Tbf, I haven’t touched a Mac in ages (and never personally owned one in my life), because the combination of the “luxury™” device tax and Apple’s vindictive anti-repair stance (and their walled garden on principle but that’s not relevant here) basically put them on my “never buy and never recommend” list. I have heard of good work being put on a compatibility layer similar to Wine on their front, but I’d imagine specialist software that depends on GPU acceleration (in my case, CAD software) would struggle to run in that scenario on Apple Silicon.
(Plus, a used thinkpad is cheap as cheap can be and again, an entry-level, fully repairable and upgradeable deck will run you around $300 with much better game performance for it’s portable weight class)
To be clear, Apple’s compatibility layer is mostly inaccessible to the user. Even with the latest macOS, so you should have GPTK (Game Porting Tool Kit), you can’t just run a Windows game. You have to do some work… or use something like Whisky. And the guy who made Whisky stopped working on it so people could pay subscription fees to CrossOver (which is not a bad product; in fact, it funnels money into WINE which helps everyone). So in theory with CrossOver your CAD software may work… or may not… but it sounds like it wouldn’t be worth it for you to try.
But wait — just out of curiosity, how upgradeable is a ThinkPad? Typically the motherboard limits what you can do (e.g. if it’s an AMD system, an AM4 means you can use most of the newest stuff, but there’s some stuff locked behind AM5 you won’t be able to touch, but it’s the same on the Intel side as well). So, just curious how far you can actually take a $300 used ThinkPad. I used to build, so it’s just that, a curiosity.
The Steam Deck is the most upgradeable, you can do all sorts of crazy stuff (I probably phrased that poorly in the prior comment), but the used thinkpad’s milage probably varies based on which model you buy. Standard stuff like RAM, storage, and so on are easily upgraded though (unlike Apple who SOLDERS THEM IN for some “fuck you” reason).
Tbf, I haven’t touched a Mac in ages (and never personally owned one in my life), because the combination of the “luxury™” device tax and Apple’s vindictive anti-repair stance (and their walled garden on principle but that’s not relevant here) basically put them on my “never buy and never recommend” list. I have heard of good work being put on a compatibility layer similar to Wine on their front, but I’d imagine specialist software that depends on GPU acceleration (in my case, CAD software) would struggle to run in that scenario on Apple Silicon.
(Plus, a used thinkpad is cheap as cheap can be and again, an entry-level, fully repairable and upgradeable deck will run you around $300 with much better game performance for it’s portable weight class)
All fair.
To be clear, Apple’s compatibility layer is mostly inaccessible to the user. Even with the latest macOS, so you should have GPTK (Game Porting Tool Kit), you can’t just run a Windows game. You have to do some work… or use something like Whisky. And the guy who made Whisky stopped working on it so people could pay subscription fees to CrossOver (which is not a bad product; in fact, it funnels money into WINE which helps everyone). So in theory with CrossOver your CAD software may work… or may not… but it sounds like it wouldn’t be worth it for you to try.
But wait — just out of curiosity, how upgradeable is a ThinkPad? Typically the motherboard limits what you can do (e.g. if it’s an AMD system, an AM4 means you can use most of the newest stuff, but there’s some stuff locked behind AM5 you won’t be able to touch, but it’s the same on the Intel side as well). So, just curious how far you can actually take a $300 used ThinkPad. I used to build, so it’s just that, a curiosity.
The Steam Deck is the most upgradeable, you can do all sorts of crazy stuff (I probably phrased that poorly in the prior comment), but the used thinkpad’s milage probably varies based on which model you buy. Standard stuff like RAM, storage, and so on are easily upgraded though (unlike Apple who SOLDERS THEM IN for some “fuck you” reason).