First Impressions: Lenovo T14s with Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM64 CPU

I love it(in context of FreeBSD):

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What does not work: Keyboard, mouse, TB & USB-C ports, thermal/freq mgt.

Conclusion: Highly recommended

That was a bit ironic, indeed, but at least the USB-A works!

For what it's worth, the majority of mechanical RGB keyboards and mice are USB-A anyways, so, if you're fine with a very powerful machine that wouldn't have an internal keyboard support for a few weeks, sounds like a good advice anyways!

I'm unsure what RGB or a keyboard being mechanical has to do with it being USB-A, or what the relevance is, but yes, there are many USB-A peripherals available.

The point is that most of the keyboards for sale on Amazon are still USB-A, even the more fancy ones, even though Apple useds tend to portray USB-A as last-century and deprecated. USB mice is still faster and more fluid cursor movement than Bluetooth, too.

Also of note, even the most premium keyboards and mice are Full Speed USB 1.1, running at up to 12Mbps. You can verify this yourself through the Apple menu, About This Mac, System Report, USB, and look for your external USB keyboard or mouse.

Compare to the USB-C USB4 ports being capable of up to 40000Mbps. And, to be full-featured, they need to support up to 100W, or more, of power input, as well as output in excess of what would be required for a USB-A USB3 5000Mbps or even 10000Mbps port. Which is to say, for the cost of a single USB-C, a manufacturer can easily provide 4 or more USB-A ports, with a change to spare. That would avoid unnecessary adapters and improve compatibility.

Not to mention that most of the memory sticks are still USB-A, too, and there's no Fit USB sticks for USB-C at all, only for USB-A. Which means that it's far easier to semi-permanently extend storage of a USB-A laptop than of a USB-C one, which you may want to do to try out a system without messing up with your main Windows installation.

It's basically a nab against Apple's decision to remove a useful port, especially on the M4 Mac mini, where they now have USB-C ports that are not fully-featured anymore — the ports at the front have a different spec than the ones at the back, which we all remember now at the time of the announcement, but imagine dealing with it several years down the line, where you'll have to be looking up specs and troubleshooting your things not working the way you expect. They could have easily avoided it by NOT including the 2 slow USB-C ports, and including like 4 USB-A ones instead.