01/03/2025 - The quest for a work laptop, (part 1?)

I already own a laptop. If you've talked to me for more than about 10 minutes, you've probably heard of it. It's an old Lenovo Thinkpad T440p I bought refurbished and upgraded a bunch.
A solid machine that i actually really enjoy using, tho most of it's usage is web browsing in bed, reading email, and remote controlling my 2 desktops from elsewhere. 
But I've been thinking that after i get my new storage, maybe i should look into a work laptop. I'm not yet exactly sure how useful it would be for me, but being able to work from anywhere would for sure be useful. 
The question is, would it be worth the price of a work laptop ? My T440p seems already capable enough to handle windows and FL, so being able to use Davinci Resolve and After Effects really is the only things i'd gain
from it. I don't move that much these days, but being able to work at a client's place is always useful, and it would allow me to travel wherever (which is something i never do atm 
but i might in the future ?)  without missing out on potential jobs.
So I've been looking around at potential candidates for that job. Now, originally i looked into macbooks. I'm not a mac guy (quite the opposite, i dual boot linux everywhere), but i do think apple makes the best laptops.
Just from the battery life who just puts every windows laptop to shame, but even without that, they really thought macOS for laptop use much better than windows who is absolutely horrible on a trackpad in my experience.
It's not all perfect tho. You know i love to dive into computers, repair them and upgrade them (the reason i got a T440p is that it's the last thinkpad that has a CPU that is socketed rather than soldered in)
So, macbooks being completely sealed and soldered all over the place kinda just makes me want to puke. Also, macOS uses their own proprietary format instead of FLAC 
(i do literally everything in flac, but it seems like that point could be irrelevant since FL on mac can still render flac, thanks 7 for checking).
They also have their own filesystems, which could get annoying since i'm primarily a linux user and work on windows.
If i get a work laptop, I'm not going to ALSO be carrying the T440p around to make music (it's already heavy enough on it's own), so even if the main purpose of it is editing work, i want it to fit nice in my music workflow.
Because of this, i found myself looking into windows laptops, which honestly is one grim market. Most of them are all soldered in, not upgradeable, and again windows just fucking sucks on laptops in general.
But then i was reminded of framework laptops, those very modular and upgradeable windows laptops. I was never really a fan of them, because last time i checked, the i/o was absolutely pathetic (which is a problem macs also have), only had one nvme slot, 
and they weren't that powerful. 
But it turns out, i had not seen the framework 16, who comes with a really solid cpu, supports up to 96 gigs of ram (DDR5), has a removable (and supposedly upgradeable in the future) GPU, TWO NVME SLOTS (FINALLY), 
a solid i/o (i wouldnt call 6 ports great but since it's modular that takes it in that territory), and obviously comes with high upgradeability and repairability like the other framework laptops. 
Also as a bonus, there's a case out there to make your old framework laptop into some kind of mini desktop when it reaches its upgradeability limit in the future.

I looked into benchmarks for the framework 16, i was especially looking into its battery life as it is my main concern for it.
In "Watching youtube, screen brightness limited to 200 Nits" (i'm assuming 1080p playback) it lasted 556 minutes (~9.2 hours) vs 748 minutes for a Macbook pro 14 (M2 max) (~12.5 hours)
That benchmark wasn't that great imo, but it was the only one that also had a macbook in it.
In another one, the framework (including the dedicated gpu this time) scored :
8 hours 50 minutes (light load, chrome refresh 15 sec. Loop, default mode, 150 nits, balanced mode)
5 hours 57 minutes (medium load, 4k youtube video playback, default mode, 150 nits, balanced mode)
1 hour 12 minutes (heavy load, PCMark gaming battery test, default mode, 150 nits, balanced mode)

The better CPU you can fit in this laptop (Ryzen 9 7940HS) scored 30234 in CPUMark, vs 39062 for the one in my desktop (Ryzen 9 5900X)
The dedicated GPU scored 15355 in G3D rating, vs 16895 for my 3060 12GB (the iGPU scored 7008 bit it's obviously not a realistic option for editing work)


So here is my list of pros and cons for each
MACBOOK :
+good performance, will 100% do all i need it to work wise
+i've seen people hook those to their monitors with hubs and use them instead of huge workstations, seriously pretty impressive
+thunderbolt
+battery life
+MacOS (it's efficient)
-MacOS (walled garden)
-additional Affinity Photo license if i decide to go this way (likely, fuck adobe)
-sad i/o
-can't hotswap battery (not a thing at all on modern laptops)
-soldered all over the place
-only 1 ssd, so id have to work on externals
-no upgrades ever whatsoever
-if one thing breaks you now own a wortless chunk of aluminum
-expensive, but that's a given for a work laptop, so that doesn't really count.

FRAMEWORK :
+good upgradeability
+very repairable, probably unkillable if i take good care of it
+decent i/o thats made great by the fact it's modular
+unused i/o can be made into additional storage (seriously thats great)
+could supposedly dual boot linux, if i find software that runs on it (Davinci Resolve does but unfortunately that's all afaik. I guess Reaper too, but that's not for work)
+since it's easily upgradeable, i can buy it without many options (still expensive) but upgrade it as time goes on, and having it pay for itself...
-...except i'm not sure how much id be able to work on starting with a weak version
-weaker battery
-can't hotswap battery (not a thing at all on modern laptops)
-apparently more flimsy and fragile build due to being more modular
-windows just sucks horribly in way too many regards
-still expensive, even if i buy a weaker version and upgrade my way to what i want

Thankfully i have a long time to make my choice, or to figure out if it's even worth the investment or not.
Because if i want something decent, i'm probably looking at a good 2000-3000€ investment, which is about twice my desktop for the same performance except i can take it around. Pretty substantial.
I'll be looking into it more. In the meantime, I got some work to do to be able to pay for these two 8Tb HDDs for my main desktop. 
Thanks for reading and have a nice day c:

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