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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

I love these Thinkpad mods but don't have the time or patience to do one myself. Instead, I did a little research and settled on the T470s as my new laptop. You won't read about it much on the Lenovo boards. It's not the fastest; that title goes to their huge desktop replacement beasts. It's not the sexiest and thinnest--the X1 beats it there. It is, however, well-equipped with a great display and fast-enough CPU, and it's quite thin. It has all the latest tech, including NVME disk and HiDPI display options.

I run Arch Linux and the i3 window manager on mine and it's just perfect.

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The T4x0 is the star of the lineup. You can get last year's model dirt cheap through the Lenovo Outlet or refurbished ($500+ US). They finally give you a good screen (remember the T430 and earlier days? Or even the recent 1366x768 screens?), battery is great, the chiclet keyboard isn't as bad as people try to make you believe, and not only did they leave the TrackPoint on, the TouchPads are pretty decent even if they aren't to Apple's level.

Easily repairable or upgrade-able by the end user, thin and light...

You hit upon my very favorite thing about Thinkpads: they are user-repairable and user-upgradeable!

Lenovo has the most amazing website that tells you, step-by-step, how to fix almost every component of their products. For those that are considering one of their products, you have to check this out: https://www.lenovoservicetraining.com

I've made a hobby out of finding, refurbishing, and reselling Thinkpads since the late 90s. The Ts and Xs have maintained a reputation for serviceability across years.

Thats what I love about the ThinkPads regardless of model. You can find them for dirt cheap on eBay or craigslist. I just bought an X1 Carbon with i5, 256 GB SSD, and 8GB RAM for $194 on eBay. Has a solid keyboard and is pretty solid.

The switch to the low-profile TrackPoint ruined them for me.

Instead of 3 options for the TrackPoint nipple, there's only one, and I was a Soft Rim user.

Isn't that just a matter of replacing the nipple with the flavor of your choosing?

I've had 3 different Thinkpads over the last decade and I don't recall there every being a selection of nipples in the box but they've always been removable and replaceable.

They only make one nipple in the low-profile form factor. There is no alternate option. The old ones do not fit.

It does appear that all of the replacement options are low profile of some kind. There is an "ultra low" option. http://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/accessories-and-monitors/keyboa...

I got a T450 from the Lenovo Outlet. It came with a terrible TN screen. But I bought a replacement IPS screen on ebay and swapped it in. Absolutely killer laptop considering the price I paid for it.

I've got an older brother, the T440s, also running Arch Linux. It's pretty good. The keyboard had to be replaced because a few keys broke off after 2 years; it got replaced on-site for free though. The feel is good but apparently and disappointingly, the keys are attached with tiny plastic teeth that aren't too sturdy. The screen is IPS but a different SKU and lesser quality than the panel the first reviewers seem to have gotten.

Apart from that, it's silent, usable and reliable, and still not too hard to replace some of its components. I'd consider getting other one from the T4xxs line if it broke.

I've got a T41 (I think) from the IBM time lying around. That thing is built like a tank; I wouldn't step on my T440s, but I'm reasonably convinced that old machine could take that sort of abuse. Great keyboard, but atrocious screen (like most old Thinkpads).

Got a T440s myself too (running Ubuntu/Xmonad).

It's mostly a great machine, my model has 14"-fullHD-mat / i7 / 12Gb RAM / 256Gb SSD / 512GbHDD.

The only real caveat I can think of is the clickpad (no physical mouse buttons). That was a bad, bad decision. This piece of hardware has 0% usability, and under linux you need to tweak xorg.conf in order to get sensible defaults. Next generations of T4xx got it right however, trackpads with physicals mouse buttons have made their glorious comeback. Luckily I was already used to external keyboard/mouse, so that doesn't hurt as much as it could have been.

Question for whoever inside Lenovo knows the real story: what was the rational behind that whole clickpad thing?

They only made that mistake for one generation. We have to assume the rationale for the *40 models was "look, apple is doing it, clearly we can make this clickpad thing work".

And then the rationale was "holy shit literally everyone who uses this hates it".

I had the exact same complaints about the Clickpad on my T440s, and replaced it with the pad from the T460s. You can find the part on eBay for around 45-60 USD and instructions to replace. It's a bit fiddly of a replacement, but mine works great!

Same here, and the procedure is pretty straightforward.

i had to swap the panel on my T440S. the LG panel is crap and suffers from ghosting, image retention, small gamut & poor viewing angles. The AU Optronics is the much nicer one but hard to find a genuine one these days (had to get on ebay from China). i verified with the seller that the part was real. "NEW/Exact Laptop Lcd Screen AUO B140HAN01.1 14.0" IPS FHD eDP Matte B140HAN01.2"

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/4cnrde/anyone_kno...

be careful when getting one, most that are sold online (like amazon) are "generic" or "compatible" and not the genuine panels.

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T/...

I have a T420s, and after maxing it out RAM/HD-wise, managed to get one of the adapter boards so I could put a FHD IPS screen (the same model you mention) in it.

One of the reasons the guy stopped selling the adapter boards was the huge proliferation of "fake" screens being sold as specific models.

The T440 was probably the least pleasurable hardware I've used in a long time. Bad screen, bad touchpad (no dedicated buttons, disabling the trackpad disabled the buttons, the trackpad tracking was garbage), fragile keyboard. Waiting for that IT hardware refresh was the worst. I'm really glad Lenovo walked the trackpad back towards sanity with the 50 series onward, but I'm reticent to trust anything other than the 30 series. I've had such good luck with my personal x230, barring a dead CPU fan, which I was able to replace myself.

the T450 trackpad is compatible with T440. it's a common swap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rkjtd6sMcA

While I really like my x230, the touchpad is practically unusable for me. It's just too small (or too jerky, if you use a large scaling factor). And while I have the higher quality IPS panel, it's still just 1366x768. Just give me the x230 with a bigger touchpad and a nice HD display, and I am happy (maybe x260/x270 would work? ...).

How's the heat? Reviews say it gets hot and throttles immediately, with the fan being noisy.

But Lenovo won't let you get a high res screen on the thicker models.

It's like they take pride in making their loyal customers being forced to decide which pointless compromises they're going to take this generation.

My T470p has 2560x1440 at 14" that's high enough for me.

The T570 is available with 4k display.

NotebookCheck says the T470p gets up to around 50 C on the keyboard? That just seems ridiculously hot. Much above room temperature get uncomfortable.

(Plus no USB-C or Thunderbolt 3, just to make customers make more decisions.)

I haven't had any heat problems. However, the default configuration under Linux will run hot and noisy and suck batteries. It's an easy fix, though. Under Arch, it's just a matter of installing powertop, thinkfan, and tp_smapi and enabling a few systemd units.

Once you make those easy changes, the battery life becomes excellent like you would expect and is very quiet.

I agree with you on the HiDPI screen availability. As best as I can tell, Lenovo (like everyone else) has trouble buying the panels at quantity due to yield issues and only makes them available in their most high-end laptops where people are most likely to buy them. That's probably business folks, who generally want a thin laptop.

I had my employer buy me a P50 in an attempt to get a powerful laptop with lots of RAM and a good CPU and the big screen. That turned out to be a disaster, though. It's absurdly heavy and I never could get used to the offset keyboard. I use my personal T470s exclusively now.

> installing powertop, thinkfan, and tp_smapi and enabling a few systemd units.

Wouldn't TLP take care of all that?

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html

Interesting you feel that way about the P50. I've also had one from work for about a year and it's the best laptop I've ever had. Solidly performant, robust, decent battery life, good sized screen. It hits a nice sweet spot of power and portability for me.

FWIW, you can buy a panel separately and retrofit it. I've done this a couple of times and gotten much nicer hi-res screens for around $100-150.

>ou won't read about it much on the Lenovo boards.

That's not really true. The T series is their defacto business laptop. They're everywhere. The s at the end is the 'slim' model which makes it closer to an ultrabook than an old school brick thinkpad. Like you wrote, its no X1, but it doesn't have the compromises the X1 has: soldered components, minimal connectors, hefty price, etc.

They're great little machines and the primary complaint is that the trackpads get redesigned every so often with some designs being duds. Lenovo has shipped a decent trackpad the past couple years so its 'safe' to buy them again.

I have exactly the T470s with Win10 as a work notebook and can't really recommend it. The good parts seem to be the keyboards which feels quite good and the display (I have the hidpi model).

However most other things feel worse compared to my 2015 13" MBP.

The touchpad at least supports Win10 multitouch gestures, but otherwise is not very good - I use the MBP always without a mouse, and the T470s mostly with one.

The T470s feels slower (haven't exactly compared compilation times, but I'm pretty sure it is quite a bit slower).

And maybe the worst thing: It's just not stable. I guess I had a frozen machine or bluescreen at least every two weeks. Errors partly look like memory errors, but memtest says everything is fine.

The docking station also makes problems, docking/undocking sometimes fails and my external hidpiscreen (dell 4k 27") often flickers like crazy on the docking stations displayport connector.

sounds like you're conflating the hardware with the software. I personally think that Windows lets down ThinkPads

Yes, I'm conflating it because it's the whole package that I'm using. I also think it's highly likely that those are driver and firmware issues. But I'm supposed to work with the whole machine which Lenovo provided me. It won't help me if I have some decent hardware without software.

I don't think the stability issues are general windows 10 issues, I have windows machines which are rock solid (no issues since over years).

The docking station thing however seems to be more of a real hardware issue to me. The display dropouts are so short that it looks like some synchronization loss due to signal integrity problem.

Doest it make loud clicks when you click on touchpad?

I think it clicks probably as loud as the older Macbooks with mechanical touchpad. Louder than my newer Macbook with Force Touch, but not annoyingly loud.

Can you have a totally silent T470?

For me this is the killer feature in a working machine. I was one of the early adopters of x220, and its fan was annoying. Everything else (aside from the trackpad) was perfect.

This is something Apple gets right. They use big fans at low revs, which are inaudible. Even Linus himself was using a MacBook Air for long time due to this reason [1].

Nowadays, a similarly silent machine (actually fanless) which is also quite cheap, Linux friendly and good quality is Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5 inch.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-milleniu...

My T450s is silent at the usual activities. If you are doing something intensive it'll spin up the fan, which, while noticeable, isn't an annoying sound.

My T470s is almost always silent. I never hear it when doing the usual web surfing and software dev activities. The only time I hear the fans is when I'm doing the things that make Macbook Pros run their fans, too: video conferencing, compiling large applications, etc.

Zing, exact same setup but with Xmonad here and I couldn't be more happy :)

I haven't gotten around to tweaking up the power saving, though.. I don't suppose you have a dotfiles repo or something?

Does the dual core processor bother you? At work I had a mid 2015 MBP with a quad core i7 HQ processor (can't remember which). It was beastly. I'm worried that by getting a dual core I will regret it... What's your impression?

I have a dual core hyperthreaded i7 in a T450s and I feel like sometimes it doesn't quite keep up.

Ah, that's too bad. I want to get the T470 with the i7 7600U and that is my main concern :(

Do you know if they've fixed the PWM issue that plagued the last few generations of thinkpad? It was an issue that affected the displays in many thinkpads when they were set on low brightness and ended up giving some people headaches.

I have T460s. No PWM on mine. There are two different model screens that come with the T460, ironically the higher spec screen uses PWM. there are loads of comment forums discussing this. I did lots of research for this machine and can tell you it was a massive difference over my previous X series which had PWM and gave me horrific headaches

I decided I wanted a laptop, so I got a T520 (i5-2520M 4gb ram) and put a little SSD in it.

The display isn't great (1366x768), and video screen-splits a bit, but I love it.

True perfection comes with NixOS and XMonad, though. ;)

I use a T460p for work and love it. Compact quiet machine with excellent keyboard, quad-core i7, 32 gb ram, dedicated graphics and excellent battery life.

It's hilariously chunky though, but I don't mind.

If I had to buy a windows/linux laptop, the T460 is what I would have selected. The 470 looks great too.

and also the terrible chiclet keyboard :(

I mostly love my T560, but really miss the good old keyboard. Also, who decided that it would be good idea to ship "professional" device like this with F-keys set to what should have been an Fn-called functions (volume and brightness control, etc...)

Can't you just change that in BIOS? I know I did on my lenovo.

you can, but it's a weird default nonetheless (plus the keyboard looks ugly with large "action" icons and small Fx labels underneath)

I guess that's more of a Windows problem. In my day-to-day use under Arch, I almost never use the function keys. I do, however, have the multimedia keys configured to do the appropriate things with my sound, screen brightness, wifi, etc.

The Fn thing is an easy fix with Fn-Esc, which swaps them back to ordinary function keys.

I have the same complaint about Windows. Professional editions should come with more professional defaults.

i really enjoyed reading about your favorite laptop (that has less than nothing to do with the featured article)

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