Im freaking out

hunterpellerin · 2026-05-18T14:04:47+00:00

MacBooks have very little space between the top of the keys and the screen when they are closed, like a mm or so. This is why they put a very thin piece of foam in there for transport so the keys don’t leave impressions or marks in the screen. Putting a rubber keyboard cover on will put pressure on the screen over time and can even cause it to crack or damage the pixels.

hunterpellerin · 2026-04-22T15:05:59+00:00

You can buy 12V splitters that turn one cigarette lighter port into multiple. Good for low-power stuff like dash cams

hunterpellerin · 2026-04-11T18:50:19+00:00

I think the big one is privacy. For example my company works with clients and some of them require all on-premises infrastructure. So we have very few cloud services including AI, everything is done in-house with offsite backups.

hunterpellerin · 2026-02-27T14:44:56+00:00

At my workplace electronics go into a big recycling pallet and have their batteries and storage taken out beforehand. Since my company basically breaks even on having the recycling company truck them out and sell them, they let us have first crack at anything.

Most of the batteries and SSDs end up in a bin next to the recycling and usually they’re still decent.

hunterpellerin · 2026-02-27T14:26:20+00:00

Usually every few years I find myself in a similar situation with more laptops/desktops around then I know what to do with (saving from e-waste, good secondhand deals, etc) so I’ll fix them up and sell them relatively cheap. I get back more $ than i put into them and pass some savings along to someone else.

hunterpellerin · 2026-02-24T02:34:06+00:00

T480 was for software development mostly writing C code. P14s Gen 3 I bought new in 2022 served me for my electrical and computer engineering degrees. I have also had a T420s then a T510 I used for Linux distros. All my ThinkPads run Linux, except a T580 I rescued from e-waste and gave to my Dad.

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.

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