I have a very old Thinkpad X40 convertible which I use occasionally as pretty much a dumb terminal. It runs the latest i386 version of xubuntu. CPU is a single core Pentium M something, 1.5GB of RAM, 40GB hard drive.
It works totally fine for SSH sessions and a web browser interface to not-very-complicated intranet tools accessed via a VPN, such as ticketing system, network monitoring software, etc.
If I want to leave a monitoring display of something running, I fullscreen it in a browser, rotate the thing into its tablet mode and prop it up against something on my desk.
Probably a lot faster, in terms of cpu and ability to render resource intensive webpages inside firefox v65. But this was also $40 four years ago.
Having a normal xubuntu environment does give an advantage of being able to install a much wider variety of software compared to the chromebook OS, unless we're talking about replacing the chromebook OS with debian + xorg + your choice of desktop environment.
My Samsung Chromebook 3 is a pretty poor performer, but I love the matte screen and battery life. I use Termux all day long with Typescript background-compiling.
I bought an x41t to use for school a long time ago. It was an ebay special, $100. The slow HDD was a pain in the ass since it didn't use standard 2.5" drives so I couldn't easily swap in a SSD. I had an issue with it where the Wacom touchscreen would have weird interference issues when in Linux but not in Windows. The solution ended up being taking about the display and taping a couple layers of tinfoil to the back of the panel. This oversized doorstop chugged along a few more semesters until I bought an x200t for $100 on ebay to replace it since some mandatory software I needed for school stopped supporting 32-bit CPUs.
In fall of 2016 (the start of my senior year of university), I bought a Thinkpad X40 for $40. After putting a 32GB CompactFlash card in, installing Debian, and increasing the RAM to 1GB, I started using it as my primary computer. (I didn't have to do that, I had a perfectly-good Thinkpad T430, but I wanted to give the X40 a good try.)
(For the record, my X40 had an ultra-low voltage Pentium M Dothan running at 1.1 GHz.)
It worked great for me, and did everything I needed or wanted it to do. I actually didn't use my T430 at all that school year, because the X40 worked fine for everything I was doing.
Unsurprisingly, it was fine for doing assignments in Python and C. It wasn't perfect with DrRacket -- I had to close and reopen every half hour as memory usage increased -- but it worked, and then I realized I could just use `gracket` or `racket`. I did a bunch of PDF/image editing in GIMP to clean up the lousy scans one of my professors gave us every week to read from. I wrote papers and presentations in LibreOffice. I killed time on reddit. I taught myself how to do CAD in SolveSpace. Most impressively, I ran CompuCell (a voxel-based biochemsitry simulator) in a windows virtual machine, fully interactively and only slightly slower than my classmates' computers.
I loved that computer. The battery would easily through one 90-minute class, and I could stretch it through two if I knew I wouldn't have an outlet. The keyboard was perfectly sized for me, and very comfy to type on. The trackpoint worked and felt great. (People didn't ask to borrow the laptop, since it din't have a trackpad.) The display fitted a satisfactory amount of stuff on it. It had real USB ports on it, just as people started having laptops without any USB-A ports at all. Using a laptop that was just able to do everything I needed it to do, I felt a lot more like I was working with the laptop, rather than just on it. (Perhaps this is a similar feeling to what people get when driving Maxda Miatas or BMW M3s -- working with the machine to get the most out of it.) And, in my eyes, it looked great -- a platonic ideal of a laptop.
Unfortunately, the X40 has a fatal flaw -- the southbridge tends to die. When that happened, I spent another $30 on a new motherboard. That also died, right around the end of the school year, in late spring of 2017. I decided I didn't want to to through that again, and I gave away the husk of my favorite computer ever -- my own "oldest viable laptop".
/tpg/ on /g/ is probably my favorite aspect of 4chan besides /prog/
Thinkpads are wonderful machines with lots of upgrade options. A T61 with an SSD and ram upgrade is quite usable for most everything except high quality video playback .Performance on win10 is ram dependent but with i3 and debian installed ram usage at idle is so so so low (sub gig)
I watch a lot of video so streaming + local 1080p+ (or even 4K) playback is a must for me at high bitrates. What's the oldest Thinkpad device that can handle that I wonder?
I would link to /tpg/ but i cannot currently. if you ctrl f /g/'s catalog for '/tpg/' there should be a link to a wiki that gives a great rundown of every model.
If you have a complete aversion to 4chan, any model that has a 1080p screen would be a good quantifier, I am not sure how many pre IBM sale thinkpads exist with that requirement though. The W series tends to have the best graphics processors as well. The T series being their general line and the X being their portable smaller laptops.
I wish my T420 wasn't in such bad shape. It works... mostly. But the physical case is beat to all hell because it came through college with me, spent every day in a bag, survived a few high falls to concrete. It'd still be a viable machine if I put in a new battery, SSD, and found a few replacement keys.
I have a trackpoint on my HP EliteBook G7, but they didn't include a middle button. So there's no way to scroll without using the scrollbar. I have to wonder if there's a patent reason or something because it seems like such a huge oversight.
The Dells at my work have a terrible Trackpoint with middle-button scroll, but it sucks badly. You have to hit the middle button, then scroll, or perhaps the other way around. Ultra-frustrating, and probably bad firmware or driver design. I'm sure the Trackpoint is a third-class citizen for Dell.
I used to love it, back when Thinkpads still had real buttons to go with it. Then they replaced them with trackpad clicking, which makes using it a pain, because it'd usually register movements besides the click, completely defeating the best feature of the TrackPoint, it's pixel-perfect precision. It was never as quick to use as a mouse, of course, but I could always position the cursor exactly where I wanted before clicking.
The second or third gen X1Carbon used a clickpad. And an LCD bar for the F1-F12 keys. The two design decisions were reversed in the next iteration of the laptop.
Alas, the L series thinkpads have the trackpoint but rely on the trackpad for clicking. Nice fast machines that have good battery life (e.g L440) but...
Ah yes, the "randomly click on the screen while typing G or H" device. I always pulled that off mine. Didn't love that tapping it produced a mouseclick.
At the time X61s was notably smaller and more expensive than its competitors and other models in the Thinkpad lineup. The "normal-sized" model T61 has both touchpad and Trackpoint, so leaving touchpad out may have something to do with the case dimensions. Maybe there were no space left for it or it would have been awkwardly positioned when using keyboard or Trackpoint, and on a more "special" model leaving it out has been a valid option. After all, T61 was available for customers absolutely requiring the touchpad.
Probably an over-summary but basically correct: the X series optimised portability and only had a trackpoint, while the T series optimised fully-featuredness and had both trackpoint and trackpad.
I still fire up my T61 from time to time -- it's the only computer in the house that still has a DVD drive.
I've used (and owned, although I bought it when it was well past obsolete) laptops without any pointing devices. Early on, trackballs were common. I personally think the ergonomics of the keyboard at the edge of the computer with a trackball hanging off the side are way better than the huge reach we have to make over a modern trackpad (or even the sizable reach on the ThinkPads in this thread). But I don't have the patience to build a frankenlaptop with an older shell and something reasonably modern inside.
My x200 doesn't have a trackpad but the next model came with one. The space available for a trackpad is not much so I'm guessing they ditched the trackpad so that they didn't have to sacrifice keyboard real estate.
The keyboard on an x200 is one of the nicest I've ever used for a laptop of that size (12.1" display). It covers as much horizontal space as possible so you get keys that not only have a proper amount of area to not hit two keys at once but have a proper aspect ratio.
The laptop comes with a trackpoint instead which after dailying that x200 for most of my school career, I've come to love and use it on any laptop I come across.
> I don't think I've ever seen a laptop without one, and I used laptops back in the early/mid 90's.
Were you using PowerBooks? Touchpads were unusual in laptops until about 2000, when things started going downhill. All of the 1990s laptops I used that I can remember (IBM, Toshiba, Compaq) had superior pointing devices: trackpoint or trackballs.
2011 Lenovo Thinkpad X220 daily user here. Really nice machine really for my needs, running the latest Debian smoothly.
I do have a spare ready to take over if needed. Old hardware could always die very suddenly. It's a frugal solution, both cheaper and more ecological than buying new.
Tell me about it. I still rock my old cracked x220. Most new alternatives (that I'm willing to pay for) would give a much worse keyboard, in exchange for an only slightly better screen.
People say this, but it honestly doesn't bother me in a laptop. Longer and thinner is easier to carry in a backpack and if I'm actually working it'll be docked and with external monitors, one of which is rotated to 9:16.
> 16:9 for a work machine is a bad choice, and the resolution is horrible.
I found a way to turn 16:9 into an advantage: if you go for 70-character columns, you can get a 3-column display in a tiling WM or Emacs if your resolution is 1280 or more pixels horizontally (there are 5-pixel wide fonts out there, but none of them are very legible).
My X220 does the exact same thing. Usually pretty fine though, but definitely noticeable, multiple times a week. I keep my display timeout pretty low and have a blank screen for the lock screen (slock, i3lock, swaylock).
T420s, same generation; I have 3 of them now, SSD + 16GB RAM + secondary large HDD: find it hard to get that combo/performance in a modern laptop, let alone the keyboard quality:)
It's not particularly hard. Just get a T480. Mine has 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD with a 1440p screen.
(I was sure I'd have complaints about the keyboard until I spent a solid month on one and then I raised that the old style keyboard just hurts my hands. It's a little less proof against spills, though the computer underneath is still fine about them.)
Sorry - when I said 'combo', one of the things I cannot easily replicate in modern laptops is small SSD + large HDD.
The other part is keyboard - I absolutely believe that if I used a T480 for a couple of weeks I could get used to them... as long as they were the ONLY thing I ever used. But that's not my use case. I have client laptop, and a lot of regular keyboards for my desktop and laptops. They all have the standard home row (Insert/Home/PgUp, Del/End/PgDwn). It's not that laptops have changed this pattern - it's that each manufacturer and even model changes it _differently_ (and seemingly needlessly), which makes it hard to have a consistent muscle memory for these keys:<
The T480 supports two drives by putting one in the 2242 NVMe slot (where the WLAN card goes if you have one; I just use my phone as a VPN+hotspot). You do need to find an NVMe m.2 2242 drive, but they're fairly easily found today. My personal T480 (I mentioned my work-provided one earlier) is outfitted as such: 1TB NVMe SSD in the 2.5" bay (Lenovo OEM adapter; if you buy the laptop with an HDD instead it comes with a SATA port there), 512GB m.2 2242 SATA SSD. You could put in a 2.5" HDD instead, though given how cheap SSDs are now I think it's probably unnecessary for most use cases.
As for keyboards--that's why I brought my machine to clients when I was a consultant, and specify the same laptop at my new job. ;)
Up until last month I used a MBP from early 2011 daily. I did get (over time) 16 GB ram, an SSD, new battery, GPU replace (by Apple for free due to an issue) and a new charger. Lost month it really died though, no idea what it is (not the ssd, not the ram).
I'm still rocking a 2008 Lenovo X200. It's just fine for home use but it's pretty hot, slow (the blame is split between the slow CPU and the slow HDD) and noisy. Also at this age the battery is mostly good for power spikes and the screen is in permanent "night shift mode" (backlight is yellowish). Still chugs along.
TPFC has been my best friend since the T41 (my all-time favorite TP). The noise is also a side effect of replacing the failing original fan with an aftermarket part a few years ago.
I didn't replace the HDD because the longer load times aren't really an issue. It's the parts that require some processing power that are a bummer. And this is also where the noisy part comes in, given that it's in high load for longer stretches. I prioritized lower temps over lower noise, this may have helped with the longevity.
I might throw in an SSD just to show the little workhorse some love.
Apple's replacement program for the 2011 MBPs with bad GPUs just swapped in another motherboard with the exact same faulty GPU. All the 15" 2011s eventually die of the same problem. The clock is ticking on mine.
Yup, I had an official replacement about 5 years in, then a few years after that the replacement died and I paid for another replacement (long story).
Now I'm just waiting for this newest one to kick the bucket. There are already some stability issues. Once it goes, I'm going to try fixing the thermal paste myself (https://www.ifixit.com/Story/20939/MBP_2011_GPU_Nightmare). I have all the parts and tools in my desk drawer ready to go for when it's game time.
I don't really know what I'll do if that doesn't work. I've considered getting a refurbished 2015 MBP.
Same. I love it. The things I replaced in the 8 years I've had this machine: Stock HDD -> Samsung 840 SSD, Keyboard (failed within 3yr warranty, they shipped me a new one overnight), and the trackpoint cover. Oh, and the OS, from Windows 7 Pro to XUbuntu. I would love a higher density display but that's about it.
I am thinking of finally upgrading to an X280 or an X1 but I am afraid the keyboard will be too much of a downgrade.
I bought the X1 Carbon Extreme. The classic 7 row keyboard layout is great, but the latest keyboard isn't as bad as I thought. The keys are fine, and I adapted to the layout: delete/home/end are independent from the f keys and easy to reach, page up/down are better than the old previous/next page keys in the classic layout.
I'm not a fan of the X280 due to some compromises in the form factor; the keyboard feels a little cramped, the screen is pretty low-res. I swapped mine for a T480 and it's been great.
If you were to use it primarily docked and with a Thunderbolt dock, though, I could see it being pretty awesome.
T420 here for the nostalgia. Apart from the ssd and ram upgrades, the FHD IPS upgrade made it an excellent cheaper alternative to the thinkpad 25th anniversary edition. My only problem with it is the battery, I bought a new one but it only lasts for about 2-3 hours.
If anyone here is planning to do the FHD upgrade, be very careful with power, you need to remove the battery/power cable and press the power button a couple of times to discharge all capacitors etc, otherwise you will blow a microscopic fuse (I did!) and it's near impossible to replace it. I just soldered a bridge between the contacts! I just can't do anything wrong again or I'll fry something.
T420 daily here too. I love it's keyboard. Not sure what I'm going to do in the future when I'm forced to upgrade. I hear you can install a classic keyboard on newer gen Lenovo laptops, but I'd really prefer a solution that didn't require mods.
T500 owner here with (what at the time was quite expensive) on-board plus discrete graphic cards and 1600x1050 screen. After replacing the drive with SSD and upgrading to 6GB, it's working as good as when I bought it in 2009, even with Win10Pro on it.
I wish the multiple replacement batteries I got for it over the years were as performant ;o)
Huh, odd. Even my old, quite run-down battery (9-cell) gets me 5-6 hours. Back when it was brand new, it got me anywhere between 7-10 hours. This is on Linux. Maybe it's the display, since I still only have the old 1600x panel.
> Maybe it's the display, since I still only have the old 1600x panel.
It is most likely due to poor quality batteries. The "cells" in a 9-cell battery are 18650 batteries, which vary in capacity from 3400mAh at the high end, to counterfeit ones that are labelled to have 1200mAh capacity, but in reality have only a fraction of that. Lithium-ion batteries also have a limited shelf life, so even good quality aftermarket batteries will have a fraction of the rated capacity if they have been sitting in a warehouse for years.
I managed to do this on a 2016 HP laptop, replacing the screen assembly. The laptop base worked great, plugged into a TV via HDMI, but a few days later, after the replacement top half had arrived, plugging it in and there was a pop sound... and a dead laptop.
Battery had been disconnected, also the CMOS battery. I usually remember to hold down the power button for a few seconds. Dang.
Didn't chase this further, as I am clumsy with board-level repairs, and my friend didn't want to throw more money at the project.
Bridging the solder points of the blown micro fuse is a very easy job even if you're clumsy with such jobs (trust me, I'm pretty much a klutz).
It'll be a shame if you just leave the otherwise working laptop dead.
I replaced the terrible 1366x768 panel in my ThinkPad E530 with a FHD panel from a W530. Easy swap and it all "just worked". So even in the Lenovo era they're very easy machines to work on.
Edit to add: Obviously this is an i5 laptop from 2012, much newer than some of the other machines in this thread. Although it's not my daily driver anymore I do still use it for music production.
I like this approach. Sudden demise of older hardware is the always saddening when it occurs. The thing is, if you went old enough to be able to afford spares with the money you saved versus buying new, it is still the better and more frugal solution.
Yep and great battery life and the battery is swappable. So I carry a spare 9 cell which, using ubuntu/i3wm, gives me close to 30 hours.
About dying suddenly; that goes, in my experience, far more for new hardware. Old hardware (especially if we are talking ‘ancient’ hardware like before 1995) has a lot more signs of giving up and a lot easier ways of fixing it when it does. I have machines that dies that first started smoking so you could pinpoint what component gave out. The x220 is not quite that old but because I have a stack of spares but one favorite, I have been able to fix it after it suddenly died quite easily without just replacing the entire thing. That will not happen when your 2018 mbp suddenly dies.
x86-32 bit though, which is getting dropped more and more lately...
I had that very machine with 1 GB RAM (though with a SSD, its SATA1 (!!)). Couldn't run GNOME 3 on it, but more lightweight stuff like XFce ran great.
It also can't do VMs well since it lacks the hardware extensions, and it can't do Docker either.
The only good about it was the rfkill, the chasis, the ThinkPoint, the detachable battery, the price, the keyboard, and Coreboot.
It has more USB ports than my current MBP which also lacks rfkill and doesn't have a detachable battery though the trackpad is the best (2015 version).
They came in both flavors depending on rev level -- mine is a 64-bit / Core2 Duo version (can't see exactly which CPU at the moment 'cause it's at home) -- it's currently running CentOS 7.6 x86_64 like a champ with no compatibility limitations in re : modern software
Total agree with regard to hardware design / ergo superiority over the MBP -- that's exactly why I made the switch
I also am still using a Thinkpad X220 from the same era and have had zero problems with it. I did replace the HDD with an SSD at one point just from a performance aspect. I am starting to use a 3rd gen X1 Carbon but still really enjoy the X220. I still have an X61s I occasionally use as well. The X61s also has an SSD now and upgraded RAM and it will handle most tasks I throw at it. Unfortunately the battery doesn't last these days. Interesting how many Thinkpads are listed here...
I have a stack of X220s and parts which should last me the rest of my career, or at least until someone makes another laptop with an actual keyboard and a non crippled CPU.
Main thing that worries me is the bios, but coreboot seems to work.
It's funny the one I bought new direct from Lenovo in 2011 is still fine, but I was able to upgrade doubling the core count and getting USB3 by assembling out of I7 parts.
Same here, 2010 x220. I've been wanting to upgrade really bad, but all the equivalent still can only take 16 GB, so I'd gain some battery life and some CPU oompf which has never been an issue, but would still have the same memory limit.
Sure the x220 has a good keyboard compared to its replacements but the other thing it has is superior mechanical design: you NEVER have to prye apart plastic pieces. Want to change me more? It's one screw away. HD? One screw. Keyboard? 3 screws. Battery? Push 2 tabs, pull the battery pack.
Sure it's a bit thicker, but I don't understand when that's an issue ever, at least I can use it on trains, cars and even airplanes as long as they don't have those space-invader-reclining-seats.
Every new laptop I look at is just worse design, less upgradable (note: I only look at laptops with track points, the other ones are useless to me). What happened? Why have laptops gotten worse?
Lets see...my x201 still works, my t520 still works (gorgeous screen), t420 still works, my t60 works, my t40 still works, my t23s still works, my very first, a t600[1], _might_ still work.
I use a 2012 Dell XPS 15 daily. I got it as a warranty replacement when my XPS 14 broke. I've given it an SSD and swapped a new battery once. Otherwise it does everything I ask of it except having more than 2 hours of battery life. I've wanted to buy something lighter (the XPS is 5+ pounds) for years but I can't justify it when the 7 year old laptop still works fine.
Still running a Thinkpad x230t here. Outside the screen resolution while not docked, it has been great! It even survived a hard tumble down a flight of stairs 3 yrs ago; the only damage was a small gap along the seam of the external battery.
I have my ~2008 T61 as my pfsense router now. I was using it until about 2-3 years ago, but I felt it was barely usable anymore. I think anything with a Core 2 duo is past its useful life. Anything just slightly newer with Nehalem? I think would still be usable today.
I have a Core 2 Duo machine running Elementary I break out once a month or so since it has some cool synth software on it. It's totally usable for me, and that's with a pretty bloated OS compared to alternatives.
Sure, for specific applications, almost any computer could still have a useful purpose (hence me reusing my T61 for a router) but we are talking about a daily driver here. In my case, browsing the web became noticeably slower, especially watching videos. I began to suspect my CPU/Intel GPU lacked native support for decoding some newer video formats, but I don't know for sure. This is where its age really began to show though.
> synth software
I use a 2008 MBP 17" because I have legacy versions of music production software that costs a lot, that I can no longer upgrade. It runs great, but it has an occasional memory buffer overload when trying to record and playback too many tracks at once.
At work we get new corporate PCs every few years and I've rejected the offer twice now because the build quality of my Elitebook 8560w is better than the modern alternatives. I put in an SSD and lots of RAM so now I don't want to deal with the hassle of a new one.
> Either laptop improvements are well into diminishing returns, or progress in hardware has stagnated, or both.
Sort of. The part about diminishing returns is arguably true, but hardware didn't stagnated.
What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s.
When a Microsoft OS requires _less_ resources than it's predecessors (like early Win7 compared to early Vista), you know upgrade cycles will be much longer than before.
Unless you're handling high definition video or playing AAA games, of course. But for any other "mundane" task, the only reason to upgrade from a 5 or 6 years old machine would be an un-repairable hardware malfunction.
> What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s.
Is that true though?
Windows might have gotten more efficient but I think overall most software has gotten worse from a performance perspective. With the prevalence of Electron everywhere, performance doesn't even seem to be a priority anymore. And "native" apps using WPF, etc. aren't as optimized as old school WinForms, MFC style apps (though there are other benefits to be had).
My first desktop was a Compaq Presario CDS 520, in 1994. It was a 486/66, and came with 4 MB of RAM and a 450MB HDD. I want to say my parents paid $2,400 for it, but would have to double check to be sure.
A dozen years later would be 2006 - if memory serves, a decent laptop in those days would have run you about $1,200-1,500, and would have come with a Core 2 Duo @ ~1.2Ghz, 2GB of RAM, and a ~40GB HDD.
I SSH into VMs and write email all day. I could get by with a text web browser at a slight loss of productivity during the steep part of the learning curve.
I could do my job on a laptop from the 90s if I really wanted to. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
> If you haven't touched an NMB Thinkpad keyboard, you haven't actually used a proper Thinkpad.
All these years as a Thinkpad user, and I had no idea of NMB vs ALPS vs Chicony. I thought the variation in the keyboard feel in the machines I own and have used was due to wear alone. Thank you for opening up an entirely new horizon of Thinkpad snobbery.
Last year during Christmas I visited my mother for a day and she still uses my MacBook Pro from early 2008. It doesn't hold much of a charge anymore (it's on it's 2nd replacement battery) but it works delightfully for web browsing, terminal use and I'm sure that I could do most of my daily SRE work on it.
Up until last year i was rocking a 2007 black MacBook. It did fine for occasional browsing and terminal work. It would’ve rocked even longer if the JS heavy web wouldn’t cripple the web browsers. Also Google stopped supporting Chrome for it. Now it lives as a terminal running Arch Linux.
Beautiful hardware. No issues other than chipped palm rest which Apple replaced out of warranty.
Ah, well you need TWO old laptops. When I go babysitting and know that they aren't going to come back when they said they would then the second laptop in my bag comes in handy. Of course I could take the power adaptor instead but a second laptop weighs about the same.
Sometimes a bit of time spent with no mains supply makes you value electricity that bit more and how big your carbon footprint really is. You can also decide to dim the screen a bit and do some real work as playing some rubbish video will bring that power meter into the red way before the parents come back.
Also it is a good way of finding out how long the battery actually lasts. One imagines there will be four hours or more but then that isn't necessarily so, particularly if running Ubuntu with the bottom of the machine so nice and toasty.
Middle management at my $FORTUNE_500 was the opposite, and I'd been using a 10 year old laptop for development with the exception of an SSD upgrade a wonderful IT dude gifted me when he saw that the mandatory malware scanner was eating 100% of the drive bandwidth almost all the time. So if your workplace is good to you with new systems be thankful. I didn't get mine until IT was outsourced and the outsourced guys couldn't figure out how to buy the right SODIMMs for my ancient lappy to get it to 16gb.
Feel free to ignore if you don't want to answer, but why do you put up with this? Why not go to another company that isn't so ridiculously stingy with hardware?
Yeah, you're basically causing more problems than you're solving if you're stingy with hardware to that degree. My company is smart about it, IMO - cheapest new MBP 13 variant (no touchbar from 2017), but maxes out SSD and RAM. It's light, thin, and has great battery life for office work and plugs into a provided thunderbolt dock at a desk.
For the price of the 2017, 13 inch, non-touchbar with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD you can get the base model 15 inch, with 3x as many cores and DDR4, not LPDDR3 ram. Doesn't really make sense.
I'm not the parent, but I think it's hard to tell what a company's hardware/software policies are. I'm at my second job out of undergrad and both have bait-and-switched me by promising that I'd get to use Linux but having a Windows spinning rust machine waiting for me. I've had to fight just to bring in my own ergonomic mouse. Some companies really care more about controlling you than productivity.
Same here. I got a E5510 when I started University and upgraded it with an SSD and a new battery a few years ago. I really like all the connectors (RS232, VGA, separate microphone and headphone jack, full-sized Ethernet port), and dread the day I have to replace it.
As I mentioned in a previous thread [0], I upgraded an old X61 with a custom mainboard produced by a group of enthusiasts in China 1.5 years ago and never looked back.
Damn the bezel around the keyboard is so sexy on that machine. That's exactly what I would want but no one sells something like that off the shelf with a warranty. I still rock my X230 but the display is garbage.
Multiboot Debian ISO FTW, there. (And rEFInd 32-bit as a bootloader for the installed system.) This trick also helps deal with crappy low-end hardware that is 64-bit capable but ships with 32-bit UEFI and Win 8/10 installs. (They do this, or at least used to, because Win 8/10 in UEFI mode is restricted to running the same architecture that the UEFI is. A 32-bit UEFI only runs 32-bit Windows, and 64-bit UEFI only runs 64-bit Windows. Of course, Linux is not so restricted - and it certainly can boot from 32-bit UEFI and then switch cleanly to 64-bit operation!)
Heh, there are quite a few people on /r/thinkpad who thinks "something about this machine that causes me to favor it" -- aye, there is, quite a lot in fact. And yes, even the X61 is usable today and the Sandy Bridge based X220/T420/T420s being the last factory machines with the classic keyboard have something of a cult following. As I mentioned many a times before here, from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC have only grown 20% and while power efficiency has grown significantly it's been negated by switching to 15W CPUs instead of 35W so it's no wonder the performance is vaguely similar. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2520M-vs... Edit: and as a comment below notes, since ThinkPads are typically bought in fleets, any ThinkPad older than three years is typically very cheap on eBay. Buying cheap old ThinkPads instead of similarly priced new laptops at retail outlets is one of those "lifehacks" I suppose. Their ease of maintenance and parts availability combined with the stalled CPU speed growth makes this a very viable strategy.
The best ThinkPad of course is the 25th Anniversary Edition having 2017 hardware with the classic keyboard. That's what I am typing on right now. The next best is a hackfest: take a T430s with an i7 iGPU, for some demented reason Lenovo put a Thunderbolt 1 controller in those (also the S430 and then the next ThinkPad with Thunderbolt is the P50 w/ TB3 four years later). Now comes the hacking: add the classic keyboard and also the high quality full HD screen from the T440s using a Chinese converter kit -- the 30 series used LVDS, the panel uses eDP so you need a converter. I have a T420s with that hack. Thunderbolt 1 is obviously slower than Thunderbolt 3 but still, any TB3 eGPU enclosure will work. As the T430s can have two 2.5" SSDs and an mSATA SSD, you can add quite an amount of solid storage to this -- much more than the TP25, the TP25 maxes out at 2.5TB currently, while the T430s can do 9TB. The NVMe disks are of course faster in the TP25 (even though one is x2 the other is x1) but the feeling in everyday tasks is not going to be vastly different -- the big jump is in HDD to SSD. You are also limited to 16GB RAM vs the 32GB RAM in the TP25. And the CPUs are even closer: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-3520M-vs... Your battery life won't be awesome, alas.
Good point on power dissipation and efficiency-- a T480 might not be substantially faster than a T430, but it's half the size and the battery lasts longer.
They're much faster. 50-60% on the single core stuff and 300% faster on multi-core tests.
Not to mention they cruise along on things that use the newer extensions for things like video playback, plus the integrated graphics hardware is much much faster
> They're much faster. 50-60% on the single core stuff and 300% faster on multi-core tests.
[citation needed] 50-60% is absurdly large for single core, the reality is 20%, and 300% is crazy. The T480 uses a 15W quad core on the same 14nm process as the 15W chip in the T470 and because it's slightly more power efficient there's a little gain, about 25-30%. So the difference between the Sandy Bridge T420 to Kaby Lake Refresh T480 is perhaps 50% in multi core.
I'm just going on Cinebench scores I've done on my own machines.
T480S i5 141
T460S i5 105
X220 i5 100
Not much of a jump in the 4 generations from the X220 to the T460S but quite a jump going to the T480S.
Double the score of the X220 and quadruple the score of the T480 and you're going to end up about 575 to 205 for multicore, which is almost 3X as fast.
This doesn't even bring GPU or SSD performance into the picture. Just raw CPU.
I love my X220 but Windows 10 will regularly bring it to it's knees, even with an SSD and 8GB of RAM. And that's not even doing anything, I'm not sure if it's updating or what. Not to mention it's not exactly a thin machine, the 1366x768 screen is mediocre...The 1080/2K IPS screens coming to the Thinkpad line finally made them usable, IMO. Even the old IPS screens in the X220 tablets were still dim, low-resolution, etc.
I've got an X220 and it's fast enough for everything but gaming (which is to say I can run UDK and Godot on it, but the HDD is too small to justify installing any AAA titles), and rugged/cheap enough that I don't feel too bad putting it through the wringer. Old fleet machine, picked it up refurbished.
I see making computer work as long as possible an environmental cause. It took awhile, but I got my company to switch from a ridiculous 2 year cycle to a 6 year and in some cases longer cycle.. At first the higher ups were very skeptical about it. It took a lot of convincing, but we got approval to try it and everyone is still as productive as ever.
Mind you, when I purchase, I try to "future proof" them as best we can. The last batch we bought for our general office users, where i5's with 16GB ram and a 512GB SSD. For our devs, I generally set them up with a super-fast ultra-portable(think mac air or dell xps13) as most of their heavy lifting is off-loaded to our private cloud. And so far everyone report very high satisfaction with the setups provided.
It's wondrous to me how viable an old laptop can be. My daily driver is a "Ship of Theseus" Dell D630 from 2008 and it's perfectly usable for the sysadmin work I do. The lack of USB 3.0 is maddening, but that aside it's fine for my day-to-day document prep and admin, scripting, mail, and web browsing. Installing an SSD added years to the machine's life. I'm on my third keyboard and second lid (hinge failure) but both of those are, arguably, wear items. >smile<
(I've had a brand new Latitude sitting unused for over a year now. I just can't get excited about getting used to a new keyboard or rebuilding my entire software environment on a new machine.)
294 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadIf your primary use is typing (coding), you'll probably prefer the machine that's better to type on.
https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X40
It works totally fine for SSH sessions and a web browser interface to not-very-complicated intranet tools accessed via a VPN, such as ticketing system, network monitoring software, etc.
If I want to leave a monitoring display of something running, I fullscreen it in a browser, rotate the thing into its tablet mode and prop it up against something on my desk.
$150 is in the territory of "Drive to store and buy in an emergency".
Having a normal xubuntu environment does give an advantage of being able to install a much wider variety of software compared to the chromebook OS, unless we're talking about replacing the chromebook OS with debian + xorg + your choice of desktop environment.
I wouldn't run Xcode on a non-SSD MBP, though.
(For the record, my X40 had an ultra-low voltage Pentium M Dothan running at 1.1 GHz.)
It worked great for me, and did everything I needed or wanted it to do. I actually didn't use my T430 at all that school year, because the X40 worked fine for everything I was doing.
Unsurprisingly, it was fine for doing assignments in Python and C. It wasn't perfect with DrRacket -- I had to close and reopen every half hour as memory usage increased -- but it worked, and then I realized I could just use `gracket` or `racket`. I did a bunch of PDF/image editing in GIMP to clean up the lousy scans one of my professors gave us every week to read from. I wrote papers and presentations in LibreOffice. I killed time on reddit. I taught myself how to do CAD in SolveSpace. Most impressively, I ran CompuCell (a voxel-based biochemsitry simulator) in a windows virtual machine, fully interactively and only slightly slower than my classmates' computers.
I loved that computer. The battery would easily through one 90-minute class, and I could stretch it through two if I knew I wouldn't have an outlet. The keyboard was perfectly sized for me, and very comfy to type on. The trackpoint worked and felt great. (People didn't ask to borrow the laptop, since it din't have a trackpad.) The display fitted a satisfactory amount of stuff on it. It had real USB ports on it, just as people started having laptops without any USB-A ports at all. Using a laptop that was just able to do everything I needed it to do, I felt a lot more like I was working with the laptop, rather than just on it. (Perhaps this is a similar feeling to what people get when driving Maxda Miatas or BMW M3s -- working with the machine to get the most out of it.) And, in my eyes, it looked great -- a platonic ideal of a laptop.
Unfortunately, the X40 has a fatal flaw -- the southbridge tends to die. When that happened, I spent another $30 on a new motherboard. That also died, right around the end of the school year, in late spring of 2017. I decided I didn't want to to through that again, and I gave away the husk of my favorite computer ever -- my own "oldest viable laptop".
Thinkpads are wonderful machines with lots of upgrade options. A T61 with an SSD and ram upgrade is quite usable for most everything except high quality video playback .Performance on win10 is ram dependent but with i3 and debian installed ram usage at idle is so so so low (sub gig)
If you have a complete aversion to 4chan, any model that has a 1080p screen would be a good quantifier, I am not sure how many pre IBM sale thinkpads exist with that requirement though. The W series tends to have the best graphics processors as well. The T series being their general line and the X being their portable smaller laptops.
The ThinkPad is my favorite all-time laptop design. No surprise to me that the author is still using it after getting his MacBook back from the shop.
I still fire up my T61 from time to time -- it's the only computer in the house that still has a DVD drive.
The keyboard on an x200 is one of the nicest I've ever used for a laptop of that size (12.1" display). It covers as much horizontal space as possible so you get keys that not only have a proper amount of area to not hit two keys at once but have a proper aspect ratio.
The laptop comes with a trackpoint instead which after dailying that x200 for most of my school career, I've come to love and use it on any laptop I come across.
I always found the trackball more usable than the touchpad ...
Were you using PowerBooks? Touchpads were unusual in laptops until about 2000, when things started going downhill. All of the 1990s laptops I used that I can remember (IBM, Toshiba, Compaq) had superior pointing devices: trackpoint or trackballs.
I do have a spare ready to take over if needed. Old hardware could always die very suddenly. It's a frugal solution, both cheaper and more ecological than buying new.
I found a way to turn 16:9 into an advantage: if you go for 70-character columns, you can get a 3-column display in a tiling WM or Emacs if your resolution is 1280 or more pixels horizontally (there are 5-pixel wide fonts out there, but none of them are very legible).
https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/6wnmqd/x220x230_f...
(I was sure I'd have complaints about the keyboard until I spent a solid month on one and then I raised that the old style keyboard just hurts my hands. It's a little less proof against spills, though the computer underneath is still fine about them.)
The other part is keyboard - I absolutely believe that if I used a T480 for a couple of weeks I could get used to them... as long as they were the ONLY thing I ever used. But that's not my use case. I have client laptop, and a lot of regular keyboards for my desktop and laptops. They all have the standard home row (Insert/Home/PgUp, Del/End/PgDwn). It's not that laptops have changed this pattern - it's that each manufacturer and even model changes it _differently_ (and seemingly needlessly), which makes it hard to have a consistent muscle memory for these keys:<
As for keyboards--that's why I brought my machine to clients when I was a consultant, and specify the same laptop at my new job. ;)
but it would be nice if we had good aftermarket hardware support, so maybe this is a fine time to rep.
my x220 is a delightful experience. awesome mechanical keyboard and (with SSD & 16gb ram) pretty snappy on all the websites i need it for.
perfect for all kinds of non-javascript coding, and handles webpack acceptably well.
I advise installing an SSD and thinkfan or TPFC. Mine is mostly silent (except when watching video)
I didn't replace the HDD because the longer load times aren't really an issue. It's the parts that require some processing power that are a bummer. And this is also where the noisy part comes in, given that it's in high load for longer stretches. I prioritized lower temps over lower noise, this may have helped with the longevity.
I might throw in an SSD just to show the little workhorse some love.
Now I'm just waiting for this newest one to kick the bucket. There are already some stability issues. Once it goes, I'm going to try fixing the thermal paste myself (https://www.ifixit.com/Story/20939/MBP_2011_GPU_Nightmare). I have all the parts and tools in my desk drawer ready to go for when it's game time.
I don't really know what I'll do if that doesn't work. I've considered getting a refurbished 2015 MBP.
See https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/166876/macbook-pro... for more info
I am thinking of finally upgrading to an X280 or an X1 but I am afraid the keyboard will be too much of a downgrade.
If you were to use it primarily docked and with a Thunderbolt dock, though, I could see it being pretty awesome.
If anyone here is planning to do the FHD upgrade, be very careful with power, you need to remove the battery/power cable and press the power button a couple of times to discharge all capacitors etc, otherwise you will blow a microscopic fuse (I did!) and it's near impossible to replace it. I just soldered a bridge between the contacts! I just can't do anything wrong again or I'll fry something.
I wish the multiple replacement batteries I got for it over the years were as performant ;o)
It is most likely due to poor quality batteries. The "cells" in a 9-cell battery are 18650 batteries, which vary in capacity from 3400mAh at the high end, to counterfeit ones that are labelled to have 1200mAh capacity, but in reality have only a fraction of that. Lithium-ion batteries also have a limited shelf life, so even good quality aftermarket batteries will have a fraction of the rated capacity if they have been sitting in a warehouse for years.
Battery had been disconnected, also the CMOS battery. I usually remember to hold down the power button for a few seconds. Dang.
Didn't chase this further, as I am clumsy with board-level repairs, and my friend didn't want to throw more money at the project.
Edit to add: Obviously this is an i5 laptop from 2012, much newer than some of the other machines in this thread. Although it's not my daily driver anymore I do still use it for music production.
About dying suddenly; that goes, in my experience, far more for new hardware. Old hardware (especially if we are talking ‘ancient’ hardware like before 1995) has a lot more signs of giving up and a lot easier ways of fixing it when it does. I have machines that dies that first started smoking so you could pinpoint what component gave out. The x220 is not quite that old but because I have a stack of spares but one favorite, I have been able to fix it after it suddenly died quite easily without just replacing the entire thing. That will not happen when your 2018 mbp suddenly dies.
I had that very machine with 1 GB RAM (though with a SSD, its SATA1 (!!)). Couldn't run GNOME 3 on it, but more lightweight stuff like XFce ran great.
It also can't do VMs well since it lacks the hardware extensions, and it can't do Docker either.
The only good about it was the rfkill, the chasis, the ThinkPoint, the detachable battery, the price, the keyboard, and Coreboot.
It has more USB ports than my current MBP which also lacks rfkill and doesn't have a detachable battery though the trackpad is the best (2015 version).
Total agree with regard to hardware design / ergo superiority over the MBP -- that's exactly why I made the switch
Main thing that worries me is the bios, but coreboot seems to work.
It's funny the one I bought new direct from Lenovo in 2011 is still fine, but I was able to upgrade doubling the core count and getting USB3 by assembling out of I7 parts.
Sure the x220 has a good keyboard compared to its replacements but the other thing it has is superior mechanical design: you NEVER have to prye apart plastic pieces. Want to change me more? It's one screw away. HD? One screw. Keyboard? 3 screws. Battery? Push 2 tabs, pull the battery pack.
Sure it's a bit thicker, but I don't understand when that's an issue ever, at least I can use it on trains, cars and even airplanes as long as they don't have those space-invader-reclining-seats.
Every new laptop I look at is just worse design, less upgradable (note: I only look at laptops with track points, the other ones are useless to me). What happened? Why have laptops gotten worse?
Solid machines indeed!
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_600
Sort of. The part about diminishing returns is arguably true, but hardware didn't stagnated.
What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s.
When a Microsoft OS requires _less_ resources than it's predecessors (like early Win7 compared to early Vista), you know upgrade cycles will be much longer than before.
Unless you're handling high definition video or playing AAA games, of course. But for any other "mundane" task, the only reason to upgrade from a 5 or 6 years old machine would be an un-repairable hardware malfunction.
Is that true though?
Windows might have gotten more efficient but I think overall most software has gotten worse from a performance perspective. With the prevalence of Electron everywhere, performance doesn't even seem to be a priority anymore. And "native" apps using WPF, etc. aren't as optimized as old school WinForms, MFC style apps (though there are other benefits to be had).
Granted, that wasn’t a professional machine, but I’d say expected memory for a machine has grown 4x in a dozen years.
A dozen years later would be 2006 - if memory serves, a decent laptop in those days would have run you about $1,200-1,500, and would have come with a Core 2 Duo @ ~1.2Ghz, 2GB of RAM, and a ~40GB HDD.
That's a lot more than a 4x increase in specs!
I don't think this is true, especially with the growing trend towards web apps being repackaged as desktop applications.
And then Electron came out and... well, there went that dream.
I could do my job on a laptop from the 90s if I really wanted to. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
One thing I found absolutely necessary to make my machine usable in 2019 was upgrading all the specs to the max.
All these years as a Thinkpad user, and I had no idea of NMB vs ALPS vs Chicony. I thought the variation in the keyboard feel in the machines I own and have used was due to wear alone. Thank you for opening up an entirely new horizon of Thinkpad snobbery.
Beautiful hardware. No issues other than chipped palm rest which Apple replaced out of warranty.
Sometimes a bit of time spent with no mains supply makes you value electricity that bit more and how big your carbon footprint really is. You can also decide to dim the screen a bit and do some real work as playing some rubbish video will bring that power meter into the red way before the parents come back.
Also it is a good way of finding out how long the battery actually lasts. One imagines there will be four hours or more but then that isn't necessarily so, particularly if running Ubuntu with the bottom of the machine so nice and toasty.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273305
- https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...
- https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook/specs/macbook-cor...
And you'd be able to run up to 10.11 (El Capitan) on the Pro or 10.7 (Lion) on the MacBook.
or switch to any current linux, if you can figure out the 32bit efi booting
Multiboot Debian ISO FTW, there. (And rEFInd 32-bit as a bootloader for the installed system.) This trick also helps deal with crappy low-end hardware that is 64-bit capable but ships with 32-bit UEFI and Win 8/10 installs. (They do this, or at least used to, because Win 8/10 in UEFI mode is restricted to running the same architecture that the UEFI is. A 32-bit UEFI only runs 32-bit Windows, and 64-bit UEFI only runs 64-bit Windows. Of course, Linux is not so restricted - and it certainly can boot from 32-bit UEFI and then switch cleanly to 64-bit operation!)
The best ThinkPad of course is the 25th Anniversary Edition having 2017 hardware with the classic keyboard. That's what I am typing on right now. The next best is a hackfest: take a T430s with an i7 iGPU, for some demented reason Lenovo put a Thunderbolt 1 controller in those (also the S430 and then the next ThinkPad with Thunderbolt is the P50 w/ TB3 four years later). Now comes the hacking: add the classic keyboard and also the high quality full HD screen from the T440s using a Chinese converter kit -- the 30 series used LVDS, the panel uses eDP so you need a converter. I have a T420s with that hack. Thunderbolt 1 is obviously slower than Thunderbolt 3 but still, any TB3 eGPU enclosure will work. As the T430s can have two 2.5" SSDs and an mSATA SSD, you can add quite an amount of solid storage to this -- much more than the TP25, the TP25 maxes out at 2.5TB currently, while the T430s can do 9TB. The NVMe disks are of course faster in the TP25 (even though one is x2 the other is x1) but the feeling in everyday tasks is not going to be vastly different -- the big jump is in HDD to SSD. You are also limited to 16GB RAM vs the 32GB RAM in the TP25. And the CPUs are even closer: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-3520M-vs... Your battery life won't be awesome, alas.
Not to mention they cruise along on things that use the newer extensions for things like video playback, plus the integrated graphics hardware is much much faster
[citation needed] 50-60% is absurdly large for single core, the reality is 20%, and 300% is crazy. The T480 uses a 15W quad core on the same 14nm process as the 15W chip in the T470 and because it's slightly more power efficient there's a little gain, about 25-30%. So the difference between the Sandy Bridge T420 to Kaby Lake Refresh T480 is perhaps 50% in multi core.
Here's my favorite Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC benchmark collection: https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_v...
Double the score of the X220 and quadruple the score of the T480 and you're going to end up about 575 to 205 for multicore, which is almost 3X as fast.
This doesn't even bring GPU or SSD performance into the picture. Just raw CPU.
I love my X220 but Windows 10 will regularly bring it to it's knees, even with an SSD and 8GB of RAM. And that's not even doing anything, I'm not sure if it's updating or what. Not to mention it's not exactly a thin machine, the 1366x768 screen is mediocre...The 1080/2K IPS screens coming to the Thinkpad line finally made them usable, IMO. Even the old IPS screens in the X220 tablets were still dim, low-resolution, etc.
It makes no sense to use them for highly intellectual tasks like programming.
For this you need Chromebook or MacBook to look hip and Wiz.
Mind you, when I purchase, I try to "future proof" them as best we can. The last batch we bought for our general office users, where i5's with 16GB ram and a 512GB SSD. For our devs, I generally set them up with a super-fast ultra-portable(think mac air or dell xps13) as most of their heavy lifting is off-loaded to our private cloud. And so far everyone report very high satisfaction with the setups provided.
(I've had a brand new Latitude sitting unused for over a year now. I just can't get excited about getting used to a new keyboard or rebuilding my entire software environment on a new machine.)