Regarding price - pre-owned ex-corporate ThinkPads are sold for very little, usually about 20 percent of the price of a new one. Plugged into an external monitor it might just work for you.
It's all about personal perspective, so just find something matches with your price/performance requirement. With my personal experience, I can always recommend my friend to by ThinkPad, new or secondhand are fine.
Their touchpads absolutely suck, with exception of some recent models. Trackpoints maybe made sense 15 years ago with lower-density screens, but I find them unusable with current HiDPI UI, they're just too imprecise.
I think tech enthusiasts like thinkpads for the same reason they dislike macbooks: out of the box linux support, good ergonomics and repairability.
Do thinkpad owners care about battery life? Yes, but once you are past a full work day battery life and can charge it with same USB C charger that came with your phone it becomes a non issue.
Lenovo and Linux support should carry an asterisk. Hopefully their acquisition of Phoenix fixes much of the "too quick to market" problems they seem to keep having.
My Z13 was a piece of garbage: arrived without Fedora fully installed, crashed at least once per week, had GPU and dock and USB and sleep problems, sent back for repairs multiple times. I tried to return it and they refused. My greatest joy was that insurance covered it being stolen from my apartment in Dublin.
My X1 Carbon Gen 11? Not great. Crashed 7 times in the 9 days I had it. Didn't sleep properly. Ibus and wireplumber would randomly crash. I'd get a glib error if I type an invalid Bash command. I tried Fedora 38 and Kinoite, Ubuntu 22, Debian 12, RHEL 9.2, TUXEDO, Pop, and Tumbleweed. Nobody had the right mix. I learned about and trialed all sorts of kernel flags: intel_idle.max_cstate, iommu=pt, Intel_iommu=on, Intel_iommu=pt, usbcore.autosuspend=-1, i915.enable_dc=0, i915.enable_psr=0, acpi.ec_no_wakeup=1, thinkpad_acpi.fan_control=1, acpi_osi, and a few others. Sometimes the 10-second power button shutdown was ignored; you have to use the little reset hole.
I can't even fully blame Lenovo. Their Linux lead puts in a ton of effort to do everything right. I'll read BIOS release notes for the laptops I hated, and they'll have a list with e.g. "fixed fingerprint reader problem, fixed hanging after hibernation, fixed hanging after resuming with lid closed, wake now works with any keyboard key, fixed issue where computer restarts unexpectedly, fixed overheating while charging, fixed problems related to docking and external monitors, fix sound, fix backlight, fix power profiles, fix slow boot, fixed USB port refusing to charge or enumerate (rarely (yes they actually said rarely in the release notes)), modify lid behavior, fix touchpad ACPI, fix sleep from power button, trackpoint doesn't work if lid closed with suspend disabled, touchpad stops functioning after restart, system hangs during Modern Standby, bunch of CVEs, updated copyright year, camera shouldn't suck anymore" This is less than half of the changes.
I mean... G. F-ing D. With so many EC/BIOS problems on nearly every peripheral, I'm baffled that this got released in the first place.
My X1 Carbon Gen 12? Acceptable. Gets hot easily. Every now and then (twice a month) just stalls, sometimes I can unplug and close the lid and come back later and the OOM killer will finally do its job.
My X1 Carbon Gen 13? Didn't not have problems until Ubuntu 26.04. I need Ubuntu for work. Unfortunately, Rust coreutils and GNOME are buggy and it affects my workflow.
Partner's P-series? No problems so far. Coworkers' Legions? no complaints from them. Old-ass X301? Works fine. T480? Nice machine.
Lenovo itself has horrible dark patterns on their website (defaulting to 3-year premium warranty in the EU despite this being an optional upgrade and restoring this default every time you modify the device config, market-specific pricing and customizations despite all units originating from the same factory such that Linux from another country was a better deal than "No OS" from my own country, basing price decisions on how long you view specific pages). The fact that the website has many glaring bugs (including in the feedback forms to report bugs) is not a great look for a computing company.
My dream machine was the XPS 9370 Developer. Dell went the wrong way for me with the bathroom shower tile keyboard and mostly OLED screens and no more explicit Linux support. If anyone can capture that lightning in a bottle again, I'll buy four.
> same USB C charger that came with your phone
Yeah, you'll need that phone charger for your Lenovo, because the latest few generations of Lenovo chargers break in a way that they'll only charge in one orientation for a while, and then they eventually break completely. Luckily, they do this quickly, so you can replace them under warranty for as long as you'...
in my experience, the elitebooks have made a substantial jump in quality in the recent years and they became a worthy alternative at a similar price, the base screens are decent (16:10 in the last models) with nice touchpads
The main counterpoint in the article seems to be screen quality, which is weird since there are plenty of second hand models even on sites such as Amazon for less than 300 euros with excellent IPS screens such as t480s or t490s (respectively 8 and 9yo). Alternatively, thinkpads are known to have a high repairability so it's relatively easy to change the screen yourself if you're not happy with it (which I understand is not something everyone would want to do).
Current-gen X1 Carbons are sold with 400 or 500 nit IPS displays. I have complaints with nearly every other aspect of the ThinkPad---even the universally praised keyboard---but the display has been stellar.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 31.6 ms ] threadAnyone knows a website in Germany that sells these Thinkpads? TIA
My macbook neo outperforms my thinkpad x13g1 (ryzen 7, 8c16t, 32gb memory, amd gpu) on all metrics.
It’s snappier, battery lasts more, i have the same disk storage (500gb)
Do thinkpad owners care about battery life? Yes, but once you are past a full work day battery life and can charge it with same USB C charger that came with your phone it becomes a non issue.
My Z13 was a piece of garbage: arrived without Fedora fully installed, crashed at least once per week, had GPU and dock and USB and sleep problems, sent back for repairs multiple times. I tried to return it and they refused. My greatest joy was that insurance covered it being stolen from my apartment in Dublin.
My X1 Carbon Gen 11? Not great. Crashed 7 times in the 9 days I had it. Didn't sleep properly. Ibus and wireplumber would randomly crash. I'd get a glib error if I type an invalid Bash command. I tried Fedora 38 and Kinoite, Ubuntu 22, Debian 12, RHEL 9.2, TUXEDO, Pop, and Tumbleweed. Nobody had the right mix. I learned about and trialed all sorts of kernel flags: intel_idle.max_cstate, iommu=pt, Intel_iommu=on, Intel_iommu=pt, usbcore.autosuspend=-1, i915.enable_dc=0, i915.enable_psr=0, acpi.ec_no_wakeup=1, thinkpad_acpi.fan_control=1, acpi_osi, and a few others. Sometimes the 10-second power button shutdown was ignored; you have to use the little reset hole.
I can't even fully blame Lenovo. Their Linux lead puts in a ton of effort to do everything right. I'll read BIOS release notes for the laptops I hated, and they'll have a list with e.g. "fixed fingerprint reader problem, fixed hanging after hibernation, fixed hanging after resuming with lid closed, wake now works with any keyboard key, fixed issue where computer restarts unexpectedly, fixed overheating while charging, fixed problems related to docking and external monitors, fix sound, fix backlight, fix power profiles, fix slow boot, fixed USB port refusing to charge or enumerate (rarely (yes they actually said rarely in the release notes)), modify lid behavior, fix touchpad ACPI, fix sleep from power button, trackpoint doesn't work if lid closed with suspend disabled, touchpad stops functioning after restart, system hangs during Modern Standby, bunch of CVEs, updated copyright year, camera shouldn't suck anymore" This is less than half of the changes.
I mean... G. F-ing D. With so many EC/BIOS problems on nearly every peripheral, I'm baffled that this got released in the first place.
My X1 Carbon Gen 12? Acceptable. Gets hot easily. Every now and then (twice a month) just stalls, sometimes I can unplug and close the lid and come back later and the OOM killer will finally do its job.
My X1 Carbon Gen 13? Didn't not have problems until Ubuntu 26.04. I need Ubuntu for work. Unfortunately, Rust coreutils and GNOME are buggy and it affects my workflow.
Partner's P-series? No problems so far. Coworkers' Legions? no complaints from them. Old-ass X301? Works fine. T480? Nice machine.
Lenovo itself has horrible dark patterns on their website (defaulting to 3-year premium warranty in the EU despite this being an optional upgrade and restoring this default every time you modify the device config, market-specific pricing and customizations despite all units originating from the same factory such that Linux from another country was a better deal than "No OS" from my own country, basing price decisions on how long you view specific pages). The fact that the website has many glaring bugs (including in the feedback forms to report bugs) is not a great look for a computing company.
My dream machine was the XPS 9370 Developer. Dell went the wrong way for me with the bathroom shower tile keyboard and mostly OLED screens and no more explicit Linux support. If anyone can capture that lightning in a bottle again, I'll buy four.
> same USB C charger that came with your phone
Yeah, you'll need that phone charger for your Lenovo, because the latest few generations of Lenovo chargers break in a way that they'll only charge in one orientation for a while, and then they eventually break completely. Luckily, they do this quickly, so you can replace them under warranty for as long as you'...