My daughter has the same laptop (I bought it for her a long time ago). When she brought it with her when visiting me in Canada from Australia this summer, she asked me to look at it because Win10 wouldn't let her in and she needed her files and pics.
So, I booted a Fedora USB and backed up her files. When I asked her if she wanted me to install Fedora Workstation on it to continue using it, she said "Yes!" because "She loves this laptop and doesn't want to buy a new one."
Fedora runs beautifully fast on this system with 8GB of RAM and will probably last her a long time.
Reading about so many people daily-driving laptops built around a decade ago, if not more (which includes myself, happy owner of a T480s), and not suffering any major penalty in terms of overall usability and battery life, it really shows that the returns of having more CPU power/smaller lithography have been marginal for a very, very long time (CPUs haven't been an enabler for new use-cases/a major incentive to upgrade a laptop in recent history, AFAICT).
That's not to say there hasn't been progress in this space, but I'm also amused by the many comments along the lines of "my 2020 M1 is so revolutionary that it's all I need in 2026" in every other Apple thread. Probably all we've been needing has been some 14/10nm 8th/10th Gen Core i7 in a decent package? And about package, how come that this era's ThinkPads and pro Dells/HPs get a bigger "love-factor" than their contemporary intel MacBooks?
Now, reading more into it¹, it appears that what Intel was shipping 8th-generation Intel Core i5 8257Us (i.e. a 2017 Coffee Lake chip) in its MacBook Pros for as late as 2020, before switching over to the M series. No wonder they weren't getting much love!
My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
Like Land Rover owners, I’m always shocked that people look to buy a thing that has plenty of spare parts.
I’d much rather buy a thing that doesn’t need them. Two decades of laptops, never replaced a single thing or had an issue. Shot, I have not had a single app crash or system crash in 5+ years. Also two decades of driving around the world without a single breakdown.
I originally bought my MacBook Air M1 just as a transitional computer because my old, incredibly expensive Intel MacBook Pro had been stolen, and I was waiting for a newer MacBook Pro model. But I grew so fond of the Air that I couldn't bring myself to part with it again. It's lightweight, has incredible performance (more powerful than the most powerful Intel-based Pros), the battery lasts a long time, the keyboard is comfortable, and the design is more curved than the Pro (and the newer Air models), which means it doesn't dig into your wrists.
I've owned an M1 Pro since its release and it's still going strong. I was going to see how long I could run it for. My bet was that by staying on Sequoia and/or installing Linux, I could run it for a ridiculous amount of time. I've met developers in the past with 12 year old Macbooks.
But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to.
The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).
I just replaced a battery on a mid 2012 retina macbook pro and set it up for my kids to use and I was amazed and how much it does basically everything just fine, which for them means playing videos and some light gaming. screen looks great still, keyboard is actually a bit nicer than the current one with a bit more travel. Speakers are terrible though.
My favorite and most beloved laptop was the T60 with an IPS display. It was rock-solid, had a docking station, a swappable CD drive and battery, and PDF manuals for disassembly. I wish I could buy something cool now to run a *nix OS, but I cannot find anything good besides the MacBook Pro.
I’m happy to see more pushback against consumer culture, and I’m happy this system meets the needs of the author.
Of course, the other part of this are people who use computers to do much heavier workloads.
There are a pretty large list of activities where every time you have some significant gain like ~50-300% performance gain, there may be legitimate justification to buy the new hardware.
As a person who plays games as a hobby I’m pretty much buying a new GPU/processor anytime there’s something affordable that will double my frame rate or anytime there’s a game that comes out that I can’t play or won’t play at decent settings.
My old hardware is never wasted, someone else buys it and uses it until it physically degrades too much to be used.
Computers as a hobby or working device are a heck of a lot less expensive and wasteful than a lot of other activities even if you go crazy on consumerism.
Think about the weight of your laptop and how that compares to the weight of just one gallon of gasoline. Surely a week to a month of commuting is worse for the planet than buying a brand new laptop, right? For the record, I don’t actually know for certain whether it is, but that seems like a fair guesstimation.
From a cost standpoint, $100 is damn impressive to have a working functional laptop that gets your work done, but arguably $1000 or $2000 isn’t a whole lot of monkey, either. That kind of money is roughly equivalent to one round trip ticket to Europe, renting a minivan for a week or two, a month of daycare or rent/mortgage, etc.
It’s both a lot of money and not a lot of money at the same time.
I find the thinkpads extemely cool, and I envy the customization / repair options soo much.
That said, I switched to a macbook pro last year and these machines are like from another world. I want to get things done instead of fiddling with the machine and, famous last words I know but, this thing just works.
Yes, it'll be e-waste the moment a small thing breaks, and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world, so it's no competition to the thinkpad.
I hope framework eventually delivers the best of both worlds.
I don't think Framework aims to be a laptop that you just set it up and forget.
You own everything and that comes with some concessions. Things won't always work, software will always be tricky to make fully compatible, etc.
But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.
That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
> I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
It really has. I bought a MacBook Pro in 2011 and used it throughout college. Worked great. I gave it to my friend’s little sister when she started college, and she ended up using it throughout her undergrad. She loved it, zero issues. So, that one MacBook got at least 9 years of use.
Fast forward to 2020, my wife needs a laptop for law school. I figure a MacBook pro would be the simplest, easiest, and most reliable option. It wasn’t. Not only had the cost gone up (I paid ~$1,300 for my MacBook pro, while hers cost ~$2,000 for the same options, but less), but using Microsoft apps like excel, word, and powerpoint was such a hassle sometimes. The apps kept signing her out or didn’t have certain options (like formatting) that were available in the Windows versions. Installing and working with third party apps that some of her professors and classes required was also a hassle, and those apps worked inconsistently. I remember having to give her my laptop a couple of times just so she could get her work done. The battery life was significantly worse compared to my older MacBook. Her MacBook seemed so much slower, couldn’t handle as much, and was overall a crap experience. The simplicity, reliability, and ease of use that used to separate Macs from windows laptops, especially for the average user, just didn't seem to be there anymore. It’s like whatever worked before, they got away from it.
So, anytime I hear someone say, “a MacBook is the best” these days all I think is, “yeah, nah, it’s crap, just like everything else, but slightly more expensive crap.”
2020 was when the ARM-based chips came out. Did you get her an Intel-based or M1-based mac? Because from 2017-2020 the Intel-based Macs were absolutely awful. I've owned several of them. The keyboards were terrible and they were slow.
I still have 2019 Macbook Airs sitting around, and I consider them completely unusable.
My wife has owned a 2020 M1 Macbook Air since then, and it's still working really well. To the extent that every time we talk about upgrading, we end up agreeing to wait.
First of all they need to offer shipping to anything but US / CA and parts of Europe. Would love to give them a shot but they seem to absolutely refuse to ship to Japan.
Not exactly the same model, but I really like the X280.
I've bought a couple of refurbished X280s to give to friends and family whenever they need a working laptop for light office/internet/email use.
Really nice laptops, super lightweight and durable, yet incredible affordable.
As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.
I built my own web tmux type thing running on a beefy metal box (for rust builds) that I access over tailscale. I was using HAPI, but I wanted to simplify and use rust for the back end and my own elm-like front-end to improve performance. I haven't published it since it's pretty specific to my workflow (I ruthlessly keep it as simple as possible), but you can think of it like a Herdr type thing in the browser. It also has a phone interface and I generally use speech instead of typing as a lot of my compositions can be stream of thought.
I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...
Have you run into any situations where you couldn't reach back to your server? I still have an m3 macbook pro w 64gb ram that I use for local qwen when my internet isn't great ie getting stuff done on a plane. Not sure if I'd feel a loss going to MBA and having a 24gb ram max or if it would be good for me to disconnect and just read a book instead
Not really. The connection speed doesn't have to be great. It's nice if it is, but you can function on slower connections no problem. That means if my land internet goes out, my phone hotspot is good enough as a fallback. I can go to a coffee shop or w/e. My dev box is not at home, it's on a rack, backed up.
I built a mobile client for agents called Cosyra. For this use case I'd say use chat to prompt an agent because it will queue the message for when you have internet and sends it as an https request so it's pretty lightweight. You can check it out here: cosyra.com
My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.
Thinkpad + Trackpad sounds all kinds of wrong. See that glorious red knob in the middle and those 3 buttons above the trackpad? That is what god intended. Now go and spin up some Emacs and a Sly + SBCL session and do the lord's work!
Macbook Air mid-2012 here. 8GB. I use Nixos without a desktop env, this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete. I have a 3090 in a desktop for messing around with LLMs but that's headless.
"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."
Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.
Since 2020 t14/t16 thinkpads no longer have a user swappable battery without removing screws. So you can get a 50wh standard battery or 82wh. Before 2020 you could get a slightly larger 96wh battery with a bump out, plus the small internal battery.
A power bank with a usb-c 65w pd will work for most laptops. Many of these will be 100wh/20000mah or 150wh/30000mah, to meet airplane limits.
I use a T480 as my daily driver and recently upgraded to a 72wh battery after the old 24wh pack died. I bought a Lenovo-branded Total Micro battery off of CDW to ensure I was actually getting what I paid for, as the last battery was a cheap knockoff that barely lasted a year. The 72wh battery was about a $10 difference to the 48wh battery and will easily last 10 hours but could last 14 hours with conservative use.
Same here. A T480 as my personal laptop. 4 core/8 thread i7 CPU, 24GB ram and 512GB NVMe.
Works for all my daily tasks, and light development. Feels nice and responsive.
I’m running arch Linux and my custom hyprland-fork, which I’m using for a more retro look and a little bit more mouse-affordances than Hyprland wants to provide.
I still own and use my original X250, which I bought new in 2015. I recently replaced the batteries and swapped out the internal Wi-Fi adapter for a €20 AX210NGW. It's almost laughable how easy both upgrades were. Everything works out of the box with every Linux distro I've tried, including the fingerprint sensor.
I prefer the keyboard on my T430, but the much better screen, slimmer form factor, and still pretty good keyboard make the X250 one of the best devices I've ever owned.
Dual batteries: my X250 on Linux, I'd like to set it up so when the external battery gets to 20% or less, the internal battery starts draining and the external no longer discharges. Can't work out how to do it. Tried Gnome/KDE and Debian/Fedora. Anyone cracked this?
PS: Mine was £100 as well, seems to be the going rate here in UK or was.
I had the same with X230. A lovely laptop that still serves as a home server after 10 years or so from being bought, and it was already used, post-lease machine back when I bought it.
MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS
Agreed. I had an x201 and an x250. The 250 main board eventually stopped working (I think due to flex when the laptop was picked up from one corner repeatedly -- a known issue from what I understand). My x201 still runs great (with occasional refreshes of the thermal paste). A version of the x201-x220 era machines with modern internals would be my dream machine.
And honestly, I am still daily driving that x220 with NetBSD and a T480 with OpenBSD and they do everything I need. Also running a Panasonic SV7 with OpenBSD.
All of them definitely not current gen beasts but if I can't make my shit run there, then what the hell am I even doing?
That was my first Mac! I loved it but those bezels were a doozy. I think that same form factor with a larger screen would be perfect. Although I wonder how close the Neo compares.
I have one of these maxed out at the time (512GB disk, 8GB RAM, fastest processor) and it runs Mint pretty well. It's a great light-task computer. But yeah those bezels.
The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?
IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.
Alas, as a Linux user, X11 doesn't seem to do that sort of thing: a 2-finger tap is nothing at all according to xev. 2-finger and 3-finger trackpad clicks are basically unreliable left and right mouse button clicks.
I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.
Depends on your laptop and exact trackpad model. I have a T470 and the trackpad works fine. That said, it does have three physical buttons (for working with the trackpoint), which I use with the trackpad when I want to do complex drag and drop operations.
The trackpoint of old is my favorite input method for laptops. But the trackpoint of new is not like the trackpoint of old. I still prefer it to the trackpad personally, just because it's so ingrained in me, but I no longer try to convince friends and family. It's on its way out, culturally, because of said enshittification.
I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.
It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.
At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.
I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.
I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.
The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.
Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.
I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.
don't buy it. I invested quite a bit into this rabbit hole, I ended up loving new macbook air much more. I've used this kind of a laptop for a few years
The x250 can also take up to 16gb ram, at least in most CPU configurations. Some models (the i3 at least) cannot.
Many people like the x220 best, because it has the old-style keyboard (does the x230 as well?). The x250 has surprisingly similar performance but much better battery life.
Which is better? I don't know, but I bought a x250 back in 2015 and am still using it as my personal laptop. It only sees light duty these days.
Had Lenovo (X220), followed by two top XPS 13" (lighter), then the first M1 (8gb), M1 Max (64gb!), and M3. Battery, weight, Linux-like, and UX (in that order) made the M1 practical to carry and reconverted my M1 Max into a server for LLM and computation. The M3 sometimes also work as a computing server in tandem. I would love to carry again my XPS 13" with Linux but the battery duration and lifetime makes it unusable for mobility.
I look forward to when these 5th-generation Intel chipsets are "jail broken" and the totality of device functionality is accessible with a management engine binary compiled from purely open source code.
My daughter has the same laptop (I bought it for her a long time ago). When she brought it with her when visiting me in Canada from Australia this summer, she asked me to look at it because Win10 wouldn't let her in and she needed her files and pics.
So, I booted a Fedora USB and backed up her files. When I asked her if she wanted me to install Fedora Workstation on it to continue using it, she said "Yes!" because "She loves this laptop and doesn't want to buy a new one."
Fedora runs beautifully fast on this system with 8GB of RAM and will probably last her a long time.
Reading about so many people daily-driving laptops built around a decade ago, if not more (which includes myself, happy owner of a T480s), and not suffering any major penalty in terms of overall usability and battery life, it really shows that the returns of having more CPU power/smaller lithography have been marginal for a very, very long time (CPUs haven't been an enabler for new use-cases/a major incentive to upgrade a laptop in recent history, AFAICT).
That's not to say there hasn't been progress in this space, but I'm also amused by the many comments along the lines of "my 2020 M1 is so revolutionary that it's all I need in 2026" in every other Apple thread. Probably all we've been needing has been some 14/10nm 8th/10th Gen Core i7 in a decent package? And about package, how come that this era's ThinkPads and pro Dells/HPs get a bigger "love-factor" than their contemporary intel MacBooks?
Now, reading more into it¹, it appears that what Intel was shipping 8th-generation Intel Core i5 8257Us (i.e. a 2017 Coffee Lake chip) in its MacBook Pros for as late as 2020, before switching over to the M series. No wonder they weren't getting much love!
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(Intel-based)#Tech...
My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
Like Land Rover owners, I’m always shocked that people look to buy a thing that has plenty of spare parts.
I’d much rather buy a thing that doesn’t need them. Two decades of laptops, never replaced a single thing or had an issue. Shot, I have not had a single app crash or system crash in 5+ years. Also two decades of driving around the world without a single breakdown.
The spare parts availability is not really about failures. It’s often about upgrades (and sometimes downgrades). Also there are accidents.
I originally bought my MacBook Air M1 just as a transitional computer because my old, incredibly expensive Intel MacBook Pro had been stolen, and I was waiting for a newer MacBook Pro model. But I grew so fond of the Air that I couldn't bring myself to part with it again. It's lightweight, has incredible performance (more powerful than the most powerful Intel-based Pros), the battery lasts a long time, the keyboard is comfortable, and the design is more curved than the Pro (and the newer Air models), which means it doesn't dig into your wrists.
I've owned an M1 Pro since its release and it's still going strong. I was going to see how long I could run it for. My bet was that by staying on Sequoia and/or installing Linux, I could run it for a ridiculous amount of time. I've met developers in the past with 12 year old Macbooks.
But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to.
The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).
Me too, base model M1 Pro from 2021 still runs like a dream.
I feel like I'm only gonna get pushed off this thing from software support being dropped.
Thirded. My sole regret is only getting 16GB of RAM.
I just replaced a battery on a mid 2012 retina macbook pro and set it up for my kids to use and I was amazed and how much it does basically everything just fine, which for them means playing videos and some light gaming. screen looks great still, keyboard is actually a bit nicer than the current one with a bit more travel. Speakers are terrible though.
If that m1 today came out as a 12” retina MacBook (2lb) it would be the first Apple product I’d ever line up for.
Neo is way too bulky/heavy.
My favorite and most beloved laptop was the T60 with an IPS display. It was rock-solid, had a docking station, a swappable CD drive and battery, and PDF manuals for disassembly. I wish I could buy something cool now to run a *nix OS, but I cannot find anything good besides the MacBook Pro.
sounds like you might appreciate the ethos behind https://frame.work/
Might not meet your spec reqs but have you looked into?
I’m happy to see more pushback against consumer culture, and I’m happy this system meets the needs of the author.
Of course, the other part of this are people who use computers to do much heavier workloads.
There are a pretty large list of activities where every time you have some significant gain like ~50-300% performance gain, there may be legitimate justification to buy the new hardware.
As a person who plays games as a hobby I’m pretty much buying a new GPU/processor anytime there’s something affordable that will double my frame rate or anytime there’s a game that comes out that I can’t play or won’t play at decent settings.
My old hardware is never wasted, someone else buys it and uses it until it physically degrades too much to be used.
Computers as a hobby or working device are a heck of a lot less expensive and wasteful than a lot of other activities even if you go crazy on consumerism.
Think about the weight of your laptop and how that compares to the weight of just one gallon of gasoline. Surely a week to a month of commuting is worse for the planet than buying a brand new laptop, right? For the record, I don’t actually know for certain whether it is, but that seems like a fair guesstimation.
From a cost standpoint, $100 is damn impressive to have a working functional laptop that gets your work done, but arguably $1000 or $2000 isn’t a whole lot of monkey, either. That kind of money is roughly equivalent to one round trip ticket to Europe, renting a minivan for a week or two, a month of daycare or rent/mortgage, etc.
It’s both a lot of money and not a lot of money at the same time.
I find the thinkpads extemely cool, and I envy the customization / repair options soo much.
That said, I switched to a macbook pro last year and these machines are like from another world. I want to get things done instead of fiddling with the machine and, famous last words I know but, this thing just works.
Yes, it'll be e-waste the moment a small thing breaks, and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world, so it's no competition to the thinkpad.
I hope framework eventually delivers the best of both worlds.
I don't think Framework aims to be a laptop that you just set it up and forget. You own everything and that comes with some concessions. Things won't always work, software will always be tricky to make fully compatible, etc.
But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.
That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
> I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
It really has. I bought a MacBook Pro in 2011 and used it throughout college. Worked great. I gave it to my friend’s little sister when she started college, and she ended up using it throughout her undergrad. She loved it, zero issues. So, that one MacBook got at least 9 years of use.
Fast forward to 2020, my wife needs a laptop for law school. I figure a MacBook pro would be the simplest, easiest, and most reliable option. It wasn’t. Not only had the cost gone up (I paid ~$1,300 for my MacBook pro, while hers cost ~$2,000 for the same options, but less), but using Microsoft apps like excel, word, and powerpoint was such a hassle sometimes. The apps kept signing her out or didn’t have certain options (like formatting) that were available in the Windows versions. Installing and working with third party apps that some of her professors and classes required was also a hassle, and those apps worked inconsistently. I remember having to give her my laptop a couple of times just so she could get her work done. The battery life was significantly worse compared to my older MacBook. Her MacBook seemed so much slower, couldn’t handle as much, and was overall a crap experience. The simplicity, reliability, and ease of use that used to separate Macs from windows laptops, especially for the average user, just didn't seem to be there anymore. It’s like whatever worked before, they got away from it.
So, anytime I hear someone say, “a MacBook is the best” these days all I think is, “yeah, nah, it’s crap, just like everything else, but slightly more expensive crap.”
2020 was when the ARM-based chips came out. Did you get her an Intel-based or M1-based mac? Because from 2017-2020 the Intel-based Macs were absolutely awful. I've owned several of them. The keyboards were terrible and they were slow.
I still have 2019 Macbook Airs sitting around, and I consider them completely unusable.
My wife has owned a 2020 M1 Macbook Air since then, and it's still working really well. To the extent that every time we talk about upgrading, we end up agreeing to wait.
First of all they need to offer shipping to anything but US / CA and parts of Europe. Would love to give them a shot but they seem to absolutely refuse to ship to Japan.
Not exactly the same model, but I really like the X280. I've bought a couple of refurbished X280s to give to friends and family whenever they need a working laptop for light office/internet/email use. Really nice laptops, super lightweight and durable, yet incredible affordable.
As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.
I built my own web tmux type thing running on a beefy metal box (for rust builds) that I access over tailscale. I was using HAPI, but I wanted to simplify and use rust for the back end and my own elm-like front-end to improve performance. I haven't published it since it's pretty specific to my workflow (I ruthlessly keep it as simple as possible), but you can think of it like a Herdr type thing in the browser. It also has a phone interface and I generally use speech instead of typing as a lot of my compositions can be stream of thought.
I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...
Have you run into any situations where you couldn't reach back to your server? I still have an m3 macbook pro w 64gb ram that I use for local qwen when my internet isn't great ie getting stuff done on a plane. Not sure if I'd feel a loss going to MBA and having a 24gb ram max or if it would be good for me to disconnect and just read a book instead
Not really. The connection speed doesn't have to be great. It's nice if it is, but you can function on slower connections no problem. That means if my land internet goes out, my phone hotspot is good enough as a fallback. I can go to a coffee shop or w/e. My dev box is not at home, it's on a rack, backed up.
I built a mobile client for agents called Cosyra. For this use case I'd say use chat to prompt an agent because it will queue the message for when you have internet and sends it as an https request so it's pretty lightweight. You can check it out here: cosyra.com
Yeah I just remote access my agent via cloud relay. There is no need in my experience for the laptop to have any oomph at all.
And once Anthropic has an outage you gonna be what...twiddling your thumbs?
This is how you justify dragging around some 2.5kg diving board of a laptop all the time?
So any cuck-coding machine serves the purpose?
My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.
Thinkpad + Trackpad sounds all kinds of wrong. See that glorious red knob in the middle and those 3 buttons above the trackpad? That is what god intended. Now go and spin up some Emacs and a Sly + SBCL session and do the lord's work!
Macbook Air mid-2012 here. 8GB. I use Nixos without a desktop env, this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete. I have a 3090 in a desktop for messing around with LLMs but that's headless.
> this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete
(Almost) same here, mid-2012 MBP here, running Solus with 12Gb RAM and a 500Gb SSD.
"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."
Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.
Since 2020 t14/t16 thinkpads no longer have a user swappable battery without removing screws. So you can get a 50wh standard battery or 82wh. Before 2020 you could get a slightly larger 96wh battery with a bump out, plus the small internal battery.
A power bank with a usb-c 65w pd will work for most laptops. Many of these will be 100wh/20000mah or 150wh/30000mah, to meet airplane limits.
I use a T480 as my daily driver and recently upgraded to a 72wh battery after the old 24wh pack died. I bought a Lenovo-branded Total Micro battery off of CDW to ensure I was actually getting what I paid for, as the last battery was a cheap knockoff that barely lasted a year. The 72wh battery was about a $10 difference to the 48wh battery and will easily last 10 hours but could last 14 hours with conservative use.
This is the specific battery I bought: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...
FYI brendo, here is the working link: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...
Whoops, thank you. I was one digit off; must have hit backspace when I pasted the link.
Same here. A T480 as my personal laptop. 4 core/8 thread i7 CPU, 24GB ram and 512GB NVMe.
Works for all my daily tasks, and light development. Feels nice and responsive.
I’m running arch Linux and my custom hyprland-fork, which I’m using for a more retro look and a little bit more mouse-affordances than Hyprland wants to provide.
Couldn’t be happier!
I still own and use my original X250, which I bought new in 2015. I recently replaced the batteries and swapped out the internal Wi-Fi adapter for a €20 AX210NGW. It's almost laughable how easy both upgrades were. Everything works out of the box with every Linux distro I've tried, including the fingerprint sensor.
I prefer the keyboard on my T430, but the much better screen, slimmer form factor, and still pretty good keyboard make the X250 one of the best devices I've ever owned.
Dual batteries: my X250 on Linux, I'd like to set it up so when the external battery gets to 20% or less, the internal battery starts draining and the external no longer discharges. Can't work out how to do it. Tried Gnome/KDE and Debian/Fedora. Anyone cracked this?
PS: Mine was £100 as well, seems to be the going rate here in UK or was.
I had the same with X230. A lovely laptop that still serves as a home server after 10 years or so from being bought, and it was already used, post-lease machine back when I bought it.
MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS
> MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS
Asahi Linux if you want to.
My X41 from 2005 has the same trackpad and “trackpoint” and still runs Debian Bookworm just fine.
My favorite laptop is the Framework 16.
An old x220 (which I have), but a bit more modern and fully OpenBSD supported would be my dream.
Agreed. I had an x201 and an x250. The 250 main board eventually stopped working (I think due to flex when the laptop was picked up from one corner repeatedly -- a known issue from what I understand). My x201 still runs great (with occasional refreshes of the thermal paste). A version of the x201-x220 era machines with modern internals would be my dream machine.
And honestly, I am still daily driving that x220 with NetBSD and a T480 with OpenBSD and they do everything I need. Also running a Panasonic SV7 with OpenBSD.
All of them definitely not current gen beasts but if I can't make my shit run there, then what the hell am I even doing?
I mean, there is the expensive option for the x210ai if you don't know about it https://www.tpart.net/about-x210ai/
I think my favorite still has to be the MacBook Air 11”. Wish they’d make that size again.
That was my first Mac! I loved it but those bezels were a doozy. I think that same form factor with a larger screen would be perfect. Although I wonder how close the Neo compares.
I had one of these in university, and those were the days. I remember coding Lisp on iTerm2. I dug up two photos I have of using it.
https://imgur.com/a/SO19Rke
I have one of these maxed out at the time (512GB disk, 8GB RAM, fastest processor) and it runs Mint pretty well. It's a great light-task computer. But yeah those bezels.
the new 13" has to be close to the same size with the lack of bezels, doesn't it?
The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?
IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.
Two-finger tap acts as the right-click. Also clicking and holding the bottom-right corner.
But I don’t pretend that any of these gestures make trackpads usable.
Alas, as a Linux user, X11 doesn't seem to do that sort of thing: a 2-finger tap is nothing at all according to xev. 2-finger and 3-finger trackpad clicks are basically unreliable left and right mouse button clicks.
I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.
Depends on your laptop and exact trackpad model. I have a T470 and the trackpad works fine. That said, it does have three physical buttons (for working with the trackpoint), which I use with the trackpad when I want to do complex drag and drop operations.
ThinkPads seem to still have physical buttons for clicking:
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
My X1 Carbon Gen13 has physical mouse buttons - I totally love them.
They're enshittified now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92bdOcsBVpQ
The ThinkPad is still the only recent-ish laptop you can actually buy with a trackpoint and a full-size ethernet port.
The trackpoint of old is my favorite input method for laptops. But the trackpoint of new is not like the trackpoint of old. I still prefer it to the trackpad personally, just because it's so ingrained in me, but I no longer try to convince friends and family. It's on its way out, culturally, because of said enshittification.
The HP Fury 16 has buttons below the touchpad. Maybe there are no other new laptops with buttons in that position.
The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.
Maybe it's just me but I find the buttons below the spacebar far more convenient to use together with the touchpad.
I thought i was crazy looking for mouse buttons in laptops, seems like the cool thing to do is leave them out.
Everyone trying to make a laptop that looks like Apple but doesn't work like one.
I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.
It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.
At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.
I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.
I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.
The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.
Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.
I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.
don't buy it. I invested quite a bit into this rabbit hole, I ended up loving new macbook air much more. I've used this kind of a laptop for a few years
Looking on eBay, it looks like I'm spending quite a bit more than $100 to get an old thinkpad of this era.
Why is this the favorite when the years older x230 takes up to 16GB ram ?
The x250 can also take up to 16gb ram, at least in most CPU configurations. Some models (the i3 at least) cannot.
Many people like the x220 best, because it has the old-style keyboard (does the x230 as well?). The x250 has surprisingly similar performance but much better battery life.
Which is better? I don't know, but I bought a x250 back in 2015 and am still using it as my personal laptop. It only sees light duty these days.
> does the x230 as well?
No, but you can fit an X220 keyboard into the X230.
Had Lenovo (X220), followed by two top XPS 13" (lighter), then the first M1 (8gb), M1 Max (64gb!), and M3. Battery, weight, Linux-like, and UX (in that order) made the M1 practical to carry and reconverted my M1 Max into a server for LLM and computation. The M3 sometimes also work as a computing server in tandem. I would love to carry again my XPS 13" with Linux but the battery duration and lifetime makes it unusable for mobility.
I look forward to when these 5th-generation Intel chipsets are "jail broken" and the totality of device functionality is accessible with a management engine binary compiled from purely open source code.
You can install Libreboot on 8th gen Thinkpads now, if that helps:
https://libreboot.org/docs/install/t480.html
Nipple .