It appears this thread was last written three years ago, so it’s as good a time as any to take the opportunity and ask:
Which laptops are people working on, now it’s 2022? Do you use it professionally? Would you pick this same machine if given the chance to replace it?
MacBook Pro M1 Max for work, Reg M1 for personal. I kid you not I can go for a weekend with these laptops and use them extensively and I will have battery left come Monday. I have been missing my OpenBSD machine but alas. The hardware is super solid and the battery life and performance have been amazing.
Mostly the same here, 16” with M1 Pro for work and 14” with M1 Pro for personal use. The hardware is incredible honestly, they don’t get hot, they done make noise, just this Monday I noticed that there was a faint sound of wind coming from my laptop and then remembered I’d had a Chromium compile using 100% of all cores for the past couple of hours. Any previous laptop I’ve owned (mostly Dells) or any of the Intel macs in the office would’ve been painfully hot and loud as a jet for the whole duration – while compiling Chromium less than half as quickly.
The Intel monopoly in the laptop space desperately needs to come to an end, and PC manufacturers need to drastically step up their game. I’m not a huge fan of macOS, but I can’t defend getting vastly inferior PC hardware (in terms of performance, battery life, build quality and the screen/speakers/webcam/etc) at the same price just to be able to run an OS I prefer.
I hope Asahi gets really good, because dual booting macOS and Linux on these things would be amazing.
Are you buying new hardware, or used?
I paid AUD325 for my refurbished ThinkPad W520 w/ 16GiB RAM back in 2018, and transplanted the (fast) SSD from my old X220 into it.
Yeah, the M1 that my employer issued me is superior in most respects to the W520. But it’s literally an order of magnitude more expensive new.
I’m buying hardware new for the most part.
I don’t tend to go for cheap hardware, I know PC manufacturers are way more competitive in the lower market segments than where the MacBook Pro operates. Apple also has insane pricing on things like storage space, so if you need a couple terabytes it very quickly becomes a much worse value proposition, and the lack of upgradability absolutely sucks. But if you’re looking for something around the MacBook Pro price range, and don’t need more than around 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM, it’s really, really hard to find a better laptop than the MacBook Pro in my experience; at least when factoring in qualities like the screen and speakers and trackpad.
Agreed. That M1 that I’ve started using is indisputably the next generation of laptop; nothing I’ve used that is Intel based comes close. It also has better sound than the Bluetooth speaker currently adorning my desk.
But a while ago I switched to refurb and I haven’t looked back.
Leaving aside my wife who runs new XPSs (also on Ubuntu) I bought the rest of our family fleet - 1 x W520 for me and 3 x X250s for the kids (so we can share docking stations, etc.) - for around AUD1,200 in total.
Indisputably? According to who?
Have you read the articles around the M1 vs Intel cpus in laptops (here’s just one)? These M1 cpus are incredibly powerful, about as powerful as the intel cpus if not more so. But they use half the energy in all comparisons. On top of Apple moving over to arm, there’s also Windows 11 built for arm and chromebooks too. I’m happy that arm is rising in popularity, so maybe we won’t just have to go with only Intel or AMD in the future.
That’s from a year ago, and a disingenuous time frame as well being pre-Tiger Lake. Here’s one from last month, PCMag, that shows Apple wininng at effecincy but losing out to AMD and Intel in several benchmarks. The differences aren’t great, but “indisputable” is the wrong word, as here it is, being disputed.
I think my use of that word literally made your head explode.
;)
I only see power being disputed there, and not by a huge margin either. Efficiency is still going to be a huge part of “the next generation of laptops.” That’s why you don’t have phones running x86 processors. Also with microsoft developing windows for arm, Apple with its m1, and google’s chromebooks, I still firmly believe that arm is indisputably the future for laptops, and hopefully desktops while we’re at it.
If not RISC coming around the corner before then. It will be a while for the industry adjusts to a non-x86 architecture. Microsoft has had ARM support for ages and was garbage. I used Ubuntu on ARM Chromebook in 2012 and still to this day, a lot of binaries aren’t available. Steam Deck had to be x86 or there’d be no games.
Okay, fair cop - that was rhetorical flourish, but only slightly, and I didn’t mean to preclude the idea that other laptops are similarly good.
To explain a bit further: the M1 represents a step change from previous laptops I’ve used in terms of battery life, convenience, and general usability in some ways. For example: no fan, no touchbar, usable keyboard, magsafe power adaptor, actual ports in addition to USB-C, etc.
There may certainly be Intel laptops at a similar level, but in which case, they also would be the “next generation” of laptops compared with the XPSs and X and W series I’m used to running.
Also, I’m still going to DIY my next laptop, because I’m quite sick of almost everything about “consumer” (how I hate that term) laptops and operating systems. But the M1 will make that a harder trade-off.
W540 :/
I mean, I looked at the the prices of new X-series ThinkPads and all except IIRC the X13 were more expensive than a base MacBook Air, and usually worse specced, not to mention things hard to put on a specsheet like mouthfeel/build quality.
You might not be buying used, but someone else has to buy new in the first place for used to actually happen.
Yup, and just as with cars, I will continue to benefit from the second hand market while not really understanding why people buy new in the first place.
I had strongly considered getting a used W520 years back. The ability to just buy replacement and extended capacity batteries, the DVD drive bay which can be repurposed, no numeric keypad, sufficient RAM… that was all great. I think the prices back in 2015 / 2016 were still a bit high for a used system, so I didn’t get one back then. The other thing giving me pause would have been the weight.
Actually I’d recommend the 521, as the 520 has an awful trackpad. I still have a 521 trackpad in my workshop to fit to the 520 at some point.
Argh, I meant 540/541 here.
Argh! Following this up like some of my other posts … I meant a W540, not a W520.
Yeah, this part is impressive. I can get with the Air 8 hours continuous with max brightness, and light usage at like half brightness for a week, maybe two. It’s a fully fledged laptop you can treat like an iPad battery life wise.
My boss, a long-time Apple hater, ended up getting an M1 MBP which he took on a two-week vacation. He told me that he realized a week in that he forgot to pack its charger, then realized “woah, it’s been a week… and I only now thought about charging it?!” Turns out it had just over 50% charge. He turned the screen brightness down and brought it home with over 10% to go.
He now begrudgingly respects Apple.
I was really wanting an arm laptop for the battery life after hearing about how well the M1 cpus performed. But I couldn’t justify spending so much money on an Apple product, I just don’t like them that much personally. I bought a Galaxy Book Go instead for under $300. Pretty dang cheap for a laptop, and obviously the specs show for it. But I like it so far. I’m gonna wait until Ubuntu 22.04 is officially released and install it probably.
For work I use a regular Galaxy Book with Ubuntu on it. It works very well for what I do, no problem running my dev environment.
I can compile things on it without fans making noise, at a speed competitive with a big Ryzen box. M1 is so good that I can forgive Apple the dark days of TouchBar and janky keyboards.
I had just built a Ryzen 3600 hackintosh when the M1 Air came out. I had spent a lot on cooling to try and get it to run silently. It was still annoyingly audible.
I bought the M1 Air and it was the same speed for everything I tried it on - and was a laptop. With no fan.
I sold the Ryzen tower straight away.
I use professionally a refurbished ThinkPad T450 with Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed, but I’ll soon switch to openSUSE Leap) with 16 GiB RAM. It works flawlessly for operations, but also for Rust / Go / Erlang development! (Although for Rust it is somewhat slow, but not too much…)
Why such an old laptop? None of the “newer” ones actually meet the following simple requirements:
have proper SATA disk support; I want to be able to just remove my SSD from one laptop and put it into another one and be up-and-running within 30 minutes! (this is the third laptop I’ve moved my SSD through with barely touching my Linux
/etcconfigurations;) (sure, I only get ~500 MiB/s I/O with SATA, meanwhile with a proper NVMe I would get ~2-3 GiB/s, but guess what, even ~500 MiB/s is good enough…)have a proper Ethernet RJ45 connector; I can’t imagine why on earth a sysadmin (or even a developer) would choose a laptop without a proper network connector… (see the next point about dongles;)
HDMI (or DisplayPort), again I can’t imagine why wouldn’t one want a proper monitor plug?
no “dongle madness” – I don’t want to carry with me “dongles”, “adapters”, “docking stations”, etc.; I want proper USB, HDMI/DisplayPort, Ethernet connectors in my laptop!
memory should be self-serviceable, not be soldered on! (as should the disk, and other important components…)
if possible, it shouldn’t cost me a kidney!
(at this point battery life, display quality, Intel vs AMD, become moot, as by the middle of my list, most “business” laptops fail to meet the requirements…)
What would I be replacing it with? A ThinkPad T460 or T470, as the T480 and newer seem to fail to meet the proper SATA support… (Or perhaps a Tuxedo laptop, as they ship in Europe without increasing the price too much… I also like the Framework laptop idea, but at the moment it’s a bit pricey…)
Colleagues at work have been hearing me saying that a laptop without a RJ45 connector is an expensive tablet with a built-in keyboard.
I can count the number of times I’ve used the network jack on a laptop (or wished I could) in the past few years on zero hands. If you’re a sysadmin, sure that’s one thing, but I can’t imagine going anywhere where I have Ethernet access but not wifi. Even if I do I can just use an adapter or something.
Nothing stops you from moving a m.2 drive between laptops. Even easier in many cases to move into a desktop, since you don’t need to fuzz with cables.
Well no… M.2 is no SATA in practical terms…
The M.2 format supports both SATA and NVMe. However older laptops support only M.2 SATA, and lately you can’t easily find M.2 SATA drives, and when you do the prices are quite high… (I know because I had to buy a few for some HP t620 thin clients.)
Then, with SATA people already have lying around USB to SATA adapters or enclosures, or if not any decent general store has one on the shelf. Plus in a desktop one has 6 or more SATA ports and only a handful M.2 connectors.
(Not to mention how easily one can damage an M.2 SSD with all the circuitry in the open, as opposed to the encased one with SATA.)
Thus perhaps M.2 is a good alternative to soldered-on SSD in laptops and other consumer devices, but I don’t think they are a good choice for professional equipment. (Although NVMe might provide increased bandwidth as opposed to SATA.)
It’ll be all NVMe before long, already well headed that way. I have a nice USB-C to M.2 NVMe enclosure that I bought when I had to pull data off of a dead laptop; it’s ludicrously fast and also quite small.
Personal: framework laptop kitted with wifi, 1 tb nvme, zfs on root, and 32 gigs of ram on one stick (for easy upgrading later to 64). I still like it, would still pick it again.
Work: 2018 mbp 16 inches, 16 gigs of ram. Given a chance I’d upgrade to an M1. I thrash out of ram without really trying.
What OS do you use? How is the battery life with non-windows?
I’ve heard there have been battery issues under Linux.
As far as I know, the issue is with Tiger Lake being broken, not capable of entering certain sleep states. It should manifest itself on Windows too. I’ve stopped using sleep, instead I turn off my laptop every time lid is closed. Fortunately, startup time is really small.
I’m using Fedora on my Framework, as that’s what Framework was recommending as having the best hardware support when I got it. (They now also bill Ubuntu as “Essentially fully functional out of the box.”)
The problem I was having was that the laptop would completely drain its battery with the lid closed in “s2idle” mode. I was able to fix this by switching to “deep” sleep, at the cost of it taking ~10 seconds to wake up, which has not really inconvenienced me. https://github.com/junaruga/framework-laptop-config/wiki/Battery-Life:-Change-sleep-mode-from-s2idle-to-deep
There are probably more advanced things I could do to improve battery life, but with that straightforward fix, it doesn’t lose more than 10-20% of battery charge if left sleeping unplugged overnight. That’s good enough to be usable for my purposes.
This seems correct. I tell it to go into deep sleep, but the battery drain when suspended is still too high. Three days unplugged at most.
But I use my suspend to ram ability, and the battery drain there is zero. I get about 6 hours active usage if I squeeze on my entirely untuned Void Linux install. I’m comfortable using about 30 to 50 percent of the battery on my most common flight routes (2.5, 3.5 hours flight time)
I tell it to go into deep sleep, but the battery drain when suspended is still too high. Three days unplugged at most.
But I use my suspend to ram ability, and the battery drain there is zero. I get about 6 hours active usage if I squeeze on my entirely untuned Void Linux install. I’m comfortable using about 30 to 50 percent of the battery on my most common flight routes (2.5, 3.5 hours flight time)
6th generation Thinkpad X1, cannot think of a better machine at this point in time (only wish it would be more repairable) - X220 for recreation
I use a 5th gen X1 Carbon and keep failing to find a good reason to update it.
T480 with 32G ram and 2T Sata SSD, external 27” 4K monitor as second screen, though most work is done on the t480’s display, with the external used for dashboards, videoconf displays and groupchat only. A logitech (silent) wireless mouse on a unified receiver. I run Debian stable, with some gnome tweaks to make it look/feel more gnome-2-ish.
I have a bunch of x230’s and I treat them as fungible (although I also have nice ones with custom hardware I haven’t really set them up yet). The thing is; I don’t want to have to care a lot about these laptop things, I just want a good keyboard and some battery life.. then I can throw them into a backpack without caring and be pretty mobile without worry. Also, I like having many chargers / batteries so I don’t get blocked if I lose anything (laptop, charger, battery.. all fungible).
System76 Lemur Pro (lemp10), 14”, 1080p, i7, 40GB RAM, 1TB NVMe.
I have a few small complaints (keyboard layout could be better, one USB-C is sometimes not enough) but overall it works a charm, it’s portable, it has the power to do everything I need it to do, and the battery lasts forever if I use it lightly. Overall I enjoy it.
Basically the same here. My biggest complaint is that the speakers are bad :(
Yeah, that’s fair too. I miss when laptops were big enough to incorporate decent speakers. 20 years ago I had a Toshiba that looked like this. You see those speakers above the keyboard? They could make some noise!
I have an M1 for work and the speakers are very good. Like, not as good as real ones or a nice pair of headphones, but good enough that you can notice the subtle things.
Also, wow, that thing looks weird with no touchpad and just a couple of buttons. I mean, I prefer the trackpoint anyway, it’s just visually weird.
Intel MacBook Pro, late 2020, 16GB RAM. Use it professionally and as a daily driver. I love it and probably won’t use any non Apple machines for work again (barring any radical changes to the hardware/OS). It handles multiple intellij projects, several DBs and microservices running under docker, countless Chrome tabs, and Slack all with no performance hiccups. Only downside is that wifi connectivity after the latest OS update has been wonky and it has crashed randomly before (but never while in active use).
I think that was the first one that I considered to be an improvement over the late 2013 model (most of the later ones had awful keyboards), but even then it wasn’t better by enough of a margin to upgrade. I’m still using a late 2013 model. My partner was using my 2011 one and when it died, we replaced it with a second-hand late 2013 one. They’re very cheap now. I’m quite tempted by an M1 model, but I might wait until the M2 comes out (and then either buy one or get an M1 model second hand).
Recently replaced a 2012 Macbook Pro 13” with a Macbook Pro 16” M1 Pro.
Very happy with it so far, especially the larger screen and lack of fan noise.
Thinkpad T15 Gen2 for personal stuff, which I LOVE except that the screen becomes unusable from glare in direct sunlight.
Otherwise it’s a beautiful laptop. I get 12 hours of battery for light work and 5-8 for heavy stuff. Great keyboard with good tactile feedback, way enough perf for such a small device.
I also use a work issued 2017 Macbook Pro which I LOATHE as it has the dread butterfly keyboard. Seriously it’s the single worst keyboard I have ever typed on - save maybe for the Atari 400 with its membrane pressure sensitive ‘keys’ that was my first computer :)
Looking forward to being eligible for refresh in 4 months when I’ll choose a 16” Macbook Pro M1. They’re quite nice.
Work: XPS with 16GB of RAM, ubuntu. Wifi started having hiccups lately, also there is a minor issue with hindge/monitor connection that sometimes causes flashes of distorted screen. Aside from that, I’m very happy with this laptop.
Private: Framework with 32GB of RAM on a single stick, NixOS. Would pick it again. Build quality is something else, wifi is also rock solid.
I’m using a ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 Ryzen 7 4750U and 32 GB running ZorinOS for my personal projects, definitely the best ThinkPad I ever had, old Thinkpad T480 with i5-8350U and 16 GB running Ubuntu for work, both on external Dell P2418HZM 24” video conference full hd led monitor, keychron k3 keyboard, Logitech MX Vertical mouse and Pinebook PRO with OpenBSD for fun.
Last 3 computers in reverse order:
The M1 MacBook Air is completely fanless.
2011-era Thinkpad T520, upgraded to 16 GB of RAM and a sizeable SSD. I use it at home, including for development.
I don’t like anything new that’s coming out of Lenovo, so I have a couple of slightly newer refurbished Thinkpads that I’ll use when this one finally gives up the ghost.
Seconded. This is my home-office OS testing machine. Mine so far has only 10GB though.
Personal travel machine: Thinkpad T420 or X220, depending on how much luggage I’m taking. The keyboards on anything newer are unpleasant to use for me.
Zephyrus G14 - AMD 4900HS, 40GB, 2060 Super. Super lightweight, great battery life, no camera which I like.
I’m using a Macbook Air M1 with 16GB of RAM. It is probably the best laptop I have ever used and I’m really happy with it. I grew up with macOS so I’m at home on that machine. I’ve used Windows, Linux, and multiple BSDs on other laptops but macOS still my favourite OS. I use it professionally, but it is also my personal machine. I don’t have a need for containers, so my workflow and needs are probably very different from other people here. I wouldn’t switch this machine for another one. I don’t see what a Macbook Pro could offer that would justify upgrading.
The aspect of a laptop that is most important to me is battery life. I’ll take a slower machine, a smaller screen, anything as long as my battery life is good. I enjoy working from coffee shops, bookshops, and libraries. Sometimes I’ll go to multiple locations on a single day. Being able to to sit down and work from anywhere without caring about power sockets and power banks is wonderful.
The Surface Pro X I used before this Mac was almost perfect. It had a good battery life; it was more versatile than a laptop, and it had a 4G modem. The only thing that made me switch away from it was the fact that Microsoft never gave Windows on ARM the attention it needed to succeed.
Lenovo T495 under FreeBSD 13.1 for personal and I replaced my X1C6 for work with a beefy Dell desktop workstation under Arch (no BSD because Docker and other things). I have no real need for a laptop hence the big Dell and I think my next personal machine won’t be a laptop either. No need for computing on the move.
I’m still working on a Thinkpad T480 from early 2018. It’s OK. It has the i7, 32GB RAM, and the 1TB OEM NVMe SSD along with a second 256GB 40mm NVMe drive.
I’ve had to replace the RAM once because the RAM it shipped with was defective, and I’ve replaced the keyboard twice because the trackpoint went bad twice. It’s also on its second large external battery.
It’s got the high DPI screen, and it’s not terrible but it’s a noticeable step down from the 13” MacBook Pro that preceded it. It spends most of its time attached to a Thunderbolt dock lately, driving a Dell 30” display from 2012.
It runs Linux well… I currently use Garuda on there and used Fedora before.
I like that the keyboard is OK and the batteries last me all day. The large external battery also makes it more comfortable to type on the built-in keyboard when I’m using it on the road. I like that it’s well supported by Linux.
I’ve been just annoyed enough by the hardware issues that I wouldn’t be eager to buy another one, but not quite annoyed enough to get rid of it.
I’m not sure what I’d use instead. Possibly a Mac, a Framework or something from System76. But there are tradeoffs to all of those that don’t really leave me any happier than the T480 does. Lenovo hasn’t produced a machine since the T480 that I like very much, either.
I suppose at the end of the day, I just don’t like laptops very much even though I do like being able to carry my whole computer with me when I go somewhere.
I am still using my librebooted Thinkpad x200 with different user environments for personal/work use. It has 8GB of RAM, an SSD, and a usb 3.0 express card expansion. I like the form factor and I/O available, but now that it is 2022 I might start thinking about a device that support HDMI…
I’m not really in a rush to buy anything new though. If I could afford it I’d definitely be eyeing an MNT Reform laptop. Though I might wait to see more third parties adopt the design and fabricate new boards for it. I want a laptop that can be maintained like a kalishnikov.
When my employer offered to get me a new laptop I requested a Librem 14. I was tired of putting up with the crap Lenovo has been releasing the last few years and actually dreaded having to buy a new laptop when the old one gave out. If I had to get a laptop from my own money I’d probably have gone with a known quantity (either a Dell XPS developer edition or a, sigh, Lenovo. Apple used to be nice but is now starting to become flaky and is always overpriced) but this was my chance to try something new without blowing a lot of my own hard earned money.
I’m quite happy with it! I also got my Librem 5 but it’s about as useful as a brick. Thankfully I received it much later, or I would’ve probably avoided the Librem 14. It makes me think Purism should’ve stuck to producing just laptops.
The case build quality is fantastic, its sturdy metal is much better than the plastic cases of Lenovo (which kept cracking and chipping on me, I had to replace my wristpad twice!), comparable to a MacBook.
The keyboard is okayish. The keys are large, but quite soft and it’s easy to accidentally mistype. It’s a bit awkward for me with the ctrl and fn keys swapped (but then again, some people prefer ctrl in the lower left corner!). I use an external Redragon K552 mechanical keyboard, so I don’t have to use it much. The trackpad is nice and big (something like Macbook size) but doesn’t get in the way when typing.
The (matte!) screen is super bright and clear as day (a far cry from the ghosting-prone x320 display). I love love love the built-in kill switch for camera and microphone. It’s really a (drumroll) killer feature! There’s also a kill switch for wifi and bluetooth, but I’ve never used it in anger.
We maxed out the memory at 64GB of RAM and got a 2TB NVMe SSD. I can’t complain about that either ;)
However, even though I’d probably buy it again if I had to buy a new laptop out of my own pocket, it does have a few downsides:
In the beginning I had some issues with the battery, it wouldn’t charge for obscure reasons. I fixed it with some arcane Linux incantation. This would’ve been a dealbreaker for non-technical folks, though.
The camera resolution is meh and a bit grainy (but the Lenovo camera was quite shitty, too), but what’s more annoying is that it doesn’t seem to have good auto-exposure (so it’s way too bright or too dim, depending on environment). So I ended up having a small shell alias to control the exposure settings manually.
Compared to the Lenovo, the built-in speakers sound rather tinny. I mostly use headphones so it doesn’t matter that much.
The fan is relatively loud and switches on quickly, so if you have a lot of heavy workloads, you might want to consider a different machine.
I’m using NixOS on it, which presented some problems (IIRC the screen stayed blank or something). Just part of the joys of running Linux as a daily driver, I guess. Thankfully, there’s a hardware config for Librems (actually, it’s a Librem 13, but it works with the 14 just as well, as the problem I had was an Intel related issue).
I’m still trying to figure out how to get decent performance in kvm, but I have a feeling that that’s another Linux/NixOS issue.
MacBook Air (M1) for family use at home.
MacBook Air (M1) for work. Our tech stack is AWS based, so all the tech in the laptop is for my OS/app experience to be snappy, me to not be distracted by fan noise, and to avoid me getting battery anxiety.
MacBook Pro 2015 15” for my use at home.
I think the Airs are the perfect laptop for all my uses. If they bring out one with a larger screen then I will buy one, but I’m not sure I will end up preferring it over the 13”.
14” MacBook Pro M1 for work (issued by my employer); ThinkPad W520 for everything else.
I’d like to run Asahi on the M1 but that will be a matter for discussion with the IT team there once Asahi is ready as a daily driver :) I’m running Ubuntu on the W520 now, but that’s a stopgap.
I still harbour plans for a DIY laptop based on a Udoo Bolt V8, hoping to bring those to fruition this year.
I meant W540 here.
XPS 15 for personal/work with fairly modest specs. I was mostly happy with X1 carbon gen 3 before, but I need a bigger screen. Running Linux without issues daily + Windows installed on a portable SSD for Windows-specific work. Doing a bit of gaming sometimes. The only thing I can complain about with XPS is the low quality camera (I’m using a separate Logitech one) and I still want the ThinkPad style trackpoint! Otherwise I’d totally get a newer XPS in the future, or maybe a used P1.
For years I bought only refurbished / minimally used machines for personal use. Always happy with the experience.
For day job, the last 15” Intel MBP which I hate for so many reasons. Can’t wait for better Asahi Linux support so I can jump on the M1 or later bandwagon.
I’ve got one of the Tuxedo’s with a usable resolution (3200x1800). Battery life is… fine (>4h), speed is fine. It’s ugly, but it’s also easy to open up and replace things (I replaces the battery once already).
Long time Linux user, switched completely to macOS since Apple Silicon arrived. A 2020 M1 MacBook Pro for work and a M1 MacBook Air for recreational use. I was switching from a ThinkPad X15C and could not be happier, everything works out of the box and no fan noise anymore. I also had a Ryzen 3700x desktop that I am about to sell because it isn’t used anymore. The MacBook Air is slower on paper, but feels as snappy as the beefy desktop machine while being portable and silent. For me x86 is history.
work: Dell Latitude 5520 - i7 and 32 GB RAM + Xubuntu. It’s nice but I’ve only had it for a week, suspend seems wonky (and I hate hidpi it seems), it replaced a Latitude 5310 (i5, 16GB) with which I was generally very happy except a little coil whine.
personal: still a T460p (i7-6820HQ, Ubuntu/varying) and an x230 (i7-3520M, always Debian), both with 16GB.
I have not used a more recent Thinkpad than a T470p (with i5, too slow) but after working with them for over 10 years I would choose a T for work again, but if I needed a new personal laptop I would either go with a small one with long battery (X1?) or go for a gaming laptop or even an M1 Macbook Air.
Also the last and only laptop I bought new for myself was in 2004, ever since I’ve used hand-me-downs because I’m a desktop person :P
MacBook Pro from 2020. Works fine for me. The heavy lifting is done on a cloud machine.
Thinkpad X270 for personal use, MacBook Air 2020 for work. If I could have gone back, I either asked for more beefed MacBook pro or a Thinkpad with Linux. As we are looking for a maybe more environment-friendly laptops pool in the future, I suggested to keep tab on the Framework laptop also.
Our current pool is a mixed bag of MacBook Air and Pro and Thinkpad X280 mostly I think.
Personal: MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2013) 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB Flash-Storage
Work: ThinkPad X1C9 16GB with external Razer Core containing nVidia 1050Ti connected to 3 displays. Personal: ThinkPad T450 with 32GB RAM and 1 SSD (Kubuntu) and 1 M.2 (Windows 10).
I’m tempted by an M1 Mac for my next work laptop, but the lack of eGPU capability will hamper that.
eGPUs are in a bad spot right now. There’s not enough lanes to keep up with the modern GPUs which is a pretty big want of cash unless buying an older GPU. ASUS ROG are putting out a new eGPU system this year that doubles the lanes but it’s only for two products in their lineup. That said, your current eGPU setup is compatible with Ryzen 6000 via USB4 which can outperform Apple’s chips (and Alder Lake is obviously compatible too). You’d save a lot of cash skipping Apple and the headache this still too much software assumes only x86 exists.
$WORK is a 16” MacBook Pro (6 core, 32Gig) (2019ish). $PERSONAL is 2012 Retina MacBook Pro (quad core, 16Gig). They send me what they send me, but I won’t get a new one for a couple/few years now.
My next laptop probably won’t be a Mac though (though we’ll see how far https://asahilinux.org/ gets in the next year or so). I am leaning towards a Framework (but also: Dell XPS13, System76 Lemur Pro are also options).
I am in no hurry, the 2012 is humming along just fine, installed a new (and bigger) SSD and power brick, but other than that plenty of horse power for the things I use it for.
I have 2 14 inches M1 macbooks for work and for personal use. I have been using macbook for a long time, things seem easy and less problem over a long time.
This time M1 is a life-saver with its all day long battery.
why two?
the work laptop is company provided, it has VPN and all the codes related to the company I work with, also having restriction on which software you can install
My work laptop is a beefy Thinkpad p15 - i9, 32gb ram, 500gb ssd. My personal laptop is a less-beefy Thinkpad T560 with an i7, 16gb ram, 500gb ssd.
Both run Xubuntu 20.04 as well.
Lenovo T15g, Core i9-10885H, 32 GB of RAM, RTX 2070 Super.
Work: Dell XPS 13 w/ 4k screen and 16Gb RAM (9370, couple years old). Home, occasional work: Macbook Air M1.
I just can’t get away from Windows workflows and powertools and find myself going back to them. I love the power, screen and battery life of the M1 though, it’s a total joy to use.
One year old M1’s on eBay are ridiculously good price/performance.
Need Linux and Windows for paid work so I have a Dell Precision 5540 (i7 9850H) and an Asus Zenbook 14 (Ryzen 5700U) running Ubuntu and Windows 11 respectively. Both machines are plenty fast and the Zenbook has a much nicer keyboard and lasts much longer on a battery charge (U vs H series so not a fair comparison). I’d definitely pick the Zenbook again but probably run Linux on it instead. Eyeing an M1 Air but I have little use for macOS to justify the buy. Had an MBA (2017 model) but the keyboard was horrible and couldn’t get xhyve working reliably. For my NetBSD experiments I use a refurbished Thinkpad T470 (in addition to a bunch of low-power desktops) which works out fine for my needs.
My work computer is an M1 MacBook Pro (14”). I basically never use it except when it’s docked to the monitor and proper keyboard, so I don’t have a lot of experience with the amazing battery or screen or anything. I prefer desktop computers, anyway.
ETA: If I were spending my own money, no, I wouldn’t. I would get a Mac Studio, probably. If I had to have a laptop? Yeah, probably. It’s plenty fast and of a decent size.
Still using the original HP Omen 2015.
16GB RAM, 512GB SSD.
Originally purchased to run multiple VMs for software development, and maybe do a little gaming on the go. This did not work out as planned. Mainly because of the hassle of VMs in general, and the non-stellar performance.
I really wanted a 15.6in 1080p screen with 16GB of RAM, a SSD, and no numeric keypad. So that limited my choices quite a bit. I can’t stand being offset from the center of the screen when my hands are on the home row.
These days… still used as a general-purpose laptop, but I remote into my development machines.
Performance for old-man gaming (turn based strategy) is still sufficient.
Battery life is crap these days, maybe 20 minutes on a full charge. Sufficient to move between power outlets without shutting down, but not much more.
Other issues:
I also have a Acer R11 Chromebook, which I end up using more than the HP Omen. It is very light and handy, and with long battery life (even after several years) it works well if you are sitting up in bed or on the couch.
Besides being my main video entertainment device, I use a Chrome SSH extension to remote into my dev machine for side projects. The keyboard is decent for being a little on the small side.
Personal/serious hobby machine: MBP M1 with 16 GB of RAM.
Work laptop 1: Dell Inspiron 5584
Work laptop 2: really old Thinkpad E130
(It’s more than 10 years old by now?)
In my experience the quality of laptops overall has been steadily going down for 10+ years now. Whenever portability isn’t a requirement, I prefer to go with a desktop these days.
I’ve been using MacBooks as my primary laptop since I got a PowerBook G4 in 2001. My 2015 MBP was murdered by my children and I replaced it with a 2019 MBP. I feel kind of locked into MacOS by OmniFocus, which I have yet to find a replacement for.
Professionally I have desktop running Windows from my employer.
I have the 2020 Intel Macbook Air. I’m sort of glad I got it when I did because it meant when I do switch to the M-chips, all the problems porting to ARM will have been long since solved, but OTOH, my fans spin up pretty bad on Zoom calls, which makes me want to buy a new laptop sooner rather than later. The current plan is to get another Air once they release a redesign in 2023 or whatever. I’m a web dev, so basically nothing development-wise ever taxes my system unless I need to recompile some C dependency for some reason.
Refurbished Thinkpad X270 with i7 processor, 16 Gb RAM and 1920x1080 display.
I use two laptops, one for work and one for HardenedBSD development. I suppose, both end up being for HardenedBSD development. ;-)
The HardenedBSD development laptop specs:
Work laptop specs:
I also have a Lenovo Thinkpad T410 that I use when I’m sick in bed (I’ve got a number of health issues, migraines being a big one.) That runs HardenedBSD 13-STABLE. I mainly use it to ssh into my other systems to do actual work there.
My “daily driver” laptop is a Framework DIY Edition. i7 CPU, gobs of RAM and disk, nice (if quite glossy) screen, good enough keyboard and trackpad. I don’t code on it all day, since I have a perfectly good Ryzen workstation in my home office with a real GPU, gigabit Ethernet to my fiber router, etc., but if I had to keep just one machine it would probably be at the top of my list.
It runs NixOS like a champ, and while it does have the Intel sleep-state issues other folks have mentioned, the running battery life is awfully good for an x86_64 machine: 8-10 hours of normal use, which for me means a fair bit of compiling, bundling, and other CPU-heavy tasks.
Being able to pop it open with a small Philips screwdriver and get at the RAM + SSD directly – plus the promise of mainboard upgrades down the line – means I’m willing to overlook the minor issues I have, which are (in no particular order):
The screen is, as I mentioned above, quite shiny and not bright enough to overpower direct sunlight. (Note: this is also true of just about every laptop I’ve used in ~20 years of having them as primary work machines.) It’s also a weird resolution (2200x1500) which limits my options for Linux desktop environments. KDE at 150% looks great and seems to manage the DPI and scaling well for every other app I run, while GNOME really wants it run at 200%, and any attempt to work around that via tweaks or manual configuration results in a bunch of scaling artifacts (horribly pixelated text in every Electron app, for example) or cartoonishly-oversized UI running @ 200%.
Framework’s USB-C “expansion cards” are cute, but really just internal storage for dongles. I still have to choose which ones to put in the laptop vs. keep in a pile on my desk, and I do find myself wishing that there were just dedicated ports for most of the ones I have, or more interesting options like an upgraded DAC, LTE/5G adapter, GPS receiver, etc. I fully expect more to be available some day but for now it’s more of a novelty[^1] than anything else.
Intel CPUs are just not that great compared to modern Ryzen models, much less the M1 family. In my ideal world there will be an ARM mainboard available for the Framework some day, but given the amount of x86-specific supporting hardware, firmware, etc. that seems a long way off even if they decided to prioritize it.
[^1]: I freely admit that having official 3D print models for the card slot does make me smile, even if I don’t have anything to put in one just yet.
For personal use, I have a late 2013 MacBook Pro. I keep expecting the hard drive will fail, but it keeps chugging along, so I keep using it. I’ve thought about installing Debian, but it’s convenient having an OSX machine sometimes, so I’m not in a hurry.
I use it for Common Lisp and OpenGL development. It’s nice to have a low-end OpenGL implementation to test on.
I don’t know what I’d replace it with. I’m done with Apple, so probably something in the <$750 price range, running Debian.
System76 Oryx Pro 5, 9th gen i7, 2070 GPU, 64G RAM. Use it for work and personal use (including games w/ Steam), running Pop_OS!
X series Thinkpads (x220 then x230, x250, now x390)
I use a 2015 chromebook pixel running Linux. The reason why is I think it is one of the most beautiful laptops ever made and when I saw they were going for $300 a few years ago I copped one. When it started to fail I copped a second for parts. I’m not sure how long this laptop will last in the long run but for now it’s exactly what I’m looking for in a portable machine.
MacBook Pro 14” with the M1 Pro (the 10 core flavor). Both at home and at the office a Thunderbolt Dock.
I feel like I am living in the future. I take the laptop out of my backpack, plug a single Thunderbolt cable and I have a workstation that is on-par with a high-end Ryzen workstation performance-wise.
X131e
https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/047_x131e_repair/
I live on second hand laptops, there is no way I can justify paying new prices. I was going to get an x260 (2016-era) instead but at the time it was x3 its normal second hand price due to COVID, ie most of $600 or so AUD, and I’d rather spend the money on a part that I can keep re-using (like an SSD).
This laptop has some hilarious fan control issues and virtualising win10 is stupidly slow (it has vx, but I think Win10 would be molasses on this bare metal anyway). Battery only charges to 55%. Otherwise it lets me get my work done, play a few games and has kept me happy for more than a year now.
2015 Macbook Pro, 16GB RAM. Primary laptop but I do most of my development SSH-ed into an OVH bare metal instance. It’s still going strong although I could replace the battery. When this one dies I’ll definitely get another macbook. They’re the only hardware I trust to work without any modifications necessary, best battery life, and best laptop keyboards. I’ve tried to like XPS and Lenovo laptop keyboards but it’s the control/shift/alt keys that are always too small, making it harder to touch type.
My work machine is similar: 2015 Macbook Pro, 8GB RAM. Company laptop, hosts all company code, runs all the builds. Same – going really strong, really only the battery that’s degraded but that’s also because of my usage (I keep it plugged it at all times).
I typically work with it by SSHing into it from my Lenovo Ideapad 5 running Linux (which is my daily driver). I feel you on the keyboard. But thankfully, being able to work in a Linux environment I’ve tweaked to fit me like a glove is enough of a tradeoff for me than to work directly on my MBP.
Work issued MacBook Pro 16 inches, i9, 16GB RAM.
I would choose a Thinkpad over this machine. The main reason is I prefer to use Linux.
Late 2020 ASUS Zenbook Flip running NixOS with: 11th Gen Intel i7, 16 GB RAM (soldered), 13” 4K OLED touchscreen, Thunderbolt 4, USb-C charging, comes with a decent stylus. My uses are front-end web development + Nix, media consumption, photography, occassional gaming, occassional drawing. My biggest complaints: no headphone jack, RAM is soldered and more could be preferred, I’d prefer 14” 16:10 OLED that 2K (wasted pixels, but 1080 looks horrible). It’s been lightweight, pretty quick, Linux-compatible, and the OLED screen is amazing.
I’d like to hand down this device soon though when 12th Gen Intel or Ryzen 6000 comes to Thailand as this its a generational leap (efficiency cores, amazing APUs, PCIe gen, USB4, DDR5) and this laptop was meant as a stop-gap between my (Linux-unfriendly) Razer Blade and this current generation.
A Dell Vostro something with 16GB RAM. I asked for something that can run Linux and this works well. But my needs are modest, as I don’t use big IDE’s and most of the power hungry tasks run somewhere else. I think the heaviest thing I run is some docker-compose with integration tests, but even that that is occasionally, because they also run in Gitlab pipelines..
As for ergonomics, I have a Ducky One 2SF mechanical keyboard (yaay! remote working) and a 24 inch LG 4K monitor. I specifically opted not for the biggest version, as I like to look outside the window behind the screen when I am thinking something over.
I use a three year old ThinkPad P52 with 128GB of RAM, 6x Xeons and a 4k touchscreen, and 3TB of NVMe drives, with an open slot for a third drive. This system cost me $3500 which I consider a good price for what I got.
If I were to replace it, I’d get the ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 with 128GB of ECC ram and 8x Xeon, and I’d switch to PCIe 4 NVMe drives.
ThinkPad X230
I use a Eluktronics MAX-17 for gaming, with a 2070 in it.
A Surface Pro 7 running Linux (Manjaro specifically, with the Surface specific kernel)
I would not get the Surface again, mostly because newer models have no linux support and dont work well. There is nothing close to it for Linux, so I don’t know what my plans are in the future. maybe an Apple ARM laptop if they ever make a flip one with Linux on it.
Honestly getting a nice, sleek 2-in-1 with good linux support that doesnt break the bank is quite hard. I also need something fanless with good performance. only the the Surface Pro 7 i5 solved that for me.
Luckily I can probably use it for a long time, and I will revisit it in some future computer change, but Fanless is key so I can use it in bed with a wife and newborn in the room. Quiet keyboards, no noise, etc.
My personal computer is a Tuxedo Pulse 14’. I wanted an AMD CPU and I had to wait a long time for it earlier last year.
It has a Ryzen 7 4800H CPU and I maxed the RAM on it to 64GB. All of the hardware is linux compatible out of the box and makes for a great little workstation. I prefer to plug keyboard and monitor into it because the build quality, screen, keyboard and touchpad are not great. Another thing I wish was better was support for the linux firmware manager, which doesn’t exist at the moment.
Would I buy it again? Probably not. My work got me a Lenovo 14s with similarly specifications and it feels much more sturdy and more pleasant to use. (this one has it’s own issues, but maybe because it’s newer I like it more at the moment).
Lenovo ThinkPad P14s with 8 core 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1165G7 and 46.8 Go of RAM. It got Kubuntu 21.10 as a primary operating system for work, and Windows 11 for games mostly. Working with it for 6 months. The only issue I can see is that the laptop case is slightly cheaper than older ThinkPads were, including keyboard quality.
I had difficulties to use it’s full potential, actually. I barely remember having the laptop performances decrease.