Comparing to Apple (I run both Lenovo and apple kit) I’ve lost two bits of hardware with apple for multiple days on repairs in the UK. A friend just got told that there’s a 2 month turnaround on his custom M1 MBP 16 which has a logic board problem.

That scared the shit out of me enough to throw the money in on a Lenovo T14 gen 3 with NBD on site repairs. If I sell my apple kit I can afford to buy another identical machine and stick it on the shelf. I’m still £120 up on my mac and mitigated a whole bunch of risks.

A couple of T490’s is probably good enough for me to be fair.

They used to have an even more exotic AppleCare tier than that for Xserve customers - onsite hardware support within 4 hours if you had a problem during the business day. I don’t remember exactly how much it cost but I want to say it was less than $500.

Remarkably, the old product page for it is still up on B&H: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/283804-REG/Apple_M892...

Pricing is also pretty atrocious compared to the US, which is sad as there are not that many alternative laptop brands with good Linux support.

"being able to take it apart and put it back together" covers for a multitude of sins if you're me.

Others may feel differently, and, well, to each their own preferred set of trade-offs :)

Requires a little paying attention to get decent odds, certainly, but it's far from impossible to do so.

Digital River was the third party maintenance company, never experienced such bad service. I'd purchased onsite support. Getting them to listen and actually book the repair was painful.

It's almost as if you get what you pay for.

I have a Lenovo gaming laptop and I have a 4 year warranty with on-site service.

Parts, firmware updates, repair manuals...even warranty extensions for 5+ year old Thinkpads is totally normal.

For computers other than Think branded things that Lenovo makes, they're functionally abandoned ASAP. They make some innovative and well-engineered things, but outside the Think line everything is basically a disposable commodity machine.

They still have the hardware maintenance manual online for my 30 year old Thinkpad 350C.

Tried getting HP to fix a monitor with a defective port and was going to have to ship it to them at my own cost with no estimates of the repair time or cost. I just went out and bought a Samsung.

If you have the time and knowledge to repair your own computers like the author it can be a fun hobby, I also have two custom built PCs, but I don't do work on them for a reason.

Do you have to pay extra or have a business plan with Lenovo to get that service tho?

... except an IBM (yes, it's that long ago) Thinkpad that was super-underpowered even for the time. Though, it did have the ~2-3hr actual-in-practice battery life that was typical of laptops at the time, no matter what they promised, so like all the rest the battery was really just for hopping from one outlet to the next (I don't know if Apple laptops were like that at the time, but I do know that no subsequent laptop let me feel like I could leave my power brick behind when getting up from my desk until I got a Macbook)

If I ever go back to PC-land, it'll be to an underpowered device from a business-oriented line. Worked once, so, maybe it'll work again...

> Two years ago I bought a Lenovo gaming laptop for my son.

This especially is a big part of your problem. Discrete graphics card in a laptop = 2x the problems—and that holds even for Apple (in the Intel days, anyway). Gaming-marketed on top of that? Add another 1x for 3x the rate of trouble over baseline. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

If I ever need a PC again, it'll be by running Parallels on a Mac Air.

I agree though, 16GB is tolerable for casual usage and consumption without massive swapping, but, 32GB would really be nice.

I doubt it will be competitive with a Switch for durability, which is the closest mirror to a Deck that also has some similarities to Apple-style hardware-quality + lock-in.

But that said, I’ve had problems with Apple laptop keyboards after only a couple years of use, and had a laptop monitor from Apple start to yellow bizarrely after less than a year. Nintendo joycons started having issues after under a year.

Sometimes you’re just at the bad-end of the bell-curve. It’s a shame that online reviews aren’t that helpful anymore; it can be hard to know what’s real with consumer tech, and hard to know how big the lemon segment is.

It's out of my wheelhouse, but I am looking for a gaming laptop manufacturer recommendation that is high quality...

Computers have had keyboards for... 50 years.

I've had great luck with exactly this--used, midrange Dell Latitudes.

And if all you need from the laptop is Chrome and SSH, then Chromebooks are actually a pretty sweet deal. I still run a 6 year old Pixelbook as the daily driver. Battery deteriorated to the point of lasting only 6-ish hours, but I have nowhere near that many meetings in a day. A new premium Chromebook should reliably last 10 hours and stay good for 5-ish years.

Anyway, there is no reason for your Air to be slower after 10 years. The hardware is the same. Either Apple makes a slower OS for it or it will be as fast as ever.

In my case I moved to Debian two months ago after years of Ubuntu. It was fast enough but it feels faster now. The fan didn't turn on often but it's even more silent now. Maybe less stuff running in background or a newer kernel and graphic driver, who knows.

On the other side, my friend's cheap Windows laptops become slower and slower until they buy a new one. I'm not sure to know somebody with a 2000 Euro Windows laptop. Maybe it's different.

Some stuff the dual core i5 just can't handle anymore, but it won't be e-waste any time soon.

I only ever bought T series laptops from them and they all still work flawlessly, the oldest being a T420 currently used by my mom who needs a computer about once a month to visit a website.

On those experiences, I'll only spend my own money on Lenovo laptop hardware. ;-)

And yes, because I relied on it for business I spent the money on their Joint Venture program to get faster service and a replacement laptop (but only if the Apple Store in question had one available which was never the case for me which is ridiculous). Until they canceled the program.

Lenovo instead: Bought premium support, had an issue, someone physically came to my house to replace the memory at my kitchen table the next day.

Apple - in my experience - is not great for freelancers and small businesses. It might be good for private people and large businesses.

I hate the ceremony and the Apple Store experience.

These are not comparable. There are wildly different quality of laptops under the Lenovo brand. A ton of them are complete crap. Apple simply doesn't sell anything like that. The author is comparing to a Thinkpad specifically.

Additionally, the 10 years old Apple that made your macbook is a very different company from today. Although they are still a premium brand, the reliability and replaceability of parts is completely different. I have one of the first unibody MBPs from 2009, and ran it for almost 10 years (although I had to switch to freebsd and linux by the end because of Apple). That laptop was incredibly sturdy, and parts were reasonably replaceable, keyboard lasted 10 years before getting squishy. Battery was a terrible hot pocket but replaceable without screws! back then it was all SATA so I upgraded to an intel SSD from before they sold their controllers to samsung - also in a user serviceable compartment next to the battery.

None of these things are true of Apple laptops today.

You're also exempt from the Lenovo panel lottery.

(Maybe not by me, but that’s only because I’ll succumb to the urge to buy something new and shiny and tax deductible in a few years.)

I just replaced my 2012 Thinkpad T430s (which I bought second-hand!) with a 2019 x390. Part of it is that the T430 became a loaner that I have gifted to a friend who needed a laptop for light paperwork, but also the battery on it (and any replacements I could find) had a pretty short lifespan, about 2.5 hours at best. The laptop was still very usable, but I've become too tied to my desk and my desktop lately and I wanted to be able to work with more mobility and not worry about having an outlet constantly available.

All that is just to say that Thinkpads, even post-IBM era ones, have the longevity you expect from a Macbook. Unfortunately, the user-serviceability has also gone downhill, with soldered-on memory being common and now the charging port is a USB-C that is built onto the motherboard.

The latest gen is better thanks to MagSafe and Mx chips help yield much better battery life.

I really do think Apple does a reasonably good job at making sure stuff lasts. It hurt to pay nearly 4 grand for a computer three years ago, but I suspect I'll get at least another five years out of it.

WSL2 under Windows is very good these days, you can run ML tasks without much overhead, and Windows 11 has an x server that allows graphical applications to run from WSL2. So for home development, all you really need is Windows (if you game, if you don't or run games that work well under Linux, Linux is the better choice).

For laptop, it very much varies by use case. For general higher level coding and web browsing, M1/M2s work very well. For more specialized use cases, Linux is simply better than OS X.

The Macs were generally very good until the generation prior to the M1. That was the worst laptop I've ever owned. I had to repair it multiple times - keyboard multiple times and also a motherboard that went bad - and I was without it for days each time. Not to mention, I also had to make an appointment, often days away, just to drop it off. The AppleCare experience with laptops was pathetic. To be fair, they've done a fantastic job on the phones and iPads I've had to bring in.

My ThinkPad's touchpad started flaking out so I called about a repair. They had someone at my house the next day and I was only without the laptop for about 15 minutes. It was a night and day difference between AppleCare and Lenovo's premium support. There's nothing sexy about this ThinkPad and the hardware isn't as good as the latest Macs, but the Linux support is flawless and I know I can count on Lenovo to provide good service.

I've had my 11" MBA in service since it launched. I did have to pull off OSX because (it became garbage); but the hardware has been solid for a decade+ now.

My 2019 rMBP lasted ~2.5 years before an OSX update came in and cooked it ~1w outside of corporate Apple Care expiring on it (see: I was told to scrap it).

I've also had a Dell tech sitting at my kitchen table replacing a bad motherboard the same day the laptop failed to post; ~8h turnaround 'Dead' to 'Working fine'.

You get what you buy and what you pay for to a large extent. Much of Apples reputation is that they simply don't sell a cheap gaming laptop.

Rule #1: do a ton of research and comparison shopping to be certain you're making a good PC buy. These huge brands like Lenovo, Dell, Acer, etc churn out so many laptops, and the build quality varies wildly between them. For my process, I completely factored out most brands: absolutely no shopping for Acer, MSI, Dell, Toshiba, etc. They're just too much of a roulette, unless you know a specific model that fits your needs (like the Thinkpad!). At the time I was shopping I was only looking at Asus, Alienware and Gigabyte (not sure if they're all still good brands in 2023).

Rule #2: be able to do basic small maintenance. I ended up buying a Gigabyte laptop that's still running perfectly 5 years later, and it IS a gaming laptop with all the heat / cooling issues that implies. I've had to replace the SSD, the battery (heat degradation), didn't replace but had to oil and reseat the fans, repasted CPU / GPU, and make various software tweaks. A computer shop could do the same, just like the Genius bar, but it just makes things so much less stressful when you can do the kind of quick maintenance that Apple so strongly discourages.

No.

Thinkpad laptop for work, gaming desktop @ home.

I've had extremely bad luck with Apple support and products. The last time I had to do some ridiculous process to prove it was still under warranty and they still tried to pawn it off on the retailer.

They broke it and made it right.

I tried buying a replacement battery online but it only worked for a short time before it stopped charging all-together.

Left a really sour taste in my mouth because the battery was the only thing stopping me from using an otherwise perfectly fine piece of hardware.

Didn't they use socketed WiFi cards? On every non hair thin laptop I could crack open, I always found the WiFi card to be mounted on a MiniPCI or newer socket, so unless that problem was due to the mainboard, it was just a matter of replacing the WiFi card and install the relevant driver.

Also, if you know how to solder and have a really thin laptop with one available internal USB port, you can fit a small module such as this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225197524670 Complete it with a small pcb antenna and you have a new WiFi card. Very useful also for small SBCs which beside the usual USB sockets usually have internal USB ports pins.

I've seen the feature on servers for the same reason they can come with (dual) internal SD cards, but I can't imagine a manufacturer putting in a full-size USB-A port in an ultrathin laptop. I'd really like to see an example if I'm wrong however.

Gaming pcs, until about a year or two ago, are pretty much desktop replacement pcs.