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When I started this website I was using a Thinkpad T420 running Arch Linux with a tiling window manager and all the other stuff LARBS gives you. If you had told me back then that four years later I’d be excited to buy a classic Macbook Air I would have probably thought you were crazy, but that is the future we are in now. I used to make fun of people who used older Macbook Airs. Sure they may have bought theirs new in 2017 but the design was unchanged from 2012, the same year my T420 came out. Their computer was just as old as mine I’d tell them. They never had a counterargument for that but looking back they should have, when one product is only on the market for a year while another stays in production for over half a decade it isn’t hard to tell which one is better. But now that they are no longer “cool” I think it is time for Thinkpad enthusiasts like me to say that the classic Macbook Air (specifically the 11” version) is the new Thinkpad.
Why did I buy a nearly ten year old Macbook Air? It was the same reason I bought a nearly ten year old Thinkpad four years ago, and another smaller one two years later. I wanted a cheap, portable, and durable laptop. The 11” Macbook Air beats the Thinkpad in all of these categories.
And yes, I’m serious when I say I think old Macbook Airs are more durable than old Thinkpads. If you take a look around YouTube you’ll find a bunch of videos of people buying lots of used Macbook Airs that had been abused by public school 14 year olds for way too long that somehow still work. They’ll have all sorts of dents and be bent out of shape but they will still work and even clean up to be a decent looking computer. When it comes to old Thinkpads there is a limit to how many plastic things can break before you have to search eBay for a parts machine to keep it together. The external battery for my T420 is held on with electrical tape and my X220 has never had a hard drive cover. Sure you could beat someone over the head with an old Thinkpad but do you really need an impact rated computer? Are you really that clumsy?
Price and portability are where the Macbook is more clearly the winner, you can get a complete working old Macbook Air for around $150 these days while a Thinkpad with a decent amount of RAM is going to set you back at least $200 after you’ve bought a new SSD and battery for it (they are unusable without those upgrades).
But the portability of the 11” Macbook Air is what sold me on it. It is nice to have a small computer that I can just throw in a backpack and forget about. I have probably only used it 10% of the time I’ve had it with me and that’s okay because it is tiny. Carrying around the big black Lenovo brick without using it would be a waste of space and energy. If I were to put a Thinkpad in my current EDC backpack there wouldn’t be room for much else. You can almost forget the Macbook Air is there.
But there are a few things that the Apple computer lacks which the Thinkpad has which 2020 me cared about but 2024 me has gotten over. First is repairability, right-to-repair advocates loved to point back to the classic Thinkpads because it was incredibly simple to access and replace all of the computer’s important parts, anyone could do it with a small phillips screwdriver. Macbooks were seen as the antithesis to the Thinkpad when it came to repairability. All of their components are locked behind an uninviting panel with proprietary pentalobe screws. But is that really such a big deal? Just buy a pentalobe screwdriver, they aren’t hard to find or expensive. I just popped my Macbook open to tighten the hinge and it wasn’t a big deal at all.
The Air was also one of the first computers to come with RAM that was soldered onto the motherboard so if the RAM fails it can’t be replaced. But have you ever actually had your RAM fail? I haven’t, and all the times I have heard of it failing it was due to an improper connection which is a non-issue with RAM that is soldered onto the board. Sure if you were to spill your drink on your RAM it might malfunction but you’d have bigger problems to deal with at that point.
The soldered RAM also means that it isn’t upgradeable, this is something 2020 me, and even 2018 me cared about, but did I really need to? I never upgraded the RAM on the two Thinkpads that I used most because when I bought them I deliberately looked for ones that had the most RAM they were capable of using. I did the same thing when I bought this old Macbook Air, upgradeability is a non-issue when you already have the maximum spec. The SSD on these old Airs can be upgraded to have more storage because those chips aren’t soldered on but the right-to-repair still like to complain about these since Apple used some proprietary connection for them rather than the standard NVME port. Back when these computers came out this was probably a much bigger deal, but these days you can buy an adapter for ten bucks. So while upgrading the SSD isn’t as convenient as it could be it isn’t really that much of a hassle. The battery is the only other thing on an old laptop you’d want to think about replacing and this generation of Macbook Air isn’t like newer Apple laptops where the battery is glued it, just pop off the back, unplug it, undo a few screws and you’ve got it out. Is it harder than doing it on an old Thinkpad? Yes. Is it really that big of a deal? No.
What else would the younger me have complained about? The software, I was a believer in open source software back then and I’ve already written an article on why I stopped caring about that so there is no point in repeating that. But I could put Linux on the thing if I want to. It is possible that by doing so I could squeeze a bit more performance out of the machine but I’m not convinced that would make a noticeable difference. Because Apple has complete control over the hardware their operating system runs on MacOS is fairly well optimized even for Apple’s older hardware. Also the only programs I use on that computer are an internet browser and a text editor. If I switched to Linux I’d end up using the exact same browser and text editor so I wouldn’t really be changing much.
The lack of ports on the Macbook is something else that sounds annoying. Thinkpad people love to brag about all the ports their computer has, but it isn’t 2005 anymore, they aren’t really necessary. None of the ports on my X220 worked and yet I still used the computer for over a year without a problem because I never actually needed them. Why stress about port selection if you don’t actually need them.
At the end of the day the only benefit Thinkpads have over Macbooks are in the looks department. Classic Thinkpads look way cooler than any laptop Apple has ever produced, but when it comes to practicality Apple has them beat. If you are looking for a small and cheap old laptop for some light computing the 11” Macbook Air from 2013-2015 is worth considering. Sure it isn’t going to run any heavy programs very will but don’t be delusional, a T420 won’t be all that great either. If you ask me the Macbook Air is the new Thinkpad.