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.

Hey cool people

In the market for a new laptop and have narrowed down my search to two ThinkPads: the P16s Gen 2 AMD and P16 Gen 2.

I would like a future proof laptop (ideally the next time I would be getting a laptop is ~5 years from now) and I am happy to max out the specs in service of that.

From what I gathered on this sub, AMD is more performant than Intel, however the P16s maps to the T16 which is (as I understand it) less powerful than the P16 overall.

Threads I have read that influenced my question:

• P16v vs P16 Gen 2

• Difference between: P16 - P16s - P16v?

• Lenovo ThinkPad P16s Gen 2 business laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 7840U is now only US$1,252.80

• P16s Gen 2 Intel vs AMD

• P16s AMD or INTEL?

• Thinkpad P16 vs Dell Precision 7670

• Buy a P16 Gen 2 now or wait for P16 Gen 3?

• Lenovo P16 Gen 2 - which configuration suits me?

• Thinkpad P16s Gen 2 AMD - Impressed

• Received my P16s Gen 2 AMD, with a 7840U and 64GB of RAM. Switching form an XPS 15, I'm impressed!

• Thinkpad P16 Gen 2 Possible Memory configs

• ThinkPad P52 Replacement

• I'm loving my P16s Gen 2

Previous machine was Dell XPS 13 9360 that I've used for ~4 years. Came originally with Windows 11 Pro (I think) and the specs are:

• Intel® Core™ i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz/16 GB RAM/1 TB PCIe/NVMe drive