In response to the comments regarding its "excellent value" at $699, Lenovo is currently selling its 14" ThinkPad P14s Gen 3 for $699. It comes with a Ryzen 7 6850U that roughly matches the M1 in performance[1], 16GB of LPDDR5 and a 512GB SSD. In terms of what the everyday consumer will want/need, having 8GB more RAM and 256GB more storage is arguably going to be more valuable both now and going forward.
Edit: There have been a number of comments linking to reviews suggesting really poor battery life, however these reviews clearly mention 12th gen Intel processors, with an onboard nvidia GPU in one instance. None of these reviews pertain to the laptop I mentioned above, which features a Ryzen 6850U.
> So, I get maybe, maybe, 2 hours battery life on my TP P14s Gen 3. It's only a few months old. I've had the battery replaced once but it hasn't helped.
> On the Tom's Guide web browsing battery test, the new MacBook Air lasted an epic 14 hours and 41 minutes.
Let’s assume Tom’s full of shit and the real life battery life is 50% of what their test claims. That’s still almost 4x longer battery life than the thinkpad.
> It has the nvidia card, touch screen, i7-1260p, 32GB, all drivers and bios up to date including windows 11
This is not the same laptop I was pointing to. The i7-1260p is much more power hungry than the 6850U, and having a nvidia GPU is definitely going to eat up battery as well.
The Mac keyboards have improved but there are so many more options on the Windows side it's not even funny - and I don't know if Apple has ever made a laptop with a numpad, which can be terribly important for some people.
Some manufacturers can be quite a crapshoot with the keyboard layout (fortunately that's plainly visible when shopping for a laptop), but Lenovo is pretty consistent with the ThinkPad layout, even if they're dubiously creating these low end plastic frame lines that pointlessly devalue their brand.
Nobody remembers that brand as being "IBM's laptops", they don't have that to borrow value against, they should take care of the ThinkPad line's reputation.
Apple never had a numpad on its laptops. Since the aluminum unibody design, the Apple laptops outshine all Windows laptops because of the touchpad alone. Nothing compares to it. On a Macbook I don't want to use a mouse, on a Windows laptop I don't want to use the touchpad. I've never had any touchpad that really worked for me, so without thinking about it. The fact that they still have those buttons and that I have to use two hands, or move my fingers away from the touchpad, or lift my fingers from the touchpad to tap to click - unbelievable that they haven't figured this out.
The Mac just works. The only time the touchpad doesn't work is when you need pixel precise selection like in photo editing, and even then it outshines all Windows touchpads.
All Windows laptops I've had look outdated after two years. I've had three Macbooks, the previous two 5 and 7 years, and both didn't look outdated, not even used
The body, magsafe, touchpad, no stupid privacy settings, disk encryption, no OS licensing - this laptop works for me. With Windows it's always waiting for the time that it doesn't work like expected or doesn't work at all.
I am not sure what are you talking about: Windows laptops had the same hardware and similar gestures since, at least, 2013. The vast majority of Windows laptops don't have buttons on touchpad (the Thinkpad in this thread actually does but those are buttons to be used with the "touchpoint", the antique IBM control with the red "pimple" in the middle of the keyboard, the touchpad itself supports the standard Windows Precision gestures so buttons are not needed). Using a Windows laptop at home and a Mac at work I see no difference in touchpad performance, except that Windows gesture for selection is easier to pull off than the Mac's but this could be just my preference as I mostly use Mac with a mouse anyways.
Please for the love of god… put the M3 pro in the 15” MBA already…
it’s so close to being the perfect lower-midrange laptop but the 1 external display (without closing the lid) is a dealbreaker for tons of people. The 15” chassis can handle it just fine for the burst loads the MBA is designed around, and the M3 pro is reduced in scope over the earlier variants already.
The impulse reply is “but they want you to buy the MBP!” and surely that’s missing the whole point of the laddering strategy? Why miss a chance to slot in one more tier to grind people upwards?
but yeah the MBA are literally such a good laptop that they can do this job of peeling people away from x86 while running fully passive, it is a little silly how badly the x86 stuff comes off in comparison. Some laptops check some of the boxes but the apple is just a killer laptop, great KB and trackpad, ok speakers (MBP is definitely better but air is also better than the average tinny laptop speaker), solid screen (MBP is better tho), well-supported Unix environment, etc.
2 monitors is so passé. It was necessary in the age where you could only get 16:9 monitors (due to 1080p format dominance).
Nowadays, I do far better with a 34" or 49" widescreen format. My home monitor is 32:9 and far better than any 2-monitor setup - even though my machine could easily do 3x external monitors + display.
You have to dig around a bit to see that this line has a plastic frame, what a waste of their old reputation to put this in the ThinkPad brand, but in truth it's not even deceiving anymore, it's damaged enough that few would trust the name blindly.
this is the hardware version of the (in)famous hackernews comment on Dropbox:
> you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
It appears battery life is really unacceptable with the P14s, being somewhere around 2-4 hours. I don't even bring my charger to work with me, these days.
You can't look at a P14s with a 12th gen Intel processor and claim it's going to represent the battery life of a P14s with an AMD 6850U. These are totally different beasts.
Specs of the third party semiconductors are like half of what you have to look at in a laptop. As tools they are subject to a lot of wear and tear, desktop computers you can compare on pure specs, but not laptops, the plastic frame of the P14s will make your investment last way less than the metal body Macbook Air.
On that note, Lenovo leadership is being super short sighted in diluting the ThinkPad brand with these models. Didn't they use to have the IdeaPad as the product line made of less durable materials?
"You can get a Windows machine with 2x the RAM for the same price!"
is a trope that's been around for what... 15 years now? And unless you're someone who KNOWS they need the RAM (gamers, certain types of creatives, people doing certain types of development), it's proven out over and over again, they probably don't need the RAM!
You're trading off other more qualitative benefits to get that additional RAM: screen quality, battery life, heat, UI/UX "smoothness," etc. Is the added RAM worth that trade-off? I'd argue not for most users, including power users like myself; I have a base-model 15-inch M2 Air for travel, and a beefy Windows+Linux desktop at home that I can SSH/VPN into.
Edit: There have been a number of comments linking to reviews suggesting really poor battery life, however these reviews clearly mention 12th gen Intel processors, with an onboard nvidia GPU in one instance. None of these reviews pertain to the laptop I mentioned above, which features a Ryzen 6850U.
[1]: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...