I have T460. I like the fact that it has two batteries, good casing, great touchpad (unlike the one that I've had on T440s), holes for liquid drainage... When you put SSD into it, and have 16GB of RAM I don't see it lagging behind more modern ThinkPads. In my opinion, new is not always batter :) The only thing that I miss on my T460 is better graphic adapter. I have Intel HD but even with it I can play games up to Fry Cry 4, Call od Duty 4, etc.
I’ve got the T470 (as it has the old docking + charging port PLUS thunderbolt), modded it with the N140HCG-GQ2 panel (1080p, 100% sRGB, 400 nits, 8bit), with a 2TB NVMe SSD, 32GB of DDR4-2400MHz RAM, etc. I've got two 75Wh batteries I can switch between.
Overall I get great performance even for stuff like running IDEA and a spring web app in a docker container, and I get 13h+ of battery life out of it (+10h if I switch the external battery to the second one I keep in my laptop bag).
I'd wish the 30th anniversary thinkpad (coming this year) will be just an upgraded T25 with a modern ryzen processor but in every other way identical (I know, an unrealistic dream)
I have a Ultra dock for a long time now... And I know that if I ever upgrade from T460 to the T470 will be the last model for quite some time. This is the last one that fits onto my existing docking station. I must say that I prefer mechanical docks over USB/TB and other types.
Excellent writeup. I don't think I'd be happy with that setup, but I still appreciate how you explain your thinking process and why you did things this way.
I switched to Mac a little over a decade ago, and since then I don't really think about my computer. It's a tool that generally just works. It's not for everyone but it really solved that issue for me.
Interestingly this CPU is only 20% faster than a newer i7 9750H ([link](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9750H-vs...)).
I'd imagine under load the performance will be similar since 9750H can't run at max without overheating in a slim XPS body being next to another hot (graphics) chip.
I similarly use a Dell Latitude from 2012. After upgrading to 16GB RAM I don't have any issues with it whatsoever.
At work for new devs we bought ThinkPads with Ryzen. These are in general fine, except that multiple people have this weird issue with the computer completely freezing at random times on Linux. The one person who had Windows didn't have this issue. If it weren't for this issue that would be our default buy for new hires. Now, I don't know really.
> At work for new devs we bought ThinkPads with Ryzen. These are in general fine, except that multiple people have this weird issue with the computer completely freezing at random times on Linux. The one person who had Windows didn't have this issue. If it weren't for this issue that would be our default buy for new hires. Now, I don't know really.
Likely an issue with the C6 power state. Try searching for "ryzen linux c6 state" and you'll find plenty of people with these issues. Try updating BIOS, disabling C6 in BIOS or with https://github.com/jfredrickson/disable-c6.
This DEFINITELY doesn't count as Ship of Theseus. All those parts are designed to be replaceable on the Thinkpad.
If you really want to talk about Ship of Theseus-ing a Thinkpad, the hardcore guys have literally ripped out the motherboard and installed a completely different motherboard with a modern i7 CPU. These "frankenpads" include the X62 (Broadwell CPU and motherboard in an old X61), T70 (Kaby Lake CPU in a T60), X210 (Kaby Lake R CPU in a X200 body). They also rip out the LCD and replace it with a modern IPS display. They sometimes also rip out the keyboard to replace it with an older keyboard- T420 keyboard in a T430 is common.
> So, a CPU upgrade? How is that not what OP mentions?
Are you asking how replacing the motherboard in a laptop with a custom third party hobbyist replacement is different from putting a faster CPU in a CPU socket?
This kind of CPU upgrade was all but supported by the manufacturer.
Unlike modern laptops, the T430 motherboard had a socketed CPU (like a desktop motherboard). Upgrading the CPU was only marginally more difficult than upgrading the RAM (as long as the replacement CPU had the same package/pinout and was supported by the chipset). Lenovo datasheets would even give you a table of every CPU configuration they tested.
The "hardcore guys" mentioned by the parent are installing bodged motherboards that were never designed to fit in a given model's enclosure, occasionally doing major board surgery to make it work.
There were reasonably fast laptop SSDs in 2012. I had the intel one In my x61 and x201 thinkpad. The specific components though may be faster, then again the newer SSDs would be bottlenecked by the motherboard bus. Sourcing newer models would be a matter of logistics, not performance improvement. Same with RAM. CPU improvements have also been marginal in my opinion, for intel chips, depending on your workload. I was running photoshop professionally just fine, video maybe not so much.
The ram upgrade was common since the 2012s, thinkpad sold 16gbs as an upgrade while buying the laptop at the time. SSDs needing to be upgraded has also been recommended since that time. And the processor update was simply maxing out the processor upgrade from that generation. It was available on the workstation version of the thinkpad in the same generation. The i7-3820QM release date is 04/23/2012. It's still a processor from 2012. A new SSD doesn't mean current gen speeds, the internal and the caddy are still limited to sata 3 speeds. It's a very 2012 machine, a very nice 2012 machine and still lacking a dedicated GPU.
I don’t think the author is alone in keeping an older thinkpad running by upgrading its components, that’s part of why they’re such popular machines with tech people. I have to say though, his complaints about the newer machines doesn’t resonate with me, my T495s works great (the only issue is the awful Lenovo buying process)
I had similar experiences with the T14 AMD that I used for over half a year. On Linux the Trackpad would often not come back after sleep. Also, the battery would drain very quickly in S3 suspend. The laptop would take off during video calls (though the fan noise was definitely not as bad as with many Intel models). In the end it was really a thousand of paper cuts, especially with Linux, despite the laptop being certified with Linux. The hardware itself was pretty ok and worked fairly well with Windows (I just don't like Windows).
In the end I went back to MacBooks. First an M1 Air, now a MBP 14" with an an M1 Pro. They are insanely fast, while staying cool. The fan on the Pro only spins up during long builds, but even then it's barely audible.
If you don't like macOS, getting an old(er) ThinkPad is probably the best option.
Is it possible to make the more tricky upgrades (CPU, display, fan) on similar models but from the X-series ? X201, X210, X220? I would love to do it on mine.
At least for the x220, there are display and fan upgrades (mine uses a x230 fan), you can max ram at 16Gb (the manual says 8Gb, but 16Gb works just fine), but the CPU is soldered, so no upgrades on that.
Reportedly there have been people who have managed to upgrade the CPU on the X230, it just requires a lot of time and effort to do it properly, BGA-s are a pain to solder and requires specialized equipment to do it reliably.
I still use my T420s as my daily driver laptop. I'd like to get something with a better screen and faster CPU but it's still reliable so it's hard to justify.
What batteries have you had good luck with? My main and ultrabay batteries are both down to around 50% of original new capacity now.
Shame it isn't a 54 slot. You'd be able to get an expresscard bluetooth mouse. They're comfier than you'd expect and incredibly convenient. They even charge while stored in the slot.
> The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022
I recently got M1 Max MacBook, and I was expecting a huge jump from my 2010 Mac Pro, but on my day-to-day work. It is barely noticeable, despite the raving reviews of M1. Perhaps for me it is not about things getting obsolete, but more of that my own needs on CPU/GPU performance were pretty much fulfilled in 2010. I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high. Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe.
If you mean Mac Pro and not Macbook Pro I wouldn't be that suprised. Single thread performance is mainly dominated by clock speed and possibly instruction set improvements. Having a much higher TDP there isn't much magic you can work to make a Laptop faster than a recentish desktop system.
> I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high
This isn't true for all programmers. I'm a programmer, and until 3 years ago a good chunk of my day was spent waiting for compiles to finish.
> Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe.
Not even remotely close. I have an AMD threadripper [0] in a desktop PC under my desk that I use for development. This is a mainstream, readily available x64 processor with 32 cores (and hyperthreading) that can sustain just 3.8GHz for at least 30 minutes (I've not pushed it any farther than that because I've needed to). Based on PassMark benchmarks [1], the threadripper is substantially quicker than the M1 Max.
Oh, can you share more? What is your programming environment?
I am debating a move to desktop/workstation with desktop CPU to support smoother Scala/lots-of-containers development experience.
Pandemic made laptops less appealing. With digital nomadism being a question mark for some. Yes, I do know some still continue to practice this lifestyle. I can be only jealous :)
> Oh, can you share more? What is your programming environment?
I work in games and write C++. Compile times are long, and we deal with large amounts of assets (current project is ~50GB of textures, models, animations, sound. This is small. Last project was >500GB).
> With digital nomadism being a question mark for some.
Sure, if you want portability or being able to move around this sort of machine won't work for you, but I live with my partner in a nice city, work remotely and have a separate home office. I have almost 0 need for the portability of a laptop.
Depending on your needs(!), you can just use the laptop as a frontend for a much more powerful machine. I did that for a while with a Sandy Bridge (core i7-2xxx gen) dual socket server in the basement, and it did work quite well. No matter if I was at home or somewhere else - but for dev work ssh into the Linux host OS was enough for me, with an occasional RDP into a Windows VM.
I considered this option with NoMachine and in-house power-machine or cloud workstation. In a way make sense, but ultimately, I decided against because:
Security – having open port to workstation makes me scared; bugs/0-days are discovered every day;
Quality Internet Connection – less tricky as most access would be local LAN, but I am certain that few times I need it remotely to fix a production issue, something will go wrong;
Maintenance vs Cost – in-house machine would be cheaper but will require remote power on/off capability vs in cloud server being rather pricey
But yes, in general, I agree. Having a light, portable device with long battery life and connecting to a remote, beefy machine would be a dream. And I am not imagining it, as this was my workflow back in 2013 when I was working for a bank. If it was possible then, it definitely is possible today.
What about real world tests for you specific workflows? My M1 Max runs my daily bread and butter R scripts approximately 4x faster compared to a top of the line Intel Coffee Lake. For me it's a huge improvement. Having over 100GB/s RAM bandwidth per core and a huge cache are a big thing for many latency-sensitive workloads.
I don't actually own an M1 Max, so I can't do a straight up comparison right now sorry. I upgraded from an 8700k to a 3970x, and for compilation the speadups were pretty much on paper gains. Each individual compilation task is ~10% slower, but the parallelism of 32 cores means that overall it's a 5x speedup over my previous CPU.
I dunno man.. You're comparing a CPU which costs as much as the complete machine (or two M1 airs). It's not portable has a TDP of 280W. Still it's 30% slower single threaded. For multithreaded it's 2.7x as fast. So yeah, maybe for rendering it's faster, but it won't be as snappy as the M1.
Then again, if you wanna use it for rendering, just buy 4 M1 macminis for the price of one CPU. Or 6 minis if you add all the other stuff you need.
The claim was that laptops are on par with desktops, not that they're good replacement for many workflows. This is just flat out not true.
> It's not portable has a TDP of 280W
That doesn't bother me in the slightest for a workstation.
> So yeah, maybe for rendering it's faster, but it won't be as snappy as the M1.
Nobody who cares about performance is doing rendering on a CPU, it's all GPU accelerated. It's not about "snappiness", it's about suitability for work. I upgraded from an 8700k to this machine and saw a 5x speedup (my compiles dropped from 30m to about 6 minutes).
It looks like this is basically a serial benchmark, so yeah of course the higher raw clock speed will win out. The run is also less than a minute, so most laptops will happily burst for that long, however what happens if you throw a 5/10/15 minute compile at it?
> Does It Scale Well With Increasing Cores?
> No, based on the automated analysis of the collected public benchmark data, this test / test settings does not generally scale well with increasing CPU core counts.
If your workload is compiling a single file serially, then sure this might be a great upgrade for you. I went through the copmpile benchmarks and the only other one that has an M1 mac and a 3970x on that site is build2 [0] which shows the m1 is 4x faster on a build that scales well with cores. FFMpeg [1] doesn't list the M1 in the test table, but it does have one benhmark [2] which is again quicker with the threadripper.
One interesting thing would be to know how much of the performance improvement in some of the compile tests is due to the high-bandwidth memory interface on the M1 chip. Since the M1 chip has both different cores AND a quintuple memory bandwidth compared to Ryzen's/Threadripper's off-chip memory, if you consider things like cache misses, one has to wonder what's the contribution of both to the performance increases.
Completely agree, and I don't have an answer to that. However, all of that goes out the window if your macbook starts throttling. I don't doubt that an m1 chip with adequate cooling will outperform an x86 one, but at that point you're not on a laptop anymore
> Nobody who cares about performance is doing rendering on a CPU, it's all GPU accelerated.
Has OSL already been ported to GPUs? You're implying that OSL users such as film studios "don't care about performance" but I suspect this simply isn't true.
Sorry, I can't edit my original post to update but you're right.
A large amount of commercial renderers and commercial rendering software is GPU accelerated which was what I was trying to refer to (and would like to update my comment to but can't).
That said, given the render times for indiovidual frames a laptop is going to end up thermally throttling which will wipe out the single threaded gains, and being limited to very small amounts of ram is likely going to make using a current M1 Mac impossible for anything like OSL.
Thanks for taking the stand here; generally new laptops are fast and especially the M10 max seems like a nice rig that beats some desktops for some programmer workloads. Maybe even many desktops for most programmer workloads, IDK. But besides not all programmer workloads being equal, desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different.
Also, I'd like to add memory constraints as an example of workload inequality: The M10 max only seems to support 64GB. Good for many, but would be a huge draw back at my last dev job. The problem could inherently use huge amounts of memory, and exact memory usage was not always predictable. Especially for those colleagues which did a lot of work for customers, changing one parameter could mean coming back to a OOM after the program run for a night (or longer). Thanks to 128GB this became much rarer, but the for the type of program at some point the only viable option to safe memory is to accept a worse result.
My 2010 Mac Pro has 48 GB of RAM, this 2021 M1 Max has 32 GB. So not much has changed on that respect either. Except on 2010 I imagine it was struggle to get even 16 GB on a laptop.
> Also, I'd like to add memory constraints as an example of workload inequality: The M10 max only seems to support 64GB
That's a really good point. In my last job, our machines had 256GB of memory to fully utilise the 3990x cores.
> desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different.
They're a little bit different, but they're still mainstream, readily available desktop envioronments. You can go on Scan here in the UK and order one of those systems just like you can order any other intel or AMD system.
Yes, definitely not true for all programmers. I guess with games, if you cannot get real time with instant compiles development experience with 120fps running 8k in debug mode, there is a room for improvement.
I compared highend 2010 desktop to highend 2021 laptop on my use case (which is arguably much lighter). And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor (which is great, but not a leap from 2010 desktop). I can imagine todays desktops could be much better compared to todays highend laptops, but it feels like the most of what I do, there is little reasons to upgrade. Which is also great. With Macs the latest macOS support is removed usually from 5 years old machines, but that feels mostly baseless from technical perspective as with hacks you can still run the latest just fine.
Perhaps it is a nostalgia / romancy. Having a 12 years old machine as you daily workhorse where upgrade was not a leap. That is something I haven’t seen before, and I have been in this industry since 90ies and a PC user since 80ies.
> Yes, definitely not true for all programmers. I guess with games, if you cannot get real time with instant compiles development experience with 120fps running 8k in debug mode, there is a room for improvement.
Day to day that doesn't matter. I work on multiplayer games, and being able to run 8/12/16 clients on one machine at 10 fps at ultra low graphics is far more important than being able to run stupid resolutions. You do bring up another point though - GPU performance. Apologies for the links but I'm on my phone, but [0] and [1] have 3dmark benchmarks for the M1 GPU and an RTX 3090 GPU - the 3090 scores twice what the M1 GPU does. This might not be important to you, but it is to some people.
> And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor
Ultimately that's all it comes down to. If you're not limited by the form factor/performance of a laptop power to you, but some of us are!
I can buy a high spec showhorse for $40k, or a new mid range sedan for $40k. That doesn't mean that the maxed out showhorse will work for commuting to work every day.
>A 3090 is $2300 right now, even paying the scalper tax.
Where can you find that? lowest I can find is 2800 new. There are some pre-owned for 2700 and some open auctions at roughly 2300 but those will land substantially higher than 2300 I would imagine.
The 3090 is such an overpowered (and expensive) card, that another GPU doing half of what the 3090 can do is still damn right impressive. And in a Laptop!
Yeah that's actually a serious compliment to the M1 GPU if the 3090 is merely double the scores?! I expected it should be like 4x or more! That's awesome.
I use the M1 Mac Air for office work. It replaced my 2017 MBP, and the difference is very noticeable -- with some 3 dozen tabs open on my browser (not the best of browsing habit) the M1 can take it without breaking a sweat. Yet for entertainment and hobby programming I revert back to my (really) old 2011 iMac that runs High Sierra -- I have invested much time fine-tuning that machine. I tried to migrate the setup to the M1, but a bunch of dependencies were broken. I'd stay with the iMac for as long as the hardware can hold out.
I think comparing old desktop with new laptop is going to give you different experience than comparing old laptop with new laptop.
I got M1 Air and not only is it a huge difference from my previous 2017 MPB 13" (which I gave to my mother who spilled coffee into her previous laptop), it is much better than my work provided 2019 MBP 16".
"Snappiness" is subjective and hard to measure, but the thermals are huge difference. My work MBP is sitting at 63°C with just Firefox pointed at HN. On both my old MBP and the work one, playing 1440p video (native screen resolution) would make it loud, and playing 4k video on 4k monitor would turn it into a vacuum cleaner.
The Air is completely silent at all times (it has no fan) and sits at 32°C while playing 1440p and maybe 40°C when playing 4k content.
It is of course possible, that this is all because the previous Macbooks were so bad (and due to hw decoding for common video formats) but I had similar "Jesus this is such a loud, overheating mess" experience with other laptops as well. But desktops have much better thermals already - so for you, the biggest difference would be the mobility I guess.
I had a similar experience to the OP with my previous Intel laptops - they've quickly get too hot and throttle and that would kill the performance. When they weren't throttling, performance was fine.
For me the big win with the M1 Pro was that I could work flat out and not worry about it overheating and giving up.
It's a lot easier for desktops to have adequate cooling and power.
I had a dual CPU nehalem around 2010 under my desk. It was a beast. 8 cores, 16 HT. Now I have an M1 Max and I have yet to get it to spin its fans up. So I don't know what your day-to-day work is, but is it possible it's just not CPU bound?
Agree for laptops, but assembling proper desktop gave me a noticeable bump in "smoothness" on pretty much everything, from mouse movements, code navigation, windows resizing, browsing, to, obviously, graphics. Seems like thermal constraints slow down laptops pretty noticeably.
Does this mean that "things that have survived for 10 years are more durable than average", or "in the last 10 years, we have become unable to make useful, durable laptops"?
If it's the latter, then I can hear the footsteps of the Anti-Singularity getting ever closer....
What's the difference between the two? Especially when the product in question requires the co-ordination of 10s (probably 100s) of thousands of engineers, designers, and operatives, as well as a mass-market able to make the initial investment worth it.
I'm all for frugality but that seems like a lot of compromises for what is this person's main work laptop. Cool that it works; but why have a slow workhorse like that?
I picked up a Samsung Galaxybook a few weeks ago. Nice core i5 system on a chip thing with Iris XE gpu. Runs cool including when under load and it's fast enough. Driver support seems decent in Linux. Even the graphics are quite alright. I played some steam games with it even. Nothing recent though.
The touchpad is a multitouch thing that sort of replicates what a decent macbook would be capable off (but with way less precision). The keyboard is alright and they even squeezed in a numeric pad. It has 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Decent battery life too. With Manjaro it's quite a nice work laptop. Not bad for 700 Euro.
At that price (which was a black Friday discount), why bother patching up a ten year old laptop. Not worth the expenses on the parts IMHO.
I have yet to see a good keyboard on a modern laptop, and I use a lot of different ones. Some people do not care, but I do. There's some keyboards that are "still decent", but all of them are progressively getting worse. Well, they say that Mac keyboards are getting better again, but I don't like their zero-keytravel style in the first place, not even in the ones that were considered good.
Thinkpad T400 roundabout was a good keyboard in my view.
Keyboard + reliability (they almost never break) + price (200 USD vs 1.8K EUR).
I've since switched to an M1 Macbook, but until last year, I spend a good four-five years working from an x220t and x220. As long as the battery is in decent shape, there still really isn't a better value proposition than the old T420-T430 era Thinkpads.
It's worth pointing out that there were several different OEMs for those older Thinkpads, and unfortunately the typing experience depends a lot on which one you have.
The NMB manufactured keyboards are excellent. The others can be hit or miss.
I know this was a big issue for Thinkpads throughout the years, but as much as I care about the feel of a keyboard, I have never cared about the layout.
I agree that the Thinkpad keyboard is pretty much unbeatable in terms of laptop keyboards. But the ergonomics of laptops are inherently terrible no matter how good the keyboard is. It is simply impossible to have both keyboard and screen at the correct heights when they are physically connected together in notebook form.
For prolonged use, you really should have a separate keyboard and monitor, properly adjusted to your individual height and posture. Your back and neck will thank you for it.
As an m1 macbook owner I would say the new mac keyboard is good for a low travel keyboard, but not good when compared to thinkpad keyboards, especially the older 1.8mm and up key travel keyboards. There is only so much you can do to compensate for a lack of key travel.
> I'm all for frugality but that seems like a lot of compromises for what is this person's main work laptop. Cool that it works; but why have a slow workhorse like that?
That's exactly what it was in my case. Maybe it isn't so bad with Ivy bridge, but my previous laptop that I upgraded from was an i7 Sandy bridge T420s. It has the 1600x900 display, and I decked it out a long time ago with 16GB and a solid state.
But still, it totally choked on youtube/twitch 60fps feeds if they weren't piped through streamlink+VLC. I'm pretty self-satisfied with how long I was able to stick it out, but when I got my first tech job last year, it just choked on video calls, necessitating an upgrade to something more reasonably specced.
A couple months ago I pulled my x220 that I hadn't used in 3 years out of the closet and got it all updated to do some hobby programming while visiting parents. My only other laptops were a work machine (X1 Carbon, I want to say from 2019) that I didn't want to travel with and a Surface Go that I didn't want to wrangle into having a decent dev environment.
When I booted it up, I checked the most recent entry in pacman's logs:
Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup.
Using it was surprisingly pleasant, I think the most painful thing was initial builds for some large Haskell projects were slow but subsequent builds were tolerable. Also the original screen, while nicely visible with the matte surface, has a painfully low resolution of 1366x768 and so few websites are happy with half of that width now that everything has huge margins.
Probably the most important thing was that it was mine (even though I haven't done the sorts of mods in TFA) in a way that my work laptop and the windows machines I'd been using outside of work could never be.
(I do love how sturdy it is. Especially with the slice battery that almost doubles the thickness and gives it enough juice for hours)
That's been my experience with Arch as well. I've only seen a handful of actual breakages in my time (using consistently since 2016), and there's _always_ a good discussion with a manual fix available within a few hours, or a few days if you want to stick to official update channels.
Plus KDE Plasma has become such a joy to use! I repurposed my T530 as a media center with a wireless keyboard and it's been a fantastic experience
The physical setup is very simple: just the laptop wired through miniDP to the TV, laptop sits behind the TV on a little wardrobe and has its screen turned off. I have various handbraked movies (not for distribution, only my personal usage) and shows that I view in VLC, plus a gigabit Ethernet connection that is more than enough for HD streaming.
I keep it simple, just have a standard desktop install of Arch with Plasma. Lets me also do work on the machine, writing code here and there, checking emails etc. The living room setup is much easier on my back for extended work sessions as compared to my office chair.
Same reasoning here, my back is not well and even though I am starting physiotherapy in a few days, I am looking for a setup I can actively practice from a couch-like position. Even bought a very nice and sturdy (and comfy) folding bed. And will soon order a lap desk.
Makes me a bit salty because the Steelcase Gesture is an absolutely EXCELLENT chair and I paid a lot for it but... health is more important. Hopefully I will be using it more in the future if my physiotherapy progresses well.
Thank you for the anecdote. I am pondering Manjaro with XFCE but might look at KDE Plasma as well; a lot of people praise it.
Anecdote: I use Manjaro on my home server and on a laptop and it's rock-solid. Not sure why people look down on Arch, I only had good experiences and I'm very far from a seasoned sysadmin.
I don't look down on Arch at all. I came from the yesteryears of using Slackware Linux. It was a lot of work. I learnt a lot of course. But I won't do that again. Arch is much much more modern and elegant, but still requires some handholding. The Arch Wiki is a pearl.
I tried Manjaro and was mightily impressed, it was a breeze. I might go back to that on a multi boot machine. Cheers.
People look down on Arch because the stability story is catastrophic, and Arch users deny that because they have low standards:
Parent was surprised that "Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything" after only 2 years of no updates. It "just" took them "an hour of babysitting it" through cyclic dependency headaches. Child comments proudly proclaim "only seen a handful of actual breakages" (since 2016) and "on the of easiest distros to fix when things go wrong".
Compare to my dad's laptop, which has been running Debian for about a decade and often goes multi-year stretches without updates, and has never broken. Not once. That's the kind of performance I expect from an OS.
fwiw I've gotten a debian install to the point where I'd rather wipe and reinstall than fix thanks to a combination of pinning, bad pip hygeine (why oh why is global install default), and not being sure where to go to learn how to untangle the mess I'd created. Sure I was a lot less experienced but there's something to be said for arch giving me enough tools and information that I actually feel like I can fix whatever comes up.
Love my X220, although it has been really struggling lately. Chromium, Opera, Brave or Firefox all cause my CPU/fan to crank up as soon as I have a couple of tabs open :(
I love my X220. Also running arch with dwm. Initially, it was more for tinkering and just to play with but it's getting more day to day use. The keyboard is great and I'm not as worried if it drops or the kids get their hands on it. I also love the light placement rather than the keyboard being back-lit
Been pushing it to do Java development and, while a little slow, it's holding up fine
I used an x220 as my primary machine for a long time. The low resolution screen and the unusually crappy touchpad are what got me to upgrade.
The touchpad in particular was horrible because it had different resolutions in X and Y. In one of those (I don't remember which) it was lower than the screen. So I found myself frequently unable to get to the 1 pixel wide handles to resize windows without the wigglestick.
I've always enjoyed being multimodal. There were workarounds but I didn't like not having access to a useful touchpad. It seemed like a clear hardware problem because I had the same problem in Windows as in all desktop environments in Linux.
I'm not sure which DE you're using, but many have a simple shortcut (in XFCE it's something like Alt+click) to resize windows with the keyboard. Becomes very natural to use and much less fiddly than the touchpad alone.
I thought about doing the same for my T430 but found out it'll cost me ~400$ and several hours so I ended up buying a second hand t470s for 300$. I like my T430 but it is really heavy and bulky and the display quality is awful (really bad viewing angles).
I do miss the track point controller. It’s kinda like hardware vim: difficult to learn to work with, so majority of people don’t. But once you do, it’s an absolute killer.
This might be blasphemous but after being thinkpad exclusively for the past 13 years (and my first thinkpad was in 98) but I find myself using the touchpad more and more when I'm not on my external trackpoint keyboard.
Not quite sure why, might be due to slightly dodgy Linux experiences (x240 dodgy buttons and then now my sensitivity on X1 gen 9 is a bit touch and go)
That said for regular point and click the touchpad is good enough. Tho when working there is no substitute for not leaving the homerow
It might be multi-finger gestures maybe? I use those a LOT on touchpad for scrolling, panning and dragging. Back when I was using Touchpoint, the trackpads weren’t capable of this, if I remember correctly. And they were like 2x3 cm in size anyway.
Any particular reason why? I’ve heard people complain about newer ThinkPads, but haven’t heard much negative about older ones, such as the one in this article.
They do seem to be very popular, and unfortunately for some operating systems they’re one of the few “safe” options with hardware support.
I personally haven’t found any particular laptop brand or model I particularly loved.
I have a similar story about my 2007(?) 17" MacBook Pro, back from when Apple made serviceable products. This MBP have had many owners before again circling back to me. I have opened it up more times than I can remember and replaced most replaceable things, like swapping the optical drive for a 2nd hard disk (and back again), and even replacing the entire screen plus assembly.
"Old" hardware is totally usable for much of what I do today, but the number #1 thing that I would miss is the modern displays which are just so much kinder on my ailing eyes. Amusingly the keyboards are often better on my old devices, but the trackpads are not.
EDIT: the processor is 64-bit. I was thinking of my ThinkPad T42p (another heavily serviced unit).
I had a visitor over the holidays who needed to work but didn't have a laptop. I had 2x old T420 (released in 2011) so I combined the RAM and did a fresh OS install. My only hassle was finding a DP cable. Other than doubling the RAM, this was still a stock machine from 2011. CPU benchmark scores for this T420 are comparable/better than sub-£400 new x86 laptops available at big box stores which was the other short-term option. Our visitor has had no issues with the T420 for Zoom calls, Chrome and other general stuff. I sold the RAM-less T420 and was informed that it was up and running with fresh RAM at its new home.
Sure. We're saying the same thing in different ways. A 2011 reasonable spec i5 laptop from my trash pile is still at least as useable for day-today tasks as a cheap new machine in 2021.
I've used a T420 as daily driver until just recently. It went travelling around the world with me, fell from rather high places, got wet more than once and much more.
My new 460s is mostly just better because it's lighter. Performance plus is only noticeable in games and such stuff.
I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty, put new batteries in and they are usually far better in every way than anything new for the same price. Am currently very happy with my T460S, runs Linux or Win10 great. My previous machines that the kids use for school work and Roblox are x250 and x220, and previous to that I have an X200 and a T61, that all lasted atleast 5 years in my ownership, over 10 years old before they were sold on. I have noticed since my X200 a slow and steady decline in toughness (I presume in exchange for compactness). You do have to pick carefully, some models have terrible trackpads, often the base LCD screens are terrible for brightness and viewing angle, so you need to ensure you get the upgraded ones (eg IPS and/or higher resolution).
I would vouch for this approach too. Ex lease laptops are really cheap, I've got a gen4 x1 carbon for easy carry daily use, a t460s at home, and so many of my customers love their ex lease Lenovos.
> I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty
I am curious if this a US thing only. I mean, I've heard of company vehicles in second hand market but never company laptops. In my experience all these company laptops get decommisioned by IT never to remove any data, but I never really considered what happens at End-of-life for those.
A few questions:
1. Where do you find these retailers?
2. Where do you find suppliers selling new batteries for old devices?
(all of my previous attempts at finding replacement batteries for laptops and e-readers always resulted in very poor performance or even faulty battery packs)
I live in Finland, and simply by Googling in Finnish I can find several companies reselling used company laptops, and there's at least one local one that I can physically go to (I've bought a used monitor from there, and they always have stacks of ThinkPads in the store when I go in).
same here in Czechia, pretty much all refurb Thinkpad are from companies, my current T520 is from Singapore of all places, if you choose A grade is basically brand new condition just without brand new smell, they should use some spray :-)
my next laptop will be again refurb Thinkpad, for wife I would choose something like X240 A grade 8GB RAM, that cost like 250EUR
I am in the UK.
I buy from eBay, there are a number of big sellers to choose from.
I tend to get my batteries from Amazon, I've probably bought 6 generic unbranded for my thinpads over the years, generally they seem to be about 90% capacity of genuine, but low prices mean great value. One I bought in 2020 was faulty on arrival, rest have all been good.
For my X220 I went for a cheap generic Chinese import (either Amazon or Ebay), its about 90% capacity of a genuine, but the price is so low its not a worry.
I always go for refurbished laptops when I can. My reseller gives me two year warranty and I can buy extra three years warranty if want to. So I can get 2y warranty in price, and I can buy 3 more years. I live in Europe and at the moment I could get T460s with new 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM and 5 year warranty for some 900 € (price with VAT).
My biggest disappointment was the trackpad on T440s. I hated is so much that I was thinkin about replacing it with a new one. Besides that I really like all of the ThinkPad laptops that I've used so far.
This laptop doesn't have a dedicated GPU and while I love my old thinkpad, a third generation i7 isn't powerful enough to do 4k h265 decoding and physically lacks any hardware acceleration for vp8, vp9 and both 8 and 10 bit h265. 1080p content is fine but with 4k it will start to struggle. This author doesn't seem to be using the laptop for multimedia consumption, but I would like to bring this limitation up for anyone looking to run this generation of thinkpad as a daily driver. If someone was planning on doing screen recording, I would strongly urge them to pick a newer generation of processor that can do hardware accelerated video encoding. A 720p webcam is fine, but seems like the limit as well since the author had to drop the desktop resolution to 720p to use OBS screen recording functionally. It's a great machine though and I completely understand why someone would feel those tradeoffs are worth looking past. I miss my w520 sometimes. I have never felt so at home with another machine.
Well, it is not much equipped to output the 4K either; the internal display is 1600x900, you can upgrade it to full hd and the external output can do 4k@30 at most, even the thunderbolt-equipped model.
Let's circle back in a few months; I too feel nostalgic when I visit my dad's and play some classic games on the old faithful PC from my youth (still rocking a 17'' Trinitron CRT). But after a few hours reality hits since I use my PCs nowadays to actually... get stuff done. I can't imagine that PC would be very useful for any productivity work, at most (frustratingly slow) browsing.
Nah, the upgraded 4-core T430 is plenty fast and very productive. You'd be surprised.
I used a dual-core upgraded T430 for quite a while. The problem was actually the battery life. 2-3 hours just doesn't compare to a M1 Macbook's 13 hours.
Funny story, I'm actually looking to make the opposite switch t430 -> t480.
My t430 is already equipped with 16gb ram and modded EC so I can use cheap 3rd party batteries and the OG 7 row keyboard instead of the trash 6 row island keyboard.
There are still some upgrades to be made like i7 QM cpu, and a 1600x900 IPS screen, but I just can't justify the costs anymore.
The reason for moving to t480 soon is that I'll be doing the t25 frankenpad mod solely just for the 7 row keyboard.
Better power effiecient cpu, nvme and high res screen is a cherry on top.
So far my thinkpad experience has been superb, and both my machines t410 + t430 have survived many drops and various liquid spills(water/coffee/alcohol)
and besides replacing the keyboard, I had 0 issues. Hopefully the t480 will be similar experience.
After upgrading the display, CPU, disk, RAM, fan, battery it's a bit click-baity to say you've gone back to a 2012 ThinkPad - but interesting read non the less.
What surprised me the most is that Lenovo ships something as annoying as a loud fan (easily replaceable even for a home tinkerer). Of course they save a few pennies per laptop; but no laptop can ever be good if it's noisy. That was one of the main reasons why I bought an X301 ThinkPad many years ago, even when it fanned like crazy it was very quiet. But the clever design of the original ThinkPad's was starting to fade already then; the X301 actually had it's speakers on top. So you could spill liquid on it, unless you happened to spill it on top of one of your top mounted speakers of course.
I've also gone through a few ThinkPad's over the years, and ever since they stopped being IBM; they seem to loose more and more of the "premium feel" for every generation. Especially the keyboard is way better on my old T40 then on the one I use right now (T14).
Thinkpad sold that model with 16gbs as an upgrade while buying the laptop at the time. SSDs needing to be upgraded has also been recommended since that time. And the processor update was simply maxing out the processor upgrade from that generation. It was available on the workstation version of the thinkpad in the same generation. The i7-3820QM release date is 04/23/2012. A new SSD doesn't mean current gen speeds, the internal and the caddy are still limited to sata 3 speeds. It's a very 2012 machine, a very nice 2012 machine.
True; I just feel that most titles are a bit exaggerated these days to sound more sensational then they really are. If I were to write a book, I'd gladly use an old ThinkPad due to the nice keyboard. But I hope I don't write a blog like this if I do: "Why I went back to my 2003 ThinkPad" :-)
"upgrading the display, CPU, disk, RAM, fan, battery it's a bit click-baity to say you've gone back to a 2012 ThinkPad - but interesting read non the less."
That's the good part - it's possible, and it's serviceable. My spouse uses a 10y (almost 11y) laptop, it has pretty much everything changed & upgraded. CPU, RAM, keyboard, CD->SSD, HDD->SSD, battery, fan, wifi 801.1 b/g -> ac+bluetooth. The discrete GPU is not replaceable, of course.
> That's the good part - it's possible, and it's serviceable.
Agreed. The way things are constructed now (cell phones are of course 10 times worse), where everything is glued in place in order to break if anyone tries to replace them are terrible. The tinker tutorials on youtube seem to be more about which temperature different glue melts at, and which temperature the parts glued get destroyed at; then anything else.
My next laptop will probably be a https://frame.work laptop for that very reason.
Might just be the current supply chain woes but I have a relatively recent X1 Yoga (Gen 1) and the fan went out. Had to buy a Chinese one on ebay to replace it since Lenovo did not have the part anymore. I kind of expected it to be easy to acquire an official part but they told me to look on ebay. The Chinese one works fine though.
That's nuts. Is that the official policy? Here in Norway, a laptop would have a 5 year "reklamasjon" (not 100% sure what that translates to in English). Perhaps "forced warranty" would be my best translation. It basically means that the product is expected to last for at least 5 years, and if it doesn't - the seller has to fix it, or give you your money back.
Some products have a 2 year "reklamasjon" while others have 5; it's sometimes a bit surprising which products get 2 and 5 years. Cellphones have 5 for instance, which seems strange given their (ab)use. Companies cannot opt out of this.
I think this laptop is likely over 5 years old, though I'd expect to be able to order 10 year old parts on thinkpads, but perhaps that is not cost effective since most companies would replace machines before that. In the US I believe it came with 1 or 2 years warranty against defect. I had purchased an additional 2 year warranty for a total of 4 years. I had the battery and cover replaced when it cracked but in the end I decided it was a waste if I could get my hands on the parts since these are easy enough to repair.
I've got a dozen ergonomic and mechanical keyboards. The feel of the keyboard is very important to me, just like a good fountain pen. So when my employer was giving to me a new Thinkpad I was excited. Thinkpad was the only laptop whose keyboard I could stand.
This T-14 has a keyboard as horrible as any Asus. It looks exactly like the standard Thinkpad keyboard, but the key travel, the bottoming-out, the spring pressure, are all horrible. Even just rubbing the finger over the plastic it feels half as thick as the previous models, you don't even need to press a key to feel the difference.
The corner cutting seems to have started the moment IBM sold ThinkPad to Lenovo. The fact that ThinkPad used to sell laptop keyboards for desktop use, says it all:
It didn't take more than a couple of years before Lenovo discontinued this gem either; in favor of a cheaper alternative (in terms of production cost).
Everyone knew this was going to happen as soon as the sale was announced. Say what you want about IBM, for decades it was a company run by and for engineers, which meant that things like quality and tolerances were important product requirements, and they sold it to an entity essentially created to do acquisitions of IBM IP based out of China so it could be manufactured more cheaply. Lenovo did exactly what every expected, and it's honestly a miracle that modern Thinkpads are as good as they are, because they still stand neck and neck with Dell, where by all expectations they should be scraping the barrel.
> Everyone knew this was going to happen as soon as the sale was announced.
At least I feared this would happen; sad to see how it all went downhill.
To be honest I think the brand still sells products based on that feeling you got when you bought a ThinkPad 15-20 years ago. It was so sturdy, so nice to type on; everything just felt so solid. That is certainly why I've stayed loyal to that brand.
While they are not original T keyboards, they are supposed to match more recent T layouts. At some point, they had bluetooth and USB variants (I've got 5-ish of them around the house, I love the trackpoint for HTPC use), but this seems to be a newer iteration of those.
Yes, but they really shouldn't have touched the original design; it was just right. I haven't seen those later models in person, but when I worked as a consultant 16 years ago in Oslo, we had 2 guys in my company that lugged that original ThinkPad keyboard around to every assignment they got.
> After upgrading the display, CPU, disk, RAM, fan, battery it's a bit click-baity to say you've gone back to a 2012 ThinkPad
Well, I think the main point is : regardless of how better some modern components are (e.g. screen resolution, CPU energy efficiency with 10nm process, etc), the build quality, keyboard comfort, repairability and amounts of I/O are critical aspects that have dramatically regressed in the recent years. (Not even mentioning the Intel ME and Boot Guard that prevent flashing Coreboot).
Besides, it also shows that a 10 years old CPU/GPU is still perfectly usable (and since we only have one planet, it would be desirable to extend the lifetime of our devices... (upgrading the RAM/SSD/Wi-Fi has an environmental impact, but far less than changing a whole machine !)).
It should be noted that he didn't upgrade the parts to their 2020 equivalent or something, they are all original components. He could have bought it from Lenovo or order from ebay.
I gave up on a Macbook Pro to use a Thinkpad T420s, the last one with the traditional keyboard. Aside from maxing out the memory and the SSD, I only upgraded the LCD panel to a better one ordered on AliExpress.
I've been discussing just this with the folks in reddit /r/thinkpad recently.
There are lots on your side, but I see lots of upvotes for the new-keyboard-haters too.
For me, the 220/420/520 are the last good Thinkpads. I have all 3 and use them all regularly. Anything after that, IMHO the chiclet keyboards are unusable trash.
They've got even worse since the ?30 generation and now are right down there with Dell and other cheapo glued-together skip-ware.
Oh, a ThinkPad T400 series, one of those models was actually my first laptop at work in my current company (joined about 4 years ago)! Albeit it was a bit dated even then, it was still a pleasure to use and i never really felt like i needed to switch to something newer, maybe just for more RAM. Though my current ThinkPad has a larger screen, which is nice too! That said, 24 GB felt enough for me throughout 2021, even for enterprise Java projects.
Honestly, as far as laptops go, it feels to me that the various types of ThinkPad laptops are some of the best out there - they feel sturdy, the build quality is good, the driver support is generally pretty good (only had problems with display drivers once in a newer model) and the keyboards are the best that i've tried in any laptop to date (outside of Apple devices, i guess).
I've also been meaning to look into the Fujitsu Lifebook series of laptops for personal devices, but currently can't really afford them. Are there any other sturdy but powerful laptops that the people here would like to recommend?
I own a T430 myself and have enjoyed using it for a couple of years already. Very durable, reliable and upgradable - plus its just fun to use. I removed the CD Rom and put an SSD in its place; upgraded to 8GB Ram; got a GTX 1050ti as an external GPU running and connected it together with an external monitor, keyboard and mouse to a docking station. That way I can use it on the go and then just put it on the docking station to have all the peripherals connected/disconnected easily.
I could also update the processor but it would require spending more than 100€ on the chip and an improved cooling which I dont think justifies a minor boost in performance.
Does the external GPU works alright? I have a T530 with a NVidia that I use dual monitor. But it's old, and Blender doesn't use it for rendering. Been thinking about one of these little egpu adapters, but don't know anyone that used it actually.
The gpus from that generation are quite shit. Nonetheless, the igpu version is better for battery life and linux. I changed my motherboard from w530 to t530 (igpu version) to get rid of nvidia.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadOverall I get great performance even for stuff like running IDEA and a spring web app in a docker container, and I get 13h+ of battery life out of it (+10h if I switch the external battery to the second one I keep in my laptop bag).
I'd wish the 30th anniversary thinkpad (coming this year) will be just an upgraded T25 with a modern ryzen processor but in every other way identical (I know, an unrealistic dream)
I switched to Mac a little over a decade ago, and since then I don't really think about my computer. It's a tool that generally just works. It's not for everyone but it really solved that issue for me.
At work for new devs we bought ThinkPads with Ryzen. These are in general fine, except that multiple people have this weird issue with the computer completely freezing at random times on Linux. The one person who had Windows didn't have this issue. If it weren't for this issue that would be our default buy for new hires. Now, I don't know really.
Likely an issue with the C6 power state. Try searching for "ryzen linux c6 state" and you'll find plenty of people with these issues. Try updating BIOS, disabling C6 in BIOS or with https://github.com/jfredrickson/disable-c6.
I know that some of the guys have tried some of the fixes that can be found online with limited success, I'll forward this to them!
It's a real pity though! Were it not for the freeze issue the laptops would be quite solid!
This is not really a 2012 machine any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
If you really want to talk about Ship of Theseus-ing a Thinkpad, the hardcore guys have literally ripped out the motherboard and installed a completely different motherboard with a modern i7 CPU. These "frankenpads" include the X62 (Broadwell CPU and motherboard in an old X61), T70 (Kaby Lake CPU in a T60), X210 (Kaby Lake R CPU in a X200 body). They also rip out the LCD and replace it with a modern IPS display. They sometimes also rip out the keyboard to replace it with an older keyboard- T420 keyboard in a T430 is common.
So, a CPU upgrade? How is that not what OP mentions?
The LCD upgrade is also on the wishlist..
Are you asking how replacing the motherboard in a laptop with a custom third party hobbyist replacement is different from putting a faster CPU in a CPU socket?
Unlike modern laptops, the T430 motherboard had a socketed CPU (like a desktop motherboard). Upgrading the CPU was only marginally more difficult than upgrading the RAM (as long as the replacement CPU had the same package/pinout and was supported by the chipset). Lenovo datasheets would even give you a table of every CPU configuration they tested.
The "hardcore guys" mentioned by the parent are installing bodged motherboards that were never designed to fit in a given model's enclosure, occasionally doing major board surgery to make it work.
I really appreciate your feedback, thoughts and own experiences that relate to this post!
In the end I went back to MacBooks. First an M1 Air, now a MBP 14" with an an M1 Pro. They are insanely fast, while staying cool. The fan on the Pro only spins up during long builds, but even then it's barely audible.
If you don't like macOS, getting an old(er) ThinkPad is probably the best option.
Ubuntu LTS works flawless on my thinkpad but some stuff break on Ubuntu 21.10.
It is kinda cool that I can get it shipped with Qubes though, which I assume means hardware support is solid.
What batteries have you had good luck with? My main and ultrabay batteries are both down to around 50% of original new capacity now.
Shame it isn't a 54 slot. You'd be able to get an expresscard bluetooth mouse. They're comfier than you'd expect and incredibly convenient. They even charge while stored in the slot.
I recently got M1 Max MacBook, and I was expecting a huge jump from my 2010 Mac Pro, but on my day-to-day work. It is barely noticeable, despite the raving reviews of M1. Perhaps for me it is not about things getting obsolete, but more of that my own needs on CPU/GPU performance were pretty much fulfilled in 2010. I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high. Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe.
This isn't true for all programmers. I'm a programmer, and until 3 years ago a good chunk of my day was spent waiting for compiles to finish.
> Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe.
Not even remotely close. I have an AMD threadripper [0] in a desktop PC under my desk that I use for development. This is a mainstream, readily available x64 processor with 32 cores (and hyperthreading) that can sustain just 3.8GHz for at least 30 minutes (I've not pushed it any farther than that because I've needed to). Based on PassMark benchmarks [1], the threadripper is substantially quicker than the M1 Max.
[0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3...
[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-...
I am debating a move to desktop/workstation with desktop CPU to support smoother Scala/lots-of-containers development experience.
Pandemic made laptops less appealing. With digital nomadism being a question mark for some. Yes, I do know some still continue to practice this lifestyle. I can be only jealous :)
I work in games and write C++. Compile times are long, and we deal with large amounts of assets (current project is ~50GB of textures, models, animations, sound. This is small. Last project was >500GB).
> With digital nomadism being a question mark for some.
Sure, if you want portability or being able to move around this sort of machine won't work for you, but I live with my partner in a nice city, work remotely and have a separate home office. I have almost 0 need for the portability of a laptop.
Security – having open port to workstation makes me scared; bugs/0-days are discovered every day;
Quality Internet Connection – less tricky as most access would be local LAN, but I am certain that few times I need it remotely to fix a production issue, something will go wrong;
Maintenance vs Cost – in-house machine would be cheaper but will require remote power on/off capability vs in cloud server being rather pricey
But yes, in general, I agree. Having a light, portable device with long battery life and connecting to a remote, beefy machine would be a dream. And I am not imagining it, as this was my workflow back in 2013 when I was working for a bank. If it was possible then, it definitely is possible today.
Have high hopes for https://shadow.tech/
[0] https://github.com/loki-47-6F-64/sunshine
Then again, if you wanna use it for rendering, just buy 4 M1 macminis for the price of one CPU. Or 6 minis if you add all the other stuff you need.
> It's not portable has a TDP of 280W
That doesn't bother me in the slightest for a workstation.
> So yeah, maybe for rendering it's faster, but it won't be as snappy as the M1.
Nobody who cares about performance is doing rendering on a CPU, it's all GPU accelerated. It's not about "snappiness", it's about suitability for work. I upgraded from an 8700k to this machine and saw a 5x speedup (my compiles dropped from 30m to about 6 minutes).
it is a good replacement for many. It might not be the fastest of all, but that doesn't mean it's not a good replacement
It's faster single threaded, and will be faster until you fully saturate more than around 14 threads.
Couldn't find a linux compilation benchmark, but here a comparison with the M1 on compilation performance:
https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-eigen
Compilation test shows that it's even faster.
> Does It Scale Well With Increasing Cores?
> No, based on the automated analysis of the collected public benchmark data, this test / test settings does not generally scale well with increasing CPU core counts.
If your workload is compiling a single file serially, then sure this might be a great upgrade for you. I went through the copmpile benchmarks and the only other one that has an M1 mac and a 3970x on that site is build2 [0] which shows the m1 is 4x faster on a build that scales well with cores. FFMpeg [1] doesn't list the M1 in the test table, but it does have one benhmark [2] which is again quicker with the threadripper.
[0] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build2
[1] https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-ffmpeg
[2] https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2201040-NE-FFMPEGBUI53
Has OSL already been ported to GPUs? You're implying that OSL users such as film studios "don't care about performance" but I suspect this simply isn't true.
A large amount of commercial renderers and commercial rendering software is GPU accelerated which was what I was trying to refer to (and would like to update my comment to but can't).
That said, given the render times for indiovidual frames a laptop is going to end up thermally throttling which will wipe out the single threaded gains, and being limited to very small amounts of ram is likely going to make using a current M1 Mac impossible for anything like OSL.
Also, I'd like to add memory constraints as an example of workload inequality: The M10 max only seems to support 64GB. Good for many, but would be a huge draw back at my last dev job. The problem could inherently use huge amounts of memory, and exact memory usage was not always predictable. Especially for those colleagues which did a lot of work for customers, changing one parameter could mean coming back to a OOM after the program run for a night (or longer). Thanks to 128GB this became much rarer, but the for the type of program at some point the only viable option to safe memory is to accept a worse result.
That's a really good point. In my last job, our machines had 256GB of memory to fully utilise the 3990x cores.
> desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different.
They're a little bit different, but they're still mainstream, readily available desktop envioronments. You can go on Scan here in the UK and order one of those systems just like you can order any other intel or AMD system.
I compared highend 2010 desktop to highend 2021 laptop on my use case (which is arguably much lighter). And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor (which is great, but not a leap from 2010 desktop). I can imagine todays desktops could be much better compared to todays highend laptops, but it feels like the most of what I do, there is little reasons to upgrade. Which is also great. With Macs the latest macOS support is removed usually from 5 years old machines, but that feels mostly baseless from technical perspective as with hacks you can still run the latest just fine.
Perhaps it is a nostalgia / romancy. Having a 12 years old machine as you daily workhorse where upgrade was not a leap. That is something I haven’t seen before, and I have been in this industry since 90ies and a PC user since 80ies.
Day to day that doesn't matter. I work on multiplayer games, and being able to run 8/12/16 clients on one machine at 10 fps at ultra low graphics is far more important than being able to run stupid resolutions. You do bring up another point though - GPU performance. Apologies for the links but I'm on my phone, but [0] and [1] have 3dmark benchmarks for the M1 GPU and an RTX 3090 GPU - the 3090 scores twice what the M1 GPU does. This might not be important to you, but it is to some people.
> And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor
Ultimately that's all it comes down to. If you're not limited by the form factor/performance of a laptop power to you, but some of us are!
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-GPU-Benchmarks-an...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3090-GPU-Be...
It helps that you can buy a maxed out macbook pro for the price of a single 3090 though.
How much M1 MacBook Pro is that getting you?
That said, I do wish the M1 GPU could game; my downtime hobby is the only thing stopping me from buying one.
Where can you find that? lowest I can find is 2800 new. There are some pre-owned for 2700 and some open auctions at roughly 2300 but those will land substantially higher than 2300 I would imagine.
I got M1 Air and not only is it a huge difference from my previous 2017 MPB 13" (which I gave to my mother who spilled coffee into her previous laptop), it is much better than my work provided 2019 MBP 16".
"Snappiness" is subjective and hard to measure, but the thermals are huge difference. My work MBP is sitting at 63°C with just Firefox pointed at HN. On both my old MBP and the work one, playing 1440p video (native screen resolution) would make it loud, and playing 4k video on 4k monitor would turn it into a vacuum cleaner.
The Air is completely silent at all times (it has no fan) and sits at 32°C while playing 1440p and maybe 40°C when playing 4k content.
It is of course possible, that this is all because the previous Macbooks were so bad (and due to hw decoding for common video formats) but I had similar "Jesus this is such a loud, overheating mess" experience with other laptops as well. But desktops have much better thermals already - so for you, the biggest difference would be the mobility I guess.
For me the big win with the M1 Pro was that I could work flat out and not worry about it overheating and giving up.
It's a lot easier for desktops to have adequate cooling and power.
If it's the latter, then I can hear the footsteps of the Anti-Singularity getting ever closer....
Or else there are still useful durable laptops being produced, but not this model or this company.
I picked up a Samsung Galaxybook a few weeks ago. Nice core i5 system on a chip thing with Iris XE gpu. Runs cool including when under load and it's fast enough. Driver support seems decent in Linux. Even the graphics are quite alright. I played some steam games with it even. Nothing recent though.
The touchpad is a multitouch thing that sort of replicates what a decent macbook would be capable off (but with way less precision). The keyboard is alright and they even squeezed in a numeric pad. It has 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Decent battery life too. With Manjaro it's quite a nice work laptop. Not bad for 700 Euro.
At that price (which was a black Friday discount), why bother patching up a ten year old laptop. Not worth the expenses on the parts IMHO.
I have yet to see a good keyboard on a modern laptop, and I use a lot of different ones. Some people do not care, but I do. There's some keyboards that are "still decent", but all of them are progressively getting worse. Well, they say that Mac keyboards are getting better again, but I don't like their zero-keytravel style in the first place, not even in the ones that were considered good.
Thinkpad T400 roundabout was a good keyboard in my view.
I've since switched to an M1 Macbook, but until last year, I spend a good four-five years working from an x220t and x220. As long as the battery is in decent shape, there still really isn't a better value proposition than the old T420-T430 era Thinkpads.
The NMB manufactured keyboards are excellent. The others can be hit or miss.
But what about the keyboard /layout/? My rant at [0]
To clarify it somewhat, currently I have a laptop with two Fn keys. I rarely use the right one, but it feels very organic when I do.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29807256
I guess we all have our pet peeves.
For prolonged use, you really should have a separate keyboard and monitor, properly adjusted to your individual height and posture. Your back and neck will thank you for it.
That's exactly what it was in my case. Maybe it isn't so bad with Ivy bridge, but my previous laptop that I upgraded from was an i7 Sandy bridge T420s. It has the 1600x900 display, and I decked it out a long time ago with 16GB and a solid state.
But still, it totally choked on youtube/twitch 60fps feeds if they weren't piped through streamlink+VLC. I'm pretty self-satisfied with how long I was able to stick it out, but when I got my first tech job last year, it just choked on video calls, necessitating an upgrade to something more reasonably specced.
When I booted it up, I checked the most recent entry in pacman's logs:
Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup.Using it was surprisingly pleasant, I think the most painful thing was initial builds for some large Haskell projects were slow but subsequent builds were tolerable. Also the original screen, while nicely visible with the matte surface, has a painfully low resolution of 1366x768 and so few websites are happy with half of that width now that everything has huge margins.
Probably the most important thing was that it was mine (even though I haven't done the sorts of mods in TFA) in a way that my work laptop and the windows machines I'd been using outside of work could never be.
(I do love how sturdy it is. Especially with the slice battery that almost doubles the thickness and gives it enough juice for hours)
YMMV but the snide remark is definitely unjustified.
Plus KDE Plasma has become such a joy to use! I repurposed my T530 as a media center with a wireless keyboard and it's been a fantastic experience
I keep it simple, just have a standard desktop install of Arch with Plasma. Lets me also do work on the machine, writing code here and there, checking emails etc. The living room setup is much easier on my back for extended work sessions as compared to my office chair.
Makes me a bit salty because the Steelcase Gesture is an absolutely EXCELLENT chair and I paid a lot for it but... health is more important. Hopefully I will be using it more in the future if my physiotherapy progresses well.
Thank you for the anecdote. I am pondering Manjaro with XFCE but might look at KDE Plasma as well; a lot of people praise it.
here's a (temporary) image of this very setup: https://i.imgur.com/YBRlvkF.jpg
Parent was surprised that "Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything" after only 2 years of no updates. It "just" took them "an hour of babysitting it" through cyclic dependency headaches. Child comments proudly proclaim "only seen a handful of actual breakages" (since 2016) and "on the of easiest distros to fix when things go wrong".
Compare to my dad's laptop, which has been running Debian for about a decade and often goes multi-year stretches without updates, and has never broken. Not once. That's the kind of performance I expect from an OS.
Its portability is hard to beat for trips; Patagonia’s lovely Atom 8L sling bag is big enough for the tablet with some room left over.
Been pushing it to do Java development and, while a little slow, it's holding up fine
The touchpad in particular was horrible because it had different resolutions in X and Y. In one of those (I don't remember which) it was lower than the screen. So I found myself frequently unable to get to the 1 pixel wide handles to resize windows without the wigglestick.
Not quite sure why, might be due to slightly dodgy Linux experiences (x240 dodgy buttons and then now my sensitivity on X1 gen 9 is a bit touch and go)
That said for regular point and click the touchpad is good enough. Tho when working there is no substitute for not leaving the homerow
They do seem to be very popular, and unfortunately for some operating systems they’re one of the few “safe” options with hardware support.
I personally haven’t found any particular laptop brand or model I particularly loved.
"Old" hardware is totally usable for much of what I do today, but the number #1 thing that I would miss is the modern displays which are just so much kinder on my ailing eyes. Amusingly the keyboards are often better on my old devices, but the trackpads are not.
EDIT: the processor is 64-bit. I was thinking of my ThinkPad T42p (another heavily serviced unit).
My new 460s is mostly just better because it's lighter. Performance plus is only noticeable in games and such stuff.
I am curious if this a US thing only. I mean, I've heard of company vehicles in second hand market but never company laptops. In my experience all these company laptops get decommisioned by IT never to remove any data, but I never really considered what happens at End-of-life for those.
A few questions:
1. Where do you find these retailers?
2. Where do you find suppliers selling new batteries for old devices?
(all of my previous attempts at finding replacement batteries for laptops and e-readers always resulted in very poor performance or even faulty battery packs)
edit: formating paragraphs for questions
my next laptop will be again refurb Thinkpad, for wife I would choose something like X240 A grade 8GB RAM, that cost like 250EUR
Most of mine came from Morgan Computers, but I also check Tier 1 Online and Bargain Hardware too.
I emigrated, and I have yet to find a good such vendor in the EU. Recommendations welcome!
My biggest disappointment was the trackpad on T440s. I hated is so much that I was thinkin about replacing it with a new one. Besides that I really like all of the ThinkPad laptops that I've used so far.
I used a dual-core upgraded T430 for quite a while. The problem was actually the battery life. 2-3 hours just doesn't compare to a M1 Macbook's 13 hours.
My t430 is already equipped with 16gb ram and modded EC so I can use cheap 3rd party batteries and the OG 7 row keyboard instead of the trash 6 row island keyboard. There are still some upgrades to be made like i7 QM cpu, and a 1600x900 IPS screen, but I just can't justify the costs anymore.
The reason for moving to t480 soon is that I'll be doing the t25 frankenpad mod solely just for the 7 row keyboard. Better power effiecient cpu, nvme and high res screen is a cherry on top.
So far my thinkpad experience has been superb, and both my machines t410 + t430 have survived many drops and various liquid spills(water/coffee/alcohol) and besides replacing the keyboard, I had 0 issues. Hopefully the t480 will be similar experience.
What surprised me the most is that Lenovo ships something as annoying as a loud fan (easily replaceable even for a home tinkerer). Of course they save a few pennies per laptop; but no laptop can ever be good if it's noisy. That was one of the main reasons why I bought an X301 ThinkPad many years ago, even when it fanned like crazy it was very quiet. But the clever design of the original ThinkPad's was starting to fade already then; the X301 actually had it's speakers on top. So you could spill liquid on it, unless you happened to spill it on top of one of your top mounted speakers of course.
I've also gone through a few ThinkPad's over the years, and ever since they stopped being IBM; they seem to loose more and more of the "premium feel" for every generation. Especially the keyboard is way better on my old T40 then on the one I use right now (T14).
That's the good part - it's possible, and it's serviceable. My spouse uses a 10y (almost 11y) laptop, it has pretty much everything changed & upgraded. CPU, RAM, keyboard, CD->SSD, HDD->SSD, battery, fan, wifi 801.1 b/g -> ac+bluetooth. The discrete GPU is not replaceable, of course.
Agreed. The way things are constructed now (cell phones are of course 10 times worse), where everything is glued in place in order to break if anyone tries to replace them are terrible. The tinker tutorials on youtube seem to be more about which temperature different glue melts at, and which temperature the parts glued get destroyed at; then anything else.
My next laptop will probably be a https://frame.work laptop for that very reason.
Some products have a 2 year "reklamasjon" while others have 5; it's sometimes a bit surprising which products get 2 and 5 years. Cellphones have 5 for instance, which seems strange given their (ab)use. Companies cannot opt out of this.
Although I'd think you had replaced the entire cooling solution, heatpipes and all.
This T-14 has a keyboard as horrible as any Asus. It looks exactly like the standard Thinkpad keyboard, but the key travel, the bottoming-out, the spring pressure, are all horrible. Even just rubbing the finger over the plastic it feels half as thick as the previous models, you don't even need to press a key to feel the difference.
http://www.notebookreview.com/picture/?f=48072
It didn't take more than a couple of years before Lenovo discontinued this gem either; in favor of a cheaper alternative (in terms of production cost).
At least I feared this would happen; sad to see how it all went downhill.
To be honest I think the brand still sells products based on that feeling you got when you bought a ThinkPad 15-20 years ago. It was so sturdy, so nice to type on; everything just felt so solid. That is certainly why I've stayed loyal to that brand.
They always had silly, hard-to-search-for names (it seems the variants I have are called "Thinkpad Compact USB Keyboard with Trackpoint" and "Thinkpad Compact Bluetooth Keyboard with Trackpoint"): https://support.lenovo.com/nl/en/solutions/pd026745, https://support.lenovo.com/de/en/solutions/pd026744
While they are not original T keyboards, they are supposed to match more recent T layouts. At some point, they had bluetooth and USB variants (I've got 5-ish of them around the house, I love the trackpoint for HTPC use), but this seems to be a newer iteration of those.
Well, I think the main point is : regardless of how better some modern components are (e.g. screen resolution, CPU energy efficiency with 10nm process, etc), the build quality, keyboard comfort, repairability and amounts of I/O are critical aspects that have dramatically regressed in the recent years. (Not even mentioning the Intel ME and Boot Guard that prevent flashing Coreboot).
Besides, it also shows that a 10 years old CPU/GPU is still perfectly usable (and since we only have one planet, it would be desirable to extend the lifetime of our devices... (upgrading the RAM/SSD/Wi-Fi has an environmental impact, but far less than changing a whole machine !)).
Obviously the ones on ideapad and whatnot are not in the same league, but the keyboard on T450s and T460s are pretty awesome.
There are lots on your side, but I see lots of upvotes for the new-keyboard-haters too.
For me, the 220/420/520 are the last good Thinkpads. I have all 3 and use them all regularly. Anything after that, IMHO the chiclet keyboards are unusable trash.
They've got even worse since the ?30 generation and now are right down there with Dell and other cheapo glued-together skip-ware.
(Skip = dumpster in USian.)
Honestly, as far as laptops go, it feels to me that the various types of ThinkPad laptops are some of the best out there - they feel sturdy, the build quality is good, the driver support is generally pretty good (only had problems with display drivers once in a newer model) and the keyboards are the best that i've tried in any laptop to date (outside of Apple devices, i guess).
I've also been meaning to look into the Fujitsu Lifebook series of laptops for personal devices, but currently can't really afford them. Are there any other sturdy but powerful laptops that the people here would like to recommend?