This story is quite personal, but should be relevant to lots of people. After I finally switched from MacOS to Linux , I had an important task of finding a laptop that is good enough for my needs. But first what are my needs?

In short I want to write and run programs on it. There are important requirement and secondary ones. Important:

• Fast CPU - I run a lot of numerical analyses, so I need fast CPU
• Good keyboard - I type a lot. Even though I usually use external keyboard. My emacs experimentation resulted in RSI, to mitigate that I recently order glovo80 keyboard. I may write its review in future blog. However, I still use laptop keyboard in bed and in train, and it is quite important that it is at least usable.
• Lightweight - I want it to be as portable as possible, so it should be lightweight and ideally 14''.
• Decent batter life - if I could get more than 8 hours of batter life I would be happy

• 14'' 1920x1200 IPS Display - I usually work with external monitor, so full HD should be enough
• No external GPU - Gaming on laptop is generally a bad idea and GPU drivers are not the best on linux
• 32 GB of RAM - it is more than enough, but since you can't upgrade it in most of modern laptops I added some extra
• 1 TB of SSD - similarly to RAM, it is more than enough, but I would put it to good use.

So, I decided to go with ThinkPad T14s Gen 4. At the time of writing this post, it had 50% discount. So, I got my 1000$ laptop and naturally compared to MacBook Pro M1.

Obviously, I knew that camera, speakers, microphone and screen quaility in ThinkPad are much worse than in MacBook. I knew that I am compromising on these items. I barely use either camera or microphone. I have good external display and speakers. To my surprise though I did not manage to make the mic working on Debian, but I can live with that.

Now, coming to the bright side, the keyboard is much better in ThinkPad than in MacBook. It is far lighter than even Macbook Air. CPU processor AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U is about 15% faster than M1 Pro. Even batter life did not result in any discomfort. So, I noticed at least some improvements in the points I deem the most important.

For 1000$, I believe it is definitely a good deal. After 3 days of use I am actually quite happy with it. And I don't expect it too change any time soon.