Thinkpad P16s Gen 2 AMD - Impressed
ThinkPad P16s Gen 2 AMD vs ThinkPad P16 Gen 2
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Ordered the AMD 7840U / 64Gb Ram version and received the laptop a few days ago. So far, I must say I'm impressed.
As a context I currently have Macbook Pro 16 M2 Max (from work) and Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra (GB3U). I bought this was mainly for work / media consumption. The reason why I bought another laptop was I was not satisfied with neither laptops for the following reasons:
MBP
Pros:
Mostly its advantages come from its CPU - the machine is powerful & quite.
It also has a great battery life, but I don't think it is impressive given its weight (more on this below). This thing is 300-400g heavier than my Thinkpad P16s Gen 2 or Samsung GB3Ultra, which means that for the same weight, I can carry a 20,000mah battery pack and achieve similarly great battery life.
Cons:
Its mini LED screen gives me headaches (I think it is due to strong blue light it is emitting, if I turn on night shift to max it goes away)
Keyboard is better than GB3U but still it bottoms out so not suitable for a long typing session.
Its speakers have mainstream bassy tuning which makes voices sound muffled --- I ended up using an equalizer to dial down the bass. But then I have to keep changing the eq settings depending on the audio output device which is annoying.
Quite heavy for a non-gaming laptop --- the weight is unnecessary because I usually use servers for heavy workloads so I don't need that much CPU power on my laptop. You cannot game on this (pitiful support) so the weight feels very unnecessary. It can be unwieldy to carry by one hand.
Have to use macOS, which I find too good, I much prefer to use Windows or GNU/Linux.
Samsung GB3U
Pros:
Beautiful OLED screen. It is not a touchscreen so the screen door effect is not an issue anyway, but I found that Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 is the only OLED touchscreen that I have ever seen that doesn't show the screen door effect. So maybe Samsung OLED panels are better in this regard.
It sounds great (I prefer this to MBP).
It is pretty light for a machine with 16 inch screen & dGPU. Substantially lighter than the MBP.
Cons:
Keyboard is worse than MBP, and also the FN key placement is different from MBP so I made a lot of typos when I switch machines.
Its touchpad is somehow slightly not accurate, making it annoying.
Its audio jack produces noise when I plug in sensitive IEMs (e.g., Sony MDR-EX800ST).
So mainly I was going for the great Screen / Keyboard / Touchpad combination, and Thinkpad P16s Gen 2 AMD satisfied all those. I've used multiple Thinkpads (X61, a few X1 Carbons, P51, X1 Yoga, etc), but I must say this one has been the most solid one so far.
Pros:
OLED screen is of course beautiful, and it is much more comfortable to look at then the MBP's screen. Since it is not a touchscreen, it doesn't have the screen door effect. I was tempted to get ThinkPad P1 G6 so I can play video games, but the dealbreaker was that it only comes with either a QHD or a 4K OLED touch screens, which means I had to choose less pixel density or the screen door effect.
Keyboard is of course much better than both MBP and GB3U. Also the FN key is located at the end just like MBP, making it easier to switch machines.
Touchpad is really good, I actually prefer Windows precision touchpads to MBP's.
I haven't run much of heavy stuff on this laptop but generally this laptop has been very quite. For normal web browsing, it is silent.
Even with the OLED screen, the battery life seems to be pretty good, it looks like it will last longer than GB3U but shorter than MBP. (Added: Just used it for an hour browsing with brightness at 45% and white background, and it used 14% of battery, which means it can go 7 hours at this brightness level)
Pretty light for the screen size, substantially light than the MBP (about 400-500 grams difference)
Cons:
Bezels are a bit thick (especially the top bezel)
Speakers have no bass.
To me, better screen/keyboard/touchpad are much more important than slightly thicker bezel. In terms of speakers, I don't care much as long as voices are clear (so I can do video chat / watch youtube videos), I use dedicated headphones for music / movies anyway.
This laptop just does not offend me in any way --- I haven't found anything annoying about this laptop, which is very rare --- usually even if I like a laptop, there are a few things that bothers me, not sure I have ever had this experience haha. Even webcam is pretty good and the finger print reader has been reliable.