2020-11-11: Why I'm Not Buying An Arm Laptop

Earlier this year the Pinebook Pro came out. What's not
to love about a mostly open sub-$200 laptop that's good
enough for most lightweight needs? I was very interested
in the Pinebook but as always with these things I have
laptops already.

Apple have announced their first ARM Macbooks. MacOS is
terrible, and I'm not interested in something as closed
as a Macbook running on the same kind of hardware as
Apple's locked down products. Hard pass.

The MNT Reform is out any day now. I *really* like the
Reform. It ticks almost all my boxes for a sustainable
device. The 4Gb of RAM is a bit of a letdown, but overall
it's a product I could get very excited about.

I'm not buying a Reform. That's not an indictment of MNT
or the product - I would definitely buy one if I was in
the market for a new laptop.

And therein lies the rub. A 'new' laptop. I recently
upgraded from a 2014 Macbook Pro running MacOS Mojave
(I can't Catalina, let alone Big Sur) to a 2012 Lenovo
Thinkpad X230 running OpenBSD. It runs an entirely open
BIOS (Seabios), an entirely open OS (OpenBSD) and it's
completely repairable and maintainable. Among other
upgrades on the device are an X220 keyboard, an IPS
screen, 16Gb of RAM, A 120Gb Boot SSD and 480Gb mSATA
home drive and an Atheros wifi chipset.

I have to say the thing that made the biggest difference
was the IPS screen upgrade. The TN display was painful
to use but the IPS screen has changed everything. I'm
not bothered about the resolution, I don't generally use
anything higher than HD except on the MBP.

I still have the Mac hanging around and will still use
it for certain tasks but the X230 does everything I need,
does it respecting my privacy and does it without buying
a new laptop. This laptop should last way into the late
2020s. When it comes to replacing it, I'll probably buy
a used laptop from around this year or earlier.

I bought a new subnotebook this year to do Windows-based
Satcom and RF stuff. It's the only portable Windows
device I have and I'm pretty happy with it, but I feel
bad for buying a 'new' device. I'm having a real quandry
on the one hand wanting to build new electronic devices,
but on the other feeling guilty about adding to the
landfill problem.

My subnotebook isn't really repairable either, unlike
the X230. It seems that in learning more about the
environment, Solarpunk and building the future I want,
I know I don't want to be part of the problem anymore.