Through my undergrad and masters, I used the T480 with a Linux distro. I was very comfortable living in a window manager, and really only used the following programs:

  • Browser: Firefox
  • Terminal: Foot + tmux
  • Code Editor: VSCode
  • PIM Text Editor: Emacs
  • Music Player: Spotify

Believe it or not, this was a peak grad student setup.

But the T480 with an intel i5-8250u was nearly a decade old by the time of writing this article. And it shows: large web-pages struggle, battery life is too short, and as much as I like the tank-like build, its actually a little heavy.

Right after my masters, I went for the M4 macbook air. I really wanted to get a new machine with one of these M-series chips. And so I got myself a 13-inch 16GB RAM variant for my personal use. Verdict? It was incredible. Everything was smooth and fast. I admit I’m not really a super power user. I don’t edit photos or videos. I don’t build massive applications. I just do what I did on my T480 here on this brand new machine. And it largely stayed the same:

  • Browser: Firefox
  • Terminal: cmux
  • Code Editor: zed
  • PIM Text Editor: Obsidian
  • Music Player: Spotify

I decided to shift to a more modern set of tools. Emacs and Org-mode is amazing, but I realized that I want an easier batteries-included experience. I don’t want to spend a few days setting up a single editor. And obsidian being already in markdown makes it easy to share notes.

And more recently, I’ve begun using terminal coding agents on my personal machine (I was already using Claude heavily at work). I installed Pi agent in a minimal configuration and paired it with OpenRouter to use low-cost chinese LLMs, and its been awesome. I could git-clone things I wouldn’t have dreamed of trying and use Pi to read and write markdowns for me to understand new projects. One really cool thing is trying to run some Metal shader programs to get a sense of graphics programming for the first time. My workflows therefore exist more in the terminal these days as I use Pi + neovim for most development work. I hardly open the editor except to have an easy place to read the changes.

The other thing that I was concerned about was the keyboard. Considering how thin the machine is, and how much key travel the ThinkPad has, I was a little worried that this is one area where the experience would suffer. But its been fine. But the trackpad… It wasn’t clear to me initially, until I returned to my ThinkPad and it was such a big downgrade. Apple got the physics and feel right without much tweaking, and that’s amazing to me.

I was able to get most of the workflow / use-cases from my old machine to the Mac with not too many changes. I think its unix base helped a lot with helping to bring a lot of linux-isms to the Mac. I use a combination of nix-darwin and brew to install packages and software. In some sense its more advanced than some linux systems. But in the areas of Docker and containers, it definitely has some downsides. Macs need a VM to run linux containers. I use Colima, which is one of the lighter options. But it needs to provision a part of your memory to run the VM. But otherwise, its been feeling almost like native. I think having a linux machine that is always on (a server) and using that for docker work is a better option since most applications need to talk through network interfaces and ports anyway. A native linux deployment is better if its accessible.

The battery life. The M4 chip truly lived up to its reputation. It sips very little power for my regular tasks. It feels like Apple has solved the issue of battery anxiety. Also, I realized that if I set it to low-power mode, I hardly notice any changes to performance and I can stretch the power even further. Having the memory situated so close to the SoC works wonders for power as the electrons don’t need to travel as much (if you do not know, most of the power in ICs today is spent on moving electrons from point A to point B rather than actual computation).

The MacBook air has been a great purchase and works very well as my personal casual-use machine. I’m so glad that things just work and I don’t have to spend too much time fiddling with things that are breaking. I also use a MacBook Pro (M4 Pro) for work, but I’ll talk about that on another day.