Thinkpad X210
geoff.greer.fm
geoff.greer.fm
Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.
> Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack.
lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it. If this happens to me, you can bet I’m digging through Activity Monitor and killing the culprit before the fans can get fully ramped up.
As for Windows 10, it's in its own class of terrible design - try as they might, the Linux folks are nowhere close to matching it.
I have to bear with my laptop's loud fan, but I would like to replace it with a fanless one in the future.
Most MacBooks doesn’t turn their fans on until the aluminum bottom is tenderizing your lap (and/or melting the table). You could configure this on most non-Apple laptops, too, but running the fans earlier keeps temps down and probably extends the hardware lifetime.
You really should be able to cover a full day’s work on 80Wh.
That's probably a fake or aged battery, or your power management is set up incorrectly. A X62 with a fresh battery lasts a lot longer than 2 hours.
My more recent Macbook pro at work is basically worst though, not sure why.
FWIW it runs OpenBSD and is currently at 52C.. When doing a heavy compile or something it can get up to about 80. Mounted to the back of a monitor, can't even see it.
10/10 would recommend.
If a modern 13.3 screamer with battery life is what you are looking for however, check out the just released Thinkpad x390. It's even more modern and the battery life is a staggering 17-18 hours.
What is hard however, is getting long life out of a performance laptop with a 45-60W CPU when you're capped to a 100Whr battery.
Yeah, but try standing in their shoes: they too are probably wondering how you can bear getting worked up over such small things such as fans going off.
It admittedly sounds like a worse situation to be in (seeing that it means living one's whole life in constant irritation) than to have noisy fans.
Fans spinning up is an indicator of something. Usually an indicator that the machine is under heavy load and you need to watch out for the things that come with machines under heavy load: slower performance, overheating, graphical artifacts, potential crashing, etc.
If my fans spun up when I was not aware my computer was under heavy load, I would believe something was wrong with my computer. If I spent any amount of time researching why my computer was under heavy load and my conclusion was that it was not under heavy load and that the fans just spun up for no reason, I think I'd be rightfully irritated.
Imagine a doorbell that rings randomly even if no one is at the door. In the grand scheme of things it's minor. But it shouldn't be happening, and every time it does I have to get up and walk to the window to see if someone is actually there. Every time the doorbell rings and no one is there, I'm going to get more and more irritated.
What if the "no discernible reason" is just poorly coded software?
I'm not an expert in CPU thermals by any means, but from what I've gathered, in order to eek out a tenth of a gigahertz for their marketing materials (with rapidly diminishing returns because physics), manufacturers usually set Turbo Boost Power Limits 5-10 (or more) watts too high. Since Turbo Boost usually maximizes a single core's frequency and the heat generated increases exponentially, it creates a very concentrated heat spike in the silicon. Even if the CPU heat sink is good enough to passively dissipate that much heat from all of the cores, the turbo boost hot spot forces the fans to spin up early before the CPU knows how long the boost will be needed (otherwise Turbo boost would significantly reduce the lifetime of the CPU). Combined with random scheduled OS tasks that take a split second of turbo to run a process and firmware configured with a minimum fan running time to avoid even more annoying pulsing, these power limits cause many mass market laptops to needlessly spin up their fans all the time.
It's ridiculous but I've been running ThrottleStop/the equivalent on Linux to under-clock every laptop I've owned since Turbo Boost was introduced. A small 10-20% reduction in turbo boost power limits is rarely noticeable unless you have a very specialized and irregular CPU-bound workload but it makes a significant change in the amount of heat it generates and gives the passive dissipation enough time to absorb a boosted workload instead of spinning up the fans in an emergency.
The general advice is to never ever leave the factory configuration in place (if you're not going to install Linux at least reinstall windows)
Hardware manufactures are, in general, not your friends.
Spotify, Slack, and Discord are major culprits, like if someone posts a single gif (are they animated manually by React?). But even some recipe website on a browser tab might go into 100% CPU usage because part of its ad-serving kit was blocked by ublock.
I consider it (or any app like it) essential for maxing your battery lifespan. Really wish it was built into macOS.
What's nice about having a global CPU graph is that you get used to normal idling levels and will start to notice anomalies.
You're also just closer to the pulse of your computer. What exactly are normal bandwidth consumption levels over the course of a day? What speeds are you normally getting? Which apps and which actions seem to be the hardest on your resources? I think these are just nice things to know about the device you use every day like how you might get used to the sounds and feel of the car you drive every day.
For example, I often see HNers suggest that a good computer confers no benefits for web browsing. Meanwhile, I can say that web browsing is the most resource intensive thing going on in my computer. What your CPU graph as you click around the internet. Or when decoding a high res Youtube video or a muted autoplaying video on some news article. Or scrolling Facebook/Instagram.
I have an older machine that stutters while playing 720p+ Youtube videos unless the CPU is idle, and busier webpages take much longer to render and lock up the UI before I can click around. A better computer can save an impressive amount of time in the long run. It's not for nothing!
MacOS always tracks the energy usage stats so you don't have to keep activity monitor open, just look at the 'Average Energy Impact' column. iStats menu also uses a fair bit of CPU, similar to Activity Monitor, it's just split into a couple processes so it doesn't show as much, not that this is a reason not to use it, I love it and use it daily, it's not a good contrast point with the activity monitor.
Good point about iStat Menus consuming its own resources. It has two processes afaict with its main process staying below 1% CPU. I bet that number sees an increase once you start turning on more HUDs like the temp/fan sensors and jacking up the update frequency though.
If you want to know 'what is using all by battery' after a couple hours using it, you want to know the average power usage by app, which activity monitor gives you. Battery life is the point of this thread, not random lock ups.
> Good point about iStat Menus consuming its own resources. It has two processes afaict with its main process staying below 1% CPU.
I wish we could just get rid of 'cpu %' as a metric on modern machines, or at least scale it based on P-state. Saying process X is taking Y% of the CPU is pointless if you don't also communicate the P-state, and chances are you don't even know which core the process is running. Point is, I'm sitting here almost completely idle and there are plenty of tasks 'using 3-5% of my CPU', of course the CPU is running at 800MHz no where near it's all core peak of 2.7Ghz, much less it's single core peak of 4.5Ghz. What does 1% CPU even mean in this world?
I run Activity Monitor 24/7; it's actually not that bad, especially if it's not visible.
I also got the first Macbook 12" and I would get better battery life running Windows 10 than I would OSX. Windows 10 I would get ~12 hours or so. Windows 10 on the Macbook Pro drained the battery quickly though because you couldn't switch to integrated graphics.
I got a Thinkpad E485 ( wanted to try AMD Ryzen mobile) and with Ubuntu installed, I get about 2.5-3 hours on the battery, which is... I forget now. I think it's 48Wh.
Now when my fans spin up, I just blame McAfee.
My fan comment was a joke about Slack's efficiency. Of course compiling a bunch of go code will make the fan turn on. That will use up 100% of your cores on any decent sized project.
I'm impressed; with Xcode and the simulator I'm lucky to get anything longer than 6 hours…
I got the figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specific... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specific...
It's less of a joke and probably just a statement.
Seriously: even something as small as someone adding an animated emoji makes slack eat CPU :-/
Yesterday I saw someone here on HN saying they didn't know (something about Windows) because they never used Windows.
Performance is not on the list and probably never will be.
>They have raised so much money and have so many engineers.
(I believe that the 13% CPU nentioned there is a rounded-up 12.5% of the whole CPU, or in other words a full 100% of one of 8 hyperthreads.)
Brian Kernighan's COS333 page links to a goodui.org that recommends animations (in moderation) but also a bunch of horrible stuff.
So there's that.
I think a lot of this might be attributable to just how well power-optimised safari is. I could get 10 hours using safari when my macbook was new, but only 6 using chrome or firefox! Given that safari is speed-competitive with these browsers, it's very impressive.
My idle times, browsing something like HN, or sitting in #emacs I get near 20 hours on my t450s and about 13 on my x220.
I think low low low idle power consumption is key to long infrequent charges. This is because the second you are not using your computer then it should also not be using power. For example, my t450s without adjusting the screen bigness idles at 2.8W, so tons of idle time with a 97WH battery.
You can't really optimize power for when you are using it. If you are compiling, you want the fastest compile time and use the most power. Same for other things that take power.
I go all weekend not charging my personal laptop and the only times I close the lid is when I am going to bed. Otherwise I leave the lid open, same brightness and walk away for hours and come back and continue where I left off.
So I see your point about people saying "I get 9 hours of battery life." doing nothing, but even 9 hours of doing nothing is fairly low, given I can make a 10 year old laptop get close to 18 hours, and a 4 year old one get near 21 hours "doing nothing".
Would you mind sharing what setup you have that lets you get such long battery life?
But get power top installed. Make sure in the 4th screen in power top and make sure all settings are to "good". I made a systemd unit to do this for me know boot. I also installed tlp and have it set it's settings. Some of those cross over into what powertop does.
I set some things on the i915 driver but that will have to wait until baby watch is over.
Does it for me.
The T450s generation (and the generation before it) use ULV processors (ultra low voltage).
The processors used in the T450s generation have a TLP of 15W.
The processors used in the X220 generation have a TLP of 35W.
On the flip side, the processors in the X220 generation (and in the next generation) are powerful, which is a good thing if you need the power and if you have the laptop plugged most of the time.
I wish to purchase a new battery for it and am looking for a place to buy a battery that
1. will ship to Norway without too high shipping cost, and
2. isn’t going to explode in my face.
Any suggestions?
Also, mbrumlow, what distro are you running? And did you customize it in anyway aside from using powertop that you mentioned, to get it to consume low amounts of power while idle?
You should be able to optimize and get even higher. I'm actually considering getting a new T480 (since it has the battery expanded slot), but I'm struggling to decide.
Modern T-series still have amazing damn battery life, and I’ve never found anyone else who comes close except Apple, or Android ARM hybrids like the old ASUS Transformer Prime with the double batteries.
I've noticed the i7-8550U in my HP Envy can easily drive consumption up to 22W during a parallel compile even though I spend most of my time idling between 5 and 7W while editing text. The extra cores seem to consume a lot of power compared to my older 5th-gen laptop with 2 physical cores.
I also wonder if mobile Ryzen behaves similarly or if Intel just trashed their power/thermals in order to compete on core count.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to find benchmarks with power vs load stats. Most of them seem to be like "7 hours watching a movie in Windows" when I'd rather see "Battery is 55 Wh but computer uses 22W when all cores are 100% and 35W at 100% CPU and GPU". You know, like actual facts about the hardware rather than subjective usage experiences.
This afternoon I upgraded my kernel from 4.15 to 4.18. Then I removed the r8168 module that I'd tried to use to reduce power consumption. Using the open source r8169 module got me PC7 states. Now my X210 idles at 5 watts. I'm guessing I could go lower if I tweaked more, but this is a huge improvement in battery life. I'm glad I took the time to look into it.
I've gotten battery consumption figures as high as 30 watts when running something like `./minerd --benchmark --threads=8`. Intel claims the i7-8550U has a 15W TDP, but it can easily go above that if it has enough cooling.
Long live the ThinkPad.
Edit: This is with mostly casual use on an Arch Linux setup.
I think the next killer feature I want/look for in a laptop is the ability to see the screen in bright sunlight. It's a gorgeous day today and I would mind spending a few hours by the waterfront coding.
I do this with an OLPC XO. I also have a Cr-48 with Lubuntu. There's a tradeoff: the XO has a brighter screen but a smaller keyboard.
But it wasn't a billion-dollar opportunity and Pixel Qi are so forgotten they were reported by the media as closed down, although might technically still exist (and might have released their IP to the public, I haven't read too far on it just now).
This year's models are doing away with replaceable batteries for the most part. T490 has a built-in 50 Whr battery and no ability to extend or replace that without removing screws. It also gets rid of the 2.5 in drive option, one of the RAM slots (but it adds a soldered one), and it replaces the full size SD with a micro-SD. All of that for a small reduction in weight and thickness.
So, basically, the thinkpad line is gone now, it's just another poor macbook pro knockoff. I expect to see articles like this one for years to come, given that there are almost no options left if you want power, expandability and battery life in a single laptop package.
> My fan comment was a joke about Slack's efficiency.
Hence the "lol" ;)
Carbon series form factor...3 hours at a time.
The stock firmware is, uh, not good. I ported Coreboot to the second batch boards (https://github.com/mjg59/coreboot/tree/X210_good ) and things improved significantly - I wrote it up at https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/50924.html
At a place I used to work, laptops were routinely getting bricked by the anti-virus software. Basically it would run a scan, the laptop would overheat and die.
At some point, it seems like the "cure" can be more dangerous than what it's designed to fix.
> Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.
On the next line he says that with a newish kernel he can get 6 hours with the flush battery. That is not bad at all.
> Update (2017-03-17): I managed to get PC7 idle by upgrading my kernel to 4.18 and replacing the r8168 module with r8169. Battery life has increased significantly. I now get 6 hours with the flush battery and 10 hours with the extended battery.
I know nothing will be very significant, but I wish at least my laptop can stay for the whole day on battery.
For desktop PCs, the ATX standard means that the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade often consists of just a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU.
A 2007 Lenovo ThinkPad X61 chassis is not that different to a 1997 IBM ThinkPad chassis (or a 1997 Dell Latitude XPi chassis). If the laptop industry standardized, manufacturers would produce a vast ecosystem of compatible components.
Instead we got decades of incompatible laptops using several different power supply voltages (and therefore ten slightly-differently shaped barrel power plugs), many incompatibly shaped removable lithium-ion batteries, and more expense and difficulty in sourcing parts if and when components break.
A little bit of forward thinking in the late 1990s would have saved a lot of eWaste.
It's likely companies like Microsoft (pre-Surface), peripheral manufacturers (eg, Logitech) and motherboard manufacturers (eg, Gigabyte) would have gladly got on board in that era.
It's likely too late to start this in 2019 (but I may be wrong). Certainly the late-1990s would have been the ideal time for this.
In a way, this is much like the situation with desktops-- Dell and HP was/is big enough to come up with their own custom mainboards and cases, but most smaller shops are going to go ATX.
I suspect part of the reason we didn't see much laptop standardization was that the second-tier manufacturers are weaker in the laptop sector than desktop, as well as being weaker as a whole than they were in 2000 when ATX was becoming a thing.
Outside of a few narrow gaming and workstation niches, there are few use cases where you can't find a suitable big-brand laptop, so the second-tier brands (and the manufacturers that supply them) are in a position of fighting for scraps, not one where they can start promoting the benefits of standardization.
This is likely worsened by the mindset that laptops are unupgradeable-- people bought ATX desktops figuring they'd buy new mainboards in 3 years, but generally assume the laptop is going to be stuck in place.
The reason it hasnt happened in laptops is you would have to compromise size and form
We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, which has practically no use.
Also companies aren't always superrational logic machines that have coldly calculated their every more; there's sometimes a lot of collective delusion going on that can leave their consumers in the cold, who then just make do with the best out of a bad lot that's offered. Recall the recent iPhones - suddenly every other phone had a notch even when it served no purpose; or the removal of audio jacks, for example. There was NO consumer preference expressed there, just one company that decided it that way for its own purposes, and others blindly copying it.
If companies spent money telling consumers to value upgradability and not to buy new stuff all the time, then we'd value that more .. but that doesn't sell more stuff, it just helps save the planet, so why bother ....
Capitalism is such a blessing.
No, but I would be shocked if they have never run focus groups for this type of stuff.
So, unless I’m mistaken, cooling the ram and moving to another doesn’t work any more.
Source: I'm working on a DDR4 layout right now, and the memory controller scrambling and swapping functions are documented in publically-available intel datasheets (for example, see https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... sections 2.1.6 and 2.1.8)
As a nice bonus it sometimes saves money. I’ve only picked my netbook for CPU (i3-6157U, 64MB L4 cache), GPU (Iris 550, 0.8 TFlops) and display (13.3” FullHD IPS). Upgraded to adequate amount of RAM (16GB) and larger and faster M.2 SSD. Both were too low out of the box, and even today there’re not many small laptops with 16GB RAM.
> Soldered CPUs are unfortunately inevitable on modern ones...
To be fair, even on desktop replacing a CPU on the same motherboard is a pretty niche thing in my experience. Not to say people don't do this, but most of the people I know upgrade both at the same time, either because of incompatiblity or because of substantial gains with the newer MB. So soldering the two together is not as bad as glueing keyboard to the motherboard in my eyes.
The desktop I’m using now had i5-4460 at the time of purchase, eventually upgraded to Xeon E3-1230v3. Only going to upgrade motherboard after AMD releases Zen 2 desktop CPUs.
A family member uses a laptop that initially had i3-3110M. I’ve put i7-3612QM there, it’s comparable to modern ones performance-wise despite 6 years difference, e.g. cpubenchmark.net rates i7-3612QM at 6820 points, i5-8265U at 8212 points (because 35W versus 15).
I agree about glued keyboards. Keyboards are exposed to outside world and also subject to mechanical wear. The only thing worse than that is soldered SSDs. Makes data recovery very hard, and also rate of innovations is still fast for them, SSDs that will become available couple years in the future will be both much faster and much larger, upgrading them regularly makes sense for UX.
So yes, laptops should absolutely be made easier to modify, the components get old really fast and I don't wanna buy the whole thing each time I want an extra bit of RAM or some small part gets broken. It's one of the things that make me steer way clear of Apple stuff.
yes, but very few, and going fewer and fewer as we speak. Even Lenovo which was famous for that ends up soldering RAM in their recent models and making the battery a hassle to replace while it used to be on the outside before.
For an example what I’m talking about, see this for current-gen Intel-based 13.3”: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c05695299.pdf
Update: and if you gonna install Linux, these laptops can always be bought without Windows license. Corporate customers use volume licensing, they don’t need these OEM Windows keys and not willing to pay for them either.
Do you have any number to compare the size of the consumer market vs the Enterprise market?
Here’s an example report that mostly has to do with the production and recycling aspects: https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/15-...
When people are done with their MacBooks they don’t just throw them out - they sell them or hand them down to their relatives/kids because they still work well enough, are supported by the manufacturer, are durable and have very high resale value in secondary markets.
Robust engineering, longevity, support, and resale markets do more for the environment than making components user-replaceable.
My old 2011 MacBook Air is still going strong and being used by my mother. If anything goes wrong, she can take it to the Apple store and get help promptly. She still gets software updates, and that thing can STILL be sold for ~$250-300 on eBay, Swappa or Nextdoor. If the machine breaks completely, she can take it into the Apple store to get it properly recycled in almost any part of the world.
That’s what minding the environment looks like. You have to look at the entire lifecycle of the product from the moment the raw materials are sourced all the way to making it easy to recycle when a product is end-of-life.
But if the parts were also user replaceable it would be better for the environment.
Not to mention you don’t want the typical user (forget the HN audience) to replace the components themselves.
Most professional users are on corporate enterprise device plans and you don’t want employees or the IT department replacing components either. It’s far better and cheaper to get the employee back up and running with a new machine while the one in need of repair gets shipped off under enterprise warranty.
Two: it's much, much harder to support a repair done on-site with a soldering iron than it is to replace a part. These repairs are much more likely to fail under both normal and unconventional use and then will come back for more repairs--which are themselves, still, expensive to provide.
Three: waste concerns have to factor in what Apple does with the part after they do the swap. (I have no insight into what they do, but your comment ignores this.)
Saying he is my favorite Youtuber is a bit condescending. I mentioned him, because he is a loud proponent of the right to repair movement.
>> These repairs are much more likely to fail under both normal and unconventional use and then will come back for more repairs--which are themselves, still, expensive to provide.<<
If that was true, I am sure Apple would choose to repair parts instead of replacing them. ;)
Of course it's true--everything from "that fan's just going to get dirty again, and faster, because it's been blown out but can't be re-sealed outside a factory" to "that solder joint is being done by somebody making fourteen bucks an hour, boy I hope I'm not relying on that long-term".
Why would a company that makes its money off of selling the closest thing to a unified end-to-end experience take the risk of a dissatisfied customer because of a frustrating defect remediation experience?
The quoted point is an example of a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple views its customers and how Apple makes its money. But stuff like that is a closely-held truth in the various repair-uber-alles communities on the web regardless of reality. (And then, as 'Operyl notes, your cited YouTubist attempts to shore up his own little slice of community by instilling in them the "enlightened"/"sheep" dynamic. Petty little cult leader, that.)
Sorry that you read some real distaste for that mess as condescension, but not sorry to voice that distaste.
You make it sound like Apple has never done it before.
Case in point: the overheating early 2011 Macbook Pros - a problem experienced by thousands of customers.
Apple basically pretended the problem didn't exist for well over a year (there was a gigantic thread about the issue in the Apple support forums). By the time they did issue their recall (or "repair order", if you want to use Apple's euphemism), a lot of people had already divested their dead Macbook Pros for a loss.
Mine had bricked just after my AppleCare expired, and I wasn't about to spend $500+ to get a replacement logic board (which basically had the same defect, except it was a brand new board. Source: I had replaced my logic board under AppleCare only to have the problem recur within two months). I was lucky that I didn't dispose of my Macbook Pro before the repair order, but I had bought a replacement laptop by the time it was issued (spoiler alert: it was my first non-Apple laptop purchase in a decade).
They also put up barriers to getting the repair order. You had to prove you had the heat issue and that it was causing crashes. Since mine was bricked, it was easy. But a friend of mine (who had two of the affected models) had to jump through hoops at the Apple Store to get his fixed.
Those early 2011 Macbook Pros were mostly high end 15" i7 models, meaning they were not on the lower end of Apple's Macbook Pro line. People paid good money for them. If Apple didn't have their heads in the sand and gave everyone replacements (i.e., a 2012 model, which didn't have heat issues) as the problem occurred, it would have been a rounding error for them. But they didn't do that.
>> fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple views its customers and how Apple makes its money.
Speaking from my one experience - I didn't feel like Apple was interested in my experience at all. While I never considered myself a fanboy, I was very loyal to Apple and totally invested in the ecosystem. After my experience with the 2011 Macbook debacle, I abandoned them completely. It meant writing off a lot of money spent on Mac software, mobile apps, etc.
Coincidentiall, this is also a machine where you still can swap the SSD. With the help of some Alibaba engineering, you can even use a stock m.2 SSD.
The latest Macbooks are bullshit, you cannot exchange anything.
If standards lower margins and make entering easier, that’s what should be regulated for.
A ref i really want to push: "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" (1902, Kropotkine). There is a whole part mostly about the evolutionary analysis of altruism (the rest is about analyzing several human social orders throughout history: pre-medieval villages, medieval cities and 19c industrial cities).
For very low-power machines you might have tons of internal space free, but more powerful laptops need complex heat management in addition to reducing size and weight. It's only now that we have very advanced fabrication techniques and energy-saving designs that we no longer have to hyper-focus on heat exchange.
If size and heat and weight weren't a factor, you can bet that a standard would have arose to manage interchanging parts. But soldered ram is a good example of why that's just not necessary, and can be counter-productive for reducing cost and maximizing form factor.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/LG+Gram+15-Inch+Repairability+A...
Maybe laptops now are mature enough as a product that what you suggest could be feasible but it is too late for business reasons, now.
And that's great, if you're into generic beige boxes.
It's been years since I put together my own IBM compatible computers. But in the time since then, I haven't really seen any innovation in desktops.
Yes, for a while the processor numbers ticked up, but then plateaued. Graphics cards push the limits, but that has zero to do with the ATX standard, and more to do with using GPUs for non-graphics computation.
The laptop and mobile sectors seem to be what is driving SSD adoption, high DPI displays, power-conscious design, advanced cooling, smaller components, improved imaging input, reliable fingerprint reading, face recognition for security, smaller interchangeable ports, the move from spinning media to solid state or streaming, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head.
Even if you think Apple's touchbar was a disaster, it's the kind of risk that wouldn't be taken in the Wintel desktop industry.
All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...? I'm not sure. Even liquid cooling was in laptops in the early part of this century.
Again, I haven't built a desktop in a long time, so if I'm off base I'd like to hear a list of desktop innovations enabled by the ATX standard. But my observation is that ATX is a pickup truck, and laptops are a Tesla.
>All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...?
Have you ever built an ATX computer? I assure you, there are plenty of different standard form factor cases out there. The beige box thing was in vogue in the 90s, but today the big trends are sleek black with tempered glass.
And standard form factor desktop does not equal giant tower. You could also do a mini ITX build, a standard that's been around since 2001 for what it's worth.
High DPI displays? This implies high end displays weren't available to desktops first (they were.) A decent CRT could produce much higher DPI than LCDs could (in that era.) Part of the reason why Windows DPI independence sucks is because Microsoft implemented it super early in, without all of the insights Apple had to do it right, and now there's like 4 different DPI mechanisms in Windows.
All in all I'm not sure what really needs "innovating" so badly with desktop form factor. Do we need to solder our RAM to the main board, is that "innovation?"
You kind of say it yourself:
>that has zero to do with the ATX standard,
So would be the case for any form factor standard. It only dictates how things interoperate.
Improved efficiency and the demise of bulky storage devices has created a proliferation of small-form-factor designs. We have two proper standards in widespread use (mini-ITX and mini-STX) and an array of proprietary designs from Intel, Zotac and others. It's now possible to get a fast gaming machine the size of a Mac Mini, or a monstrously powerful workstation that'll fit in a shoulder bag.
Desktop is still the primary place for innovation. Laptops use technology that was introduced and pioneered on desktop, then refined until it could fit in Mobile/Laptop. Don't get me wrong, there's probably more work in getting the tech into Mobile than developing it in the first place... But the genesis of the ideas happen on desktop.
Desktop has the opposite mix of freedom and constraints as mobile. Standard internals, but freedom of space. There are dozens of heat-sink manufacturers for PC... Dozens of small teams focused on one problem. There's some variation between chipsets, but nothing that requires major design changes. These teams can afford to innovate... And customers can afford to try new solutions. If the heat-sink doesn't perform, you're out 5% of the total cost. But there's no similar way to try things out for laptops.
For example... Should a laptop combine all of its thermal dissipation into one single connected system or have isolated heat management? It completely depends on usage and thermal sensitivities of the components... It was desktop water-cooling that gave engineers the ability to test cooling GPU and CPU with the same thermal system to determine where to draw the line.
Maybe it could evolve to a laptop experience if blocks get powerful enough and somebody develops compatible chasis.
*update: The project Ara was cancelled in 2016 [2].
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ar...
Manufacturers probably don’t want to standardize on the remaining motherboard/graphics/chassis/cooling because a laptop isn’t like an atx computer where you get modularity at the expense of wasted space. A laptop is basically a 3D puzzle with thermal components. Few consumers would buy a laptop with even a little wasted volume or weight, even if it meant better serviceability and upgradeability. Same with phones. We aren’t going to see modular phones beyond the concept stage either.
But surplus laptops are in such quantity that I’d be fine replacing my tablet with a laptop.
I'm using a Silverstone ML08 (about 100$ at the time), which is slightly bigger than a PS4 pro but fits a full length, double slot GPU.
The ML05 is even smaller, costs about 50$ but fits only a single-slot GPU.
https://www.bsicomputer.com/products/fieldgo-m9-1760 for example (the first vendor I saw that actually shows prices, as opposed to just request-for-quote) It starts at nearly $2400 for a low-spec Celeron, and I'm not sure it even has an onboard battery.
What I could see as viable would be a micro-ATX case of similar dimensions, sold as a barebones for like $300-- use the extra volume from not accommodating ATX mainboards to store batteries and charging circuitry, which can be off the shelf because space constraints are minimal. Pop in some reasonably priced desktop components, and you'd have a competent luggable for under $1000.
https://megaeshop.pk/5v-dual-usb-power-bank-box-diy-shell-ca...
> Same with phones. We aren’t going to see modular phones beyond the concept stage either.
I disagree. I'm writing this on a Fairphone 2, which I bought for its modularity & because running Lineage OS (or any other OS you choose) doesn't void the manufacturer's warranty. While I'm sure Fairphone's sales are small compared to the broader industry, I think they've shown a market exists for ethical, modular phones. I've seen other Fairphones in the wild here in France, as well as seeing them for sale on used goods sites like leboncoin.fr.
Even if you don't want to keep your widescreen DVI display from 2008, the interoperability means that when you drop it off at a e-waste center, it's more likely to be reused in its current state for a few more years, rather than immediately recycled (reduce, reuse, recycle!)
I do agree there is some degree of changes in interfaces overtime (like IDE to SATA to NVMe M.2), but if you build a system for a similar intended use case the changes within any given 5 year period are small. This means the upgrades you do over a 15 year period will go from a 2.5" platter drive to a 2.5" SATA drive, or from 800x600 to 1024x768 resolution display, but not both at the same time (with a different but significant set of components being shared every upgrade)
The standard ATX form factor has been upgraded to reduce size over various years with the vast majority of accepted iterations maintaining the same mounting hole and IO panel locations. I literally have a mini-ITX board sitting in a case I purchased in 1999. This probably fits more into the fear you state in your comment with a reasonably new technology "forced" to consume more space than is necessary, but I think it argues for the opposite by showing that incremental changes to a standard format can allow for wide ranging compatibilities.
For an example, when ATX was altered by squaring the board to the shortest length (microATX), it didn't require a new case or a new power supply to be placed on the market in order to be consumed because it fit within the "too big" ATX case. Then when cases that only fit microATXe became abundant and another incremental change to the motherboard size to DTX, we again didn't have to release new cases or power supplies or IO cards to start to consume this version. It allowed consumers to purchase and use the boards until they decided they wanted to reduce their case size, amortizing the upgrade costs over months instead of requiring larger up front payments.
I considered the Lenovo Carbon X1, but it is pricey, doesn't have a number pad, and is at the ultra-slim form factor of a MBP or other similar notebook form factor.
The Lenovo T580 has the num pad, but the graphics card is the NVIDIA MX150, a mobile but faster version of the GeForce 1030. Not really an issue for me, but my son's Lenovo Yoga came with a 1050 two years ago.
Anyway, I've owned all sorts of notebooks, including MBPs, and have found the Lenovos to be my workhorses, and getting out of my way to get things done. Yes, the battery is only 4 to 6 hours, but for me, even traveling and living all over the world, it has never bit me work wise, only when playing.
For normal dongles a search for “Anadol Gold Line Wifi AWL150 Micro 150Mbit/s USB WLAN S” shows the one I use in various bsds/linuxes with no problems.
Both re0/run0 chips.
It all depends too if you are in managed mode or monitor mode. See this: https://github.com/nmap/npcap/releases
Here's some more info. on modes and your capture setup: https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/WLAN/CaptureSetup/WL...
Do you use a non-root account?
[1] https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/02/19/spawning-windows-comman... [2] https://github.com/doublec/shen-wasp/releases/tag/v0.8
the P71 is very bulky (somehow more than how it looks in the pictures) and its case feels a bit cheap (the case is "real" plastic and if you tap on it below the keyboard it really makes the sound of an empty plastic case) => personally I expected a bit more as it's not cheap (the components I chose are basically the cheapest ones with the exception of the 4k panel and the backlit keyboard).
Additionally some weeks ago, while I was typing, the backspace and "t" keys stopped working out of the blue => I switched the laptop off but 1 day later the keys were still not working => I then opened the laptop and extracted the keyboard (veeery easy - compliments Lenovo) to read the model number to order later a spare part, touched a bit the connector cable of the keyboard and after putting all back together they keys magically started working again.
Saying all this just because I have the feeling that overall it could be that in the case of the P71 the quality might be a bit lower than what's otherwise the case for other models. Cheers.
I use FreeCAD, since I have been familiar with it for years. It was once clunkier and had less features, but now it can be used for a lot of the things I need to do.
For a quick start in making a cube, make sure you are in the correct workbench Part or Part Design in the tutorial. The only two issues I have are that it is difficult to interface with clients that use Autodesk, Solidworks, or Rhino products. I have done FEA with the Calculix backend in FreeCAD, and used Paraview to create my FEA pictures for reports. If you know Python, you can even create a cube in the console below. Check out the scripting tutorials. I am not a fan of Python, but I use it in FreeCAD and Blender3D.
The next time somebody asks why everybody has a problem with Electron, I'm referring them to this page.
However, for all the efficiency challenges Electron brings, Slack is universally cited in types of comments such as the above. This makes me highly suspect that—beyond being just written in Electron—Slack is actually an extremely poorly written app, and just the canonical example of overengineered inefficiency in general.
Slack Web, for example, also does similarly draconian things to my CPU.
Similarly, Riot.im—probably the most comparable app to Slack functionality-wise—is also built in Electron. It has some of the performance problems one would expect from any Electron app, but it is nowhere near as bad as Slack (and has a much much smaller development team with much tighter resources).
In short: Electron may not be ideal, but it seems to get an unfairly bad name from Slack; we should be laying the criticism with the Slack dev team rather than with the Electron one.
Spotify is almost certainly used by many more people than Slack, and vscode's usage is probably at least within an order of magnitude. The general feedback in comments is that Spotify is bad but not exceptionally so, and that vscode is actually very performant (not when compared to Vim, but it seems to do fine in the context of GUI IDEs).
The other app that there has been a lot of complaints about in the past has been Atom. These have declined recently due to improvements by the Atom team, but also: Atom being the very first ever Electron app probably didn't help here either.
A billion dollar company has few excuses in my opinion.
If Electron is such a horrible platform that you literally can't write performant software with it, and Slack's performance problems are really a huge problem for regular users, and yet as a massive company with a singular product they still rely on it, then I would guess at least one of two things should be true:
A) Native app development is actually way more horrible than most people say, and Electron's experience is so much better that even a company as big as Slack finds it preferable to building a dedicated Mac team.
OR, B) Slack's dev team just may not actually care all that much about performance in the first place, and they might just be writing a poorly optimized app on top of a poorly optimized platform which exasperates all of its problems.
Or, maybe a combination of the two. I dunno.
Anecdotally using Slack within a web browser (which should get rid of some of Electron's downsides since it's no longer a separate browser instance) I still occasionally see slowdown and issues with the App. Not nearly as bad as, say, Twitter, but not great. Certainly not as performant as I would expect an interface this simple to be.
So while it's silly to claim that Electron doesn't have an impact on performance, I suspect that even if the Slack team was writing native apps, they still might end up with a piece of software that has problems. Maybe fewer of them, or maybe even more, since you can get away with a lot of bad architecture in a C++ program before you hit the same bottlenecks like loading time or typing lag.
Are we sure that the Slack team wouldn't just view a native codebase as license to cut even more corners with performance?
There are plenty of wealthy companies with huge resources that make bad software. The size of your developer pool is not the sole key to quality.
Because it's a running gag nowadays.
I can run Discord and vscode on my machine just fine, with plenty of editor tabs/server tabs open. While Electron surely has its issues, Slack being terrible really shouldn't be blamed solely on Electron.
But maybe there was Satanism involved. In that case please do tell, Mr. OP!
Why isn't Lenovo as much of a security risk as Huawei?
Many still enjoy the old IBM models. I'm typing this on an X220 model, and I do understand the risks associated, which is why it's running coreboot, a stripped-down Intel ME, and GNU/Linux (as opposed to original firmware and Windows).
The X220 that I'm using has run every Linux distro I can think of with zero modifications, and I even had macOS on it as a hackintosh for a time. I've replaced the wifi card, I have two hard drives in it and two batteries for it, and it still does everything I need a computer to do with zero fuss.
Even without Coreboot and Linux, many still find the risks don't outweigh the rewards. Same reason people buy newer Macbooks that lack magsafe, sd card slots, USB-A, Ethernet, a decent keyboard, an escape key, replaceable disks/RAM, etc. For Macs, it's form over function. For Thinkpads, specifically the older ones, it's the exact reverse.
But you're right, I would never buy a "modern" Lenovo though. But in fairness, I don't know that I'd buy a modern notebook at all.
At work I have the x230 with the new keyboard - it's not as good as the old one still in the x220 but it's way better than let's say the new macbook keyboards.
The sad thing is that the x220 doesn't compete doing stuff with many VM's or consumer things like videos with high-res.
But I can totally live with that and use it for everything else with the following specs & setup: - 16GB RAM - 256GB SSD - i5-2540M CPU @ 2.60GHz - extended battery (good for holding it while carrying around) - i3wm (it's awesome how much you can do with few resources) - programming/writing etc. with VIM (also saves a lot compared to an eclipse/intellij)
It's definitely not the PC you want a full fledged desktop environment on and you shouldn't bother doing video stuff etc. but for everything else it's just perfect and I wouldn't want to give it away as long as I can.
The x230 is ok but I don't have so much love for it, can't explain what exactly I miss most but it's not the TP experience I was searching for all the years.
My next project is an old x200 that will be refurbished and put to test with some BSD OS (I heard it's also quite interesting and easy on old hardware).
P.S.: The trackpads suck hell and I only use the red nub on TPs. The only trackpad I ever found useful was on a MBP (some time around 2016 I think) but they managed to destroy that experience like they did with their crappy keyboards :-P
Same goes for spying: - The US spied on countries in EU by hijacking (network) hardware deliveries and installing intelligence offices near DE-CIX and many other actions we just don't know officially - China is suspected to do the same once in a while (I think there was some rumor about 500GB HDD's with pre-installed malware) and I'd wonder if any country with the necessary resources would do otherwise
These arguments are made to distract us from the fact that there is no real hiding place. It is made to try to convince us that one of those parties is "the good" and the other "the evil" because they want power.
Huawei has been the target of a pretty unprecedented effort by the US to eliminate their hardware from both US and US-allied countries. I doubt many of us have the knowledge of the necessary facts to evaluate the appropriateness of that action against Huawai, but either way, Lenovo hasn't been singled out like that.
https://amontalenti.com/2017/09/01/lenovo-linux
Fan never turns on, matte display, awesome connectivity, great battery life, and everything on Linux just works.
The Arch wiki page[1] has been tremendously helpful in getting set up. However, I think the length of the article goes some way toward showing that compatibility is far from perfect.
The trackpad / NFC issues seem to only be present on laptops with NFC behind the trackpad, so my recommendation would be to avoid that one if it's possible to get a similar model without.
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...
That’s intensive. And sad.
Much more resource efficient, faster to close/open, and easier to have (gasp) a tabbed browsing experience to keep an eye on an important channel.
Same if it doesn't work in Edge (or Chrome for that matter.)
I refuse to run Chrome when I can avoid it (not even installed on the majority of my machines.)
In Firefox (or standalone) Slack eats CPU when someone uses animated emojis in a thread you have open.
Maybe it works in Chrome but I guess not and I'm not gonna install Chrome for that or even for testing it.
When the standalone app doesn't work properly && the web app doesn't work properly in all major browsers it is broken.
Minor gripes: (1) The dispayport-hdmi thing, (2) the mainboard is split (sound + rhs usb are on a separate board) and the small part has pretty flimsy attachement inside the case, (3) the CPU (i5 broadwell engineering sample) is pretty lackluster but perfect for development (no turbo, no throttling, no surprises), (4) finding an ok screen is hard, (5) nobody told me that I have to buy a separate wifi card. There is a free mini-pci slot, but 51nb could have been clearer on their online description, (5) the old x60 speakers suck.
Overall, it is an awesome machine (trackpoint, ibm keyboard, beautiful rubberized metal case). And shockingly cheap: An x62 mainboard, plus an old x60 chassis from ebay and battery from amazon, plus screen from alibaba, plus SSD, wifi-card and ram comes at ~$600 (I think?), cheap enough to buy as an experiment. I can definitely recommend to anyone who is ok with a little tinkering and the small adventure of ordering this from China (best approach: have Chinese colleague).
edit: Linux drivers work perfectly. Really, the ram was the most expensive component of this build. To expand on the no-surprises advantage of the CPU: To me it is more important to effortlessly benchmark small code changes than to quickly compile large codebases. And the weird engineering sample CPU that the 51nb guys sourced somewhere is absolutely perfect for that: Timings reliably match up with Agner Fog's instruction tables / iaca, without anything getting into the way (after the kernel cpufreq manager adjusted).
I did that mod to my X62 and it made the screen actually usable.
Also, thanks for all your guides on the thinkpad forums.
Would you mind writing a small idiosyncratic guide about "51nb procurement for dummies"?
Like: Buy one of these models of chassis. These aftermarket batteries. These screens (possibly with aliexpress links). Use this preferred method of ordering. Remember that you also need to procure (ram, wifi, ssd).
I was lucky enough to have a chinese collegue who dealt with everything for me (I sent him the taobao link and gave him cash, next time he visited family he brought me my board). Without that I would have been lost.
(seriously, taobao? no way to enter a non-chinese address? Take my money already! There must be somebody in China who wants to make a quick $50 per item for just reshipping 51nb boards to the West, e.g. via aliexpress or ebay, instead of imposing on the time of hackers / hardware engineers who have better things to do than reshipping packages)
There are Chinese services that do forwarding (I use FSC), as well as enthusiast engineers, like Jacky (or me), but enthusiasts get overwhelmed quickly... it becomes a full time job for little or no profit. I have to consciously dial way back to keep this only a hobby so it stays fun.
Don't get me wrong, putting together my x62 from your and other's guides was fun. I am just wishing that some of the Shenzen hardware hackers had an entrepreneurial cousin or friend who made a business out of this. I wish I could just send an aliexpress link to all my friends who rightfully complain about lenovo design quality nosediving.
That's however the same with the stock design and I've never had an issue with that. IIRC there are a couple pins from the lower casting holding it in place and then it's sandwiched using IIRC two or three screws between the lower casting and the palmrest. That's pretty solid.
It's not a big issue, but makes assembly pretty annoying because everything sticks out: There is no screw-hole from the lower casing in the extra attachement, and the flat connector cable has enough tension that the entire contraption bulges out and flaps around, until everything is fitted together. Or maybe I am just bad at this kind of stuff.
Just praising with faint damnation, really.
It would be so awesome if someone in the 51nb circles made an attempt to make money by properly marketing their stuff: make ordering easy in the west, possibly sell pre-assembled modded barebones (screen mod + 51nb mobo + new battery in place, chassis bought in bulk in china), put some modest markup on top and try to sell in the 10k units instead of the 100s. There really are a lot of people who think t60/x60/x220 are the pinnacle of laptop design and would love to get a machine with similar quality but modern hardware. The set of people who are motivated to spend their time modding is much smaller.
I am under no illusions that you could sell enough modkits to recoup engineering costs, if this was a truly commercial product. But you don't really need to: The development is a labour of love.
I have a 2016 13" MBP, and find the screen too small for coding. It's high-res, but that means everything is super-small unless you increase the scaling, which of course reduces the available screen real estate. The screen is annoyingly reflective too, but that's another problem entirely.
My daily driver is a 15" HP Zbook G3 with a 1080p display, which I also find too small. I'm thinking a 15", high-res display would probably be ideal for portable coding?
And I use it for coding.
My tablet is on an arm suspended at eye height about 15-20cm away from my face. At the same time I can have my ThinkPad BlueTooth keyboard+trackpoint in an ergonomically sound position (not possible to do both of these things solely with a laptop due to the keyboard and display being tied together).
I had a 15.6" laptop display and a ruler within reach so I just measured... at 35-40cm away from my face the visible area of the 15.6" screen is occluded by the visible area of the tablet screen at 15-20 cm away. The aspect ratios are different (my preferred 16:10/1920x1200 on the tablet vs 16:9/1920x1080 on the laptop lcd) but this is roughly correct. Admittedly 35-40cm is probably a little further away than most people have their laptop screen but it's in the ballpark.
I've had setups with multiple/larger monitors in the past. It's hard to compare properly as so much has changed for me. I move towards spending more and more of my time in the terminal and have learned to make good use of tmux for workspace management (and i3 workspaces when I'm using a WM). I don't miss the multiple/larger monitors (but am not suggesting anybody should be the same as me).
I can say that this is my favourite of my personally-owned setups ever, for its lightness, silence, low power usage and minimal space requirements. These requirements of mine are very specific of course but you asked for a subjective measure. I am very happy (and on a 10.1" screen)!
Next time I upgrade I'll be looking for a nice rootable tablet... possibly something x86 which can run linux so I can get VMs to work. I think I'm done with laptops.
[ To repeat stuff I've mentioned here before but which might help make sense of the above:
+ the 'display' is an Android tablet running termux (as it's the fastest and nicest terminal I could find)
+ I just use termux for its terminal and work in Debian Stretch via Linux Deploy
+ Termux is very good on its own but in my experience the best armhf packages are on Debian. I'm comparing to termux and Arch which are all I have experience with - they are both great but I've found some packages to be either missing or had problems due to termux's clang vs gcc... or that Arch uses Armv7 binaries whereas my tablet seems happier with Debian's Armhf in some cases. I specifically had trouble getting a working binary for Chromium which is essential for me as I need the developer tools but achieved it on Debian.
+ I run Debian GUI apps via local XSDL server and/or VNC
+ So far the only thing I've been unable to achieve is VMWare emulation of X86 OSes but as I don't have an X86 CPU in here I can't be surprised about that ]
1. "winter (low power) necessity" Do you live in some remote cabin where you exist solely off of solar power or something? Sounds fascinating.
2. "I don't have an x86 CPU in here" Do you do all of your development solely off of a Android tablet running Debian in some kind of bizarre franken-ARM-Linux setup?
Very fascinating.
I am sold, totally :)
I was amazed that it seemed like a 5-7 person operation and they designed a modern laptop motherboard. Maybe they contracted out some work and the office was mostly just operational people, but it was really cool to talk to a bunch of retro thinkpad enthusiasts making what they love.
Well it’s happened: the x390 now exists. Maybe ever better would be a thick X1. Not larger or wider but thicker so the battery life was insane and you could upgrade the ram to 32/64gb.
Lack of swappable battery is annoying. Maybe I belong to the minority, but battery life is still one of my main problems with laptops. Just so annoying to have to constantly look for an outlet in meeting rooms or conference places. I guess external USB-C batteries are the way to go.
T480?
I haven’t done business directly with anyone in China for a number of years (I helped a student on a project about 10 years ago and a media company had me write a simple machine learning model for them) but them paying me was easy, just used PayPal.
Buying not rebranded Chinese electronics interests me, because of potential lower cost, as long as it is westernized in things like keyboard, etc. and has a year warranty. I have specifically been looking at products like GPD Pocket 2.
I bought a NAS off Amazon a few years ago... one of their 3rd party sellers had the same product for $50 cheaper so I went with that. Anyway, what happened next was really amusing to me.
I get the product about 8 weeks later... I had tried to cancel because it was so slow, and Amazon wouldn't let me -- they said I had to receive the product and then send it back as a return once I got it in order to get a refund.
I was planning on just sending the box back the same day... but something caught my eye. The box had come from Shenzhen, China. Curious I cut open the outside box.
Immediately I saw that the NAS they sent inside had been opened, and had been re-tapped shut -- and poorly, there was a clear bulge on top of the box. My heart sank a bit... but I figured, "Well, let's see -- maybe it was a return or something... can't hurt to open it again since it's already been opened."
Inside the NAS box, all the manuals are in Chinese... and seem like they are just photocopies of the originals. The NAS was not in the original packaging, but rather elaborate bubble wrap. And there's a China to US power adapter to the cord.
I'm curious if it would even turn on, so I plug in the NAS... It boots! But not in English. I'm thinking, "What did I just buy?!" But I can sort of read some of the messages and it seems like instead of 4x2GB drives, it came with 4x4GB drives. Interesting.
It's late so I leave it initializing the drives (I think that's what it was doing anyway) and go to bed. Next morning I wake up, and it's still initializing the drives. Fuck it... time to call tech support and get my money back. The little light kept blinking yellow, but I couldn't read anything.
I email Amazon to initiate the return process, then go to work. I leave the NAS running -- honestly just sort of forgot about it. Got pulled into a business trip that day, so it was about 4 days until I got back to focus on the project again. When I got home the little yellow light on the NAS was still blinking, and I thought it was weird that I hadn't gotten an email from the seller with return instructions.
I email Amazon to tell them I hadn't heard anything back from the seller, and since I had to wait anyway, decided to call tech support. Cringe.
The thing was, the NAS was still doing something. The drives were still spinning... but after 4 days... I figured it wasn't doing anything good. But I didn't unplug it. I read the serial number to the guy in tech support. Pause... "Can you read me the serial number again?" I do... longer pause. "Can you read me the serial number one more time?" I do... Pause... "Please hold, Sir."
"Sir, where did you get this NAS?" I'd been transferred to someone up the food chain who told me that the device I had wasn't a valid serial number -- that the number I gave was for a model that hadn't been released yet. Super weird conversation, they took all my details, Amazon order number, and told me they would call me back.
Really late, like 2 AM that night, I got an email from the seller. It just said, "What wrong?"
So I write back, and my phone signature had my cell phone number on it. I get a call. At like 3 AM. The guy is polite, but his English isn't great. He tells me to just unplug the NAS, and plug it back in again -- then walks me through how to install the English interface. We're chatting for like 2 hours. He's crazy knowledgeable. We get everything set up, but I have no idea what all I just put on the device... most of the links he had been emailing me throughout the process were just IP addresses and paths. But they seem legit... and there wasn't anything on the NAS yet so I didn't mind running strange updates on it.
He says the yellow light will blink for 4 hours 24 minutes. (I don't remember the exact number, but the point was it was an exact number.) He says to email him, not Amazon -- he's very clear about that -- if I need help after. He's a friendly guy, I liked how helpful he was.
I go back to sleep for a few hours, do some yard work when I wake up, forget about the NAS, but when I checked later... some point after 4 hours 24 minutes... it's all green and working fine. And it's got twice the space than I paid for. And it's all in English. Only thing was... when I hit the "check for updates" option it just spun and nothing happened. But everything else seemed perfect.
So I'm on the fence... I have this clearly not authentic NAS from some random guy in China... that the manufacturer says it's not supposed to exist... but it's 100% bigger than what I thought I paid for...
That night I got an email from the seller, and you can tell he's sad. "I tried to help you, why did you tell Amazon it was a fake? It not a fake." I wrote back that I think that was from before he and I spoke, I had called the manufacturer's tech support to get the issue fixed and they told me the serial number wasn't real, but that it's working fine for me now.
He was writing back instantly, "It not a fake, you want a refund? I give you refund, but please don't complain to Amazon about me, I sell good stuff." Right away I see an email from Amazon telling me that the seller had given me a 100% refund. He even refunded shipping costs.
I felt awful. Here's this guy who spent 2 hours on the phone with me, probably spent a lot on an international call, and the manufacturer contacted Amazon about the order and came down on him for selling counterfeits. Probably scared him or told him he wouldn't be able to sell on Amazon any more if it was a fake... who knows.
I write back, "Thanks for the refund, where do I send the NAS? I will pay for shipping. I didn't mean to get you in trouble."
He writes back, "I'm sorry. It's not a fake. Please don't be mad at me."
The case was marked as resolved at Amazon, the guy told me I didn't have to return the NAS, and I never heard back from the manufacturer. Free NAS! But a little guilt because I didn't pay this guy for it, or for his time... and he stopped responding to my emails after that. I offered to send it back to him two more times.
About a year later I logged in to the interface, realized the auto-update feature was working fine. Updated the bios and firmware. I think that was 5-6 years ago now -- it's been running great.
I had raved about the quality of the NAS to a friend, who bought the same model about 6 months after I did... but his died a few months ago... when we took it apart to switch out the drives we realized it had totally different drives and cables, and even the logic board seemed different from the one that mine had. Sure hardware changes, but... his seemed more legit and polished inside than mine. Mine has a few spots inside that just look glue-gunned in place. (=
Anyway yeah, probably 7 years on... my little free (and probably semi-counterfeit) NAS is still running great.
That call at 3 AM was by far the most knowledgeable of any seller or tech support person I've ever spoken with.
You never know if you’ve won.
How are you gonna do that? Run a stress test on it for two years? If it's working now doesn't mean cheap caps won't blow the night after.
>They’re ok when they work but when they don’t they can burn your house to the ground or empty your entire NAS to a random IP in China.
I have never come across the term 'shed' in this context, either in urban slang or formal speak, please can you provide a valid source and/or clarify the origin of this term?
I’ve heard it used in London and Nottingham regularly.
I always thought shed came from them being the sort of rust bucket normally found abandoned in a shed. Barely running, owned by someone who can barely fix or fuel it. So it would be somewhere to sit parked - and listen to the crappy stereo at max distortion - with bits falling or rusting off it in time to the bass. Least that's how we used it oop north in the 80s. The car equivalent of a rat bike. Both sewn together corpses, and animal corpses hiding in dark corners...
Pistonhead's Shed of the Week[1] is far too upmarket to be a proper shed - they all work. :)
I think that's where shed started. A lot of people got lucky / rich and actually finished their car project. I had a proper shed which was a series III land rover with an engine in pieces in the back rather than the front. When I lived in Nottingham there were a lot of proper sheds!
Those "sheds" on pistonheads are ridiculously too good to be called a shed.
Clearly there is a market for people wanting this kind of machine to the extent they are jumping through hoops for it.
I have a maxed out T470P (stock) and it's a cracking little machine and while the keyboard is by modern standards excellent that's because the bar shifted, it's still not as nice as the one on my old R50 was.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-t-ser...
It was a decent showing, but not what I wanted (an X60 form factor with a 4k 4:3 screen)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZUSFda_W7k
"Unbox Therapy
After many years using MacBook variants I've made the switch to Windows. I've used every version of MacBook Pro and MacBook Air that have been released. My current laptop of choice is the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon / Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme.Turns out switching from Mac to Windows isn't as painful as I expected."
Hasn't been invited to an Apple event since. To the surprise of no one.
Electrical interface changes just need to be paired with compatible motherboards.
Same with hard drives: the interface changed but the form factor has not. They are even compatible with their larger versions: a laptop 2.5" platter drive or SSD can fit in a 3.5" drive bay with a cheap bracket. The SATA versions were backwards compatible speed bumps. Performance was always the maximum supported on the motherboard.
M.2 is just PCIe in a different form factor, so on desktops a $5 passive adapter allows NVMe SSDs to be used on any PCIe slot on even on relatively ancient PCs (though use as a boot drive dependent on BIOS support).
Same with display interfaces. VGA is still supported on many systems, with DVI-I being backwards compatible with cheap passive adapters. DVI and HDMI are electrically identically (minus audio) so cheap passive adapters work.
The broader point is that large incompatible electrical changes are possible because they only mean the new motherboard just needs to be paired with a compatible component. There's still market pressure for backwards compatibility unless the leap is large enough.
2009 high-end/enthusiast desktop CPU: Intel Core i7-975
2019 high-end/enthusiast desktop CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K
Single-thread performance has doubled. And the i9 has double the number of threads. And uses less energy.
> and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Intel-Microsoft-Dell-Motherboard Cabal.
The point is that you do not need to buy an entirely new systems every two or three years (and I personally know few people that do), but can comfortably upgrade parts. CPU upgrade compatibility has sometimes been annoyingly short, but most of time you can easily extend the lifetime of a system by buying a former high-end CPU for cheap, and for other pieces compatibility is way longer. SATA drives from 10 years ago still work with modern PCs if they survived (or your PC from 10 years ago you still use because "CPUs haven't become faster" can be upgraded with a SATA or PCIe SSD, which it can't fully utilize, but it'll work and make a difference. PCIe cards always have been compatible between versions, you had the choice between AGP and PCIe for quite a while (when that switch happened, like 15 years ago?), and technically can still buy boards with PCI ports today (although that's a market niche).
I resent the new keyboards. I also resent soldered memory, soldered storage and the lack of ethernet jacks.
I vote with my wallet where I can but the keyboards are ubiquitous; you can't vote with your wallet if there is no choice.
Nobody is even making 4:3 monitors anymore, laptops or not.
I had the non-chiclet keyboard. I now don't want to get a newer MacBook Pro because the lack of function keys and escape key, even though my first computer's keyboard didn't have function keys (though it did have escape).
There's something terribly wrong with this statement
Things like scrolling down a recent issue Web site are the main reason I'm not still using a vintage unmodified X200. I realise that the OA quote was probably tongue in cheek but I do find that surfing the Web has become a processor intensive activity!
I'll just stick to repairing my 9 year old t410s.
I wanted a ThinkPad but while they were overall good laptops none of them offered a decent GPU except for the very expensive and massive "workstation" models with Quadros on the level of a mid range GTX.
I get that these aren't gaming laptops but why not give us the option of doing at least some gaming. And GPUs aren't just for gaming we did some projects at work that involved 3D rendering, plus there is all that GPGPU thing.
In the end I got a light gaming laptop, and at work, they also got gaming laptops for these projects that involve 3D. With RGB and all that, something I find kind of fun in a "serious business" environment.
I'm mostly interest in running ML on them, and Linux support is somewhat spotty though.
I have been for the last couple years putting a Thinkpad (P52 or X1 Carbon/Extreme or P1) I'm lusting over in my cart, but not hitting the buy button.
After owning this MacBook Pro, my first question is how replaceable are the keyboards? I want to have a spare in the case of spills, crumbs, dirt, etc and so forth. It's piece of mind at this point.
From my quick and dirty research, they aren't as replaceable as they used to be, but still able to be done by the user. The P52/72 seem to be the only easy option like the, "good old days." While the X1/P1/X series require the entire top palm rest replaced, which is costlier, but it's an option none the less.
I'm eyeing either an X1 Extreme, P52, or maybe getting something slightly more portable like the X390. I feel this is the year I'm finally going to hit that buy button and at least test the waters if I can get myself out of the Apple Ecosystem and survive without regrets using Linux, even so, it will be a fun experiment.
I never got a chance to buy one because they sold out and didn't release more.
This is not, for the record, "working out of the box".
Nothing that a few commands can't fix. Zero maintenance.
Of course, he mentioned no such problems. So please cease the straw man.
What, what these options are? Is there an answer to the mystery of "how to get power management working on a Linux laptop?".
Or even the easier question “how to get power management working on your Linux laptop”?
sudo powertop --quiet --auto-tuneOn my mac, I've got HammerSpoon configured to change a bunch of things depending on power levels, sleep state etc, including killing off Slack.
I have no doubt that some other distros would work just fine without any changes, you're nitpicking.
edit: Does any one else feel that redefining "working out of the box" to mean the opposite "just for linux", hurts linux's reputation more than just saying something non-hyperbolic, like it "works with a surprisingly minimal amount of driver treasure-hunt"?
As a tangent, I wonder if this applies to other things. if BMW users tell you "when talking about BMWs the term low-maintenance refers to not having your engine explode every 10k miles. With that in mind, BMWs are very low-maintenance", are you less likely to buy one than if they say "well there's a little more required maintenance than some other manufacturers, but as long as you do it the car is very reliable."?
Are you talking about buying a laptop with windows pre-installed, or installing windows on a barebones laptop?
I doubt that a laptop with linux preinstalled from e.g. dell requires you to install drivers. It's been a while since I did a barebones windows install, but I would be surprised if no drivers were required.
Are you talking about laptops that shipped with Linux though? I suspect not.
You'd have about as much fun putting macOS on a laptop that shipped with Windows, and vice versa, as you would putting Linux on either of them.
Is that normal? That a group of enthusiasts designs Thinkpad models?
Also choosing a graphic chipset instead of a laptop GPU seems like the best option.
I've been trying desperately to source rubber feet for my X200 but can't find them anywhere.
Any company reducing physical peripherals slots on their devices should be publicly condemned!
There's something wrong if you go thru all of this and Slack consumes significant resources on your laptop.
That's amusing and sad.
> The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack.
Made me chuckle :-)
I also tend to categorize machines by elemental classification. Servers are alkalai metals, laptops are nonmetals, consoles are halogens, etc. I didn't have any neat nonmetals left, so I just called my new laptop "iron".
I describe the whole scheme in a blog post I wrote long ago: https://geoff.greer.fm/2009/06/17/hostnames/
Ok, that's definitely a step farther than I've ever taken it. Ingenious though, I'm stealing that idea!
What's the best Thinkpad I could get in Europe for ~200€ right now? (Off eBay of course). I don't care whether it's 13" or 15".
Edit: thanks for all the replies.
A lot of corporates off-load perfectly good laptops (as 'company property' they've often been taken care of reasonably well, or just left on a desk, or kept in a cupboard as backups) as part of their procurement cycle. Find such a reseller and you'll likely not only have a cheap laptop, but one with years more life in it too.
Thankfully, they reverted to physical buttons in ?50 series and later.
They’re kind of a pain to disassemble, but it’s doable.
As the article suggests, you can also upgrade it along the way if your budget increases.
(Not affiliated with them, just a happy customer)