Best 15" Macbook Air alternative?

Laptops Suggest a Laptop
1

The 15” M4 Macbook air (24gb ram + 512gb ssd) for ~$1400 (or the equivalent M3 one for ~$1100) would be the perfect laptop for me…except that I can’t stand macOS. I’m a CS student and I want Linux.

I’m looking for a laptop that has:

  • An x86 processor (Linux on ARM isn’t quite ready yet)
  • Excellent build quality (haptic track pad preferred, good typing experience)
  • Decent battery life/heat/fan noise.
  • ~15” (preferably high-resolution) screen

What I don’t need:

  • More than ~24gbs or ram and ~512gbs of storage
  • Dedicated gpu
  • Powerful cpu. I have a powerful pc I can ssh into for heavy coding tasks.
  • Good speakers/webcam
  • OLED/high refresh-rate display

Based on my preliminary research I don’t know that such a laptop exists (at least not at a ~$1400 price point) but I’m open to suggestions.

2

If you want to run linux then why even consider a macbook? I would say get a windows laptop that has an intel chip on it (since linux has driver issues with AMD processors. You can fix it but if you don’t want to go through that hassle then intel is the chip to choose).

Look into the Lenovo yoga series- specially the yoga pro 7i or the yoga 9i. (Best laptop in my eyes in terms of display and keyboard)

Or you can look into Asus laptops- the zenbook S14 or the zenbook 14.

I couldn’t find the yoga 7i 2025 in Josh’s website but if you look into the official Lenovo website then you would find the yoga 7i and the IdeaPad pro 5i without any dedicated GPU. The price of both those devices would not exceed 1200$. Both have good displays ig 3K OLED displays.

2 Likes
3

Take a look at this one it slightly over your budget but it’s a very good laptop, if you are sticking to the $1400 budget and you need a GPU consider Nerd’s option with the IdeaPad Pro 5i16

2 Likes
4

I personally like the Thinkpad X9 15 as an upgraded pick. Its pretty pricy if you get the good screen on it.

Otherwise the Slim 7i 15:

2 Likes
5

I know that Lenovo tries to ship ThinkPads with Linux support ready to go at least for the major distros. Is that true for this X9 Aura as well? Its been about a year since these released, do you know how the Linux support is doing on either of these laptops now?

6

What about ASUS Vivobook S16 OLED or Vivobook Pro 15 OLED (N6506), 24/32bgs ram + 1TB nvme + QHD + under 2kg + long lasting battery + good speakers + reasonably priced.

7

Just wanted to pop back in to say that I ended up going with the X9-15 and it’s been awesome so far. I got one with the nice screen and 32gbs of ram for $1,000.

Thanks for all the recommendations!