Technology

The reasons old ThinkPads were are better than MacBooks (except for being old) are about design too.

For me ThinkPads are beautiful and convenient, while MacBooks are ugly and inconvenient.

Most people simply don't have an opinion of their own, they get theirs from "social media influencers" (something that once meant the leaders of that clueless crowd, usually bribed by companies, and now means in fact not separate humans, but teams, employed by companies).

And that's where Apple shined, it really managed to promise apes a lift in status by backing them. Almost a Fender Stratocaster level feeling. Not just that, if you do some digital archaeology, you'll find that around year 1999 many people seriously considered Apple to be some kind of counterculture, underground etc thing. That doesn't work anymore, because Steve Jobs lost the battle against his own ignorance and died, but frankly I think it stopped working after iPhone. Wrong kind of propaganda and wrong kind of audience to be compatible with the old image.

Still that image was rather strong. One can still sometimes find traces of it. Hotline and KDX software, and that idea of convenience of GUI programs.

You'd probably be better off using your phone for taking photos of papers. Better camera, better angle/lighting, generally better editing options (with default photo apps, imo Photoshop is overkill for taking a picture of a document, generally I only adjust brightness and contrast). The only downside is needing to get the photo to the laptop, but there's about a million ways to do that depending on your setup.

The built-in cameras use cases are video conferences, so they use the "afterthought" cameras (cheapest they can). I understand your use case, and I agree that the camera quality is shite, never mind the MP count. My 2005 phone shouldn't have had a camera better than my 2024 laptop. Period.