I hope they used the official Apple cleaning cloth that’s certified compatible with that model of MacBook
You mean the iRag?
Oh you crafty SOB.
Bravo… sneaky bastard
The cleaning cloth pictured is the one that comes with the particular brand of screen cleaner that Apple recommends using.
Apple Cleaning Cloth Pro, coming this October
I have a pretty recent thinkpad that supposedly has “military grade durability”. The plastic is literally falling apart at the corners after 2 years, and my fan grille is gone.
Fucking lenovo
Military grade is bullshit marketing. Basically anything is military grade
Military grade is code for “cheapest bidder”
Military grade means literally nothing. Actual military equipment is “mil spec”, and not something the average consumer needs, or can afford, in most cases.
Even when military spec equipment is made by the lowest bidder, this stuff still has to be blast proof, bullet proof, work from -60°C to +85°C, be water/dust resistant, and many other requirements depending on what is being made.
You can definitely get plenty of Mil spec shit, just not what you really expect. My hat is a Swedish army cap worn by some dude named Albert Kempf in Tunisia circa 1991.
Fair enough, I was thinking more in the direction of electronics, mechanics, etc
I also have a 1960s wire field phone that they would use in Vietnam. I am still trying to figure out how to get it working with an Aux jack.
Is it possible to show the hat? I kinda wanna see that hat and how it looks after such a long period of use.
Note it probably hasn’t had constant use cause I only got it a couple months ago, before that it was at a surplus store in Idaho falls. Now it is in SoCal, before Idaho though it could’ve been in a crate for all I know.
That looks like a good hat! I’d be happy with that.
So I googled the name and first thing that came up was Albert Kempf Mützenfabrik, which means hat factory in German. I don’t think herr Albert personally wore this.
In Ukraine nowadays it means “anything that can survive up to one assault”. I hear they take donated cars that no-one sane would drive or even pronounce street-legal.
I was in the Marines and I had to buy some of my shit on my own, so yeah, agree 100%.
I guess aircraft-grade aluminum isn’t good enough anymore.
Sounds military grade to me.
Which Thinkpad do you have? The “Thinkpad” line has been expanded to basically all professional grade laptops now.
the x131e is definitely not professional grade
No, none of the X line are. I really like the L line of Thinkpads. Those are still pretty solid and reparable.
nah the old x series (e.g. x61, x201) were good, they’re basically just a t series with a smaller display and no disk drive
Yeah the older ones are. But the new ones compete more with the XPS imo and they suffer for it.
I have a 16 year old T420 that’s survived numerous falls drops spills and still ticking to this day and I love it. It’s the best damn keyboard to type on. Only Thinkpads for me.
IBM would’ve never
As others have eluded to, military-grade means “meets our minimum spec at the lowest price.”
So it means they said “Our casing was made of this material last year, and this is the lowest bidder for the same quality this year.”
ThinkPad is a work tool. MacBook is a fashion statement.
Not where I work. My thinkpad is managed by the understaffed IT department, and is severely crippled by clownstrike and other garbage and bloatware. Linux is not allowed, only windows.
But my colleagues who chose a MacBook don’t have all that crap because said IT department haven’t figured out how to remotely manage Macs yet…
MacBook user:
omfg, my MacBook got that big scratch. Gonna buy a new one then
ThinkPad user:
draws ThinkPad logo on the back using scratches
Love it
Essentially average MacBook fan vs average ThinkPad enjoyer
I mean… tools, not jewels. It has a robust design for a reason. Develop that patina, kid. Don’t lose your mind over a scuff.
I’ve been buying second hand thinkpads for the last decade or so.
They arrive pre-scuffed so I don’t need to worry.
Prescruffed? That’s just the vintage look.
Just call it “distressed” and charge more for it!
Never regretted a purchase more than my macbook after visiting their subreddits.
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That’s all I’ll buy laptop wise. I’d be a fool to buy a new laptop for my use case.
Give me an off lease Thinkpad with no SSD
I’ll furnish my own drive and OS.
I thought of getting a laptop from tuxedocomputers, the original reason I got a mac was I was fed up with windows, my last laptop was toast, and needed something asap, that i didn’t need a time investment to use since uni courses were starting soon. Learning there’s a company that makes fair priced, built for linux machines with their own distro, that now seems like the perfect device for me.
The one good thing about macs is they don’t loose that much value, so I can resell it and buy something other than a mac
ah, remember the time that Lenovo shipped spyware in the UEFI of Thinkpads?
I certainly remember when lenovo pushed a keyboard firmware update so bad that it physically damaged a part on thousands of legion laptops and then refused to own up to it. Fuckers. Never again.
*ok I half remembered, I don’t actually know that a part was physically damaged but the only permanent fix involves soldering so close enough
Apple: The Gucci of the tech world.
It really is. I once dated a girl that would rip on me for having a Samsung. She said she needed an iPhone for work cause she takes a lot of pics and uses socials a lot. She couldn’t fathom that my Samsung could do all of that and arguably more
needed an iPhone for work cause she takes a lot of pics
She takes a lot of pictures…so she needed a worse camera?
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Her problem was that her fans would then see a Samsung phone in the social pics, instead of the seasonal variety ornament that is the iPhone.
Not sure if it’s changed by now but a lot of the social apps for Android would just take a screen grab when taking a picture, so when uploading from Android the pics looked much worse than iPhone.
I dunno man, I’ve made it a point of pride to be rough with my Macbook over the years. They hold up well to repeated beatings and last a long time. I’d rate my 2017 Macbook Pro as hardier than the Thinkpad X1 Carbon I had as a company computer for my last job. And the MacBook might have been cheaper new too.
Ah yes, great post in the year 2010 when thinkpads weren’t complete crap, yet.
Idk how scratch-prone the post-touchbar models are, but I’ve had a series of MBPs that I’ve been profoundly uncareful with and never had a problem.
Used a 2009 model until 2016, no scratches. 2016 model that I use to this very day, no scratches. 2017 I used for work until 2019, I ran it across an exposed screw-tip on a broken desk and it left a line you could see if you held it just right to reflect a light, but I can’t imagine anything shrugging that off. 2019 model I used for work until a month ago, no scratches.
Meanwhile, the other devices that have coexisted in the same backpack have not done as well. Dented USB hub, dented dock, broken screen on an Android device, shattered screen protector on another device.
Edit: That said, I did just buy a Thinkpad to derp around with NixOS on, so I can compare and report back in a couple of years if anyone wants.
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Using a generator to power a computer is a really bad idea. You’ll significantly shorten the lifespan of the power supply. Ask me how I know.
Ask me how I know.
Ok. How?
Because I killed a PSU by plugging my PC into a gas generator once
To be fair, laptops have those bricks on the cord that help protect it from power oddities.
And that one weird slimline computer I had once that didn’t have a traditional PSU and had a laptop charging cord, lmao.
Thnx!
<airplane>By typing the question in the comment box, but that’s not important right now</ariplane>
I’m trying to figure this out at the moment.
What is the best way to power a laptop in an off-grid setup? Mine will be primarily solar + AGM battery.
I think the simplest “just works” set up is to get a “pure sine” inverter and go:
solar > battery > inverter > power supp > laptop
The thing is, if I understand correctly you have a big inefficient inverter to AC only to transform back to DC, with the only benefit being that the plug fits in the socket.
I’m curious to know how a generator ruins a power supply? Is it something to do with the arcane sine wave magic from the inverter?
Best power yours off solar then, cos everything else is generators.
But why would it? Is the output not voltage controlled?
Use an inverter-controlled one and you’ll be fine. Our emergency communications shelter runs off one of those just fine, with a cheap offline UPS in there.
Yes, those that control frequency using the engine rpm aren’t that great for most switching power supplies.
I’m guessing the cheaper ones don’t have sine-wave inverters (they use a dressed up square wave which can be produced by purely digital electronics) so quality of the output waveform is bad. The power supply of the laptop (or PC) ends up having to work harder to cut out the extraneous bits of the waveform (that is it’s job) but all that extra crap is just turned into heat. Laptop PSUs are small , so have less heat dissipation and likely aren’t built for this. The ideal use case for these cheap inverters are purely resistive loads (like heaters) but even some less sophisticated electronics would probably be fine. Computer however, are generally designed for clean power.
If it’s a sine-wave inverters and the generator is working properly then idk why it would matter.
That sounds like a really good explanation, thank you
Oh shit, you just made me realize when I get my first pay check I should really invest in a decent UPS. I had to sell my old one before moving state lines to condense space.
Yea man, you need an inverter generator for that. Thankfully small inverter generators are very affordable these days.
I have a thinkpad in the late 90s and it still boots up till this day. I added more memory and added an SSD and a fresh set of batteries. This shit just won’t die.
The actual IBM ones from before Lenovo bought the company, the fat ones, those were fucking tanks. I remember using them in middle school, they were the best.
I honestly will never understand why people buy macbooks.
Number of reasons. Works well with Apple products, long battery life, way more powerful for most normal (sometimes applies to even some basic UI devs and small project video editing). It’s got great hardware. However Apple is a nightmare capitalist company that’ll try to dime and nickel you for every possible thing.
Disclaimer: Macbook user here.
Its okay for a lot of things. And its great for people who don’t expect much. But for power users, the moment you start installing stuffs for QoL or for more functionality, its there and then (the lack of RAM) really makes one want to bite the fingernails. I’m running 24GB, but even then my memory pressure is on yellow and i’ve “offloaded” a lot of stuffs into Ferdium (as that was the only reasonable way of maintaining certain things).
But for those who use on the web stuffs for almost everything, a macbook is a much better chromebook, and it works really well for those who don’t want to fiddle with anything.
But that price though. If Macbooks were priced lower (especially the RAM and storage upgrades) I think there will be a huge uptick of people buying the M-CPU Macbooks.
Agreed. I got the 16/512 (max specs) M1 Air for a decent price for the performance and battery life, and I currently run Linux on it, but I’m constantly bottlenecking both the RAM and SSD and it sucks that I can’t upgrade it, will probably get a Framework when it dies
What Linux do you run and is it great? Now you are making me think I should plonk more money into a macbook once this macbook is too old and run both Mac OS and Linux.
Framework is a great hardware. I like their vision.
Fedora Asahi Remix. Considering how the M1 has no official Linux support, it’s impressive that it runs as well as it does, and they have compatibility hacks to run Steam games and get Widevine to work. There’s still a lot of rough edges however, like no microphone (should be coming out soon though) or fingerprint, aarch64 software support is second class and tends to have more frequent bugs (cough Electron cough) that get ignored by package maintainers and some (even FOSS) software isn’t supported, I don’t think high refresh rate is supported yet, full disk encryption isn’t supported (but there’s blog articles from people who figured out how to set it up), limited distro options, worse power efficiency so gets hot faster (just got a cooling pad to deal with this, get a Pro if you can so you have a fan) and battery life is barely different than what I’ve heard from Framework users so there’s not really much to gain atm. Currently only supports M1 and to a lesser extent M2, and also the fact that you’re dual booting makes the soldered overpriced SSD space even more limiting.
As far as distro support goes, Fedora Workstation is the only distro that has official support. There’s other options with community support but there’s a higher likelihood of stuff being outdated or not packaged (i.e. Arch Linux ARM doesn’t have the same level of community support as normal Arch Linux). I haven’t tried NixOS or Guix System on M1, but I use Nix/Guix on the Fedora install. aarch64 Guix packages keep breaking making it annoying to update and issues tend to be ignored (also certain core packages don’t like the tmpfs 16k page size so you need to make it use /var/tmp instead), aarch64 Nix is a lot better but support is still slow to where Signal is several versions behind and has been broken for weeks despite there being multiple pull requests with fixes, and both Nix/Guix prioritize x86 over aarch64 for builds so it will need to compile a lot of things from source.
Huh. Thanks. Once this macbook of mine goes old enough I will then try this for funsies.
Audio editing tools. I love linux but… its still catching up
It’s UNIX with a million and one creature comforts and high build quality. The ThinkPad touchpad gives me a rash.
Honestly, I’d love a cost equivalent laptop in could put Linux on in Europe, but for the money the MacBook Air is just really hard to beat
Great battery life on macOS, although turns out a lot of it involves software-related optimizations since with Asahi Linux it’s barely better than x86
I made the wrong comment to a wrong reply, but i think Thinkpads are great. Except the premium thinkpads have Apple-esque prices but non of the Apple-esque support.
If there was a thinkpad with a good price (especially the newer thinkpads that have soldered RAM) I would buy it and replace my laptop. Not that I don’t like my laptop (Its a Clevo, so I know what I’m getting), but ThinPads are pretty good and all rounded for many things.
My work gave me an HP piece of crap laptop, I’d rather have a MacBook.
