Anecdotal evidence is obvious but Lenovo has at least tried to keep up their quality (don’t buy anything other than the thinkpad line) but Mac durability in the long term may can have issues. I remember that I had to get a repair of two Mac’s I have owned (but one time Apple upgraded me to the newer version so that’s why I am loyal.)
I'll second this: Non-Thinkpad Lenovo laptops are poorly designed trash heaps. Thinkpads have largely retained the build quality that everyone brags on.
My tl;dr advice for buying a computer on a budget is, get a T480s off of eBay. They are corporate cast-offs and there are so. many. of them. The R2v3 rating system has become popular. Get one rated C5 or better (cosmetic: minor usage marks only) and F4 or better (functionality: everything works). Spring for one with a backlit keyboard, and a power supply included if you want it turn key.
As of this writing this should cost around $250 and the machine should be fairly future-proof including official Win11 support. And excellent Linux compatibility - my fingerprint reader doesn't work, but literally everything else works perfectly.
I've done what you described multiple times. One other tip is buy one with a lower resolution screen, and then replace the screen with a higher resolution one. Be sure to research this, though, some of the highest resolution screens need a different mobo with a higher pin connector.
While possible, I've never found the dollars-per-research-time conversion ratio to be particularly good for this upgrade. My advice is aimed at someone who doesn't want to become a thinkpad nerd (although that route is always available!).
Is there any tl;dr equivalent for upgrading screens like you described?
I think that advice depends on whether you're looking for "a laptop" or "a project" :)
I'm a massive thinkpad fan, as per sibling comments I have half a dozen in the room with me right now, but have never and don't plan to ever replace a screen. My time and hassle are worth more than $0-$30 I'd pay for one that already comes with higher res, and the risk / pain / fidgetiness is outside of my own personal threshold. Not so for others!! But my message is you don't need to replace screens and 3d-pring and dremel new keyboards to get value out of ThinkPads :).
1. Awareness that not everybody can or wants or dares to do that or be you. There's other people in this world! :)
2. LoL-ing other people for not being you
Entirely you choice! :)
-----------------
e.g. I can change tires and oil on my car and am aware that majority of people can't or don't want to - even handy, technically oriented ones.
There's simply a vast, vast majority of people to whom:
1. I'd happily recommend a ThinkPad because I think it'll serve a wide swath of people well
2. I would not come anywhere near suggesting they replace their screen; not only would that likely lead to disaster, but it'd 99% turn them off from considering ThinkPad in the first place.
Do you mean "T480-s" as in plural of T480, or T480s, as in the smaller version of T480?
The reason I'm asking is - "T480" is the last nicely modular ThinkPad with removable external battery. Which means if you get a used one and need to replace the battery, it's literally a 2 second job - you push a button, slide it out, and slide the new one in :)
The "T480s" though is a slightly smaller version with only an internal battery, like all newer ThinkPads, which not everybody will be comfortable with.
And yeah, I have 2 T420s-s and 3 T480's around me today and love them :-)
I have a T480s as well as a T25 (let's not talk about the x300, x220 and earlier stuff I have, being used as bookends; I did have a 701 but sadly threw it out, much to my chagrin in recent years), and the T480s gets used more often, simply because it's more portable. Plus, a rare slim laptop with that neato expandable RJ45 plug, when newer slim laptops nowadays forgo the same.
The internal battery can be readily sourced and replaced easily enough.
My latest toy is a GPD Win Max 2, keyboard isn't too bad actually, but I doubt it will last anywhere near as long as the T480s.
I did mean the T480s, singular. The increased portability is valuable in my opinion, but I'll grant that it's a tradeoff. Replacing the built in battery is a 3 minute job if you know how to work a screwdriver. (Literally just a Phillips.) Unless the battery is completely shot I'd argue that you should perhaps leave the OEM one, unless you know how to identify a genuine replacement.
Yep, with companies doing laptop replacements on a 3 year basis or 5 year basis depending, there are so many on ebay.
And looking at my own work provided ThinkPad, I keep it closed and docked 99% of the time, so the keyboard looks brand new despite being a 4-year-old laptop now.
But that just depends on the user/site it goes to.
For people eyeing a T480s, make sure both batteries inside don't have too much degradation. At some point, the switch from one battery to the other doesn't work properly and the laptop will most times suddenly switch off when battery #1 reaches 0%, even if the 2nd one is at 100%, no matter how many recalibrations you do.
Maybe it will work. But mine has more than 50% degradation on both, and I run Nixos from RAM and don't do serious work on it, so I don't care about the shutdowns.
I feel like this story is also relevant to the 2012 MacBook Pro and Air. My partner kept her air going for more than 10 years, and I saw people who for whatever reason (maybe keyboard or Touch Bar) hold on to those pros long past normal. So consider that another anecdote. Real data would be great here.
Conversely I had a classmate who used to joke about the fact that by the end of our degree, his macbook air had become a 4 "page" (mac)book as both covers were splitting.
I had a 2011 MacBook Pro that I used until end of 2022 when the discrete GPU failed for the second time (first time in 2016 Apple replaced the logic board).
+1 to this. got a 2012 MacBook Pro as a gift for middle school, upgraded to a 1tb drive and 8gb ram in high school, again upgraded to an ssd and 16gb ram after starting college in 2019. Kept using it until last year when I got a 16" M1. I still occasionally use it for Windows shenanigans, best gift ever.
I came here to add this, as a x230 user, the other laptop that has Mercedes diesel like longevity is the 2012 Macbook Pro. I've kept numerous alive for friends.
Agreed, I have two MacBook Pros from 2010 and 2011 which have been chugging along great since then; daily drivers up until 2020, then stuck on a shelf without any power conditioning for two years. Dusted them both off and put back in service. They're easy to clean, look basically brand new, and work just fine now as home servers after purchasing a USB-C to Magsafe adapter so I could recycle those old bricks. Now those I definitely went through a few of over the years.
Only thing that "killed" my older Air (I want to say 2016, but 2012 probably would have had the same issue): it couldn't run Zoom backgrounds without a green screen.
I usually paid 2/3rd of the cost of my upgraded model by parting out my old one. Thanks to Apple restricting parts (and their continued upgrades), the spare parts had good value. Sold everything (including the screws, people want OEM), except the battery.
I still use a fully specced out (i7, 8GiB memory, 512GiB SSD) Macbook Air 2013 daily . With OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1] it runs Sonoma well enough and dual boots OpenBSD for an even more lean experience.
Had to replace the battery, fan and thermal paste over the years - and it's surprisingly easy to work on, just a few screws on the bottom to take it apart and access to everything.
All these replies makes me want to buy yet another battery for my old 2014 MBP. But the last two gave up very quickly - so any ideas as to where I can get proper batteries for the old MacBooks?
Is it feasible to keep old MacBook up to date with regards to security patches? I have an old Mid 2014 MBP, but unsure how "dangerous" it would be to keep using it still?
I have a few of these I use in the garage. Slap an SSD and fresh battery in them and install a lightweight Linux and they're damn near perfect as a workbench computer. My only complaint is HD video playback can be a bit slow.
> 12-year-old Thinkpad has outlasted two high-end Macbooks
Nice! Our two MacBook Air from 2013 died at about the same time, about six months ago. Despite putting in a faster SSD and changing the battery: eventually RIP is RIP (and thanks for the 10 years). Our recent MacBook Air M1 lasted... 13 months. Upon waking up one morning the screen was fuxx0red.
Meanwhile my 2017 LG Gram's screen is ultra flexible and sturdy and can deal with pretty much anything you throw at it, including its previous owner (a friend of mine) waking up one morning and stepping on it by mistake.
You can also throw it down concrete stairs and it'll keep working fine: (skip to 0:34... video not made by me but it's basically my experience with that Laptop)
I keep forgetting that LG is not HP and that, in contrast to HP, LG makes very durable and high quality things (especially white goods and TVs). Thanks for reminding me. I had never considered their laptop before. I would trust HP because their TV is quite ethical and ie compared to Samsung and other brands, it has never served me Ads and asks permission before collecting my data.
I can relate to this. I needed a laptop quickly and found a factory display piece on eBay. It was an x230. It must have been atleast a year old. I bought it. That was in 2013 or so. I'm still using it. Upgraded the Ram once. The current problems are a slow fan and a poor battery. I haven't fixed them yet but can probably do so. The thing still works. It's running an old Debian and is my primary machine.
If you want to make it like-new... The T60* fan is a few-dollar part on eBay (plus you'll need a little ordinary PC CPU heat sink thermal compound, and some tape), it's not too hard to replace, and there's documentation.
If you download the Hardware Maintenance Manual (HMM) PDF for that model, IIRC, it'll tell you step-by-step how to replace the fan&heatsink assembly. Follow those instructions, but after you remove the assembly, just remove the thermal compound, pull the fan off, tape the new fan onto the old heatsink assembly, apply thermal compound, and resume following the HMM instructions for putting the 'new' assembly into the laptop.
Thank you so much for that link! Also in the X230 club and my battery died not long ago. Will give that battery a shot. I think the display needs to be changed as well and also unsure if purchase a replacement. Do you have any idea about a good screen replacement?
Yup. The T420 itself is quite big and clunky these days; but I have a couple of T420s ('s' tends to be the slightly smaller version of any given generation of the mainstream T series) in active use around home, and have setup and given a few to friends and family as well
They run Windows 10 perfectly fine once you put an SSD in, and they're small enough not to feel like 80's retro-futuristic Cyberpunk deck clunkers :-).
I'm posting from my X220 (circa 2013). It's a laptop of Theseus at this point, but bits of the original still survive. (The keyboard is the single most-replaced component, and I'm on my third motherboard.) I can't stand more modern laptops - I've yet to find a newer laptop keyboard that's comfortable to type on. Performance-wise, it's perfectly adequate to run Linux Mint or Windows 10. And I get a kick out of having an SSD, an MSata, and a M2 drive in the ExpressCard slot (plus the SD card, which I use for additional backup). And at 12"x9" its a very convenient carry size. (Only better carry laptop I've had was a Fujitsu P1120.)
>>I've yet to find a newer laptop keyboard that's comfortable to type on.
FWIW, the anniversary t25 has the good keyboard. It was expensive though not outrageous, so after talking it through with my wife, I bought it when it came out. It's still my primary driver, I use it 8++hrs a day for 6 years running(with no sign of stopping), so it mostly worked out. It's essentially a t470 so easy to maintain (external battery, SD card, and one screw for ram or ssd upgrade).
Otherwise, everything after the '30 series had the modern random ridiculous layout. We had a standard for decades, then apple decided each laptop will have unique layout and we all blindly followed - muscle memory is for wussies who don't stare at their keyboard to type! Rant rant grouch grouch :)
I dislike trackpads, and use pointing sticks (or external mice, or trackballs) instead. (I know, I'm extremely picky on my input devices.) The first thing I do with a new Thinkpad is disable the trackpad, and then I never think about it again.
trackpad is useful as a scrollbar. Main mouse is the nipple, or an external mouse when I'm at my desk, but for scrolling I do find the trackpad useful. My window manager has "disable while typing" set, and scrolling set to edge scrolling, so I can use my right thumb to scroll without moving my hands.
I have a X62 (x61 with a custom mobo with updated everything) sitting in a box now. My build is 6(?) years old and still works like a champ. But the battery is the main reason it’s in a box. You have to use it like a desktop and keep it plugged in within a hour or two which really defeats the purpose of a laptop…
2012 Samsung Series 9 here, going strong with Debian Stable! I might end up ditching it for something with an OLED screen, but I am sure it will still be running fine.
My Samsung qx410 died miserably (motherboard gave up the ghost) after only 2 years. Bought in 2010, died in 2012. Replaced it with a hand-me-down thinkpad t510 which is still going strong after 11 years. (Not my primary machine anymore of course but it still works quite well)
I have a 2013 Samsung Ativ Book 6, the younger brother of your machine! The display broke twice, the keyboard is 85% unresponsive, HDD got replaced with SSD, and jampacked a larger (Ativ Book 8) battery inside.
Physical issues aside, it runs Windows 11 passably for a backup PC -- Not bad!
I just had my T420 die on me the other day. It simply will not power on. I do have some spare parts but I think I'll finally cave in and buy a new laptop.
Author kinda summed up the problem a few paragraphs in.
> I needed a machine that a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity),
So saying
> If you want a modern, sexy, lightweight, high-powered laptop? Go get something pricey from Apple or Microsoft.
should rather be
> If you need to get modern work done, you will likely need to obtain a modern, high-powered laptop that the modern tools were designed for, and this will likely be something pricey, but not optimized for long service life from Apple or Microsoft.
I recently had to upgrade the OS on my moms Air and it was a pain in the butt because she ignored updates for so long that all the SSL authority certs expired and the internet didn’t work. Plus Apple’s upgrade software was no longer supported by the servers – server wanted 2fa, moms laptop was too old to know what that is.
After a few manual hops, she is now smoothly running the latest and greatest MacOS on a 9+ year old laptop. Everything works fine.
I've had 3 Macs so far since work is on the Apple train. The first failed due to the discrete GPU desoldering itelf. The second didn't technically fail but the battery swelled up to the point the laptop was almost 1cm from closing at the edges. At least the latter problem is not so much an issue with a removable battery since it's, well, removable :-)
Fwiw my 2012 mbp still runs. Takes in plenty of dust working outside and on account of the plastic hinge turning brittle and falling apart years ago. Once every two years I will open her up and blow her clean again. Thats about all the maintenance she needs today. Ironically it has somewhat stronger specs than gps new m1 air, considering I also have 16gb memory, but then 1.5tb of storage and 2 operating systems.
Nice machine but 1400€ while the laptop in the article is $200. So you could replace it 6 times and still come out ahead... and drive more than 1 external display.
Also, I am not sure that the ram or storage won't become limiting within these 10 years, e.g. media is only getting larger (120GB+ for baldur's gate 3), LLMs,... . On a non-mac you can simply grab a 2TB ssd for like $100 and in 8 years can probably replace it with like 8 or 16TB for about the same price.
Again, perfectly nice, quiet, fast machine with a decent display, but soldered stuff sucks. If that were not the case, I would consider upgrading to it from my current 5 year old machine (also 14" 2k HDR ips screen, 16GB ram and above mentioned 2TB ssd upgrade). However, paying 2000€ just to match the ram and storage of my 5 year old laptop is definitely off-putting and you also don't get OS upgrades for the full 10 years, right?
This is bizarre. There's a hilarious contrast between the stated requirements for their laptop:
>a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), b) had a high-resolution screen for my lousy eyesight, and c) had a 1-terabyte hard drive.
And so then the article extols the virtues of buying a laptop that can't run Logic Pro, has a "fuzzily low-rez, which isn’t great for me, given my lousy eyesight" screen and was upgraded to only a 512GB SSD. What?
Great job. You sure nailed those requirements.
Yes, the 2016-2019 Intel Macbook Pros were terrible. I'm with you there. But you could have had a 2012-2015 Retina Macbook Pro, which would have run Logic Pro, all have remarkable high resolution screens, and can be outfitted with multi-TB drives with a little elbow grease. And were fairly indestructable!
... and then you won't want one of those if you have a 16GB Apple Silicon Mac.
You can just run older logic thats compatible with like catalina or mojave. Thats what I do for adobe suite and its fine for my use cases. There are also third party patches to install more current os on older hardware.
... and so do Windows machines. Windows 10 will EOL in July 2025. My Threadripper 1950X, still outperforming most of today's mid-range CPUs, isn't allowed into the Windows 11 world. Why? Who knows?
But yes, I didn't realize that Logic Pro was no longer compatible with macOS versions before 12. So, if this person wanted an indestructible laptop that could run Logic Pro, have a hi-res screen and be upgraded to a 1TB drive, a 2015 Macbook Pro would certainly have been the thing. Hey look, they're $300 on Swappa!
We know exactly what the hard cutoff is for CPUs. This feature is what the official CPU list is based on. (with the exception of 7th gen intel systems added due to the surface linup)
Soft support is actually just Secure Boot and TPM1.2, so you could probably install from ISO, the installer will not warn you about any issues. I have tried this on 6th gen i7 laptops without an issue. Technically you are just blocked from recieving an update to 10, but not from running or using 11. You can even get 11 working on systems without a TPM, but that is more tricky.
I would say OS support is still better overall on the windows side, you can get a still supported OS, on 15 year old systems (win10). And on the EOL date it will be about equivalent. We will see what the future holds for 12.
I think a key difference between Windows and MacOS is that Microsoft has (historically at least) not stopped you from installing newer versions of Windows on older hardware, provided it's fast enough to run it.
Trying to run newer versions of MacOS on 10 year old Apple hardware is next to impossible.
Windows 11 has a requirement for TPM 2.0, which older hardware doesn't have. I believe that requirement check is relatively easy to patch out and install anyway.
Plastic makes such a difference. I can, and do, keep using Thinkpads that have been dropped, even when they get cracked. Because who cares? But a bent MacBook Pro is often ruined.
Depends on the mac. None of the corners on my 2012 are undented at this point. Even the lid with the screen. This thing has been down cement stairs. When you open it up you can see theres actually somewhat of a crumple zone. Not sure if the newer models are so bullet proof. One of my friends ran over his 2012 with an f150 and it still worked minus spiderwebbing on the screen.
My primary machine was a 2011 MBP until maybe 2018 and it was pretty sweet, but I'm pretty hard on my machines, and there was also a hardware issue that Apple wasn't able to fix. The Thinkpad I had working for IBM a-decade-and-a-half-ago was an absolute beast. I wish I could still get my work done on one of those old reliable machines, but having transitioned to heavy 3D Graphics stuff and working with game engines precludes this kind of thing. The increase in display capability alone has been a huge game changer for this work, let alone the kind of video cards you can get in these machines. The top-of-the-line 2022 Razer machine I use now will be essentially obsolete even for lightweight professional work within two years.
Keyboards are a matter of taste. To my fingers, the T420 is the last of the T series with a really good one. Older Thinkpads are easy to repair. I've replaced the keyboard once, and after near daily evening use for many years, I'm about to attempt to replace a failing fan. I'll miss this laptop when its time comes. It's run various releases of Ubuntu like a champ.
I have a MacBook 13 inch from 2011 that now plays YouTube videos daily for my daughter when she is eating and Netflix until we canceled the subscription. Still going strong with only a replaced battery and the hard drive replacing the dvd spot. I have an older 2004 Toshiba portage m200 tart also won’t die. The only thing that seems to die on these computers is the battery, which used to be a lot easier to replace.
Yeah, my 2013 MacBook Air is similarly still trucking along. I wish it used a more standard storage medium; upgrading the chip did not look particularly cheap or easy.
I had a T420 in college. One day in a CS class, I bumped my (uncovered) cup of coffee and it spilled into the keyboard. I knew the laptop had ducts to drain water out, but never tested it (for obvious reasons).
I blotted up as much coffee as I could with some napkins and kept taking notes on the soaked keyboard. Worked like a charm. After drying it out, a few keys stopped working so I bought a replacement keyboard for ~$20 and swapping it out was rather fast (from memory).
I use an M1 MBP now, but I still have that thing in the basement. It still works, and I loved it. I don't miss carrying it around though (or the hilariously short battery life due to forcing discrete GPU mode so I could dock it for multiple monitors at home).
Friend of mine in college spilled.. I think beer?.. on this Thinkpad. He instinctively grabbed it (me, across the room, yelling to keep it stable) and turned it to the side. The fluid got into the fan intake and boom, dead it was.
I spilled an entire mug of tea on my X1E when it was just new. That would have killed any Macbook, but the Thinkpad was fine. Turned it off, unplugged the power, let it drain through the bottom. Next morning, open it up, clean it out, turn it on, and it's fine.
> After drying it out, a few keys stopped working so I bought a replacement keyboard for ~$20 and swapping it out was rather fast (from memory).
I had an X220 in university (same keyboard part as the T420).
I did wash my keyboard multiple times using dish soap and normal tap water and I only killed a single keyboard (when I didn't wait enough for water to dry out).
You could have most likely just washed the keyboard in warm soapy water, as long as you had enough patience to wait for it to be properly drier (2-3 days at least imho, depending on temperature in your home/area).
I recommend getting the X230 over the X220, if anyone decides to play with these old Thinkpads. I have both machines, and I found heat dissipation has been significantly reduced on the X230 for otherwise the same performance, thanks to Ivy Bridge's die shrink over Sandy Bridge. Most components from both machines are interchangeable with the exception of their bottom covers and motherboards (an EC firmware hack is available for interchanging keyboards and batteries).
I have both i5 and i7 X220s. The i7 has USB3 and 16GB of RAM, plus dual SSDs, and it remains 100% usable today. I just wish it had a slightly higher-res screen. I'm perfectly happy with the colours and the viewing angles, but it's a bit cramped, which is one reason I still use Unity.
I said "an EC firmware hack is available for interchanging keyboards and batteries" for a reason. X220's keyboard works nearly perfectly on the X230 with this firmware hack and a slight hardware mod (insulating two LED power contact with masking tape). You can also bring your existing X220 monitors and batteries to the X230 during the upgrade.
I looked into it. I also looked at a keenly-priced X230 from a friend to do it to.
I decided, reluctantly, too much work and too difficult. I like my X220 as it is and I have a to-do list so big I will die before I make a dent in it. Life is too short for customising laptops.
The 420 with Windows 7 is my personal idea of the peak of desktop computing. 2011 was also around the peak of computing in general considering it was right before social media turned hellish psyop and smartphones became distraction / disempowerment devices.
I have a T530 and it's perfect. It's been around the world with me and has one single crack in the plastic to show for its decade of service. I have no clue how many times I've disassembled it for cleaning or upgrades or just plain tinkering. I have a new extended battery that hangs out the back like a tumor, but this bad boy gives me five whole hours on a charge. My modern work laptop lasts 40 minutes, maybe.
It's thick, it's heavy, and it's comfortable. It doesn't tip over if the screen is opened too far. It even has an honest to god docking station, none of this USB-C dongle nonsense. It maxes out at a mind-blowing 90 Watts of power. Which is a blessing after having my wrists burned by my modern all metal laptop with the latest whizbang nvidia 48000000 GPU.
Yeah it's old and slow. It only has four cores and 16GB of RAM and a positively prehistoric GPU, but I love it dearly and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
What are you claiming was improved compared to Win2K? As far as I can remember everything after that was dumbed-down UI and pointless security clickthroughs.
Win+arrow keys for docking to sides I use all the time. Much better multi monitor support. Grouping taskbar. Start menu that lets you search (ie to run notepad, press win then start typing note.. and hit enter)
Vista added a lot of usability features like window snapping and start search, but it's underlying OS was literally unfinished. 7 became what Vista, could've been and even Vista became usable when enough updates were applied.
7 disabled a lot of the security prompts for usability. It didn't remove them, it actually just automatically approved them. These days, most software doesn't need admin privileges anymore. You could always turn off all of the prompts if you wanted to, I think there were 4 levels of prompt severity?
I can’t even bear to look at a low DPI screen for more than a few minutes. Anything under 150dpi just looks so awful to me at this point. Basically ruins all older laptops from my perspective.
I have one of the lcdfans modded Thinkpads. It's a "T70"—a T60 with an i7, 16GB of memory, the old style keyboard, a giant SSD, and, importantly, a high DPI display.
It's an awesome machine but it might as well be a desktop because it's so bulky and heavy that I never take it anywhere.
I travel with my M2 Mac but that Thinkpad sure is a sleeper.
Normal “low” DPI screens I can deal with, but the panels that used to be built into many ThinkPads until pretty recently are some of the worst screens I’ve ever used… washed out, terrible viewing angles, mediocre brightness.
I have an old Dell workstation laptop and 15” MBP both manufactured around 2008, with 1920x1200 and 1440x900 panels respectively and they’re both much nicer to use than what you find in a lot of T-series Thinkpads, so it’s not even an age thing… Lenovo just used bargain basement panels.
Starting with the *40 gen they changed from LVDS to eDP screens and got access to better screens. This was the start of 1080p being available at 14" where it was only in 15" models before. There's a panel from one of the Razer Blade laptops that was popular to put in the ThinkPad T440p. 1080p IPS. Looks nice.
On the older models you can also do a mod to sacrifice your DP port for use internally with an eDP panel. There's one for the X220 to do that. Although if you're okay with 1366x768, the X220 Tablet models all have IPS panels from the factory and don't look too bad.
I did the 1080p mod on both my T420 (AliExpress PCB) and X220 (nitrocaster mod).
The X220/X230 mod uses the docking port's DisplayPort lanes, instead of the DisplayPort port. I'm still able to use the DisplayPort port on the X220.
The T420/T430 converter doesn't use DisplayPort, but simply converts LVDS to eDP.
I used the B140HAN01.3 (AUO panel) for my T420, which my friend also got for a T440p. Colors and viewing angles are great on it, likely the Razer Blade panel you mentioned.
The X220 mod was a pain to install IMO - soldering to tiny solder points on the motherboard, soldering the sense wire which needed burning off the enamel from the enameled wire, and having to cut out (I used flush cutters) parts of the top case for the new display to fit. My first install wasn't great either, with a cold joint causing issues I solved later on by reflowing the joints.
The AUO 14" panel has better color gamut (IIRC 100% sRGB coverage) than the available 12.5" panels for the mod.
A friend of mine works with his laptop connected to some 40+ inches 1080p monitor or probably just a TV screen, I never checked. "But you can see the pixels", I told him. "No, I don't because I have such a bad eyesight", he replied to me.
Basically me. I spend a lot of time with an old MacBook Pro 13” with non-retina 1280*800 screen, and I see no pixels and see very little actual difference with my workflow, while comparing to my other retina 13” MacBook Pro. Just watching videos is very different, all other tasks are the same to my eyes.
I'm still rocking a 2012 built HP EliteBook 8540w which I bought second hand in 2015. The weight of the thing is a little bit annoying and the battery is dead. It has never failed me, running Windows 10 now. It has always come back from standby and hibernate without fail. By far the most reliable computer I own. But it is showing its age though, not because of the hardware but because of software. Windows 11 doesn't run smooth on it unfortunately :-(.
HP Elitebook 8460P of similar vintage owner here. I also bought it second hand, it came with an SSD and a bigger HDD (that died), I replaced the battery a few years ago, bumped the ram to 12GB (I should bump it to 16GB while memory sticks are still available) and it has been running on Fedora Linux for years. It is kind of a heaby brick brick but it works well, everything is still fairly smooth on Gnome with wayland.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadMy tl;dr advice for buying a computer on a budget is, get a T480s off of eBay. They are corporate cast-offs and there are so. many. of them. The R2v3 rating system has become popular. Get one rated C5 or better (cosmetic: minor usage marks only) and F4 or better (functionality: everything works). Spring for one with a backlit keyboard, and a power supply included if you want it turn key.
As of this writing this should cost around $250 and the machine should be fairly future-proof including official Win11 support. And excellent Linux compatibility - my fingerprint reader doesn't work, but literally everything else works perfectly.
Is there any tl;dr equivalent for upgrading screens like you described?
I'm a massive thinkpad fan, as per sibling comments I have half a dozen in the room with me right now, but have never and don't plan to ever replace a screen. My time and hassle are worth more than $0-$30 I'd pay for one that already comes with higher res, and the risk / pain / fidgetiness is outside of my own personal threshold. Not so for others!! But my message is you don't need to replace screens and 3d-pring and dremel new keyboards to get value out of ThinkPads :).
1. Awareness that not everybody can or wants or dares to do that or be you. There's other people in this world! :)
2. LoL-ing other people for not being you
Entirely you choice! :)
-----------------
e.g. I can change tires and oil on my car and am aware that majority of people can't or don't want to - even handy, technically oriented ones.
There's simply a vast, vast majority of people to whom:
1. I'd happily recommend a ThinkPad because I think it'll serve a wide swath of people well
2. I would not come anywhere near suggesting they replace their screen; not only would that likely lead to disaster, but it'd 99% turn them off from considering ThinkPad in the first place.
The reason I'm asking is - "T480" is the last nicely modular ThinkPad with removable external battery. Which means if you get a used one and need to replace the battery, it's literally a 2 second job - you push a button, slide it out, and slide the new one in :)
The "T480s" though is a slightly smaller version with only an internal battery, like all newer ThinkPads, which not everybody will be comfortable with.
And yeah, I have 2 T420s-s and 3 T480's around me today and love them :-)
The internal battery can be readily sourced and replaced easily enough.
My latest toy is a GPD Win Max 2, keyboard isn't too bad actually, but I doubt it will last anywhere near as long as the T480s.
And looking at my own work provided ThinkPad, I keep it closed and docked 99% of the time, so the keyboard looks brand new despite being a 4-year-old laptop now.
But that just depends on the user/site it goes to.
Maybe it will work. But mine has more than 50% degradation on both, and I run Nixos from RAM and don't do serious work on it, so I don't care about the shutdowns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#PowerBook_G3_Fire...
The discrete GPU ones (i.e MacBook pro) can eventually fail due to the video ram chips getting loose.
Replaced it with a Thinkpad T480.
I usually paid 2/3rd of the cost of my upgraded model by parting out my old one. Thanks to Apple restricting parts (and their continued upgrades), the spare parts had good value. Sold everything (including the screws, people want OEM), except the battery.
Had to replace the battery, fan and thermal paste over the years - and it's surprisingly easy to work on, just a few screws on the bottom to take it apart and access to everything.
1. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
Nice! Our two MacBook Air from 2013 died at about the same time, about six months ago. Despite putting in a faster SSD and changing the battery: eventually RIP is RIP (and thanks for the 10 years). Our recent MacBook Air M1 lasted... 13 months. Upon waking up one morning the screen was fuxx0red.
Meanwhile my 2017 LG Gram's screen is ultra flexible and sturdy and can deal with pretty much anything you throw at it, including its previous owner (a friend of mine) waking up one morning and stepping on it by mistake.
You can also throw it down concrete stairs and it'll keep working fine: (skip to 0:34... video not made by me but it's basically my experience with that Laptop)
https://youtu.be/herYV5TJ_m8
They're not cheap laptops. They're not "retina display". But, darn, can they take a beating.
Not like the precious and ultra brittle porcelain that the latest Macbook are.
Also have a really old T60p. Might be close to 15 years old now. It has a bad fan.
What I did was put the machine into passive cooling and spin the fan up at boot! Kind of like a jump start.
Runs just fine.
If you download the Hardware Maintenance Manual (HMM) PDF for that model, IIRC, it'll tell you step-by-step how to replace the fan&heatsink assembly. Follow those instructions, but after you remove the assembly, just remove the thermal compound, pull the fan off, tape the new fan onto the old heatsink assembly, apply thermal compound, and resume following the HMM instructions for putting the 'new' assembly into the laptop.
Edit: The latest version of the HMM I could find: https://web.archive.org/web/20210429114642/https://download....
They run Windows 10 perfectly fine once you put an SSD in, and they're small enough not to feel like 80's retro-futuristic Cyberpunk deck clunkers :-).
And yeah,
FWIW, the anniversary t25 has the good keyboard. It was expensive though not outrageous, so after talking it through with my wife, I bought it when it came out. It's still my primary driver, I use it 8++hrs a day for 6 years running(with no sign of stopping), so it mostly worked out. It's essentially a t470 so easy to maintain (external battery, SD card, and one screw for ram or ssd upgrade).
Otherwise, everything after the '30 series had the modern random ridiculous layout. We had a standard for decades, then apple decided each laptop will have unique layout and we all blindly followed - muscle memory is for wussies who don't stare at their keyboard to type! Rant rant grouch grouch :)
FWIW, I've noticed knock-off replacement keyboards consistently have awful pointing sticks.
Physical issues aside, it runs Windows 11 passably for a backup PC -- Not bad!
> I needed a machine that a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity),
So saying
> If you want a modern, sexy, lightweight, high-powered laptop? Go get something pricey from Apple or Microsoft.
should rather be
> If you need to get modern work done, you will likely need to obtain a modern, high-powered laptop that the modern tools were designed for, and this will likely be something pricey, but not optimized for long service life from Apple or Microsoft.
I recently had to upgrade the OS on my moms Air and it was a pain in the butt because she ignored updates for so long that all the SSL authority certs expired and the internet didn’t work. Plus Apple’s upgrade software was no longer supported by the servers – server wanted 2fa, moms laptop was too old to know what that is.
After a few manual hops, she is now smoothly running the latest and greatest MacOS on a 9+ year old laptop. Everything works fine.
Also, I am not sure that the ram or storage won't become limiting within these 10 years, e.g. media is only getting larger (120GB+ for baldur's gate 3), LLMs,... . On a non-mac you can simply grab a 2TB ssd for like $100 and in 8 years can probably replace it with like 8 or 16TB for about the same price.
Again, perfectly nice, quiet, fast machine with a decent display, but soldered stuff sucks. If that were not the case, I would consider upgrading to it from my current 5 year old machine (also 14" 2k HDR ips screen, 16GB ram and above mentioned 2TB ssd upgrade). However, paying 2000€ just to match the ram and storage of my 5 year old laptop is definitely off-putting and you also don't get OS upgrades for the full 10 years, right?
>a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), b) had a high-resolution screen for my lousy eyesight, and c) had a 1-terabyte hard drive.
And so then the article extols the virtues of buying a laptop that can't run Logic Pro, has a "fuzzily low-rez, which isn’t great for me, given my lousy eyesight" screen and was upgraded to only a 512GB SSD. What?
Great job. You sure nailed those requirements.
Yes, the 2016-2019 Intel Macbook Pros were terrible. I'm with you there. But you could have had a 2012-2015 Retina Macbook Pro, which would have run Logic Pro, all have remarkable high resolution screens, and can be outfitted with multi-TB drives with a little elbow grease. And were fairly indestructable!
... and then you won't want one of those if you have a 16GB Apple Silicon Mac.
Logic Pro is a great example. It requires MacOS 12 or greater. MacOS 12 will only run on 2015 or newer MacBooks.
But yes, I didn't realize that Logic Pro was no longer compatible with macOS versions before 12. So, if this person wanted an indestructible laptop that could run Logic Pro, have a hi-res screen and be upgraded to a 1TB drive, a 2015 Macbook Pro would certainly have been the thing. Hey look, they're $300 on Swappa!
But yes, eventually, we all need to upgrade.
Linux isn't for everyone, of course. But avoiding this charade is a nice bonus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Level_Address_Translati...
Soft support is actually just Secure Boot and TPM1.2, so you could probably install from ISO, the installer will not warn you about any issues. I have tried this on 6th gen i7 laptops without an issue. Technically you are just blocked from recieving an update to 10, but not from running or using 11. You can even get 11 working on systems without a TPM, but that is more tricky.
I would say OS support is still better overall on the windows side, you can get a still supported OS, on 15 year old systems (win10). And on the EOL date it will be about equivalent. We will see what the future holds for 12.
Trying to run newer versions of MacOS on 10 year old Apple hardware is next to impossible.
Windows 11 has a requirement for TPM 2.0, which older hardware doesn't have. I believe that requirement check is relatively easy to patch out and install anyway.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-air
I blotted up as much coffee as I could with some napkins and kept taking notes on the soaked keyboard. Worked like a charm. After drying it out, a few keys stopped working so I bought a replacement keyboard for ~$20 and swapping it out was rather fast (from memory).
I use an M1 MBP now, but I still have that thing in the basement. It still works, and I loved it. I don't miss carrying it around though (or the hilariously short battery life due to forcing discrete GPU mode so I could dock it for multiple monitors at home).
Friend of mine in college spilled.. I think beer?.. on this Thinkpad. He instinctively grabbed it (me, across the room, yelling to keep it stable) and turned it to the side. The fluid got into the fan intake and boom, dead it was.
Even had time to make a photo: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/h0663l/good_thing...
Don't count on this too strongly though; not every Thinkpad is spill-resistant, unfortunately.
I had an X220 in university (same keyboard part as the T420).
I did wash my keyboard multiple times using dish soap and normal tap water and I only killed a single keyboard (when I didn't wait enough for water to dry out).
You could have most likely just washed the keyboard in warm soapy water, as long as you had enough patience to wait for it to be properly drier (2-3 days at least imho, depending on temperature in your home/area).
Until I left it in my basement for a few weeks, i.e. in a slightly cold and humid environment.
Now, the keyboard is broken: I need to press multiple times on each key (it's better now that it has dried a bit, but not perfect).
The trackpad is also broken: only hard-clicking works.
Next step is to open and clean it up but I don't have much hope.
And so long as you don't need a big GPU on-board, it's perfectly fine for most Linux-based developer workstation purposes.
slightly different keyboard layouts also, wrt pgup pgdown
One day I dropped it about a foot onto a carpet floor, and the metal chassis accordioned and bent in the corner. Was not impressed by that.
I have both i5 and i7 X220s. The i7 has USB3 and 16GB of RAM, plus dual SSDs, and it remains 100% usable today. I just wish it had a slightly higher-res screen. I'm perfectly happy with the colours and the viewing angles, but it's a bit cramped, which is one reason I still use Unity.
I looked into it. I also looked at a keenly-priced X230 from a friend to do it to.
I decided, reluctantly, too much work and too difficult. I like my X220 as it is and I have a to-do list so big I will die before I make a dent in it. Life is too short for customising laptops.
It's thick, it's heavy, and it's comfortable. It doesn't tip over if the screen is opened too far. It even has an honest to god docking station, none of this USB-C dongle nonsense. It maxes out at a mind-blowing 90 Watts of power. Which is a blessing after having my wrists burned by my modern all metal laptop with the latest whizbang nvidia 48000000 GPU.
Yeah it's old and slow. It only has four cores and 16GB of RAM and a positively prehistoric GPU, but I love it dearly and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
7 disabled a lot of the security prompts for usability. It didn't remove them, it actually just automatically approved them. These days, most software doesn't need admin privileges anymore. You could always turn off all of the prompts if you wanted to, I think there were 4 levels of prompt severity?
It's an awesome machine but it might as well be a desktop because it's so bulky and heavy that I never take it anywhere.
I travel with my M2 Mac but that Thinkpad sure is a sleeper.
I have an old Dell workstation laptop and 15” MBP both manufactured around 2008, with 1920x1200 and 1440x900 panels respectively and they’re both much nicer to use than what you find in a lot of T-series Thinkpads, so it’s not even an age thing… Lenovo just used bargain basement panels.
On the older models you can also do a mod to sacrifice your DP port for use internally with an eDP panel. There's one for the X220 to do that. Although if you're okay with 1366x768, the X220 Tablet models all have IPS panels from the factory and don't look too bad.
The X220/X230 mod uses the docking port's DisplayPort lanes, instead of the DisplayPort port. I'm still able to use the DisplayPort port on the X220.
The T420/T430 converter doesn't use DisplayPort, but simply converts LVDS to eDP.
I used the B140HAN01.3 (AUO panel) for my T420, which my friend also got for a T440p. Colors and viewing angles are great on it, likely the Razer Blade panel you mentioned.
The X220 mod was a pain to install IMO - soldering to tiny solder points on the motherboard, soldering the sense wire which needed burning off the enamel from the enameled wire, and having to cut out (I used flush cutters) parts of the top case for the new display to fit. My first install wasn't great either, with a cold joint causing issues I solved later on by reflowing the joints.
The AUO 14" panel has better color gamut (IIRC 100% sRGB coverage) than the available 12.5" panels for the mod.
It still looks good & comfortable to my eyes ; however all kinds of software just become unusable at that resolution.
Which is quite disapponting.