I’m rather certain that you will come to the same conclusion, esteemed reader, as I did, namely that the Thinkpad X220 is the best laptop ever made, in consideration of the following points.
»
This is fantastic and actually written more clearly than my own!
As for your point:
> You can’t watch videos on it
I don’t seem to have the same issue? Most videos on the internet stream/load fine without much struggle on my X220. Does your laptop heat up / spin up the fan?
My i5 X220 is a battered old much-repaired much-upgraded thing, but still works fine. Currently it runs ArcaOS but before that Haiku.
My i7 X220 is like new, and works like it too. It is maxed out with 16GB RAM and two SSDs and performs well. I do wish the screen were a bit higher-res, though.
I personally detest videos as a source of information and try to avoid watching them. I prefer watching video on a bigger screen several meters away, and I don't do much of that.
That being said, I have both i5 and i7 X220s, i5 and i7 T420s and an quad-core i7 W520. All play video just fine for me, and under Linux their performance is good and they don't run hot.
Never had a problem on YouTube or or similar, but when doing group calls on zoom I had severe overheating issues on my x220. I think the CPU was due a thermal paste replacement, but I never bothered.
Sadly the worst ones ever - ours had NVidia onboard GPU and they got toasted after 2 years of moderate non gaming use - company then switched to Dell after that debacle.
I'm still in love with my x201s, the x220 predecessor. It was 16:10 and could have a super high res of… 1440x900, a rare thing in such a small format for the time. These small thinkpads were solid as hell, packed with I/O. Perfect keyboard. You could set it with a 90Wh battery. For a 12" laptop. Haha. Screen quality, speakers, touchpad were all garbage but oh well. So much other stuff was perfect. Good times.
I've been looking for one of those for some years now. In $JOB-1 I had 2 colleagues who were X200 fans and one of them told me about it (and bequeathed me his docking station when he left).
It is a great machine but the screen resolution was already rubbish when the X220 was introduced.
And crucify me if you will but the new ThinkPad keyboard can feel _great_ on the models where it is deep enough (T series mostly). I just miss the 7 rows of the old layout.
The screen is garbage and most of the second-hand fleet has the TN screen. The IPS screen was a rare option. The X220 and its immediate predecessors came out during the very embarrassing (for Lenovo) period during which they claimed it was impossible to source IPS displays. A few days after the X220 came out, Apple switched to 100% IPS displays across their product line. This forced Lenovo to change their tune.
IMHO the "good" laptops were from the era when Lenovo was still traveling on IBM's roadmap. The X61 Tablet had a magnificent display. As soon as Lenovo switched to widescreen designs, it was all downhill.
tablet versions usually came with IPS, I recently bought an x220t because the x220 screen is garbage. a missed a rare opportunity two weeks ago to buy an IPS panel for an x220 for 20€
My travel machine is a Thinkpad X13s. I'm stuck on Windows for most of my work, but it's been an utter treat to use while on the road (especially with the onboard 5G). It's one of the first machines I've been able to use that a 10+ hour day away from a charger is finally feasible under my working conditions.
Ah, I actually got mine well before your review ;) I've had mine for a year now (Aug 2022); here in the States I took advantage of my mobile carrier's 0% financing to grab one direct from them. It was a bullet to bite for sure but it's well paid off. My only hardware gripe is the one you've pointed out - no USB-A kills me sometimes if I forget to pack a dongle.
For me having the onboard 5G was the ultimate boon. Sure, hotspotting is An Thing, but it's so much nicer to just not have to think about that and let the laptop do all the work. Verizon gives me true-full-unlimited data on its Ultra Wideband 5G coverage, and it's so weirdly satisfying to have almost "wireless fiber" jammed into the thing - I've seen multi-Gbps speedtests out of this thing on the cell network.
I still have an T440p and a X220 in the workshop they are workhorses. I am Linux only these days but the T440p with MacOS is the perfect laptop if someone sends you a keynote file or you need Xcode.
I'm sorry to be that guy, but what is a "screen lock" button? Does the X220 have a button to lock the display, or (again, I'm sorry) are you talking about ScrLock (Scroll Lock)?
Writing this on a ThinkPad with great appreciation for them. And, in fact, I'm genuinely unsure what magical buttons a ThinkPad might have squirreled away.
I don't know why Lenovo likes to throw money to the pit and don't go back to the IBM keyboard layout, I have a t430 with a t420 keyboard mod and despite not being mechanical it's amazing to type on.
A 10yo used eBay X220 got me through four years of college. I did Verilog synthesis on it. I learned how to use i3, and even used my own fork of Sam, an old text editor for Plan9. I wrote my first from-scratch RTOS on it. It's a tremendous laptop even today, but it's also one that holds a special place in my heart.
X270 is my PC when I am away from my home office - wish it was a bit faster but then I look at my colleagues lugging around their HP/Dell "gaming" laptops and I am not so envious anymore.
Yeah, an X270 is my newest Thinkpad. I got it as kind of a beater for a vacation that COVID cancelled. That or an X280 feel like kind of the sweet spot for usable almost modern small Thinkpads that can still be upgraded. USB-C port for charging, video out, etc. $70 FHD display panel. Can take two SSDs (one small one in the WWAN slot). It's been mostly fast enough for everything except heavier games but software builds can be slow.
I don't think it's a coincidence that author has picked a laptop whose processor came out in 2011. Intel has basically had a lost decade in terms of performance. I remember going from my 2012 Macbook Air (i7) to a 2015 Macbook Pro (13inch) to the 2014 Macbook Pro (15inch) to finally getting a Thinkpad X1 and I never felt like the 2012 Macbook Air was struggling in the way that the subsequent laptops struggled.
Now my X1 doesn't have the build quality of the X220 - but it's still very good and I finally bit the bullet and did what someone well paid who relies on a tool for work should do. I bought the full 5 years support package for my X1. Any hardware issues? Send it in they'll fix it no questions asked. I need the laptop for work, I get paid good money, it's a good investment to have that business level support.
The only area where the X220 is really showing it's age today though - you just gotta have USBC ports I'm afraid.
I just grabbed a cousin of this model and have been having fun modding it and use it more than my new gaming laptop. It's a A285. I have a surface laptop 4 that's smaller and technically faster but I still enjoy typing on the Thinkpad more and other than ram everything is basically upgradable.
Sandy Bridge was a really really good release, but it's also not useful to ignore that Intel really did keep improving their product for a while. While their product segmentation (keeping mobile parts pinned at 2 cores, and the quad core limit on desktop) definitely was a form of 'stagnation', Intel made real improvements in their micro architecture, at least up to (and including Skylake).
The real 'lost years' were post Skylake, where we got like 5 generations of Skylake refreshes while Intel couldn't manage to get their new node online.
I know we can point at benchmarks and things like that, all I'm saying is that my personal experience is that I spent a decade trying to find something as good as my top-spec 2012 macbook air, which is pretty depressing. Note obviously I also went via the horribly broken keyboard era of macbook pros. Eventually I settled on a X1 carbon, and then a couple of years later the ARM macbooks came out, but I can't justify buying a new laptop out of cycle if my current one works.
I bought an X1 around 2016, and its still super reliable. I think it was a 4th gen.
It has a couple small issues, sometimes the USB ports fall asleep and never wake up regardless of OS, the lid has a couple hairline cracks where it takes the brunt of the open/close force. The fingerprint reader never worked in Linux.
Aside from that, it still has 90% of its battery life after all this time, boots fast, does everything I need a laptop for.
Even though RAM is soldered, 16gb still works and its a decent sacrifice for a laptop so light and thin.
Intel CPUs definitely got better over the years, but Macbooks were nerfed by Apple's mediocre CPU cooler designs. Their power curve was tweaked so users wouldn't notice (boost to extreme speeds extremely quickly to respond to clicks and such fast, then come down fast because the cooling can't sustain the boost speeds) but the CPUs never came out their best in any Macbook design, no matter how expensive they were to buy.
Most Thinkpads haven't been struggling, except maybe their netbook counterpart. Some "workstation" ones with Nvidia hardware in them do put out unreasonable amounts of heat and noise, but that's hard to prevent when Nvidia is the only one making GPU hardware that performs well in laptops.
I must say the Dell and Lenovo support packages are great. Few people buy them, but the knowledge that the company will send someone to your house within 24 hours to either replace a broken part or give you a new laptop should placate a lot of anxiety.
I think the unspoken story of the apple intel relationship in the latter half of the 2010s was that Apple was waiting on intel to release cooler and more efficient chips (by means of smaller processes), and intel might’ve made promises causing apple to adapt smaller and smaller designs for cooler running chips, and intel didn’t deliver.
Intel could've failed their promises in the 2012 Macbook and the blame would fall squarely on them, but when the 2015 Macbook came out, Apple still fell for it. In fact, they got worse over time.
Something tells me they were starting to design for M1 before the M1 was ready. The 2020 Intel Macbook Air ran effectively passively cooled by dumping heat into the motherboard and chassis and cooling a whole different part of the machine.
Apple machines and heat have always been a complicated story. The trash can Mac was innovative in its cooling design, but that same design made upgrading the machine tough. One Macbook model blew hot air right into the place the cover around the screen was glued to, and at one point Nvidia's shitty hardware managed to desolder itself inside a Mac machine because of its bad design.
I'm glad they've found a way to produce cooler chips because it seems Apple's fetish for sleekly designed machines conflicted heavily with their cooling performance.
X200/201, X220/230, X240/250/260, X270/280/A275/285 are each substantially different. Between slashed groups there are limited parts interchangeability e.g. battery, X250 trackpad retrofit on X240. In case that matters.
Strange. My brother was running this laptop and had to replace display twice because there is a mechanical point of failure with how the display cable is layed out within the case.
As counterpoint for the repairability I never liked how hard it is to access the fan assembly on thinkpads. You basically have to fully take the laptop apart to access it. And for the laptops from a decade ago I typically wanted to clean the fan assembly properly every year around springtime.
For example for the X220 the fan assembly is removed after the system board, no way around. Before the system board can be replaced, the following components need to be removed:
• “1010 Battery pack” on page 63
• “1020 Hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD)” on page 63
• “1030 DIMM” on page 65
• “1040 Keyboard” on page 67
• “1050 Palm rest or palm rest with a fingerprint reader” on page 69
• “1070 Backup battery” on page 73
• “1060 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless LAN/WiMAX” on page 71
• “1080 PCI Express Mini Card for wireless WAN” on page 74
• “1090 Keyboard bezel” on page 76
• “1100 LCD assembly” on page 77
• “1110 Base cover assembly and speaker assembly” on page 80
There are other decade old laptops with similar quality service manuals that don't have this issue and the fan assembly can be removed without too much hassle.
No idea what that process is - I have a few t430s and have replaced each of their fans at least once. It's just a case of remove the k/b and top bezel, maybe one of the speakers (can't remember, but it's just a single screw anyway) and then the heatsink/fan. No need to remove the screen and all that other stuff in the manual. takes 15 mins max.
I have a 220, it is a PITA, I have taken it apart to repaste it. And yes, taken it apart. Even the display had to come off. However, I have two others - X1s - and they are a piece of cake. Just remove the bottom panel and the fan is right there.
I recently had to replace the fan because the motor died, and agree, that's a really big hassle. If you want to unscrew/remove the whole fan from the motherboard, you have to lift off the whole heatsink assembly from the board+cpu, meaning you also have to re-apply thermal paste every time you clean the fan. Far from ideal.
But the most difficult part was finding a screwdriver for the VGA port (it screws into the case).
I actually replaced the fan on mine a few years ago and it's not hard at all. From that list:
* Battery pack is just clipped in the back
* Hard disk is removable with an extra maintenance hatch
* DIMM can stay where it is
* Keybord is fixed with five screws on the back
* palm rest is fixed with another three screws, remove it in the same step as the palm rest
* backup battery is not applicable for the x220
* pci cards can stay where they are
* keyboard bezel clips out
* lcd assembly can stay where it is
* base cover assembly and speaker assembly can stay where they are
A better manual would be:
* remove battery from the back
* remove ssd from its slot
* unscrew + remove keyboard and palm rest with keyboard bezel (this is pretty much one step trust me)
* unplug all five cables
* unscrew motherboard
* take motherboard (to which the fan is attached) from case and do what you want with it
X220 maintenance is a 10 minute job for disassembly and reassembly combined.
I 100% agree! I made a post earlier in the thread about this. Cleaning the fans on my T530 was so tough!
You basically have to take apart the entire computer from the keyboard down to the fan. The MBP Unibody 2012, which came out around the time of the T530, is way, way easier to clean the fans of.
I believe the way ThinkPad HMMs(Hardware Maintenance Manual - I'm sure it's an intended pun) works is you start from the first page until you hit the problematic part, and it ends with the CPU or "system planar" and all the parts around it. It's a carried over culture from IBM probably.
I've gotten by taking a hose from a vacuum cleaner and partially covering and uncovering the intake and exhaust holes in quick succession. It makes enough turbulence to clear most of the dust and hasn't broken anything yet.
I've had X220s and X220Ts for a few years, and I agree that they're probably one of the best laptops you can get second-hand. But they aren't as cheap as they used to be on eBay and they're only getting older. I had to cycle through three X220/Ts in four years because they failed for various reasons. Screen died. Bios just decided to stop working.
Finally I decided to ditch my last one by choice this summer and got a Thinkpad X13 Yoga Gen 3 and I really love it. Battery life of at least ten hours for what I'm doing. Still great Linux support. It's not too much lighter than the X220T, but it's a whole lot thinner and that's important trying to shove a whole lot of stuff in one bag. Also: USB-C charging means I no longer have to carry around a big proprietary brick and cable. I can just use the same charger as my phone. That's also important when it comes to weight and space savings.
The reason I chose this model in particular is because like the X220T, it also has the digitizer pen garaged in the frame. Really hard to find laptops that met that, and USB C, and thin, and Thinkpad keyboard + mouse nub. In fact I think it's the only one.
If this (fingers crossed) lasts me a while, amortized I don't think the cost up front will be that much more than what I would've had to have spent upgrading and transferring parts between eBay franken-ThinkPads over the same time.
Sadly it has that shitty modern Lenovo keyboard, with Fn in the left part of the keyboard (I'm not talking about Fn/Ctrl placement), Insert on Fn+End combo (Why?! WHY?![0]) and the stupid PrtScr under the right thumb, like you are taking screenshots every minute.
This alone averts me from any ThinkPad past x220 (and even x220 has elephantitis on the Del key..)
Sometimes it's not even "I use them not", sometimes it's "I need to use them because some program/whatever requires them" so there is no options.
And PrtScr on these keyboards replaces ContextMenu and I'm hardwired for a quarter of century to use it when I'm on the go without a mouse (hey, it's a laptop!). I lost my clipboard contents too many times so I had to figure it out, but it's ridiculous in the first place.
And overall it's like having a dildo in the driver seat of your car - you can choose to use it or not to, but still there should be no such thing in the driver seat of a car at all. /rant
... I don't remember I ever missed DEL on any laptop keyboard with a separate, two row functional keys block. At least never to bother me enough to remember that. It's in the bottom-left edge, you can't miss it, you have the tactile feel of it.
I fully agree about the newer ThinkPad keyboards. I wouldn't call them shitty, but after using the old ones it's such a step back. I use a key remapper to fix this stuff, currently using Xmonad which works very well (e.g., that dumb screenshot key is now the traditional menu key).
I've been following (and tempted by) someone on faceboock (lcdfans / Jackyzhang - http://www.cnmod.cn/ ) who has a business of rebuilding x220 / x200 series laptops with modern hardware - the latest I've seen is a "X2100" - an x210 with I7-10710U and 13 inch 3000X2000 IPS...
One day if I have and extra few $k that I'm willing to risk I may ordering one...
X230 seems like a better option to me, you can replace the k/b with a 220 keyboard.
But even though they're built like tanks, these 220/230s are getting old now. Given a choice of old X series thinkpads, the x270 makes more sense - still very decent build quality, modularity, etc, but pretty much better everything. The X280 has soldered ram and other undesirable changs.
For T series, the T480 seems to be the sweeet spot.
Still have one. Still an amazing machine. And still performing quite nicely despite being more than 10 years old by now.
The only limiting factor is the iGPU, which is way too old even for 1080P playback and DX10-level features.
I wish there were any expresscard-sized video cards available, even an heavily downclocked current-day mobile chip would be good enough and within the termal and power requirements of the integrated port; The x220 is fully capable of deactivating the internal video card and sending the signal from the pci-express bus to the integrated display when it detects a discrete one, I've tested it with no issues using an nvidia 750GTX ti and a pci-express adapter.
Body flex is not an issue that I expected to see mentioned about an X series. I have not had an X series since the X60 but that thing had about as much flex as a brick.
139 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] thread« Why Thinkpad X220 is the best laptop ever made
Published on 10.05.2020
I’m rather certain that you will come to the same conclusion, esteemed reader, as I did, namely that the Thinkpad X220 is the best laptop ever made, in consideration of the following points. »
https://okigiveup.net/blog/why-thinkpad-x220-is-the-best-lap...
I have 2 of them, and I love them dearly.
As for your point:
> You can’t watch videos on it
I don’t seem to have the same issue? Most videos on the internet stream/load fine without much struggle on my X220. Does your laptop heat up / spin up the fan?
My i7 X220 is like new, and works like it too. It is maxed out with 16GB RAM and two SSDs and performs well. I do wish the screen were a bit higher-res, though.
Here is one of my several stories on ancient-vs-modern Thinkpads:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/26/thinkpad_motherboard_...
I personally detest videos as a source of information and try to avoid watching them. I prefer watching video on a bigger screen several meters away, and I don't do much of that.
That being said, I have both i5 and i7 X220s, i5 and i7 T420s and an quad-core i7 W520. All play video just fine for me, and under Linux their performance is good and they don't run hot.
I have both an x220 and x201 and while the former is a better machine, the latter look nicer to me.
And crucify me if you will but the new ThinkPad keyboard can feel _great_ on the models where it is deep enough (T series mostly). I just miss the 7 rows of the old layout.
IMHO the "good" laptops were from the era when Lenovo was still traveling on IBM's roadmap. The X61 Tablet had a magnificent display. As soon as Lenovo switched to widescreen designs, it was all downhill.
I now use an M1 MacBook Air. It is better in many ways, but I miss the Thinkpad keyboard!
Ubuntu is just about there now, and Armbian works acceptably booted from a USB key.
With Windows, but you know this stuff:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/lenovo_thinkpad_x13s_...
Update: now with added Linux:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad...
For me having the onboard 5G was the ultimate boon. Sure, hotspotting is An Thing, but it's so much nicer to just not have to think about that and let the laptop do all the work. Verizon gives me true-full-unlimited data on its Ultra Wideband 5G coverage, and it's so weirdly satisfying to have almost "wireless fiber" jammed into the thing - I've seen multi-Gbps speedtests out of this thing on the cell network.
Writing this on a ThinkPad with great appreciation for them. And, in fact, I'm genuinely unsure what magical buttons a ThinkPad might have squirreled away.
But yes, I do find those little extra keys useful. Print Screen is great since I have it linked with scrot via dwm.
Now my X1 doesn't have the build quality of the X220 - but it's still very good and I finally bit the bullet and did what someone well paid who relies on a tool for work should do. I bought the full 5 years support package for my X1. Any hardware issues? Send it in they'll fix it no questions asked. I need the laptop for work, I get paid good money, it's a good investment to have that business level support.
The only area where the X220 is really showing it's age today though - you just gotta have USBC ports I'm afraid.
There needs to be more 12in laptops imo.
It looks like a thinkpad, but feels "wrong"
The real 'lost years' were post Skylake, where we got like 5 generations of Skylake refreshes while Intel couldn't manage to get their new node online.
Here's a review of Skylake (6700k) from way back showing IPC improvement from Sandy Bridge to Skylake - https://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-670...
It has a couple small issues, sometimes the USB ports fall asleep and never wake up regardless of OS, the lid has a couple hairline cracks where it takes the brunt of the open/close force. The fingerprint reader never worked in Linux.
Aside from that, it still has 90% of its battery life after all this time, boots fast, does everything I need a laptop for.
Even though RAM is soldered, 16gb still works and its a decent sacrifice for a laptop so light and thin.
This is a pretty goofy take. A current mobile Intel CPU is 4-20x faster than a mobile Sandy Bridge depending on application.
Most Thinkpads haven't been struggling, except maybe their netbook counterpart. Some "workstation" ones with Nvidia hardware in them do put out unreasonable amounts of heat and noise, but that's hard to prevent when Nvidia is the only one making GPU hardware that performs well in laptops.
I must say the Dell and Lenovo support packages are great. Few people buy them, but the knowledge that the company will send someone to your house within 24 hours to either replace a broken part or give you a new laptop should placate a lot of anxiety.
Something tells me they were starting to design for M1 before the M1 was ready. The 2020 Intel Macbook Air ran effectively passively cooled by dumping heat into the motherboard and chassis and cooling a whole different part of the machine.
Apple machines and heat have always been a complicated story. The trash can Mac was innovative in its cooling design, but that same design made upgrading the machine tough. One Macbook model blew hot air right into the place the cover around the screen was glued to, and at one point Nvidia's shitty hardware managed to desolder itself inside a Mac machine because of its bad design.
I'm glad they've found a way to produce cooler chips because it seems Apple's fetish for sleekly designed machines conflicted heavily with their cooling performance.
The X230 is practically identical physically, and can have the X220 keyboard swapped in.
But in the X230 you get a newer gen SoC and the iGPU is vulkan-capable.
note: the author of the site has been awol for a while
Great little machine, still enjoy it for basic hacking and writing once in a while.
An internal 3 cell battery and a removable 3 cell battery (a 6 cell one is also available)
I don't have a spare but the main point of this set up is to allow hot swapping of batteries wit no shutdowns when AC is unavailable
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X...
For example for the X220 the fan assembly is removed after the system board, no way around. Before the system board can be replaced, the following components need to be removed:
https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/0a60739_01.pd...T220 is not better in this regard either.
There are other decade old laptops with similar quality service manuals that don't have this issue and the fan assembly can be removed without too much hassle.
https://thinkpads.com/support/hmm/hmm_pdf/t430_t430i_hmm_en_...
Granted, you don't have to remove the display at least.
* Battery pack is just clipped in the back * Hard disk is removable with an extra maintenance hatch * DIMM can stay where it is * Keybord is fixed with five screws on the back * palm rest is fixed with another three screws, remove it in the same step as the palm rest * backup battery is not applicable for the x220 * pci cards can stay where they are * keyboard bezel clips out * lcd assembly can stay where it is * base cover assembly and speaker assembly can stay where they are
A better manual would be: * remove battery from the back * remove ssd from its slot * unscrew + remove keyboard and palm rest with keyboard bezel (this is pretty much one step trust me) * unplug all five cables * unscrew motherboard * take motherboard (to which the fan is attached) from case and do what you want with it
X220 maintenance is a 10 minute job for disassembly and reassembly combined.
You basically have to take apart the entire computer from the keyboard down to the fan. The MBP Unibody 2012, which came out around the time of the T530, is way, way easier to clean the fans of.
Finally I decided to ditch my last one by choice this summer and got a Thinkpad X13 Yoga Gen 3 and I really love it. Battery life of at least ten hours for what I'm doing. Still great Linux support. It's not too much lighter than the X220T, but it's a whole lot thinner and that's important trying to shove a whole lot of stuff in one bag. Also: USB-C charging means I no longer have to carry around a big proprietary brick and cable. I can just use the same charger as my phone. That's also important when it comes to weight and space savings.
The reason I chose this model in particular is because like the X220T, it also has the digitizer pen garaged in the frame. Really hard to find laptops that met that, and USB C, and thin, and Thinkpad keyboard + mouse nub. In fact I think it's the only one.
If this (fingers crossed) lasts me a while, amortized I don't think the cost up front will be that much more than what I would've had to have spent upgrading and transferring parts between eBay franken-ThinkPads over the same time.
Sadly it has that shitty modern Lenovo keyboard, with Fn in the left part of the keyboard (I'm not talking about Fn/Ctrl placement), Insert on Fn+End combo (Why?! WHY?![0]) and the stupid PrtScr under the right thumb, like you are taking screenshots every minute.
This alone averts me from any ThinkPad past x220 (and even x220 has elephantitis on the Del key..)
[0] and now I'm talking about Fn placement on the left side - even I can't make Fn+End with one hand. Compare it to ASUS TM420 keyboard: https://i0.wp.com/techraman.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/A...
And PrtScr on these keyboards replaces ContextMenu and I'm hardwired for a quarter of century to use it when I'm on the go without a mouse (hey, it's a laptop!). I lost my clipboard contents too many times so I had to figure it out, but it's ridiculous in the first place.
And overall it's like having a dildo in the driver seat of your car - you can choose to use it or not to, but still there should be no such thing in the driver seat of a car at all. /rant
not even the Thinkpad T25 Anniversary Edition?
One day if I have and extra few $k that I'm willing to risk I may ordering one...
But even though they're built like tanks, these 220/230s are getting old now. Given a choice of old X series thinkpads, the x270 makes more sense - still very decent build quality, modularity, etc, but pretty much better everything. The X280 has soldered ram and other undesirable changs.
For T series, the T480 seems to be the sweeet spot.
The only limiting factor is the iGPU, which is way too old even for 1080P playback and DX10-level features.
I wish there were any expresscard-sized video cards available, even an heavily downclocked current-day mobile chip would be good enough and within the termal and power requirements of the integrated port; The x220 is fully capable of deactivating the internal video card and sending the signal from the pci-express bus to the integrated display when it detects a discrete one, I've tested it with no issues using an nvidia 750GTX ti and a pci-express adapter.
That would be fantastic - should be a standard capability of newer m.2 slots too.
https://www.xyte.ch/mods/x210-x2100/ (note: the seller is awol)
would be happy to upgrade to a similar x220 mod with e.g. amd zen 4.
unfortunately, from what i understand lenovo sued the 51nb folk (motherboard designers) out of their business.