Ten Years of ThinkPadding
<i>> My X13 AMD, for example, has a powerful 32-core AMD APU, 32GiB of RAM, and a superfast 1TiB NVMe SSD.</i><p>The X13 does not have a 32-core APU. The highest spec available is the 4750U with 8C/16T.<p><i>> By the way, the latest MacBook Pro comes with an Ethernet port. We loved the jokes about iDongle; how about ThinkDongle?</i><p>The latest MacBook Pro <i>does not</i> come with an Ethernet port. It is however very annoying that Lenovo requires a proprietary dongle to use the built-in Ethernet controller.<p><i>> The removal of the SD cards slot and Ethernet port has made recent ThinkPads a suboptimal choice for traveling photographers and some IT professionals.</i><p>The removal of the SD card reader on the X13 AMD Gen 2 is bizarre, but they can and do still offer Ethernet via a dongle.<p><i>> would you read about the update procedure after you’ve done multiple BIOS updates for the same machine already? Even if you would, would you pay much attention to the Notes section?</i><p>Yes, but I'm probably weird because I like to know what the vendor fixed and whether the firmware update might remove features that I use (shakes fist at Dell).<p>I own an X13 AMD Gen 2 (20XH), and I think it's a great laptop with some small caveats.<p>Pro:<p>- 1600p matte display looks amazing<p>- proper support for S3, very low S3 power consumption<p>- super quiet, I never hear the fan and the laptop is never uncomfortably hot (even doing heavy things like compiling buildroot)<p>- amazing performance for a laptop (5850U)<p>Con:<p>- no SD card reader (seriously, why?)<p>- proprietary dongle for Ethernet<p>- Ethernet is only GigE<p>- Came with MediaTek 7961 WiFi, which while supported by mainline Linux, the performance is trash (~30MBit on 802.11ac). Luckily it's only M.2 so you can replace it with something like the AX201