New Lenovo ThinkPad Range with Ryzen 4000 and 4000 Pro Mobile
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
For such an otherwise powerful machine, I don't k ow why they'd limit it?
The P series (https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/c/t...) is more the "desktop workstation replacement" line; heavier and thicker, but with more room for components. You can get those with up to 128GB of RAM.
It's an amazing machine: excellent build quality, screen, and variety of ports. The only thing I can complain about is the battery life, which isn't great.
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The AMD-based T495 can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM; the Intel-based T490, up to 48GB.
FHD is plenty on a 14" screen.
There is a fix in progress for XWayland scaling: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/2064
I'm pretty sure I'd prefer a WQHD screen to FHD, but am also pretty sure I wouldn't get any benefit of going to UHD. But at the same time, if WQHD has a significant impact on battery life, I'd probably stick with FHD.
Besides DDR4 SODIMM 32GB modules exist, if 32GB is what you want you just buy it off Amazon and put it in. Don’t have to mess around with “what they offer us the privilege to be able to purchase” like with soldered RAM.
Does it have any issues with heat dissipation or/and fan noise when doing CPU intensive work?
My HP Zbook is pretty heavy and chunky, but still gets pretty hot and can be annoyingly noisy (thanks Mcafee...).
With 16 cores and 32 threads I'm able to use all 32 GB easily. I guess I should run more VMs to really understand where people need 32 GB in a laptop.
On light road-warrior machine like X1 they likely wanted to maximize the battery life. And supporting many types of memory on same model was not likely an option.
That said, the forthcoming x13 mentioned in the linked piece goes up to 32gb, looks like. It’s only 0.25lb heavier and looks to be much less expensive. The catch is a smaller screen :-\
And you can throw it everywhere, just travel with it and use everywhere due to it being so small and nice. And you can damage it and probably the floor tiles break before the laptop gets any real hit.
Edit: oh and Linux just works so great in any of those business ThinkPads. Any linux. I'll go with Arch typically, but even more exotic operating systems, such as OpenBSD just work with it (running it in one of my ThinkPads for some years, and the experience is great).
The XPS's keyboard would multi press, the touchpad didn't work great, the hinge made it difficult top open the screen, the speakers kinda sucked. Don't get me wrong, it was a nice laptop, but felt very over hyped. A death by a thousand cuts. I felt a bit let down from what I expected after reading a bunch of reviews.
On the other hand, when I finally got the the X1C, I couldn't believe that there was so little hype about this laptop. All I would ever see online is stuff about macbooks and the XPS line, nothing about the X1C.
The X1 is such a solid machine. The interface is completely uncompromised, yet it is so light, it feels like I've just got a spiral bound notebook in my bag when I'm carrying it around. Feels like a leap ahead, rather than two steps forward, one step back.
My next laptop will be a Lenovo.
I also like the look and feel more and it’s always easier to upgrade Lenovo.
unless your work requires you to use macOS, you have no reason to buy a Macbook
If hardware is all that matters to you, sure. But some people actually prefer the software experience of macOS to that of Windows, for a variety of reasons.
I used to run OpenBSD on a laptop (not this one) and that was great too.
[0]: This seems to be less true every year, both because desktop Linux is becoming more stable over time, and because macOS seems to get buggier with every release. Still, as someone that uses both operating systems on a regular basis, my MacBook Pro is still marginally more stable than my Linux desktop machine on average.
People say this yet still use Adobe software on macOS over windows. Despite the fact adobe software runs horribly on macOS compared to windows.
If you buy a Mac for using adobe software you’re definitely not buying it for workflow.
Second, can you elaborate? What makes Adobe run "horribly" on macOS? I admit I haven't used an Adobe product in years, but I used to do some design as part of my job, and I can't say it worked any worse on my Mac than it did on my Windows machine.
[0]: I recognize that this isn't necessarily a huge segment of users, but I for one would be hard-pressed to go back to Windows, even if it saved me a thousand bucks on a laptop.
If you deal with large photoshop files, and you only have say 8gb of memory. Windows will just get really slow when you move around the document.
On macOS it will crash randomly, and often. Premier you can be scrubbing the timeline, scrub too much, boom premier just stops working.
Lightroom (this is what I mostly used for editing photography) it generates a history of applying changes and removing them, if you begin toggling boom crash.
This is just personal experience, but I know alot of people who do graphic design and they now just have this natural reflex to constantly save their work allllll the time in fear of the software crashing.
Yet on Windows I don't recall any of that software ever crashing...
https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/photoshop-cc-2020-c...
There's many more threads on about the software crashing on macOS than Windows.
In any case I'll probably never buy another macbook again. Lenovo + Ubuntu for me now. :)
They even have a page with "certified supported" versions: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd031426
Recently, they've even partnered with Red Hat to ship Fedora on some laptops by default: https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-lapt...
I pick up the Thinkpad expecting the worst... and the only damage was a very slight opening along the seam of the external battery... not a scratch on the actual unit itself... no components jarred free... nothing...
Been buying Thinkpads ever since...
That's what I would call pure satisfaction. Thanks for adding that detail. You made me smile.
Something wrong with screen or the ribbon cable connecting the LCD screen caused the screen to die in a vertical strip about two inches from the left side. [1] You could press down on the bezel just under the distorted/dead strip to try to bring it back, but eventually even that would stop working. Referred to as MIGR-76367.
I actually haven’t bought a ThinkPad since that one. I switched to a MacBook Air running Bootcamp. I do miss the keyboard.
The W530 was dubbed a "mobile workstation" (by Lenovo) and it really is a beast (hell, it's had 32 GB of RAM since day one, which is still more than what you can put in many laptops even today!).
At my previous job, I primary worked from home but when I did go to $work (the office, a customer's site, or one of our PoPs), I would often ride my Harley-Davidson Street Glide Special (midwest weather permitting). That machine -- which was also a beast, by the way -- vibrates like nothing you've ever seen! The W530 would get shoved into my backpack, which just barely fit in the saddlebags. Then, after arriving at my destination, I'd grab it, flip it open, and get back to work. Not once did I have an issue with it failing to do anything. It even accompanied me, in the saddle bag, on a 2,000 mile round trip!
I've had at least two (and perhaps three) MacBook Pros during the same time period but I would never have been brave enough to take one of them for a ride on the bike. I've got a feeling that many lesser laptops would not have survived.
(My next ThinkPad will almost certainly be whatever the current "mobile workstation" is, whenever the W530 finally gives up the magic smoke.)
It's a good laptop and its performance remained snappy until recently (for a Gen 1 X1 Yoga). Still, I just switched... to a MacBook 12.
The killer feature for me is its silent operation - with better performance than my X1. Silence is such an overlooked design aspect, though perhaps I'm particularly allergic to fan noise. With current processor gens a fanless design is a must for any ultraportable that doesn't have a dedicated GPU. That's a relatively new development - the 2015 Macbook 12 was under-powered for some daily tasks but the 2017 is more than fine for those. Shame they stopped making them that year.
The screen is also a significant improvement (though I'm guessing Thinkpads screens have advanced since I bought mine) and the trackpad is no competition.
I'm worried about keyboard reliability but the typing experience is fine. I get along with most keyboards, with the strong exception of one pet peeve - mushy keys. The Macbook certainly doesn't have these.
I've spilled more drinks on a single Thinkpad than all the other laptops I've owned combined. Everything just kept working.
Thinkpads are (/used to be) exceptionally well built. Including under-keyboard drainage.
(Typing this on a Pixel Slate with the Brydge keyboard, which leads to an interesting though: If I spill a drink on this keyboard, at worst I'll fry a completely separate bluetooth keyboard.)
The biggest thing I miss from my MacBook is being able to open it after a week of being closed and still have battery. There's definitely something not going into deep sleep when I close the lid, but that's probably my fault.
The Arch wiki has lots of information on how to do this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management/Suspen...
Most of the complaints about battery life seem to be by people who keep the screen at a certain percentage instead of keeping it at a certain brightness. eg: There are reviews where someone keeps the screen at 70% brightness instead of 200 nits. That's like a car reviewer keeping the gas pedal pressed down 70% of the way and then complaining about fuel efficiency.
Edit: Oh and if you're curious about battery life, see my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23106156 You should expect 5-12 hours depending on what you're doing. You could go as low as 2 hours if you stress test the CPU while at max brightness.
If it drifts in a single direction in that time, I found it was actually a physical problem and fixed it by cleaning around the trackpoint.
I haven't seen this in software though, I currently have the X1 gen 6. Which do you have? Which bug is it? I'd love to see if there is a way to help.
The only remotely related phenomenon I've seen is after resting on the trackpoint steadily long enough, it learns that to be the new center as it's constantly adapting. So upon finally removing my resting finger, it will drift just long enough for the adaptive centering to update and the drift stops. But that's perfectly normal and very short-lived.
I've always run the trackpoints as PS/2 mice in Linux which is basically the legacy compatibility mode, and I don't use the touchpad. So I'm not running the Synaptics driver at all, and I do remember when I tried using the Synaptics driver on the X250 @ my previous employer it was very frustrating until I got rid of that and got things back in old-fashioned PS/2 mouse emulation mode. I wasn't having problems with drift, it was more click behavior and acceleration curves being very wonky.
But maybe if you're driving things at the Synaptics driver level there's a tighter integration and the OS/driver plays a bigger part in recentering the trackpoint. I'm just speculating here.
They've all been bulletproof used as PS/2 mice.
Instead the firmware takes average value over time and regard that as the current neutral, and if your finger is on it longer than that integration period, the sum of mechanical imperfection, planetary gravity, heat, whatever noise AND weight of your finger all combined becomes a new zero point.
The solution is to lift your finger off of TrackPoint and letting it wander until pointer stops. There’s nothing mechanically wrong or damaging in and around that, again, just how it is. Same as how digital kitchen scales or body weight scales need to calibrate itself upon powerup, except TrackPoint does it on the fly.
My old IBM 600X (1998 era) had this issue, as did my 2013 T430 and my current 2017 T470, although it hasn’t happened for a long time.
Long time ago the Thinkpad Keyboard was the closest thing to 2015 MacBook Pro Keyboard.
It is just sad in 2020 we have to look for keyboards with all the keys and companies dont mess around with the key travels.
My only complaint about my X1? Windows.
At any time of year, see if you are eligible for their "Tickets At Work" program which offers sizable discounts. They sometimes even stack with seasonal sales...
Could also watch or set up relevant alerts with model numbers on Slickdeals.
For that price you can get the highest end 13" macbook pro, 32gb of ram and 2TB of SSD. baffling
Pricing was announced to start at $1499.
edit: My X1C gen7 with 1080p screen, 10th gen i7, 16GB ram and 256SSD was the equivalent of just under $1200 USD
The highest end 13" with 2TB of SSD and 32GB of ram actually costs 3000
Reducing it to a TB SSD and 16 Ram leaves it at 2200 for the mac.
Wish the Thinkpad quality would extend to their other products.
The MBPs have came and went but the W530 is still being used nearly every day.
Many of us (former) die-hard Apple fans have become disillusioned with Apple in the last several years.
this is just my own experience but i think they both have well-deserved reputations as being tough machines. i would sooner drop a thinkpad than a mpb, for sure, but i love using the macbook so much more. i think apple's problem is they stopped innovating, and while their systems should be getting cheaper as a result, they are getting more expensive. while thinkpad continues to grow.
On my Thinkpad T470, when the keyboard goes bad (which, yes, happens about once every two years), replacing it requires a $50-$60 replacement keyboard, a single small Phillips screwdriver, and spending about 5 minutes installing the new keyboard.
Wow. What was the original price? ~$2k? Where did you get such a big discount?
I've been using Thinkpads for close to 20 years now, and it's more correct to say that their greatness comes from feeling like a laptop from the past: excellent ergonomics, upgradability, durability, ports. Indeed, my current machine (X230, 2012 model) already inspired some criticism for deviating from the IBM-style keyboard of its predecessors. Newer models like the X280 have even more complaints arising from the unswappable battery, soldered RAM, and lack of Ethernet port. Lenovo apparently faces the same thinness-over-usability marketing focus that afflicts all electronics today.
Also, as a former die-hard x201 user I actually like the new keyboard. Agree on the memory thought
The replacement was faulty. Replaced again (a little quicker this time) but there were still problems. They consider their job done. Never shopping Lenovo again.
Then for a new role I got a brand new XPS 13. Put Ubuntu on it and everything Just Works(tm). Very happy Dell user now. (Shame the sticker price is so high but it is a quality system.)
Also the Lenovo performance was never as good as it should have been. It turns out while it had a then current generation CPU it was a cheaper version than the competitors.
The laptop still works fine, but I’ll never buy Lenovo again. Terrible company to deal with.
I only run Linux on it, and I have never had any issue with hardware support (except fingerprint sensor which I do not use anyway). Note that I have heard that Linux support on X1 Carbon Gen7 is somewhat poor (the only one so far with such issues).
I've had an XPS 15 running Ubuntu for about 2.5 years, and while it's certainly got a lot of objective things going for it, it's my least-favourite computer in the last ~15 years and I'm considering an update.
Give it a look, it's quite a marvel.
Do you wait like a year or three? five? Do you never buy Lenovo again? What's reasonable? This isn't rhetoric: I'm legitimately asking for a figure, as well as a rationale, because I don't know the answer.
Personally I'm in the market for a high end laptop for running Linux, and I just couldn't see myself buying something from them ever, no matter how good their machines are, because I just don't trust the people in the organization who develop products to take system integrity seriously enough.
Or, copy trackpoints from outside of the patent window. A 20 year old trackpoint won't be as good as a modern one (probably, I'm not a trackpoint user), but it's better than no trackpoint?
What in the actual fuck... this seems straight off a dystopian graphic novel
When I play movies I've paid for on my iPad I've paid for, if I want to screenshot frames from them to share or reference or meme, the screenshots come out as black rectangles.
No fair use for you!
https://www.techpowerup.com/248827/asus-z390-motherboards-au...
Re-imaging the OS would not help in this case, so you would only be protected if Lenovo did not, in fact, put the rootkit on the Thinkpad line.
And then you just don’t care about stuff like that, because it honestly doesn’t affect you the slightest.
I do understanding that it's entirely feasible for them to rootkit Linux from the BIOS and install malware onto their Thinkpads but I just haven't seen it happen yet
I know that's not feasible for their newer lines, which I also own
It’s not actually, because the mechanism which allows a vendor to provide “drivers” via UEFI is used by Windows only and nobody else. Windows exclusively is the target of such UEFI abuse.
Lenovo can put as much garbage and bloatware they want in the relevant UEFI firmware-sections, and Linux will simply ignore it, like it always have. No root-kit will be triggered.
As a Linux-user you are actually 100% immune against this abuse. As a ThinkPad-owner doubly so, since this major fuck-up only affected budget/non-Thinkpad product-lines.
https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html?m...
Show me one example - any example - of Lenovo installing any of this kind of stuff on a factory fresh ThinkPad, and then we'll have something to talk about.
Until then, I suggest ignoring biased and axe-grinding sources like "thehackernews".
edit: "some Lenovo products"
https://www.howtogeek.com/226308/the-windows-platform-binary...
When I was last in the market they were offering HP, so that’s what I got.
That Lenovo fucked up at some point in the past is immaterial to my purchasing decisions.
And I consider myself a fairly reasonable person.
Writing off a company for adding root kits to their machines out of the box seems to be perfectly reasonable.
Regardless, a lot of people would say no to either, acetomenephen and ibuprofen have largely replaced Asprin for most uses.
What is the threat model? They will not be using the rootkit for hiding useland malware. Are they extracting my documents and misuing them? Are they performing MITM on my connections and doing something harmful? While the capability is there, I don't see the software being used in a way that will inconvenience me.
It is a weak point in the system, maybe someone else exploits it, but I have so much software that I can say that about. When looking at threats the question for me is what is most likely to get me owned. It will probably be phishing or a malicious document. That's not going to change based on the manufacturer I buy from.
If I do get owned by some targeted malware that uses a Lenovo driver for priv esc, well they were probably going to get me with or without that. As good as it would feel to boycott a company with poor security practices, I'm over running unrefined System76 laptops.
Please explain this further.
Not snark, genuinely curious.
Maybe Lenovo will include a sketchy driver, but I trust Lenovo to not use that driver to drop ransomware on my machine. In the same sense I trust Google with my location and emails. You may trust an AV company that can upload any file on your machine to not grab your tax returns and open a new credit card in your name.
Even if Lenovo starts intercepting my private web traffic or placing files on my machine there is only so much damage they can do. They are not about to frame me by dropping plans to overthrow the government in my downloads folder then blackmailing me to design more secure drivers for no pay.
There are threats I'm afraid of and a computer manufacturer, no matter how negligent, is not one of them. Is OP avoiding Intel too? Meh.
https://www.cnet.com/news/superfish-torments-lenovo-owners-w...
It did MITM to inject ads, including adding their cert to the trust store to MITM SSL connections.
Of course the software needed the private key to work, which they shipped to every laptop and was quickly put online.
All of the sudden banking at coffee shops on a lot of Lenovo models was no longer private.
I'm not sure if captured traffic could be retroactively decrypted, but I wouldn't doubt it. PFS support probably wasn't high on Superfish's priorities.
Have you configured your browser(s) to "fail closed" when it comes to OCSP queries? CRL and OCSP behavior has been, well, "not ideal" since basically forever.
in the case of a starbucks, the AP itself is not necessarily secure (under a counter somewhere?) so it's possible users are connecting to a malicious AP.
the threat model depends on the level of risk: the convenience may outweigh those risks, it may not. for myself it is one of a few tasks i wouldn't engage in on a network i don't have more trust in, but in retrospect this advice was indeed probably too strong for most.
Again, what’s the threat model here? Exploiting a browser vulnerability? Maybe?
Not to excuse Lenovo - they fucked up big.
https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html?m...
The firmware rootkit, to my knowledge, has never been found on ThinkPads.
I think it's best to always start from clean slate because even 'good' manufacturers put a tonne of shit in there. So in that sense, it doesn't really matter what the manufacturer does, apart from the terrible decision making that they should learn from.
The person you replied to also suggested running Linux instead, in which case you are not affected.
Honestly, I would not be surprised if one of them, at some point, tried something like this with Linux, too.
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[0]: https://fwupd.org
The only thing this does, is enable you to update your UEFI BIOS and other machine-firmware from Linux, without having to have a separate dual-boot OS like Windows (or bootable USB sticks) to do that one task, and it frees you from having to download and obtain proprietary firmware-installers/checks per device you want updated etc.
I consider it apt-get for firmware and use it all the time. Everything in one place, easy to keep up to date etc. It's great!
And very importantly: It does in no way enable the UEFI-abuse with bloatware "drivers" as outlined earlier, which is still a Windows-only phenomena, because Linux does not check for nor use these drivers.
Edit: Oh hey there Jeremy. Long time no see! Where did my good ol' IRC buddy go these days? :D
Consider using OpenBSD instead. The barrier to entry is higher, but worth it. Hell I'd be surprised if they could get that to run on linux without exploiting a 0day. Windows tries to be too helpful, and that's where the problems arises.
Your point is valid though; why trust them? If you follow that train of thought all the way down you'll be forced to live naked on a deserted island.
Would be willing to buy something else. Anything else. But most other laptops out there have even worse keyboards (which I deeply care about), terrible form factors, specs that are stuck in 2010, awful support/warranty, no Linux support, or all of the above!
If someone builds something I'm happy with, I'll buy it. Price is not an issue. My laptop is my toolbox. I want it to work the way I like it. If it breaks, I need to have fixed preferably today, but tomorrow or the day after can be acceptable as well. That basically leaves Lenovo & Dell.
This thread has more information from someone who works at System76.
Please, ffs, learn the difference.
I am however very pleased to see Lenovo embracing AMD in their high end products.
Bring back the external battery !!
https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-usb-c-battery-packs-a...
It's not as slick as the "swap batteries, now you're fully charged", but on the other side, the USB batteries can charged without the laptop, and you can pick the size you're willing to carry around.
It is a bit unfortunate that they don't support Thunderbolt though. The ability to add an external GPUs/PCIe cards widens the horizon a lot for desktop-replacement systems.
T490 -> T14
T590 -> T15
..etc
I just hope this doesn't imply they're going to start making laptops a lot like other manufacturers (e.g. less durable, more soldered down components, ...)
Regarding storage, on the other hand, I don't believe the ThinkPad lineup has gone down the road of soldered SSDs, not even in the X1 Carbon lineup.
T420 - Sandy Bridge, 2640M
T430 - Ivy Bridge, 3340M
T440 - Haswell, 4300U
And so on and so on.
I love ThinkPad and planning to buy one soon, but reporters of problems with sound and WiFi drivers concerning.
Since linux drivers live mostly in kernel space, for new devices I would imagine a lot of issues would be fixed by running the latest kernel or mainline for even newer hardware.
processor.mac_cstate=5 rcu_nocbs=0-7
See for instance this: https://community.amd.com/thread/225795
But I can't help but see that as a feature, no a bug. I can plug in my headphones with a mic when I need to, but having the hardware cover over the camera and no working microphone is nice.
[1] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/6385a5fd1b8a67c051b...
The Lenovos they should be named AT490, AX490 and AL490 so the next Lenovo model would be named AT500 and so forth. Where A would mean AMD.
Edit: and at least 32gb ram. It really feels like Intel is paying the laptop mfgs off on this one. Almost every AMD laptop this generation is gimped with single-socket ram upgrades and/or capped with RTX 2060 graphics.
I would love a 4900 with no dGPU, myself. (wide-CPU compile workloads) The iGPU in these is plenty for my portable needs, especially at 1440p.
Ideally we'd have good external GPU support, so we choose to hook it up to a real heavy-hitter.
Since AMD systems are likely 1-2 years away from seeing good, broad Thunderbolt support (probably aligned with USB4), eGPU isn't an option. AMD currently does more, with less power than the Intel counterparts in the upper end classes of systems.
Find me a laptop with a 2070 Max Q that isn't at the higher price point that the AMD 4800H doesn't fit into.
The only thing that makes me use mac is the trackpad and retina. I have 15" late 2015 mbp, so far the best mbp out there w/o the butterfly keyboard.
Im still considering to go back to thinkpad for my next laptop since i had t42p, t60 before.
I recently had to get service for my current generation X1 Carbon.
Completely understandably, Lenovo are not currently able to provide on-site support at residential addresses. However, right now the best case for a depot repair appears to be around 3 1/2 weeks. Call center staff say that they have been prohibited from giving any kind of a timeline for a repair or even an escalation call-back by management.
Lenovo says this is due to Covid, but friends of mine (And a very chatty call center rep) report that it began in January when they moved their primary repair operation from Tennessee to Texas.
For example: Lenovo claims that my 7th gen X1 Carbon has "up to 18.3 hours" of battery life. Typically my laptop uses 5-10 watts. It can go as low as 2.5 watts if I dim the screen to its lowest setting, close all applications, and disable the radios. The battery is 52 watt-hours, so that would be 20 hours of "usage" before it runs out of juice. Really though, I get 5-12 hours depending on what I'm doing.
The generic name for this behavior is "hybrid sleep" or "hybrid suspend". It's when the laptop does everything it needs to hibernate (suspend to disk), but then just suspends to RAM.
Almost every laptop is capable of this. The limiting factor is software support. You have to deal with different hardware RTCs, different disk encryption setups, swap partitions vs swap files (and how big they are). It's complicated enough that I decided it wasn't worth configuring, so my laptop loses 3-4% of battery life overnight. That said it is possible on Linux, especially if you use a swap partition instead of a swap file in an encrypted disk.
Maybe it's just Linux, which I run on Thinkpads. Overall as a system though, the difference is drastic, not in favour of Lenovo.
I get the same behavior in Linux with TLP.[1] I run "tlp setcharge 75 80" and my battery only charges to 80% (and only starts charging if it goes below 75%). If I think I might need power for a longer time, I can run "tlp fullcharge" and wait for it to fully charge.
TLP remembers these settings across reboots so I don't have to think about it.
I used to have a couple of things tweaked like TLP etc but when I reinstalled from scratch with Fedora 32 I didn't do any of that. Still get awesome battery life, i'd definitely buy one of these newer Thinkpads in a year or so.
As an aside I've been running Ubuntu 16 for the last couple years no problem. Recently updated to Ubuntu 20 and it's been great so far.
It's not an absolute necessity for me. I do my primary computing on a desktop, and always offload compute onto it from a laptop for anything heavy. It's nice to have some local grunt, though.
As for your question, I've never heard of at least the "real" ThinkPad series laptops (X/W/T/...) sold without the TrackPoint. Does it really bother you when typing? If it's the appearance, you can likely find a black nib for purchase or maybe remove the included nib and blacken it out.
Recently my work laptop was switched to a Dell without the nub and I noticed reduced workflow immediately.
I never found a solution for this. I hope they fixed it in the newer gens.
The touchpad was also really annoying when I had to select and scroll.
Apart from that it was a fine laptop, but IMO the XPS 13 is a bit better.
The idea of a T14 with a 4900HS (a T14p, if you will) and no dedicated GPU would make a fantastic compact developer machine.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X1-Ca...
The closest thing I've seen so far is (apparently, it's almost impossible to even find out the model code this is supposed to have, I think it's GA401IV-HA026T?) the Asus Zephyrus G14. There's talk about a 15" version (heck, I'd happily take 17" or more), I sure hope it won't be more expensive.