This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
Framework. It’s framework.
Yeah I opted for the Framework 13, even with the less than perfect keyboard and lack of touch. My hope is that touch will be an option in the future. otherwise its a near perfect option.
Am I the only one that literally never uses the touchscreen on my laptop?
No but on my 3 in 1 I find the touch screen and pen very useful as a big tablet for consumption, laptop for productivity and gaming, and writing and drawing pad.
having a touchscreen is nice for the extra durability
It’s no wonder people gravitate towards apple, it’s almost impossible to find a good laptop amongst this mess.
I really like the MacBook Air, but I was dissuaded from it because the M4 isn’t supported by AsahiLinux yet.
Well I say it’s no wonder people gravitate towards it but I don’t actually like it myself. It sucks that they make it basically impossible to upgrade snything. And that there storage and RAM upgrades cost several times more than they should.
I have a Macbool air (not by choice) and I installed asahi linux a couple of weeks ago. Main take away is that it’s really good except for software support. I’ve had a bit of trouble finding programs that work well on arm even open source projects often don’t compile there programs to work on arm.
ThinkPad P14s G6 (AMD) with the 2880x1800 touch screen? Only 60Hz though and $$$
You seriously can’t go wrong with the lenovo thinkpads on eBay. I Got a thinkpad E14 ryzen 7 (7th gen), 48gb ram, 1tb ssd for $400 on ebay with a small hair crack on the hinge.
At the end of the day, a laptop is a laptop, and the cost difference between a $2000 brand new laptop and a $400 used laptop there really is no argument/justification to be made to buy a $2000 laptop in less-intensive tasks. Here’s a better instance of your money: find a $400 laptop with semi-good performance (ryzen 3 or intel equivalent) put $1600 to a gaming computer and setup a virtual environment with a radeon or rtx gpu at your fingertips.
What I really want is a place that has physical locations that sells linux laptops and will give you something like apple care used to be with apple in the middle aughts. They will take care of anything and you just don’t have to worry about it at all. I keep on thinking it would be great for microcenter to partner up with someone on this.
Companies usually handle this by using a hardware vendor with on-site support (like Dell) for hardware issues, and a Linux distro with corporate support (like RedHat) for software issues. Definitely more than a regular user would be willing to pay, though.
There is no perfect laptop as it is a subjective choice.
I got a MacBook Pro which is the one that ticks the most boxes for me. It is simply a well built and reliable piece of hardware with really nice battery life and performance.
Yes, Apple tries really hard to sink their machines with terrible software decisions and hostile repair policies. But that still does not undermine their machines build quality.
Also, this is trivial, but their website is simple and easy to use. They don’t bog one down with a slew of laptops that are hard to differentiate. I know what I am looking at, and what I will be getting.
The only other machines I own are ThinkPads. But Lenovo loses me whenever I get on their website. It is easier to look at an eBay listing for a second hand ThinkPad than to navigate and search their website for a new one. Also, their newer machines just aren’t as good as the older ones.
I say this as a user of an array of ThinkPads and ThinkCentres to quench my thirst for BSD (and sometimes Linux). I use these machines for writing, gaming, watching movies, and more. But I cannot depend on those machines for any critical or work-related tasks.
Framework laptops aren’t sold here so I have never used them. There is no point in importing one where the whole raison d’être is their modularity and repairability which requires their ecosystem to be present first.
P.S. Using Linux on M-series MacBooks
I have contemplated using Asahi Linux on the MacBook Pro, but I am sure I won’t get the best out of the machine especially w.r.t. battery life. Perhaps when the machine is no longer supported by Apple, I will experiment with it.
I have also been confounded by the situation.
It is even worse when you are on the secondary market. The company’s product pages are broken. Trying to compare across different release years is way harder.
I assumed the reason for this had to do with the production systems and supply chains. They can get a certain number of x parts at y price from a factory located in a given location. You get enough parts in proximity to each other and you make it a model.
Its one thing for a small company to have enough components to have only a few models but with the volume dell or HP moves, they would need to really invest in suppliers or actually make the components themselves.
I dont imagine the marketing people have come up with all the options, they’re just the ones who have to try to sell want they’re given.
The Thinkbook 14+ 2025 seems to check quite a lot of the boxes. Nevertheless, depending where you live you will have some high taxes to pay if ordered from Aliexpress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G_xM0qxA-8
The option with the TGX(Oculink) port to use an eGPU is particularly appealing for some.
There is a guide to install Arch on it: https://github.com/Cyber-Typhoon/Secure_Arch_Install_Oculink_eGPU
