<story><title>Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480</title><url>https://maxrozen.com/replacing-my-macbook-m1-with-thinkpad-t480</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yamtaddle</author><text>Every single laptop I owned before switching to Apple was a huge piece of shit, in hindsight—like, probably shouldn&amp;#x27;t have been saleable, just a straight-up lemon by design.&lt;p&gt;... &lt;i&gt;except&lt;/i&gt; an IBM (yes, it&amp;#x27;s that long ago) Thinkpad that was super-underpowered even for the time. Though, it &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; have the ~2-3hr actual-in-practice battery life that was typical of laptops at the time, no matter what they promised, so like all the rest the battery was really just for hopping from one outlet to the next (I don&amp;#x27;t know if Apple laptops were like that at the time, but I do know that no subsequent laptop let me feel like I could leave my power brick behind when getting up from my desk until I got a Macbook)&lt;p&gt;If I ever go back to PC-land, it&amp;#x27;ll be to an underpowered device from a business-oriented line. Worked once, so, maybe it&amp;#x27;ll work again...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son.&lt;p&gt;This especially is a big part of your problem. Discrete graphics card in a laptop = 2x the problems—and that holds even for Apple (in the Intel days, anyway). Gaming-marketed on top of that? Add another 1x for 3x the rate of trouble over baseline. Avoid, avoid, avoid.</text></item><item><author>browningstreet</author><text>Regarding Lenovo:&lt;p&gt;I bought an original Macbook Air. It always worked well. As it got on to about 10 years old, I took it in to an Apple Store a couple miles from my house and asked if they could replace the battery. The battery worked pretty well, but I figured.. the machine was going strong and if they still had batteries in stock, I should grab one now and the laptop will live even longer. They replaced the battery for $99 and when it came back (3 days later), they also replaced the motherboard for some reason. I don&amp;#x27;t know why, but basically, aside from the screen and the keyboard, it&amp;#x27;s a new machine. I still use it today -- the only thing I can&amp;#x27;t really do on it is edit 4K video.&lt;p&gt;Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son. A couple of weeks ago the keyboard stopped working. We bought a replacement keyboard and swapped it out. Still didn&amp;#x27;t work. So, something on the motherboard. When we called and asked about getting it fixed, they said it wasn&amp;#x27;t in warranty anymore and the price to diagnose and replace the broken part couldn&amp;#x27;t be estimated, nor could they estimate how long it would take. We&amp;#x27;d have to ship it to a third-party repair center. So my son is walking around his college campus with a Lenovo laptop and an external keyboard, for a laptop we bought 2 years ago for almost $2,000.&lt;p&gt;So, no. No Lenovo for me. And given my previous stupendously negative experience with Dell (they couldn&amp;#x27;t repair 2 brand new machines that were shipped to us with broken WiFi and took so long to declare it unrepairable the machines couldn&amp;#x27;t be returned either -- two machines bought together had to be reported in separate calls to tech support and the third party tech support people who came to the house weren&amp;#x27;t very knowledgable -- calls disputing the non-returnable declaration took so long to return and were bounced among so many unhelpful people at Dell Headquarters they basically convinced me to give up, buy third-party wifi cards and live without Bluetooth in these machines), no Dell XPS laptops for me either.&lt;p&gt;On those experiences, I&amp;#x27;ll only spend my own money on Apple laptop hardware.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>IggleSniggle</author><text>You know what? I’ve only had my Steam Deck for slightly under a year, but I’m honestly astounded at the amount of abuse it has endured without showing any apparent problems. I’m very curious to see how long it lasts.&lt;p&gt;I doubt it will be competitive with a Switch for durability, which is the closest mirror to a Deck that also has some similarities to Apple-style hardware-quality + lock-in.&lt;p&gt;But that said, I’ve had problems with Apple laptop keyboards after only a couple years of use, and had a laptop monitor from Apple start to yellow bizarrely after less than a year. Nintendo joycons started having issues after under a year.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you’re just at the bad-end of the bell-curve. It’s a shame that online reviews aren’t that helpful anymore; it can be hard to know what’s real with consumer tech, and hard to know how big the lemon segment is.</text></comment>
<story><title>Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480</title><url>https://maxrozen.com/replacing-my-macbook-m1-with-thinkpad-t480</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yamtaddle</author><text>Every single laptop I owned before switching to Apple was a huge piece of shit, in hindsight—like, probably shouldn&amp;#x27;t have been saleable, just a straight-up lemon by design.&lt;p&gt;... &lt;i&gt;except&lt;/i&gt; an IBM (yes, it&amp;#x27;s that long ago) Thinkpad that was super-underpowered even for the time. Though, it &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; have the ~2-3hr actual-in-practice battery life that was typical of laptops at the time, no matter what they promised, so like all the rest the battery was really just for hopping from one outlet to the next (I don&amp;#x27;t know if Apple laptops were like that at the time, but I do know that no subsequent laptop let me feel like I could leave my power brick behind when getting up from my desk until I got a Macbook)&lt;p&gt;If I ever go back to PC-land, it&amp;#x27;ll be to an underpowered device from a business-oriented line. Worked once, so, maybe it&amp;#x27;ll work again...&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son.&lt;p&gt;This especially is a big part of your problem. Discrete graphics card in a laptop = 2x the problems—and that holds even for Apple (in the Intel days, anyway). Gaming-marketed on top of that? Add another 1x for 3x the rate of trouble over baseline. Avoid, avoid, avoid.</text></item><item><author>browningstreet</author><text>Regarding Lenovo:&lt;p&gt;I bought an original Macbook Air. It always worked well. As it got on to about 10 years old, I took it in to an Apple Store a couple miles from my house and asked if they could replace the battery. The battery worked pretty well, but I figured.. the machine was going strong and if they still had batteries in stock, I should grab one now and the laptop will live even longer. They replaced the battery for $99 and when it came back (3 days later), they also replaced the motherboard for some reason. I don&amp;#x27;t know why, but basically, aside from the screen and the keyboard, it&amp;#x27;s a new machine. I still use it today -- the only thing I can&amp;#x27;t really do on it is edit 4K video.&lt;p&gt;Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son. A couple of weeks ago the keyboard stopped working. We bought a replacement keyboard and swapped it out. Still didn&amp;#x27;t work. So, something on the motherboard. When we called and asked about getting it fixed, they said it wasn&amp;#x27;t in warranty anymore and the price to diagnose and replace the broken part couldn&amp;#x27;t be estimated, nor could they estimate how long it would take. We&amp;#x27;d have to ship it to a third-party repair center. So my son is walking around his college campus with a Lenovo laptop and an external keyboard, for a laptop we bought 2 years ago for almost $2,000.&lt;p&gt;So, no. No Lenovo for me. And given my previous stupendously negative experience with Dell (they couldn&amp;#x27;t repair 2 brand new machines that were shipped to us with broken WiFi and took so long to declare it unrepairable the machines couldn&amp;#x27;t be returned either -- two machines bought together had to be reported in separate calls to tech support and the third party tech support people who came to the house weren&amp;#x27;t very knowledgable -- calls disputing the non-returnable declaration took so long to return and were bounced among so many unhelpful people at Dell Headquarters they basically convinced me to give up, buy third-party wifi cards and live without Bluetooth in these machines), no Dell XPS laptops for me either.&lt;p&gt;On those experiences, I&amp;#x27;ll only spend my own money on Apple laptop hardware.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thrill</author><text>&amp;quot;If I ever go back to PC-land, it&amp;#x27;ll be to an underpowered device from a business-oriented line.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If I ever need a PC again, it&amp;#x27;ll be by running Parallels on a Mac Air.</text></comment>