I have been a loyal GNU/Linux users since Ubuntu 5.04 (side rant, I have no idea what stupid animal name it had and it drives me crazy that people insist on referring to them by their codenames). Over the years I owned two ThinkPads, a T61 and then later a T430s. I bought ThinkPads because they would “Just Work” with virtually all GNU/Linux distributions.
Recently, however, when it came time for a new laptop I bought a Mac and switched to OSX. I made this choice for three reasons.
First, the quality of the ThinkPad hardware, at least for my purposes, has been falling. You might have noticed, if you’re familiar with ThinkPad model numbers, that I had my T61 for quite a few years, but the T430s is still only one generation old. Why did I replace it so soon? It turned out that if you spill even a tiny amount of liquid (a few drops, caused by dropping a cookie into some milk) in the right place on a 430 series ThinkPad, the trackpad, and the TrackPoint device will stop working, permanently. In fact, if you don’t then disable their drivers in the kernel, you can’t even use the keyboard reliably. To me, this is the result of poor design. I had my T61 for so many years because it stood up to the occasional minor accident.
The second reason I bought a Mac, and this might be the most important, is the battery life. Back when I used a desktop computer I didn’t care much about power efficiency. When I started using a laptop, it was such a step up that plugging in everywhere I went didn’t really bother me. But more recently I found myself frustrated that I was basically tied to the nearest outlet everywhere I went. A MacBook is effectively a giant battery with a computer strapped to it, and that’s just fine with me.
Finally, screen quality played a role in my decision. Back when I bought my T61, pretty much all laptops had dim, washed-out screens. But I expected better by the time I bought my T430s. Unfortunately, Lenovo didn’t deliver. Many, many years ago I owned a Toshiba Satellite with a passive matrix display (the kind where the mouse pointer would get “lost”). I didn’t mind because it was a laptop and that was basically the coolest thing in the world. But my eyes aren’t what they once were, and I actually have real work to do now, so fiddling with (and squinting at) a laptop display is no longer on my list of acceptable activities.
I hope to return to GNU/Linux at some point in the future. But until the hardware ecosystem works itself out, I’ll be sticking with a Mac.
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