I daily drive an M1 MacBook Air and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 11 running Arch/Hyprland. Software-wise I absolutely adore the latter, but hardware-wise it falls short of the Mac on nearly every level.
Battery life is horrendous (despite extensive tuning). The speakers are complete crap (despite using Easy Effects). Fans get loud sometimes because, well, it's x86_64.
It's a shame, because even though the Apple Silicon CPU is faster on paper, the same task flies on the Thinkpad compared to the Mac. And of course the Thinkpad's keyboard is fantastic.
Honestly the one thing I simply can't look past are the speakers. I work from home so battery life isn't a massive issue for me. Fans I can look past. But I simply cannot stand listening to music or watch a YouTube video on it, they are SO bad.
I have a T14s and recently bought an iPad Air and was blown away by how good the speakers and display are. (I understand the iPad Pro is even better) Speaker and display is just not a priority for thinkpad it seems. Noise cancelling headphones solve the problem for me.
OTOH with Linux you can get an OLED display and amazing speakers right now if you want!
Battery life is horrendous (despite extensive tuning). The speakers are complete crap (despite using Easy Effects). Fans get loud sometimes because, well, it's x86_64.
It's a shame, because even though the Apple Silicon CPU is faster on paper, the same task flies on the Thinkpad compared to the Mac. And of course the Thinkpad's keyboard is fantastic.
Honestly the one thing I simply can't look past are the speakers. I work from home so battery life isn't a massive issue for me. Fans I can look past. But I simply cannot stand listening to music or watch a YouTube video on it, they are SO bad.