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architect64

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One issue to watch out for: Sub-4K res monitors look surprisingly bad on newer versions of macOS with Apple Silicon Macs. And no, it's not simply a matter of non-Retina obviously not looking as nice as Retina monitors - something like a 1440p monitor will look much worse on macOS than it would on Windows or Linux. This is partly caused by a lack of subpixel rendering for text on macOS, but it doesn't affect just text, with app icon graphics and such seemingly optimized for High-DPI resolutions only and thus looking awful too. You commonly see people using 3rd party apps such as BetterDisplay to partially work around this problem by tricking the system to treat 1440p displays as 5K displays and then downscale, but it doesn't solve this completely. So yes, the price for the machine is fantastic, but you may want to budget for a basic 4K display as well.

As far as Mini PCs go, I'd consider Intel NUCs (currently NUC 12 Pro line), primarily because they have great firmware lifecycle support. A lot of cheaper brands in the NUC-like Mini PC space don't consistently release firmware updates (if at all), e.g. to fix security vulns, which is a deal breaker for me. Intel NUCs are validated for Ubuntu and RHEL. The main downside is that you'd be relying on an iGPU for gaming, so do some research on whether the Core i5-1240P's Xe iGPU would be able to handle the games you're interested in.

I've been thinking about the same thing since Google impressed everyone with their computational photography tech years ago. The software in DSLRs is really primitive in comparison.

2014: https://ai.googleblog.com/2014/10/hdr-low-light-and-high-dyn...

2017: https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-pho...

Really makes you wonder what could be achieved by combining Google's computational photography algorithms with a bigger sensor and high quality optics. I'm probably not going to buy another high end camera, until I see something like that on the market.

For what it's worth, the Superfish and LSE BIOS scandals didn't apply to ThinkPads. I think Lenovo understands that they have too many serious business and gov clients using ThinkPads to risk doing something silly like that to their professional-grade ThinkPad brand.