Moving to a Thinkpad

Why would I move from Mac?

My current Macbook Pro was nothing short of a perfect laptop for a very long time, but now it is over 5 years old and slowly more and more issues are cropping up, mostly with battery life and performance. So I decided to start looking at new used laptops to see what I can replace it with, not only for doing development, but also for leisure.

The reason why I didn’t go for a new Macbook was because they are more far more expensive while being far less reliable. It sucks because OS X as an OS is extremely good for development while giving you access to a lot of tools that creative people professionally. I use OS X at work as well and while this works fine, the recent upgrades have not given me much hope for being able to upgrade safely from one OS version to another, not feeling secure in that the software you get as an upgrade will even work correctly is a not a feeling I want to have regularly.

I also want to try something new and also see what the world outside of the Apple ecosystem was like. Since I have been in the Apple ecosystem for so long, it is hard to see what has changed outside of that. I do use Windows at home but only for gaming though as I am not a big fan of doing development on a Windows machine. I am hoping that the next laptop I buy could do some light gaming without dual booting outside of Linux, though that isn’t a requirement that ranks very highly for me.

Choices, choices, choices

I think that finding a good laptop is very hard, especially when used laptops can cost a lot of money for hardware that is 3-4 years old. I was definitely expecting a downgrade in display/audio quality because I think unless you buy a recent laptop, you will not get top quality audio / displays because it is an older laptop. What I wasn’t willing to compromise on was battery life, portability and performance. This might be a low standard for some, but I’d like the laptop to last at least 3-4h with normal web browsing and a bit of development/writing work.

Brand-wise I decided on a Thinkpad early on, as I kept hearing good things about them due to a few of my friends having used them and having a lot of positive points to say about their experience with the Thinkpads in general. Additionally, I really really wanted to work in a Linux environment again as I feel like I am more productive in Linux for… some reason, I can’t really explain why though. I also think it is easier to get set up with a lot of development environments (platform-specific environments like ASP.NET notwithstanding here) on Linux. Although with package managers like brew and Chocolatey being so easy to install and use, it isn’t like it is any more challenging on other OS’s either. Thankfully we are at a point where what system you choose to develop with is almost entirely down to personal preference, and my personal preference is to use Linux.

I was originally going to buy the Lenovo Thinkpad T460 as I liked the idea of having a slightly larger screen than my current Macbook Pro. This was swiftly defeated by seeing an amazing deal on a Thinkpad X260 (a slightly smaller model from the same generation) while I was visiting my family in the UK a few weeks ago. The model numbers won’t explicitly expain this but these laptops are 3, maybe nearly 4 years old at the time of writing, but that does not make them any less capable at handling the tasks I want to use the laptop for.

If you want to look into used Thinkpads yourself, check out the r/thinkpads subreddit as they have a lot of resources for helping you find the right thinkpad for your needs. The community seems to be pretty friendly from when I read in the comments and from when I have interacted in there myself.

The good, The bad, The pleasant surprises

So how is it for daily tasks? It is really good, I love how snappy this machine feels, how nice the keyboard feels and the fact that the trackpoint exists. I’d make a tired joke about how some people dislike it, but I can understand why not everyone would like it and honestly, if you don’t, that’s ok. I think it is an insanely useful tool and while I can live without it, I think that it is definitely not a bad addition to the keyboard. One of the main reasons I swapped to a mac in the first place as because Windows laptops generally had terrible touchpads, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the keyboard / trackpoint and trackpad in this Thinkpad. The fact it just shuts off when you are typing and instantly lets you continue using it when you have stopped typing is a godsend, because this was something I always had issues with on Windows laptops in the past and had to adjust my to so I wouldn’t accidentally trigger misclicks while trying to type out anything.

There are always issues however and mine are mostly minor, starting with a few things that you just miss because you don’t use OS X anymore. For example (and I will bullet point these):

• iPhone doesn’t automatically pair as a hotspot
• No desktop iMessage client
• iTerm is still the best terminal emulator, nothing comes close imo

These are minor nitpicks though at best, but there were some other things that did bother me. The speakers are terrible; this was something I expected, but what I didn’t expect was how much it disappointed me coming from a Macbook. Why is the speaker on the bottom of the computer? Why is it so quiet even at max volume? These are questions I don’t think I will ever get any answers to, but these design decisions don’t make sense to me. Really the only other complaint I have is that I am not used to the keyboard and that I had a few tiny issues where the spacebar doesn’t always want to fire when I press down on it, it feels like it needs more force in general compared to the Macbook. Also, why is the right-hand super replaced by printscreen? Maybe I’m afraid of change, but I genuinely find the ctrl/alt/super keys being on both sides genuinely useful, compared to a print screen key which I would use far less in comparison.

But outside of any good or bad things I experienced, what pleasantly surprised me? I decided to go with Pop!_OS as my choice of Linux distribution because it “just works”. It has “just worked” since I’ve installed it and I have only had to do minor tweaks to system settings for some functionality. The rest of it has been extra customisation all of the way and it works splendidly for my use cases.

And for me, this deserves it’s own paragraph because somehow you can run FF14 on this laptop! It doesn’t matter that it is only 20fps maximum because the fact I can even sign on and chat to people / browse the market board (no matter how sluggish it is) is absolutely amazing to me. I’m sure you could tweak some config files and push the performance even more, but I don’t feel like getting banned for breaking Terms of Service.

Should you do this?

Frankly I’m not here to tell you whether you should do this, I think that is up to you and your workflow. I cannot make that decision for you, I can only tell you how it has worked out for me. If you want as close to a perfect experience as possible with how your workflow works, get something similar to what you have now, if you are willing to tinker, to experiment, go for it! Your mileage will vary and that’s ok, that is definitely part of the fun.