After I made a few comments here on HN about the T460, I felt I should condense all the stuff into a short blog post. Feel free to add your experience or alternate developer machines, with pros and cons.
What I missed at Dell and Apple is the possibility to configure your hardware a bit so that it better fits your needs. This was better for Dell when I purchased the Dell Latitude 7 years ago.
I did not choose an MBP because I feel safer with Linux in the long run. I heared that the security updates stop two years afterwards and the software upgrades makes the 'old' hardware a lot slower.
In the end every OS somehow sucks, but Linux sucks least.
I've got a T460 and have been pleased with it although I am running Windows on it at the moment. However it has just developed a fault on the screen (bright spot in the middle).
Ive went with a T420 recently, mostly because of the keyboard. But also because $400 for laptop + battery + Samsung SSD + 16GB hyperX Ram sounded so cheap i could not resist. And honestly even after a 2015 MBP it feels perfect for all my needs. In fact due to the superior RAM and SSD it feels often way faster than the MBP for 5 times that price felt. Plus it has way better battery life.
Seriously Thinkpads are the best dev laptops ever.
What about the T-series keyboards changed recently that bothers you?
If it's actually the touchpad changes, they reverted them on the xx50 and up (or made them optional, I forget which).
(Typing this from a T430 I'm using while my W550s is being repaired, and I can't recall any drastic keyboard changes that had me in an uproar in the last while.)
I have not tested a t430 but the t450 feeled a lot more "mushy" or rubberdome like. The t420 has a solid click (without the "click" :/) which is something i really like.
From what ive read it got worse after the t420. So it was a easy choice for me.
Not recently but simply the amount of keys have dropped from T420 to T430. The Home - End - PgUp - PgDn keys are the same place on my T420s (which is upgraded to a quality full HD screen) as any 101 key keyboard in the last 35+ years. Insert - Delete isn't but that's kinda OK because Insert is rarely needed anyways. Taking away the 7th row is the cardinal sin of the T430+ keyboards. Also switching to keyboard backlight from ThinkLight is a moronic decision, there are more things to light than just the keyboard.
Linux, the 3 cell one (the one i got it with a 2 cell has about 4 hours left). I get about 9 hours with full light and wifi and about 14 with ethernet & slightly dimmed light. Obviously linux (also Arch), i dont think Windows can be optimized for such battery life. And in my experience Arch also beats Ubuntu. At least without a lot of hacking.
Sorry, but then you did something wrong. Since Haswell they are not only better overall but also much more energy efficient. The Macbooks went from 5-6hours to 10 in that generation.
not sure what we are arguing, maybe i should have mentioned the fact that my macbook ran OSX and my Thinkpad runs Arch Linux? I've did several battery management optimizations as well.
If i could run Arch painfree on a mac i would agree that i would have better battery life most likely.
I am mostly just arguing against the constant mention for "macbooks having the best battery life for developer laptops". Which is not true if you could also use a Thinkpad with Linux
Typing this from a refurb T410 with added SSD. It was dirt cheap and the only issue I have running Ubuntu on it is a funny wake-from-sleep issue that sometimes makes some text display badly. Apart from that it has a lovely keyboard and does what I need. Battery life is not an issue for me, I have a laptop due to lack of space for a desk, but I am normally plugged in. Screen res could be higher, but it makes no practical difference in writing Python code or browsing HN
I wont upgrade until a) it breaks or b) someone pays me to get a new one
Another poster upstream commented the T470 is being announced this upcoming week, so I would imagine that the X1c that was announced is from the same logical "generation", and we might see a T470s/p as well.
There's a T460s that is lighter and slimmer than the standard T460. No swappable batteries though. The RAM options and screen options are slightly weird - the HDPI Screen is only available for the students edition, but can be swapped after purchase and parts of the RAM are soldered, so the machine maxes out at 20GB. Still, it's a nice workhorse and easily portable.
I think the parent means that it may take some time until the hardware support gets to Linux kernel.
I bought a Broadwell laptop right when the first ones came out, and had a lot of trouble with the integrated graphics (Intel, who supposedly do a good job with their Linux drivers compared to anyone else). It took about an year for Ubuntu to package a kernel that didn't either have annoying blinking glitches or hard lock-ups regularly. Obviously, I've been using the mainline kernels all that time, but even with them it took a couple of months.
So yes, caution and patience with bleeding edge hardware is advisable.
Having purchased a ThinkPad immediately after its CES announcement before, I'd strongly recommend against it, for several reasons.
If something goes wrong, you'll have a long wait for service, due to unavailability of parts or replacement systems. I had to wait literally months for "next business day" service. (Under normal circumstances, they really do show up on the next business day.)
Wait a few months, let any teething issues shake themselves out, and then get one. If you can't wait that long and need a new laptop now, grab an established model.
"The T470 is one of the new models to feature an optional Intel Optane 16 GB cache drive, and it also will have a touch fingerprint reader and Windows Hello camera option. Thunderbolt 3 is also here on the 14-inch laptop, along with a GeForce 940MX GPU and up to 32 GB of DDR4. It continues to feature the split battery, with a 23 Wh in the front and a removable 48 Wh or 73 Wh battery in the rear. It will be available in February starting at $914"
ThinkPad T470s
"The ThinkPad T470s continues to get slimmer and lighter. What was once a slightly lighter T series is now a 14-inch notebook that is under three pounds, with the latest version just 2.9 lbs. It can be had with up to 24 GB of memory, with 8 GB soldered on and a single DIMM available for another 16 GB. It still features Ethernet, along with Thunderbolt 3 and up to 1 TB of PCIe SSD. The thinner T series is also available in silver, with availability in February starting at $1099."
ThinkPad T470p
"The p model is for performance, with 45-Watt CPUs instead of the U series found in the slimmer and lighter notebooks. This is combined with the GeForce 940MX, and up to 32 GB of DDR4. The T470p is also available with the 16 GB Intel Optane caching drive, and split batteries with up to 12 hours of battery life with the larger 72 Wh battery in the rear. The T470p will be available in March starting at $1049."
ThinkPad 13
"The ThinkPad 13 is Lenovo’s value offering, and it will be available in January for a starting price of $674. For less than $700, it will feature Intel Kaby Lake processors, with up to 32 GB of DDR4 with 2 DIMM slots, and up to 512 GB of PCIe storage. The display is a FHD 1920x1080 touch version, and it features 3 USB 3.0 ports, USB-C which doubles as a charging port, dTPM 2.0, and a SD card reader. It’s 19.1mm thick and weighs 3.17 lbs. It will also be offered in black or silver."
ThinkPad L470
"The L series is positioned as the mainstream business value lineup, and they slot in for a bit less money than the T series. The L470 is a 14-inch FHD IPS model, and it also features optional Intel Optane caching, and 2 DIMMS for up to 32 GB of RAM. It keeps the split batteries as well, offering up to 95.5 Wh of battery capacity. In addition, it adds a discrete GPU in the Radeon R5 M430. It will be available in March starting from $799."
ThinkPad X270
"This 12.5-inch ThinkPad has been around for quite a while now, and the latest version adds USB-C for power, display, and data. RAM options are 4 to 16 GB of DDR4, and storage is up to 2 TB of HDD or 512 GB PCIe SSD. It offers the ThinkPad split battery with 23 Wh in the front and 48 or 72 Wh in the rear. With the largest battery, Lenovo claims up to 21.4 hours of battery life. It comes in at 2.9 lbs, with availability in March from $909"
And one of the most awesome things about Thinkpads not mentioned; you can get every (most?) replacement part directly from Lenovo. You can actually look up the part number in the service manual, order it, and replace it yourself. For nerds like us, this is sooo nice sometimes, when you just wanna get it fixed quickly, from the comfort of your own home.
Good to hear that Lenovo has continued to do this after the split from IBM - I ordered a new front bezel for my X40 when it cracked and the amount of parts available was staggering.
Didn't knew this, thanks. I also like the fact that the (rear) battery is easily replacable. Also something more recent laptops do avoid due to "the thin contest"
Recent laptops don't just avoid replaceable batteries due to thickness or weight; they avoid them because they want to cram as many battery cells in as possible, and provide longer battery life. A modern laptop chassis contains 50-80% battery cells by volume; every bit of the volume not occupied by other components gets filled by battery.
So thickness and weight are the drivers for this: You can always build a laptop that has the same battery capacity with a detachable battery as you can with a non-detachable. It's just going to be thicker and heavier.
It'll also have a great deal of wasted space, more moving parts, more breakable components, less structural support, additional hardware and software validation requirements, and require some careful engineering to avoid having it fall over backward when you open the screen slightly past vertical (battery cells work nicely as a counterweight). All for a laptop that wouldn't sell as well because people do care about size and weight.
Getting the same battery capacity would require a battery much larger than the classic removable ThinkPad battery; you'd need a system where you can remove a battery 60-80% the size of the chassis.
On the flip side, you can still replace the battery after a few years when it loses enough of its capacity; it just requires a bit more work. And for people who want more battery capacity and currently swap batteries for that, the trend towards using USB-C as the universal charging port will make it easier to have compatible external batteries, that will also work with your phone and other devices.
I totally agree that integrated batteries sell better - I just wanted to point out that the driver is "cram the same capacity in less space and weight". It's a tradeoff between the three, and since a lot of people prefer lighter, smaller laptops over serviceability, that's where things go. (Written on a laptop with a non-removable battery).
I'm still waiting for a USB C battery pack that can output the 20V that the XPS 13 requires. That said Dell's external battery pack is excellent, though extremely expensive.
Why would you open the laptop screen when there is no battery? The only time when you have no battery in the laptop is the few seconds it takes to replace one with another.
AFAIK, fixed batteries are located in the very same place as the removable ones: at the rear of the laptop. They are not spread everywhere, there is no hyper-advanced design is that respect, and they definitely do not occupy 60-80% of the chassis. They could be pulled away / inserted back from the rear is the design choice was such.
> AFAIK, fixed batteries are located in the very same place as the removable ones: at the rear of the laptop.
Not typically. The tiny system board lives near the back of the laptop, to connect to the ports and the screen. (Often, the system board doesn't even take up the full width of the back of the laptop, and instead has ribbon cables connecting the ports on one side to the system board.) The battery takes up all the space under the front and middle of the laptop.
> They are not spread everywhere, there is no hyper-advanced design is that respect, and they definitely do not occupy 60-80% of the chassis.
I've seen the insides of many laptops, both in person and via pictures. I've seen battery cells laid out in many different shapes around the system board and other components, including Ls, Us, and Hs, and in multiple packets of cells with minimal connections between them.
As for "advanced design", https://www.apple.com/macbook/design/ made a point of talking about its terraced battery cells to fit the enclosure. And while some laptops might not go that far, I've seen many laptops shape groups of battery cells around other components to make a non-rectangular battery.
And as for volume, I've personally seen the internals of many laptops, and the better the laptop, the higher proportion of the volume that consists of battery cells. I wouldn't have given those estimated numbers if I hadn't seen laptops fitting both ends of that range and various points in the middle. (Some quick searches suggest that much smaller laptops, and lower-end laptops, may dip as low as 40-50% battery cells; medium and large laptops, and those intended as higher-end or with higher expected battery life, have more.)
A new keyboard is like 40-50 € for most models, for example. But don't expect to get a sparkling new system board for 200 €. New rubber feet are like 10 € (but it's the whole set for all rubber feet of the system). For the X20x there are still some parts available new from distributors. Which is like 6-7 years of parts supply.
The fact that there are easily accessible service manuals (that tell you how to fix the computer) or sometimes videos (that show you how to fix the computer) is also a nice plus.
I've owned Thinkpads in the past and almost bought the T460 last month, then I discovered the Dell XPS / Precision line and fell in love. I picked up a manufacturer refurbished XPS 15 on eBay and wound up swapping in a Dell Precision E3-1505M motherboard I stumbled across.
The line has Intel quad core CPUs, minimal bezel (my 15" is almost the same size as the 14" System 76 Galago Ultra Pro it's replacing), reasonably slim for a quad core, 84Wh battery, 10+ hours of low power dev (baseline power is about 5.25W on my 8GB + 1080p + Xeon E3-1505M machine) in (Arch) Linux? YES.
Oh yeah, and for nerd points the Dell Precision M5510 has the option for Intel Xeon and Ubuntu stock for people doing CPU intensive Linux work (in my case Linux embedded system builds that grind for tens of minutes to two hours).
To add icing on the cake, you can easily get parts (batteries, motherboards, etc) on eBay if you ever need to fix it yourself which is a sharp contrast to the non-existent System76 Galago Ultra Pro I picked up a few years ago after I ditched my last Thinkpad.
I keep looking at the Thinkpads, but they seem a generation behind.
I used to have a Dell Precision M4800 and honestly you don't buy them for battery life. They're desktop workstation replacements that you haul off to meetings occasionally. I got about 2-3 hours of battery time on that thing when running usual work-related workloads on it... (IDE, VM's etc.). I don't remember the noise, but I'm not very sensitive to noisy laptops so I may have never noticed.
I miss that laptop. The build quality was through the roof and it was solid as a brick.
The new Precisions are a lot less Desktop workstation replacements and more power efficient. I wonder if they still offer the same kind of performance though.
> I wonder if they still offer the same kind of performance though
Base clock speed is down a tick (2.7ghz vs. 2.8ghz) compared to previous generation Intel chips in the M4700/M4800 line vs. the new Precision 5510. Same 8M cpu cache; presumably newer intel chips are more efficient and make up for performance difference elsewhere (e.g. less heat = less cpu throttling during intensive tasks).
Sitting on the fence here, waiting to see if Intel's next line of mobile CPUs bring significant performance improvements. Current setup (M4700, i7 extreme, 2 X SSD, 32GB) is awesome modulo the battery life, which is about 2 hours for minimal workloads.
Yes, ordered a manufacturer refurbished XPS 15 from eBay, apparently that's a popular thing to do. A day or two later I stumbled on a deal on the Precision 15 E3-1505M motherboard and took a gamble on swapping it. Worked out without any issues other then likely warranty complications if I ever go down that road.
I can easily get 6+ hours on it doing vim + chromium + GCC builds. If I baby it, it can do 10 hours I assume, but it's to the point it doesn't matter unless you need to go a weekend without charging.
My old System 76 ultra pro was lucky to get 2.5 hours doing the same things.
Most of my components are selected for power. I've heard the 4k display with touch is brutal for battery life and selected 1080p instead. I have 8GB of RAM, started to swap in 32GB but the baseline power at idle went from 5.25W to around 7W. The bigger 84Wh battery is an obvious choice and I use the Intel GPU 99% of the time (sometimes the Quadro M1000M for the rare times I play games via bumblebee).
So what's the point of having a Xeon? The Core i7 options offered for the laptop support all the same processor features [1], except ECC memory [2], which Dell isn't even shipping.
Edit: I think it's a legitimate gripe, Dell is selling a Xeon but there's zero benefit over buying an i7 equipped model. But thanks for all the downvotes!
> The only difference in the processors is the Xeon supports ECC, while the Core i7 doesn't. But Dell isn't shipping the laptop with ECC anyway.
The clock is faster, try the compare link[0].
And since I originally bought a XPS 15 with the i7-6700HQ then scored a deal on a Precision E3-1505M motherboard and frankensteined my laptop, I spent 30 seconds doing a benchmark[1]. The tl;dr is that for 6% faster clock, you actually get about 10% better performance, so the cache is contributing. Is it worth the Xeon mark-up? Probably not if I didn't come across a deal, but hey, this thing still costs way less then the local fruit farm alternative.
Now the interesting question is of course whether that 3 % difference holds up when these are used in an actual laptop, ie. does it make a difference before all of them throttle anyway?
> does it make a difference before all of them throttle anyway?
I thought this as well, figured the i7-6700HQ was popular because it maxed out the thermal design, but haven't observed this.
Mine didn't throttle at all. Test setup was on a desk plugged in to the 130W power adapter, nothing special. The benchmark ran for 10 minutes without throttling, note that Github tests show that the first pass was just as fast as the last.
If anyone is really interested, I can run the tests again, but I expected it would throttle after a few minutes of the fans roaring and hence why I ran a few tests back to back and averaged them. Also, I cut the test short because I wanted to swap the motherboards and get on with life. :)
It may throttle if the Nvidia GPUs were enabled and working at full load, but they weren't as this is how I normally work and what I bought the laptop to do.
Update: Ran CPU Burn's `burnmmx` x 8 for 20 minutes and monitored it with i7z, and the cores remained at 3.3GHz the entire time with the cores ranging from 60C - 70C. Recorded it with asciinema, but apparently it doesn't play nice with tmux so it's not really readable.
I suppose the ability to install ECC memory on one's own is still a benefit. Still would be nice for Dell to ship with it, though, instead of requiring customers to buy it elsewhere.
"just works". Touch surface is smooth, clicks require slightly more force then an old rMBP I had. Only real concern is that it might be too sensitive and clicks while my finger is hovering. This might be configurable, but haven't cared enough to try.
As for keyboard, feels great to me, but I'm not that picky.
Reduced battery time (?), more stuff to fail and being dependent on software for hotswap functionality which may have some serious issues with non-Windows and even none NT10 based Windows operating system and the list can go on.
We're not talking about a fingerprint reader here. Convertible laptops have to make very specific design choices/compromises which come with some disadvantages currently.
this is FUD. reduced battery has nothing to do with a convertible form factor. You are talking about the display resolution perhaps - QHD displays are obviously more power hungry than FHD. But then again, most people want "Retina".
Software has largely matured for hotswap. Fedora 25 with kernel 4.9 is brilliant on a convertible. Windows has had it for decades.
We already use the cheaper yoga and Dell inspiron convertibles in my workplace. They are awesome. Dell and Lenovo have had many years of experience in building convertibles by now. We are talking of 500$ laptops here. The Dell 5368 hinges are well reviewed by now [1] [2]
IMHO the design of Yoga 900 (with its "watchband" hinges are unparalleled).
BTW, we are in non-Apple territory here. Replacing hinges is damn easy. You can buy a ton of them on ebay.
No I do mean design constraints, hinged screen is one thing, a fully convertible one is another.
As far as the hinges, I had to replace the hinges on my Yoga 900 due to lose cylinders twice already under warranty.
Getting the wristband replacement as an aftermarket part hinge is well impossible.
On my Yoga 1 I've replaced the hinges myself and it never really fits like it came from the factory don't know if they do fitting but it's never 100% straight and with the amount of glue and crap they use to seal laptop with its never really like new.
Laptops with a rotating screen add complexity and have to add weight to make the laptop balance depending on the modes that the screen have to operate under.
They also have other design constraints for the keyboard and buttons which means the typing experience is often sub par due to a shallower keyboard and the screen has to be touch.
Laptops with a detachable screen as in convertibles have other issues including still blue screens (my Surface Book will still blue screen from time to time) as well as a lot more design constraints as far as what goes where in terms of hardware.
The Surface Book is probably the best designed by you still get a very top heavy laptop with a very small battery in tablet mode and problematic thermals.
If I'm buying a laptop I don't want a rotating screen, I don't want a touchscreen, and I don't want any of the crap that has to be tacked on or removed to allow it to turn into a tablet.
I wish people who stop using "FUD" as a synonym for "incorrect" or "wrong".
FUD ("fear, uncertainty and doubt") is a disinformation strategy to undermine the opposition and "influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear" [1].
FUD was famously a tool used by Microsoft against its competitors.
I got cheap HP envy 360 ($699) with convertible design.
Love that feature - use it a few times.
Great to convert it as huge 15 inch, 1080p, 16GB RAM tablet and browse the web/amazon with a few people together. 16GB makes is much better browser experience than ipad and most of the android. The con is that it does weight a lot more than regular tablet.
If you get the XPS and plan on Linux, plan to buy the Intel 7260 2x2 WiFi card. I tried the Dell DW1830 3x3 Broadcom WiFi and the driver support is rough for both WiFi and Bluetooth.
Does anyone have any idea if I could buy the Intel wifi and have Dell swap it in? I have whatever the highest non business warranty support is at the moment.
You can choose the intel card on the Precision 5510, which is basically the same as the XPS 15. I doubt you can send your intel Wifi card to Dell and have it installed.
It takes 10 minutes to do it yourself. The Intel card costs about $15, consider getting the 8260, which is $5 extra and newer (Bluetooth 4.2). While your at it swap out the M.2 SSD for something bigger (1TB ~AU$600)
Since my MacBook Air is long in the tooth (4 GB ram, non-upgradable), I'm thinking of getting an XPS when they're announced. Kaby Lake + Iris sounds fantastic, I hope that's what they announce.
I just got through installing Ubuntu on my p70...love it so far. I've lost count of how many Thinkpad Linux Laptops I've gone through over the years, but not a single one ever failed or had compatibility issues with Linux: my 6 year-old w510 is my DHCP server has been up and running for 467 days running Ubuntu (it was powered off due to a power outage). There's a w540 and w520 sitting idle, and other T-series ones that are unusable only because the batteries are shot. Well-built and reliable.
I think by default hitting the left and right mouse buttons in linux emulates a middle click. You can also configure three finger clicks as a middle click, which is my preference.
Different people have different needs. This laptop despite its minor flaws was in the end the best option for his particular needs
...or as a HN user said a while back:
tuananh 42 days ago | parent [-] | on: Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM
all of this largely depends on personal preference.
to me, i value battery so much more.
it seems when people recommends stuff that has many flaws like this, it seems they set the standard pretty low and i find it hard to take the recommendation.
You can buy reasonably cheap laptops with similar specs, either by buying >2 generations back (this T430 was $300), or by buying new models that are made of cheap plastic.
In my experience, all laptops eventually suffer damage, the more durable ones just take longer and tend to be more minor faults each time.
So if you can afford your laptop suddenly failing and switching to another machine (possibly by swapping the drive out, presuming that didn't fail, or restoring from backups/cloud storage), great, you have a robust setup. But many people don't have such a robust configuration, nor do they bring a backup laptop when e.g. traveling.
So for individuals and businesses that have configurations of Highly Replicated Data (where it doesn't matter if you lose an individual laptop), it might be worth it to buy lots of cheap laptops.
For cases where the amount of time/value of data lost to failed laptops is worth far more than the cost difference of the more durable laptops, it's probably worth it to get the ones with the rollcages and carbon fiber-infused chassis and [...].
You can get a 13" 1920x1080 IPS panel on a Chromebook for about $350. With ~5 minutes of labor (swapping in an SSD) you can install Linux natively on it with GalliumOS.
The X1 does not offer docking stations nor does it offer the port range that a T460s offers (full ethernet, card reader, etc). The T460s is a few mm thicker than the X1 and about 200g heavier, but it shares a lot of hardware with and can use the same dock as the X260, T460 and T460p which is interesting if you're a business customer that wants to support a range of options from ultra-portable to powerful.
If you're a single freelance person or consumer, the X1 may be the more appealing choice.
I have the T450s, and it's a great laptop for sure. But as someone who has owned laptops from the previous IBM ThinkPad series, there is a noticeably deterioration in quality ever since Lenovo took over. Is it only my laptop or have others noticed this as well?
I have also T450 and have had older ThinkPad's as well. And yes the quality is tad worse than it used to, but for me still better than others I've used.
Personal Machine: (Ubuntu/CentOS with 1 or 2 VM running sometimes)
For me: AMD Quad Core - A10 7300 , with 8GB DDR3 RAM and 1TB HDD (acer aspire e15) is perfect Linux development machine, it costs less than $500 . Unless you are running 3 or more VM or stuffs like high-end data processing using 16GB RAM for development is worthless.
Work machine: (Windows / Fedora-19 with 3VBox vm running most of the time)
We (team of 7 members) received new Lenovo thinkpad in 2012, with 256SSD, 16GB ram, and i7 processor. Within 18months 3 or 4 of my friends faced hardware related-issues (suddenly stopped booting etc). Luckily mine survived until I left the company in 2015.
I am selling my much newer MacBook Pro retina now, as the Thinkpad is so much more functional, the keyboard is amazing the feeling of the machine itself is fantastic.
I am thinking to buy a X260 brand new because I need a newer CPU and better battery life, but for sure I'll only buy Thinkpads or Latitudes (I have one at work, amazing machine) from now on.
The keyboard is a smooth smudgefest with so-so tactile feedback (this particular point will depend on which manufacturer supplied the keyboard that ends up in your unit).
The keys and trackpoint leave marks on the display when it is closed. The display bezel leaves marks on the palmrest. This is really poor engineering on basic stuff.
When I pick up the laptop by the lower left corner (hey, it's an ultraportable, why would I ever do that, right?), it immediately crashes with a garbled screen. After looking that up I found out that the HDD/SSD is under the left palmrest, and picking it up there may flex and alter the SATA connection, causing the crash. This seems to affect a random sample of users. So much for Thinkpad's vaunted "sturdy rollcage". But here's the real kicker: when I found this info on Lenovo's own forum, it was for the X230! This defect has been known for 3 generations of X-series Thinkpads, and yet they have never bothered fixing it.
Ever since they decided to move to 16:9 with horrible Low-Fi resolution (for a line of laptops meant to be for serious, professional users), I feel like Lenovo's Thinkpad group have be led with the vision and drive of a Roomba: mostly face-plants, and every actual improvement is to catch up to the competition (notable exception: hot-swapable battery). I only stick to Thinkpads because of the trackpoint and Linux compatibility, I suspect I'm not the only one.
I am not saying that you cannot get a decent X260, but notice how now in every Thinkpad thread there is a significant number of "me / my team had a number of thinkpads, we've had to go through N replacements during the last year", whereas a few years ago they were the poster boy for reliability. Thinkpads now have the engineering/manufacturing tolerance of a low to mid range consumer laptop, even though they are supposed to be professional equipment. This is unconscionable.
This is why I don't recommend something like the X260. You can't buy a premium laptop and "just hope" it will have none of the reported defects. We pay a premium with an expectation for reliability, not for a QA lottery.
Conversely it seems most complaints are for the X2xx and T4xx series, which is why I believe it has to do with manufacturing tolerance: maybe on 15" it's just good enough to not have any significant defect, and they kept the same M.O. for the more compact models, and there problems did pop up.
(The screen resolution has in fact been getting better for the latest two generations, but here again it is only to catch up to the competition. Remember when you could get a 15in Thinkpad with an IPS 2048x1536 display, long before the "retina" buzzword came to life? That was before Lenovo took over.)
>I am not saying that you cannot get a decent X260, but notice how now in every Thinkpad thread there is a significant number of "me
Well its subjective either way. We've got over 300 of the things in the office though, so more inclined to trust that than counting complaints in threads.
I'm sure there are better laptops out there but the x240/260s are far from duds. What they are though is old...office is replacing them with x1 carbons thankfully - with HD screens (finally).
> ... I find the boot time compelling enough (~23sec until login, plus 2sec to open the browser) that I do not need this.
I think something is slowing down your boot, I get faster boot on a 2008 thinkpad running the same OS.
OT: systemd was supposed to improve boot performance but it has actually become much worse. Upstart on a weak chromebook boots in under 2 sec, why shouldn't your current generation thinkpad with a fast SSD match that?
Would be nice to have a faster one, yes :) ... some recommendations?
Just fyi: I measure boot time from the time I press the power button. The BIOS logo appears a staggering 8sec or something although the BIOS fast boot is enabled. (Maybe the sync with NSA or something ;))
The initial boot delay is VERY annoying. I wish libreboot was supported on my laptop, then I could ditch lenovos ancient BIOS (and the NSA ping) once and for all:
8 seconds for the BIOS sounds ridiculous; that should take less than a second. Check that you've booted and shut down successfully on the prior boot; with those, the boot should take much less time. (On an improper shutdown, the BIOS may do some extra work that takes longer.) Also check that you don't have some option enabled to make it wait around a while for a keyboard key.
For the Linux portion of your boot, try running "systemd-analyze plot > /tmp/boot.svg" and looking at that. (Also note that "kernel" includes any time spent waiting in the initramfs for you to type your disk encryption passphrase.)
Unsurprisingly UEFI didn't change much about vendor firmware shittiness. There's also still firmware around which just takes 5-10 seconds of black screen before doing shit.
I find it curious that you care about boot-times. I use macbooks and just close and reopen the lid. Waking from this sleep takes less than a second usually.
My average uptime is about 22 days until I reboot for an update or something.
I used Linux for years, and I understood that in 2008 sleep/resume on notebooks didn't properly work, but now we have 2017 - 9 years later!
According to a comment in the post it fails when the swap partition is encrypted. However why enable swap with 16 GB of RAM? I've been running without swap for almost 3 years and never had any trouble. If I start approaching the limit I'll buy another 16 GB.
Exactly, the comment in your blog is "suspension to disk does not work if your swap partition is encrypted. This is due to how Ubuntu encrypts your home (ecryptfs) but not due to Linux itself."
...which is crucial since you don't want to lose your data when closing the lid. (Non-tech-term is on purpose here, since users shouldn't need to know about the difference. Also I believe OSX uses a hybrid approach).
I don't really care about boot times, but as a tech guy 23 seconds sounds like an error to me and I want to find it and fix it :)
Also, old laptops with dieing batteries (or new ones with always-on sensors such as fingerprint readers) have some leakage during sleep so it may be better to turn them off if you are not going to use them for a few days.
edit: resume/suspend in linux works just fine and has done so for many years (in response to eltoozero)
I use whole drive encryption to protect data in the event I leave my old X220 (Fedora) on the bus.
I don't mind boot times in the 20s range (X220/Fedora/cheapo SSD) too much, but I do need to close down/reboot a couple of times a day otherwise no point in encryption.
> but I do need to close down/reboot a couple of times a day otherwise no point in encryption.
Given, I'm not a Linux user, but I don't understand this at all.
On Windows, encrypted is encrypted-- the lock screen is exactly as secure as the login screen. Are you saying that in Linux the lock screen is easily-bypassed? So you have to keep your computer logged-out when you're in a place it might get stolen?
What I'm not understanding is why logging out or rebooting is required to keep a computer with full disk encryption secure. That's certainly not the case on competing OSes like Windows.
Usually in Linux the system is installed on an encrypted filesystem (cryptsetup, LUKS). Only kernel and so called initrd image (early boot stuff) is outside the encryption. The disk is opened at very early stage in boot when just about the kernel is loaded. Thus, the encryption is open whenever the operating system is running. Everything is of course still transparently encrypted on disk but the "lock" is open. One must shut down the computer to close the filesystem's encryption.
"Then click Install Now, and follow the rest of the instructions until you get to the “Who are you?” page. Make sure to choose a strong password — if someone steals your laptop while it’s suspended, this password is all that comes between the attacker and your data. And make sure that “Require my password to log in” is checked, and that “Log in automatically” is not checked. There is no reason to check “Encrypt my home folder” here, because you’re already encrypting your entire disk."
Above quote is from the section titled 'How to encrypt your disk in Linux' on the page at
Wasn't there a recent story about how Windows is storing keys so that it can wake up in the middle of the night and apply updates? I thought that the conclusion was that locked isn't as secure as logged out.
I have a X240 (12.5" version of the T440) for about 2.5 years now, and while indeed being super quiet when it's new, today the fan is almost always on, even if it's only on the lowest speed. Probably need to open it up and give it a good cleaning, and/or replace the thermal paste between the CPU and cooler.
I did that with 2009 thinkpad and it got much worse. I guess the cheap paste I used was worse than the 6 year old paste lenovo had used :(
What _did_ help was to take out the fan, clean it and then oil it carefully (too much oil or doing so without cleaning it first will only make things worse). You can also buy replacement fans, although original fans are quite expensive.
Lenovo are on my personal shitlist after superfish and abusing the windows platform binary table. When my current laptop dies (a thinkpad T440p that I'm reasonably happy with), I may have to suck up the performance hit and go to minifree for a machine I can actually trust.
Ah, "consumer" vs "business" computers. I wonder whether this distinction even makes sense. I think the biggest reason it still exists at this point is Best Buy and similar retail outlets, right?
The consumer space at Best Buy is focusing on whatever shit can be made and sold for < $500 dollars. And they are incredible at making stuff cheaper (whatever they may need to drop and break to reach that price).
Business require better built laptops than that, they've got money to pay and they want to have decent services and support. As a special characteristics, they also never bother to have a GPU (save money and power but missing for some consumer folks).
I have a signature ThinkPad bought at a Microsoft store and it came with plenty of software that I would consider bloat. Lenovo ships a lot of extra software on their systems. I'd still recommend a reformat and reinstall of Windows.
Yes, but the ThinkPads have a much bigger reputation on the line than the IdeaPads. Lenovo seems to know better than to annoy the businesses and power users that typically buy ThinkPads, whereas the IdeaPad-buying ordinary user is more tolerant of bloatware.
Not if they have shown that they can go so far as to put in BIOS. Imagine the level of effort it requires to develop something like this? If that is true, why not develop a small dedicated chip for it and put it somewhere unaccessible on the motherboard? (I mean, it's likely that they did or will do this.)
http://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html
I'd recommend going with another vendor than Ministry of Freedom (by Leah Rowe). I ordered a laptop from there and it took months to get the payment processed and the laptop shipped, with barely any contact in between. I thought it was very unprofessional and it definitely was the worst online shopping experience I've had so far.
Expect to wait at least three weeks for every time you send them an email.
The laptop is OK, though it was dirty when it arrived. It had a bunch of some kind of sticker glue on it.
I've been considering building my own and have recently dropped out to start working for myself; I'm thinking, perhaps I could build one for you?
It'd depend on how soon you need it and to what spec, as I'll have to source it from scratch. If you leave some means of contacting you I will, I'm quite interested in building these things for another purpose than "I like having and making these".
I'm passively looking for a machine at the moment but not really actively looking yet - this one's still got a fair amount of life in it. If you want to reach me, the email in my profile works.
Are you planning to do a libre hardware startup or something?
I don't currently have much of a plan aside from "do contracting for personal development and sustenance, while looking for interesting opportunities".
"Secure hardware + software for the masses" is one area I'd really like to work on.
ThinkPads never had Superfish nor the Lenovo Service Engine (the Windows Platform Binary Table thing you're referring to).
Of course you're right that Lenovo never should have put those on any of their machines, but my impression is that ThinkPads and the consumer line are run by very different groups within Lenovo.
Unfortunately, even a recent (Aug 2016) new Thinkpad T460p included a Lenovo Windows app that apparently runs daily to send "usage data" to Lenovo. It is easily disabled, but still troubling because most customers will be unaware that it exists.
> As of September 2015: Lenovo systems may include software components that communicate with servers on the internet - All ThinkCentre, All ThinkStation, All ThinkPad
To be fair, if it comes with a preinstalled version of windows you can never really be sure what is on the machine, can you?
I suspect that if a company really wanted to hide something they probably could. So unless you install windows or another OS on it yourself, you don't know what the manufacturer put on it.
I guess it would not be too hard to find in general if it shows up in the list of processes, but they could make it quite obscure and hard to find.
But yeah, I agree that this is quite an annoying move from Lenovo. The least they could do is make it opt-in instead of on by default.
If you are not sure if it has spyware installed, you also do not know what the spyware is doing exactly and it could potentially be worse than what the spyware you know of is doing.
I guess I could argue that the former is actually worse. If you know spyware is installed, you can opt to remove it. If you are not aware of the existance of spyware on the system, and it happens to have spyware, you are more vulnerable.
You could of course take the risk and assume that it does not have spyware, and maybe you're right and everything is fine, but you can not _know_ that it is fine.
That is completely inane. You're telling me that a superset of something is worse than the thing itself, which can only be true if "I know it has no spyware" is worse than "I know it has spyware".
The rest of your comment disingenuously assumes that a computer can only have one piece of spyware, and if you know what it is you can remove it and now you're safe. What if there's more spyware you don't know about? And if your remover is completely safe, why not just run it on all your computers, safe or not?
Not to mention that removing spyware from a computer turns it into a computer that might or might not have spyware.
Lenovo have been repeatedly caught doing this. They have shown that they do not want or plan to have this as an opt-in - instead they are trying to hide it better. It's obvious that it's their strategy, not some one time "mistake". (They put it in BIOS even! (!)).
http://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html
One thing to consider w.r.t. SuperFish is it was two years ago, and Lenovo did apologise for it. Sometimes you have to keep a grudge, but my opinion on this is it was something that pretty much any laptop manufacturer could have done and they did deal with it. YMMV.
I have avoided buying anything significant made by Todhiba for 30 years. It's probably time for me to drop my grudge against them (it has to do with milling machines and corporate misconduct during the Cold War).
I bought a T460p a few months ago and am not very happy with it. The problem I have is that linux(I am running debian) has quite a few problems with the Skylake architecture, especially the graphics driver.
I tried everything I can think of, installing the intel driver manually and installing the newest kernel(4.9.0) but I still have some troubles with the graphics glitches.
So I when I'll be buying a new laptop I will definitely avoid the Skylake arch, every other version I tried worked a lot better.
That was the problem I mentioned regarding the scaling of the video. In VLC this was easy to fix -> see article. For in-browser videos like youtube all was fine without a config.
The main problem I have is graphics artifacts in applications that use webkit, for example Vivaldi and Code.
Here(https://gfycat.com/MemorableIndolentDuckling) is a screengrab I made of the tearing, it mainly happens when I move the mouse over certain objects. Everything works fine in firefox so its pretty weird.
I can confirm that Ubuntu 16.04 works great on a T460p. The only issues I had were with the high resolution screen I chose and that was solved by finding the Gnome scaling options and also launching Chrome with '--force-device-scale-factor=1.4'.
EDIT: Oh, and swapping out the hard drive isn't super easy any more. It's a matter of watching a Youtube video then everything goes smoothly, rather than look at the bottom of the laptop and everything goes smoothly.
I have Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. At first, I thought I am buying an almost IBM quality laptop. Craftmanship is not good, it looks cheap, screen is flickering and there is a constant 20 kHz hiss from cpu fan. Battery does not long last as it was promised (they had ads: battery life longer than macbook air's). Touchpad is not very responsive. And finally: another new type of usb-size adapter port, I have not seen anywhere else.
I should finish my post on the 1st Gen X1 carbon I got used. I was able to run FreeBSD on it, but after a while it just started crashing randomly and I got an error when trying to update the bios.
I did buy it used so it could have just been a problem inherited from its previous owners. It worked well for the short time it did work.
I got another one when I switched teams at work, but the last guy had taken it with him on a boat and it got wet. The touchpad didn't work and the lower left screen was discoloured. I didn't use it very much.
Very different experience with a X1 3rd generation (Broadwell). Battery life is 10h+, touchpad is butter smooth (to my surprise, better under Linux than with the original Windows 8.1), fans are stopped most of the time and the laptop is very silent. All this with Debian stable (more recently testing), so a pretty conservative set-up.
For battery life (and maybe fan noise?), have you installed "laptop-mode" or its successor "tlp" (the laptop project)? Both will tune the system automatically for AC or battery power, and it does make a huge difference for battery life. If you don't use either, you should really try them: the 5 mn installation time will be a good investment ;)
Main issue on my side: I bought it just after it was announced, and Linux support was so-so (functional, but annoying glitches and stability problems). Next time, I'll wait for the new models to be out and will buy the last gen one on the cheap --- there's so little changes anyway nowadays. But now all this is gone, and Linux support is top notch.
Quality ok but not as good as I had imagined: there's now a bit of flex in one corner. Not a problem in practice, I just expected more sturdiness from a TP.
I love these linux on laptop articles. I've used linux since Redhat 5.0 and have almost always had to configure things to get everything to work. Nowadays, I don't really have the time to dick around, I used Gentoo for a long time, so I rely on Ubuntu to make it a simple plug and play install. Even with most of today's laptops, ubuntu seems to play well compared to the bad old days. I find I can throw Ubuntu on any laptop and get working as soon as I put in a few customizations and tweaks. Really, in my mind, linux has come a long way. But it's great to see how easy it is to get linux up and going on most laptops today.
I used to use Arch Linux and moved to Fedora for the same reasons (don't want to fiddle with everything all the time). I was really surprised to see that it had HiDPI support by default. In Arch, it required some real gymnastics to make it work OK.
Basically, everything works, I can get like 80% of the customization I had on Arch, haven't had any BS for the few months I've used it (besides newest Spotify version crashing with Wayland, but a downgrade solved that). It's pretty nice.
Correct, all three-figure models are at least DDR3. The X20x support up to 8 GB (2x 4 GB).
Edit: And no, they really don't support more. The memory controller only supports 2 Gb chips, so with two ranks per channel you only get 2x 4 GB. (Intel i7-600, i5-500 series processor datasheet, section 2.1.1).
Yes, such things are often outdated, but the availability of different memory chips does not change existing hardware. The MC really doesn't support it, there is no way to change anything about that...
I believe there were other chips at the time that supported more than 8 GB (i7-9xxM perhaps), but these are a different die (Clarksdale quad cores, ie. high end mobile chips that are selected desktop chips).
The point is that the datasheet is now inaccurate. This happened before with 2Gbit DDR3 and Intel had to update the datasheet for the Mobile 4 Series chipsets.
The difference is that with the one DS we know it's accurate because anything beyond 2 Gb simply doesn't work. So that DS is accurate. On the other hand we know that with Clarksdale more than 2 Gb does, in fact, work, just like they work on Lynnfield. As one would expect, it's the same silicon after all.
If you'd excuse me now, I believe my work here is done ;)
X20x: make sure to get a Panasonic cooling unit; Toshiba's is awful. Apart from the noise they are built differently (so easy to tell apart), the coldplate on the Panasonic is split into the actual coldplate and a silver aluminimum piece that holds it down, while on the Toshiba the coldplate is copper all the way to the screws. But you only see that if you flip the system board over.
... and at something like 1.3-1.5 kg they aren't really heavier than more modern laptops anyway, just thicker.
Why do ThinkPads have such terrible resale values? That's one point that makes Apple machines more appealing - in three years the resale value is still decent, drastically lowering the TCO.
T440S user here: The thing broke already 3 times in two years. The quality of Thinkpads is rapidly declining. I'm going to move away from Thinkpads after being satisfied for about 15 years. Also the moves Lenovo recently did is a blocker.
My 2 cents about thinkpad, I have an x230 and am very happy with it.
3. Same resolution but smaller monitor and smaller overall size makes for easier traveling imo.
7. I have the exact same issue with hitting the touch pad when typing, but I've learned to go slower and avoid it.
8. I first ordered the x230 by accident with the larger battery and was amazed at the working time of 12-15 hours but it was also quite bulky. So I re-ordered with my missing keyboard backlight and with the slimmer battery and I'm quite happy with the slimmer form-factor while still having a good 6 hours of work time.
11. It's clearly not a media machine, it even lacks shortcut keys for pause/play media.
390 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadWhat I missed at Dell and Apple is the possibility to configure your hardware a bit so that it better fits your needs. This was better for Dell when I purchased the Dell Latitude 7 years ago.
I did not choose an MBP because I feel safer with Linux in the long run. I heared that the security updates stop two years afterwards and the software upgrades makes the 'old' hardware a lot slower.
In the end every OS somehow sucks, but Linux sucks least.
That should fix the palmdetection problem. If not, also do:
synclient PalmMinZ=0
Seriously Thinkpads are the best dev laptops ever.
If it's actually the touchpad changes, they reverted them on the xx50 and up (or made them optional, I forget which).
(Typing this from a T430 I'm using while my W550s is being repaired, and I can't recall any drastic keyboard changes that had me in an uproar in the last while.)
From what ive read it got worse after the t420. So it was a easy choice for me.
Personally, I haven't had tap to click enabled for a long time, since I have physical mouse buttons available.
I picked up a cheap, off-lease T420 several months ago and added in 16 GB of RAM and an SSD and had a pretty decent machine for ~$250 all-in.
How much battery time are you getting?
And which battery do you use?
And are you running Linux or Windows?
(I'm considering a T420 right now)
If i could run Arch painfree on a mac i would agree that i would have better battery life most likely.
I am mostly just arguing against the constant mention for "macbooks having the best battery life for developer laptops". Which is not true if you could also use a Thinkpad with Linux
I wont upgrade until a) it breaks or b) someone pays me to get a new one
For the Carbon there seems to be a recent version released (in the US): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286150 (maybe they plan to substitude the 460s?)
If you look around, you'll mostly find 14.04/16.04 in supported OSes. Even for OSS software, not just commercial stuff.
I bought a Broadwell laptop right when the first ones came out, and had a lot of trouble with the integrated graphics (Intel, who supposedly do a good job with their Linux drivers compared to anyone else). It took about an year for Ubuntu to package a kernel that didn't either have annoying blinking glitches or hard lock-ups regularly. Obviously, I've been using the mainline kernels all that time, but even with them it took a couple of months.
So yes, caution and patience with bleeding edge hardware is advisable.
If something goes wrong, you'll have a long wait for service, due to unavailability of parts or replacement systems. I had to wait literally months for "next business day" service. (Under normal circumstances, they really do show up on the next business day.)
Wait a few months, let any teething issues shake themselves out, and then get one. If you can't wait that long and need a new laptop now, grab an established model.
see ThinkPad T470
"The T470 is one of the new models to feature an optional Intel Optane 16 GB cache drive, and it also will have a touch fingerprint reader and Windows Hello camera option. Thunderbolt 3 is also here on the 14-inch laptop, along with a GeForce 940MX GPU and up to 32 GB of DDR4. It continues to feature the split battery, with a 23 Wh in the front and a removable 48 Wh or 73 Wh battery in the rear. It will be available in February starting at $914"
ThinkPad T470s
"The ThinkPad T470s continues to get slimmer and lighter. What was once a slightly lighter T series is now a 14-inch notebook that is under three pounds, with the latest version just 2.9 lbs. It can be had with up to 24 GB of memory, with 8 GB soldered on and a single DIMM available for another 16 GB. It still features Ethernet, along with Thunderbolt 3 and up to 1 TB of PCIe SSD. The thinner T series is also available in silver, with availability in February starting at $1099."
ThinkPad T470p "The p model is for performance, with 45-Watt CPUs instead of the U series found in the slimmer and lighter notebooks. This is combined with the GeForce 940MX, and up to 32 GB of DDR4. The T470p is also available with the 16 GB Intel Optane caching drive, and split batteries with up to 12 hours of battery life with the larger 72 Wh battery in the rear. The T470p will be available in March starting at $1049."
ThinkPad 13
"The ThinkPad 13 is Lenovo’s value offering, and it will be available in January for a starting price of $674. For less than $700, it will feature Intel Kaby Lake processors, with up to 32 GB of DDR4 with 2 DIMM slots, and up to 512 GB of PCIe storage. The display is a FHD 1920x1080 touch version, and it features 3 USB 3.0 ports, USB-C which doubles as a charging port, dTPM 2.0, and a SD card reader. It’s 19.1mm thick and weighs 3.17 lbs. It will also be offered in black or silver."
ThinkPad L470
"The L series is positioned as the mainstream business value lineup, and they slot in for a bit less money than the T series. The L470 is a 14-inch FHD IPS model, and it also features optional Intel Optane caching, and 2 DIMMS for up to 32 GB of RAM. It keeps the split batteries as well, offering up to 95.5 Wh of battery capacity. In addition, it adds a discrete GPU in the Radeon R5 M430. It will be available in March starting from $799."
ThinkPad X270
"This 12.5-inch ThinkPad has been around for quite a while now, and the latest version adds USB-C for power, display, and data. RAM options are 4 to 16 GB of DDR4, and storage is up to 2 TB of HDD or 512 GB PCIe SSD. It offers the ThinkPad split battery with 23 Wh in the front and 48 or 72 Wh in the rear. With the largest battery, Lenovo claims up to 21.4 hours of battery life. It comes in at 2.9 lbs, with availability in March from $909"
Getting the same battery capacity would require a battery much larger than the classic removable ThinkPad battery; you'd need a system where you can remove a battery 60-80% the size of the chassis.
On the flip side, you can still replace the battery after a few years when it loses enough of its capacity; it just requires a bit more work. And for people who want more battery capacity and currently swap batteries for that, the trend towards using USB-C as the universal charging port will make it easier to have compatible external batteries, that will also work with your phone and other devices.
AFAIK, fixed batteries are located in the very same place as the removable ones: at the rear of the laptop. They are not spread everywhere, there is no hyper-advanced design is that respect, and they definitely do not occupy 60-80% of the chassis. They could be pulled away / inserted back from the rear is the design choice was such.
Not typically. The tiny system board lives near the back of the laptop, to connect to the ports and the screen. (Often, the system board doesn't even take up the full width of the back of the laptop, and instead has ribbon cables connecting the ports on one side to the system board.) The battery takes up all the space under the front and middle of the laptop.
> They are not spread everywhere, there is no hyper-advanced design is that respect, and they definitely do not occupy 60-80% of the chassis.
I've seen the insides of many laptops, both in person and via pictures. I've seen battery cells laid out in many different shapes around the system board and other components, including Ls, Us, and Hs, and in multiple packets of cells with minimal connections between them.
As for "advanced design", https://www.apple.com/macbook/design/ made a point of talking about its terraced battery cells to fit the enclosure. And while some laptops might not go that far, I've seen many laptops shape groups of battery cells around other components to make a non-rectangular battery.
And as for volume, I've personally seen the internals of many laptops, and the better the laptop, the higher proportion of the volume that consists of battery cells. I wouldn't have given those estimated numbers if I hadn't seen laptops fitting both ends of that range and various points in the middle. (Some quick searches suggest that much smaller laptops, and lower-end laptops, may dip as low as 40-50% battery cells; medium and large laptops, and those intended as higher-end or with higher expected battery life, have more.)
A new keyboard is like 40-50 € for most models, for example. But don't expect to get a sparkling new system board for 200 €. New rubber feet are like 10 € (but it's the whole set for all rubber feet of the system). For the X20x there are still some parts available new from distributors. Which is like 6-7 years of parts supply.
The line has Intel quad core CPUs, minimal bezel (my 15" is almost the same size as the 14" System 76 Galago Ultra Pro it's replacing), reasonably slim for a quad core, 84Wh battery, 10+ hours of low power dev (baseline power is about 5.25W on my 8GB + 1080p + Xeon E3-1505M machine) in (Arch) Linux? YES.
Oh yeah, and for nerd points the Dell Precision M5510 has the option for Intel Xeon and Ubuntu stock for people doing CPU intensive Linux work (in my case Linux embedded system builds that grind for tens of minutes to two hours).
To add icing on the cake, you can easily get parts (batteries, motherboards, etc) on eBay if you ever need to fix it yourself which is a sharp contrast to the non-existent System76 Galago Ultra Pro I picked up a few years ago after I ditched my last Thinkpad.
I keep looking at the Thinkpads, but they seem a generation behind.
I miss that laptop. The build quality was through the roof and it was solid as a brick.
Base clock speed is down a tick (2.7ghz vs. 2.8ghz) compared to previous generation Intel chips in the M4700/M4800 line vs. the new Precision 5510. Same 8M cpu cache; presumably newer intel chips are more efficient and make up for performance difference elsewhere (e.g. less heat = less cpu throttling during intensive tasks).
Sitting on the fence here, waiting to see if Intel's next line of mobile CPUs bring significant performance improvements. Current setup (M4700, i7 extreme, 2 X SSD, 32GB) is awesome modulo the battery life, which is about 2 hours for minimal workloads.
Yes, ordered a manufacturer refurbished XPS 15 from eBay, apparently that's a popular thing to do. A day or two later I stumbled on a deal on the Precision 15 E3-1505M motherboard and took a gamble on swapping it. Worked out without any issues other then likely warranty complications if I ever go down that road.
I can easily get 6+ hours on it doing vim + chromium + GCC builds. If I baby it, it can do 10 hours I assume, but it's to the point it doesn't matter unless you need to go a weekend without charging.
My old System 76 ultra pro was lucky to get 2.5 hours doing the same things.
Most of my components are selected for power. I've heard the 4k display with touch is brutal for battery life and selected 1080p instead. I have 8GB of RAM, started to swap in 32GB but the baseline power at idle went from 5.25W to around 7W. The bigger 84Wh battery is an obvious choice and I use the Intel GPU 99% of the time (sometimes the Quadro M1000M for the rare times I play games via bumblebee).
Except they don't ship with ECC memory.
> 32GB, DDR4-2133MHz SDRAM, 2 DIMMS, Non-ECC [0]
So what's the point of having a Xeon? The Core i7 options offered for the laptop support all the same processor features [1], except ECC memory [2], which Dell isn't even shipping.
[0] http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...
[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/88970/Intel-Core-i7-6820HQ-Pro...
[2] http://ark.intel.com/products/89608/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-...
Edit: I think it's a legitimate gripe, Dell is selling a Xeon but there's zero benefit over buying an i7 equipped model. But thanks for all the downvotes!
The only difference in the processors is the Xeon supports ECC, while the Core i7 doesn't. But Dell isn't shipping the laptop with ECC anyway.
The specifications don't even list support for ECC RAM! [0]
[0] http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheet...
The clock is faster, try the compare link[0].
And since I originally bought a XPS 15 with the i7-6700HQ then scored a deal on a Precision E3-1505M motherboard and frankensteined my laptop, I spent 30 seconds doing a benchmark[1]. The tl;dr is that for 6% faster clock, you actually get about 10% better performance, so the cache is contributing. Is it worth the Xeon mark-up? Probably not if I didn't come across a deal, but hey, this thing still costs way less then the local fruit farm alternative.
[0] http://ark.intel.com/compare/88967,88970,89608
[1] https://github.com/kylemanna/dell-xps-9550-precision-5510
Now the interesting question is of course whether that 3 % difference holds up when these are used in an actual laptop, ie. does it make a difference before all of them throttle anyway?
I thought this as well, figured the i7-6700HQ was popular because it maxed out the thermal design, but haven't observed this.
Mine didn't throttle at all. Test setup was on a desk plugged in to the 130W power adapter, nothing special. The benchmark ran for 10 minutes without throttling, note that Github tests show that the first pass was just as fast as the last.
If anyone is really interested, I can run the tests again, but I expected it would throttle after a few minutes of the fans roaring and hence why I ran a few tests back to back and averaged them. Also, I cut the test short because I wanted to swap the motherboards and get on with life. :)
It may throttle if the Nvidia GPUs were enabled and working at full load, but they weren't as this is how I normally work and what I bought the laptop to do.
Update: Ran CPU Burn's `burnmmx` x 8 for 20 minutes and monitored it with i7z, and the cores remained at 3.3GHz the entire time with the cores ranging from 60C - 70C. Recorded it with asciinema, but apparently it doesn't play nice with tmux so it's not really readable.
As for keyboard, feels great to me, but I'm not that picky.
The convertible, bezel-less XPS convertible = macbook pro + ipad pro
We're not talking about a fingerprint reader here. Convertible laptops have to make very specific design choices/compromises which come with some disadvantages currently.
Software has largely matured for hotswap. Fedora 25 with kernel 4.9 is brilliant on a convertible. Windows has had it for decades.
We already use the cheaper yoga and Dell inspiron convertibles in my workplace. They are awesome. Dell and Lenovo have had many years of experience in building convertibles by now. We are talking of 500$ laptops here. The Dell 5368 hinges are well reviewed by now [1] [2]
IMHO the design of Yoga 900 (with its "watchband" hinges are unparalleled).
BTW, we are in non-Apple territory here. Replacing hinges is damn easy. You can buy a ton of them on ebay.
[1] http://www.techarp.com/articles/dell-inspiron-13-5000-laptop...
[2] http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/laptops/1404957/dell-inspiron...
As far as the hinges, I had to replace the hinges on my Yoga 900 due to lose cylinders twice already under warranty.
Getting the wristband replacement as an aftermarket part hinge is well impossible.
On my Yoga 1 I've replaced the hinges myself and it never really fits like it came from the factory don't know if they do fitting but it's never 100% straight and with the amount of glue and crap they use to seal laptop with its never really like new.
Laptops with a rotating screen add complexity and have to add weight to make the laptop balance depending on the modes that the screen have to operate under.
They also have other design constraints for the keyboard and buttons which means the typing experience is often sub par due to a shallower keyboard and the screen has to be touch.
Laptops with a detachable screen as in convertibles have other issues including still blue screens (my Surface Book will still blue screen from time to time) as well as a lot more design constraints as far as what goes where in terms of hardware.
The Surface Book is probably the best designed by you still get a very top heavy laptop with a very small battery in tablet mode and problematic thermals.
If I'm buying a laptop I don't want a rotating screen, I don't want a touchscreen, and I don't want any of the crap that has to be tacked on or removed to allow it to turn into a tablet.
I wish people who stop using "FUD" as a synonym for "incorrect" or "wrong".
FUD ("fear, uncertainty and doubt") is a disinformation strategy to undermine the opposition and "influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear" [1].
FUD was famously a tool used by Microsoft against its competitors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
you are fudded?
Love that feature - use it a few times.
Great to convert it as huge 15 inch, 1080p, 16GB RAM tablet and browse the web/amazon with a few people together. 16GB makes is much better browser experience than ipad and most of the android. The con is that it does weight a lot more than regular tablet.
<sent from my X131e>
...or as a HN user said a while back:
:)it seems when people recommends stuff that has many flaws like this, it seems they set the standard pretty low and i find it hard to take the recommendation.
You can buy reasonably cheap laptops with similar specs, either by buying >2 generations back (this T430 was $300), or by buying new models that are made of cheap plastic.
In my experience, all laptops eventually suffer damage, the more durable ones just take longer and tend to be more minor faults each time.
So if you can afford your laptop suddenly failing and switching to another machine (possibly by swapping the drive out, presuming that didn't fail, or restoring from backups/cloud storage), great, you have a robust setup. But many people don't have such a robust configuration, nor do they bring a backup laptop when e.g. traveling.
So for individuals and businesses that have configurations of Highly Replicated Data (where it doesn't matter if you lose an individual laptop), it might be worth it to buy lots of cheap laptops.
For cases where the amount of time/value of data lost to failed laptops is worth far more than the cost difference of the more durable laptops, it's probably worth it to get the ones with the rollcages and carbon fiber-infused chassis and [...].
Full details can be found here:
https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
Been using it for a few months now for development and it's been great.
The T460 has hot-swapable batteries, real memory slots, and standard SATA disks. (but I wish is was a NVMe disk)
I picked a 460 over a 460s because it seems a lot more servicable in the future and I can easily replace worn out batteries.
If you're a single freelance person or consumer, the X1 may be the more appealing choice.
Personal Machine: (Ubuntu/CentOS with 1 or 2 VM running sometimes) For me: AMD Quad Core - A10 7300 , with 8GB DDR3 RAM and 1TB HDD (acer aspire e15) is perfect Linux development machine, it costs less than $500 . Unless you are running 3 or more VM or stuffs like high-end data processing using 16GB RAM for development is worthless.
Work machine: (Windows / Fedora-19 with 3VBox vm running most of the time) We (team of 7 members) received new Lenovo thinkpad in 2012, with 256SSD, 16GB ram, and i7 processor. Within 18months 3 or 4 of my friends faced hardware related-issues (suddenly stopped booting etc). Luckily mine survived until I left the company in 2015.
I am selling my much newer MacBook Pro retina now, as the Thinkpad is so much more functional, the keyboard is amazing the feeling of the machine itself is fantastic.
I am thinking to buy a X260 brand new because I need a newer CPU and better battery life, but for sure I'll only buy Thinkpads or Latitudes (I have one at work, amazing machine) from now on.
The keyboard is a smooth smudgefest with so-so tactile feedback (this particular point will depend on which manufacturer supplied the keyboard that ends up in your unit). The keys and trackpoint leave marks on the display when it is closed. The display bezel leaves marks on the palmrest. This is really poor engineering on basic stuff.
When I pick up the laptop by the lower left corner (hey, it's an ultraportable, why would I ever do that, right?), it immediately crashes with a garbled screen. After looking that up I found out that the HDD/SSD is under the left palmrest, and picking it up there may flex and alter the SATA connection, causing the crash. This seems to affect a random sample of users. So much for Thinkpad's vaunted "sturdy rollcage". But here's the real kicker: when I found this info on Lenovo's own forum, it was for the X230! This defect has been known for 3 generations of X-series Thinkpads, and yet they have never bothered fixing it.
Ever since they decided to move to 16:9 with horrible Low-Fi resolution (for a line of laptops meant to be for serious, professional users), I feel like Lenovo's Thinkpad group have be led with the vision and drive of a Roomba: mostly face-plants, and every actual improvement is to catch up to the competition (notable exception: hot-swapable battery). I only stick to Thinkpads because of the trackpoint and Linux compatibility, I suspect I'm not the only one.
Never had a hardware related issue in ~2 years of use. Well except that one bluescreen a couple months back - that could be hw I guess.
The screen res pisses me off though. :/
This is why I don't recommend something like the X260. You can't buy a premium laptop and "just hope" it will have none of the reported defects. We pay a premium with an expectation for reliability, not for a QA lottery.
Conversely it seems most complaints are for the X2xx and T4xx series, which is why I believe it has to do with manufacturing tolerance: maybe on 15" it's just good enough to not have any significant defect, and they kept the same M.O. for the more compact models, and there problems did pop up.
(The screen resolution has in fact been getting better for the latest two generations, but here again it is only to catch up to the competition. Remember when you could get a 15in Thinkpad with an IPS 2048x1536 display, long before the "retina" buzzword came to life? That was before Lenovo took over.)
In my experience, only Thinkpads and Latitudes have provided me satisfying user experiences.
Except XPS 13 and Macbook Pros, which I tried and I don't like the feeling.
Well its subjective either way. We've got over 300 of the things in the office though, so more inclined to trust that than counting complaints in threads.
I'm sure there are better laptops out there but the x240/260s are far from duds. What they are though is old...office is replacing them with x1 carbons thankfully - with HD screens (finally).
I think something is slowing down your boot, I get faster boot on a 2008 thinkpad running the same OS.
OT: systemd was supposed to improve boot performance but it has actually become much worse. Upstart on a weak chromebook boots in under 2 sec, why shouldn't your current generation thinkpad with a fast SSD match that?
Just fyi: I measure boot time from the time I press the power button. The BIOS logo appears a staggering 8sec or something although the BIOS fast boot is enabled. (Maybe the sync with NSA or something ;))
https://askubuntu.com/questions/10290/how-do-i-improve-boot-...
The initial boot delay is VERY annoying. I wish libreboot was supported on my laptop, then I could ditch lenovos ancient BIOS (and the NSA ping) once and for all:
https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/#supported_laptops_x86intel
For the Linux portion of your boot, try running "systemd-analyze plot > /tmp/boot.svg" and looking at that. (Also note that "kernel" includes any time spent waiting in the initramfs for you to type your disk encryption passphrase.)
My average uptime is about 22 days until I reboot for an update or something.
I used Linux for years, and I understood that in 2008 sleep/resume on notebooks didn't properly work, but now we have 2017 - 9 years later!
I've had Linux on mobile for ages and have yet to have reliable sleep/wake behavior on a dozen machines over the years.
Sleep on Linux works reliably if you run it inside a Mac VM though, FWIW! ;)
I was reporting that.
BTW: OSX has not a "pure" suspend to disc anymore and the default method is suspend to RAM when closing the lid
Which means the user loses data.
Also, old laptops with dieing batteries (or new ones with always-on sensors such as fingerprint readers) have some leakage during sleep so it may be better to turn them off if you are not going to use them for a few days.
edit: resume/suspend in linux works just fine and has done so for many years (in response to eltoozero)
I don't mind boot times in the 20s range (X220/Fedora/cheapo SSD) too much, but I do need to close down/reboot a couple of times a day otherwise no point in encryption.
Given, I'm not a Linux user, but I don't understand this at all.
On Windows, encrypted is encrypted-- the lock screen is exactly as secure as the login screen. Are you saying that in Linux the lock screen is easily-bypassed? So you have to keep your computer logged-out when you're in a place it might get stolen?
Above quote is from the section titled 'How to encrypt your disk in Linux' on the page at
https://theintercept.com/2015/04/27/encrypting-laptop-like-m...
I'm just a bit confused about how Windows can remove keys without messing up file handles &c when suspending to RAM.
The level of security I have now is adequate to my purpose but certainly something for others to take into consideration. Thanks for posting.
Wasn't there a recent story about how Windows is storing keys so that it can wake up in the middle of the night and apply updates? I thought that the conclusion was that locked isn't as secure as logged out.
What _did_ help was to take out the fan, clean it and then oil it carefully (too much oil or doing so without cleaning it first will only make things worse). You can also buy replacement fans, although original fans are quite expensive.
Business require better built laptops than that, they've got money to pay and they want to have decent services and support. As a special characteristics, they also never bother to have a GPU (save money and power but missing for some consumer folks).
Expect to wait at least three weeks for every time you send them an email.
The laptop is OK, though it was dirty when it arrived. It had a bunch of some kind of sticker glue on it.
https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200
One piece of hardware I'm very excited about is LowRISC: they're developing a fully open-source SoC, including open source chips, SoC and firmware.
I think it's the most promising platform for formally verified computing, because it's open and thus possible to model and verify all the way down.
I've been considering building my own and have recently dropped out to start working for myself; I'm thinking, perhaps I could build one for you?
It'd depend on how soon you need it and to what spec, as I'll have to source it from scratch. If you leave some means of contacting you I will, I'm quite interested in building these things for another purpose than "I like having and making these".
Are you planning to do a libre hardware startup or something?
"Secure hardware + software for the masses" is one area I'd really like to work on.
Of course you're right that Lenovo never should have put those on any of their machines, but my impression is that ThinkPads and the consumer line are run by very different groups within Lenovo.
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_n...
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2984889/windows-pcs/len...
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht102023
> As of September 2015: Lenovo systems may include software components that communicate with servers on the internet - All ThinkCentre, All ThinkStation, All ThinkPad
I suspect that if a company really wanted to hide something they probably could. So unless you install windows or another OS on it yourself, you don't know what the manufacturer put on it.
I guess it would not be too hard to find in general if it shows up in the list of processes, but they could make it quite obscure and hard to find.
But yeah, I agree that this is quite an annoying move from Lenovo. The least they could do is make it opt-in instead of on by default.
Yes, but "not sure if it has spyware preinstalled" is much better than "sure it has spyware preinstalled".
I guess I could argue that the former is actually worse. If you know spyware is installed, you can opt to remove it. If you are not aware of the existance of spyware on the system, and it happens to have spyware, you are more vulnerable.
You could of course take the risk and assume that it does not have spyware, and maybe you're right and everything is fine, but you can not _know_ that it is fine.
The rest of your comment disingenuously assumes that a computer can only have one piece of spyware, and if you know what it is you can remove it and now you're safe. What if there's more spyware you don't know about? And if your remover is completely safe, why not just run it on all your computers, safe or not?
Not to mention that removing spyware from a computer turns it into a computer that might or might not have spyware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba-Kongsberg_scandal
On my NUC, when new, I ran debian testing and had to pull in packages from debian experimental for Intel driver support.
So I'd suggest maybe switching to downstream Ubuntu might involve less trauma?
https://01.org/linuxgraphics/downloads/intel-graphics-update...
EDIT: Oh, and swapping out the hard drive isn't super easy any more. It's a matter of watching a Youtube video then everything goes smoothly, rather than look at the bottom of the laptop and everything goes smoothly.
I did buy it used so it could have just been a problem inherited from its previous owners. It worked well for the short time it did work.
I got another one when I switched teams at work, but the last guy had taken it with him on a boat and it got wet. The touchpad didn't work and the lower left screen was discoloured. I didn't use it very much.
For battery life (and maybe fan noise?), have you installed "laptop-mode" or its successor "tlp" (the laptop project)? Both will tune the system automatically for AC or battery power, and it does make a huge difference for battery life. If you don't use either, you should really try them: the 5 mn installation time will be a good investment ;)
Main issue on my side: I bought it just after it was announced, and Linux support was so-so (functional, but annoying glitches and stability problems). Next time, I'll wait for the new models to be out and will buy the last gen one on the cheap --- there's so little changes anyway nowadays. But now all this is gone, and Linux support is top notch.
Quality ok but not as good as I had imagined: there's now a bit of flex in one corner. Not a problem in practice, I just expected more sturdiness from a TP.
Basically, everything works, I can get like 80% of the customization I had on Arch, haven't had any BS for the few months I've used it (besides newest Spotify version crashing with Wayland, but a downgrade solved that). It's pretty nice.
Coreboot support too if that's your kind of thing.
Stay away from the tablet x201, forget that noise.
Edit: And no, they really don't support more. The memory controller only supports 2 Gb chips, so with two ranks per channel you only get 2x 4 GB. (Intel i7-600, i5-500 series processor datasheet, section 2.1.1).
I believe there were other chips at the time that supported more than 8 GB (i7-9xxM perhaps), but these are a different die (Clarksdale quad cores, ie. high end mobile chips that are selected desktop chips).
If you'd excuse me now, I believe my work here is done ;)
... and at something like 1.3-1.5 kg they aren't really heavier than more modern laptops anyway, just thicker.
All of Lenovo's offerings seem overpriced as with the industry as a whole.
3. Same resolution but smaller monitor and smaller overall size makes for easier traveling imo.
7. I have the exact same issue with hitting the touch pad when typing, but I've learned to go slower and avoid it.
8. I first ordered the x230 by accident with the larger battery and was amazed at the working time of 12-15 hours but it was also quite bulky. So I re-ordered with my missing keyboard backlight and with the slimmer battery and I'm quite happy with the slimmer form-factor while still having a good 6 hours of work time.
11. It's clearly not a media machine, it even lacks shortcut keys for pause/play media.