I've used a Thinkpad as my personal laptop since roughly 2015 when I got one in college to replace my cheap Surface. It served me well enough that shortly after graduating I upgraded from a T420s (i5/128gb /8gb) to a T480 (i5/1tb/32gb).

I figured I'd be using that laptop for at least the next 5 years, in reality it was barely over a year.

The T420s had wowed me with it's value for the ~$300 I paid for it. The keyboard was the best I had ever used and it had no problem completing a CS degree (Windows VM, various IDEs, etc). Unfortunately, the ~$750 T480 wowed me with how unimpressive it was. The keyboard is trash and it didn't 'feel' any faster despite the 6 generation CPU jump and m.2 SSD.

Simultaneously, at my first 'real' job I was using macOS for the first time. During my internship a fellow intern was a huge Apple fan and we would constantly argue about Linux vs Mac. At the time I thought Macs were nothing more than a more expensive, worse version of Linux. What I was learning was macOS was a lot more capable than I gave it credit for. Sure, Spotlight still sucks and homebrew doesn't hold a candle to apt, but the fact of that matter was developing on macOS was not significantly different than on Linux.

Only a few months after buying the T480, Apple came out with M1 Macs and seemed to have revolutionized the laptop world. You couldn't browse any tech-adjacent website without seeing someone sing their praise. Initially I wrote this off as Apple fanboys justifying why they bought a new laptop 6 months after spending $3k on the also hyped 16" i9. However, the 20 hour battery life and impressive benchmarks certainly caught my eye.

Eventually it came time to upgrade my work laptop and the M1 Air had become the company's default laptop. I was truly awed by how much snappier everything was compared to any computer I'd previously used. Less than one month later, I caved and bought an M1 Air (256gb/16gb) for myself. It felt like a sin after shilling Thinkpads for the past 5 years to every family member, but the price-power ratio was beyond even my beloved T420s.