On: Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad T480

[Hippocrates]

Am I crazy? The author writes

> It's not as insane of a downgrade as it sounds.

And then goes on to describe assembling a Frankenstein laptop that has specs and ergonomics that pale in comparison to the MacBook's.

This sounds like a truly awful computer to me, but if your only goal is to spend as little as possible and get user-serviceability then I guess this is one way to go.

[gruffin → Hippocrates]

Yeah I don't think anyone would disagree that with time, know-how, manual labor, and a 50% performance degradation, you might save money.

[rejectfinite → Hippocrates]

1440p screen, an i7, 32GB RAM, glass trackpad + sturdy thinkpad body and ports = awful computer? What is awful about it?

Im using a 3 year old 490s for work. Great machine. Wish they gave it more RAM and SSD but other than that Im happy with it.

[TheBigSalad → Hippocrates]

I think he means the experience of using it. And the price was much cheaper.

[smoldesu → Hippocrates]

On the bright side, he did avoid spending $200 for the 16gb RAM upgrade.

[ribit → smoldesu]

For RAM that's around 3x slower. I mean, if it works, it works, but it's hardly something to boast about.

[rejectfinite → ribit]

RAM speed does not make up for capacity. If you need a lot of RAM for VMs or Docker or loads of tabs, getting lower capacity, but higher speed RAM is not a substitute.

[Hippocrates → rejectfinite]

For loads of tabs it does. For docker or VMs maybe not. Requiring a large amount of fully allocated RAM, like 8G+ seems like a deficiency in the software/dev environment, and definitely an edge case. In my whole career I've not needed that, but seen some poorly done dev environments configured with 4G+ VMs, so I don't doubt it can happen.