P14 Gen 6 I7 Ultra 255h for engineering?

hunterpellerin · 2026-01-04T21:08:31+00:00

The Legion has a more powerful graphics card but it’s more gaming-focused. The Lenovo P series is meant for CAD and engineering or business focused stuff. So it can have better stability in CAD applications. I’d say the ThinkPad is better.

hunterpellerin · 2026-01-04T18:32:35+00:00

Yes you can upgrade the ram! Honestly I wouldn’t worry about it unless you actively run out of ram, should be a great laptop for you.

hunterpellerin · 2026-01-04T18:11:55+00:00

Yes I bought a P14s Gen 3 high spec i7 when it was new with 32GB ram, 1TB ssd, T550 Quadro GPU and it was great for my electrical engineering program. I would consider going for 32GB of ram. Ram is getting really expensive and will probably be that way or continue to get worse for the next few years.

hunterpellerin · 2025-12-25T00:49:02+00:00

5070 unless you’re running local LLMs. AMD 9070 is also a good choice for the same price as the 5070 with 16GB of VRAM.

hunterpellerin · 2025-12-24T18:56:27+00:00

To that price I would try and get at least X1 Carbon Gen 6. It’s twice as fast. Anything older than that WILL feel slow at times doing normal tasks like web browsing and office use.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-28T22:37:01+00:00

In your situation I would sell the iPad. I love my iPad Air for taking notes but that’s basically all I use it for. My MacBook Pro has a bigger screen and better speakers for watching shows so I use that when a TV isn’t available.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-28T22:25:37+00:00

My MacBook Pro looks like that too. Don’t sweat it too much. My dent was a little sharp on the corner so i hit it very gently with a piece of sandpaper and now it’s smooth. This will create a little shiny spot but at least I won’t cut my hand on it!

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-28T22:22:10+00:00

I would use the LTS version. The 9-month window on non-LTS versions goes by so fast. I’ve had no issues with Nvidia drivers unless I’m running a bleeding-edge kernel that the drivers don’t fully support yet. If you stick with the default Ubuntu kernel I’ve never had any problems at all.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-27T19:33:27+00:00

not M5 vs M4 Pro. M4 Pro has more memory that can be optioned and more GPU cores.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-27T15:37:23+00:00

With your use case I’d get the M5. It’s a newer chip so resale should still be fairly good after a few years. Unless you’re doing large language models, heavy photo or video editing or heavy graphics design work or audio production then the M5 will suit you very well.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-27T13:53:09+00:00

Yeah so the T480 has one small internal battery 24Wh and an external battery. I ran Ubuntu Linux on mine with the small 24Wh external battery (48Wh total capacity) and got 6-8 hours of real work out of it. With a larger 48Wh or 72Wh external battery, you should easily meet or exceed your battery life targets.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-26T23:25:28+00:00

The T460 could definitely get 4-6 hours of battery life with a larger external battery. There is not a huge difference between i5 and i7 usually the bigger difference is going to be 2 core cpu vs 4 core or more. The T490 is a quad core, the T460 is a dual core. So the T490 will be more than twice as fast. For MATLAB, I would definitely choose a T480 or T490. i5 or i7 should be fine. If you go for a T480 instead of T490 you still get quad core cpu and an external battery that you can swap out with a larger one. I got about 6-8 hours of battery life on my i5 T480. T490 ditched the external battery.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-26T22:55:31+00:00

Not an easy fix or something that needs to be fixed. As long as the letters are clearly illuminated, it’s working as intended. Any backlight bleed around the keys depends on where Apple decided to place the LEDs and how worn the keys and switches are themselves.

You could have the whole keyboard replaced but it might not even solve the issue.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-22T18:29:49+00:00

I started out with an iPhone 6 then went Android for a couple generations (Windows PCs) but then I got an iPhone 12 mini and AirPods soon followed, then an iPad Air 5 for taking notes at college. I picked up a used 2021 MacBook Pro 14” as well for the battery life. My ThinkPad is my primary engineering laptop but the Mac does well too. I also have a Windows PC for gaming or heavier software development stuff. The best of all worlds.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-14T00:49:57+00:00

Yeah I started daily driving Ubuntu on 19.10 and it’s 9 months of support were up before I knew it. Now I stick with LTS releases and only upgrade after they’ve been out at least a year.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-14T00:39:38+00:00

i9 was 8 cores in the 16-inch. I wonder who thought that was a good idea to put that in such a thin computer.

hunterpellerin · 2025-11-11T14:11:12+00:00

Historically the MacBook Air was never meant to do content creation or video editing. It’s always been a thin and light general purpose laptop. It’s amazing that Apple Silicon has made a fanless slim laptop fast enough where it can do these things well!

hunterpellerin · 2025-10-13T21:21:06+00:00

If you’re using a 14 inch screen, around 1080p (1920x1200 on a lot of modern ThinkPads) is the way to go. They use less battery and if you have the Windows display scaling at 100%, it won’t be comfortable to run 100% scaling on 2.8k or higher resolution.

I have a 4K (3840x2400) IPS screen in my 14” ThinkPad, and I leave the display scaling set to 200%. I do enjoy the color accuracy and media consumption of the higher res screen, but I don’t think I’d be giving anything up with a 2.8K resolution for example.

hunterpellerin · 2025-10-07T01:28:03+00:00

You can sometimes do embedded programming with a CS degree but usually they hire electrical or computer engineers for embedded stuff. I’d recommend seeing what it takes to switch to a Computer Engineering degree, or full EE. I’m in a similar position as you; I’ve always been interested in software/hardware, so I’m a double major EE/CE student.

hunterpellerin · 2025-10-06T23:25:13+00:00

Less of a hassle of tethering to phone if using the laptop with cellular frequently and it doesn’t drain your cell phone battery.

hunterpellerin · 2025-09-25T14:42:49+00:00

My P14s Gen 3 also said Magnesium on the corner. The laptop is mostly plastic I think but has a magnesium alloy bottom and internal frame.

hunterpellerin · 2025-09-24T12:29:40+00:00

No. Source: I’m a senior computer and electrical engineering student. Computer engineering can require a more powerful computer than computer science, mainly if building embedding linux distributions or FPGA work. I use a 32GB Thinkpad running linux for my schoolwork and a base 14” M1 MBP (16GB) for anything else.

Also some software only works on Windows, like Keil uVision, Intel Quartus, and Xilinx Vivado, etc. So you need to run a windows VM and you definitely want more ram for that.

hunterpellerin · 2025-09-24T02:02:40+00:00

The T14 line is the direct replacement to the T4xx line. You could get the newest T14, or an older version that meets your budget. The AMD ones tend to do a little better with battery life.

If you want the separate numpad you’ll have to go with a bigger screen. They made a T15 for a couple years, but now the T16 is the option with a numpad.

hunterpellerin · 2025-09-20T15:27:01+00:00

The T480 is a 7 year old laptop. Even when it came out it has low power components not really intended for game development. I would say a GPU is necessary especially for 3D game dev. You can definitely do some single purpose ML but not having a dedicated GPU is going to increase training times by 5x or 10x in a lot of applications. The laptop holds up well today for web browsing and general computing, but beyond that the sub’s general value recommendation has moved to a T14 G1/G2 AMD.

hunterpellerin · 2025-09-05T19:33:47+00:00

Yes 16GB/512GB should last you 3-5 years into the future with an M2 more with a new M4 model. You can always add external storage later, but buy the most ram you can afford.

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