I was thinking for some time about switching to MacOS from Windows. In my blog post My Hackintosh experiment failed, I am now looking for real Apple machines I talked about trying to build a Hackintosh which failed. So I got me a real Apple machine 🙂

I am interested to get to know the Apple ecosystem. I am a Windows user since Windows 3.1, then Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 and actually Windows 10.

I think Windows matured a lot in these years. Windows 10 is great. It is fast and snappy, it is secure, its built in apps like Mail, Calendar, Groove Music, Fotos, Edge, … are very usable. OneDrive is working very well. I am using Outlook.com for emails, contacts and my calendar. I was a Windows Phone user starting with a Nokia Lumia 800, then a Lumia 900, then a Lumia 920, a Lumia 930 and actually a Lumia 950 XL. But I am not satisfied with Windows Phone and thinking about switching to an iPhone in the coming months.

I find MacOS interesting and want to get to know it in detail and compare it to Windows. I am already using an iPad Air as a tablet, since two days I own a MacBook Pro 13″ late 2011 and in some months I will get an iPhone and will then be part of the Apple ecosystem. If I don’t like it, I will switch back to Windows.

Currently I am using the following machines under Windows 10:

a 15,6″ ThinkPad P50 with 16GB RAM and 768GB NvME SSDs, Nvidia M1000M GPU and Intel Core i7–6700HQ CPU clocked at 2,6 – 3,5 GHz. This is my main working machine and I mostly use it in a ThinkPad dock. This machine is very powerful and runs fine under Windows 10.

For mobility I am using a ThinkPad X220 running a Intel Core i5 2450M CPU with 2,5 – 3,1 GHz and Intel HD 3000 GPU. The main memory is 2x4GB RAM clocked at 667MHz.

I will still be using the P50 for main work. But I will exchange the ThinkPad X220 for the MacBook Pro because I cannot justify to have both machines. In this blog post I would like to compare both of these machines. They are both from 2011 and have very similar specs. Here is a comparison of the two contenders:

MacBookPro Late 2011 ThinkPad X220 CPU Intel Core i5-2435M

2,4 – 3,0 GHz – 35 W Intel Core i5 2450M

2,5 – 3,1 GHz – 35W GPU Intel HD 3000 Intel HD 3000 RAM 2 x 4GB 2 x 4GB Display 13,3″ 16:10 aspect ratio

1280×800, LED screen 12,5″ 16:9 aspect ratio

1366×768, LED screen Storage – Apple TS128C SSD

128GB(Toshiba)

– Apple HDD ST500LM012

500GB (Seagate)

=FusionDrive with 614GB Transcend MSA370

mSATA SSD 128GB Battery 5155 of 6100 mAh

631 cycles 9100 mAh

24 cycles

Here is a picture of the two machines side by side. The X220 is clearly more compact and easier to carry around:



I won’t talk about macOS Sierra in this blog post. This comparison will be done in another post. In this post I am interested in comparing the hardware of both machines.

The display

The MacbookPro wins the comparison very clearly. It’s display is gorgeous, very bright and not dependent on the viewing angle. I also like that it is in the 16:10 aspect ratio. This is something that Lenovo stopped using since the Tx20 series. The resolution is 1280×800.

What I don’t like is that it is glossy. But if you turn the brightness up you won’t really notice that.

The ThinkPad X220 has the standard TN panel display. It is very bright and it is matte. This is very important for business users that the display is matte. The resolution is 1368×768 and it’s aspect ratio is 16:9. I don’t like this aspect ratio but got used to it the last years.

One thing that Apple really sets apart from Lenovo is that the MacBook Pro has an integrated brightness sensor. This sensor allows the device to automatically adjust the screen brightness according to your surroundings. If you sit in bright sunlight, the display will get brighter automatically and if you are sitting in the dark, it will dim down, vey cool!

The CPU

The CPUs in both machines are nearly identical. They are both 35W cpus.

The MacBook Pro runs an Intel Core i5-2435M clocked 2,4 – 3,0 GHz.

The X220 runs an Intel Core i5 2450M clocked 2,5 – 3,1 GHz.

The difference between the machines is negligible. I ran Geekbench 4 on both machines.

The MacBook Pro scored 2953 in single core and 5511 in multicore.

The X220 scored 2736 in single core and 5550 in multi core.

The GPU

Both machines are running an integrated Intel HD 3000 GPU. I tried running Unigine Heaven and Unigine Valley on both machines. But MacOS only supports OpenGL and Windows 10 on the X220 does not provide the correct OpenGL version for the benchmarks to run in OpenGL and so I can only test using DirectX in Windows 10. This would not be a fair comparison so I will leave it like that. Also OpenGL is much slower in gaming than Windows.

The memory

Both machines run with 2x4GB main memory. macOS Sierra and Windows 10 run fine with this amount of memory. It is very useful for doing software development, run virtual machines, …

The keyboard

This is the first big difference between both machines.

The keyboard on the ThinkPad X220 is perfect. I like it much more than the island style keyboards that Lenovo introduced since the x30 series. The keyboard feels more like a mechanical keyboard. The keys are very responsive and give good tactile feedback and have a good depth when pressing them, absolutely perfect 🙂

I talked in depth about what I like about the ThinkPad keyboards in my blog entry: I think I finally found the perfect keyboard for me (ThinkPad USB-Keyboard with TrackPoint)

The MacBook Pro keyboard is different. It feels very mushy and has a very short travel. At first I did not like it but I quickly got used to it and can type quickly but is far away from the quality of the X220 keyboard!

Another thing that bothers me on the MacBook Pro keyboard is that Apple removed lots of keys that are very important for software development. There are no dedicated pos1, end, page up and page down keys. That really sucks. Apple also does not have dedicated keys for volume up, volume down, mute, … which I find very handy on the ThinkPad.

They also removed the delete key!

Another annoyance is the way Apple arranged the four arrow keys. They are much shorter than the other keys and are hard to hit. I think Apple arranged them this way in order to make the keyboard look symmetrical but sacrificed typing comfort for this!

What I also dislike is that Apple does not show the brackets on the keyboard. I mean the following symbols: {}[]. You can type them by using Alt and 5,6,8,9. Also the Backslash is not imprinted on the keyboard. You have to press Alt+Shift+7 to get the \ char. Not good for software developers.

The function keys on the Mac by default work as keys to control the brightness, loudness, etc. You have to keep the fn-key pressed to access the function keys as F1..F12. But you can change this in MacOS in the keyboard settings and let act the function keys primarily act as function keys if you wish so!

The keyboard lighting

The MacBook Pro has integrated keyboard backlighting. It is implemented very well. Because the MacBook Pro has an integrated brightness sensor it automatically turns on the keyboard lighting when it gets dark, this is one very handy feature. You can also change the backlight brightness manually by using hotkeys! Very well done, Apple.

The X220 uses a ThinkLight. This is an LED on the top of the screen bezel which shines light onto the keyboard. This works well. You have to do it manually.

I prefer the MacBook Pro in this case.

The touchpad

The ThinkPad X220 uses, like all ThinkPads, a combination of a trackpad and a tracepoint stick with dedicated buttons.

The trackpad is clickable and can register left clicks and right clicks. Its surface is very rough and it is a bad trackpad in my opinion. I do not recommend it to anyone.

Where ThinkPads shine is the tracepoint. This is the little red nun between the G, H and B keys. You use your index finger to move the mouse cursor with it and it is very precise once you got used to it. Below the tracepoint you can use three dedicated mouse buttons while you leave your index finger on the tracepoint. This arrangement allows you to leave your hands on the keyboard, move the mouse cursor with your index finger and press the mouse buttons using your thumbs. Nothing beats this combination in my opinion. Here is a bigger view of it (this is not my machine):

The MacBook Pro is completely different. First of all, it does not have dedicated mouse buttons which I really dislike. The whole touchpad is clickable. MacOS is not built for right clicks but you can enable right clicks by either allowing the system to register clicks in the lower right area of the touchpad as right clicks which is difficult if you do not look at the touchpad or by using a two finger tap which works better but still not as precise as a dedicated button!

Where the MacBook Pro really shines is in the surface of the touchpad. It is made of glass and it is very smooth and precise, in my opinion this is the best touchpad I ever used if you put my gripes about the missing dedicated buttons aside.

It is extremely precise and fast. MacOS makes good use of it, you can use lots of gestures with the touchpad very precisely and can work very fluently with the OS and the programs.

I have mixed feelings about what is better but after several years of ThinkPads I like the ThinkPad tracepoint better! Especially if you work without looking onto the trackpad/touchpad the TrackPoint is the better solution in my opinion.

The chassis

Both machines are built very sturdy and durable. But they follow two completely different design philosophies:

Apple uses an aluminium unibody design. The chassis of the MacBook Pro is very sturdy and elegant. It is built very precise and feels very sturdy and high quality. The problem with this design is that you cannot easily replace parts of the chassis in case of a damage. In contrast to newer MacBooks the late 2011 model is serviceable if you remove some screws at the bottom. You can swap the battery, the hard drive, the RAM ans other components.

The build quality is so good that MacBooks have a high resale value even if they are several years old.

The build quality is so good that MacBooks have a high resale value even if they are several years old. Lenovo is following another design with the Thinkpad X220. It is black as almost any ThinkPad.I like it very much 🙂 Everything in this Laptop is replaceable by design. Lenovo builds is ThinkPads in a way that you can easily replace components (CRU = customer replaceable units) by yourself. The Thinkpad hardware maintenance manual describes for every component which steps you have to follow to exchange it. The whole build quality of the ThinkPad feels cheaper and of lower quality that the MacBook Pro. The keyboard palm rest, for example is of relatively cheap plastic. The advantage of this is that you can replace the palm rest by unscrewing three screws on the bottom of the laptop and put a new palm rest in place for at about 20€ at the time of this blog post. This makes these laptops very long lived because you can find parts for them even six or seven years later for cheap. You can find elder ThinkPads for cheap on eBay and upgrade them very easily, I personally like fiddling around with ThinkPads a lot. But times are changing and newer ThinkPads start going the Apple way 😦

One thing I really miss on most laptops including the MacBook Pro, is status indicators for WLAN, disk access, etc. Here is an image that show the X220 status indicators, I especially want to see if there is some disk activity or if the computer simply froze, which is not possible on the Macbook:

But the MacBook Pro has another goodie: a battery status indicator at the side of the chassis. It also works when the laptop is turned off, very neat:

Fans/noise/temperature

The ports

Both machines offer a good variety of ports. Both machines offer an ethernet port, mini display port, card reader slot and headphone/microsoft port.

The X220 offers three USB 2.0 ports, the Core i7 variant has one USB 3.0 port. The MacBook Pro offers two USB 2.0 ports.

For business users the ThinkPad X220 offers a VGA port which is very handy if you often do presentations!

Charging the laptops and MagSafe

The MacBook Pro has a very unique charger. It is a 60W charger which can be used with a long cord and a short power tip which is quite handy. What I really love about the MacBook Pro is the MagSafe connector, this is a great invention and it protects the laptop 🙂 Sadly Apple starts removing MagSafe since the late 2016 MacBooks, which is really a shame!

The ThinkPad X220 has a 65W charger which is very light and compact.

Battery

The ThinkPad X220 has a very unique way of working with batteries. You can use three differently sized batteries from 29Wh to 94Wh. The smallest 4 cell battery fits exactly into the laptop chassis. The 6 cell and the 9 cell stick out of the chassis. My device is using a 6 cell battery. I am getting about 6 to 6,5 hours of runtime with the 6 cell battery in my X220. The battery is easily swappable without having to open the laptop.

The MacBook Pro has an integrated battery with about 5200Wh. I can get the laptop to run for about 4,5 to 5 hours.

The clear winner in terms of battery runtime and easy battery swapping is the ThinkPad X220. It also wins because you have three different battery sizes which have different weights and runtimes.

Here is an example of the battery swapping, you just have to unlock/unlatch the battery and then swap it:

Here are the three different ThinkPad X220 battery sizes:

Sound

I will keep the section short. The clear winner is the MacBook Pro. Its speakers are very loud and clear with light basses.

The ThinkPad X220 has bottom facing speakers which are not very loud. The sound quality is mediocre. They are acceptable and usable but nothing more.

Connectivity

I only tested WLAN on both devices. Interestingly although the ThinkPads (especially the older ones) are praised for their good WLAN reception the MacBooks WLAN reception is on another level. It receives a stable WLAN signal at places in my house where the X220 does not, very interesting, I did not expect that.

Fan noise / cooling

Both systems work very different in this area.

The MacBook Pros fans are not running / not audible for a long time. When the system reaches a certain temperature the fans kick in very loud. I have the impression that the MacBook Pro wants to stay silent as long as possible and then tries to cool down the system very heavily. The fans are definitely very very loud when this happens! The laptop gets quite hot on the bottom side!

The ThinkPad X220 works differently. The fans are running constantly but very slow and nearly inaudible. When the workload increases so does the fan speed. The machine stays much cooler than the MacBook Pro.

I like the ThinkPad cooling system more. The MacBook Pro is definitely too loud in some situations, I did not expect that.

Storage

The ThinkPad X220 can be equipped with a mSATA SSD which I did with my machine. It also has a very easily accessible port for adding a 2,5″ HDD or SSD. so you can easily run your machine with two storage devices without much effort. In order to access the 2,5″ bay you only have to loose one screw!

On the MacBook Pro you can also run two storage devices if you take out the SuperDrive and replace it with a caddy which can house an HDD or an SSD:

Sadly you have to completely open the MacBook to do this:

The ThinkPad X220 is clearly the winner, here. It is easier accessible and extensible.

Update 2017-22-04: I am running the MacBook Pro in a Fusion Drive configuration using an SSD and a HDD. I posted my impressions on Apple Fusion Drive here if you want to know how well Fusion Drive works and how easy it is to set up.

Docking

One thing the MacBook Pro is completely missing for professional users is a docking station!

In my blog entry Working with the Thinkpad Performance Dock and a P50 I described how I work with my P50 and a docking station in details. This is something you cannot do with the MacBook Pro 2011. The latest Macbook Pros 2016 are moving into this direction by the introduction of docks via Thunderbolt 3.

But ThinkPads offer this functionality for ages. Here is an example of a dock for the X220:

That is the end of my comparison between these machines