Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook, and you can too

read original get Chromebook Laptop Stand → more articles
Why This Matters

This article highlights the growing consumer dissatisfaction with Apple's software, despite their hardware's popularity, prompting many to switch to alternative devices like Chromebooks. It underscores the importance for the tech industry to address software issues to retain customer loyalty and showcase hardware potential. For consumers, it emphasizes that high-quality hardware can be paired with different software ecosystems to meet their needs.

Key Takeaways

My last blog post complaining about Apple's Liquid Glass somehow hit the front page on Hacker News, and even the actual news media in some countries. All this made me realize Liquid Glass and Apple's software incompetence is absolutely universally hated, yet their hardware is universally loved. So credit where it's due, they make great hardware.

After my last blog post I received tons and tons of emails from people mentioning that they switched to X or Y because of Liquid Glass, and much like them, I switched away from the Apple ecosystem thanks to these ongoing issues as well. I picked up a nice new Android phone and a Chromebook.

So this blog post is about my painful journey trying to find a nice piece of hardware that works and feels just as good as Apple's hardware as a web developer.

Let's start with the hardware, and how I stumbled upon this incredibly well designed laptop in the first place.

Hardware

Macbooks are incredibly well engineered pieces of hardware, and I really didn't want to settle for a laptop that feels worse or has a shit processor inside. Apple's m-series chips are ridiculously good with performance and battery life, so I didn't want to buy anything that feels less or worse.

After searching online for days and reading up about processors and ranking what's out there, I stumbled upon a random comment that recommended checking out Mediatek Kompanio Ultra/Mali Immortalis G925 chips (which is also an ARM CPU/GPU), and mentioned that they're essentially the equivalent of Apple's M2.

Having bought into Apple's M-series marketing thinking : "no fucking way there's a Mediatek chip out there that's as good as M2?!? right!?" I quickly searched processor benchmarks.

Well, damn. Turns out, it is in fact almost as good as M2.

Alright, so I googled the first laptop that has this fancy Mediatek chip, first result was from Lenovo, and before clicking I braced myself thinking it's going to be a thick plastic ugly machine straight out of a 90s hacker movie, but wow was I wrong. It looks just as good as a macbook if not better in many ways.

... continue reading