I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.
Thinkpad + Trackpad sounds all kinds of wrong. See that glorious red knob in the middle and those 3 buttons above the trackpad? That is what god intended. Now go and spin up some Emacs and a Sly + SBCL session and do the lord's work!
Macbook Air mid-2012 here. 8GB. I use Nixos without a desktop env, this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete. I have a 3090 in a desktop for messing around with LLMs but that's headless.