I don't think I'd consider getting any laptop that isn't a used thinkpad at this point. I use my old ones as servers, which I affectionately refer to as the ThinkStack.
I had a Thinkpad X200T with a Core 2 Duo serving as my home router for a while, eventually I upgraded to a Dell Optiplex that my work was throwing away. Laptop as a router is great because they blow SBCs out of the water while preserving a modicum of energy efficiency. I do miss just being able to pop the lid open when I needed to troubleshoot something instead of having to lug the Optiplex into the office to attach a monitor and keyboard.
When she was 4 my daughter managed to shove one of those trackpad caps up her nose. At first she was going for the clown look but ended up in frantic tears and a visit to A&E at 2am
My ThinkPad (T480s) is turning 8 this year, and only got its first battery replacement last month. I've been carrying it with me everywhere, on every single trip (office or holidays alike), on all continents. In that same timespan, I used up 3 backpacks and 2 suitcases along the same routes. All I want for its replacement is not to cost an insane amount of money because of the made-up by AI components shortage, and maybe now that I'm older I would prefer a smaller form factor like the X1.
I rather liked the T-series (had quite a few!). But Lenovo are really running out of good will as far as I am concerned. They're riding the brand to destruction. Had some serious problems recently including one brick and one out of warranty battery turning up completely dead. The latter was an absolute nightmare to sort out resulting in a chargeback in the end.
I've taken to just buying multiple 2-3 year old "tested" units again (plenty of NOS ones out there) and keeping them alive via ebay which is what I was doing around the X201 era. Same with the desktops - mine is a 2019 M720T ThinkCentre that cost me $150 equiv a couple of months back (before the RAM pricing went mental)
I had a brief affair with Apple, culminating in a fairly nice M4 MacBook Pro, but quite frankly it scares me carrying that around and I really do not like Tahoe (Sequoia was fine). Back to Debian stable on the T14 gen 3 it is...
As much as I love the old thinkpads, the T540p was my last. The case being entirely plastic means it will eventually start warping, motherboard included, in short order turning your expensive device into a paper weight.
Has any of the newer ThinkPad models been upgraded to use a metal case or they are still made out of plastic? Asking as that is the main deal-breaker for me
I don't think there's a sexier laptop design than the Thinkpad'. I've tried other manufacturers, a M2 Mac, Dell, HP, yet something always pulls me back to ThinkPads, even if the recent versions aren't the powerhouse the 4xx versions were. The black and orange combination just has something so alluring. That and also the flexibility of the warranty/support if you buy used. I've probably owned over 7 ThinkPads so far, which is a lot to me, I'm not that old. Many of these were sold or died, but I still keep my old T530 which is now a media server and it's a plan replacing my Latitude with a T14.
Lenovo is dead to me. I have nothing but issues and I'm not alone. We have a fleet of around 3000 X1E, X1C and T480s. The USB port regularly craps out not sending the display signal to the monitor so my co-workers regularly have to restart their Lenovo after they go to standby. This is super disruptive, especially for our developers. In some cases, connecting a display even causes blue screens. (All our monitors are Lenovo Think visions, too...)
I reported this issue to Lenovo and was stuck in the typical service desk loop of hell. Once I escalated the issue with our Lenovo representative the issue got some traction, but there wasn't any real progress for months and the troubleshooting remained nothing but superficial. Not a single expert got in touch with us to get some real and in-depth hardware debugging logs or whatever you need to truly analyse the hardware faults.
Ultimately, my employer decided to stop follow up on that with Lenovo and to just deal with it. We continue to buy these crappy laptops and monitors despite all the issues they cause us and shove the money down Lenovo throats, like any real company would. /s
I used my ThinkPad T430s for 12 years. I got it second hand from a developer I looked up to when I was in college and it carried me through a large part of my career. Loved that machine to death.
When I finally replaced it with a Framework a few years back I've regretted every second of it.
The ThinkPad still lives. I refurbished the batteries and slapped ChromeOS Flex on it and donated it to a Ukrainian refugee who needed a Chromebook for school. It'll probably live another 10 years.
I loved that thing to death. And I'm just happy it is still being used.
I loved my T430s. I swapped the keyboard out for a backlit one, and took out the DVD drive and replaced it with a hot swappable second battery. I was running Ubuntu MATE on it, it worked very well for me. The ThinkLight was also great.
I now have a second hand T480s which is also a wonderful machine, but not as amazing as that T430s. I gave my T430s to my mother who uses it to run software (albeit via Windows now) for her sewing machine.
Replaced the keyboard (orange juice spillage), screen (upgraded to a higher resolution panel), hdd (to an SSD of course), RAM, Wifi adapter (Wifi 6) as well as the battery.
I now use an X1 Nano and while it's nice (and very light!) I am sad that the upgradability is nowhere near as good.
I went from a X200 to work on my hobby OS 5 years ago, to a T440p with 16 GB of RAM for my daily computing, then upgraded to a T480 that I could fit with 64GB of RAM, and I finally added a X270 for a more compact form when I'm outside.
They were all very inexpensive due to their age (when RAM was still cheap) and I'm really happy about them, I work from a console and a browser, they are perfect for my usage. I wouldn't use any other kind of laptop.
I've been using Thinkpads exclusively from 2005 or so. My first was a T40 I got from work. Then I got a T42 of my own. I used it heavily till the fan gave out. After that, I got an X200 which I used for a long time. The keyboard got damaged because of a spill. I replaced it but somehow, the motherboard got shorted out and it died. I then bought a second hand X240 (roughly 2013) and used it as my primary machines. Replaced the battery (twice), fan, hand rest. And it's still running. My kids use it to play some simple games. My main machine right now is an X1 carbon (which I'm not really happy with compared to the others but it's okay for now).
I used a Macbook for about 2.5 years in between. Didn't like it (hardware was decent. Software was terrible). I also bought a Dell latitude (which was okay and is being used now as headless machine at my workplace for tinkering).
But my primary machine is a Thinkpad and I don't expect to see that changing in the near future.
I appreciate all the innovations that him and his team brought to the ThinkPad, since this is my main set of laptops.
Lenovo, on the other hand, has been a hit or miss for awhile. I had a T570, which was horrible; one problem after the next. It's just a source of parts now. There are some design issues with the T480 (no center screw in the front/bottom). Also with the T480 is, what it seems to be, the slightly flaky USB-C connectors. The external keyboard (non-bluetooth), while very useful for 2 years, has always been a struggle with the flimsy micro-usb, leaving me to hack that. But now, I somehow now lost an important key on it, I just gave up and bought a nice Tex Shinobi. The only stable-ish one is the one I am on now, a T470p. It's not been perfect, but it's the best designed TP I had (my T430s is overall good, except for battery power, but the internals for those old machines are a chore to get through.) I have a P14s at work. It's OK, but nothing to write home about.
If all these TPs die, and Framework has a trackpoint version + delivers to my country, I would like to get that instead.
It's a portfolio, the guy did things that shipped in millions of units.
It was a good design, in critical environments small goose-neck lights are typically used, even if the buttons and indicators are backlit. I still prefer it to backlit keyboards which, with decreasing thickness, increasingly compromise the quality of the keyboard (I have tested this with later chicklet models running through all available keyboards for a few era ThinkPads). Having a small amount of ambient light is easier on the eyes, especially the yellow-shift on the X40, and you can run the screen at minimal brightness to increase battery life and whatever health benefits this all has.
I had a thinkpad x1 carbon. Amazing machine, i liked how sturdy and lightweight it was. Plus, i loved playing with the trackpad cap during boring meetings.
Only downside was the cooling: the fan was constantly spinning and producing noise akin to a plane taking off.
I switched to a T480 from a crappy macbook pro 2017. I enjoyed the switch to use linux fulltime but ultimately I was let down by the Intel processor that would throttle very badly. Compiling code was a nightmare. Ive since switched back to the M1 macbook pro which I plan to keep as long as possible and probably switch to linux when macos inevitably decides my hardware is too old to support. I would love to have a non-apple future, though.
I have a x230 at hand, mainly to quickly diagnose my car. I bought it used some years ago, including the dock, and I still love it. Sure, resolution is limited, and so is the power. But it gets the job done, and also has this useful thinklight on top of the bezel, which helps reading printed stuff in the dark. I'll hold on to it as long as I can.
What this brought to mind for me is that you are quite literally at the mercy of a different company when you do not control your OS as a computer/server company. All the wonderful design makes no difference when you’re at the mercy of the likes of Microsoft/Windows.
Inversely, I am convinced that is largely what has made Apple so successfully at the core, controlling the OS did not limit them to all the technical reasons that, e.g., windows OS based scrolling and the track pads were/are so horrible, resolution limitations, and inconsistent design and styling of the OS that subordinated the value or beauty of any hardware design to the OS level that users interacted with… subordination to Microsoft.
It’s essentially unconscionable that they likes of IBM, Dell, HP, etc did not get together and at the very least develop their own OS and also aggressively counter the de facto monopoly stranglehold of Windows on government, which then caused the domination among corporations.
Similarly unconscionable is also the European failure and subordination to the USA/Microsoft by not fostering at least an alternative to Windows that its corporations and governments can operate on. There has been nothing but talk and tiny little forays into adopting open source, but absolutely nothing that could even rise to being a real alternative to Windows or even MacOS.
> the European failure and subordination to the USA/Microsoft by not fostering at least an alternative to Windows that its corporations and governments can operate on. There has been nothing but talk and tiny little forays into adopting open source, but absolutely nothing that could even rise to being a real alternative to Windows or even MacOS.
Yet.
The current US 'situation', combined with US tech spying means those little forays are getting seriouser and seriouser.
It's going to be somewhat slower due to languages, and induvidual governments wanting 'their' version (of spying on their populations), but the beginnings are begun.
I use a ThinkPad with Linux as my daily driver and a MBP at work. I love my ThinkPad dearly-but it goes 0/4 up against the MBP.
The best thing I've done for my in practice battery life on Linux is enable aggressive suspend to hibernate, but it still doesn't compare to the all day use I get out of the MBP.
Driver support is really good, everything works, but it obviously can't compete with the 'perfect' driver support you get with macOS.
Performance is again really good but it's not M* performance, nothing is, but I'm happy with it. The OS is perfectly snappy and responsive.
Security is also quite good, Linux has fantastic TPM support now so you get passwordless full disk encryption. Fingerprint reader works and is well integrated into popular DEs. But it's not TouchID or Apple's secure coprocessor, SIP level extra. And just in general the Linux security model without SELinux or Flatpak sandboxing is user-based so you don't get protection against software you run behaving naughtily. The antivirus story is also not as good / nonexistent, but I've never really cared about those so nothing lost for me.
The advantage of the Thinkpad is you get to run Linux, it's about half the cost of the MBP, it's more than good enough as a daily driver, and you get all the full sized ports with no adapter.
When it comes to laptops, I’ve primarily used MacBooks but really miss the excellent keyboard and TrackPoint on ThinkPads. Nothing seems to comes close.
My solution was to buy a Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II and pair it with my MacBook over Bluetooth. An added benefit is that I can keep the MacBook on a stand, avoiding the wobble you get when typing directly on it.
I also use an Apple Trackpad alongside this setup, since I find it hard to beat for certain tasks.
I've always regretted not getting one of the tablet Thinkpads, and it kills me that the Lenovo Yogabook 9i is two technologies away from being perfect for me (needs to have a Wacom EMR stylus, and to have a Trackpoint)....
I have a preference for using a stylus, and kind of wish I could go back to the previous gen stylus tech and use an X230T (or that there would be an update of that model, or an easy way to replace the digitizer for the newer styluses).
50 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 64.1 ms ] threadI had no idea David did the swooping mid-1990s AS/400s, I have a couple of those in my system collection and they definitely have an aesthetic.
I never owned another mouse as laggy and imprecise. Its design is good, but its basic mouse functionality is just very bad.
I've taken to just buying multiple 2-3 year old "tested" units again (plenty of NOS ones out there) and keeping them alive via ebay which is what I was doing around the X201 era. Same with the desktops - mine is a 2019 M720T ThinkCentre that cost me $150 equiv a couple of months back (before the RAM pricing went mental)
I had a brief affair with Apple, culminating in a fairly nice M4 MacBook Pro, but quite frankly it scares me carrying that around and I really do not like Tahoe (Sequoia was fine). Back to Debian stable on the T14 gen 3 it is...
I reported this issue to Lenovo and was stuck in the typical service desk loop of hell. Once I escalated the issue with our Lenovo representative the issue got some traction, but there wasn't any real progress for months and the troubleshooting remained nothing but superficial. Not a single expert got in touch with us to get some real and in-depth hardware debugging logs or whatever you need to truly analyse the hardware faults.
Ultimately, my employer decided to stop follow up on that with Lenovo and to just deal with it. We continue to buy these crappy laptops and monitors despite all the issues they cause us and shove the money down Lenovo throats, like any real company would. /s
When I finally replaced it with a Framework a few years back I've regretted every second of it.
The ThinkPad still lives. I refurbished the batteries and slapped ChromeOS Flex on it and donated it to a Ukrainian refugee who needed a Chromebook for school. It'll probably live another 10 years.
I loved that thing to death. And I'm just happy it is still being used.
ChromeOS made me throw up a bit but the recipient made me smile. May it serve them well.
I now have a second hand T480s which is also a wonderful machine, but not as amazing as that T430s. I gave my T430s to my mother who uses it to run software (albeit via Windows now) for her sewing machine.
Replaced the keyboard (orange juice spillage), screen (upgraded to a higher resolution panel), hdd (to an SSD of course), RAM, Wifi adapter (Wifi 6) as well as the battery.
I now use an X1 Nano and while it's nice (and very light!) I am sad that the upgradability is nowhere near as good.
They were all very inexpensive due to their age (when RAM was still cheap) and I'm really happy about them, I work from a console and a browser, they are perfect for my usage. I wouldn't use any other kind of laptop.
I used a Macbook for about 2.5 years in between. Didn't like it (hardware was decent. Software was terrible). I also bought a Dell latitude (which was okay and is being used now as headless machine at my workplace for tinkering).
But my primary machine is a Thinkpad and I don't expect to see that changing in the near future.
Lenovo, on the other hand, has been a hit or miss for awhile. I had a T570, which was horrible; one problem after the next. It's just a source of parts now. There are some design issues with the T480 (no center screw in the front/bottom). Also with the T480 is, what it seems to be, the slightly flaky USB-C connectors. The external keyboard (non-bluetooth), while very useful for 2 years, has always been a struggle with the flimsy micro-usb, leaving me to hack that. But now, I somehow now lost an important key on it, I just gave up and bought a nice Tex Shinobi. The only stable-ish one is the one I am on now, a T470p. It's not been perfect, but it's the best designed TP I had (my T430s is overall good, except for battery power, but the internals for those old machines are a chore to get through.) I have a P14s at work. It's OK, but nothing to write home about.
If all these TPs die, and Framework has a trackpoint version + delivers to my country, I would like to get that instead.
It was a good design, in critical environments small goose-neck lights are typically used, even if the buttons and indicators are backlit. I still prefer it to backlit keyboards which, with decreasing thickness, increasingly compromise the quality of the keyboard (I have tested this with later chicklet models running through all available keyboards for a few era ThinkPads). Having a small amount of ambient light is easier on the eyes, especially the yellow-shift on the X40, and you can run the screen at minimal brightness to increase battery life and whatever health benefits this all has.
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Only downside was the cooling: the fan was constantly spinning and producing noise akin to a plane taking off.
Inversely, I am convinced that is largely what has made Apple so successfully at the core, controlling the OS did not limit them to all the technical reasons that, e.g., windows OS based scrolling and the track pads were/are so horrible, resolution limitations, and inconsistent design and styling of the OS that subordinated the value or beauty of any hardware design to the OS level that users interacted with… subordination to Microsoft.
It’s essentially unconscionable that they likes of IBM, Dell, HP, etc did not get together and at the very least develop their own OS and also aggressively counter the de facto monopoly stranglehold of Windows on government, which then caused the domination among corporations.
Similarly unconscionable is also the European failure and subordination to the USA/Microsoft by not fostering at least an alternative to Windows that its corporations and governments can operate on. There has been nothing but talk and tiny little forays into adopting open source, but absolutely nothing that could even rise to being a real alternative to Windows or even MacOS.
Yet. The current US 'situation', combined with US tech spying means those little forays are getting seriouser and seriouser. It's going to be somewhat slower due to languages, and induvidual governments wanting 'their' version (of spying on their populations), but the beginnings are begun.
The best thing I've done for my in practice battery life on Linux is enable aggressive suspend to hibernate, but it still doesn't compare to the all day use I get out of the MBP.
Driver support is really good, everything works, but it obviously can't compete with the 'perfect' driver support you get with macOS.
Performance is again really good but it's not M* performance, nothing is, but I'm happy with it. The OS is perfectly snappy and responsive.
Security is also quite good, Linux has fantastic TPM support now so you get passwordless full disk encryption. Fingerprint reader works and is well integrated into popular DEs. But it's not TouchID or Apple's secure coprocessor, SIP level extra. And just in general the Linux security model without SELinux or Flatpak sandboxing is user-based so you don't get protection against software you run behaving naughtily. The antivirus story is also not as good / nonexistent, but I've never really cared about those so nothing lost for me.
The advantage of the Thinkpad is you get to run Linux, it's about half the cost of the MBP, it's more than good enough as a daily driver, and you get all the full sized ports with no adapter.
My solution was to buy a Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II and pair it with my MacBook over Bluetooth. An added benefit is that I can keep the MacBook on a stand, avoiding the wobble you get when typing directly on it.
I also use an Apple Trackpad alongside this setup, since I find it hard to beat for certain tasks.
_Thinkpad: A Different Shade of Blue_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad
I've always regretted not getting one of the tablet Thinkpads, and it kills me that the Lenovo Yogabook 9i is two technologies away from being perfect for me (needs to have a Wacom EMR stylus, and to have a Trackpoint)....