ThinkPad X1 Carbon | Hacker News Reader

ThinkPad X1 Carbon

www3.lenovo.com

299 pointsfiji-flo526 comments

I want to be excited by a good non-Apple laptop. But they're all just so terribly designed. They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy, have grills and screw holes and uneven surfaces and stickers everywhere.

I had a T530 for a few years at my first job and just hated it. It had fantastic specs but it felt awful and unreliable and like I had to babysit it. I got a 2015 MBP to replace it after IT damaged it (broke off a bunch of plastic bits from two grills) and while it was a migraine getting Windows and Ubuntu to dual boot, I don't think twice when closing the lid and slipping it into my backpack to go home. Tossing my backpack into my trunk, or in the overhead carry-on.

I would pay a fortune to have a solid chassis (not case) metal non-Apple laptop available.

Yoga 910? Spectre x360?

I'm surprised you say it had fantastic specs. My case was the complete opposite: my Thinkpad had pretty terrible specs for the price I paid for it, but I'm yet to find a keyboard that comes close to it. I don't think the keyboard is incredible, but it's depressing most laptop's keyboards.

I was given it on day one so I don't know it's history, but it was definitely maxed out specs. So fantastic for what I was used to? =)

The keyboard was very nice. Though the trackpad was terrible. The #$*(# thing is a damn sticker. And I had to replace the sticker twice because it would wear smooth where I used it most.

Thinkpads T have a huge range of specs.

For any reference, there are hundreds of sub-references with different combinations of hardware.

Yes. I was referring to the relationship price-specs. Unless things have changed, a 1000$ thinkpad T won't probably buy you more than 8gb, an i5, possibly still a HDD (hopefully not anymore). I suppose people that are used to Macs won't see a problem with this, since Macs tend to be quite expensive, but it's still a bit of money, although I would rather spend this than buy a laptop that doesn't work well, like plenty of what's out there.

Lenovo's prices for a lot of upgrades (RAM, SSD) tend to be high. My recommendation there is to upgrade the things that aren't reasonable to do yourself/later (screen, WiFi adapter if you have choices between 2x2 and 3x3, backlit keyboard, fingerprint reader). RAM and HD upgrades on Thinkpads tend to be pretty easy (though I don't know about the X1 never having looked at one), so for those it may be better to get the cheapest option then upgrade on your own.

X1 has gone back and forth between upgradable and soldered on. Occasionally I will see an X1 at a price I'm willing to pay only to find out that I can't upgrade.

Yes, I actually did that with my SSD and memory. One of the things I miss of Thinkpads is the GPU. It seems like in the past two or three years it's been increasingly hard to find a Thinkpad T with GPU. I'm aware that the W have them, but those are beasts. I read somewhere that you could buy them through other countries, like Japan, but didn't look much into it.

They're not mentioned very often, but it looks like at this point for the T4xx you have to go with the "p" models to get a Nvidia GPU - the T460 and T460s are only Intel, as I understand it the T460p is somewhere between the T460 and the W product line - a little bigger, a little more expandable, etc.

Looks like you can also only get the GPU with the i7-6820HQ, so out of all the T product line there's a single CPU/GPU combination that's not using the Intel graphics. That may in part be related to the significant improvements in Intel's graphics capabilities in recent generations - starting around the HD4000 in the third-generation processors the GPUs are actually reasonably capable, and they've improved rapidly even from that point.

It's an unfortunate consequence of the ridiculous markups on hardware add-ons, but if you're willing to apply a little elbow grease and look at resellers, it's not too hard to get what you're looking for for 1000$.

New:

  * 818$: cheapest T460 on the website
    * +270$ for i3-6100u => i7-6600u
    * +390$ for 500GB HDD => 512GB SSD upgrade
    * +470$ for 4GB RAM => 32GB RAM

Here's your 1000$ build:

  * 700$ for a T460 with an i5 on eBay (http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?LH_Sold=1&_udlo=700&_dmd=1&_ipg=200&LH_Complete=1&_sop=15&_nkw=t460%20i5)
  * 170$ for a 500GB 850 EVO (https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E500B-AM/dp/B00OBRE5UE)
  * 108$ to 170$ for Crucial's 16GB RAM kits (depending on specific specs)

If you're willing to part with another 200$-300$:

  * <800$ for a T460 with an i7 on eBay (http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?LH_Sold=1&_udlo=700&_dmd=1&_ipg=200&LH_Complete=1&_sop=15&_nkw=t460%20i7)
  * 340$ for Crucial's 32GB RAM kit (http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/thinkpad-t460/CT8304418)

If you're a more on-the-go person who needs a small laptop that needs to do it all, and do it all day then you might consider also checking out the x220T laptop.

They have a model with an i7, sometimes they have 3G sim readers, and has a touchscreen + touchpen (you can disable one, or both of these in software). These are great for taking notes, more then enough power to survive a day of real programming.

I've actually got an x220 with the original 6-cell and a slice battery, which puts me at 6 hours unplugged. It's not very impressive tbh, but it's been worth what I paid for it.

In terms of industrial design, Samsung's ultrabooks are excellent, in my opinion: http://www.samsung.com/us/computing/windows-laptops/12-14/no...

All 3 laptops suggested to me in this thread have foldy complicated hinges. What's the deal with that?

If you can get past the "gamer" aesthetic and you aren't interested in a 2-in-1-- the Razer Blade (and Stealth) are great build quality and specs. Razer itself has terrible (non-existent?) support-- but the products are good.

They're intended to be folded over to be used in a "tablet" mode, or propped up in "tent" mode. All based around the touch screen, basically.

If one is (like I am) looking for a Retina-like screen, there's only one option, the Notebook 9 Pro 15.6'' [1], which is quite bulky and has that cheap plastic look.

[1] http://www.samsung.com/us/computing/windows-laptops/15-18/no...

Not true. I have the 13.3" which I bought from Best Buy and it is retina.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-notebook-9-spin-13-3-tou...

Thanks. That's a very underpowered machine (dual-core, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, integrated graphics), though. I neglected to say that I'm looking for a MBP 15'' alternative.

It isn't perfect by any stretch, but I've been liking my XPS 13. The battery is especially noteworthy.

How do you feel about the odd placement of the camera? I'm considering it but a couple of design choices always make me doubt I'll enjoy it as much. Camera is one of them (I use videochat a lot)

The camera placement is bad. I don't use video much at all, but when I need to on my XPS 13, I actually use a separate USB webcam. The built-in camera is just really strange to use - to others it looks like you're looking off into the distance, and if you type, your left fingers will cover up the camera entirely. All that being said, this is an excellent laptop otherwise, and I really enjoy using it daily.

The 13.3" Clevo is pretty much an unbranded Macbook Air (Google for Schenker S306 or https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/lafiteII/)

Thanks for the tip. I had never even heard of the brand before. It does seem to be a great laptop!

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Schenker-S306-Subnotebook-Revie...

And when it breaks, good luck getting support! My time is worth more to go with a big vendor with ubiquitous support.

? All Schenker laptops come with a 24 months warranty. Not as convenient as walking in an Apple Store (I see you are an Apple fan), but I'm fine with paying for shipping to get a replacement if it breaks. Only 1 out of my 5 previous laptops (various brands) has ever needed a warranty repair.

I just recently bought a ASUS ZenBook UX360UAK with a 7th gen i7, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD.

It's made out of aluminium, has a glass touchpad and costs around half of what a similarly priced MacBook pro costs in Germany.

It's my first non-Mac after 20 years. I've owned it for a good week and so far I'm very happy. It has superb battery life, great build quality and is fast. Only 1 minor con: the fan always runs, but it's not too loud and I can live with it...

How's the keyboard? I'm so so sad that most laptops' keyboards are terrible... You can't imagine. I so much would love to buy an ASUS or similar laptop as the one you purchased, especially since they are affordable, but every time I check some laptops, their keyboards are beyond terrible. It's a shame, really. I will have to stick to Thinkpads.

To be honest it's not as good as my MacBook Air's. I have very low requirements when it comes to that. If it is of importance to you I guess you might not be happy with the ASUS...

My GF has one and I was surprised when I used it, as it was great for a slim laptop. I'm used to using a mechanical keyboard or a MBP keyboard.

If you really cared about the keyboard, they all suck. Get an external mechanical keyboard. I've used one with Cherry MX blue switches at two jobs and no one has threatened to murder and/or fire me yet. Guess I'm lucky. :)

I've actually thought about doing so, but I'm always moving back and forth, so right now I think my best choice is to stick with a laptop. I agree that they all suck, but some (most?) of them suck so much they are out of question. I don't know what happened, really. 10 years ago you bought a laptop, no matter which brand, and you would get a decent keyboard. They have sacrificed quality for aesthetics too much, but maybe you are right; I should just buy a mechanical. I looked into the Happy Hacking keyboard. It's a bit pricey, but I've heard very nice things.

If you buy a 10-keyless keyboard they are usually small. You can pick up chinese cloan switches now for extremely cheap right now.

This one looks good enough: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Water-Resistant-VicTop-Mechanical-W...

IF you're concerned wrap it in some kind of cloth but for under 30 bucks it's not a major concern if you get a decent lifespand out of it. I'd say anything over 2 years is a huge win.

Thank you very much for the link! That one is pretty affordable. I might purchase it actually.

Thanks for alerting me to these, I've kept looking at the proper 10keyless keyboards like Topre [0] thinking "Really? Is it worth that much?".

Be good to try something cheaper, though the single-height enter key would drive me CRAZY.

[0] http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard/realforce-88ub-45g-key-bl.... £192!!

Something is only worth how much you will use it. If you will use your keyboard every day from now until the cataracts and arthritis gets you then you'll probably find it worth the money to invest in good tooling. My keyboard was is actually and open boz/broken from manufacturer version of an OK one, I paid 37$. Worth twice that for how easy it makes typing and these are bad switches mind you.

I agree, but until I have tried one (never having used mechanical keys) I don't know how much it's worth to me :)

> I don't know what happened, really. 10 years ago you bought a laptop, no matter which brand, and you would get a decent keyboard.

THIN became a much more important marketing tool than GOOD, or even FUNCTIONAL.

There is nothing more "good" or "functional" about deep travel keyboards. They're just a matter of taste. You can type just as fast on something like a MacBook keyboard once you get used to it.

Sure. That's why Cherry went out of business years ago...

Lots of companies stay in business selling subjective experiences. But there isn't a functional advantage to keyboards with a lot of feedback.

Got any research to show that? Or should I just assume that your personal opinion is worth more than everybody elses'?

You're the one making the affirmative statement that high travel keyboards - which the whole market is moving away from - are functionally better than low travel ones. You prove that there is any real rather than purely subjective benefit.

The whole market isn't moving away from high-travel keyboards. In fact, there's a lot of interest in them, and they are generally preferred by gamers.

How do you explain the widespread perception that laptop keyboards used to be good but are now crappy?

> real rather than purely subjective benefit

Subjective benefits are real benefits.

On Cherry Browns, my managers believed that I was more productive because they could hear lots of key noise.

I have Cherry Blues at home but wouldn't dare use them in an open-plan office environment - far too noisy.

Macbook/Macbook Pro/Macbook Air keyboards are probably the highest quality laptop keyboards I've found (I have 2x cherry red mechanical keyboards at home). Every other laptop keyboard I've tried feels like _garbage_ in comparison.

Linux or Windows?

Currently running Windows with Bash installed though. I briefly tried Xubuntu, but occasionally it froze while booting up. Didn't have time to check what was wrong (needed to hurry for a project) so decided for Windows.

I took a look at the ZenBook range. The range looks decent, but the 15'' has a hard drive (!) (no option to choose SSD only, apparently), a numeric keypad (!!) and the highest-performing model is a dual-core i7 with 16GB RAM — so aside from the price, not a good alternative to a MBP.

(I find the shiny brushed aluminium look to be embarrassingly tacky, though not quite as bad as the rose gold model.)

Not true, you can find them with SSDs. For example heres a revieew for one: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ZenBook-Pro-UX501VW-Notebo... Also unlike in Macs you can buy extra RAM to go above 16GB.

Thanks. Weird, I didn't find that model on Asus' site.

Shame about the keyboard not coming in different variants, though. I am sure that some people like numeric keypads, but ever since my first PC cirka 1992 I've always hated them. It's the last thing I need on a small laptop.

Sadly, most recent 15", of all brands, have a numeric keypad. IIRC I only found one non-MBP beside the XPS15 that still have no keypad, but it has way worse issues (very bad heat issues). So you pretty much only have the choice between an MBP and an XPS if you don't want a numeric keypad(and an off centered touchpad, beurk!) on a recent 15"

Really? The Asus and some ThinkPad models are the only ones I have seen this in. For example, none of the models offered in this Verge article [1] have a keypad.

The 14'' Razer Blade [2] also has a normal keyboard, and comes close to being a MBP replacement, though it's not perfect.

Apparently a lot of these laptops have issues with heat and noisy fans. Some articles say i7 laptops (the quad-core ones) tend to have low battery life. I'm getting about 4 hours from my MBP 2015 using only Safari, Terminal and VSCode, and I can't imagine these other laptops would be worse than that.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/11/2/13497094/be...

[2] http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade

Actually I just found that some Samsung Notebook 9 "pro" 15" have keypad-less keyboard. However, they seems to be limited to 8GB, and I don't want to be sent 6 years in the past. I also don't exactly know what the "pro" in their name is for, given they ship with Win10 home...

I bought one of the first gen zenbooks. The trackpad was completely unusable due to terrible windows drivers (dragging didn't work right). I vaguely remember failing to install linux on it.

They had two models of ssd, but one laptop sku. One model went to review websites, the other's performance degraded to actually be noticably slower than a hard disk. You could replace the ssd, but it was a non-standard form factor, so you needed to buy an expensive m.2 converter.

The keyboard dropped keystrokes.

The screen was meh for the time.

This was their flagship laptop that year.

After it has been a full decade, I might consider buying another asus laptop.

> the fan always runs

Are there laptops where it doesn't? I've had 4 different models from 4 different makers, including a MacBook Pro, and every one has run the fan 100℅ of the time.

On my X1Yoga, the fan almost never runs.. When it starts up I look at the running processes (because something is likely wrong)

My 2013(?) MB Air is not running its fan at all...

According to this page, the asus laptop costs around 2500USD. If you buy a MBP (Mid 2012 non retina), it would cost around 900USD and then you swap out hdd for ssd and max out RAM at 16 GB so the total price would be something around 1250 USD.

Can't beat that.

[1] http://www.amazon.in/ZenBook-UX360CA-13-3-inch-Touchscreen-W...

In Germany it's 1300 euros which is half of what the new MB Pro without touch bar costs: https://www.notebooksbilliger.de/product.php/asus+ux360uak+b...

I looked an the ASUS ZenBook, but the screen was too dim and the trackpad not functional enough for my tastes. I've grown less enamored with Apple since Job's passing, but I've yet to find anything that really compares, even with Apple's current warts.

This is the first one that comes more than close enough for me to make the switch. Was worried at first but am really happy with my decision now :)

The lack of fans and vents on the bottom of MacBooks Pros is seriously a huge benefit. I can actually use it ON MY LAP!

Yeah! But a massive drawback is forgetting that it's metal and that you left it in your trunk last night. I was in my jimjams Christmas morning, went to put on some music, and without thinking, placed this frozen box of death onto my bare legs.

Were you wearing gloves when placing it on your lap?

I'm overthinking this, but it doesn't seem odd. Us in colder climates have our hands adjusted to cold (since they are usually exposed) while areas closer to our chest and groin (such as inner thighs) not as adapted.

I love the feeling of cold MBA on my thighs :) Wim Hof would probably laugh at your comment ;)

I've had the 2015 macbook for over a year now, and you learn reflexes, similar to how you avoid the heat with other laptops in the past.

Too true! Nothing sucks more than Christmas shrinkage.

The Razer Blade has similar unibody metal chassis as Apple laptops and is not coated in stickers. I have the Blade Stealth and its just as sturdy and sleek as the Apple equivalent.

Which Apple equivalent?

MacBook air? Base MacBook pro?

I'm running Fedora on my Razer Blaze Stealth.

The Razer Blades do look amazing. I was looking at getting one, but at the time they didn't have any 16GB models. I ended up getting an MSI instead and using it as a Linux development laptop:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/

I never hear anyone mention the Razer Blade's and yet they seem to be the best looking and spec'd non-Apple notebooks by far.

They are almost too good to be true. What's the catch?

Have you had any issues running Linux on them?

I run Linux as a VM on mine, which works fine for my use cases. I've heard the Wifi/GPU/Webcam can give you trouble in some cases depending on exact laptop model and Linux distro used.

I upgraded to a Razer Blade from a 2013 macbook.

Performance is great.

It is very well built, I would say on almost on par with a Mac, except for thin grills covering the cooling fans on the bottom. Grabbing the laptop in the wrong spot can easily push the grills up against the fan.

Battery life is terrible. Lucky to get 4-5 hours running a nothing but a browser and ssh client. (On windows 10. I haven't tried, but remember reading that power management on linux is even worse)

The trackpad gestures are not as accurate as on a Mac. I don't know how much of that is Windows vs the hardware.

Cooling fans are always on, and they are kind of loud even at low rpm. Not noticeable in a noisy office environment, but annoying in a quiet setting. The black chassis is a fingerprint magnet like no other laptop I've seen. The lit green logo on the lid is a bit obnoxious, and would not fit in at a very corporate environment. The actual display size is somewhat smaller than that of many similarly sized notebooks.

I'm okay with the trade offs (though the battery hurts...) but its definitely not a clear-cut winner compared to the competition.

Edit: the Blade Stealth may fare a little better battery wise, but even it doesn't have a stellar battery life.

The price, they are in Macbook range.

As a gaming laptop they're not great. The reason is that, for example, one model had a GTX 970M, which sounds good but the thermal performance is such that the GPU is near constantly throttled resulting in questionably worse performance than similarly sized and specked machines with a 960M part.

That's just poor thermal design. You know you just don't get that with MacBooks (you don't get a 970M either of course).

Personally I'm passing on this generation of MBPs. Will Apple wait another 2 years to update them? I'm just not convinced that this isn't now an iPod market for Apple.

Instead I ended up getting a Dell XPS 15. Having a Linux subsystem is pretty nice. It's nowhere near as polished as the Apple experience but for $1300 (including upgrades) I got the base machine and put a Samsung 950 Pro and 32GB of RAM into it, so that's nice.

I'm sorry, but you are just wrong on this. I own one of those 970M model Razer Blades and I can tell you personally that throttling is not an issue on my machine. At all.

https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads/razer-blade-...

Razer has superb thermal design.

> What's the catch?

What happens when you need hardware support? Lenovo gives you (shitty in my experience) on site service - if you pay. Apple has the Apple Store, superior if you have a store nearby.

What's Razer got? Depot service for my main money making tool? Unacceptable.

I'm pretty happy with this one: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Noteboo...

Especially because it is aluminium an Linux just works on it.

What flavor do you use? any driver trouble?

Just the plain one with max ram, or did you mean distro? Arch Linux. No driver problems at all. In fact i just took the SSD out of my Thinkpad and put it in into this without reinstalling anything everything just worked.

This has a magnesium chassis, so it should be stiffer than aluminum. It is also carbon fiber, not plastic.

> They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy

The Carbon X1 is made from carbon fiber. It super-robust and light-weight at the same time.

It feels light years ahead of the super-heavy aluminium-nonsense Apple is trying to peddle. Count me happy my laptop doesn't double as a bench-press.

When we got accepted into YCombinator back in 2011 (Mailgun), I remember PG looking at our Thinkpads running Linux and asking something along the lines of "what's wrong with you?", with almost [1] all YC teams using Macbooks.

I wonder if it's the Valley culture? There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad [2] for programmer productivity: the keyboard, the UltraNav, the swappable batteries (you can fly around the world with a x260 + spare battery), a nice docking station, upgradeable storage/memory and a trouble-free Linux distro. Plus, they don't burn you with ice-cold aluminum every morning.

The gap is huge! If a Thinkpad is a 100, the prev. gen Macbook Pro would be 60 and everything else lingering in misery under 10.

Full disclosure: I am 100% Macbook right now because Photoshop/Sketch, the struggle is real, I miss everything about Thinkpad, hence this passionate comment.

  [1] Another 100% Linux, 100% Thinkpad company was http://www.acunote.com 
  [2] Properly configured, i.e. IPS, Intel graphics, etc.

I don't understand it either, the thing that always gets me is most developers setting up vagrant on their Mac just to get a working environment.

Cut the bullshit and just run Linux on the bare metal, your program will run faster, and your laptop battery life won't be halved.

You will have to claw my x201 out of my cold dead hands, I've not found a single notebook (even the newer ThinkPads) that are as comfortable to use. I've got no crummy trackpad wasting space and a 16:10 display that's designed for work, and not watching cat videos.

Spare parts are dirt cheap, and since the magnesium alloy rollcage is on the inside I don't have to worry about ugly dents, I just swap plastic panels out on the cheap when I think they are getting a bit too worn.

> not watching cat videos.

yea. ok

edit: Why not watch cat videos?

I've been a thinkpad user since 386 days, and love my x201 and x220, but I prefer the Dell Rugged Extreme (price notwithstanding) -- feels like an old school bombproof (literally in this case) thinkpad...

but I really miss the UltraNav.

If you want there was a P series of thinkpads that are designed to be milspec and IP60 something.

Not all the P-series, as far as I can see - the P50/P50s/P70 do, but the P40 Yoga notably doesn't (and I'd be impressed if they had made a hybrid tablet/laptop that did).

(And here I thought the P-series was "just" what the W series morphed into...)

Yeah I bought a pretty expensive Macbook Pro earlier this year and recently ended up switching from OSX to Ubuntu after I got tired of dealing with all sorts of random Docker issues. To my surprise, I've found Linux to feel faster and be somewhat more pleasant than OSX. Now I sometimes wish I had just spent half as much money getting a more powerful (bulkier) laptop that just ran Linux.

Docker outside of Linux has been a major pain point for a while. I'm switching to a Linux laptop and native Docker is one of the things I'm most looking forward to.

I know the feeling. I was sick of using company's laptop (ideapad) to everything I needed to (messing personal stuff together), and went forward looking for a new (used) laptop in internet classified boards. I wanted a well built, portable (like 13" max), and mint condition used laptop. Went to Docker Slack and asked what were their experience running docker on mac. There are still some improvements to be made there, and besides I dont want to run VMs again unless its totally needed (like a windows environment in a vm, or coreos on qemu as I use here for k8s testing, but not docker itself). I know xhyve is transparent and everything, but lets face it, its just another virtual machine running docker, from boot2docker to xhyve was a no-go to me. So I decided to go for a Linux laptop (using linux since 98, in fact I got excited about it). My options for a decent linux laptop concerning portability were the Dell XPS, or a Thinkpad X260. So I started to watch reviews on youtube for both laptops. Doing so I found that the Dell has a coil whine issue that would really drive me crazy having a laptop screaming right out of the box. It was a no-go for me. If you want to check what I am talking about, watch this https://youtu.be/cwR4CWzDtfQ. My boss has one and I started to listen to the laptop and yes it is kinda noisy. So there was this thinkpad. At amazon the X260 was USD 2750. Far from my spending range right now, so I decided to check classifieds for a used one. Keeping in mind the linux laptop for docker development, I found a thinkpad x240 which is a beast - 12,5"/i7 proc/8GB ram/256 ssd. its silent, portable enough, feels well built as most thinkpads, its possible to upgrade the memory to 16GB when I have the resources for it, has back-light keyboard, a nice keyboard indeed. The trackpad is sort of weird, but I am getting used to it. The version I got is a touchscreen HD display and not FHD, so my max res is 1366x768. Using the gnome tweak tool I was able to change some fonts and icons size, its just great now, feels like HD for me. Has 2 video ports, VGA and miniDV. it has card reader. Even a sim card modem built in. It was USD 500. I dont see myself changing to another one soon. And docker is flying over here - as well qemu. Cheers mates.

> Cut the bullshit and just run Linux on the bare metal,

I run Linux on Linux via vagrant, it's not about my program running faster it's about isolating a client projects dependencies from each other so when I have to work on that system that is still in production on PHP Current-1 or Ruby-1 I don't have to fuck with my host OS at all.

In fact I have very few developer bits and bobs installed on the host (mostly just JetBrains stuff) and all the actual tooling is run in the VM, this makes for far easier deploys for myself since my process is

pull projectname/(site||name), pull projectname/vagrant, vagrant up.

It takes me less than 30 minutes from reinstalling to having half a dozen projects with all their weird dependencies and cruft installed and I never have to worry about breaking something else or needing to blow away a machine for some reason.

I'm happy to trade some performance for running damn near everything in a guest OS for that.

Curious, why Vagrant and not Docker? Then you don't need to run a VM, but still get the same isolation.

well pointed!

I am guessing is that when he started working on this stuff docker was in it's infancy (still is IMHO), and had no reason/time to port it.

Or you could have glanced at the article and seen that your guess is wide off the mark.. ;-)

Which article?

Absolutely this, vagrant has bee reliable, stable (barring the odd oops on a new release) and fits my workflow, docker is interesting but the switching cost to payback ratio isn't there (yet, I'd really like to get rid of having to use NFS, that's accounted for 80% of my vagrant issues).

> Curious, why Vagrant and not Docker?

I have a Vagrant/Virtualbox workflow (on Windows host, so Docker not a great option yet) but curious: does Docker have shared folder support - via NFS or other?

It's been the getting stuff into & out of the VM that's most painful IMO.

Docker has better than just shared folder support, you can share folders, UNIX SOCKETS!!!, and DEVICES!!!!! And no need for NFS either, its just a bindmount into the container...

On Windows, if you are using Docker Toolbox, you can keep using VirtualBox. The corresponding driver of docker-machine will spin up the VM that runs the docker daemon, which, once it's running, you can control from the "outside". It uses shared folders support to map the user's home directory by default: https://docs.docker.com/machine/drivers/virtualbox/

> On Windows, if you are using Docker Toolbox, you can keep using VirtualBox.

Oh awesome, thanks! I looked when Docker for Windows came out and (thankfully) spotted the "After Hyper-V is enabled, VirtualBox will no longer work" (?!) warning before trying it. I didn't dig any deeper.

Not the person you asked, but I use Vagrant because I deploy to hosts that I consider disposable and don't trust Docker in production, for reasons more thoroughly explained by the person that wrote this article: https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/01/docker-in-production-an-his...

I thinkimux is rather hit and miss when it comes to battery life on Linux.

I've never really quite understood why, as I though ACPI is meant to handle this. But I'm not terribly au fait with this interface, so there might be good reasons, I know Torcalds criticised it early on as a "design disaster" and there were and I think still are concerns about the way that bytecode has unfettered access to the system.

Yeah, I wouldn't want a crummy windows trackpad taking up space either ;) also all Apple laptops are 16:10, other than the 11" MacBook Air.

What's a Windows trackpad?

> You will have to claw my x201 out of my cold dead hands, I've not found a single notebook (even the newer ThinkPads) that are as comfortable to use. I've got no crummy trackpad wasting space and a 16:10 display that's designed for work, and not watching cat videos.

the X201 has a trackpad. The X1 carbon (and several other models) have 2560x1440 displays.

The x201 was the last ThinkPad to offer NOT having a Trackpad, you just swap the palmrest.

http://mos6581.com/pictures/thinkpad/201-palmrest.jpg

> (...) most developers setting up vagrant on their Mac just to get a working environment.

What kind of working environment requires setting up Vagrant on OSX? It's a Unix-based OS, if you're doing any web development you can do it on the host system.

You generally develop on the platform that your software will end up running on, and nobody in their right mind uses OSX on a server.

If you have a SaaS product that needs 3D rendering on the server, Windows and Linux servers that have a GPU are targeted towards GPGPU and are expensive to rent.

MacPros have two descent AMD FirePro GPUs but much cheaper to rent.

If you are trying to match your production platform then you will use a VM of some sort in Linux anyway. If you are not trying to match your production platform then you can develop just fine on OSX.

Isolation and reproduction.

For one thing, you want the development environment to be as similar to production as possible – same OS version, same webserver version, same DB version, same dependencies, no unwanted extras that differ between environments.

For another thing, you don't want to have to solve conflicts between project A and completely unrelated project T if you need to work on them both.

If you care about isolation and reproduction then you're using a VM anyway and the host OS is completely irrelevant.

Using a VM is the reason to use Vagrant.

Yes, I know.

You hinted at it in the end: MacBooks have good software that works. No troubles connecting to peripherals like printers and projectors. No worries about laptop sucking battery when I close the lid and forget to sleep.

And MacBooks have the best touchpad of all laptops.

> MacBooks have good software that works

I just spent my entire workday struggling to figure out why `kernal_task` was constantly using 16gb of RAM. Whenever people say macOS "just works" I assume they do nothing but web browse. It's great at that.

Your OS manages all of your memory. You can't get any memory at all without asking it for it. How much memory were you requesting, and why didn't you get it? Is that the problem you were solving? Is there some reason you suspect the OS preferentially gives memory to web browsers?

Did you figure it out? If not, you may want to try choosing "All processes, hierarchically" from the View menu in Activity Monitor.

I "solved" the problem by restoring a week old backup from before I'd upgraded to Sierra. All other things were equal, so the OS was the culprit. This is why good backups are important, never know when Apple's gonna screw you.

The browser takes up most of takes up most of my resources. Apart from that it would be Adobe products and sometimes MATLAB (all less resources than safari). My terminal would be negligible.

I agree with your comment. Generally, OSX often means I am using more resources to do the same task than when I use my archlinux. But in the era of 16g+ ram and terabyte Harddisks, I find it simpler to just let OSX use extra resources so I can spend less time thinking about low level processes.

Man I feel like I'm attacking apple a lot recently but this is something else I saw on my MBA - various daemons (powerd, kernel_task, accountsd, and more I can't remember) spinning on 100% cpu usage leaving the laptop unusable.

The only software I miss is "Preview" on Mac OS. It's amazing for editing pdfs - merge, split etc.

Preview.app is one of the few things I miss when working on Windows or Linux systems, we just had to buy a Foxit PhantomPDF license to do basic PDF editing like this and I was thinking "why the hell is this not just a standard feature like it is on macOS?".

>Preview.app is one of the few things I miss when working on Windows or Linux systems, we just had to buy a Foxit PhantomPDF license to do basic PDF editing like this and I was thinking "why the hell is this not just a standard feature like it is on macOS?"

For that we have to go back about a decade:

http://betanews.com/2006/06/02/adobe-to-sue-microsoft-for-pd...

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server/microsoft-strips-key-...

The long and short of it is that Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft for including PDF support as a feature in Office (despite allowing it on OS X and OpenOffice at the same time) so MS stopped doing anything PDF related. Adobe was widely derided in the software industry over the incident.

So we all can thank Adobe for that.

IMO Windows is better than OSX, but to each of its own.

For example I hate Finder, I dont like that I am not able to run lots of software, I dont like that its running an ancient version of OpenGL/there is no Vulkan.

I'm of the opposite opinion. I like finder since I can do a search and have instant results, rather than the hour wait that Windows Explorer provides. I also like how file indexing is built into macOS by default, rather than having it available only via a nebulous add-on.

I agree when I switched from Windows to osx, I had a lot of trouble with finder. But now I am slowly getting used to it.

Also, as a mac user for the past year and a half, I still can't figure out when the three coloured dots are useful. Just give me windows-style minimize/maximize/close buttons please...

Every long time Mac user I've asked says they just don't use those buttons. Maximising windows is a mess in mac. Multi monitor support is also rather poor.

Over all, I've had no real problems with OS X (at least after installing my own terminal program and own version of bash and such) and everything worked smoothly, which is great, but I certainly wouldn't hold OS X up as some example of perfect design because there are lots of things windows and Linux do better.

> MacBooks have good software that works.

More specifically, the stuff I don't want to mess with just works: peripherals and GUI stuff work without intervention, and the thing goes to sleep when I close the lid. And the stuff I want to mess with is still good old familiar Unix. I haven't tried out desktop Linux in awhile, but the Free Software model only seems to work for things coders like to work on in their spare time, like terminals, text editors, and command-line programs. For the rest, I'm willing to pay my fellow coders so I don't have to deal with it.

> I haven't tried out desktop Linux in awhile

I read your first sentence and was like "wow, this guy hasn't used Linux in a while." Then I got to your second sentence.

So, yeah, maybe give it another go. In my experience most of the complaints I had 4-5 years ago are gone at this point, and the convenience gap has closed substantially. OS X is still more user friendly of course, and there's a little bit of configuration required to make everything work smoothly under Linux, but it's a lot better than you remember.

Importantly, I've seen some devs using OS X, and they spend way more time dealing with dev tooling issues than I spend dealing with printers, devices, and gui stuff.

> No troubles connecting to peripherals like printers and projectors.

Well, except for all those dongles you need to drag around with you.

I've had problems connecting by MBP to the projector system in a company that uses predominantly macs... (but not using Apple TV - that's always worked flawlessly for me). So I definitely disagree with the no trouble connecting to peripherals like projectors.

Bollocks. I have plenty of Mac uses at work asking me for help setting up their Macs with peripherals.

A lot of developers love their Macs and I don't get it. For me OSX 10.6 was the last decent one. Mission Control is garbage compared to Expose. I got so frustrated with it that I started running Linux in a VM on my Mac as my primary system. I also got into tiling window managers, which killed every going back to Mac/Windows.

Today's Dell and Lenovo laptops are good Linux dev machines. I've never had a problem with putting Linux one one, either my Dell Inspiron at work or my XPS at home. My old first gen carbon can even run FreeBSD-11 fine. Everything worked straight off with a stock kernel and the current linux-firmware package.

At one time, Macs were more cost effective for the specs you got. But with all the ram and SSD storage you can pack into modern laptops, they're really good dev machines.

Decent machines indeed as long as you are close to a wall socket. Linux power management has a lot of growing up to do.

My experience with linux power management has been alright, or at least better than my expectations. I have an asus laptop that gets f*-all battery life under windows (either 8 or 10, though it seems to be worse now) but I can usually get at least 90 minutes more out of it under linux. It took some tweaking to get to that point, and I have no macbooks to compare it to, but I think the situation isn't as grim as I see a lot of people say it is.

I'm not sure if this is a fare comparison, but my MB Air can easily get 9-10 hours of battery life (if I don't run Chrome).

Agreed. Lenovo claims "up to" 9 hours for the 3rd gen X1 carbon, I get at most 5 under linux.

That said, I still prefer my X1 to macbooks. I find the MBP 15 heavy, the air has an atrocious screen. And both make my wrists hurt when typing - the edge of the laptop is too sharp. The X1 has a great screen (QHD), is very light and has an excellent keyboard. I think the trackpad, software and battery life are better with macbooks.

I get a measured 13 hours of work time on my new T460. You're citing intuition which is awfully stale.

13 hours with the extra goiter-battery? Doing what?

Let me rephrase, if for no other reason than to give you the ability to retreat to some other anatomical metaphor:

This box, with a i7-6600U, routinely idles with the screen on at 5.5-6W with a current kernel (spending almost all of that in PC7 per powertop). Your ideas about Linux power management are just plain misinformed.

I have an X1 (Yoga).

Tiny almost weightless (feels lighter than current-gen Macbook Air) laptop, and it runs between 10 to 11 hours on the battery when doing normal work (programming, mail, web, spreadsheets etc..) on wifi with pleasant screen brightness ...

Linux power management is fine today on modern hardware... (Powertop reports 5.2-5.5 watts)

Is there anything you need to do / configure, as I am not getting that sort of battery out of my X1 Carbon running Mint. (I realize I usually leave bluetooth on, and the screen at mid to high brightness and have about 20-30 tabs open in firefox but I would still be lucky to get 5 hours out of it.)

On my machine mentioned upthread, I have a third party SSD installed which apparently fools the firmware into disabling SATA link power management. Powertop will tell you about most goofs like that.

Beyond that, run a current kernel (my measurements are on Fedora's 4.8.12 kernel). Also recognize that recent Intel SoCs have gotten a lot better at idle power draw. The "X1 Carbon" brand started with (I think) Ivy Bridge boards which obviously aren't going to perform like this.

Current/modern kernel (I run Arch), disable unneeded radios (bluetooth and lte for me), slightly lower (but still nice) brigtness on the screen and agressive tuning by powertop..

Can confirm this (>14h) for T460 with the large battery option and under normal 'working load'

It certainly does, but my XPS 13 lasts ~7 hours running Fedora 25 and my work-issued W540 gets around the same (this is a stupid beast of the machine that only gets that much running Windows, a 40W quad-core i7 in a laptop isn't power sipping when I'm building something in Visual Studio or IntelliJ). It's getting a lot better as long as you're not running a Skylake chip, Haswell/Broadwell and below have pretty decent support these days.

I don't mind Mission Control too much, I've got a hotspot set in the top left which triggers it, it means I've got shared muscle memory between OSX and Gnome 3 on my other machines.

> I also got into tiling window managers, which killed every going back to Mac/Windows.

I'm also a tiling WM fan. I found amethyst a resonable comprise when using macOS though.

Aquasnap for windows is also pretty nice. Though lately, I just use the window management shortcuts added in Windows 10 for setting up tiles.

Mac OS X 10.6 was great.

I remember when Apple released it saying, 'no new features'. Just bug fixes and speed improvements.

We need one of those again.

Snow Leopard was super stable. I can't remember a single crash.

10.6 was great for the time, I was actually really pissed after 10.7 and many releases afterward fucked up Expose during the Mission Control debacle (I think there's now a way to turn off the window grouping, but this was what ended up making me sell my 2012 MBP and switch to Fedora since GNOME 3 manages to have all the comfort features I liked from macOS).

and move away from the annual major release cycle again...

You're in a thread responding to someone (who I happen to agree with as well) that disagrees with you on "There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad". It's a bit a of a bold claim. I disagree with you on the keyboard and the navigation. The solid aluminum construction of the MBP is one of the best aspects of it, next to the display. I've dropped the thing probably 20 times without issue. I will admit, knowing how carbon feels on my bike, I'm curious about how it looks and feels on the X1. My 5 year old MBPr still gets 5 hours of battery life while the Thinkpad I had got 30 minutes when it reached the 4 year mark. Not in the valley, by the way, and I also prefer linux.

Curious: my 2012 X1 Carbon still runs about as long as ever from battery. (It never got 5 hours, more like 4.)

My X61s (with extended battery) went from ~12h to 9-10h over the four years or so I was using it.

> There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad [2] for programmer productivity: the keyboard, the UltraNav, the swappable batteries (you can fly around the world with a x260 + spare battery), a nice docking station

Keyboard and UltraNav are more taste than anything else. I have a T450s for work and a 15" rMBP and vastly prefer the keyboard/touchpad on the latter. It doesn't help that Lenovo's QA is shit. My T450s keyboard is bulging in the bottom right of the keyboard deck, and several of the keys stick for a millisecond on the way down. As if they're not quite seated properly and hitting the key causes something to click into place. I suspect it's temperature related, because it goes away after typing for awhile, but comes back after a bit of non-use.

> upgradeable storage/memory

Programmers are expensive. No reason not to buy a maxed-out machine to begin with.

Also, it's hard to get over Lenovo's penchant for shit displays if your job is to stare at text all day.

I have an X1 Yoga (a touchscreen equivalent of the X1 Carbon) with an OLED display and it's absolutely gorgeous. It's much better than the ~1 year old Mac Book Pro I have for work. The colors and contrast are incredible—it can even render a black that doesn't glow at all.

The Carbon is touchscreen, just not a convertible.

The X1 Carbon (4th gen) mentioned in this thread is not a touchscreen, they don't seem to offer a Carbon Touch anymore. It appears the X1 Yoga is essentially the Carbon Touch.

Agreed, I was wrong. I have a 2015 X1 Carbon, which has a touch-screen. I'm surprised they removed this, it's quite decent. But it is unlikely that I'll miss it.

So they basically just renamed the X1 Carbon Touch to a X1 Yoga but it is a convertible so I guess that is why.

Anyways, the 5th gen Yoga was just announced at CES 2017!!

It is pretty impressive and is my new dream machine, http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-yo...

Lenovo is infamous for shipping shitty RAM / Disk options. You often can't buy appropriately maxed out hardware from them. A few years ago, I was procuring a few Thinkpad W520 for a new team and at no point did they offer a 500gb or larger SSD. The 384GB drive they had was an extra grand. I bought the machines in max cpu/graphics config and ordered ram and disks separately. Nobody on the team had an issue using a screwdriver for 5 minutes of their life.

Thankfully the W500 series is super easy to upgrade aftermarket like you said, we've never bothered ordering ours with anything but maxed out CPU's - RAM and SSD's are cheap and easy DIY upgrades and everybody on our team can swap them out in a minute or two.

This is what I did with the P50 my work bought me. Basically I bought a dual-4k-monitor setup with tons of RAM and disk for what a comparable MBP would have cost.

> There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad

Your criticisms are pretty almost all a matter of taste, and we're in disagreement just about throughout.

> I wonder if it's the Valley culture?

I'm not in the valley. I've never found any non-apple laptop with a good (or even decent) trackpad, and I like that OSX has a community of indie developers who actually care.

> the keyboard

I don't enjoy thinkpad keyboard.

> the UltraNav

Same as above but much stronger, I absolutely hate this thing, and I love Apple trackpad. In fact the trackpad is one a huge reason for remaining on Apple laptops despite other shortcomings: I can and even enjoy using MBPs without a mouse.

> the swappable batteries

have never been something I've needed, plus that requires carrying additional batteries.

> a nice docking station

Meh. "nice" is in the eye of the beholder, the thing's ugly as sin. And with type C/TB3, you can actually replicate it without being beholden to Apple (!).

> upgradeable storage/memory

That is indeed a really annoying "feature" of Apple over the last few years. Though of course you can get a maxed-out MBP.

> Linux distro

and I don't see that as an advantage.

> The gap is huge! If a Thinkpad is a 100, the prev. gen Macbook Pro would be 60

If you like thinkpads more power to you, but all my experiences with them were disappointing, I'd put the 2015 rMBP at 70 and the average thinkpad at 40, maybe 50.

You've never used a business thinkpad for more than 15 minutes

That's interesting - do you know him?

Eh, different strokes.

Personally, I have a ThinkPad W540 for work and while it weighs like a brick man is it easy to work with. The UltraNav isn't as nice as the trackpad on my XPS 13, but I usually work with the TrackPoint on ThinkPad's anyway (killer feature for me to be honest, even Apple's awesome trackpad disappointments in comparison to a good ol' TrackPoint in my opinion) - upgrading the RAM and SSD required a couple screws for the appropriate bays in the base cover instead of needing to take the whole thing off like my old 2012 MBP. Also, while USB Type-C and ThunderBolt 3 "work" for a dock, being able to plop by ThinkPad down on my desk at home and have it start charging and connect all of my peripherals is still easier than plugging in a cable (even if it's just one cable).

Also, as far as Linux support I guess that all really depends on the individual. Most of my workflow is heavily dependent on Linux (Java/Python dev in JetBrains products, ansible stuff, administering a couple dozen Linux VM's) with the exception of our .Net apps (where I run Visual Studio in a Windows VM) - there's not a whole lot of benefit to me running macOS, and in fact, I'd really rather run Fedora (call me an oddball I guess) since anything not getting deployed to a Windows server goes to a CentOS VM, makes moving from development to production a lot easier.

"Also, while USB Type-C and ThunderBolt 3 "work" for a dock, being able to plop by ThinkPad down on my desk at home and have it start charging and connect all of my peripherals is still easier than plugging in a cable (even if it's just one cable)."

I have an older Retina Pro, and I have a dock that works exactly like this. I stick the MBP in, and it's charging and connected to a keyboard and mouse, two displays, and my printer, along with speakers.

Henge Dock? I had one for my 2012 MBP, the downside was I lost the display which I find useful for keeping my email/TFS/whatever up instead of needing a second monitor.

Henge Dock indeed. I have two 27" displays to make up for the loss of the laptop display.

> Eh, different strokes.

Er… yes that's quite literally my entire point, and specifically spelled out as my first paragraph.

> there is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad

Isn't this one of those YMMV kinda things that really depends on the person, though? It seems equally wrong to say that no one could be productive on a MBP as it is to say that no one could be productive without a MBP.

I used to be a strong Thinkpad adherent. But then Lenovo really jumped the shark, and I moved to a MBPr 2012 which was not even remotely in the same class as my T410s it was so much better.

Maybe they are better these days, but I need to spend more time with one. But they changed the keyboard, the trackpads were almost laughable, and the battery life was an utter joke - not even enough juice for a MSP-LAS flight. Not to mention (at the time) laughable resolution, and miserable build quality compared to the IBM nameplate T-series.

I'm looking for a nice 14-15" laptop like an old T60 that is built like a tank with amazing battery life.

It's tempting for me to try the T-series line again, especially if they bring back the classic keyboard they so stupidly did away with. But for some time it was utterly stagnant and more or less unusable trash.

I want to like the X1 Carbon

>I wonder if it's the Valley culture? There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad [2] for programmer productivity: the keyboard, the UltraNav, the swappable batteries (you can fly around the world with a x260 + spare battery), a nice docking station, upgradeable storage/memory

You completely missed the most important productivity tool for a programmer, the display and no thinkpad can compete with a macbook in that regard.

In addition new Mac keyboards are better than new thinkpad keyboards. Mac trackpads are better than thinkpad trackpads, the ultranav is not good, battery life on macbooks are better than thinkpads and you don't need to carry extra batteries, and macbook docking solutions are better than thinkpad docking solutions.

Also why would you want to use linux when that will 100% give you shorter than 4 hours battery life along with a host of other issues when you can use OSX and get good battery life along with a fully posix compliant os?

> the swappable batteries

the Carbon X1 doesn't have swappable batteries.

I've got similar experience, but at my new employer. When I got an offer I had to choose which laptop (MacBook Pro or ThinkPad W, the recruited insisted on Mac), I chose Thinkpad because I'm a Linux person.

Right now I'm the only programmer in my department that has a Thinkpad (and the only one that has Linux on a Thinkpad). Which is a strange thing for me, I always thought that Macs are more for designers or endusers not programmers/hackers (as you mostly are very limited at hacking on Mac, quite the opposite of Linux).

We have all the developers using Linux, and it-ops and product management using MacOS.

For myself, instead of a laptop I ask for a custom workstation. For the same price, I get four fast cores, lots of RAM, lots of ports, huge monitors and lots of (fast) disk. I have a good sound setup there and developers usually don't do meetings or when we do it's whiteboard only and quick. I think it's very satisfying to use a minimal xmonad setup with a proper workstation, then running cmake and seeing your CPU and RAM is used in stuff that actually matters.

If I need to do home office, I use my own laptop. But I prefer to be in the office, otherwise some of my time goes to the cats, who want attention the whole day. :3

Neal Stephenson summed all this up in In the Beginning Was the Command Line.

Macs are beautiful, hermetically sealed devices that work perfectly until they explode.

Linux (or thinkpads) are like M1 Abrams tanks you can service yourself, run forever on a nuclear battery, and people think you're weird if you have one.

Hm, half the photos on the YC website front page have Thinkpads.

Is it as slippery as Apple laptops?

> Count me happy my laptop doesn't double as a bench-press.

ThinkPad X1 Carbon: Starting at 2.6 lbs (1209 g)

MacBook Pro 13: Weight: 3.02 pounds (1.37 kg)

I think the more important part is where OP implied anything not made of metal was deemed unreliable.

I think that's a pretty stone-age point of view given modern material technology.

People say this, and I really really want to like the ThinkPads and in particular the X1 Carbon because it's black and badass but it can't possibly be made out of carbon fiber for how flimsy it feels. Granted perhaps it's more durable than it seems but MacBooks are so solid and dense and rigid by comparison.

One of my friends has dropped his Air out of his lofted dorm bed numerous times and you couldn't even tell by looking at it, it's totally fine. One of my other friends has a ThinkPad Yoga and the fancy hinge was fucked within two weeks of purchase.

I did the yoga thing with a Macbook Air and it's hinges was fucked instantly :)

My X1 yoga has no trouble what-so-ever and I dropped it a few feet.. (and it rattles along unprotected in a leather bag every day)...

Well the MacBook Air is pretty obviously not designed to do that. The ThinkPad hinges are different on either side, and they came out of alignment and then jammed and broke.

You may have dropped it a few feet, but I drop my MacBook Pro all the time because I'm a terrible person. This dorm-bed fall has happened several times now too. The durability is simply off the charts, and I can't say the same about ThinkPads. They just feel so flimsy, everything bends or flexes on them.

Well obviously (or maybe not) it was a joke.

In all seriousness four comments:

- I bend my X1 fully around all the time, not problem with the hinges

- all X1's I have ever seen have 3-year ON-SITE warranty, your friend should call support and get it fixed next business day (where s/he is).

- Strength and "flexiness" are not related, often materials are allowed to flex to keep them from breaking. The X1s are made of carbon fibre and have sufficient strength even if our ape-brains prefer something that does not flex...

- and even if not, there is always next-day onsite warranty (mine is upgrade to 5 years - not having the option of onsite for Macs is alone a disqualifying trait for me)

It's worth noting that thanks to a clever configuration, the X1's 14" screen and keyboard are a bit bigger than the MacBook—enough so that it feels significantly more roomy while only being a little bit bigger. (It barely fits into my bag designed for 13" laptops—but it fits!)

that was a unit mess...

ThinkPad X1 Carbon: 2.51 lbs (1.14 kg)

MacBook Pro 13 ......: 3.02 lbs (1.37 kg)

or about 17% lighter

I don't like the aluminum bodies (as a matter of taste, I think they are ugly). But carbon fiber isn't functional. I've had a carbon-fiber-body laptop for ~3 years now. In that time, I've had to replace the fan twice. My bet is the flexible carbon fiber allows more bending than the electronics can actually handle. The flexibility also makes it feel cheap; why would i want a laptop that gives in when I type?

I have a 4th gen Carbon X1, and I have to admit it feels flimsier than the last MBP I've used (I haven't used the latest generation MBP).

There's still some give when I pick it up one handed. I'd happily trade some weight and thickness for a more durable feel, but I might be in the minority.

I use the 3rd gen - agree it's possible to slightly bend it. I can only do so when open, with either screen or very slightly with base. When it's closed, I would probably need to step on it. A MBP 15 feels a bit more solid.

No, it doesn't. I had gen 1, gen 2, gen 3 X1 carbons. Each was flimsy crap. Each was unrepairable. The gen3 literally fell apart when the screen needed to be replaced due to a manufacturing defect. This flimsy build is not a problem with my Apple laptops.

They have become flimsier, but also lighter. I have tried several, and have stuck with my first gen x1. But the newer thinkpads are so light now you can get a like-for-like with an original X1 by replacing it with a T-series.

> The Carbon X1 is made from carbon fiber. It super-robust and light-weight at the same time.

If I'm honest I have no Idea why there is an ad for the X1 on hackernews today. The page itself is 404-ing for me.

That said, I held an X1 carbon last september when shopping for a new laptop with my girlfriend. It was a fucking glorious machine.

In the end we wound up buying the lenevo yoga because it comes with an i7, SSD, & 8gigs ram (the three checkboxes I need on a laptop) - this was the cheapest with all my boxes ticked.

X1C was a lot more expensive, but you could feel why when you held it. What a beautiful machine.

(Again, why is it listed as a link on HN? Just so we can moon over it? Fair I guess)

Then you should try the X1 Yoga - basically an X1 Carbon 4th gen with the yoga hinges and a wacom digitizer and a glorious screen..

It has been my main laptop since release and it is by far the best laptop I ever owned...

5th gen X1 Yoga just released. MMMM, it has USB-C now, aka finally a real docking solution. Also has WiGig but I am not sure how that is.

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-yo...

I am typing on one right now.

The light weight actually makes it feel flimsy / cheap at first, but having used it for the best part of a year, I realize there is a stiffness to it that you don't get with cheap plastic.

I'd agree four years ago. No decent ultrabook nowadays is made of plastic or has the other build quality issues you mention (the linked Lenovo included).

I have an HP Folio 1040 G1 which is a few years old now and is just as sturdy as a MacBook air, nearly as thin, but has better specs. Also much cheaper. The only place the Apple really outshines it is the tracked (and OS X if that's your thing.. it isn't mine).

There are plenty of options, but it really depends on your definition of good. Different people making the same complaint as you on HN have very different and sometimes very particular criteria. If you look at the systems overall the MBP's have good alternatives now.

The X1 is actually really impressive. First gen had a short battery life and the display wasn't high resolution, but they addressed that pretty quickly.

Perhaps from a hardware perspective this is true, but if you have to run commercial software (e.g. Adobe, DAWs, etc.) and do software development in a Unix environment, there really isn't a better option than macOS on a MacBook Pro. Windows sucks, and as much as I love Linux, it just doesn't cut it when I need Illustrator, Photoshop, Studio One, or Logic.

My guess is that most software developers don't use the packages you mentioned as they are for designers primarily.

If you're really a heavy user of DAWs and Adobe's media software, you already have a very different set of needs than most developers. I also fall into that category, except with game dev Windows is pretty much the only viable choice for a primary dev platform.

If you're just using Adobe's software every now and then, you just need a dedicated GPU and enough RAM. Many alternatives to the MacBook Pro have that. And you'd probably want a desktop sized screen anyway.

The most heavy duty stuff today's software devs would commonly use that their own laptops would need to power are VMs. By the time you get to really heavy duty stuff you'll get much closer to your hardware needs for cheaper with actual workstations anyway.

This is the sort of stuff I meant when I was talking about very specific requirements. For most developers having either Linux or OS X is usually plenty for work purposes, but OS X is nicer designed.

Weird, I have a T530 that I have carried literally everywhere with me for 4 years and the thing just won't die.

What about a surfacebook?

Apparently Linux is a bit finicky on it?

I use a Surface Book as my main computer and it's absolutely wonderful. I get a PC in tablet form with a pressure-sensitive stylus when I want a tablet and I get a moderately beefy laptop with a dedicated GPU when I want a laptop.

> I use a Surface Book as my main computer

I've heard that it's fantastic hardware but had lots of software and driver teething problem, what's your experience with that?

Mine has been flawless so far, this is the newer one(performance base) with the discrete GPU.

Picked up my SurfaceBook the day they were launched - there were definitely teething issues, sometimes the detaching process would fail, there were sleep issues (not sure if Intel cops the blame for that one).

All of these issues have been resolved with firmware updates by about 3 months after launch - reliability has been rock solid from then on out. Can't recommend it enough.

I picked up a Surface Book on launch day. i7, 16 GB, 512 GB. As others have pointed out, there were several software glitches for a few months after launch. Ultimately, the software problems have been worked out.

For me, the ultimate deficiency is the Surface Book's inability to drive two 4K monitors at 60 Hz. Although not promised in so many words during the launch event (they said "two 4K monitors" without specifying the refresh rate), I had assumed it would support 60 Hz rather than 30 Hz. This limitation convinced me to retire my Surface Book to a purely mobile role and use a proper workstation for 90% of my computing.

I expect that a second-generation Surface Book will resolve that specific hardware limitation.

They worked out the software and driver issues, so now it's pretty much fantastic hardware design with moderately good performance specs.

The only two (small) downsides that I run into regularly:

1. Some important software doesn't handle high DPI mode in Windows 10 well. Specifically Adobe offerings. Visual Studio 2015 has some small issues too.

2. The 3000x2000 pixel screen makes gaming a bit finicky. Games rarely support 3:2 ratios other than the native 3000x2000. The dedicated GPU is pretty capable, but not always 3000x2000 capable, so you're often stuck with 16:10 ratios that approximate 1500x1000.

I'll second the surfacebook love. Was using an Asus ultrabook before this and the surfacebook(i7, discrete GPU) has just a bit more oomph that I needed.

Build quality is outstanding, tablet is great for browsing on the sofa and multi-pressure pen is awesome for photo editing. Chews through heavy compiling/development very well. Decent gaming for what it is.

I feel like Microsoft was trying to do the whole tablet PC back in early 2000s and I think that the surface book is the actual realization of what they were trying to achieve.

Comparing a Macbook and a Lenovo is like saying "My BMW is better than the Ford F-350 Superduty". Want to have style and best design? Take a Macbook. Want to have lots of Ports? Thinkpad. Need Milspec? Thinkpad. Want to have 17 hours battery life and then swap them without shutting down? Thinkpad (ok, not the carbon). Want to have 3G/LTE, smartcards or Cardreader? Thinkpad. Want to be able to repair yourself? Thinkpad. Does not always look fancy, but is just the SUV-way of computing. I, at least, love my x240 like no Laptop before.

The Dell XPS 13 is great. It runs Linux very well. The WiFi is excellent. It's got an aluminum chassis. The part where your hands rest is carbon-fiber composite so it isn't cold in the morning. The HiDPI touch screen is incredible, and the performance is pretty amazing. There is a single hinge stretching across most of the laptop for the screen (like the Macbook), unlike the flimsy set of two hinges on most laptops. Most laptops I've seen have broken at the hinge. I customized mine by maxing out the processor, screen, 16 GB RAM, and 512 GB SSD. The unboxing experience was very well-designed and it really felt premium.

In short, this is the good non-Apple laptop that you're looking for.

> It runs Linux very well.

I've been researching into the XPS series, and online there are plenty of reports of problems with Linux.

Can anyone here confirm first-hand that they have an XPS 13/15 that's running Linux flawlessly?

Got the previous generation (9333) running Ubuntu 16.04, no troubles.

I have an XPS 13 (9360) - the Kaby Lake Developer Edition.

With Ubuntu 16.04 (or more specifically kernel < 4.8) the only issue I had was dynamically adding a Thunderbolt 3 (to DP) monitor.

With Fedora 25, Ubuntu 16.10? No issues.

Wifi is great. Sound. Performance. Display (I have the QHD version).

I have the XPS 13 9350 (dmidecode c&p). The only issue is the BCM4350 Wifi card, and its a biggie. Do not buy the BCM, get the Intel Wifi card fitted. Or replace it yourself with this one: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Generation-Wireless-Computer-No..., they cost about $15.

I also had suspend/resume issues occasionally, a recent bios upgrade fixed that, I think.

Apart from the original WiFi, I'm very happy with the XPS 13.

Slightly off topic, but has anyone had luck with a (preferably intel) 3x3 wifi adaptor? I want one for a desktop. The linked one is 2x2, and amazon has a m.2->pcie wifi adaptor for $17.

I have a 3x3 broadcom now, but it occasionally disassociates with the access point (and the box suffers from undiagnosed kernel hangs whether I plug an nvidia or amd video card into it...)

Linux Intel support is the best of all vendors, as far as I can tell. They have dedicated Linux driver devs and their specs are open. The quality of their drivers reflects this. In future I'll walk wide circles around anything broadcom.

Qualcomm Atheros also has dedicated devs for their Linux driver. Broadcomm stopped making wireless cards for the PC market earlier this year.

It looks like this may be a winner: AEX-QCA9880-NX

Except maybe they explicitly removed linux support:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-wireless/msg110852.html

I can't find a hardware rev number on on the amazon page (was 1.0 ever sold to the public?). Also, the amazon page says it is for engineering samples only / contact vendor before ordering. Hmm.

According to Intel, installing Intel wifi adapters in computers or laptops "may be illegal":

https://communities.intel.com/thread/108092

I'll probably buy one anyway.

They actually make an XPS 13 Developer Edition preloaded with Ubuntu.

http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/productdetails/xps-13-linux

That's the URL for one of the older versions. In general dell.com/sputnik (same as dell.com/developers) will get you to the current systems.

Oh, and we've moved the XPS 13 Developer Edition to be in the same place as the Windows version. One side affect is that this (well, the internal details of how that's done in our catalog) makes it easier for us to change up the Dev Ed config options. You can use the OS filter drop-down just above the config carousel to narrow down to only the Ubuntu configs.

>> I want to be excited by a good non-Apple laptop. But they're all just so terribly designed. They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy, have grills and screw holes and uneven surfaces and stickers everywhere.

Is this really a serious reason to buy a laptop, or not, the design? You buy a computer because of its performance, not its appearance- which is something completely subjective in the first place.

I agree about the toughness requirement, but, like others said below the X1 Carbon is called "Carbon" as in "carbon fiber", which it's made of (although the fourth gen model has a lid that's a mix of carbon fiber and plastic).

I've stepped on my second gen. Carbon a good few times and I've dropped my fourth gen on its lid from a coffee table, and they're both hale and hearty.

> Is this really a serious reason to buy a laptop, or not, the design?

Yes.

> You buy a computer because of its performance, not its appearance

For a desktop/workstation maybe, and even that is debatable (I would not buy a desktop computer with plexiglas panels and LEDs all over).

For a laptop though, the design is part of the function and has an impact on it. Design is part and parcel of a laptop's usability and usage, and impacts its effective lifespan (you can get mileage out of a laptop while it's falling to pieces but that's not an enjoyable experience).

And of course a laptop is not stashed away in a corner of the desk (or under it hidden from you), it's usually right in front of your face and right under your fingers, liking how it looks is a pretty good idea.

> which is something completely subjective in the first place.

That just means the design you want is different from the design I want. Maybe you like the Surface Book and I don't (I do, but bear with me).

> Design is part and parcel of a laptop's usability and usage, and impacts its effective lifespan (you can get mileage out of a laptop while it's falling to pieces but that's not an enjoyable experience).

I don't think that's a fair characterization of the thinkpad experiance. I own one, and every other owner I know, hasn't had these things crap out. Also, if they do crap out there are guides telling you exactly what to do. The case also exposes the screws you need to take out to fix certian problems.

Spill coffee on your laptop and need to order a new keyboard and trackpad module? Flip over the laptop and the screws are labeld with pictures of a keyboard and a trackpad.

> And of course a laptop is not stashed away in a corner of the desk (or under it hidden from you), it's usually right in front of your face and right under your fingers, liking how it looks is a pretty good idea

A computer is a tool. Would you buy a shovel if it was very bad at shoveling and had a pre-determined lifespan just because it was colored to match your khakis?

> A computer is a tool. Would you buy a shovel if it was very bad at shoveling and had a pre-determined lifespan just because it was colored to match your khakis?

In that sense, a car is just a tool to get you from A to B. So buying a Porsche would be completely pointless.

Clothes are just tools for keeping you warm. It's pointless to take pride in how you present yourself.

So many of my engineering friends think this way. Too many. In fact, most of Sweden thinks this way about cars, and most of Germany thinks this way about clothes.

> In that sense, a car is just a tool to get you from A to B. So buying a Porsche would be completely pointless.

A Porsche is a different class of car in quality of construction and maximum speed achievable. That's the only reason I'd buy one. My car is a Subaru Forester and I love it.

> Clothes are just tools for keeping you warm. It's pointless to take pride in how you present yourself.

Some clothes keep you warmer or cooler depending on the environment. I guess I'm a minimalist but all of my shirts and pants are either single colored or a line pattern on a button up. They work fine as shirts, the only upgrade they need is pockets.

>So many of my engineering friends think this way. Too many. In fact, most of Sweden thinks this way about cars, and most of Germany thinks this way about clothes.

I guess some people are just fine with presenting themselves as a person and don't want to look special. I personally thing my winning personality will keep people away if my cloths don't so I'm already set.

>> So many of my engineering friends think this way. Too many. In fact, most of Sweden thinks this way about cars, and most of Germany thinks this way about clothes.

Are we talking cars and clothes now? I'm Greek and I don't drive, but I certainly like my Italian fashion as much as the next fashion victim. Brains just don't come into it. But a computer is a computer and a coat is a coat- you can't think the same way about both.

Even so, in fashion too there's a lot to be said about building stuff to last, even as you make them look and feel good. Terry Pratchett has a bit about this in a couple of the Discworld novels, where he notes how cheap shoes end up being more expensive because you have to buy a new pair every year whereas expensive ones are made to last for decades, so you may pay a premium once, but it turns out cheaper on the long run (and I think he goes on to comment how this is another way rich people keep their money etc).

I think you'll find that the most highly valued (and therefore, most expensive) fashion tends to be made according to this ideal, of beauty that lasts.

For me it has nothing to do with appearance - it has to do with feel.

My job provides me with an HP Ultrabook. When I type on it, the plastic near the trackpad creaks. If I bought it retail it's something like $1400. And it creaks.

If I'm spending $1400 on a piece of technology I expect to have for 3-5 years, and I'm going to be hauling it between locations (on-call schedule) I really need to feel like "Yeah, this won't get broken if I accidentally put something a little heavy on top of it (e.g. in my bag)".

It's partially a performance story, but I rather pay an extra $100-200 for a solid chassis that makes me think the motherboard won't bend when I put pressure from my wrists on it.

I think you're focusing too much on the aesthetic aspect of the word "design," and not enough on the functional aspect.

I buy a laptop to use, and if I have to use a spongy keyboard, a stupid pointing nipple, a subpar trackpad, or deal with a creaking, bendy case, then the 8 to 10 hours I spend in front of that damn thing every day are not going to be very pleasant for me, and I cannot stress the importance of that enough.

I understood that the OP mostly meant design as in aesthetics:

They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy, have grills and screw holes and uneven surfaces and stickers everywhere.

The "flimsy and bendy" feel is more than just aesthetics, but owning two generations of the Carbon, it really doesn't apply to it. For the second gen. the term "brick shithouse" comes to mind. The fourth gen. has more plastic on the lid (which though feels "smooth as a baby's butt" according to a colleague) but its innards are tough as nails and knowing that's enough for me.

In any case, like I say what I need from a computer is performance: fast processor, as much RAM as you can fit on a laptop and plenty of storage. If I really cared about durability and toughness that much, I'd get a Toughbook [1].

_____________

[1] http://business.panasonic.co.uk/computer-product/products-an...

I've come very clost to buying one, several times. I just like the idea of a computer I can take with me on the beach and use to browse the 'nets while lying on an inflatable mattress in the sea. That'd be cool and it'd border on "design" trumping specs even in my book. On the other hand, I'd look a bit of a pillock so I've never gotten round to it.

Are there any Thinkpads for sale now that don't come with trash-tier displays?

I've been doing research, looking to replace this Macbook some time in the new year, and it looks like the new T470 is keeping the abysmal displays of the T460.

Errr.... T530 had titanium cover and endoskeleton chassis. My friend routinely walks over his while it's powered on, as a demonstration. How is it possibly an example of a "plastic, flimsy, bendy" laptop?

Yes it has screw holes and grills... it's a working-person's laptop :). The new ones don't, because they're becoming more like apple - which means I cannot as easily replace battery, hard drive, memory, etc as I do on the older Thinkpads.

Yes, this is Hacker news. Since when did having screws accessible to the user become a bad thing?

The screws are accessible on my MBP 2015. They are just not in recessed screw holes, and are flush with the body of the laptop.

Ya, I'm really not sure what they're on about. I took parted-out a Macbook Air, and it was the easiest laptop I've ever disassembled. Having everything built for the specs of one manufacturer means a lot less 'glue' to make it all one piece.

When they became less fashionable and calling yourself a "hacker" because you use social media became fashionable.

As a non-social-media using "hacker" (HN is the closest thing to social media that I use), I think portability in laptops should be picked over ease in hardware replacement (if you're often needing to change hardware, that's a quality problem). Recessed screw holes and bulk are a departure from that and feel like stepping into the past after using a macbook.

Similarly, I spend far more type writing software than with the soldering iron.

There were quite a few models where the RAM wasn't upgradable - I believe they were soldered directly to the main board. Is this the case for this revision? I can't tell!

Seriously, I used to be able to tell from product spec sheets, but Wikipedia also used to have model lists for each major product line with detailed specs. Wikipedia doesn't do this any more? Not even as part of Wikidata?

It's possible to have screws to access case-internal hardware without a laptop being bulky and hard to look at.

I'm also hungry for a macbook pro alternative (after Apple's courageous decision to remove function keys and magsafe and not meaningfully improve hardware), but I've yet to find something that isn't at best a flimsy clone -- I travel a lot and don't want to sacrifice look and feel for the 30 minutes every three years that I'd need to swap ram/hdd.

Laptops are status symbols now. Design commentary is beginning to reflect that. Screw are so declasse.

The MacBook has screws. What it doesn't have is cheap plastic held together with clips (like most Thinkpads).

At least on the T-models I'm aware of, the important parts are still easily accessible. And the rest is also replaceable, it just may require some more work.

Here's for example the maintenance guide for T560 http://ok1.de/thinkpad/HMM/t560_p50s_hmm_en_sp40k04930.pdf

There are so many factors to consider in a laptop: CPU and TDP, memory, disk, screen size and quality, size and weight, keyboard, track-pad, maintainability, OS, price ...

Different people give these factors different weights according to their resources, needs and preferences.

There is one more factor - the image the laptop projects. To each his own, but if you give the image a high score compared to the other factors - be honest about it.

The Carbon-X1 has screws, and the battery is easily accessible. https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/PD103715

The body is made out of carbon fiber. Technically this is 'plastic', but not in the context of your comment.

I have a T530 laying on my lap right now. I would call it plastic, flimsy, and bendy. Pick it up by one corner, it creaks and I can feel it flexing. I can see and feel the screen flex as I adjust the angle. Close the screen by pushing down on the top right corner, and it doesn't latch properly because it flexes so much. I can feel and hear it flexing as my left wrist rests on the palm rest while typing. I would not want to walk on it, I would be willing to bet money that I'd break it. This is not a solid laptop, and I will not be sorry when I replace it. My previous one was a T500, and it was well built. My next laptop will probably be a Dell Latitude, the ones I have held were solid as a brick. I saw one that was kicked as hard as possible by a large guy. The screen was broken, and it was visibly bent, but still solid.

> My next laptop will probably be a Dell Latitude

You'll be disappointed by battery time and sometimes CPU whining/noise. Coming from there and love the price-performance ratio, silence and battery from the T460 now ;)

Yes, my Dell latitude experience was filled with coil whine - highly irritating!

T530 had titanium cover and endoskeleton chassis.

Titanium?

walk over to my work T530, leaned up against the wall...

What 'cover' on this is made out of titanium? It's all black plastic. I've heard it has a magnesium skeleton...? Maybe you mean the hinges? I guess those could be titanium - they're some kind of metal.

Dude - the whole case on this thing is made out of plastic. I'm scratching the whole thing to find anything on this that's metal at all. What are you talking about?

I don't know about the modern ones. I've been a thinkpad user since 2005 or so and my impression is that the quality has been dropping consistently. Traditionally though, many of them came with a magnesium alloy roll cage that protected the internals quite well. It considerably reduced flex and made the whole thing quite solid. The X1, it seems, has a carbon fibre roll cage. I don't have any personal experience with it http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thisisthinkpad/innovation/roll-c...

I'd agree with others that it (t530) feels flimsy, it creaks and moans when I moved it. However it did fly off a car (in a backpack) at 85mph in the middle of Nebraska and survived with only minor damage. I was sold on the build quality, regardless of the sound it made. What killed me and eventually drove me to buy a mac was the size, weight and battery. I'd love to not be on mac, but still nothing else has been a compelling enough option. I hope this changes by time I am ready for something new.

My "plastic" dell latitude laptop feels more solid than my macbook pro 13. Plus is has way more comfortable keyboard compared to mac (at least for me).

Linux runs pretty well on my e7440.

You've clearly never used a T series or X1 Carbon before

I've had the new MacBook Pro 15" with Touch Bar for several days now. I'm returning it. The Lenovo is what I really wanted, but it doesn't run MacOS.

This Touch Bar is the worlds worst idea. I literally now have to look at the keyboard to type again, like I'm 10 years old. I haven't looked at a keyboard in decades. The machine is going back this week. What a disaster.

And, don't tell me to learn to use Caps Lock for ESC or to type control-[. I've been using VI since 1988, I'm not about to retrain that length of muscle memory.

My feelings exactly. When is this X1 Carbon coming out? I can't see any models online.

Agreed. It's really disappointing they didn't simply offer the TB as an option on the 15".

You could always get one of the new MBPs without the Touch Bar. I think I agree with you, though. I also touch-type, use vim, and the Touch Bar breaks my flow.

Just for the record, retraining your muscle memory is good for your hands. (Disclaimer: I have the same rMBP-touchbar, for about a week now, and I love it. Remapped CAPSLOCK and not looking back...)

microsoft surfacebook is magnesium, no?

I like to think of ThinkPads (esp. T and X series) as the Tumbler Batmobiles of laptops: they're big, black, chunky, and ugly, but they take a beating and get the job done.

Got an XPS15 9550. metal/magnesium body, 4K screen. Really really nice to look at, and a solid work horse. Weighs a bit, but it's sturdy.

I've been happy with google's Chromebook Pixel LS running Linux with openbox (for minimal resource consumption) and running windows 8 inside a VM. The construction of this chromebook is at the same level of any Apple device, with the upside of having a better design (in my opinion).

Has high DPI support improved on Linux? The last time I tried this it was impossible to get the desktop and the graphical apps to usable.

+1 to the Chromebook Pixel being amazing hardware. Thinkpad touchpads drive me nuts.

I've been struggling to get Ubuntu working nicely on my 2015 MacBook. Did you follow any guide that you can recommend?

I was assigned one of these (the 2015 model) as my office laptop, and I hate the thing for five reasons (two dealbreakers on top):

- It is huge and unwieldy, like a cafeteria tray (and comes with a sizable power brick)

- The touchscreen doesn't have an oleophobic coating, so it becomes a smudgy mess within hours (unlike my iPad, which looks pristine for weeks despite being even more heavily used)

- The screen seems dim or washed out no matter what I try (then again, I have a retina MacBook at home...)

- Battery life is poor(ish) on the i7 model. I can only partially blame all the corporate junk we have installed.

- Wi-Fi seemed flakey at times (and you need a proprietary dongle for Ethernet)

I've seen the 2016 models (which don't improve on the above) and they share the good bits:

- Very decent (if somewhat mushy) keyboard, with lots of travel (perhaps a bit too much)

- Relatively lightweight (considering the size)

- Pretty decent touchpad (not on a par with a MacBook, but good enough for three-finger gestures, although maddeningly imprecise at times)

- Despite the color/brightness issues, the HIDPI screen is sharp and readable under Windows 10

- The fingerprint sensor actually works (but doesn't hold a candle to TouchID)

- DisplayPort or HDMI output (depending on model, mine has both, and I use my Apple dongle for DP->VGA)

I disabled TrackPoint within a month due to RSI (I used original IBM laptops for years and it was a recurring issue for me).

TrackPoint is much more precise than the trackpad for accurate positioning, but I'd rather carry a Bluetooth mouse and retain the use of my fingers (whereas I'm perfectly fine with the Mac trackpad for drawing diagrams and pixel-level positioning).

Edit: Oh, and I run Linux on it through Hyper-V and Docker, since I need to run Windows 10. Had no trouble booting a couple of Ubuntu/Elementary Live USB drives for playing around, most of the hardware seemed to work.

At 300 nits, the display is going to be mediocre at best. Even the P50 4K display which I think is supposed to be 350 nits is dim and really quite awful.

HP and Dell have much nicer screens these days.

Good point. My trouble with the display isn't so much brightness but contrast and color range. I can attribute that partially to the touch layer, but, in all honesty, I just find it an eyesore in general.

I use the same wallpapers on my Mac and Windows machines (a set of coloured trianglify patterns), and EVERYTHING looks so much nicer on the Mac that it's just sad.

>coloured trianglify patterns

I searched for this on Google to have a look and found a neat tool which I think is worth sharing.

https://qrohlf.com/trianglify-generator/

Sorry, being an owner of the 2015 version, I don't know what the fuck are you talking about:

- The brick is tiny. Sure, not as tiny as the 50 gram mac one, but is very small compared to most laptop bricks.

- It's huge? Some peope want more screen real estate, and 14in is good for that.

- Battery life is 6+ hours; less if I spend them watching youtube of course

- Never had a problem with WiFi

The only thing I agree is with the ethernet dongle (which I have only actually used once, when setting up the wifi at a new place).

Well, I have an EU brick (which may well be different from yours) and seldom get more than 4 hours from it running Office and remote sessions (less if I fire up Docker, Visual Studio or heavier apps).

Like I said, we run a fair amount of extra stuff that may be to blame, but my experience carrying it around to customers for over a year is that I always need to sit near a power socket by noon.

Comparatively, my peers toting Surface 4s (who work on the same accounts and whom I travel with) outlast my laptop by a couple of hours.

I own this laptop too, and I agree with you. I would add a few complaints of my own, though:

- The computer sometimes seems to turn on after it's closed and asleep in my bag

- The CPU gets pegged constantly, even on the i7 version (admittedly, this may be due to some background processes that were installed by my employer, but sometimes in task manager it just seems like a generic Windows process it taking up all of the CPU, so it's hard to tell).

- The fn key placement is awful. Seriously, I think Apple started this trend, and I wish other manufacturers would stop following it. Years of muscle memory have trained me to put my pinky in the bottom, left-hand corner of the keyboard for ctrl. At least you can change this in the BIOS on this computer, unlike a Mac, but that's still less than ideal.

On the CPU being pegged, I have bothered my IT department to death over the same thing on my X1 Carbon. If you download Process Explorer, I would bet it's CSCService that's causing the issue. If so, the culprit is likely the Windows "Offline Files" feature which lets your IT department sync your laptop files with the corporate network every so often. My IT department has failed to fix the issue, though, so yours may be unable to find a fix. For a while, I just messed with the power setting on my laptop in order to never allow the CPU to be fully utilized so that the fan noises were not insufferable.

> - The brick is tiny.

I and my family have owned several Thinkpads. I just bought a Thinkpad this past cyber Monday, and the power brick it came with is significantly larger than prior Thinkpad models' bricks. So much so that I was a little disheartened when I saw it. Since you mention you have a slightly older model, I suspect that your adapter is tiny, as you say, on par w/ MBPs'. But the current models from Lenovo have regressed in this respect.

Just so you can see, here's a photo[1]. The smaller brick is from an older T500, and the larger one is from my new T460p. The small Lenovo and the MBP appear to output roughly the same. The larger, newer Lenovo one is capable of pushing more power, but at quite a cost in size.

[1]: http://imgur.com/CQJKyUp

I bought a new X1 Carbon six weeks ago. It came with the smaller brick in your picture.

6+ hours of battery life is _absolutely terrible_ by today's standards.

The size of the power brick should be less of a concern with the 2016 models since it appears to use regular old USB Type-C Power Delivery. Even if the Lenovo-provided one is not to your liking, you can just use another one.

Since you noted Wifi issues and Windows 10 - is it only flaky when you're on battery power? If so, open the Start menu, type "Power Options" for that control panel, edit your plan settings, Advanced settings, and check the Wireless Adapter settings - Windows has a tendency to lower those for power savings, and I've seen having them even down at Medium cause dropouts on a laptop 20 feet from the access point.

I bought the 2016 version to replace my Samsung NP900X3C and returned it because:

- The lid was wobbly.

- It's big, thick and just looks mediocre to me. Display rim is too big.

- The coating is susceptible to smudges / fingerprints. Why are they even making those in 2016? Unacceptable.

- Display was way too dim.

- Colors were yellowish but that's probably fixable.

All 5 points are relative to the (few years older) Samsung. It's a shame they don't care much about laptops anymore. I mean, it's 8+ years old and it's hard to find a replacement (which I'm looking for because it has 4 GB of RAM).

I don't know if my requirenments are so unique or if there's a big mismatch between market demand and supply. Which would seem odd to be honest because laptops is a mature and competetive market.

I have recently upgraded form 4 year old X1 Carbon to new X1 Yoga. Bottom line is I'd recommend the X1 Yoga over the Carbon.

Here is my original X1 Carbon review: http://blog.itaysk.com/2013/05/04/lenovo-x1-carbon-touch-rev... And here are my thoughts on the X1 Yoga: http://blog.itaysk.com/2016/12/30/from-lenovo-x1-carbon-to-l...

    High DPI is still half baked in Windows.

I found this comment hilarious given who your employer is...

Just to be clear - I do work for Microsoft, but have nothing to do with Windows, so I don't have any influence on it.

I don't find any problem criticising what's wrong and commending what's right. I do that openly with "my employer" products, and the competition as well.

A large chunk of the Thinkpad user community is pretty fed up with the ultrabook spec that Lenovo is shipping on its flagship models, namely the inability to effectively customize and modify to use. I keep an X201 alongside my late 2013 rMBP simply because I can use expresscard and a dock and ethernet without carrying around a stupid dongle. I understand they are trying to chase Apple's market, but expect them to fall flat with products like this. I can stand to have a few extra mm of thickness to actually have a usable product.

51nb (chinese forum) has been addressing the need for upgraded specs in the old chassis with things like their Thinkpad X62 https://imgur.com/a/As6On#uHTzOer (you can find the boards on ebay)

There's no products that fit the old ultraportable form factor. The T5xx series is great but can't be lugged around easily.

X240/X250: dock, Ethernet, VGA, SD, optionally smartcard and mobile modem. No dongles required. In X260 they replaced VGA with HDMI, but everything else is still there.

The X62 looks nice though :D

My Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2nd gen is still going strong 3 years later, but this 5th gen is pretty tempting.

Main questions:

- Are these "up to 15.5 hours of battery life" numbers purely theoretical? Even brand new, my 2nd gen only got about 6 hours of normal usage. I run Ubuntu so maybe these power saving tweaks are the result of closer hardware integration with Windows?

- The mobile broadband option (Qualcomm Snapdragon X7) is intriguing, it would save me carrying around a separate hotspot. Has this worked for any Linux users? What carrier do you recommend?

- Any reports of the Wigig Dock working on Linux?

Pros that I can see:

- Real function keys! The adaptive touchpad on my 2nd gen is awkward and silly -- can't believe Apple followed their lead on this. Good riddance.

- That the 5th gen is even smaller and lighter boggles the mind. My 2nd gen is already ridiculously thin. After 5 years of hauling 5-8lb T4x models around NYC my back was killing me, and I was probably on the verge of permanent physical injury. The X1 was a godsend.

- Same old Trackpoint I know and love. Not for everyone, but a mouse on the home row + vim is ergonomic heaven for me. Never change, Thinkpads!

Cons that I can see:

- Looks like almost the same display as my 2nd gen, a 2560x1440 WQHD IPS. A small bump up in nits but that's it. Viewing angles are better than on older laptops, but I still can't read my screen in bright environments, and it gets gummed up with debris and smudges way too easily. Apple continues to dominate in this dimension.

- Matter of taste, but the Silver design feels like Lenovo is trying way too hard to look Apple-y.

I can't say anything about this specific Qualcomm, but I have used Qualcomm Gobi 2000 and Sierra EM7345 in previous generations of Thinkpad. They both work fine with Linux but their firmwares were buggy as hell. You have to upgrade them as soon as possible. All the problems I ever had were finally solved by upgrading those firmwares. This usually mean you need to keep Windows for that.

Good to know, thanks!

They really should write that it has USB-C charging in bigger letters (see http://www3.lenovo.com/medias/ww-lenovo-laptop-thinkpad-x1-c... for the evidence).

Is that USB-C fully compatible with the new MBP one?

It'll be grossly non-compliant with the USB spec if not, but the thing you have to take into consideration is the wattage. Apple likes to provide basically the weakest charger it can get away with based on how much power a particular Macbook model will draw while in use. I believe it's a 29W for the Air, 61W for the 13" MBP, and 87W for the 15" MBP. So while you can technically use any charger with any machine, if your machine draws more than the charger then it won't be able to keep up while you're working (plus, running the device at a charging deficit like this will wreak havoc on the battery).

Oh! I was just considering getting an X1 4th gen. If this is true, I'd wait so I can have USB-C charging on it like I expect all of the rest of my machines to have soon. I wonder if the power adapters will play nice with other hardware.

That's a better collection of ports! Hopefully the trackpad is big and precision per the latest Windows 10 requirement.

I was just looking for this, all I saw was how awesome USB-C is, not that it charged with USB-C. Thanks!

nice! hope that comes to the next x1 yoga model too

Yes, I just came to the conclusion that the X1 Yoga is my ideal laptop but I am going to hold out and wait for the next gen version so it has USB-C charging.

And the X1 Yoga 5th gen was just announced at CES 2017 and has USB-C and more!!!

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-yo...

I posted a new thread for the ThinkPad X1 Yoga (2017) here http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-yo...

Has anyone installed Linux on this machine? If so, how has your experience been with respect to driver support, etc.? Thanks in advance.

Given it's not even fully announced yet, yet alone released... that'd be a no.

Ah, that makes sense. I got really excited by the site and didn't read for content.

I've got a 2016 model and things work pretty well with Ubuntu 16.10. Only gripe I have is bluetooth audio isn't working out-of-the-box.

Same experience. Everything works great except for Bluetooth

What about inexpensive USB plug-in Bluetooth adapters?

There are some that just show up as an audio USB device, which is pretty nice. I have this one, been using it with Ubuntu 14.04 on my W520 Thinkpad:

https://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-BTD-500-Bluetooth-Dongle/d...

It does voice too, but looking at the reviews it seems that some other people have headphone compatibility issues. Definitely try before you buy.

I can't speak to this generation of the machine, but I've had a decent experience with Ubuntu on the 3rd gen Carbon X1. I have constant issues with the wifi, though... networkmanager needs to be restarted a couple times a day or else the OS will just lose connection and say wifi is disabled. There is also a general sluggishness, especially when web-browsing, that I have not yet tracked down.

All in all, though, it is fine, and the hardware is very nice. I did have trouble getting any other distros besides Ubuntu to install and run properly, though, YMMV.

Interesting that your wifi experience sounds terrible, but you've given it a "decent" rating. For me, wifi concerns are among the most important. Thanks for the feedback.

At this point, the fix is just a matter of popping open a terminal, hitting Ctrl+R and typing "restart" to find the command that fixes things, and hitting Enter. So yeah, it is annoying but not a dealbreaker by any means for a power user. I could probably cronjob the restart, too.

could probably write a service or cron to check if it's working and restart?

Makes me think of this: https://www.amazon.com/NetReset-NR-1000US-Automated-Cycler-R... heh

I do sudo networking restart and/or sudo network-manager restart a few times a week.

Takes 30 seconds. Annoying. Totally acceptable IMO to have an OS I otherwise love (KDE Neon).

(I like Windows 10 as well but it has a weird laggyness on my lenovo. I suspect the lenovo drivers but cannot do anything about it that I know.)

This is pretty standard for any wifi connection in Ubuntu for me over 3 machines with 3 different wifi cards in 16.04

You get to restart network manger so it will do things like list wifi networks or reconnect to a network after suspend, it gets fixed for a few weeks, and then the issue comes back a few patches later.

sources:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+b...

Hmm, this has been happening to me running Linux on a Macbook Pro too; it didn't used to happen earlier. Wonder what broke in recent builds...

That's why I'm still using netctl.. It's 2016: some one needs to rewrite that pile of crap..

I did it on the previous (4th) generation and wrote about it: https://gist.github.com/jjmalina/5e13b2269ec97895ea5fda9df6d...

Probably will be a similar experience having to install non-free wifi drivers and possibly some kernel graphics drivers not working well.

Don't have this machine, but have a Lenovo Yoga 14, I was amazed when even the touch drivers worked out of the box.

I just got a 4th gen X1 and installed Ubuntu 16.10 on it. Everything's been great so far. Wifi has been working fine. The only weirdness I've noticed is a few background chrome tab crashes. Perhaps something with the gpu?

I had to make one change in the bios, to disable secure boot so Ubuntu could use certain drivers.

I've read that the fingerprint sensor on the newer X1's doesn't have linux support yet, and I've never tried the wwan stuff. That might not work either. I haven't tried bluetooth yet.

I'm dual-booting Fedora 17 (with the KDE desktop) on my second generation X1 Carbon.

I don't remember having any serious trouble with any of the hardware, including the wifi (which can be a pain point). Connecting an external monitor also worked fine- I think that's another common pain point.

I couldn't find a clickpad driver that would support gestures as well as the proprietary Synaptics driver on Windows (but I tend not to use gestures anyway), and the battery seemed to drain faster on Linux than on Windows, but that's about it.

If memory serves (I've had this machine for a while) the only complain I had was that booting into grub2 was noticeably slower than booting into the Windows boot manager.

I also got the fourth generation model a couple of months ago but haven't yet installed Linux on it, mostly because I can find so little to grumble about. Either Windows is getting better or I'm getting old :)

Lenovo X1 usually has good support for Linux.

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Thinkpad/X1%20Car...

Ubuntu 16.04 installed and runs without a hitch on a 4th gen (this announcement is of the 5th gen), with the exception of the LTE (needed to install a few libraries from 16.10), and the fingerprint scanner (which is apparently at the complete mercy of the hardware manufacturer Synaptics, no ETA there afaict). One thing to be aware of, though, is that support for Hidpi screens isn't quite as good as on OS X, so sometimes you're greeted by tiny text. Steam is a notable example of an app that doesn't scale properly.

It looks like they included a different LTE chipset this time, though, so maybe compatibility is better there.

I have a 4th gen X1 Carbon with Ubuntu and everything has worked fine. Even the functional buttons like screen brightness and volume work for me.

On the other hand, the palm detection does not work or is just terrible because I find myself constantly randomly tapping or moving the cursor when typing. Indeed it's moving around as I type this.

I ended up just disabling tap to click which I actually love using, but besides that it's great. I definitely long for the day when Linux touchpad support will match OS X's. Still, I really like the keyboard and the little nub thing is pretty awesome too, although I haven't really gotten used to using it.

Here are my notes to fix the overly sensitive trackpad on my Lenovo Carbon X1 (they'll probably only make sense after reading the links) from https://major.io/2012/12/28/handy-settings-for-the-touchpadc...

synclient "PalmDetect=1" synclient "PalmMinWidth=5" synclient "PalmMinZ=40"

Or soft link to a file from /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-synaptics.conf.

To get middle-button scroll with trackpoint:

From https://askubuntu.com/questions/578600/how-do-i-get-the-trac...

edited /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d\11-evdev-trackpoint.conf upated the line:

MatchProduct "TrackPoint|DualPoint Stick"

MatchProduct "TrackPoint|DualPoint Stick|PS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"

Sorry if they don't make sense, but the links are where I got my information, so they should help. The changes made a world of difference.

No problem with any drivers. My blog post about arch Linux on x1 carbon: https://kozikow.com/2016/06/03/installing-and-configuring-ar...

I run xubuntu 16.04 on a third generation with 0 issues. Works great.

This machine isn't available yet :) But since Lenovo is the Red Hat corp laptop vendor, support is generally excellent. I've used Fedora 23+ on the Third gen X1 carbon with zero issues.

354 comments for a constantly-refreshing 404 page( "Product 22TP2TXX15G does not exist" )? Is anyone actually following the link or just commenting on the title?

try: http://www3.lenovo.com/ca/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/Thi...

That points to the 4th gen X1 Carbon, whereas the link for the story seems to be about a 5th gen X1 Carbon (which now returns a 404). Lenovo may have inadvertently leaked that page onto their site without intending for it to be reachable yet.

Lenovo accidentally published the product page of the new X1 Carbon which actually hasn't been announced yet. They've since realized their mistake and taken it down again, but yesterday you could read everything about the new X1 Carbon.

Here is a snapshot of the page: http://archive.is/L1o6h

This looks like a very nice computer.

I really applaud dell for trying to make the XPS 13 somewhat Linux friendly but they really do feel cheap.

Lenovo thinkpads, while not having the quality they had during the IBM era, are still head and shoulders above Dell in this regard.

This is the Linux laptop to get in 2017.

Really, I have both of them (X1 2016) and I prefer the build of the XPS. The X1 has better keyboard, but not by much. The XPS has aluminum on the top and bottom making it more study and not plastic feeling. I don't baby the XPS as much as the X1 when traveling.

When I bought my notebook back in february, I went to a shop (cyberport) that had both the (then current) X1 carbon and the XPS 13 on display, which I figured were the only ones acceptable for developers.

The X1's keyboard was larger, had more key travel and all, but was subjectively somewhat less comfortable to type on (matter of get using to, I suppose, but still).

The X1 had a much worse display, and was overall bulkier and clunkier, yet more expensive. Went with the Dell and didn't regret it.

Edit: running Ubuntu on it

Any issues with Ubuntu? or did it all just work out of the box?

I'm really interested in the XPS 13/15, but don't want to end up with a brick.

XPS 15 9550 here. Got mine on eBay for ~$1k with no SSD. Mine has the i7-6700HQ, 4K IGZO touchscreen, bigger battery (which takes up the 2.5" SSD space, so M.2 SSD only which is fine by me), and GTX 960. Follow http://seb.mamessier.com/dell-xps-15-9550-ubuntu-16-04/ + http://malachisoord.com/2016/09/10/xps-15-9550-ubuntu-setup/ and it's OK. Graphics switching doesn't work flawlessly. Powertop requires some messing about to get the fans to totally stop. Battery life is worse than under Windows. Palm detection on the touchpad is wonky and requires blacklisting a kernel mod to get working properly (the touchpad shows up as two devices). My keyboard had a cable under the spacebar not properly glued down, so I had to get a replacement KBD (~$15 on ebay, parts are readily available). Plextor M8Pe works fine but I had to mess with the BIOS a bit to get the UEFI boot stuff working correctly. Wifi works fine. Bluetooth works as well as it does on Windows, which is to say not that well, but I don't think it's the fault of the hardware or Ubuntu. Configuring X to play nice with the proprietary drivers + power settings + stupid Synaptic touchpad daemon + graphics switching + Arc theme took a few days to get more or less working.

The screen is also terrific and very noticeably better than my work mid-2014 15" rMBP. I wouldn't have optioned the touchscreen if I had a choice, but the 4K IGZO is only available as a touchscreen. I actually use it sometimes, and the hinge is good enough that it doesn't flop around and it feels solid when tapping on it. I only really use that for casual browsing.

My past few personal laptops have been Dell Latitudes since they're typically made from metal and have nicer parts (keyboard, hinges, touchpad, etc) than stuff like the Inspiron series. Parts are cheap and easy to find (e.g. an extra power adapter is $35 shipped in bulk packaging) and they're generally easy to repair, with repair guides, service manuals, and Dell's great service code look-up readily available. If it blows a motherboard or drains a battery tomorrow, I know that I can keep it running for relatively little money. Dell also has great business warranties if you can find a used one with a year or so of warranty left.

TL;DR it's still a huge PITA to get even the latest Ubuntu working right with a top-of-the-line Windows laptop, and even then it's less nice and doesn't "just work" as well as a Mac, but I paid about 1/3rd of what a comparable MBP would cost, and since it's just a personal laptop for my side projects and electronics hobby stuff (microcontrollers, audio measurement, open source, etc) it's totally fine.

Interesting, thanks!

It seems like a lot of effort. I think I may just snap up a 2014 MBP and install Ubuntu on that.

You can buy the XPS 13 with Ubuntu pre-loaded on it by Dell. It used to be branded the "Developer Edition" but now it's just part of the normal lineup (but you have to buy from the SOHO-branded storefront because wow is Dell's site a mess).

I wiped their Ubuntu install and put on Debian and that's been working fine for me.

Had to upgrade bios/firmware (with Dell-provided download, via bios-integrated flash utilities, so no Windows or DOS boot necessary).

Had to use a custom kernel for skylake/nvme; 4.5-rc7 for wily run ok for me, though there are some boot warnings. Still having (rare, like once a month) problems with the touchpad. Battery charge lasts much shorter than Apple notebooks.

I believe Dell's developer edition has the slightly more expensive Intel WLAN option, but I have no trouble with mine (Broadcom?).

If you're looking for a developer notebook for Linux and can wait until it's delivered (1-2 weeks or more?) I think Dell's developer edition XPS 13 with preinstalled Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is one of the best, if not the best, option available.

Back when I needed one, this offering wasn't available in Germany, but cyperport.de had a plain XPS 13 available in retail store, and I needed it asap. I liked that cyperport.de shops had the XPSs and various Lenovos available in store (unlike eg. big retailers here which have hundreds of cheap/crap notebooks with glare screens etc. but not a single pro notebook), so they got my money.

I have the non-touchscreen variant (I hate glare screens). But I believe next time I have to reconsider because a notebook in that price range shoud have HiDPI today.

As someone who recently got an XPS DE coming from a Mac background, I'm not sure what you mean about feeling cheap. Metal. Sturdy. Single hinged display (which is infinity edge, so is smaller than my MBP 13). The 'rubberized'(?) surrounds of the keyboard actually feel nicer on my wrists than the MBP which was actually sharp-edged. I prefer the keyboard to my 2015 MBP, and my girlfriend's 12" MB. No creaks, flexes, and still lighter than my MBP.

As someone who is constantly on the road, having a built in sim card for connectivity is something I'm super excited about. This could be the 2016 MBP we wanted, but switching to windows still sounds difficult.

These supposedly run Linux very well, as another option.

As a Linux user in the market for a new laptop: citation needed?

Lenovo's laptops generally have some of the best supported components for linux.

This has been true for quite a while now.

Most office environments where developers run Linux are full of Thinkpad T4xx, X2xx, and X1s.

I'm typing this on a Lenovo x230, having owned an x210 and x220. However, when such a statement above is made I was hoping that, like Dell, Lenovo had started to officially support Linux.

Hence the question.

Furthermore, Lenovo has been in the news late 2016 for not allowing Linux to run on some of their (Microsoft certified) laptops. And when the t460's and x260's came out early 2016, the Linux distros available at the time had all kinds of issues. Black screens, no Wifi, iirc.

So, again: is there any article that actually point to this laptop running Linux well? Or is it merely based on historical data and personal opinion?

As far as I'm aware laptops of new generations practically never ran Linux well out of the box from day one. It always took some time to adjust stuff to the new chips of a new generation. Only after some time you can just stick Linux into it and it'll just all work.

I bought my T440s pretty much on day one and didn't know this. If I recall correctly the following Ubuntu release almost half a year later was the first time I managed to get a system where both the 3G and wifi worked.

I kept hearing the same thing and seeing mixed reviews on the Linux commitment since Thinkpad left IBM and went to Lenovo. Seems like there was a big push around Yoga tablet-hybrids that were not Linux friendly for a while.

I ended up going with the Dell Developer Edition Ubuntu laptop line after talking to a few people who swore that their XPS 13 was the greatest thing they'd ever owned. Personally, I went with a beastly 17" Precision because I wanted a desktop replacement. Should be delivered any day now, but I'm excited. Btw, I'm switching from a Mac.

Thinkpads are still reliable for Ubuntu, but I went with a Dell for the 4k IGZO display, four DIMMS, and 1.8 teraflops of GPU. Battery is not great. It's not light. The keyboard is ok, but not a Thinkpad...but it does have a track-stick.

>> Dell for the 4k IGZO display, four DIMMS, and 1.8 teraflops of GPU

Which Dell model is that? Precision 5510?

m7510. I bought it off the Dell Outlet. Same three year NBD on-site warranty, lower price, a green sticker on the bottom saying it's refurbished.

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/22/campaigns/outlet

It's the third time I've bought a machine from the outlet and I've always been satisfied. I had spec'd out a base m7510 with Ubuntu, 70% gamut touchscreen, larger battery, and lighted keyboard. This one came up with the IGZ0, Windows 10, 4GB Quadro 2000, i7-6820HQ instead and was a bit less money. The base unit was still a good machine.

The 5510's are more Macbook like...slimmer, limited expansion, less powerful CPU's and graphics cards at the top end of the line (slim light cases limit thermal capacity).

The 7000 series are heavier and support ECC RAM and have four DIMM slots and can accomodate a conventional SATA drive plus an M42 x 80. For me heavy is relative. My first three laptops were 7 pounds, 6.5 pounds, and 8.5 pounds. The first one was light, the second was about a pound over light, and the third was svelte for a 17".

In general:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X1_Carbon_(3rd_Gen)

Ubuntu in particular:

https://certification.ubuntu.com/certification/make/Lenovo/?...

When I was shopping for a laptop recently, I was told that to order one with Ubuntu pre-installed I needed to call sales during business hours. Ultimately, I went with a Dell Precision T7510, left Windows 10 in place, added an NVME ssd, and installed Ubuntu on that (Dell Precisions also offer Ubuntu pre-installed and at a discount).

I've been running Debian on my X1 gen 3 since the day I got it. The only problem was Debian doesn't ship with drivers for proprietary NICs and you have to supply them separately, but that's a Debian problem, not an X1 problem.

I'm currently typing this while USB-tethered through a stock Android phone, which 'just worked' when I first tried it - the only settings screen I've ever seen when USB tethering is the one that toggles it on.

It is normal for linux to perhaps have a driver issue with a very new laptop, but it's usually sorted out in a month or two, especially with thinkpads as they have a large linux-using population.

i'm using a 4th gen x1 carbon as my work laptop. it's the machine google settled on as their 2016 linux laptop after doing a bunch of research on current models from various manufacturers, and it's worked perfectly for me. i used the 1st gen for a few years before that, and that was a great experience too. (the 4th gen has worse speakers than the 1st gen, which was kind of weird to realise, but other than that i've been happy with the upgrade too)

This was great to know, thanks for sharing this.

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/pd031426

The certifications on this page are done by the vendors (typically RedHat or Ubuntu), against specific OS releases.

That will always be my issue.

Why do you find that better than tethering to a phone? The last thing I want is a separate mobile account for my laptop.

Phone tethering tends to eat through the battery, also, there's just a difference in how you use it and how it feels.

On the one hand you've got a laptop that is online the whole time, on the other hand you've got a situation where you have to have to fiddle with two devices to get online.

Moving onlineness from a deliberate, modal thing to a continuous thing changes the way you interact with the network.

Not the parent, but for me, a reason would be to have a dedicated, company-paid data-only subscription. I work from coffee shops a lot, and my personal T-Mobile subscription doesn't have enough data. Right now I'm considering getting an external Verizon "JetPack" for this, but it's another little device to pack and charge.

Your company can just as well provide you with a Wi-Fi hotspot.

You didn't read my whole comment, then. "But it's another little device to pack and charge."

Read my other comment on this thread. I find that the pros vastly outweigh the cons, and I've been doing phone tethering in earnest since Ericsson shipped their first decent 2G phone with a data modem (the SH-888), back in 1998. :)

So I am being downvoted for having experience in the matter?

No, you're being downvoted for trying to stuff your experience into someone else's usecase.

I understand that you like those features, but I was offering a reason why, for me, an integrated device is much more convenient. I don't want to think about an external device. When I settle down in a coffee shop, an airport, on a train or bus, etc. I already have to deal with my earbuds (noise-canceling, requires occasional charging) and external MacBook charger. I don't relish the idea of yet another device to unpack.

Agreed. I am constantly out and about and much prefer carrying a Wi-Fi hotspot or a secondary phone, for the following reasons:

- I can upgrade the hotspot/phone separately (right now I'm at 150Mbps LTE, which is very nice, and I started doing this in 1998 with the Ericsson SH-888... a few orders of magnitude slower)

- I can place the hotspot/phone away from me (typically near a window), and get excellent mobile signal regardless of where I have to sit

- I can share the bandwidth among multiple devices

Having spent over fifteen years at telcos and mobile operators, I can assure you that this is the sanest option both due to mobile hardware deprecation (you will _never_ be able to upgrade embedded 3G/4G/LTE in the same way), performance (embedded designs are a lot more trouble to get right) and, yes, price gouging from telcos.

Even before leaving the sector, I never saw SIM slots as an advantage in laptops -- they're just a way to charge you more for an effectively worse mobile experience.

The laptop can remain connected even when you leave the desk. No need to wire the phone (my iPhone battery does not last too long with active tethering use)

Separate device would be one extra thing to carry and remember.

With Project Fi, they give you free data-only sims with no extra plan charges.

> Why do you find that better than tethering to a phone? The last thing I want is a separate mobile account for my laptop.

Because not having to tether is better. And every mobile-operator under the sun offers twin-SIMs for your laptops and tablets and what not.

Usually free of charge, if it's already a business-subscription.

I have a 4th generation x1 carbon, and having a built in sim card is way nicer. With 2 clicks I can connect to 4g vs getting my phone out, turning tethering on, and then connecting to my hotspot. (Not to mention the extra battery drain from tethering).

Project Fi allows you to add extra data sims for free, so the cost is the same as tethering.

Here is why I don't like mobile data peripherals on laptops: it causes the software to firm incorrect beliefs about the link state. With a mobile modem the OS will decide the link has gone down, and sever all connections. With wifi tethering the laptop has no idea what the link state on the phone might be, so it rides out brief loss of signal events.

Small but important difference in my opinion.

Not saying you're wrong, but I was pleasantly surprised that I only had to plug my iPhone 6S+ in via USB and it just showed up as an additional network connection and "just worked" in Ubuntu 16.10. I've never had an easier tethering experience. FWIW it also did not work at all over Bluetooth (couldn't even see my phone).

cough try linux cough

I use a T460s with a Google Fi SIM card in it running Debian. It works really well and Google lets you get up to 10 free data sims so you don't need another account.

"Google lets you get up to 10 free data sims"

Tell me more. What exactly do you mean by "up to 10 free data sims" ?

If you are a project fi account holder, you can get an additional data sim cards (up to 9) to put in devices like iPad, other tablets, or in this case the laptop. It will be linked to your main account and share the data budget of your main phone, at the same rate of $10/GB.

Awesome. Thanks.

Linux is available to you and a very good option for these machines.

I absolutely adore my ThinkPad X201, if there was any way to purchase a pristine new-in-box X201 I would. However, I recently picked up a 3rd gen x1 carbon and absolutely love it compared to my rMBP '15. Sure, it's not quite as fast and the screen isn't quite as good, but I can run a true tiling window manager (not the garbage that is KWM on OSX) and have a unfettered dev platform.

I run Fedora, I like it more than Ubuntu or Debian and like the fact that I don't have to worry about random underlying features breaking all the time when I update (which wasted a ton of my time when I was using Arch Linux).

Can you not run Fedora on a MBP? And if you can/could, how would the comparison still stack up?

I'm sure you can run a decent Linux on MBP; I've been running Arch on my MBP for 2.5 yrs now, and it's been great, bar a couple of hiccups. In fact currently it works better than MacOS; MacOS refuses to wake up after shutting the lid.

Why is the webdesign so amateurish. I really don't understand these companies that can't put proper priority on having webpages that look really good and luxurious. Spend millions on great industrial design but can't spend the thousands for a decent sales page.

That was my first thought as well. The page just looks awful, even more so on mobile.

It is almost perfect. I would love real 4 core i7 with 8MB L3 cache CPU for laptops, instead of the 2 core (4 threads) with 4MB.

Edit: 6th generation of mobile Intel CPUs have models with 4 cores and 8MB of L3 cache (i7-6970HQ), using 45W [1]. However, in 7th generation there are only 2-core models [2].

[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88392/6th-Generation-In...

[2] http://ark.intel.com/products/family/95544/7th-Generation-In...

Using a higher wattage part needs more cooling...

They'll have the 4C model in the T470p

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Classic-ThinkPad-models-...

Thank you! :-D

The 4 core ones (HQ series) have not been released yet. They're supposed to be out Jan/Feb.

All it shows me when I try to view models or customize is a message saying no models are available at this time.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nymnxfm8xmdcl0s/Screenshot%202016-...

I don't see a 5th-generation listing under Lenovo's products pages. Does anyone know what the release date will be?

Edit: closest hit I can find is a rumored launch at CES in a few weeks -- http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/leaked-new-lenovo-thinkpa...

> Does anyone know what the release date will be?

CES is next week, we'll likely get more details then, shipping products are still likely a few months out.

Ubuntu on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon is my workstation. As a Go developer I only need Chrome, a terminal, and Go itself (which I install from the official tarball binaries).

Now that I have Google Fi I'm kicking myself for not getting the cell radio builtin as Google will send you a data only SIM for free! I would never have to deal with another terrible airport or hotel captive portal again!

My coworkers are all Macbook Pro users and ask why I don't get one too. I just don't see the point. I think MBP's build quality is nicer but otherwise I get twice the machine for the same price and get to develop on the same OS as my project primarily targets (Linux).

> Now that I have Google Fi I'm kicking myself for not getting the cell radio builtin as Google will send you a data only SIM for free!

Oh, I forgot Fi would send us this, thanks!

> I think MBP's build quality is nicer but otherwise I get twice the machine for the same price and get to develop on the same OS as my project primarily targets (Linux).

I just looked at the X1 carbon specs and my 3 year old MacBook Air is faster than the base model carbon and I spent about the same amount of money.

The build quality is huge for me as I spend 50+ hours a week directly-on or with peripherals cabled to my laptop. If I wanted, I could install a Linux on it, but really, OS X just works without having to fuss with it (e.g. trying to get the touchpad feel anywhere near as nice).

As for writing Go, isn't cross-compilation pretty good? I spend most of my time writing in VHLLs (js, python, etc) and OS X is (still, even after some iOS-direction changes) quite good as a dev environment -- spinning up a VM for when I need to compile something lower-level and test on a target OS is trivial.

> As for writing Go, isn't cross-compilation pretty good?

Go's cross-compilation is near perfection unless you use cgo which needs to use a C compiler to link against native libraries. Then you need all of the normal tools and libraries for cross-compiling C; Go just puts a decent on it.

Ah, cool. My workflow is essentially "write Python until it's too slow, then profile and write C," so maybe it's time I move to a Go/C approach.

It's not the sexiest laptop in the world, but my work Dell Latitude 7470 with an I7 6600U, 16GB DDR4 RAM, NVMe drive with a 1920x1080 screen is the best PC laptop I've used. Works great with the Dell dock, where I have two Ultrasharp 21.5 inch monitors in 1080p, with the laptop screen flipped open; three usable screens.

I still (slightly) prefer my Mid-2014 13 inch Macbook Pro though, but it's very close.

They didn't fully learn the lesson of the Superfish fiasco:

"X1 Carbon is available with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Signature Edition. No more trialware or unwanted apps. No more distractions—and easy provisioning for IT pros."

So do that with every version, and stop feeding people "unwanted apps" altogether. You just admitted that nobody wants them, and this irresponsible attitude is exactly why you got bopped for pre-installing the Superfish MITM malware.

"Signature Edition" is a Microsoft concept, not a Lenovo one. [0]

And there will always be trialware and unwanted apps as long as the company gets money from including these. Because who doesn't want free money?

[0]: https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Signatu...

You're missing the point. Yes Signature Edition is an unadulterated Windows install, nfoz is asking why they're selling anything else given "nobody wants them, and this irresponsible attitude is exactly why you got bopped for pre-installing the Superfish MITM malware"

Yes, to which I replied "Because who doesn't want free money?"

Companies don't give a shit as to who wants them or who doesn't, because they get free money for each install that includes the bloatware, and that's all that they really care about; maximizing the profits.

Microsoft's profits are probably negatively impacted by the bloatware in the form of a bad experience, and probably pays the OEM some amount to offset the removal (I don't work in sales, I have no idea how those deals are made or what they contain) so that users have a better experience with Windows.

OEMs can choose to go that route, or not, and the reason why most computers are not is that they probably get more money from having the bloatware in there; otherwise, we'd see Signature Edition as the default.

Trialware is installed because it improves ROI on the product. Whether people want them or not is functionally irrelevant--whether they're willing to pay to not have them is relevant. If you're willing to pay more, feel free to demonstrate it. (I'm not, because I nuke-and-pave hardware when I get it.)

How long does it take to do a full reinstall nowadays? Still hours?

Not really. Windows 7/10 should be up and running in under half an hour in most circumstances.

I installed Windows 10 on an SSD, plus Office 365 from the Internet, in around 30 minutes last week, so yes.

Clean Windows 10 install from usb key is under 30 mins nowadays.

Don't even have to clean install from a USB Key as of the Windows 10 Anniversary update from a few months ago. Microsoft now has a tool that downloads the image and installs it for you automatically.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10s...

Iirc they introduced that with Win8

Not quite. This tool takes it a step further.

The Win8 Refresh/Reset was based on an image preloaded by the OEM, or installed as part of a Win8 install. If you reset your computer, you'd get all the bloatware back unless you clean installed (which replaces the image).

Win10 Refresh/Reset doesn't have such an image, and just reconstructs a fresh state as part of the process, but then runs a package that the OEM preloads on the computer after resetting.

This tool basically deletes that package so that when you reset, you get a fresh copy without any of that bloatware reinstalled.

Ahh I see. I didn't have Win8 preinstalled on my PC back then, so when I used that feature it only ever gave me the clean install.

Thanks!

They might have been able to "capture" a good amount of drivers with their new update strategy. This might help to be able to do that... and this is a good news!

I haven't really needed extra drivers in either my Surfaces (duh) and also my Lenovo laptops. My custom-built gaming tower did need some but mainly just to enable some gaming features.

For the OS only (not including any app installs you might need) I can install Windows 10 in about 10 minutes on an SSD using the standard consumer windows setup GUI method (no fancy imaging techniques or whatnot).

Ah, "consumer" vs "business" computers. I wonder whether this distinction even makes sense.

Superfish didn't happen to the ThinkPad line of computers - it was a different division in Lenovo that made that error.

I have the 2016 model running Arch Linux. The machine is a great piece of engineering. Light as a feather, and feels durable. The carbon fiber body feels great in hand. Performance wise, I have the i7 model 16G RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD. The only slight negative would be battery life. I expected more, but it does last me a full 8hr day of work with screen dimmed. I'm looking forward to purchasing new in another year or so.

I think it is super important to have honest discussion between developers, with as little flame possible about machines we are using.

I am using 5 yr old Macbook Air for development, it works well. I always imagined that I will use ThinkPad /w some Linux distribution in future. It is not trivial to use Linux on your laptop. While a lot of things will be faster, browser most likely will be slower and there will not be as many tools. What I would mostly miss is photography tools, Lightroom is essential for processing photos. I can't not do it.

Let me add one more thing to this fairly random post :). I think X1 is better then Macbooks and Airs at the moment, docking station makes a lot of difference.

Writing this from a Lenovo X1 running Linux...

The keyboard is great so if you do a lot of writing (e.g. you are a developer) this is a very good machine. But if you are doing other stuff then maybe this is not the machine for you.

With that said, checkout darktable (http://www.darktable.org/ ) which was discussed a few days ago on HN.

Thank you. It is good but can't replace Lightroom. However, there are ways to go around it and I am thinking it through. I can leave one Mac or do dual boot for Win for Lightroom and few games I can't have on Linux.

Again, thank you for reference.

As someone who is considering moving from a MacBook Pro 2015 to a Linux laptop, the keyboard and, in particular, the trackpad on PC models are the biggest disappointments. Apple has spent so much effort on the tactility of their laptops, while PC manufacturers still seem to be stuck in an earlier decade. I was a little bit shocked to discover that Thinkpads still have that terrible little mouse nipple, which I hadn't seen in about 10 years.

The laptop with the most promising keyboard/trackpad combo, that I have found, is the Dell XPS (it has physical trackpad buttons, but at least they're located at the bottom), which is probably not accidental; it looks a lot like a MacBook, too.

The Surface Pro 4 type cover, and I'd assume the Surface Book, both have a comparable keyboard and I'd say the trackpad is definitely as good as the Macbooks I've used or better (haven't used the latest of any model, but some older Pros and Airs)

Does the Surface Pro series have a model that's comparable to the MacBook Pro 15''? From what I can tell, they max out at 12'', 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD?

The "type cover" looks decent, but in the YouTube videos I find, it looks like it's less rigid/solid than a fully integrated keyboard. I see that some people prefer to detach it and use it flat on a solid surface for that reason.

You're supposed to go to the Surface Book line. And there's a Pro 4 model with 16GB of RAM and an 1TB SSD.

I think neither the Book nor the Pro are comparable to a 15'' MBP.

Book is 13.5'', Pro is 12.5'', too small for me. Both max out at a dual-core Core i7-6650U (it's hard to find out exactly, the specs don't say anywhere, but that's what reviews tell me), which is two cores less than my MBP. Both max out at 16GB RAM, same as MBP.

Surface Book, but that does not offer quad core CPU.

I hate the apple keyboards, and only use the trackpoint(mouse nipple) and disable my trackpad immediately. So to each their own.

Yeah Lenovo actually removed the trackpoint in one generation (t440?) and had to bring it back due to demand. Maybe it's an acquired taste.

They never took it away, they tried to switch the touchpad to an integrated unit in the *40 gen (240, 440, 540) (like how Apple does it) and had to revert it because (1) they did such a godawful job of the sensitivity and (2) integrated touchpad buttons don't make sense in conjunction with the trackpoint.

Well, it was truly a piece of shitty crap. Absolutely not comparable to how Apple does it - and by several order of magnitude... it was a soo huge disaster that they made sure to design the next model so people would be able to retrofit its touchpad with buttons on their Tx40...

Counterpoint: I still use only Thinkpads because they have TrackPoint. For those of us who prefer it, it is vastly superior to trackpads.

Yeah, I was not a trackpoint fan in theory for a long time. Then I got a 4th gen X1 and I find myself using it almost exclusively. Not having to move my fingers off the keyboard trumps accuracy for me.

Toshiba have it as an option on their keyboards.

is it as good as the ones on the thinkpads?

Completely agreed. I disable my trackpad and use the nipple exclusively. (And am stuck with thinkpads because of that preference. But I like my new X1 so I'm not too sad about that.)

As for the keyboard, my favorite was the "old thinkpad" keyboard (X220 generation), but I have to admit the new thinkpad keyboard is better than I expected. Travel and resistance are very comfortable. Compared the "new macbook" keyboard with tiny travel and those useless up/down keys, it's vastly better.

i love it, but i wish it were a little less stiff. even turned up to the maximum sensitivity it's giving me rsi twinges.

Do you have other rubber caps to experiment with? In my experience they affect how much force is needed to move the pointer around (my favourite is the concave with the rim as you pull the rim rather than push the side of the dome...I've probably explained that badly but it's worth trying some different caps if you haven't already).

no, i didn't even know the caps were swappable out! i'll experiment with a concave cap if i can (work laptop, so i'd have to get it okayed first)

"mouse nipple"s are the best. I used to be able to play single player FPS games with it because I got so comfortable with it.

Nicest part is you leave the keyboard very little so for the few things I used the mouse for I'd have it but otherwise it'd be out of my way.

That said, I prefer Apple's trackpads these days because over all Apple hardware has been better to me than ThinkPads.

In my experience, trackpads that feel weird and unresponsive in Windows can be fine when running Linux. I think it's the OS and the drivers as much as the hardware. The Yoga I'm typing this on (with Linux) has the best trackpad I've ever used.

(Though I'm probably not a useful counterpoint for you, because I think Apple laptops have rather iffy ergonomics. Cold hard wrist rests, too slippery to hold when closed, sharp edges, annoyingly grippy trackpads)

The mouse nipple is what keeps me using thinkpads. Maybe if Apple includes a mouse nipple on their products I'll consider switching over.

Don't hold your breath on that one. We'd probably have something like "RSIgate" if Apple did that.

And besides, Apple's trackpad is best in class, they don't really need another mouse input.

As an involuntary user of a corporate-issued MBP 2015, I have to say that its keyboard bothers me quite a bit after many years of using Thinkpads, and even after MBP 2013.

The trackpad is nice, though; I almost don't miss the trackpoint any more, but I do miss the separate mouse buttons, and especially the middle button.

I desperately want exactly this in a Macbook Pro: "The X1 Carbon delivers up to 15.5 hours of battery life. And if you’re running low, the rapid charging feature provides 80% capacity in just an hour."

Specifically the rapid charging. Hell I'd be fine with current battery life (6-10 hrs depending on usage) if it could recharge fast.

Same goes for the phones.

I just desperately want a full 88 key keyboard in a top spec MacBook Pro.

Love the Thinkpad hardware. Hate Windows 10.

If something like the current generation Thinkpad hardware (T or X series) could run OSX, it would be what the Macbook Pro used to be... Remember the first generation Intel macbook pro in 2006 which had a full complement of ports? Everything relevant and needed except RS232.

Now need to wait until Linux is installable on it.

Thinkpads are designed to support both Windows and Linux. Dunno what you're saying.

Thinkpads are not better than other laptops when it comes to Linux support.

Just look at the broadcom wifi chipsets: if you mistakenly buy a thinkpad with one directly from their website (and they obviously don't advertise it as such when configuring the hardware), and then ask their support to get it fixed/changed (even on your own dime) they'll just stonewall you. Once they got money out of your pocket, you mean nothing for them.

The only solution is to buy a supported (intel chipset, for the wifi) FRU aftermarket (and good luck finding it, since Lenovo's support won't tell you that information).

At least, with a Dell or a Chromebook I have a recurse if the hardware they sold me has incompatibilities with the Linux version they shipped it with

Moreover: I won't support a company with such an horrible and embarrassing security track record as lenovo

Ah. I guess personally this is less of an issue because I stick to after market laptops, not new ones, and I know where to look to replace stuff like the WiFi module (had no idea Broadcom chipsets didn't have Linux drivers). Can't justify the price.

On the security point, SuperFish was on a different product line - Ideapads, Lenovo's consumer line (with quality that parallels Dell's consumer stuff) - and I would have no trouble believing that some idiot SVP in the chain of command who had nothing to do with Thinkpads made that decision.

For me it's honestly the TrackPoint and the modularity of the laptops. There's just nothing else out there that comes close to what Lenovo figured out 10 years ago, unfortunately.

> had no idea Broadcom chipsets didn't have Linux drivers

Actually, it was a Realtek chipset (I'm not currently using that laptop, so I remembered incorrectly). The driver was available, but it was severely unstable, dropping connections and packets, and even triggering kernel panics a few times (once it even happened during a coding interview!)

> On the security point, SuperFish was on a different product line

Unfortunately, SuperFish was not the only fiasco that Lenovo plagued its devices with:

http://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...

Still running my 2012 x1 carbon... One thing that has kept it going is that it's very serviceable. I hope the new model is as friendly towards component replacement, as I've had to swap out the DC power harness and cooling assembly so far.

I owned a first generation X1 for a while. Eventually sold it because it only had 4GB of RAM, and there is not much of a source of the proprietary SSD. The battery was down to 3 hours, and I wasn't going to replace it if I couldn't put at least 8GB/512GB into it.

I really liked the Lenovo X1. From 2012 to now I've went from the MacBook Pro to MacBook Air and now the MacBook Pro Retina. With the Lenovo, the touchpad wasn't quite as good, the power adapter wasn't quite as compact, the battery life wasn't quite as good (but all were good enough).

The screen and keyboard were very good. The trackpoint is a nice addition. The Mini DisplayPort worked with my 27" Apple Cinema Display without issues in both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu worked perfectly BTW). Build quality on the machine was great. Didn't run hot or anything, had all the ports that my Mac did.

Later on they sabotaged the function key row and ruined the touchpad. After a year of customer complaints they put it back, but the things were so expensive I just stuck with a Mac. If I needed a Windows/Linux machine however, they would be my first choice.

The first gen X1 came with 8GB of RAM and standard SATA interface (is was quite bulky for that very reason).

Maybe you are thinking of some other device?

I was speaking of the X1 Carbon - which the article is talking about

Please support the idea of building a better planet for our children and do not buy laptops where you can not replace the battery - managers in companies that build these kind of products have to learn that they are acting against human interests and need to change their way of thinking.

Of course this applies to all Laptops where you can not change battery.

Thanks and have a better 2017!

Interesting. I hadn't heard of this before. Can you share some references about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolescence

Oh. I thought there was something particular about removable batteries. It wasn't clear to me at all that planned obsolescence is what you were referring to.

Nonsense. If you dispose your ewaste properly (which is in general the law) a builtin battery will get recycled or disposed of just the same as one that is replaceable.

You seem to believe that "ewaste" is something that can be "properly disposed" - you have no clue about reality or you are a marketing guy that wants to spread his lies. Maybe you are just naive and really believe the things big companies are telling you - a good follower!

It is fairly easy to replace the battery. All you need is a screwdriver.

Ok, that makes it much better - I had the impression that the battery is soldered or fixed in a more anti-hackable way, but just a few srews are ok! Hopefully they keep that design!

I wish HQ CPUs were an option (quad not dual core) - I work primarily with compiled languages.

I wish they ditched SATA option for m.2 only and used the extra space for more battery (or cooling for HQ cpu)

Asus ZenBook working well for me with linux for the last 3 years. I've always had good linux support from thinkpads too. The Asus replaced an apple macbook pro, the model where apple shipped broken GPUs and didn't recall, so that one is a very expensive web-browser that constantly panics and reboots, giving me the opportunity to write a sentence to apple about how I feel about their miserable company that I'm sure nobody will ever read. "The Donald Trump of Computing Companies." Apple really are amazing though. Top comment is an apple fan boy desperate to continue to believe in apple and affronted by the existence of other laptops while other kool-aid drinkers up vote even though it's got stuff all to do with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Probably hasn't even got an apple logo shaved into his head!

I love everything about the ASUS laptops expect one thing: the mushi keyboard. Press the keys in the middle of the laptop and the keyboard flex with as much as 4-5mm.

> Top comment is an apple fan boy desperate to continue to believe in apple and affronted by the existence of other laptops ...

Unfortunately this is becoming common on HN posts that praise or even merely discuss another company.

As someone looking to replace my 2013 13" MBP this is almost exactly what I want.

Enough has already been written about the new MBPs and why many of us will no longer consider them. I've already tried the Kaby Lake Razor Blade Stealth but returned it due to shocking quality and support issues. I considered the Asus Zenbook but it has too few ports to be a serious contender and the HP offerings all have screens with a lower resolution than I want.

I've always avoided Lenovo, party because Apple were building machines I wanted and partly because my experience of Lenovo to date has been low end cheaper models which suck. I'm willing to give them a chance at the upper end with this though. The sooner to market with this the better

I've had the X1 Carbon 3rd gen (Refurbished) for a few years now as my personal laptop. I don't do much heavy lifting with it, mostly League of Legends, Counter-strike, and some side programming. But it's my favorite laptop I've used. The 14" size is perfect for me and I like the feel of the rest of it. Performs well and didn't break the bank.

(I've always owned windows PCs, though I've used MBP at work for 2 years now, and have had a MacBook Air that I resold because it was too small and didn't have a niche to fill after my ultrabook and my ipad.)

I use a thinkpad every day, my current model I'm typing this on is a T460. It's entirely user-serviceable(all batteries, ram, hdd, etc) by anyone with a screw driver and the ability to read a manual.

The frame is carbon fiber(according to lenovo), and the outside is matte plastic. It doesn't bend, creak, or otherwise make me think it's cheap. It doesn't feel as "solid" as the 15" MBP on my shelf, or the 15" MBP(with touch bar) on the shelf next to it. And before you ask - work buys all this kit, not me.

So, in summary...I use one every day(the t460) and it doens't feel cheap. Compared to the 1st gen X1 carbon(also on my shelf, but not 2nd or 3rd gens), it feels significantly heavier, but not any more or less sturdy.

The real issue with non-Apple hw is the OS. Linux is great for development but sucks on pro media/audio support.

I don't think I'm alone in saying I'm disappointed by the new MBPs, and also haven't found a reasonable alternative. I buy for a small office (<100 people) and it's a constant challenge to find decent quality and performance.

In a city of 5mm I also can't find a brick & mortar store where I could even evaluate what's on offer. Any place selling laptops these days are all targeting home users, and sifting through online offerings isn't much better.

Maybe my expectations are unrealistic, but I'm convinced we've taken a step backward in the last year or so.

What happened to the Carbon touch? This would be my next computer except it doesn't have touch. As a developer I use Chrome dev tools emulator with my Thinkpad W510 to perform touch testing. Plus it is fantastic for annotating presentations (Ubuntu, Compiz Annotate plugin).

The XPS 13 developer edition looks nice and comes with Ubuntu 16.04 but doesn't have a pointer stick. I love the pointer stick, faster than trackpad.

Ah, looks like I am waiting for the next gen X1 Yoga (touch). It would have USB-C charging then and be light, with a nice screen and my favorite, the touchstick!

Okay, here we go, 5th generation Thinkpad X1 Carbon just announced at CES 2017. This is a dream machine.

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-yo...

16GB ram, 14" WQHD OLED Touchscreen (300 nit), 1TB SSD, Intel® Core™ i7 vPro, Trackpoint (touchstick), retractable keyboard in convertible mode, rechargeable & dockable pen, WWAN (Project Fi free data only sim), touch fingerprint (not the swipey kind), Thunderbolt 3, USB-C (docking is amazing now), WiGig docking.

All starting at 3 lbs. (my W510 is 6 lbs w/extended battery).

Mmmmmmmmm, now that is a sexy machine!!! Only thing better is if it would come with Ubuntu pre-installed and everything working out of the box.

I am gonna get one of these and install Ubuntu or Apricity on it!

> Plus we managed to keep the 14" display in a 13" chassis. Now that’s innovation.

Dell XPS put a 13" display in 12" a chassis and a 15" display in 14" a chassis.. But a 14" display in a 13" chassis. Now that’s innovation.

Does Lenovo's history with malware give anyone pause when considering this laptop?

I'm just interested in general - I'm a Mac owner now, but used to be a happy thinkpad owner back in the day.

X1 is business series, I think their "malware" was some analytics they installed on the cheap consumer laptops.

(not that it makes it any better)

Page is down :/

Here's an image of the page: http://imgur.com/szPrPuN

I spent a year waiting for the Yoga x260 thinking I had found the perfect machine, after 11 months I am getting ready to send it in for the 3rd time for a "freezing" trackpad, remedied only by plugging in an external mouse. Also, lack of Linux support is insane for a company selling a working man's machine like this, going back to Dell after this :(

Am I correct that "Signature Edition" means no Linux?

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/53ri0m/warning_micro...

Read the top comment...

Please do not reference "top comments" as comment order is usually in flux for a while.

It's a three month old thread.

These look nice, I'm only able to afford like the first generation but I look forward to buying that.

If only they were fanless.

I have a gen 4 X1 carbon. top 16gb ram 1tb hard drive all in. Is the best machine from last year.

I have an X1 gen 3, and it has a dongle for the ethernet port. Given the thickness of it, I don't see how this new gen machine can hold a 'native rj45'. Perhaps it's one of those hinged ones that opens out?

That is a really good question and I don't fully understand what 'native' means in this context. did you manage to find out more about it?

It's native because it is not over USB. The "dongle" is only a cable to go from the "mini" RJ45 to the regular one.

Ah, thank you. Yes, it's mildly annoying having to carry a dongle around if I want ethernet, but I've survived so far :)

I have a second generation X1 Carbon and I absolutely love this computer!

Anyone know if this will have precision touchpad?

What do these usually go for? Does anyone know?

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...

> we managed to keep the 14″ display ... in a 13″ chassis. Now that’s innovation.

Indeed. I'm not sure what they mean here.

Probably 'a chassis comparable in size to other 13" laptops'.

As in, a smaller screen bezel.

id upgrade to one of these in a heartbeat if i could afford to but right now thats not an option, thankfully my current gen2 x1 carbon is still an excellent machine that can handle most everything i throw at it

The trackpad is off center (to the left), what's up with that?

It's centered relative to the keyboard (the middle of the trackpad is below the 'g' and 'h' keys)

... But if you drop it won't it still rattle loose?

> WQHD IPS (2560 x 1440) 300 nits

Is this their OLED screen?

No, IPS is a variant of LCD displays.

Smaller resolution that my 18 month old Chromebook Pixel in a larger size, and with fewer nits. It's a disappointment is what it is. I'm in love with the laptop otherwise, but I've had two X1s already and the screens were some of the worst I've ever used.

Looks solid. I like the Snapdragon included.

will it bend?

If it's anything like the 2016 model I have, no. It's solid and can take abuse well.

thx. i'm worried a little because this laptop is really thin. especially compared to lenovo book which is also thin but not as wide as carbon.

Only 16GB, no Quad-Core option (i'd take an underclocked one at this point :( )... i need more threads and ram on the go, why is that not an option outside of the alienware 13 monstrosity?

You must be trolling. Look at the size of it. The thermals for the quad core chip don't make sense and they can very likely only fit 16gb of ram.

The T series is what you are looking for.

Try find any laptop of that size with 32gb ram and quad core option. It doesn't exist.

Thats my point, it doesn't exist, but for arbitrary reasons. The RAM chips in an Alienware 13 aren't more or larger than in the X1 Carbon, its just that they opt-to not offering this. The Intel i7-7500U is capable of driving 32gb, so there's no limit there, even if I would have to compromise on the quadcore.

But the Thermal Restrictions of the quadcore are imo manageable aswell, as they only have to dissipate about 20W of heat more at peak. The Alienware 13 mostly needs the additional cooling performance for its beefy graphics processor, which is not necessary for most dev use-cases.

The smallest T-Series that would fit the bill is the 14 inch ThinkPad T470. For some reason i cannot fathom the T470s only supports up to 24gb of ram, as per their press release.

The T470 is needlessly heavy, has more ports than I need and is larger than I want.

13 inch is my personal maximum, i'd rather have something between 10-12 inch. I'm lovin the dimensions of my Surface Pro 2, i just need something with a quad-core and more ram. I can compromise at the quadcore, but it boggles the mind that theres nothing below 14inch with 32gb. The Alienware 13 is the only machine that currently fits the bill, but that graphics chip and ridiculous chassis makes it unnecessary heavy.

I believe T470s has one 8GB dimm soldered to mobo. Thats why 24GB is max.

>they only have to dissipate about 20W of heat more at peak

That's a hell of a lot of extra heat in a thin laptop. Especially if a big chunk of the market values silence. An office full of laptops all sounding like airplanes isn't ideal.

My 2015 MacBook Pro has a quad-core i7. No 32GB of RAM but that seems like more of a chipset issue than a space one. Or if you ask Phil Schiller it's a battery life issue.

I have a T460p, Quad Core (i7-6820HQ), 32 GB of RAM. I am satisfied. The T470p will also be available soon.

I too am interested in the T470. But read disappointment with the display: https://www.thinkscopes.com/2016/12/28/lenovo-announces-new-...

T470 != T470p.

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