This $1099 config better have 16GB Memory and 512GB by default. Otherwise it is a machine that cost about the same as MacBook Air M2, with lower Display Res, slower CPU and GPU and No Touch ID. This is perhaps for the first time in history Apple has a better "spec" machine for the same price. With the scale of iPhone and iPad, Apple is now at a point where the whole PC industry can no longer compete. And that is excluding things like speakers, trackpad, and thunderbolt port.
>A spokesperson told Ars Technica that its business customers are being more open to the aspect ratio.
Biggest lie ever. People want 16:10, but for years the industry shove 16:9 to your customer because it was the cheaper panel.
> Arm Cortex-X1 cores at up to 3 GHz
For Context, the Single Core GB5 Scores
Arm Cortex-X1 cores at up to 3 GHz = ~800
Apple M1 ( A14 Core+ ) = ~1700
For PC Laptop counterpart, a 800 GB5 score you are looking at something like AMD Ryzen 7 4700U if it was limited to run at ~10W. So not too bad. Apple is the outliner here.
This was also true at times after Apple switched to Intel — for example, around the time Apple went SSD-only they were considerably cheaper _and_ faster than the competition who were either shipping HDDs or using slower low-end SSDs using HDD-optimized interfaces. The main confound has been that they weren't selling crappy but super cheap machines or large laptops, so you could find products in those classes which were faster (at twice the weight / half the battery life) or much cheaper and a lot of people would make comparisons for things which were really in different classes.
The difference now is that we've hit the point where it's easier to do those side-by-side comparisons because everyone is using SSDs, solid case designs with decent thermals, etc. so there isn't an obvious confound like weight or build quality to complicate the comparisons.
Doubtful. But they’ll make up for it by having it be on sale 24/7/365. I love my thinkpad but the buying process is awful.
That's, like, your opinion, man.
Give me a high end mobile workstation with 4:3!
i would love to know if linux can shine on arm for desktop use out of the box
My fear is that, with windows becoming popular on ARM, this incentive will disappear and linux support on these machine will be weak.
Eh, honestly the baseline MacBook Air has often been pretty good value in the past relative to the competition.
It's a shame we're been wandering for nearly a decade, still trying and get back to what we already had.
4:3, please.
This is probably not a fair comparison since it's a laptop and windows-based, but it would take a lot to win me back with how much money, time and effort i have lost over the years with these products... not to mention the amount of ewaste has been generated.
Even more true with my experience with Motorola (Lenovo); $600+ phone stops getting support/updates after 6 months of ownership... trade-in value of $28. Never again.
Then again, seeing Intel with some serious competition warms me up a little bit. Also the thought of an ecosystem of blossoming Linux distros for ARM laptops/desktops makes me excited.
What an unfortunate choice by Lenovo.
Well they didn't have much choice here. MediaTek, Samsung, and the rest are equally bad. The ARM SoC market is flooded with chips designed to have the shortest SW support lifespan possible.
Maybe Nvidia can get its shit together and put out a competitive ARM chip.
I think even the Pinephones with their Allwinners and Rockchips aren't perfect, with both models being based on I believe older SoCs (although the Rockchip in the Pro has been modified, afaik).
Well, I'm not really wanting to go back to regular intel/amd laptops now, I have been spoiled.
But I agree, Apples MacBook is of a different kind. The only time I heard the fan was when playing Metro Exodus and when I ran cinebench :). My MacBook Pro outperforms every other computer in my possession.
But I'm still interested in this Thinkpad, because I'm not too happy with macOS anymore. But I assume there are too many limitations with Windows for ARM as well :). And considering the price of this Thinkpad, I'm probably just buying another MacBook, which has better battery life and better performance (and probably a better screen, Thinkpads often have terrible screens imho).
True. I was not interested in Intel Macbooks because the pluses even with that great screen didn't win me over from of thinkpads but M1 has changed the game for me. The battery and performance improvements are just too good to ignore.
Similar experience here. If I only had experience with ThinkPads from work I certainly would hate them. Slow, loud and shitty screen.
My T14 Gen1 I run at home at balanced power mode runs quiet and fast. NVMe I could switch, ram upgraded to 32GB, fingerprint reader and windows hallow, all for ~1100 EUR
So maybe look into T14s Gen2 AMD (which may be pretty similar to X13 Gen2 since they share the HW maintenance manual). But YMMV of course, and I have no experience of M1.
I wouldn't do image editing on anything in the line but for dev work the T14 has been great.
Also a truly beautiful oled screen, whereas new thinkpads tend to have terrible screens.
Also about 1kg, almost perfect windows laptop.
If not, I'm going to be dissapointed.
Edit: According to a reddit-comment[0], ARM ServerReady, UEFI and ACPI are all requirements for Windows on ARM, so if this thing runs Windows, we should be able to assume all those other things are in place too. Unless someone has locked the SecureBoot-settings, these laptops should be able to run Linux too without too much trouble.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k3av65/when_will_arm...
ThinkPads were always great for Linux and I've been happy with them ever since I can afford them (6 years now).
Here are some items to look for: - a device tree for the chipset for your device - a u-boot fork or patches for the chipset/device/both - a Chromebook built with that chipset, due to how ChromeOS development is done - any sign of commitment from the chipset manufacturer
This topic is a lot like early Android bootloaders before... one of the early Motorola devices. Before there was a set of expectations/framework-support/etc for unlocking. That first unlockable Motorola device, there was 9 months of every wise-guy on the Internet swearing it was just a matter of time. And often it is, but only due to what amounts to luck.
Hint: there's a reason that every single Linux enthusiast isn't running a ARM laptop. There's a reason that Linux folks are excited about the Linux on M1 project even though it means jumping through hoops and reverse engineering and playing ball with Apple.
Fedora 35: aarch64 DVD ISO should work.
Just FYI, we run our entire production api on arm on AWS. Its pretty rock stable and mature. The stability of ARM on linux is pretty much a solved problem at this point.
ARM in the cloud and ARM on the desk-top (aka, SBC and Laptops) are nearly entirely different ballgames - certainly from a user UX perspective. Basic boot support, standards around device tree, actual driver support, firmware, quirks, ecosystem challenges due to vendors and the nightmare of a gazillion kernel forks.
I was actually shocked to see that Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 already has upstream support, but AFAICT that's not a tablet/laptop chipset. And the one that is again seems to only be seeing Windows support. The other mobile chipsets with decent suppor are few and usefuls even fewer - maybe three and that's including Librem/Pinephone.
Maybe you can find me an example of the 7c/8c running, anywhere? There are at least some DTSI for some 7c boards, but again, absolutely zero consumer hardware in the wild. I spend time every month looking and the options for running a proper upstream kernel, on an Android based laptop or kernel, and every time "upstream support" is added as a crtieria, the options drop to zero.
I've never wanted to be wrong so much before, but again, I look into this pretty regularly and am involved in some development efforts that expose me to some of these realities first hand (I run everything on aarch64 except my gaming PC). It's sort of amazing, actually, to boggle at how much collective time has been spent by some many random devs at random companies and then painstankingly re-discovered by OSS folks, especially for phones/SBCs.
(granted, if you can boot upstream, it's all downhill from there these days)
It's too expensive for an ARM device.
It also runs a really good Unix OS. This laptop still won't run Linux out of the box.
Seriously hard to justify $1000+ for this crap.
References:
[1] https://www.inverse.com/innovation/36136-lenovo-settles-spyw...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/05/lenovo-tumbles-after-report-...
Probably the biggest factor though is in Windows land cross architecture comparability will be a much much bigger issue. If your legacy app only works on intel then arm is useless.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/
Isn't the apple device more powerful spec wise?
Current-year MBPs are a whole 'nother class of device.
This ThinkPad is going to chug in comparison to an x86 laptop because Lenovo doesn't have the technical capability or clout to design a whole new, hyper-fast ARM part and basically make arbitrary demands of the supply chain to get it into users' hands, the way Apple does.
I'm almost there with using remote development on super beefy Windows desktop (waiting for Rider remote development support) - I want a mobile device that's powerful enough for client apps - but I want to offload heavy lifting to a tower that I don't have to listen to whizzing next to my face.
I'm not sure why they keep forcing the laptop form factor on this - tablet is much more flexible, you can add the keyboard folio if you want it but I prefer using dedicated keyboard/mouse when I'm using it for anything nontrivial, and tablet is more practical in most other scenarios.
Maybe it's just me, but I have the first generation Microsoft Surface Go, which I mainly used as a tablet device, but occasionally attach the keyboard to it when I need to do more extensive typing.
Over time, I discovered the connectivity between the keyboard and the tablet became worse, until it finally failed, and the tablet did not recognize the keyboard. Trying a new keyboard did not fix the problem, so I assume the problem is with the connector on the tablet.
For now, I've bought a BT wireless keyboard, which I can use with the tablet.
For that reason, I've soured on tablets with attachable keyboards, and looking for a small (13-14 inch) 2-in-1 laptop for working on the go.
In my experience - the only time I use attached keyboard/mouse is when I'm at the office and I need to join a call in the conference room or a call booth in co-working space - other than that I use external BT mouse and keyboard exclusively. For those use cases I think I could get away with using a touch screen, maybe if I needed to present - but I'd just pickup my keyboard/mouse in that scenario.
The last time I saw this tested, it was more likely to fail than succeed, but it's been a while.
Am I right in saying you need to compile the OS and all applications to run on ARM? If so, I bet at least one thing I use daily wont work, and I don't want to commit to a laptop like this unless I know it will be a full replacement for my Intel machine.
Whats the state of this in Ubuntu?
Is it? Unless you’re routinely working with assembly it’s essentially irrelevant, unless you’re writing low-level multithreaded native code (aka you’re directly working with atomics and barriers).
Though obviously if you assume customers are or may be switching hardware, it can be useful to test or bench on ARM to get some inkling as to their eventual experience, or make sure you’re not relying on ISA details.
Don't get me wrong, ARM is neat and all, but your comment’s assertion that “it’s time to learn” doesn’t seem motivated by anything real, any more than “it’s time to learn” about RISCV or PPC.
> Am I right in saying you need to compile the OS and all applications to run on ARM?
Technically you could run emulated, although that has a non-trivial cost.
> If so, I bet at least one thing I use daily wont work, and I don't want to commit to a laptop like this unless I know it will be a full replacement for my Intel machine.
You could always get an ARM-based devboard (e.g. a raspberry pi or similar) to play around, that’s hardly a major investment, although obviously it is what it is.
An other alternative is to use ARM-based “cloud” systems.
Ubuntu has great support for ARM. However the is an extra dimension that Arm laptops are also _much_ less standardised then x86; I would wait to see hardware compatability this this precise device.
I give it another 2 months and I'd bet someone boots the basics at least. (Assuming the laptop is reasonably powerful and has enough users / interest) They mostly need to make sure the device tree is correct.
Pluton is another core which is a security module---in this case, a Microsoft product. TZ splits data and instruction access into insecure and secure classes on the original core---letting a little information pass from one side to the other without revealing the inner functionality.
There are plenty of Arm SoCs with Cortex-A cores plus an onboard Cortex-M-based trusted platform module (TPM). There are also already Arm chips using Pluton, such as the MediaTek MT3620.
I still remember the days when "IBM PC compatible" meant (at the very least, a desire to) something.
If Lenovo releases the schematics and detailed architecture reference like IBM did with the PC, they might start another PC revolution; but I doubt they will.
I'm disappointed.
- IE is finally dead, and shipping a downstream Chrome build in the form of Edge gives Win10/11 not only a revamped WebView but platform-level support for PWAs (I cannot stress enough how much of an impact there is here just from how much the Web has evolved as a platform, and as a Linux user this cuts both ways tbh)
- To this same point there's also a first-party React Native build, allowing devs that are already shipping mobile apps to extend those to target desktops
- .NET has since been open-sourced, gone cross-platform, and picked up native ARM support
- Windows Subsystem for Linux, and now Windows Subsystem for Android, let you reach outside the Windows ecosystem entirely (the latter of which, interestingly, should also compound over time with the various efforts that Google is finally making again to make large form factors viable on Android)
- Project Reunion exists now, for the stated purpose of providing a common set of APIs that Windows developers can access
That last one alone, btw, makes the landscape inherently different from WinRT, which removed Win32 support entirely and only allowed you to run UWP apps.
The last time I saw this tested, it was more likely to fail than work for any particular bit of modern 64 bit Windows software.
In fact, this laptop goes in the opposite direction, it's not intended to be modified as much by the user. It's one that runs Windows 11 with some feature called "S mode" ('S' as in Secure). In S mode there is some kind of secure boot and apps can only be installed through the Windows Store. A user with admin rights can disable S-mode but it can then never be re-enabled after that.
So actually this laptop is not intended to be open at all, it is marketed for business where the environment can be more locked down and secure.
A nice advantage is in a few years when the battery wears down some you'll still have fantastic all day battery life compared to most other laptops.
