So, after more than 6 years, I finally retired my research laptop - ‘Arena’. This was literally an arena for me as a test lab and was the start of a long and frustrating road to learn many things. Over the last 1.5 years, I started thinking of replacing this with something that matched my current requirements:
- something with thunderbolt - the one cable connectivity to a monitor is just too awesome.
- traditional laptop form factor - A good amount of usage currently is without the use of a table/chair, and with me sitting on the ground sometimes. The surface was impossible to use when not seated on a table.
- a better display - the surface display was smaller, reflective, and (OMG) the bezels!
- better computing horsepower - needed a much better CPU than a ‘U’ series processor and a lot more than 16 GB RAM.
- Repairability - I tend to keep these devices for a long time (definitely more than 6 years), so the ability to perform repairs and upgrades is very important. Impossible to do on the Surface.
With that said, the choices boiled down to a few contenders:
- The M4 Macbook Pro was (and is still) super tempting - however, with the specs I was looking at, the cost was turning out to be super expensive. Secondly, I could not work on windows x64 stuff without the severe penalties of emulation (note that you can only virtualize Windows on Arm on a mac). So, ruled out, although I might get a mac mini if I do decide to get into iOS / iPadOS app development.
- The M4 MacBook Air - super thin / light, but not that great a display, plus all of the limitations with the MBP listed above. So ruled out without any further consideration.
- The ThinkPad lineup - ooh, the choices :). After probably going through each and every laptop model, I narrowed it down to:
- The thinkpad X9 aura 14 - Super thin, super light, latest processors (the core ultra 2nd gen). However, I ditched this as the RAM was on package, and could only be configured to a maximum of 32 GB. Maybe enough for now, but difficult to manage this for 5-6 years.
- The thinkpad P14s - workstation class, light (enough), plenty of expansion options, however, there was no OLED screen option available. Rejected!
- The thinkpad T14s - Thin, light and the flagship workstation of the thinkpad series - however rejected this due to a lack of certain upgrades I wanted to get.
Enter the Titan
I finally decided to go with the standard Thinkpad T14. sufficiently light (at around 1.4 kg) while having super upgradability. Here’s the final configuration I arrived at:
- Core ultra 7 155H processor - although the first gen of core ultra processors, this is the H version that has a much higher processing capacity - the second gen processors actually have a fewer number of cores compared to this.
- 8 GB RAM / 256 GB SSD - ordered the base specs from the factory, but will be shortly upgrading this to 96 GB RAM / 2 TB SSD. That’s the maximum this processor / chipset supports.
- Connectivity - WiFi 7 and WWAN 4G. Yes, this has a built in sim card slot that provides 4G connectivity on the go. WiFi 7 is future proofing as this is soldered on the motherboard. I will be upgrading the WWAN card to a 5G capable one in the future.
- The gorgeous 2.8 K OLED display - looks amazing, much better than the MBP IMHO.
- The battery is user replaceable and Lenovo ships it to you when you want to change it.
All of this combined with multiple cash back and exchange offers from Lenovo, got the price to almost one thirds of what I would be paying for a similarly spec’ed M4 MBP.
Pretty happy with the purchase, considering the amount of time spent in deciding and finalising.
Looking forward to exploring a lot of stuff on this, can’t wait to get started.
Titan on the left, Arena on the right