My 4-year old Dell XPS 15 is up for replacement, but somehow no manufacturer aside from Apple is making laptop with decent specs nowadays? I want 2TB storage, a 4k (or close) HiDPI display, good build quality, and not a bulky gaming laptop. The XPS 15 was perfect, it had those specs, except it only had 1TB storage which is now full. I was expecting that to not be an issue 4 years later ... But now Dell discontinued XPS, and their new Pro/Premium models have worse specs in almost all ways. The only non-Apple thing that I can find that even comes close, is a bulky 16" ThinkPad.
And then there is Apple who pack everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device, plus a very fast CPU and battery life that is years ahead of anything else ... Why is there no competition here? I'm willing to compromise on battery life, and I don't need the fastest CPU, just a good quality work laptop where I can run `cargo build` / `docker pull` without worrying about filling up the disk, and mostly just a browser aside from that. Why is the gap so large?
There's nothing close, Apple has better talent and the vertical integration gives them an edge (especially on performance per watt on their chip designs).
Since the M series chips, there's been no other option if you care about quality. There are crappy alternatives with serious tradeoffs if for some reason you are forced to not use Apple or choose for non-quality reasons.
The leap from intel to the M series chips really left everyone else behind. I can't even use my 2019 Macbook anymore it feels so sluggish.
I have an M3 Pro and it blows all my old computers out of the water. Can handle pretty insane dev workflows (massive Docker composed environments) without issue and the battery life feels unfair. I can put in an 8 hour workday without my charging cable, I don't think I have turned it fully off in a few months, it just chugs along. It really embodies the "it just works" mindset.
I have the M3 Max, and a custom built pc using some Ryzen chip that has roughly equivalent benchmark scores to the M3 Max.
The amount of cooling and power required for such a PC versus the aluminum slab with small fans that almost never turn on is a testament to the insanely good engineering of the M series chips.
I compile large c++ codebases on a daily basis, but the M3 Max never makes me feel like I can “grab a cup of coffee”.
M series mac's are my dream c++ development machines. Just this week I was investigating some potential bugs in Qt's javascript engine and I was recompiling it from source across multiple tags to bisect. On my i9 mac I would compile Qt overnight, on my m3 pro it takes about 10 minutes, on battery, silently. Truly remarkable.
I have a M3 Max as well, 16" iteration, it's the best laptop I had, and it's clearly a desktop replacement for my usage and until I want to generate meme vids with LLM...
Nowadays I am looking forward to the Nvidia digits+ MacBook Pro duo.
“When we saw that first system and then you sat there and played with it for a few hours and the battery didn’t move, we thought ‘Oh man, that’s a bug, the battery indicator is broken’”
I mean my AMD T14 G4 gets like 12 hours of battery running windows, 150 browser tabs and a virtual environment. Not sure how the newer ones are and no they aren't as sleek or probably durable as a metal apple or dell XPS but I haven't got any complaints for the price.
I don't think they "gaslit themselves," but I do think M1 was good enough a lot of people stopped thinking about hardware and their frame of reference is horribly out of date
T14 Gen 5 AMD has replaceable RAM, SSD, battery, and WWAN. Just got one for Linux (besides my MacBook) and loaded it up with 64GB RAM (which was only 160 Euro) and a 2TB SSD.
I had never really used a mac (or anything from apple) before M1, and since I got an M1 air I never looked back. Not all people who are hyped about apple silicon were previously apple users.
It is true though that in terms of laptops my only experience to compare it with was with intel chips, but that's because it used to be hard to find an AMD laptop back then.
In the context of software development, I run Linux on those AMDs and it's a great experience. It's not for everyone and I respect that, but it's not too hard these days.
Also a Windows machine with WSL isn't the worst thing, just treat it well.
The problem is that you pay with battery life. I did some Windows vs Linux laptop battery life testing when I bought my Thinkpad T14s AMD gen4.
The test itself is simple: a Puppeteer script that loads the Reddit front page and scrolls it at 50 px/s for 10 minutes, in a loop until the battery dies. This actually produces a fairly decent load including video decoding (because Reddit autoplays by default, and there are plenty videos in the feed). I also had Thunderbird, Discord, and Telegram running in the background.
On Windows 11, the battery dies in 500 minutes.
On Linux Mint 21.3, it dies in 200 minutes.
Now, this is because Chrome (and Firefox!) disable GPU-accelerated rendering by default on Linux due to "unstable drivers". To be fair, it really is unstable - when I enabled it and watched the test as it was going, I saw the Firefox tab in a crashed state more than once. But even then, with Firefox + GPU acceleration, I got 470 minutes of battery life on Windows vs 340 minutes on Linux.
I had a 2023 ASUS Zephyrus G14 (AMD 6800 + 6900HD dGPU) and I took a battery hit, but not near what you saw. Somewhere closer to 20-25%.
It’s bigger problem was it was far too eager to trigger the dGPU, especially with accelerated graphics in browsers and the like. So I ended up running it in integrated only mode, unless I wanted to play games.
The problem with Apple is there is this awful MacOS along with the walled garden company called apple. The Problem with windows is.. none I can install my own.
I never understand why people are so fixated on battery runtime. If you actually use the device indoors, don't you have a possibility to charge anytime. For me, I alternate between my home office room and the living room. Sometimes I work when on the train. And even less often in national flights and on airports. Except when flying or on very outdated trains, there never is an issue charging.
I like to use my devices without needing to be tethered to an outlet. I don't like having to deal with wires creating trip/pull hazards because my laptop needs charging. Sitting on the porch without needing to run extension cords is also nice.
I have a problem when the laptop doesn't survive 2 days on suspend... My previous T480 never had a problem, even on a 50% battery... but the newer T14 sometimes does.
If I close my lid with 100% battery at the end of the workday, I should be able to open it up the next morning and get at least a few hours of work in before the battery dies.
And this used to work.
But with the same laptop, a certain version of windows has basically eliminated any benefits of shutting the laptop hinge.
Heck the worst part is the same thing happens even if you shut down windows. The only reason it’s now become usable for me is because I learnt if you do shift + power off that does a real shutdown, unlike a regular shutdown.
100% this. My daily driver is a 2015 MacBook Pro that I only have one complaint about: the battery life doesn’t come anywhere close to letting me work on an airplane if there’s no 120V plugs available. I mean… most of the time I don’t mind just sleeping but it would be great to take better advantage of the quiet time with no slack messages.
Looks like they’re decent laptops. Although surprisingly the newest models are hundreds of dollars more than similarly spec’d MBAs. Not sure on how the CPU/GPU performance compares.
Yeah, because apple is totally reliable for sleeping when it is supposed to. I love my macbook, but I have dealt with over a decade of macbooks waking when they should not. Love it when my macbook cooks itself in my bag overnight.
I have never met someone with this problem, and have not experienced it myself in over 12 years. Closing the lid and walking away is what MacBooks are (were?) known for, I guess in my circles.
It’s a pretty common issue. Search around and you will find pages and pages of people experiencing the same issues on macrumors, the apple discussion forum, etc. Glad it hasn’t been a problem for you, I envy you!
I assume you’ve turned off “allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer” and “wake on network access” in system preferences? Those are the only things I can think of that can randomly wake up macs
Oh yeah, I’ve turned every single possible thing off. It still randomly dark-wakes. And then, when it does, it will sometimes get into a doom loop of scanning the network and refusing to release its power assertions, meaning it won’t go back to sleep. Eventually it will hit a thermal emergency and then shut down.
I suspect the answer to these questions are the same. When different companies are developing the OS, the drivers and the hardware it is much harder to get everything to play together nicely.
harder perhaps, but not impossible, and the market has had decades to figure this out.
My guess is typical PC manufacturers have not felt it worth the time to invest in getting this aspect right.
Ironically, the best non windows trackpad I ever used was when Vizio tried to make computers. They actually got the trackpad right. In fact, those computers were really cut above everyone else, but my guess is they didn't sell well because they were taken off the market almost as fast as they were introduced
I’ve always wondered if the Apple trackpad was just the capacitive part of an iPhone screen. It feels like glass. It responds similarly. And they have a huge user base sample size for improvements.
I think it’s another example of vertical integration making it better. Apple making the hardware plus OS gives them an advantage, making the trackpad experience great is hard if you don’t control both.
Apple has also learned a ton about how to do this well from the iPhone.
It’s less vertical integration than MS not actually taking the steps to control this market.
For example, the Precision touchpad, which was the first actual touchpad tech MS created, with Windows previously testing touchpads as mouses, has been released for a little more than a decade.
Touchpads had been around for over 4 decades and have been standard to laptops since the mid to late 90s.
And the worst part is that MS still allows hardware vendors to ship non Precision touchpads today.
MS won’t allow you to run windows 10, but vendors can ship touchpads that only support decades old software.
It’s very hard to get Windows manufacturers to pay attention to the touchpad when MS itself isn’t interested.
Unfortunately, the Windows domination in the non Apple part of the industry means that serious change is only driven by MS.
A lot of advantages we think Apple has due to vertical integration are more because MS is pretty terrible
The problems you’re describing are largely because they don’t have vertical integration. They don’t have the ability (sometimes legally) to force suppliers to do things they want.
Microsoft tried to prevent crapware from being installed by OEMs a while back and got blocked.
What you’re describing is the effect of not controlling the stack and the only way to really do that is by doing it yourself.
This is seriously the thing I like the most about my 2017 and 2023 macbooks. The trackpad feels so good. Every other manufacturer that I have tried, and no it is not all of them but a lot, they all make my fingers feel bad after using them. I don't know if they are rougher or textured somehow? The only one that does make my finger pads feel sore is the macbook.
It's also the accuracy. I'm able to do light photo editing work right from the trackpad, even basic sketches and airbrushing. Have never been able to do anything remotely close with other laptops
100% this. I use a MacBook at work, and I bought myself a Framework laptop for personal stuff. Overall, the Framework is great, but the touchpad is a letdown.
In my experience the Snapdragon X Elite is about the same as an M2. It's got slightly worse battery life but still a battery that blows the competition out the water.
Plus you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc without paying Apples ridiculous prices
Snapdragon are just getting started. The Snapdragon X2 is coming out later this year with 18 cores
> you get the benefits of loading out your laptop with 64GB RAM etc
If RAM is all you need on a M_ air type of machine sure, but the selling/buying point of apple silicon's unified memory is mainly around GPU/memory bandwidth at a low energy consumption level, which is yet to be rivaled (maybe AMD recently took steps towards there). If one's workload optimises for CPU-only and very high RAM, apple silicon was and probably will be the worst choice cost-wise.
Also, for me, the no-no reason for snapdragon x elites until now is having to use windows, plus, as it turned out, the early unreliability of the actual products sold by laptop manufacturers.
But the market has opened up, so prob we will see more competition towards there, which is great. Apple's good but not doing anything magic that others cannot eventually do to some extent. Though I am far more optimistic for AMD than Qualcomm tbh.
Is the performance gap so huge? Power efficiency yes, absolutely, but for peak performance last I saw the last AMD vs M3 benchmarks were a slightly slower single core, and a little faster in multicore. Doesn't seem as world changing as described.
I feel like somehow my big Linux desktop with a Ryzen 7950X and 64 GB of ram feels less "snappy" than my M2 Macbook Air running Asahi when doing lightweight tasks, despite the big Ryzen being obviously much better at compilation and stuff. I'm not sure why and my guess was the RAM latency. But maybe I misconfigured something in my Arch Linux...
It has a Ryzen 9900X, 64GB of DDR5, AMD Radeon RX6600XT, 2x2TB Hanye NVMe, ROG B650 ATX motherboard and 850W power supply.
I bought the system mostly to increase the single core performance from the Ryzen 5 3600 I had before. As well as to get rid of all the little 256GB SSD disks I had in the previous one.
If I go look up an arbitrary 850 watt supply (seasonic focus gold), it looks like it wastes about 10% plus 5 watts anywhere from 0-60% load. So extra capacity doesn't hurt that one.
Yes. No other laptop can sustain peak performance as long as the M-series Macs. The only thing that competes is a dedicated desktop with a big cooler and fan.
Mac laptops feel faster, even if the synthetic benchmarks say otherwise.
I don’t agree. Compile times are definitely and very noticeably quicker on my Intel gaming laptop (that’s actually a few years old now) vs my M3 MBP.
That said, I’ve never once felt that the M3 MBPs are sluggish. They are definitely super quick machines. And the fact that I can go a full day without charging even when using moderately heavy workloads is truly jaw droppingly impressive.
I’d definitely take the power performance over that small little extra saved in compile times any day of the week. So Apple have made some really smart judgements there.
In guhidalg's defense, they did say that the "Mac laptops feel faster" (emphasis mine) not that they are faster. There's a trick here with Macs, which is that their user interfaces for the OS and many programs are tightly integrated with the hardware which makes the UI faster--that's the "feel faster"--it's a software, not hardware thing. In cases where the software is equivalent (i.e. cross-platform compilers like GCC/Clang/Cargo) you're going to see little difference, but your OS experience is definitely snappier on Macs.
The arm architecture is also optimized for UI-like tasks, quick to start and stop processes on one of many cores with differing power constraints, whereas x86 is more for workstation-type sustained workloads
M3 vs other high end intel chips on code compilation generally has the higher clock speed always winning. Only with the M4 is starting to hit clock speeds nearer to high end intel chips . We are 2 generations out to probably 5ghz sustained on Apple chips.
I bought an M1 Max with 64gb of ram at release. I'm still not sure what will get me to replace it other than it simply breaking. Maybe an M5 will finally make me want to buy something new. I'm debating getting a cheaper Air and maybe a base Ultra now that I do most of my heavy work at a desk.
I’ve gone entire work days with my Pro on battery because I didn’t notice I hadn’t plugged it in. All my docker containers, IDE etc plugged into my external monitor. It was a good 9hrs before I noticed.
Macs are easy to beat depending on what trade offs you want to make though.
Also, most laptops will run at significantly worse performance when not plugged in. Macs are much more consistent both thermally and when not plugged in.
The power efficiency gap equates to a fan noise gap, and the fan noise/heat of powerful Windows laptops is much more annoying than merely having poor battery life.
I ran some bioinformatics pipelines on an AMD pangolin notebook. Its was faster than the apple M2 (I think it was an M2 or M3) notebook my work neighbor had. My machine had more RAM, but still for workloads that use the extra cores it made a difference.
The performance alone says nothing. What about the battery life, size, weight, temperature, fan noise, and quality of the touchpad? These are important trade offs in any laptop.
When we’re both plugged in and my process finishes 10 minutes faster, it says something. Also the gp post specifically was about performance and specifically not efficiency.
I could get 7+ hours from my work Linux laptops battery and I don’t really care for macOS. The OS quality matters more than the touch pad to me. I’ve come the appreciate a Mat screen. But im glad there is choice.
Everyone values different things and has different requirements, so I’m glad your laptop works out for you. I’m just cautioning against an emphasis on performance: even if the laptop is plugged in, other design considerations will dictate and limit the raw performance.
Yes. You need to go to server class chips (eg. threadripper) before beating the raw multi-core performance of a top-spec M4 Max in a Macbook pro, and the battery life is still crazy good!
What gave me pause was when my base-spec M1 Air handily beat my admittedly old server (Xeon E5-2650v2) on a single-core compute-bound task [0] (generating a ton of UUIDs). I know Ivy Bridge is 12 years old at this point, but I didn’t expect it to be 2x slower.
EDIT: Also, I know the code in the link is awful; the point is doing a 1:1 comparison between the architectures.
It's a laptop, same performance with higher power efficiency means same performance with a much longer mobile uptime, which makes the Macbooks tiers above their competition.
And for data centers, same performance at better power efficiency means hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in power.
My M1 Max MBP is a bit slower feeling than a new Lenovo Thinkpad P16s (Ryzen 7 Pro 7840U) I have, when using VS Code in Linux. But a M3 Max MBP I have blows it away. If you run Linux, and care about MacOS apps or need non-dev stuff like Outlook, then a Linux AMD laptop can be a really cheap, fast option. Unfortunately the manufacturers don't want to load them out... like my AMD chip supports 128GB, but no laptop manuf. will lay down more than 64GB.
Their 16" laptop is extremely bulky. I think this is a category where Macbooks clearly win. Thinkpad and FrameWork have great options for 14", but at larger screen sizes something is always missing for me.
To be fair, the 16" MacBook Pro (I have the M1 Max) is also rather bulky. It's to big and to heavy for travel. If you need do a lot of traveling, or just don't work at your desk, I'd recommend against getting a 16" laptop in general.
But it seems the parent's point is there's no reason Dell couldn't have kept making improved XPS models. Maybe they don't compare on a $/watt basis with Apple silicon, but you could presumably have still paid less and gotten something pretty decent.
They have superior technology because they control the full stack and have taken more and more ownership of it over the years (most recently building their own modem in the iPhone 16e). They could design chips for an exact set of constraints (originally iPhones) and then expand that to the mac. Intel with x86 had to support legacy and tons of different devices (and bad leadership caused them to ignore efficiency and later ignore gpus). Other laptop manufacturers have to run other people's software and few really make their own underlying hardware to the extent apple does.
> (originally iPhones) and then expand that to the mac
Yes and: (as you know) Aggregate volume also benefits Apple's whole product suite.
It's hard for a laptop mfg to justify pushing to next node process for just ~25m units. So competitors have to wait for Qualcomm, Samsung, whomever to transition.
It's easier for Apple with ~250m phones, ~50m tablets, ~25m laptops, etc. per year. (Apple's war chest also enables monosopoly of upcoming node processes.)
Imagine trying to pull off AirPods or Vision without that deep vertical integration. The ridiculously ambitious Vision is just barely feasible, riding on mobile's coattails. A Vision using 3rd party CPUs would be delayed.
--
This all is in addition to the Apple specific optimizations, which you mention.
No they don't all their technology is equivalent to what's in the industry save their chips. Which btw is manufactured by TSMC so the chip itself is not vertically integrated.
My argument is they were able to develop the chip because of their control. The constraints allowed them that freedom and the constraints come from the top down integration and control.
I'll bow out here because I can just tell this won't be a worthwhile thread.
> But what other advantage did this give them? Like name specific examples. Feel free to leave, but I honestly don't see where you're coming from.
Back when Apple used Intel processors, they were at the mercy of Intel's roadmap; if Intel missed a deadline for a new chip, Apple had to change plans. Obviously, that's no longer the case.
Back in the Motorola/IBM days, their G5 processor ran so hot that Apple had to create a special case with 7 fans to cool it. It was an amazing engineering feat, but something Apple would never do unless they had no choice. I've used a Power Mac G5—it sounded like a jet taking off, and the fans stayed on. [2]
They get to integrate new technologies quicker than being constrained by the industry.
Apple launched the first 64-bit smartphone, the iPhone 5s, in 2013—at least a year before any Android manufacturer could. And when Qualcomm finally shipped a 64-bit processor, no version of Android supported it. [1]
There are dozens of examples where Apple's vertical integration has allowed them to stay a step ahead of competitors.
The latest is the C1 modem that shipped in the iPhone 16e. Because the C1 is much more efficient than Qualcomm's modem, the 16e gets better battery life than the more expensive iPhone 16 with Qualcomm's modem. [3]
And because Qualcomm's licensing fees are a percentage of the cost of the device it's in, shipping the C1 enables them to put modems in laptops. The Qualcomm fee is significant: an iPad Air starts at $599; the same iPad Air model with one of Qualcomm's modems costs $749.
Customers have wanted MacBooks with cellular modems forever; now they'll be able to do that, since the modem will become part of Apple's SoC in the near future.
That's what you can do when you're not constrained by off-the-shelf components.
They've been able to reap some real technological efficiencies because of their vertical integration. Notable ones I know about:
- The integrated on-chip RAM dramatically speeds up memory access. Your full 16 GB of RAM on an M1 functions at cache speeds; meanwhile, the L3 cache on an Intel processor is 1-8M, more than 3 orders of magnitude smaller.
- Apple takes full advantage of this with their software stack. Objective C and Swift use reference counting. The advantage of refcounting is that it doesn't have slow GC pauses, but the disadvantage is that it has terrible locality properties (requiring that you update refcounts on all sorts of different cache lines when you assign a variable) which often make it significantly slower on real-world Intel hardware. But if your entire RAM operates at cache speeds, this disadvantage goes away.
- Refcounting is usually significantly more memory-efficient than GC, because with the latter you need to set aside empty space to copy objects into, and as that space fills up your GC becomes significantly less efficient. This lets Apple apps get more out of smaller overall RAM sizes. The 16GB on an M1 would feel very constraining on most modern Wintel computers, but it's plenty for Apple software.
- The OS is aware of the overall system load, and can use it to determine whether to use the performance or efficiency cores, and to allocate workloads across cores. The efficiency cores are very battery-efficient; that's why Macbooks often have multiple times the battery life of Windows laptops.
- The stock apps are all designed to take advantage of efficiencies in the OS and not do work that they don't need to, which again makes them faster and more battery efficient.
Apple M1 (or any M-series) RAM absolutely does NOT function at cache speeds. Do you know how expensive that memory would be? The RAM is not literally "in the CPU", but colocated in the same SoC "system on chip" package as the CPU.
It feels like a core part of your claim--at least half of it--relies on most software for "Wintel computers" being written in garbage collected languages, which would be shocking if it were true.
You’re treating vertical integration as if it’s this absolute thing. Apple is clearly more vertically integrated than any other laptop brand by virtue of designing everything from the CPU to the OS. That remains true even though Apple doesn’t run their own chip fabs or mine their own bauxite.
Apple is very dependent on using the latest process node from TSMC though.
For that reason and the fact that the US cannot match what TSMC does, it all points to Taiwan dictating what kind of aid the US must provide.
I don't see the current US leadership wanting to put that in jeopardy.
Apple is better because they’re not competing on price which is why they can afford to bring so many things in house. That’s how they can afford the talent and other R&D resources.
$899 (edu) or $999 is extremely competitive for what you get.
Most people buying an entry level computer these days should at least consider stretching to get a MBA than the $300-400 shovelware, they’ll get so much use out of it.
My wife is still using her 2020 M1 Air and it’s still as snappy as the day we got it, still works for all her use cases.
That’s a great point, but I think that’s the result of decades of work enabled by premium pricing culminating in their custom silicon (which is itself a product of their ability to command exclusivity with TSMC nodes). The shareholders demand ever constant growth and Apple is moving down market just like everyone else (looking at you, BMW 3 series).
My wife is still using her 2020 M1 Air and it’s still as snappy as the day we got it, still works for all her use cases.
Ah! my early 2015 13" Macbook pro died only few weeks back. I don't think any other laptop will last nearly 10 years (TBF I did replace the battery and speakers for $280 in 2020 though)
I am using my HP Omen from 2016, which is still my main laptop. I gotit for 600 I think? I also upgraded Ram and SSD. The hinges on the lid broke the plastic case, and i am not replacing the dead battery, but it definitely works
> Most people buying an entry level computer these days should at least consider stretching to get a MBA than the $300-400 shovelware, they’ll get so much use out of it.
I don't think that expecting everyone to waste 3x the money to scratch the same itch is an informed take, specially when the $300 shovelware has far better specs in terms of RAM and by far HD.
Nowadays you can even get better performing miniPCs for half the price than your MacBook Air M3, such as any of the systems packing a AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS.
I think some people look at the shiny computers and don't look past that.
> Nowadays you can even get better performing miniPCs for half the price than your MacBook Air M3
This is a stupid comparison: even a Mac mini pretty much fulfills this, since the M4 is a step up from the M3 and the actively-cooled mini can sustain higher performance than the passively-cooled MacBook Air, and at about half the price of an M3 MacBook Air.
This is an incredibly lazy comment. I think you and most people would agree on the immense utility of Apple products. There’s also no evidence that demand increases with price in MacBooks.
It isn't, and it's amusing how people get riled with a simple request to justify why dismissed someone else's opinion without presenting a single argument.
> I think you and most people would agree on the immense utility of Apple products.
They are consumer electronics, and laptop manufacturers are a dime a dozen. Why do you believe they are special in that regard? I mean, until recently they even shipped with a below-standard amount of RAM.
> There’s also no evidence that demand increases with price in MacBooks.
That's the definition of a Veblen good, something that is not known for being useful beyond serving as a status symbol.
I don’t think it’s possible to understand what a Veblen good is and also think that Apple makes them. Apple get a brand premium for sure, but a “Veblen good” is something specific, and Apple don’t make those.
> It's mostly overpriced shit wrapped in a nice cellophane.
That's orthogonal to the concept of a Veblen good. A Veblen good can very much be shit wrapped in cellophane.
The core trait of a Veblen good is that customers buy it as a status symbol. Also, being overpriced contributes to reduce the number of those who can afford to buy one.
Apple products have always been status symbols and this Macbook is no different.
One could easily put together a significantly more powerful Linux desktop for a lower price. This has always been the case, but Apple's marketing tries to convince you otherwise. Honestly, I've always been surprised by how effectively their marketing has misled the tech-savvy crowd on HN.
You can’t simply swap OSX for Linux. I heavily use accessibility tools that are just not comparable on Linux. These tools probably cost more than the laptop, even though Apple include it in the OS.
Maybe check out the Framework laptops? For example the Framework 13's new screen is 2.8k @ 256PPI apparently [1], which has slightly more pixels than the Macbook Air M4[2] (obviously pixels isn't everything), but you can get up to 8TB NVMe storage + an extra storage expansion cards if you're happy to sacrifice ports and up to 96GB RAM. [3]
Personally I've been a huge fan of my Framework 13, and am planning at some point to swap out the mainboard with the new one they released — it's pretty nice that you can do that (and they sell a desktop case to put the old mainboard in, so you end up with a faster laptop and a spare desktop afterwards!).
Battery life is the main downside, although it doesn't bother me too much — running manufacturer-supported Linux is very nice and worth having to charge more frequently. It uses USB-C anyway, so it's just one cable for all my devices — doesn't feel like that big of a deal.
Yeah, I love Framework (disclosure, I invested in their community funding round) and I pre-ordered the desktop and have strongly considered upgrading my Intel laptop of theirs to an AMD mainboard (or just getting a whole new unit since I'll have to get new RAM and would like the higher DPI screen) and compared to other Windows or Linux options right now, I think they are pretty strong for thin and light HOWEVER I would be a liar if I said I think it can compare to a MacBook Air right now.
Which to be honest, is fine -- plenty of people want something different from a MacBook Air, whether it is the ability to run Windows or Linux without compromises (tho VMs on Apple silicon are pretty good, it's not going to be ideal for everyone), the ability to upgrade storage, or just wanting repairability.
But the battery life on a MBA is not something Framework or any of the Windows laptops can compete with right now. I thought we might get there with Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips last year -- and maybe the next iteration will (and ARM64 chips have their own trade-offs for Windows and Linux (whereas if you're committed to Mac, those trade-offs don't exist anymore)) -- but right now, unfortunately, Mac is where it is at for the true all-day performance and battery place.
Even there, however, I would specify that it is the MacBook Airs that have the best battery life. My 16" M4 Pro with 48GB of RAM has great battery too -- don't get me wrong. But my original 14" M1 Max and the 14" M3 Max I replaced it with both have exceptional battery life for what they can do, but I can definitely drain that battery in under 5 hours if I'm working on it hard enough. Whereas the Air just lasts and lasts and lasts.
I would love better battery life, but personally, running manufacturer-supported Linux is worth the tradeoff: every Linux tool I'd run in production works for every program on my laptop (no need to set up VMs, and even then, the Linux tools can't work with or inspect what's running on the macOS host...); containers run at full, native performance; games on Steam work much better than macOS (it's literally just a bigger, better Steam Deck!); plus the niceties of upgradeability.
If I usually worked from cafes, or spent many hours a day working on planes or trains, all-day battery life would be at the top of my list. But I usually work in workspaces that have power, so... It would definitely be nice to have better battery life, but other features are higher priority for me.
I would love it if they made it easy to split 16x PCI-e 5 16x/8x/4x slots into gen3 or gen4 breakouts.
The chips may not have the lanes, but they have the bandwidth if only 10GbE / 4xm.2 / storage controllers could plug in. I wonder if power is an issue.
The main problem with the Framework 13 at this point is underwhelming battery life. I have one of the newly announced models reserved in hopes that the new CPU improves that to a reasonable degree, but if reviews come out and that turns out to not be the case there’s a substantial chance I’ll cancel.
I upgraded to the AMD board and the larger batteries and this improved significantly - 7/8 hours of real usage now, which for me is fine. On linux with minor tweaking. Depends what you need, but surely for most people a full workday without power is manageable!
Are those numbers with power saver mode turned on? For what this laptop is being used for I don’t need much muscle and would rather need to charge less frequently.
No, normal usage with no special power saver options. Turning off WiFi+minimal brightness+power saving etc pushes it further, but I'm rarely in a scenario where I want to do that for more than a couple of hours anyway.
I've heard Windows defaults or more advanced Linux games can do better, but at this stage I don't feel the need.
It’s annoying that Asus is shipping 14” laptops with 75Wh batteries while the Framework 13 maxes out at 61Wh and doesn’t use LPDDR. On the other hand, it’s annoying ASUS doesn’t ship models with more ram.
It’s also annoying that the latest Intel/AMD Zenbooks don’t offer a non-PWM IPS panel screen option. The OLED panels they use apparently bother some people at low brightness settings with flickering and of course there’s the usual longevity concerns with the technology.
There’s a number of benefits to long battery life besides being able to work for long stretches unplugged.
- Longer cycles means cycle count accruement and thus degradation is slower (sometimes dramatically so)
- For longer trips, charging can be done overnight with a tiny trickle-charging phone brick, which is also better for battery health
- No need to bring a brick, cable, or power bank for shorter trips
- Impact of phantom drain during standby is greatly mitigated
- Laptop will more often than not have enough charge to be used whenever you pick it up, without having to leave it plugged in all the time
- Bluetooth and wifi can be used liberally without fear of chewing through battery too quickly
- You as a user spend a lot less time thinking about your laptop’s battery
There’s also secondary effects, like a machine being efficient enough to have long battery life generally also reducing its heat output and making it more practical to keep cool with a slow fan or passive heatsink.
Once you can go through a full workday without having to charge, it's a game changer. Same reason why an Apple watch that can't make it a full day would be a dealbreaker.
As others have said, I think it is more than just "when can I plug in, it is also "what is my performance when I'm not plugged in."
My Framework and my HP Spectre (that I bought last year) both perform differently if they aren't plugged in and both make more noise than a MacBook Air. Whereas my MacBook Pros are usually silent (tho they can def turn the fan on if I'm pushing them a lot) and I can definitely run the battery down, but I never have to worry about having to have it plugged in just so I can do what I want without worries.
And on Windows anyway (Linux power management is its own nightmare), having to triage to figure out "how much time do I have before I have to move to a different seat in an airport lounge or find a plug at a coffee shop or snoop around at an office if I'm not at a set desk" to make sure I have enough time left to make that video call is like not a small thing.
Yeah, you can often find a plug -- but a) sometimes those plugs don't work. and b) sometimes the effort to find and look for one really interrupts your flow, versus just being able to to trust that my laptop has enough power to operate.
Not all airplanes have plugs and at cafe's people tend to prioritize seating near the precious outlets. Its a small thing but having to pack up or go home when you are in the zone is a hassle I will pay a little extra to avoid.
Being restricted to seats with plugs sucks. Not finding a place to sit because all the places with plugs are already occupied sucks. Needing to take a power brick out of the bag and fumble around on the floor to plug it in sucks. Being unable to use the laptop on plane or train rides without plugs sucks.
Same reason I like wireless headphones. It makes wires a non-issue a majority of the time.
Carrying around a charging brick sucks. Now you have to get a table at the cafe by the wall. Or hope the airplane power is functional.
I want to bring my laptop to work, not think about charging it, and not worry about what I'm doing on the laptop throughout the day (video calls, compiling, etc.)
I think it appears large for a couple of reasons. First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays. Second is that many companies try to limit SKUs for their off-the-shelf products and 2TB or 4TB apparently aren't moving units. People who really want that model can just go buy a bigger drive to drop into it.
That said, one last thing to consider is that while 14" Macbooks are very capable for their footprint, they are heavier and thicker than some other options. If weight is the concern there are 16" laptops that are thinner and lighter than the 14" macbook. The LG Gram Pro 16 2-in-1 weighs 0.5lbs less and is 0.10" thinner than an MBP14 and has two ssd slots.
> First is that Mac screens are much closer to 3K than 4K. You can find tons of really nice 14" 3K laptops so the gap is pretty much negligible there, especially if you consider how cheap you can get 3K OLEDs on Windows PCs nowadays.
You are discounting the quality of a Macbook screen without understanding how it differs from competitors. A Macbook is the only laptop on the market that accurately reproduces colors out of the box to an extent that is sufficient for color grading photographs or video. I'm a hobbyist photographer and primarily do editing on a desktop where I have LG and Ezio displays that are color accurate, but when I'm out and about there is no alternative on the market I can buy other than a Macbook, because while on paper the "resolution" of other laptops may be similar or even superior, in actuality they are somewhat between shit-tier and D tier in actual color reproduction and quality. Macbook displays are MASSIVELY better than anything any other laptop offers at any price point non-Apple.
I previously used a mixture of different laptops and have over the course of time shifted to using Macbooks for everything because the performance, battery life, power efficiency, display quality, software availability, and annoyance minimization advantages are so large for Apple that it makes no sense to use anything else, except perhaps Linux just to use Linux (which I do on a Framework 13 for personal tinkering projects). I don't see how anyone can honestly recommend that anybody purchase a non-Apple laptop in 2025 for any purpose other than tinkering with Linux, in which case the Frameworks are great.
There's obviously a cost to that superiority and not everyone can afford it, but that doesn't mean alternatives are /preferable/. They clearly are not, they are a trade-off in every single aspect. Even in the case of weight that you mentioned, that trade-off is in durability, the Macbook weighs more because it has an entirely metal chassis and most non-Apple laptops are cheap plastic monstrosities.
I have a Macbook Pro 14 M3, I do hobby photography and you can get great laptop with excellent color accuracy with better screen than Macbook Pro out of the box, from Asus or Lenovo. There are Yoga Pro 9i, yoga aura Edition and even newer Ideapad pro has OLED options ranging from 2.3k to 4k resolution 1000 nits peak bright, depending on config, factory calibrated which is quite close.
I got one from Lenovo with OLED, came pre-calibrated, running X-Rite calibration gave minimal gains.
That's very good news, I found a starkly different situation the last time I upgraded my laptop. Do these competitive screens also offer a wide color gamut, with >99% sRGB coverage?
Near-perfect sRGB coverage is relatively common, especially with OLEDs. Now the concern is AdobeRBG, DCI-P3, and Rec.2020 coverage* -- which are still generally lagging (basically nothing short of some $$$$$ laser projectors are anywhere close to full coverage of Rec.2020, which covers ~75% of all visible colors and is an ambitious forward-looking colorspace) .
I jut don't care that much much about color accuracy.
Software availability is worse for me, as ARM still causes problems. The AMD CPU are pretty nice.
The ThinkPad still have some advantages to me. There are some design choices I much prefer. Granted, when recommending to other people, they likely wouldn't value those same things.
I bought a ThinkPad recently, just as I have done for 15+ years now. At the same price point I would say its at least competitive.
But yeah, if Linux on M-Series continues to make progress, maybe I would would consider it. I'm not using MacOS as I daily driver.
The X1 Carbon Aura Edition looks like a nice MBA-class machine, I just wish Lenovo were a bit less stingy on its battery since even the most efficient x86 CPUs are more power hungry than M-series SoCs. They’ve also stated that they don’t intend to support Linux with it which is concerning.
True, but the vast, vast majority of people can't tell and don't care about color accuracy. I am not even talking about 100% sRGB vs P3. I am talking about 45% NTSC vs 72% NTSC. Most people can't tell the difference unless you show two screens side by side and point out the difference to them.
Seems like you haven't actually looked into it if that's the impression you got, because both Thinkpad (X1) and Framework (13) make a laptop that fit your requirements. The X1 carbon even offers a 4k OLED option if you want it.
Going from an X1 Carbon to a MBP felt like stepping 10 years into the future. The seamless lid close, battery life, operating temp, build quality and performance were all _huge_ upgrades.
I held out on Mac for 20 yrs, no idea what I was thinking.
I spent weeks last year trying to decide what to get to replace a MBP M2, and while Lenovo's offering was good for enterprise consumers, there was very few laptops with decent perfs and HiDPI screen in a practical form factor.
I think for anyone not caring about gaming perf, the Microsoft Surface line is way ahead of anything Lenovo has to offer.
For better perf Asus had a better lineup, and we get form factors like the X13 or Z13 which are just excelent in day to day use (now if only they made 32 or 64G a standard option for all their "gaming" machines I'd have no notes).
I kept a mac for backup, but am seriously waiting for Apple to make more drastic moves (finally a real iPad computer ?) before ever going back.
I've had countless Lenovo laptops over the years. They were amazing up until about 2012 or so. They used to be built like tanks, could survive anything, upgradeable in every way, repairable and affordable (especially used.) There was a span of over a decade where $250ish would buy you a fairly powerful used Thinkpad in decent shape, and it would last you forever because they were indestructible. My Thinkpads went diving with me into canals, oceans, piles of mud, bogs and other non-OEM-recommended-environments and they always survived. Worst case you might have to replace one component, which you could do with a swiss army knife in about thirty seconds. All of those things built tons of goodwill that carries on in people's minds today.
I say 2012 is the dividing line because that's when they released the Yoga, which was a big step in a new direction. I actually owned multiple Yogas, and didn't hate some of them, but they had nothing in common with Thinkpads. In 2012 they also released the X230, which was more locked down than the X220, which the enthusiast community hated. The decline after 2012 was sort of slow - I bought a T440p (released 2014) after my X230 got stolen and I found it was pretty decent, certainly pretty durable - but Lenovo's main focus had clearly shifted towards the new and shiny.
These days they're just another Windows laptop OEM, which is to say: built and engineered like crap, weirdly expensive for what you get, horribly ugly, software full of ads and spyware and AI bullshit, disposable after a few years. The M1 Air was released 5 years ago this year and I still use two on a daily basis for serious tasks; I'll probably be using them years into the future too. They're not really repairable, but they do last. Any five year old Windows laptop is slow as a dog, has small plastic parts breaking off of it, looks somehow even shittier than it did originally, and of course is full of adware and garbage.
Anyway, that's all to say: yes, in 2025 Lenovo is overhyped, but that's just reputational inertia from many years where they were genuinely good.
I have a framework 13” and a few MacBooks. The framework is a really mediocre laptop, even for PC laptops. I don’t even think it really has potential to be honest.
I've been considering a Framework laptop for some time, but your comment made me reconsider. What do you think are the biggest shortcomings of your Framework 13"? How long ago did you get it?
I got my FW 13 late Sept 2022 when pre-orders were available in Australia. I needed it for work.
Look the modularity and repairability is nice, and I like how it addresses e-waste. However regarding modularity, I would rather have more fixed ports than a choice of changeable ones.
My biggest gripe is battery life, in Linux I can only seem to get 4 hours of usage and that's if I'm lucky. More like 2.5 to 3 hours, and that's usually minimal usage.
My second biggest gripe is the hinges in the laptop. WHen I pick up the laptop with the screen erect at the 90 degree position, it usually falls flat 180 degrees. How this even got past QA annoys me, and the fix is to buy a new hinge kit, but that costs $30 AUD plus $40 AUD shipping, so basically a ripoff.
The keyboard is actually quite decent, but I would've preferred Macbook layout with the fn on the left and half-size inverted T arrow keys. I was hoping a 3rd party would make the keyboard, but the reality is not many 3rd parties are making FW stuff.
The modular ports can be erratic when powering on the laptop, sometimes a usb port doesn't register and I have to eject and reinsert the modular ports, which is annoying.
The display is fine, except mine developed a thin grey line that's noticeable when the pixels aren't lit up. I take care of my laptop carefully, but I feel like this display is weaker than most. Thankfully it's not noticeable when the screen is bright. I also find the screen overly glossy that I had to buy a matte screen protector and apply it, but I believe in newer models you can get a matte display.
The webcam is fine. The speakers are trash. The mic is okay. The trackpad is okayish (for what you can get out of Linux anyways).
Just bought a P14s gen5 AMD with a 16:10 OLED, reconditioned, for about a grand. Two SoDIMM slots and one m.2 NVMe slot. Now rocking 96GB RAM, for which I paid the princely sum of 200 pieces of silver. Loaded openSUSE on it - everything works.
It feels plasticky (magnesium chassis T/P-series belong to the ages) but it's a damn sight more computer than I could get from Apple for that money. Well, apart from the battery life, RAM bandwidth, OS-hardware integration, and build quality. It's more RAM than I could get from Apple for that money, for sure.
I'll have a Mac any day an employer offers to buy it for me. Lovely hardware, but it's just too glued-down for my current budget and growing frustration with lack of repairability.
I shall take a good lesson from your case and keep my ThinkPad in its Pelican case whenever I'm not using it. Can't afford to be laptopless for months!
Latest as in the last ~10 years worth of releases. They are on gen 12 or 13 (I had or still have gen 5, 6, 8, 11).
The worst problem is they are Intel-only so I moved to T14s which is not as polished (their premium AMD option is too MacBook-like with sharp edges and worse keyboard in Z13 or something), yet AMD is much closer to Macs on thermals, battery life and performance.
I’ve been browsing the Lenovo (and others’) website for weeks, and the only two laptops it shows with 2TB storage and 4k display are the ThinkPad P1 and P16s.
The ThinkPad X1 and Framework 13 have a much lower resolution display. Also, I appreciate Framework’s mission, but it’s not the build quality that I’m looking for.
If you use the product filter it only shows laptops that come pre-configured with 2TB of storage. If you choose a custom build you can configure the latest X1 Carbon with 32 GB RAM, 2 TB storage, and a 2.8k display.
If you choose the custom build route some even can ship with Fedora or Ubuntu, so presumably Linux support is reasonable.
There should be no questioning on matters of personal taste, but I will offer my experience with the 13 FW, which is that build quality is pretty great already, but also you get the option to maintain it longer term, such as changing hinges etc. which gives confidence on longevity. I also have a Macbook M1, and I have found myself reaching for the framework almost exclusively now. It feels great to work on a machine that you feel like you own a bit more than any other. Macbook is also great, I think one of the best machines I ever owned, but it gradually loses first place to Framework.
> It feels great to work on a machine that you feel like you own a bit more than any other.
This is a thing right? You come back to your computer, and it’s exactly as you left it. It didn’t try to magically reboot because of overnight updates, it didn’t prevent you from starting a program because it phoned home to the mothership and it told them that particular dev hasn’t forked over their $100 yet. It’ll tell you there are updates and ask if you want to install them.
It’s such a relief to work on something not windows or mac in so many ways.
I own a Framework 13, my biggest problem with it is the poor build quality. After only a few months of carrying it in a laptop bag (not in a backpack), it stopped being able to sit flat on a table. I have never had this problem before, including with laptops that cost way less than the Framework. I get that I could try to repeatedly buy case components from the site and replace them until it sits flat on a table again, but I don't want to have to do that and then have it start wobbling again in another few months. The fan on mine is also very loud and on a lot, and if you use it on anything besides a flat table (i.e. your lap or a bed), the vents get blocked, causing the fans to go super high and the computer to start thermal throttling. Overall it's nice that the Framework is upgradable long-term, but I don't think it's worth it when the benefit is that I'm just able to use a computer that I don't enjoy using for longer.
I have the opposite experience. First my FW 13 came with the dodgy hinges where picking up the FW the screen flops 180 degrees. The cost to upgrade the hinge is like $30 AUD but costs like $40 AUD in shipping which is bloody ridiculous. Battery life is awful, about 4 hours if I'm lucky in Linux. The speakers are trash. The display quality is bad, I have a grey line of pixels when the screen is dark (thankfully they're not an issue when the screen is lit). The trackpad is trash. Sometimes a modular usb port doesn't work after powering the laptop, you need to eject and reseat it. The fan is really noisy. I just can't stand using the FW over my M-series Macbooks, the difference is night and day.
Yep, there's no one else. It's a sad state of affairs in the laptop world outside of Apple.
Used to be primarily a Linux on the desktop user, but have been on macOS since the M1 air, and now typing this from a 14" M4 Pro MBP that will probably last me the next 5+ years easily.
I don't love macOS but it's usable, I pretty much live in the terminal anyway, and the ecosystem features are nice - I make heavy use of clipboard sharing between my laptop and phone, iMessage, and universal control with my iPad that's on my desk.
There's just no other laptop on the market that has this combination of aesthetics, performance, thermals (this thing is cool and silent), screen quality, top notch speakers and microphone for a laptop, and unmatched trackpad. Let alone anything that'll run Linux without some headaches.
I had hopes for the Snapdragon X elite laptops, but no Linux still, and they still don't hold a candle to the Macbooks.
I put a LOT of the blame on ARM chipset manufacturers. The reason you can't get a good ARM laptop that isn't a Mac is because the chipset manufacturers treat them like they treat everything else. They want to have a custom patched kernel that's already 2 decades old and they drop support for it next month.
It says a lot that probably the best in the space is the humble Raspberry Pi.
I'd probably make a point of buying a half-decent Pi laptop. I bought a 400, compile the Pi versions of my audio plugins on it.
Pi laptop with the most cursory audio I/O? I'm there. Not to live, but to support as a first class production option. There's something very 'sailboat with solar panel' about 'em.
Gaming laptops aren't neccessarily bulky, my Razer Blade 14 is about the same dimensions as my macbook pro 14. They're about the same age and price (2022), the main difference is that the Razer is much faster (plugged in) but the MacBook is vastly more efficient. I do respect how fast MacBooks feel subjectively, but in terms of number crunching and graphics processing the Razer is a lot better. I guess my overall point being youre not going to beat a macbook on efficiency, but there are options out there that aren't bulky or tacky.
I use a razer blade 14 personally... My mileage varies. I love that I can run a lot of stuff on it, but I hate the fact the ram was soldered and the GPU definitely throttles. I recently ran a benchmark for some GPU code I wrote and found that my steamdeck outperforms the Laptop 3060. Its also got terrible battery life and doesnt help that my work laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad P1 beast (FWIW the razer 14 has better battery life with linux than the lenovo) which is great for building code, terrible as a portable. For me the biggest complaint I have about Macs, is well the OS. With the razer at least I can replace windows with ubuntu and most things work. Im really hoping the AMD stuff catches up soon, otherwise I may have to upgrade to a new desktop + macbook air for personal work.
If you ran the benchmark on battery, I'd definitely run it plugged in. It's not a power drain thing, if it's not plugged in (with the dedicated plug) the GPU can't run full throttle (it can't pull enough current from the battery I think). I had the thing for like a year before I found that out.
So far I'm 2/2 for ok batteries, but we'll see in a few years! Weirdly I've had more problems with apple products with bloated batteries, I had to replace two macbook batteries and an ipad. The thing I worry most about with the Razer is how hot it gets.
The way I see it is that Apple competitors have given up on premium portable devices. Apple tech is so far ahead that consumers looking for the best non gaming hardware will most likely choose Apple devices.
For competitors, spending a huge amount of money in R&D to try to compete with Apple, will be most likely at a loss. At least until some chip manufacturer (read: Intel) doesn't step up their game.
As a consequence, competition has moved to the middle-low quality segment, one in which they can still compete because of 2 main factors: Apple is not interested in that segment and most companies won't move away from Windows (even if they probably should).
Does it really require that much R&D? Slap one of the excellent AMD mobile processors with built-in GPU in there, standard cooling (they don't use much more power than they did 5 years ago. They surely have the blueprints for the last XPS machines), and a bigger NVME. It's all more or less commodity hardware in a name-your-preference shell.
It’s easy until you can’t really fine tune the software because you use windows and it’ll eat the battery alive for reasons you can’t control as a manufacturer (but customers will still think it’s your fault)
OEMs have been doing basically this for years with their phones for decades at this point, pushing customized builds of Android with every phone they make, this has been successful to close the gap Apple created when they released the iPhone.
I guess a hurdle smartphones didn't have as they were breaking into a new market is compatibility; outside of the tech world, virtually all of corporate and personal environment is dependent on Windows and Windows-only software. Steam has shown it can work with SteamOS and Proton, making gaming on Linux a reality for a wide audience. What's missing is a major OEM to build a high-spec laptop with a custom Linux build to optimize performance and battery life, with a decent Windows compatibility layer and that would provide software companies an incentive to sell native Linux versions and support. Is Samsung really going to keep their laptop line depend on Windows, and leave it on the side-line as they will never be able to really optimize battery life and performance and compare to the MacBooks?
sure, you'll have some unhappy customers but that's not new. They used to sell just fine. I wonder if it's the neverending hunger for bigger margins that's really doing them in. It's not enough to make SOME profits when you need to show shareholders you're making MORE profits.
I've been using LG Gram laptops running linux. They are fantastic. My current daily drive is 3lbs, 17" display, 32GB RAM i7 CPU, and I bumped the SSD to 2TB. It is lighter than my 13" Macbook air and cost $1200 at Costco. Oh, and battery life is 14-16 hours of use.
The Asus ROG Flow Z13 with 128gb unified memory and the AMD Ryzen AI Max amu would be my first non-M4 laptop pick. Surprised how under-reported this device is.
Hope lenovo ships the amd max in a P1 type laptop. I have an almost 5 year old thinkpad P1gen2 with Core i9, 64GB, 2.5Tb disk, T2000 discrete GPU, 4K oled touch display running Linux. Something similar that runs LLMs faster would be nice. The GPU is limited by only 4GB. Also, something that does not run out of battery power in less than 2 hours.
Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition is in fact lighter than the Macbook Air, has Lunar Lake, up to 2 TB storage, great battery life, and a 2880 x 1800 OLED display. It's pricy, though.
An M4 air will run circles around Lunar Lake being over 30% faster at geekbench (both single and multe-core) and over 40% faster at Cinebench 24. The GPU is 25-35% faster too. Air is also 60-80% faster at Geekbench AI.
People spent a decade upgrading laptops for a mere 5-10% increase in performance (sometimes less). I can't see someone giving up that much of a performance jump unless Windows is absolutely the only option.
I also have a 4-year old XPS15. The SSDs and RAM are super easy to upgrade. There are two internal SSD slots (one shipped empty). Dell charges not-quite Apple-scale arms and a legs for RAM/SSD upgrades, so I bought mine Dell-minimal and immediately upgraded them both and have bumped them up as prices come down for new parts. The upgradability was a major reason I went for the XPS15 instead of the XPS13 (my previous machine)
I always feel that the kind of laptop I want is a unicorn if I exclude Apple M-series laptops. Is there a laptop out there which is fanless (passively cooled), supports Linux reliably, has great performance per watt, has decent raw performance (anything better than a recent lower end AMD/Intel laptop processor), and has great build quality?
I don’t think there are any fanless x86 but I had a system76 pangolin for work. It was quite well built (I bought the next gen one for myself). They OEM the notebooks though, so the quality is decent (I’m coming from a 2015 Mac book, pretty much the gold standard of Macs)
I wanted an XPS15 for a while, but they kept getting relatively worse than my 2017 one. I ended up just replacing the battery on it and kept the 1080p screen that wasn't great anymore, but I was not going to buy a laptop with a worse battery for a higher price than what I got the old laptop for.
Later I bought a new Malibal laptop, but mostly for the screen, usb-c ports and lower weight,but had to compromise on getting an unnecessary nVidia GPU that I just blacklist right away because the right laptop just didn't exist. I like the laptop, but I can't recommend Malibal laptops though, they are a weird company and getting things to work alright took way more effort than on my old XPS.
Good question and probably worth an article or two. My thinking is that Apple is designing silicon that makes for great laptops (M4 in this case) and then building around that. You will be hard pressed to find an x86-64 chipset that does what the Apple chipset does, and without that no matter what laptop you build around it is not going to be competitive. Nimbler companies like Framework are working with more speculative silicon (like the AMD Ryzen AI Max) which people like Dell and Lenovo won't do (yet?) But even there you get closer but not really close to something like the compute complex in the Macbook Air.
Mobile. A lot of games I played as a kid have mobile apps, and in some cases, I don't know if its the case for all of them, the userbase is mostly on their phones. I can only imagine this is the case for a lot of things.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the thinkpad x1 extreme laptop. It was basically the lenovo/thinkpad response to the xps 15. It's way thinner than the ThinkPad T16/P15 lines.
they claim it's a 16" laptop but only because they made the bezel smaller enough to fit a larger display in the same space.
it's usually mostly on par with the dell xps but i'm not sure about the specs though... my personal laptop is a rusty thinkpad x270 (i'm torn between the newly announced m4 macbook air or the upcoming framework 12) and i've been issued a m3 macbook pro for work.
I have an X1 extreme gen 2 - great expandability (two SSD slots), good port selection, not too heavy but runs hot, the GPU is crap and the battery life isn't great. Running pop os with KDE on it; normal usage.
And just checking the XPS 14 it has both 2tb and 4tb storage options, and the 3.2k OLED screen is higher resolution than what Apple's 14" offering contains and it's 120hz.
Surface Laptop 7? While they don't technically sell a 2TB config, they do use a 2230 M.2 SSD and there are 2TB versions of those. As a bonus it's WAY cheaper to do it that way than from the factory. The Surface Pro tablets are another option if you can live with the form factor. Even easier to swap the SSD in those too.
I'm very disappointed with my Surface Pro tablet ... battery life sucks, resuming from sleep is really slow and the keycover needs to be disconnected and reconnected for it to 'remember' it is there. I've owned 4 Surfaces over the years and won't buy again.
I'm not a fan of OS X but seriously considering one of these just for the battery life and it-just-works portable computing.
Well, my ThinkPad P14 Gen5 is pretty much this. Small, lightweight, 64gig RAM, 2TB SSD, and a pretty darn good screen. But yeah it's black and has a coating and you won't feel like a genius machinist when you touch it, plus no apple logo, so I guess Apple wins again. How do they keep doing it?
I am quite happy with Asus and Thinkpad pro graphics laptops, wihout being bulky gaming laptops, and I get more tech per buck with the nice Win32/DirectX and CUDA ecosystems that everyone is "emulating" nowadays.
Why get the lesser copy, when I can get the original at better price?
The thing that irks me, is the premium price for storage. Everyone has a cloud storage package to sell, so the air model that has amazing features but small storage will cost you in the long run. Storage should be easy to replace and plentiful!
My laptop before getting my M2 MPB was a top of line ThinkPad P series with all the best on paper specs. As long as I was running benchmarks on it while it was plugged in and I didn't care about fan noise, performance was fine. Once you tried to use it like an actual laptop it was terrible in just about every way. Performance when on battery was either so throttled as to be barely usable, or would kill the battery in 45 minutes. The noise and heat it spit out when doing anything even moderately taxing was extreme. Despite having the most expensive graphics card they offered at the time, interactive 3D and games was still always stuttering and rarely ran smooth. Sleep was hit and miss, so if I just closed the lid and chucked in my bag, there was good chance it would be both hot and dead when I pulled it out an hour later.
There is a lot more to a good laptop than specs, and so far only Apple seems to really get that.
I own couple of ThinkPads myself: an old L-series one, a T490 and lately a P16s. They all are fine. 45 mins on battery on best performance mode is very bad.
I am currently using a P16s with an Intel's meteor lake CPU and an RTX 500 Ada dGPU. I would say it is not that bad. Linux Mint worked OOB perfectly. I get 5-6 hrs of battery life which is fine for me (considering it has a 4K OLED display). The dGPU is mostly idle and the machine is mostly silent unless I am gaming.
The only times I hear the fans going are when using it on my lap or playing games. I do run Windows VM for a big .NET Framework project (coding on JetBrains Rider) and at the same time some coding on Linux. The CPU handles those fine.
These are my personal experiences though. The only issue I can pick is sometimes Chrome shows some artifacts (I think, related the iGPU driver)
I bet you had an Intel CPU. Intel is almost always the worse option since the first Ryzens were released in 2017 or so.
(Intel has to have some sketchy deals with manufacturers, otherwise why design a product like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon line only to put these Intel energy hogs in there?)
Especially for the command line and a browser which are primarily rendering text, pixel density matters so much! Why look at pixelated text when you can have print-quality crisp text? I never want to go back to low pixel density displays!
I had an XPS 15 with 4k display in 2016, yet in 2025 it’s somehow difficult to find a laptop with that pixel density?
I wonder the same with phones actually, my Nexus 6P from 2015 (10 years ago!) had an amazing 518 ppi display. When the modem died I got a Pixel 2 which had only 441 ppi, and the display was a really noticeable downgrade, text looked significantly uglier, I could see the pixels and hinting artifacts again. I expected high pixel densities to become mainstream to the point where every screen has a density at the limit of what the human eye can perceive, yet here we are 10 years later, and Google’s flagship phones have only 495/486 ppi, worse than the Nexus 6P!
Pixel density is important for crisp small text, so cli on a 14 inch screen and maybe web browsing would be good reasons for a 4k display - it would be the only reasons for me at least.
For the same reason your PC screen likely has more than 480p resolution even though you technically don’t need more than that, why you have stereo instead of mono sound, and more than one CPU core.
> I'm willing to compromise on battery life, and I don't need the fastest CPU, just a good quality work laptop where I can run `cargo build` / `docker pull` without worrying about filling up the disk, and mostly just a browser aside from that.
I know this isn't your point but this is exactly why I don't use docker--but I'm a bit surprised to hear you mention `cargo build` as something that might fill up the disk. I've been a vocal critic of Rust on Hacker News in the past, but the one thing I always thought they did very, very well, was Cargo and the tight executables it produced for me.
The optimised release binary isn't the issue - it's the many GB of build artifacts produced along the way if you have a lot of dependencies. You can accumulate hundreds of GB in target/ over time working on large projects.
If you don't travel from your house with it I understand your confusion, the weight is a factor when traveling. I never have back pain, but when I do, its because I'm carrying a heavy laptop around on my back.
Even around the house it makes a difference in my opinion. My 12” X1 Nano is much nicer to carry and use around the house than my 16” M1 Max MBP is, and so the Macbook spends most of its life docked. The MBP comes with me when I travel because it’s my primary computer, but reduced size and weight would be welcome. If only the 14” MBP didn’t sacrifice cooling capacity as much as it does.
I just schlepped 150 kg (in 30 kg chunks, and not 2km but some distance with lifting) and I’m entering my eighth decade on Earth. No back pain. Did have a little back pain in middle age, but a few years in the gym with a personal trainer fixed that right up. Fitness, my friend, fitness.
I travel with my laptop a lot, but much prefer a beefy workstation for all the work I do when I get where I'm going. The weight of the laptop is not a big deal, even my big Lenovo P53 (~30mm thick 15.6" black brick) is only 3 kg.
I do use an Osprey 22L hiking backpack for my daily driver, it's got a waist belt to transfer weight to my hips, a chest strap to keep the shoulder straps together, and internal semi-rigid frame... but that's more for all my other stuff, and for activities I do in the woods far from stuff like 'laptop computers'. Even if it's just in a handheld briefcase, 3 kg is not a lot. That's about as much as a water bottle - which I also have in the backpack, as well as a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that also weighs a few kg.
I herniated a disk a couple years ago due to a waterskiing accident, but I've fully recovered and even while dealing with that injury, walking around airports and so forth with any laptop is not not strenuous.
In hindsight, I wish I'd gone for the big P73, I miss the giant 17" screen of my old 40mm thick, 3.5 kg Dell Precision... but the OLED on the P53 is beautiful. 17" UHD OLED when, Lenovo?
Because they are laptops. I can't even use my 16" MacBook Pro on the couch. It's portable sure, but it's not a laptop. You can't take it anyway, only move it from desk to desk. It's the single heaviest thing in my bag when I travel.
I can do the same work on a MacBook Air when I'm away, and it's basically just a desktop when I'm home. To me it would make way more sense to have a desktop at home and a 12 - 14" laptop, if it wasn't for the cost of having both.
It's really nice to be able to take a laptop out and start working on an idea wherever you are. Macbook Air makes me more productive and home or anywhere because it's less of a hassle to boot up the laptop.
I have a gaming laptop, even 14", and I can't stand the boot up time and needing a thick power brick cable to get things going. I barely use it as a result and use my Steam Deck more.
Mostly, but also take it when I fly, along with a mouse + mouse pad. The weight has never bothered me, usually the backpack with the laptop in it is the lightest bag and then I have a much heavier carry on as well.
So that makes sense it is not issue for you if you mostly travel by car. But it can be for those that use bike or public transport or just walk. (As example last time I used car about two months ago).
When I'm walking around S.E. Asia and it's 90 degrees and humid I care about every extra gram.
Even an Air is too heavy IMO compared to say an LG Gram. But, I need the specs and the screen so I lug around a MacBook Pro 16" at 4.6lbs - often I have to lug around 2, my corp one and my personal one.
Given an iPad Pro 13" is 1.3lbs they "could" (for some definition of "could") make a 16" device with keyboard closer to 2 lbs.
Yes, I'd rather carry a lighter laptop, but that's mostly because of all the other stuff I want to carry in my backpack (eg groceries). If walking "a few kilometres with a 3kg gaming laptop on your back" is a problem for you, you're rather out of shape.
I have (at least) 2 laptops at any given time. They fit into 2 categories:
1) Is 99% of the time actually on my lap when I'm using it. It's (usually) the one I take with me when I leave the house. I care very, very much about its size and weight. It's an M1 Air and I wouldn't mind if it was a bit smaller/lighter.
2) Is 99% of the time sitting on my desk, plugged into my KVM. It almost never leaves my house. I don't care how bulky it is. However, I prefer medium-ish form factors in case I do need to travel with it.
Any laptops I have over 2 will usually be in the 2nd bin, but sometimes the 1st.
Only answering for myself here, but when I already have 10+ lbs of camera gear in my backpack, a huge gaming laptop makes a big difference compared to an ultrabook. And I'm not talking about an excessive amount of gear either. One body plus one lens plus a couple extra batteries, etc, easily gets me to 10 lbs. And then I still have to get on a plane with it.
Other than my work laptop (a horrible, horrible Dell Precision), my laptops hardly ever leave the house: MacBook Air M2, Lenonov X220 (Linux) and HP 17 (Windows). I still prefer the sleek and light one over the others.
I bought an XPS 16 recently. 4K screen, 64 GB RAM (+8 GB VRAM), 2 TB storage (4 TB was an option). It cost about 3/4 as much as a similarly specced MBP.
I know many people still love MacOS, but it lost me a few years ago. I've also, frankly, had much better milage out of Dell machines than Apple ones over the last ten years.
Dell XPS 13 isn't discontinued, its rebranding will be fully rolled out later this year
In the meantime Dell XPS 13s are currently available with 2TB and 64GB RAM (with a better screen than this Air I might add) and with a Snapdragon X Elite chip (which there are very few compatibility issues with in March 2025 even with gaming)
If its a 14 inch laptop you want XPS 14s are currently available with upto 4TB. They will also be rebranded later this year. They're on Intel chips and I'm hoping they will switch to Snapdragon on the rebrand to get the Apple like battery life
I don't think the SL7 is a like-for-like comparison even if it seems like it on paper. The SL7 is great if you want/need to run Windows - I convinced my sister to get one and she loves the battery life and low heat (less fain noise) compared to her previous devices.
If you want a nix experience, Linux support is still a WIP and progress is quite slow because of a lack of help from Snapdragon and OEMs. I expect that it might take a generation or two to get it to the point where it was with the x86 SLs.
However, at this stage, I'm tired of the quirks of Windows so the lack of nix support pushed me to get the Macbook Air for myself.
I am between Lenovo X1 Aura, MSI Prestige 13, and this. All have Lunar Lake so battery life should be exceptional, except of course if there are any issues with battery drain during sleep on Linux. Definitely spoiled by Apple not having battery drain issues, but would love pointers on how to solve it.
I have an M1 for personal use, and recently got a Surface L7 for work. Build quality wise, its the closet thing you're gonna find to a macbook that runs windows.
I also run a custom Windows desktop and a synology NAS, so I like to consider myself mostly agnostic.
And then there is Apple who pack everything I want in a sleek 14" or 15" device, plus a very fast CPU and battery life that is years ahead of anything else ... Why is there no competition here? I'm willing to compromise on battery life, and I don't need the fastest CPU, just a good quality work laptop where I can run `cargo build` / `docker pull` without worrying about filling up the disk, and mostly just a browser aside from that. Why is the gap so large?