I need advice, which laptop would you buy now?

marcus-aurelius
2025-06-22T21:10:52Z

I would like to upgrade my aged 8 years old laptop and I'm completely undecided about which laptop to buy right now.

I considered Apple Intel laptops terrible, bad thermals, overpriced, unreliable, touch bar (uggg), I hated every second working on it, when the company I work for upgraded me with a M1, it was such a huge improvement from any laptop I have ever tried, absolutely no noise, incredibly performant and the longest battery life of any laptop by a lot.

I still don't like the Apple ecosystem, and I would prefer to use Linux as my main OS, but I can't find anything that comes even closer for the price of a Mac Air, If I go with Framework I'll get a less performant machine with a way worse battery, I honestly don't think the premium on repairability is worth for me when I don't have any issues repairing more challenging laptops, at the end repairability will be how easy is to get new parts.

ThinkPads have good reputation and repairability, but for what I see, the quality has gone down the drain in their latest models, and if I go with their premium models I get similar performance to Apple with worse battery, Dell has similar issues.

Gaming laptops are not an option, I don't do any PC gaming and the size and aesthetics are a dealbreaker for me.

The main issue seems to be that until ARM processors become better competitors to Apple, the battery life will be always the bottleneck, and I don't know how good the new Snapdragon X Elite compares right now.

Besides web development, photography edition and video editing (4k), I don't do many demanding tasks, I'm more than fine with the performance of a M1 as the baseline.

As an alternative, I'm thinking about getting a powerful desktop for the demanding tasks and a less powerful laptop with a good battery and screen, but ideally I would prefer a single machine.

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