Comment by firefax

I remember people I knew at conferences who were extremely fond of Thinkpads due to being Linux geeks (at a time when it was harder to find hardware support for things we now consider basic features like wifi) complaining when it went from IBM to Lenovo the build quality went down. OTOH they were looking at migrating to Dell...

I've had good luck with a Macbook Air and running a Debian VM for anything of import. The build quality is good and I can go to a physical location for repairs.

(Though over time more and more can't be fixed on site sadly.)