Do any of the Snapdragon laptops not suck? I haven’t used any of them, but I’m looking for:
- high quality keyboard - I love my ThinkPad E495’s keyboard (which is a bit worse than my old T440), but everything seems to use really short travel keys these days (and my 2019 Macbook Pro for work absolutely sucks in the keyboard dept)
- physical mouse buttons - I love my ThinkPad’s TrackPoint + middle mouse combo, it’s great for scrolling through documents
- comfortable keyboard layout - I like the position of page up/down, home, end, etc on my ThinkPad, but most laptops suck with key placement
I’m excited to get a new Macbook Pro next year (our company has a 4-year replacement cycle), mostly for better CPU performance (my coworker’s M1 runs our tests in 1/4 the time vs my Intel Macbook Pro) and battery life (mine frequently dies in meetings), but there’s no way I’m buying one for myself. So I’m looking for an alternative.
I’d really like a Framework, but it doesn’t have physical mouse buttons (very strong preference) or a TrackPoint (I can budge here), and the keyboard layout looks kind of crappy. The best so far seems to be the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, but I’m really trying to get away from ThinkPad due to their horrendous Motorola bootloader unlock policy (i.e. you agree to never resell your device, and your warranty is void), and if that’s the direction their company is going, I would prefer to avoid them, and it’s kind of expensive (starts at $1275). The rest that I’ve seen seem to have crappy keyboards and no mouse buttons.
I wouldn’t pay the premium to be a beta tester for Qualcomm for the new Snapdragons. They’ll be cheaper, have better drivers and more laptops to choose from in a couple of years.