New Notebook

After more than seven years my beloved MacBook Pro 15″ (late 2011) has died the GPU death. Before that I have had at least three replacement motherboards, the first after less than 24 hours of owning the thing. All these replacements were free-of-charge and without any hassle. So no complaints from that end. But given Apple’s abysmal product strategy in recent years, and particularly the butterfly keyboard, it was no option to buy a MacBook again.

To be clear on the keyboard topic: My primary objection against the butterfly keyboard is not its reliability, or lack thereof. For me it is simply a very bad keyboard with its short-travel keys. Yes, I am lucky to own an original IBM Model M and that sets a very high bar. But there are quite a few people I know who share that verdict.

Another factor not in favor of Apple was its pricing strategy and the fact that repair is next to impossible. Why would I want to spend enormous amounts of money (approximately EUR 3.500 for what I want) on a machine that cannot be repaired, upgraded, and is thermally constrained anyway? And quite honestly, with all the systematic product issue that existed for more than a decade, why would I believe this has changed?

I still own a Mac Mini from 2011 but it is months that I last used it. And after a number of years when I was really(!) happy with MacOS, I am finally departing from the latter. Overall, I got the impression that the management folks of Apple are going though the “harvesting” phase, where bean-counters have taken the reign after the founder(s) were gone. The same has happened to Hewlett-Packard, which I have had the privilege to work for many years ago. They, as so many others, had the same problem: People at the helm that do not really understand the business, but just apply methods they learned at business school. And for a number of years that works. Until it does not anymore …

So I ended up in the Windows camp, again. While Linux is my OS of choice on the back-end/server side, it has been failing to convince me for the desktop for the last 24 years. Yes, I started using Linux in 1995. And for special purposes I have used it on the desktop, usually via X11, where it made sense to me. In the 1990s that was technical development as well as authoring papers for university with LaTeX. And while a recent attempt, using KDE Neon, showed great improvements, there are still too many things that simply work better for me in Windows.

As to the actual notebook, I was pointed to the Razer Blade 15 (2018 base model) from various YouTube videos. It is a great machine and I had gotten a pretty good deal on Amazon for it. Everything was great – but the keyboard. The latter is something you can find mentioned in a number of reviews, but I must admit that I had underestimated it greatly. This is really sad, because otherwise it would have been the perfect machine for me. So where did I end up instead as keyboard afficionado?

Yes, a Thinkpad T model. What else! More precisely a Thinkpad T490 with a full-HD display, 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. This blog post is actually the first one written on the T490 and the keyboard is an absolute treat. What drove IBM to sell this part of the business to Lenovo? Oh yes, the harvesting phase ;-).

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