Updated ThinkPad Laptop Portfolio | Hacker News Reader

Updated ThinkPad Laptop Portfolio

news.lenovo.com

55 pointsqzio67 comments

After that little spyware shittie they pulled off few years ago, while introducing huge security risks for their customers. And not once, but as repeat offenders[1] this is a brand I would not touch while donning a hazmat suit.

May be that they didn't do that with their pro offerings, but I for one try to avoid companies with such a mindset.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lenovo+spyware

Looks like I will be sticking with my xps 9360. Debating whether i want the new XPS with the taller screen, or not.

Just to add some detail as to how bad this was, they actually man-in-the-middled https connections to inject ads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish

Man that's bad.

Also didn't know about the "Download Valley"

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

Wasn't that non-Thinkpad Lenovos? It's vitally important to understand that not every Lenovo is a Thinkpad. My impression is that they're a lot more careful with their Thinkpad brand than with their Lenovo brand.

That said, it's true that it doesn't speak well of the company.

It might help if they do what HP did and branch out their enterprise offerings.

This is, in my opinion, one thing that greatly helps apple build their reputation. When you mention "Dell" people first think of their cheap/bad inspirion stuff and not of the high priced xps, elitebook etc. models. Similarly for HP, similarly for Lenovo.

For the most part it helps to think of the consumer and non-consumer branches as completely different companies that just happen to have the same name.

Doesn't Lenovo do that already? When you say "Thinkpad", people think of indestructible laptops that pass a bunch of military tests.

Kinda, but not really. They do the branding for their premium models well, but they don't distance it from their consumer stuff.

Case in point: There are many comments in this thread about their their privacy disasters with the consumer line or how they don't like the service levels for the consumer line. On the one hand, this has nothing to do with how it works for thinkpads, on the other hand both are Lenovo.

As a similar example, suppose you have an article about a new Porsche and then 90% of the comments are about how they don't like something in their VW Golf. That would seems weird, right? Yet both are made by the same company.

It could very easily be said that the majority of bloatware saddled on most consumer oriented PCs sold today introduce security risks for their customers. This is not unique to Lenovo but is standard practice for HP, Dell, etc. Unfortunately it's become standard practice to bastardize vanilla Windows installations by vendors in their own interest and not that of the customer purchasing.

If I were a consumer buying a Windows laptop for Windows use cases there is no way I would trust any hardware supplier's OEM build out of the box to not include bloatware that adds a level of risk out of the box that isn't worth completely wiping the disk (including restoration partitions). Whether it be for "support" use cases or more nefarious / gray areas it's a hard sell to say any one is exemplary better than the other. Maybe niche players and those that are selling non-Windows variants, but the reality is margins are thin on general purpose computing and so these types of angles become the norm. And the reality is Windows has lost it's way with regard to being consumer oriented. A default consumer build out of the box is already riddled with ad and bloatware. It's truly a cringe-worthy state of consumer options today.

The difference being that Lenovo did it at the firmware level. Even if you reinstalled Windows from scratch, the malware would still be installed.

Not exactly. It was bundled into the recovery partition, so if you used that to reinstall your machine you'd get the OEM installation which included Superfish.

However, if you reinstalled Windows manually you wouldn't have. Technically it had nothing to do with firmware.

So what would be the best brand of laptop to buy and put Linux on?

Dell is selling XPS and other business laptops with Ubuntu installed at the factory. Not sure if it's a Dell spin of it, but it'll save you ~$40 by not paying the Microsoft tax.

Purism has an open source laptop that looks good. Expensive, though. Voting for FOSS hardware with your wallet ain't cheap.

I'm typing this on a T470 running Linux. It has been a fantastic laptop all around. In general I find it more productive than my work issued MBP. Others have stated hardware failures with their Lenovo, however I use mine daily and, generally, do not treat it any different than other laptops. The keyboard has fared better than the last three MBP I've been issued / reissued. YMMV, obviously. All hardware can fail and all hardware can have manufacturing defects. Overall, however, I feel as though my T470 is a more durable machine. And I'm excited to see AMD in the T lineup. While I might not purchase the first iteration, I'll definitely be watching the space.

Lenovo is supporting Linux on a lot of their hardware moving forward [0]. Lenovo also joined LVFS in 2018 to provide native Linux firmware updates [1].

[0] https://www.lenovo.com/linux [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/08/lvfs-lenovo-firmware-upd...

I typically tell people, "Everything but the fingerprint reader". On my X1C the only tiny battle I had to fight was for S3 suspend. I'm not even going to bother with the fingerprint reader.

Red hat is apparently paying for some work on this: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fed...

So I guess it is going to land in fedora first and then make its way to other distros.

That said, under windows the fingerprint reader is frustratingly bad (lots and lotsof false negatives and slow). How can they be almost perfect on phones but that awful on laptops?

My Macbook Pro's reader has been great. But yeah, I've had readers on my PCs for the past 10 years, and every one of them has been just a notch above terrible.

I'll be opting for a Darter Pro from System76 later in the year. Like others have stated, going with FOSS hardware/software isn't cheap, but it looks to be the best compromise for myself.

Dell's XPS "Ubuntu edition" looks like a great device. However, limitations on repairability at that price are a non-starter for me.

After many years with old X and T Thinkpads i got a Dell Latitude at work and i'm pretty happy with it. Everything works well, including the thunderbolt dock. Even the keyboard is pretty decent, just the trackpoint (they call it a "pointing stick") sucks, nobody except IBM/Lenovo seems to get it right.

System76 or the Dell Ubuntu systems

I bought a T495 recently. It’s the worst ThinkPad I ever owned. (After a T60, a X301 and a X250). With modern ThinkPads you have the choice between slightly thicker notebooks T4… series and decent cooling and shitty build quality and thinner, higher build quality (T4…s, and X…) and virtually non existing cooling (thermal throttles the minute you are trying to use the CPU) T495 has weird bugs (S and K keys not working after suspend); and is extremely vulnerable to what I assume are static charges; meaning if I push it over my mattress (to make room to climb into the bed) it shuts down. Never had the issue with any notebook before; Never occurred to me that this could be a problem. Battery life is crap as well.

To be fair, one ending in a 5 is an AMD, which has had considerably worse battery life than Intel for a decade, and is also probably somewhat to blame for suspend/sleep bugs. It might be hard to discern if you have ThinkPad issues or AMD issues, and I would not coorelate your AMD issues back to Intel ThinkPads. Battery life should have been a known expectation going into buying one.

I don't think the thermal throttling thing is accurate. I have the X1 Carbon from 2019 and I can run my CPU continuously over 3Ghz.

I purchased an X1 Carbon Extreme late last year, and I gotta say I wouldn’t buy Lenovo again.

A crack appeared in the bezel around the screen. I figured the issue was my fault, but I also babied the device and the crack was a full crack through the plastic bezel. Lenovo could not have been less helpful because I didn’t pay for their insurance. I was very happy to pay, but wanted a quote for accidental damage for my credit card. Lenovo would not, under any circumstance, give me a quote without my paying a fee for a quote to fix my computer. At this point I’m just hoping the crack doesn’t get worse.

I had a similar cracking problem on the lid near the hinge on a X1 Carbon 6. I had the insurance, and still had to hastle them on the online forum to get it fixed.

Here's a tip for anyone buying Lenovo in the future: always pick onsite warranty (not depot), and always pick accidental damage protection. It's around 10% more, but not only will accidental damage be covered, but you will also get service on site at your location of choice.

You can also splurge an even extra 10% to get next-business-day onsite service.

Also, the price is very negotiable. Don’t pay full price for the warranty.

Do you think a single person corporation could easily get a sales contact to do said negotiation?

I got onsite support when I recently bought my X1 Extreme. It costs a bit, but if this means stuff gets repaired quickly without long waits, it's quickly worth it.

> You can also splurge an even extra 10% to get next-business-day onsite service.

It is worth to note that it does not actually mean that Lenovo will come next business day to fix. It means that they "try" (whatever that means) to do something next day, and if they fail, they shrug their shoulders and come later.

Source: My NBD serviced Thinkpad was bricked for something like 10 days.

Often the accidental damage isnt part of the on site. So they will come on site to fix any defect, but if YOU broke it you still have to depot it.

I still recommend at least the onsite, if not both, but careful because Onsite+Accidental does not necessarily mean Onsite Accidental.

I am sure there are ways to cheat this system by stretching the truth, but its not the spirit of the agreement youre making when you buy the device and related maintenance contract.

I did that and they said they couldn't fix my problem onsite (SD card reader didn't work). So I had to send it in anyway, and once I did that they said they were out of parts (they replaced the entire motherboard). I waited for a month to get it back. But I have really bad luck with stuff like that so maybe it's just me.

After about 2 years the screen on my Lenovo laptop started flickering. I opened up the laptop to re-seat the connection from the screen to the motherboard, this seemed to help a little bit at the time but it's becoming progressively worse. A friend of mine who does hardware for a major corporation told me this isn't that uncommon with Lenovo. The laptop is in otherwise great condition, but between this and Superfish I won't be buying Lenovo again either.

That's interesting to read about re-seating the connector. I have a 6 year old TP T540p which experiences half of the screen flickering. When I first got the T540p the wireless signal strength was terrible. I replaced the wireless card with two different other brands but they didn't improve the signal strength. Lenovo sent a tech onsite that opened the computer up to discover that the antenna which is routed from the mobo up through the hinge was being pinched when the screen was opened.

X1 Carbon or X1 Extreme? They're two different laptops.

For a brief moment in time it seemed like they were marketing the "X1Carbon" as the line and the Extreme as the sku variant. They have since dropped the Carbon. It also could have been new sources quoting press releases poorly.

Wikipedia also treats the Extreme as a submodel of X1Carbon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_X1_Carbon

Just last week I was ordering some Ideapads directly from Lenovo and the online store is a mess: Multiple search filters for dozens of different models and no clear technical specifications on a slow site.

One example: My models are supposed to be sold with 8 GB RAM, the tech specs say "Up to 16 GB" and the order confirmation suggests 4 GB.

You can almost see the multiple generations of code underneath that site. I'm sure they have the money for a good clean up.

Doesn't look like any of these have a network port.

Surely there's a market for a laptop with a good keyboard and real ports somewhere? If I'm at a desk I'll work at my desktop, I want a portable device for doing on site stuff, which often involves plugging into a network

P43 and P53 have this, and might be what you want. (P1 and lower use an ethernet->usb dongle)

Look at Japan only market Panasonics: https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/index.html

The platform specifications haven't been released as far as I can tell, but i believe the non-slim T models T14 and T15 have an RJ45 port on the right side of chasis.

I was hoping to see a return to 16:10 aspect ratio screens, but it looks like they're sticking to 16:9

Exactly. I'm constantly needled by the fact that there isn't a single Youtube reviewer who is a full-time programmer. Or at least someone not in the "creative" domains. At least none of the big names are. It's always Nvidia this and Premiere Pro rendering times that and SD card slot whatever.

Fine, but where are the people who will spend ten minutes talking about the different keyboard options they considered for their daily driver? Where are the people who have to read code for a living and will openly mock 16:9 with it's pathetic vertical space? Talking about how easy it is to dual boot Linux on the machine?

If anyone knows of such reviewers, please drop a link below. I'm sick of wathching MKBHD.

Of course many YouTuber creators are in the video creation domain. So why view reviews on YouTube instead of reading reviews that are published in text form?

Mainly laziness and entertainment. If I was indeed buying one tomorrow, I'd spend a lot more time reading people's experiences on Reddit, for instance. But just for watching tech reviews while I eat dinner or something, I sure wish there were programmers out there making videos for that audience.

I've considered filling this gap myself. Perhaps less about specifically programmers and more about regular people who have a regular job that dictates their use cases. Almost all big YouTubers are fulltime YouTubers and when it comes to tech and its impact on my day to day life, their opinions tend to be a bit lacking. Ofcourse, if you weren't a full-time YT, you likely wouldn't become big so it's a catch-22.

Secondly, the review genre lends itself to a race for releasing something first and results in only the most superficial aspects of a product considered which I find could be better served as well.

I've gone to a nearby Micro Center and I found I can accept and even readily enjoy the keyboard on the new Dell XPS 2-in-1 with a 3840x2400 display (16:10 / 8:5). It has very shallow, maglev keys. It takes getting used to but I believe it would be durable and even enable quicker typing. The problem is I have a laptop with an OLED screen. I wish I didn't have to step backwards in terms of color reproduction. The device is also too expensive right now.

I'm waiting for 8:5, OLED or microLED, and I'm continually looking at Thunderbolt docks for something cheap & compact. The Dell XPS 2-in-1 is very close to what I want, but I wish there were 1 more USB type-c.

Dell actually has an OLED screen on the Dell XPS 15, but it's 3840x2160 (16:9). c'est la vie..

As I understand, the new XPS is also coming out with a 16:10, but it is also an IPS panel.

I have no idea of youtube channels, but I ask on the irc channels I like to hang out in.

I was hoping to see a return to the 4:3 aspect ratio screens, actually.

My dream laptop would be the new XPS 13 + track point.

I wish Lenovo would create this. Both vertical & horizontal edge to edge screen. Super slim. Sub 14” display for those of us who travel a lot. Light weight. Etc.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-13-lapt...

That is basically the X1. Edge to edge kind goes in the way of the whole milspec thing, but we will just have to wait how the (several) new models look like.

Unfortunately it’s not.

X1 display is not vertical edge to edge.

And it’s larger than I want. It’s 14” and I’m not wanting a form factor so large.

This video (granted it’s dated) gives a sense of the size difference between XPS and X1

https://youtu.be/0prKNdJkyTI

It seems like the Thinkpad malaise of the past 7-8 years (at least with the X series) continues.

I can't believe it, but Lenovo's best compact laptop is still the X220 or X230 (where the keyboard already started to deteriorate). Sure, the new ones are faster, but it doesn't make up for the deteriorated structural features, keyboard etc.

Anyone know whether Lenovo still ship with Linux? Or have any experience running Linux on a modern Thinkpad?

Used Linux on multiple thinkpads, works well. Is one of the reasons it's popular with the Linux community.

My last was a T460, but have a colleague who got a T490 and sang it's praises for a week. Think he put Arch or Manjaro on it.

Been running Fedora on an X260 for a couple years. ThinkPads generally have good support with the cutting-edge distros because of their popularity (which is because of their robustness and repairability).

I have a T480 with Ubuntu 19.04 on and it works fine. I chose not to have a fingerprint reader or card reader, so I can't tell you if they work, but as a work laptop it's build very well and I can see another 3 years of life at least out of it. Business support is also nice, with on sight if needed (which I think you can also get with Dell).

I run linux on a P1 (2nd gen) and I know people who run it on the X1 Carbon.

The linux experience with the P1 has improved quite a bit since I got it about 8 months ago as support for the hardware has improved in the kernel.

Generally, I would say ThinkPads support linux as well as anything else right now: the ultrabooks with Intel graphics are fine. Anything with optimus graphics chip will work but not quite perfectly. Imho stay away from OLED for now.

Ubuntu 20.04 will bring fractional scaling and a new kernel. Along with packaging the nvidia drivers on the ISO and the optimus support they've built in, that is probably going to be the best laptop distro.

I have the X1 Carbon from 2019 and it mostly works fine in Linux but the audio has been a major issue. Getting the microphone to work at all requires new drivers and a lot of tweaking that took months after release to become usable.

The new drivers are still quite unstable and many people still have no mic or bad audio.

The recurring problem of Linux on Thinkpads is Nvidia graphics drivers. If you avoid the Nvidia option you should be ok.

I ordered a p1 before Christmas. At the start of February, they no longer had a shipping date estimate. It took almost two weeks to get a confirmation of the cancellation and a refund, despite them being required by law to cancel it at that time and me requesting cancellation explicitly. How anyone can do business with such a shitty company is beyond my comprehension.

So much business jargon (or honestly, just BS). You win on buzzword bingo in the first three sentences.

"built leveraging the core tenets of design, innovation and quality."

I do appreciate their naming, which includes now the screen size (T14,X13).

They really should have dropped the 1.

X1 X3 X4

T4 T5 T7

T5s T5e (or T5p)

E4 E5

P5 P5s P7

and then just versioned them

T4v2 or T4g10

*s being slim, e being extreme or p being performance. T5P vs P5S might be confusing, so id be ok with the switch to E.

Still no departure from 16:9, it seems. Glad to see Ryzen 4000 throughout, though.

Wake on voice? In a business laptop? Creepy as hell.

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