> Things I learned to look out for:

Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in.

When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though.

They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point.

There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways.

I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.

> there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.

But such laptops don't work 100% with Asahi. Speakers and mic, external displays, fingerprint reader, suspend are the sore points I've read about, and shorter battery life compared to when they run Apple's SO.

Maybe what you are noticing is the "laptop on lap" detection? Check the bios, there was a "cool when on lap detected" mode on mine. Turn that off and re-test.

In my experience Intel and AMD Thinkpads of that era are about the same for battery life but Intel always needs some kernel parameters set. Where I notice the biggest difference is Intel's integrated graphics gets you better battery life over anything AMD if your GPU needs are modest enough to be handled by Intel's integrated graphics

ThinkPads used to have accelerometers to protect the hard drives, so if you dropped the machine or treated it roughly, it could park the drive, protecting it from data loss.

People used to write Linux utilities that read these accelerometers, allowing for example to switch virtual desktops by physically smacking the machine on either side.

M1 and M2. But those are in an entirely different price bracket. I’d go so far as to say those are not comparable.

> Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves

Wtf? That sounds crazy, any sources?