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by the_third_wave 1393 days ago
No, the EV pack is not an apt comparison, the battery packs in e.g. those Thinkpads I have around here are. One of them (a T550) has an internal battery pack in addition to the easily replaceable one. It can still be replaced easily after removing the (clearly marked) screws and removing the pack.

As to your experience working for an Apple authorised repair centre I'd suggest that the intersection between Apple users and DIYers is probably smaller than that between e.g. Thinkpad users and DIYers. Part of the appeal of the Apple world lies in its appliance-like nature where things (are supposed to) 'just work', not in its openness to tinkering.

As an aside I must say I'm surprised in the fervour with which these Apple strategies are defended. It is not hard to design a glued-down battery which can be removed by pulling a few tabs as is common in many mobile devices, why defend this clearly wasteful practice? Maybe Apple keyboards are (or were, at least during the 'butterfly keyboard' years - 2015-2019) close to being shot around the time the battery wears out but even so it would be easy to make that keyboard replaceable.
1 comments
birdyrooster 1393 days ago
The MacBook Pro gets 22 hours of battery life, the ThinkPad can't even hold a candle to it.
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the_third_wave 1393 days ago
The T550 gets 21 hours of battery life [1] so I'd say those candles are pretty well matched, especially given the possibility to swap one of the batteries in the T550 with a charged one without the need to shut it down which can extend the runtime well past what that Macbook Pro gets.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/Lenovo/Thi...

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birdyrooster 1392 days ago
If only battery life was the only thing that mattered. The T550 is running a 5th Gen i5 which would be absolutely destroyed by the M1 Max.
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dmz73 1392 days ago
Exactly, battery life alone is meaningless.

With T550 you get a computer with decent keyboard. With M1 Max you get a Mac. Even the best quality Mac keyboard is completely unusable for me and the OS feels like it is fighting you at every corner, I haven't been that frustrated since Windows Vista, so even if the CPU was 1000x faster, the user experience for me is horrible. My old Samsung T700t with 2nd gen i5 and a dock keyboard feels like usability king compared to every Mac I ever used and it also feels much faster once I swapped Windows for Linux.

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