade before any of the affordable stuff is worth using. It really is hard to beat a ThinkPad from eBay. Even 4 years old or newer you can get quite performant machines for under $1000. On the less low-end there are the Apple Silicon machines, but Asahi needs a bit more time to bake as well. I'm still hopeful for the future, but will be more cautious in actually embracing it from now on.