There are millions of Macbooks out there that will be out of MacOS support one day. If this project diverts just a fraction of them from becoming e-waste for a little, it will be a win.

And then beyond that, there is simply no laptop manufacturer that meets the quality of Apple's hardware design. I like Macs for their hardware, the software is a compromise. A linux macbook would be my ideal laptop.

dont most ppl just throw these laptops in the trash, or does someone give you money to turn an out of support mac in somewhere

> does someone give you money to turn an out of support mac in somewhere

Yes, marketplace

Because they want to. Their time, their choice.

This horse has been beat to death on HN. Because the apple laptop ecosystem is the highest quality laptop you can purchase.

> nothing beats the 2008-2013 Thinkpad keyboards

Maybe so, but 15-20 year old laptops are definitely starting to show their age.

An M2 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is only 4 years old, has a fairly OK keyboard, and is still in striking distance of current high-end ultrabooks when it comes to performance.

The only thing my X230 struggles to do is run LLMs locally. My needs are simple, and I think normal people (i.e. probably not most people on this site) don't have needs that are any more demanding than mine.

Granted, this is running GNU/Linux rather than Windows. If you're running Windows then yeah, they show their age.

Asahi Linux is certainly not targeted at "normal people". Normal people would just run macOS

There's this saying, all progress is done by unreasonable people, because reasonable people just accept things are the way they are

I think an X230 would be performant enough for 95% of the things I do, but a 14 year old CPU is going to have pretty terrible battery life for anything more than very light usage. And things that would be light usage on a recent PC, like watching video encoded with a modern codec, would be fairly taxing on an old CPU with no hardware decode.

True. By the time I upgraded from my X200 (fantastic machine, noticeably outdated), the lack of software support for hardware decoding H264 was noticeable. Also being stuck with OpenGL 2.1 isn't the best either.

I don't know what I'll do if and when my X230 stops being sufficient. If I could buy an Apple motherboard in an X200 chassis I'd do it in a heartbeat.

> My needs are simple

Congrats, but I think you may be in a small minority when it comes to developers shopping for laptops.

Personally, I had to upgrade from a late-model i9 MacBook Pro to this M2 MacBook Pro, because the npm + docker setup at work was taking upwards of 20 minutes for a production build...

>The only thing my X230 struggles to do is run LLMs locally. My needs are simple, and I think normal people (i.e. probably not most people on this site) don't have needs that are any more demanding than mine.

People who edit video or make music and other such tasks are totally normal too, and there are hundreds of millions of them

I think maybe you don't understand what the needs are of normal people. It's only partially about what software they run.

I recommend Mac's to the people in my life because when they have a problem they can take the machine to the Apple Store in the mall. Or if they want to understand iPhoto or Pages better, they can go to the Apple Store and take a class. They like Apple laptops because they look nice, they feel great, sound amazing (for a laptop) and have excellent battery life.

Like you, I have a ThinkPad (a P-something) and, frankly, it kind of sucks. It's all plasticy, it flexes, battery life is a joke, the trackpad is meh, and the fans are almost always running. I do like the keyboard though (I'm a fan of backspace).