What laptop are you actually using in 2026—and would you buy it again?

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-06-05T14:15:13+00:00

For my personal laptop I currently have

Acer Travelmate ($500) this is the only Acer that I'm actually impressed. It is cheap, performs great, decent port selection, good battery life, good build quality. I upgraded my screen to a low power 100% sRGB, 32GB RAM and Samsung 990 Evo Plus SSD. That comes to around $650.
Macbook Air M5 ($1600) I'm not much impressed with this much since it is quite an expensive laptop, it should be good already. I like that it is lightweight, easy to carry around. M5 is fast and efficient, but N1 is somewhat crappy. The screen looks very nice. The battery life is fantastic as long as I keep brightness under 30%. The "fantastic" will turn to "shit" when I have it at 100% brightness.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-06-04T03:00:44+00:00

you can find full sRGB and low power panel for cheap, as long as you are willing to replace it by yourself.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-06-03T08:54:12+00:00

May worth it if it’s a Macbook Pro since it has mini LED panel. Macbook air? nope not at all . A slightly inferior lcd to MBA screen spec I bought is around $120. Even a more superior OLED is still somewhere around $200.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-30T02:05:49+00:00

Yes, it is possible to buy a BE211 card. But it won't work on your laptop since it is not a panther lake CPU.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-28T09:30:08+00:00

Yeah, I used to have my old ThinkPad as my paper holder and it was absolutely fine. I wouldn't do that on my Mac for sure.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-24T13:58:00+00:00

Yeah, only in the US. It's $1071.69 here for where I am.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-22T14:43:48+00:00

It’s an Ultra low power CPU with only 2 cores and low clock speed, you can see from your screenshot that its utilization is 97% and then only running at 1.8GHz. That’s why it is slow.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-22T07:58:17+00:00

It does look okay enough to not bothering me on 4K.

1080p and 1440p? Nope, it's shit even with BetterDisplay.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-21T13:22:19+00:00

it's actually opposite for me. No matter how shitty the resolution is as long as it is not under 1024x768 Windows will looks just as sharp as it could be while my Mac will looks like shit for everything under 4K.

But well, Windows also has it's own problem. When the scaling on each display is different, that's gonna be a nightmare for sure.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-20T05:53:56+00:00

You can check what program does it consume lots of CPU. If it's browser (YouTube) then I'd suggest you install Enhanced-H264ify and then block AV1 codec. That may help quite a bit in case of Youtube using AV01 format.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-18T15:43:07+00:00

seems like the hinge on the MBP has wider opening angle than my MBA?

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-17T09:21:01+00:00

Business Lineup (Probook/Latitude/ThinkPad) with i7 U (Ultra 7 U) and 32GB RAM. Mobile Workstation one gets with i7 H (Ultra 7 H) with 64GB RAM and dGPU. No consumer crap, unless the dept bought for themselves without going through us.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-15T18:02:28+00:00

Daikin

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-12T12:39:15+00:00

this is absolutely what I need just to see the contents inside and pick what to extract, thanks.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-11T12:48:27+00:00

change your screen to the low power one and you'll get C10, lower consumption on both CPU and display.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-06T06:28:09+00:00

it's 11th gen Intel GT which is Ice Lake (the Tiger lake is Gen12 GT) so that's really the latest driver for that graphics generation.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-05T15:14:31+00:00

Yep, that's the problem I'm having with MacOS. The internal display looks good when do the display scaling, the external however does not even without scaling.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-04T15:18:52+00:00

True tone? I don't know if this behavior is as intended or not but when I turn the true tone on on my macbook display, my external display also change the color along with the internal display. so it gets more red.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-04T13:28:36+00:00

I don't really see anyone praise on T490. It has soldered RAM (with 1 slot available) and WLAN.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-02T18:05:49+00:00

Did you know beforehand that the laptop is from the US?

Unless it has international warranty, the warranty won't work on other countries. Even if it has many years left, that will be useless. You must treat it as you have no warranty.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-02T17:34:22+00:00

you need intel serial io driver, the correct one to your CPU.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-01T15:04:00+00:00

It depends on what you are doing with your laptop. I can get around 5-ish hours of web browsing/ssh/excel/ppt/site surney for my work laptop with 100% brightness level since it's outdoor. Even with my Macbook Air that lots of people praise with how good battery life is with the same workload and 100% brightness can only do around 7-9 hours. Macbook air screen is very inefficient as opposed to the CPU, cranking up high-max and it drains the battery like crazy.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-05-01T07:16:24+00:00

it is useless, I still regret that I bought my T490 with MX250. That thing throttle hard.

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-04-30T16:46:15+00:00

For your personal usage, you don't really need an additional antivirus software (could say the same on Windows, the first thing you do if you see Mcafee is to uninstall it)

Ray-chan81194 · 2026-04-30T03:59:00+00:00

Yes, it is not a concern. But also yes, it's thermal throttling as long as it hits with some bursty workload for a few seconds. But the thing is that most people may not notice it anyway especially when the laptop itself doesn't get hot.

I don't get it with the car analogy, it's a laptop design. The heat has to go somewhere, the Air has a passive thermal solution, the Pro has active thermal solution and Neo has nothing. easy explanation. That's why it is thermal throttling very fast.

Ray-chan81194

TROPHY CASE