The only thing I don’t like is Lenovo. The Chinese manufacturer has done some shady things that compromise security. My company doesn’t allow use of Lenovo computers for sensitive work.
Most of the silicon is modern machines in manufactured in China. Even Dell and HP machines are put together in China. On my last purchase, I was going to go Dell, even though they are overpriced and underpowered for the same money as Lenovo.
However, the fact was that Lenovo had the best prices, the best storage prices, the best heat dissipation, and the best flat out sustained performance for a laptop.
And since they are all made in China, I went with Lenovo.
I don’t design sensitive applications, but if I did, I would feel no more or less comfortable with any of the brands.
With any chip nowadays sporting billions of transistors, it would be easy to hide a few extra gates. Add in wireless on all of it, and there is no way to know what your machine is really doing, unless you want to invest your time watching the machine rather than using for its purpose.
I did interview a candidate in my day job once that implemented a OS in Intel processor SM mode. He could intercept anything the real OS was doing, without the OS knowing, had an IP stack and ethernet drivers in that OS, could CC any packet to anywhere he wanted too, no AV or firewall could stop it, since they had no clue the code was there and ran inside of both protected memory and processor execution state.
This was a hobbyist. Imagine what dedicated staff could do?
I have no idea if ARM has a similar mechanism (doubtful, at least officially).
Finally in relation this article, I look at ARM processors as lawn mower engines, and the XEON & AMD Opteron (or whatever they call their server/workstation chip now) as big HEMI’s or modern LS engines.
And not many people realize, but x86_64 added a lot of RISC like features to the old architecture.
The truth is the lawn more engines have been found fine for most people puttering on the internet (me included), but when we need to get real work done (building code), there is no substitute for the x86_64 processors. This will change over the next decade, of course, but it isn’t there yet.
One thing that will truly tilt the board is when it becomes monetarily beneficial to build ARM motherboards that fit into a PC case. PC’s don’t drive growth like they used too, but they still are the code building engine behind everything except Apple products.