Asahi Linux is certainly not targeted at "normal people". Normal people would just run macOS

There's this saying, all progress is done by unreasonable people, because reasonable people just accept things are the way they are

I think an X230 would be performant enough for 95% of the things I do, but a 14 year old CPU is going to have pretty terrible battery life for anything more than very light usage. And things that would be light usage on a recent PC, like watching video encoded with a modern codec, would be fairly taxing on an old CPU with no hardware decode.

> My needs are simple

Congrats, but I think you may be in a small minority when it comes to developers shopping for laptops.

Personally, I had to upgrade from a late-model i9 MacBook Pro to this M2 MacBook Pro, because the npm + docker setup at work was taking upwards of 20 minutes for a production build...

>The only thing my X230 struggles to do is run LLMs locally. My needs are simple, and I think normal people (i.e. probably not most people on this site) don't have needs that are any more demanding than mine.

People who edit video or make music and other such tasks are totally normal too, and there are hundreds of millions of them

I think maybe you don't understand what the needs are of normal people. It's only partially about what software they run.

I recommend Mac's to the people in my life because when they have a problem they can take the machine to the Apple Store in the mall. Or if they want to understand iPhoto or Pages better, they can go to the Apple Store and take a class. They like Apple laptops because they look nice, they feel great, sound amazing (for a laptop) and have excellent battery life.

Like you, I have a ThinkPad (a P-something) and, frankly, it kind of sucks. It's all plasticy, it flexes, battery life is a joke, the trackpad is meh, and the fans are almost always running. I do like the keyboard though (I'm a fan of backspace).