Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD

I think you're missing an obvious option: Lenovo supports Linux on all Thinkpads, and the AMD models like the T14 are a great bang for your buck, much less than $2000 even with 3y next business day warranty service. I've been doing dev on recent Thinkpads for the past couple years, and honestly they're the least hassle of any laptop I've used in the past decade. I've run Arch, Ubuntu, whatever. work great, reasonably priced, excellent support.

Can also vouch for this. Bought a 2nd gen AMD Thinkpad T14 ~last year and haven't had any issues at all running Debian testing (bookworm). Swapped the m.2 with a 4TB one and added an extra 16GB of RAM to supplement the soldered 16GB. I believe they're on 3rd gen now but I imagine hardware compatibility is probably similar to 2nd gen. The size/form factor is basically the same as my old T460s which I've had for ~8+ years and is still running, but a bit dated now with a 2c/4t Intel CPU. I believe back then the T460s was the "slim" version of the T460, but Lenovo seems to have dropped the "s" for the T14 even though the dimensions of both seem the same to me, maybe a couple extra mm in height on the T14.

I have had excellent sleep duration with a T14 Gen4 AMD under Fedora. I can put it to sleep and wake it a week later and still have >60% battery. Windows 11 was a different story - I'd find it dead after a day or two of sleeping. The "i" in Thinkpad pulses while asleep so it was easy to tell when it had switched from sleeping to drained.

I have a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD (besides MacBook Pro M1 Pro) and with some powertop tweaks it lasts about 6-7 hours. Not as great as the M1 Pro, but generally good enough to work a few hours without power. The nice thing is that I loaded it up with 64GiB RAM and a 2TB SSD for cheap (almost infinite NixOS generations, yay!). The MacBook has a better trackpad, stronger case, better battery life, far better display. But the ThinkPad has NixOS running perfectly (I had Asahi on my Mac Studio, but with the lack of Thunderbolt and not so great battery life I don't want to run it on a MacBook). At any rate, the Mac is going to be better, but I have to sacrifice a bit for tech-feudalism-free computing (Mac is slowly becoming more and more closed).

Sorry to hear that! I have a T14 (non-s) Gen 5 AMD and everything works great, also suspend-resume. A few years ago I had a Gen 1 AMD and it was certainly much worse. It would resume, but the trackpad or trackpoint would often not come up. But I'm very happy with the Gen 5.

We had an expensive IBM ThinkPad model (too long ago to remember what model it was) and the keyboard and several other parts were worn down in three years of mostly in-home use. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. At least a lot of modern ThinkPads are still modular. Recently got a 5th gen T14 AMD. Memory, NVMe SSD, WWAN modem, battery, and a bunch of other components are really easy to replace. I think I prefer the keyboard over my MBP, it feels less harsh.

Mind you, I haven't used Macs since last intel ones, but my current workhorse of Zephyrus 14 2023 has at least comparable mics to last intel 15" and 16", and better speakers. T14g5 AMD I have from one contract has slightly worse speakers than that but comparable to the Macbooks I used (if not slightly better, the Zephyrus just has a whole grade higher amplifier setup with 4 speakers). And doesn't vary sound based on where it's placed :V I haven't bought for built-in sound quality in the past (or ever, it's backup's backup after all), but I do remember lots of laptops offered with Harman-Kardon sound system, including hardware implementation of the dynamic compensation system in M-series Macbooks. Except also usually with way beefier speakers. Microphone arrays came in later arguably, but that is more correlated with availability of audio coprocessors - T470 had not great twin mic (mac was better there), but new ones easily handle it beyond my needs. Way above "last choice backup solution" that "built in speakers and mic" are used for by me.

I got a Thinkpad T14 AMD Gen 5 a few weeks ago to use aside my MacBook Pro. Filled it up with 64GB RAM and a 2TB SSD for about 160 Euro each. In contrast to my previous Thinkpad experience 4 years ago, all the hardware just works out of the box. Even suspend/resume comes back without any devices lost, etc.

T14 Gen 5 AMD has replaceable RAM, SSD, battery, and WWAN. Just got one for Linux (besides my MacBook) and loaded it up with 64GB RAM (which was only 160 Euro) and a 2TB SSD.

Currently using a T14 gen2 amd with 5850U and 32g of ram. Performance is excellent. The battery life is also excellent, unless you get the 4k screen in which case it's not good (I have both). I'm waiting for newer amd options really: I'm extremely satisfied with the vega performance, and stability has been excellent under linux. Compared to the issues I had with the intel xe drivers under linux I'm not willing to go back really. I would consider the M1 Pro if it had complete linux support. However I do prefer the lenovo keyboard, and I also generally like the "boring" chassis of the lenovo as well. The x1/thinkpad chassis is extremely durable and forgiving. If you travel with your laptop you don't need to worry about handling it like it's made of glass. I cannot count the amount of dinged or bent macbooks I've seen due to the alu chassis. System 76 is not really competitive in EU last time I checked due to customs. I know framework only recently has opened resellers in germany/france so it wasn't an option when I was looking at the time. However I don't see much appeal at the "upgradability", aside from the battery and ssd (which is easily serviceable on all lenovos). I always bought the laptop maxed out to avoid upgrading/incompatibility issues and used the laptop until it finished it's service life (5+ years).

I use (and roll out at my work) Lenovo's with AMD chips, going back to the T495, then T14 Gen 1 and T14 Gen 2, not had a need to get any new laptops for a while, but would get T14 Gen 3 if we did. They have all been really good, although did need to run Ubuntu interim releases until 22.04 LTS to get the latest kernels which helped with a number of things. Also, make sure to change the BIOS sleep setting. It'll default to Windows which can cause sleep and resume to not work properly in Linux. Upgraded RAM where possible to 32GB and 512GB SSDs. Unfortunately they only ship the laptops with Windows in Australia, so need to wipe and install a fresh Ubuntu when they arrive.