Linked List: April 12, 2021

Monday, 12 April 2021

ThinkPad X1 Nano: Lenovo’s 2-Pound Laptop 

Monica Chin, writing for The Verge:

If you’ve used a ThinkPad before, you probably know 90 percent of what to expect from the ThinkPad X1 Nano. All of the staples are here. It’s got the black carbon fiber chassis, the discrete buttons on top of the touchpad, the mechanical privacy shutter, the ThinkPad logo on the palm rest, and (of course) the red pointer nub in the middle of the keyboard.

But one thing is unique about the X1 Nano: it’s the lightest ThinkPad Lenovo has ever made. Starting at just 1.99 pounds, the Nano isn’t technically the lightest laptop on the market. But it’s still one of the best combinations of portability, build quality, and performance that you can buy.

Now here’s a PC laptop that truly catches my eye. If I had to use a PC laptop, I’d use a ThinkPad. But that 2 pound weight* — that’s something Apple currently does not compete with. An M1 MacBook Air weighs 2.8 pounds (and an M1 MacBook Pro weighs just 0.2 pounds more — the Air is only ever-so-slightly lighter than the 13-inch Pro).

How about this? My 11-inch iPad Pro attached to Apple’s Magic Keyboard: 2.36 pounds. Lenovo’s X1 Nano even has that beat on weight, and the ThinkPad has a 13-inch display and full-size keyboard.

Apple did sell a 2-pound laptop once: the 12-inch no-adjective MacBook that was available from 2015–2019. That 12-inch MacBook was beloved by some people I know, specifically because it was so damn light. But even folks who loved it admit it was severely compromised performance-wise.

Surely, Apple is going to come out with an Apple Silicon MacBook that runs really fast, lasts long on battery, and weighs 2 pounds (or less). It’ll make today’s M1 MacBook Air feel like a brick. It just can’t stand for long that Apple is so far behind the PC state-of-the-art in lightweight laptops.

* Worth noting that Lenovo sells the X1 Nano with two different screens, one a touchscreen, and one not. The touchscreen model weighs 2.14 pounds.

The Framework Laptop 

Upgradeable, modular 13-inch Windows laptop set to ship this summer. I’m sure it will succeed similarly to Google’s Project Ara, the modular device that reinvented the smartphone in 2014.

‘Surviving the Crackdown in Xinjiang’ 

Extraordinary piece for The New Yorker by Raffi Khatchadourian, profiling Anar Sabit, a young ethnic Kazakh woman who was living in Vancouver but returned to her family in Xinjiang, China in 2017 when her father died:

That summer, Sabit and her mother returned to Kuytun, to settle her father’s affairs. Friends had warned her not to go: rumors had been circulating of an escalating crackdown on the indigenous peoples of Xinjiang — of Kazakh traders being disappeared at the border. But Sabit had made an uneventful trip there less than a month earlier, and she wanted to be by her mother’s side. For two weeks, they met with family and visited ancestors’ graves. The trip, she later recalled, “was full of tears and sadness.”

On July 15th, Sabit and her mother drove to Ürümqi Diwopu International Airport, for a flight back to Kazakhstan. They arrived in the middle of the night, and the building was nearly empty. At customs, an officer inspected her mother’s passport and cleared her to go. But when Sabit handed over her documents he stopped, looked at her, and then took her passport into a back office.

“Don’t worry,” Sabit assured her mother, explaining that the delay was most likely another bureaucratic annoyance. Minutes later, the officer returned with an Uyghur official, who told Sabit to sit on a bench. “You cannot leave,” he said. “You can discuss between yourselves whether your mother will go or stay.”

In an emotional torrent, Sabit’s mother pleaded for an explanation. The officer replied, “We need to ask her a few questions.”

She wasn’t released until early 2019. Brutal, heartbreaking, angering story, and the scope is unimaginable:

Reporters with Radio Free Asia called up local Chinese officials, who, accustomed to speaking with Party propagandists, were strikingly candid. When one camp director was asked the name of his facility, he confessed that he didn’t know, because it had been changed so often, but gamely ran outside to read the latest version off a sign. A police officer admitted that his department was instructed to detain forty per cent of the people in its jurisdiction. In January, 2018, an official in Kashgar told the news service that a hundred and twenty thousand Uyghurs had been detained in his prefecture alone.

The growing camp infrastructure attracted notice, too. Shawn Zhang, a student in Canada, began using satellite data to map the facilities. By the summer, it appeared that roughly ten per cent of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population was under confinement. Adrian Zenz, an independent academic who has unearthed troves of government documents on Chen’s crackdown, estimated that there were as many as a million people in the camps — a statistic echoed by the United Nations and others. Not since the Holocaust had a country’s minority population been so systematically detained.

As the crackdown evolved, hastily assembled facilities, like Sabit’s in Kuytun, gave way to titanic new compounds in remote locations. When forced to acknowledge them publicly, the government described them as benign or indispensable — noting, “Xinjiang has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil.”

These are long block quotes, but they offer only a taste of the whole story. You’ve surely heard Joseph Stalin’s line that “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” This is the first-hand story of one internment in China’s Xinjiang ethnic cleansing camps, and it is tragic.

U.S. Secretary of State Says China Let Coronavirus Get ‘Out of Hand’ 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in an interview on Meet the Press:

“I think China knows that in the early stages of Covid, it didn’t do what it needed to do, which was to, in real time, give access to international experts, in real time to share information, in real time to provide real transparency.

“One result of that failure is that the virus got out of hand faster and with, I think, much more egregious results than it might otherwise.”

In other China-COVID news, their vaccines are apparently — by their own admission — not highly effective, yet are being distributed around the world in huge quantities. The Washington Post:

The head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention conceded that the efficacy of Chinese coronavirus vaccines is “not high” and that they may require improvements, marking a rare admission from a government that has staked its international credibility on its doses.

The comments on Saturday from George Gao come after the government has already distributed hundreds of millions of doses to other countries, even though the rollout has been dogged by questions over why Chinese pharmaceutical firms have not released detailed clinical trial data about the vaccines’ efficacy.

China has struck deals to supply many of its allies and economic partners in the developing world and boasted that world leaders — including in Indonesia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates — have taken the shots.