Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook replacement

There is no such thing as a macbook replacement at the moment IMHO. There is literally nothing with the same quality, battery life, thermals, audio, display, keyboard and reliability on the market. Not even the most expensive machines can get anywhere near even an M1 MacBook Air on this front. The M1 MBP destroys everything else.<p>I develop software on it no problems at all. We are way past targeting one platform. Linux can be the destination for sure but like hell I&#x27;m going to do the dev work on it. Years of attempting to run Linux on a laptop or desktop have left a very unpleasant flavour in my mouth. It might work today but it probably won&#x27;t tomorrow and I&#x27;m getting too old to waste my time futzing. It has to work right now, properly, today with no risks.<p>Note: I have a mandated Dell Precision 7670 for some work, one of the most ridiculously stupid computers ever made and far more expensive in this config than a high end MBP M1 Max and it&#x27;s absolutely a pile of shit from a hardware and software perspective. If you ran Linux on it, it&#x27;d be worse than if it ran windows on it, which is already terrible.

Can you provide more details about these three things?<p>- trackpad - your two sentences are very vague. Can you navigate with two fingers in a web browser? How is text selection? Or selecting a sentence out of a long paragraph, etc? In my experience nothing matches Apple in terms of precision and accuracy, but maybe Lenovo finally caught up recently.<p>- screen: I use the built in display quite a lot. The color on a MacBook Pro is really nice. How does the Lenovo compare?<p>- battery life: how many hours do you actually get? Your description is vauge and can be anything from 3 hours to 40 hours.

Found recently a no go for me against Linux on desktop (it&#x27;s important for my workflows):<p>HDR, wider color space (P3 etc) + color management for all that things are not really supported in current Wayland desktops.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.freedesktop.org&#x2F;wayland&#x2F;wayland-protocols&#x2F;-&#x2F;merge_requests&#x2F;14" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.freedesktop.org&#x2F;wayland&#x2F;wayland-protocols&#x2F;-&#x2F;m...</a><p>It will probably change next year (and the desktop software like players etc. need to catch up too) but monitors supporting these standards are existing for many years now. There is only Mac and Windows (Windows is even better with broader HW support actually) in this niche.

I&#x27;m using an Apple MacBook Air M1 (2020) with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD and a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD at the same time. As an intense power user, I care less about budget and more about the quality of the machine I use.<p>I ordered myself the MacBook at work and privately purchased the X1 to put Ubuntu Linux on it (curious about the M1 and having had a great experience with each of a range of past ThinkPads - X61s, X220, X230, T41).<p>Both machines are very light, and not very rugged (for ruggedness, go for a Dell Latitude E6400 XFR or E7450). Both fell one time each, the X1 had no visible marks, but the MacBook Air now has a visible dent just above the logo. Thankfully, both machines remain fully operable.<p>The X1 is great for Linux, and that&#x27;s my preferred platform. I&#x27;m biased towards that because it&#x27;s not proprietary, but not out of purely ideological reasons, I just want to make sure the platform continues to exist. Thankfully, the Mac also has a Unix under the hood, alas often things are in weird locations or not installed at all, so I feel less &quot;at home&quot; on MacOS X. Also, having been a dual Linux&#x2F;Mac OS X user since 2008, I find the usability of Mac OS is decaying - many things are hidden in non-obvious places. For example, it&#x27;s not helpful if scrollbars are hidden and you have to exactly hover over where they ought to be in order to make them visible first - when you are on a call and need to pull up some data quickly, this is distracting. The Mac has longer battery life, and is often superior when discovering a WiFi network nearby; it&#x27;s audio also works flawlessly. In contrast, on the X1 under Linux, occasionally the headset plugged in isn&#x27;t instantly recognized without some fiddling.<p>Both machines are very fast, with the M1 being without equal. I notice it mostly when installing&#x2F;updating new software, as heavy compute jobs are usually done on clusters or in the cloud nowadays.<p>I end up using the Mac mostly for e-mail, making slides and going on Zoom calls, whereas any development work tends to happen more on the X1.<p>Neither is a perfect machine. I&#x27;d love to have a Mac with a proper keyboard, or a ThinkPad with an M1 chip, and the former would be more of an improvement than the latter because CPU speed isn&#x27;t the bottleneck for my laptop usage profile. For the time being, I shall continue to carry two laptops.

I can&#x27;t speak for others, but for me it is 80% macOS (and its seamless synergy with everything Apple I own), and 20% hardware, what keeps me on Apple.

I own a first gen ThinkPad X1 Nano and while it&#x27;s a great laptop in many regards (super lightweight and tiny, great screen, has support for proper S3 sleep, and generally good in respects that x86 laptops often aren&#x27;t), its CPU undermines it entirely.<p>Even though it&#x27;s built with the lowest spec Tiger Lake CPU that was offered at that point in time, it can&#x27;t keep its fan off doing anything more intensive than web browsing. Even plugging in a rather pedestrian 2560x1440 60hz monitor is enough to keep its fan running. The CPU also sucks more power than it should given its performance, even in &quot;Power Saving&quot; mode under Windows 10&#x2F;11 and Fedora.<p>I wish so much that in place of its Intel CPU there was an M1. That alone would increase its appeal dramatically. The ARM-based Thinkpads Lenovo now offers are a nice step in that direction but sadly their performance trails far enough behind the two year old M1 that it isn&#x27;t an ace in the hole either.<p>Honestly depending on how things go I might just trade the Nano in for an Air at some point and do Windows Things™ through a Parallels VM running Windows for ARM or even just an RDP session to my custom build tower.

Honestly, the X1 Carbon is a nice laptop. And even if you don&#x27;t want to run Linux as your main OS, Windows 11 really isn&#x27;t bad. With WSL2, you can use have all of the benefits of Linux for development while being able to run whatever Windows apps you want, and it really was pretty easy to setup. You can even run VS Code on Windows and edit files in your Linux container. I had a period last year and this year where I was consulting, and used my Ryzen Desktop as my main work machine.<p>If I were looking to use something other than Macs (which I&#x27;m not), there are more good options now than there have ever been. Even though everything is still compared to the benchmark of Mac Laptops, which isn&#x27;t an accident.

I’m really looking at the framework laptops as well for my next laptop. The ability to fix and upgrade it as well as what seems like good build quality is enticing.

A long time linux user, turned to mac user, back to linux and now back to mac again disagrees with you.<p>The amount of time and energy I had spend fixing silly problems and integrations could&#x27;ve be better used somewhere.<p>In contrast with mac, I open it and do work and close it knowing it won&#x27;t explode next time I open it.

The M1 has completely and utterly outclassed Intel&#x2F;AMD and there is no way I would buy one now except for games and ML workloads that need NVIDIA cards.

Can it drive a pair of 4K monitors? The only reason I&#x27;ve not bought one of the HP DevOne units -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hpdevone.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hpdevone.com&#x2F;</a> -- is the lack of support to drive external 4K monitors.

What is currently the best lightweight Linux laptop on market? I hear mixed reviews on System76 construction quality.<p>I run Ubuntu or Fedora on my laptops and desktops.<p>I was looking into MacBook Air, for battery life, weight and keyboard, but don’t want this MacOS black box.<p>How is Linux on a MacBook Air?

I’ve used thinkpads (and the X1 in particular) for many years. And I do think they’re the best option you have outside of the apple ecosystem. But they are far, far, far of being an excellent replacement for MacBooks. Specially after the new Apple silicon has shown up. The deep OS integration, power saving, performance, seamless upgrades of OS, build materials quality, trackpad, audio quality, etc, etc is far ahead on MacBooks.<p>But I do agree they are the best option if you hate or can’t pay or aren’t allowed to use apple products.

Unfortunately, while I loved and used ThinkPads for many years, the lack of a 4k or similar hi-DPI screen immediately makes this a non-starter. As does the pitifully poor brightness and color coverage. I’ve never understood how developers could work on a low quality screen after seeing (or using) the first MacBook Pro with a “retina” screen.<p>That’s not to mention the performance and heating issues that plague every high-end Windows laptop (i.e. the Dell offers 4k screens and above, such as the XPS 17”, but they suffer from thermal issues, suspend issues, and atrocious sound—not to mention being heavy and cumbersome).<p>Speaking from experience, having used Linux on a laptop as a primary development machine on-and-off for years, you’ll spend many hours of your life trying to fix trackpad issues, suspend and hibernate problems, fan issues, graphic driver hell, boot issues after kernel upgrades, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi “quirks”, etc. And that’s on Dell’s XPS line, not some oddball laptop.<p>Let me know when there’s a manufacturer that produces laptops with Apple’s XDR screen quality, similar performance, thermals, sound, build quality, reliability, etc., and with the ability to run Linux natively. Competition would be fantastic. Realistically, I don’t see it happening anytime soon.<p>I do, however, miss the keyboard and “nub”.

In a previous role at a Macbook only shop one team requiring linux machines got X1 Carbons as they best linux machine generally available and easily supportable.<p>Through a roughly 5 year period of trying various models they were consistently pretty reliable, and very easy to run Debian or Ubuntu on (our standard linux OS), through multiple OS versions too.<p>The screens and trackpads definitely weren&#x27;t Apple quality. Not bad, but switching between my Carbon and my Macbook was pretty jarring. That said, it paired up immediately with my Logitech mouse (MX Master) that I got for it, and it was easy to get the driver to show things like mouse battery in the linux menubar, something macOS won&#x27;t do for you.<p>Generally everything just worked out of the box, including things like USB-C charging, which was great to share chargers with the Macbooks.<p>The biggest issue we consistently faced was TPM support. At least once a year a kernel upgrade would totally bork a couple of machines as the TPM got reset of corrupted, meaning the machines would need to be wiped and rebuilt. After the first people would update and get broken we&#x27;d just warn the team to be careful around those updates.

I&#x27;m using both a 16&#x27;&#x27; Macbook Pro (M1) and a 14&#x27; Lenovo T14 (Gen 3), the former mostly for work and the latter for personal computing using Linux (Kubuntu). Both machines are great, the new T14 was the first laptop I was happy to replace my T460p with. I tried a few of the earlier Lenovo models but they were terrible and hardly offered any performance improvements over my 5 year old model.<p>The Macbook is of course an amazing device, build quality is great and if you&#x27;re a fan of MacOS it&#x27;s the perfect machine. It has a humongous battery as well (almost 100 Wh I think), which really gives it an edge over the T14 (50 Wh), especially since the base power draw is lower (7W vs. 11 W), which itself is ridiculous given the larger screen size. That said the T14 is the perfect Linux machine, everything works out of the box without issues, even the touchscreen and the fingerprint reader. There is still a minor issue when suspending&#x2F;waking up (touchpad reactivity will degrade), but I hope there will be a fix soon.

Lets see:<p>&gt; Integrated Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics<p>No Nvidia, nice, may work with OpenBSD<p>&gt; 8 GB LPDDR5-6400MHz (Soldered)<p>Why Soldered Memory, not good. And who sells 8gb memory with a serious look :)<p>&gt; 256 GB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe TLC Opal<p>Fine by me<p>&gt; Intel® Wi-Fi 6E AX211 2x2 AX vPro® &amp; Bluetooth® 5.1<p>Should be fine<p>&gt; 14&quot; WUXGA (1920 x 1200)<p>Edit, not bad I think - seems even better than 16:9, more vertical resolution, nice.<p>All in all, sorry, I will pass due to the Soldered Memory. But looks like a nice machine that could be used with a BSD

I had one and quite liked it (gen 6 I think?). One caveat is that my E key broke and I swapped it. However, I noted the date and from the relative frequency of how often E is used (most common letter) vs A (second most common letter), I was able to accurately predict the month my A key would break. That’s… not great.<p>Carbon is a great material though - apple needs to stop with aluminum.

I own the 16&quot;, i9 (&gt;$5000) version of this, and I must say: a) It&#x27;s one of the best PC notebooks I ever owned. b) It&#x27;s a piece of crap.<p>The keyboard is very (VERY!) wonky, got two replacements, it&#x27;s systemic. The touchpad dies every 2-3 weeks, Lenovo service has been great, getting me a new one within 2-3 days every time, I gave up on replacing it after two months, and just use ... sorry ... a magic trackpad. The middle of it started bubbling up about 3 months in - leaving about a 3-5mm gap when closing the lid. Not that the lid ever closed tightly anyway. Don&#x27;t even get my started on battery life. It doesn&#x27;t exist.<p>Switched from using Fedora to PopOS. Which - for me - is an even better experience.<p>And just to be clear: It&#x27;s the hardware that&#x27;s crap, not the software. And: I have been a ThinkPad user for the last 30 years. Still have my 700C, and all the models inbetween.

I&#x27;m happy that OP is happy, but he points out to the most highly regarded model of the most beloved non-Apple laptop brand as a great alternative...<p>And while X series Thinkpads are solid workhorses with reliable warranty, this is not true. I&#x27;m not even talking about that Lenovo&#x2F;the whole segment still doesn&#x27;t have a competitor for the original M1 with battery life&#x2F;performance. But due to old rotten deals they are only offered with Intel CPUs that have terrible thermals, throttling, and have shaky Arc GPU drivers. I can&#x27;t even choose them with the better AMD options out of the already uncompetitive x86 options. There are other lines like the Yoga 7 Gen 7 (that is more aimed at the macbook crowd) but those lack the business features that would put them somewhat in line with value.<p>Most serious non-Apple laptop makers are in a Catch-22 with their lucrative Intel exclusivity contracts.

I am glad for those that have found machines and operating systems that work for them. For myself, I also prefer a solid Linux (NixOS) workstation over anything else.<p>I also really like the M1 Macbook hardware a lot and think that&#x27;s a sweet experience!<p>One thing of interest that I am noticing in the comments is certain comments coming off as &quot;absolute truth&quot; in regard to the experience with their preferred OS and hardware vs a less preferred alternative. I find it useful to chill out and realize that everyone will find things they like more about the OS and ecosystem they have chosen.<p>All OS-es have awesome strengths and frustrating weaknesses and I find it annoying when anyone tries to argue otherwise. Let people enjoy their chosen paradise!

<i>&gt; Plug it into a 100Mhz ultrawide monitor via a lightning cable, and not only does it seamlessly extend the desktop at native refresh rates, but it also mounts all the devices that are connected via the monitor&#x27;s integrated USB hub.</i><p>@hunterloftis what ultrawide monitor do you use?<p>I own an X1 Carbon Gen 10, i7-1260P, 2TB, 32GB RAM with OLED screen and WWAN modem with Ubuntu 22.04. The webcam and the WWAN modem are still not supported under Linux.<p>I want to buy a Lenovo ThinkVision P40w-20 5K ultrawide monitor, but after googling I see that many people having problem with Ubuntu 22.04&#x2F;Wayland.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s working with Fedora, but not with Ubuntu?<p>What&#x27;s the resolution of your UW monitor, and does the Intel integrated graphics fast enough for it?

I have an X1 gen 6 and I love it. Keyboard keys don&#x27;t have the nice click to them like a mac or surface, it&#x27;s more of a mushy feel. However thinkpads do have pgup, pgdn, home and end buttons which is a big plus if you learnt to type on a pc desktop.<p>-Recent X1s have switched to a higher TDP Intel processor (p instead of u series?), so I imagine performance has improved at the expense of more fan noise.<p>- I went with the matt 2k screen, which doesn&#x27;t have the brightness of a macbook screen.<p>Thinkpads are often up to 30% off on lenovos website, but it seems that they don&#x27;t discount the configurable options any more, which rules out getting a good price for a 32GB config.

I was thinking about getting one of these to replace my 6+ year old XPS 13. Did you compare this to the new XPS 13 Plus? It looks like for Linux laptops, these are pretty much the only two good options. How&#x27;s the battery life?

I like my Framework with Ubuntu. Wish it wasn&#x27;t Ubuntu but everything works.

The larger P series from Lenovo are also excellent, have 4k screens, and run Fedora flawlessly. They also have next day onsite warranty support which actually works.<p>The hardware is definitely not Apple level, but it&#x27;s good, and for those of us for whom Apple software&#x2F;ecosystem for various reasons are not a fit, the combination of Fedora and Thinkpad is something to be grateful for.<p>As much as I support the motivation behind System76 and Framework- and I own products from both- the quality is not (yet) professional tier. Fedora + Thinkpad is.

I have tried several non-apple systems with windows or Linux. No, sorry, but unless you want to go crazy behind the PC and&#x2F;or operating system Apple wins hands down.

Compared to the MB, the fan is loud. I even stated writing my own fan control, but it can&#x27;t fix the fan that&#x27;s either definitely audible at 4500RPM or dead silent at 0RPM (which is not sustainable even for very light workloads on Linux).<p>Here&#x27;s the script: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;luisgerhorst&#x2F;fancontrol-tpx1c9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;luisgerhorst&#x2F;fancontrol-tpx1c9</a>

My criteria for a laptop are: must be totally silent with no loud fans, very long battery life, must not overheat. Usually that rules out any Intel laptop.

You know what works as a MacBook replacement? Pretty much any laptop. I have yet to encounter a laptop that didn&#x27;t run Arch Linux just fine.

Related: my take on the X1 Yoga (not Carbon), similar configuration: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taoofmac.com&#x2F;space&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;03&#x2F;1600" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taoofmac.com&#x2F;space&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;03&#x2F;1600</a><p>Nice, but not world-shattering. Also noisy. Would not use it instead of a MacBook Air, let alone a Pro.

I purchased the ThinkPad P1 mobile workstation in 2018. It&#x27;s a great machine but it&#x27;s about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

So far I am impressed at the quality of my X1 Yoga Gen.6. The least bullshit, most work oriented machine I&#x27;ve ever had.

Excellent until the charging ports burn out, requiring a motherboard replacement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.lenovo.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops&#x2F;X1-Carbon-Gen-9-charging-issue&#x2F;m-p&#x2F;5127796" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.lenovo.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops&#x2F;X1-Ca...</a>

I&#x27;ve been considering moving from a mbp to an x1 for a while now, but a couple things are keeping me from it:<p>- mbp isn&#x27;t dead (yet)<p>- x1 is made in china, human rights issues<p>- x1 is less repairable than other thinkpad models such as t14 or p14 (which are still made in china, however)<p>- now there is linux support for mbp for dual booting

I&#x27;ve used Thinkpads exclusively for &gt;20 years, last ~10 all X1s. I am typing this on an X1C Gen10 as well. It&#x27;s an OK machine, but unless something shifts spectacularly, it will be my last Thinkpad: it runs hot, even with the fan on (I dont code anymore; this is just standard Office workload), its battery is ridiculous for 2022 (~6-7hrs in practice even with battery saver turned on) and it&#x27;s glitchy (which granted may be Windows 11). At the end of the day, I can excuse all of these if a) it wasnt a nearly $3k machine (!), b) that Macbooks didnt exist.<p>And with me so will probably go my company&#x27;s fleet as well. Thinkpads are still the best corporate series I&#x27;ve seen (including Macbooks) but the value for money just isnt there any more: what&#x27;s the point of squeezing out depreciation as far as you can when you are starting at 2x the price&#x2F;benefit?

Does this support 2560x1440p@60Hz x3? Lenovo promised that their thinkpad 14s with the thinkpad thunderbolt 4 dock could do it, but the dock fails to actually consistently display all 3 monitors, with one irregularly flickering.

Does the fingerprint reader work?<p>How long does the battery last?<p>Using Ubuntu, does hibernation work?<p>As a final tip, the touchpad might be good, but imho the real benefit of the thinkpad line is the TrackPoint. You can do basic mousing without moving your hands.

Why wouldn&#x27;t you get one of the AMD ThinkPads?<p>That i7-1280P only has 6 performance cores on &quot;Intel 7&quot;, when the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U as in the Gen3 X13 ThinkPad has 8 performance cores on &quot;TSMC 6nm-FinFet&quot;.

Lenovo has the absolute worst bioses of any laptops I&#x27;ve ever bought. None have LVFS&#x2F;fwupdmgr support. My most recent one, bought from newegg, appears to be a limited mainline-china-only release that hasnt received A SINGLE BIOS UPDATE despite there being numerous high-sev platform updates for every other device in my arsenal.<p>Neither would let me re-enable S3.<p>Again, unlike my other devices, the Lenovos become almost useless if the internal display breaks. They require intervention on boot (internal disp only) if you use an unofficial power supply.<p>This isnt even counting battery life, the M1 performance, trackpad quality, trackpad click mechanism, trackpad size, on and on, etc. Keyboard deck flex. The list goes on. Complete stockholm syndrome vibes.

i have this laptop and am also very satisifed. zero issues. i run a minimal dev setup[1].<p>there is a simpsons episode where homer designs a car. it has a lot of cup holders and is very expensive. this is a lot like macos, and even more like the linux setups people struggle to get to work after migrating off mac.<p>architectural tip: fewer cupholders.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nathants&#x2F;alpine-setup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nathants&#x2F;alpine-setup</a>

I have a Lenovo p14s. I got it from work. I love it. I came from a 2020 MacBook Pro. I’ll never ever go back to MacOS. I love my thinkpad and fedora too much.

Granted, I feel they&#x27;ve been slacking on the (previously) legendary T series models, sadly...screen&#x2F;trackpad suck and the chassis flexes

I set up and supported 200 X1 Carbons over the past few years.<p>This is terribly inadequate as a MacBook replacement. It&#x27;s noticeably slower than any Apple Silicon machine, it has terrible battery life, the screen has the same absurdly-wide aspect ratio common to so many PC laptops, which makes them useless for so much real work, and the heat management is a complete joke. Fan runs, loudly, if you even breathe on the machine.<p>And of course, the trackpad is vastly inferior to Apple&#x27;s.

I&#x27;ve been using the X1 Carbon for my Linux laptops for at least six years (4th Generation), and mostly love it.

Is the keyboard as lovely as my x220 with xubuntu? Can I replace parts?

I wish they had one with the i9 and no Nvidia card.

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