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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

I love Thinkpads and I love Linux. My current "daily driver" laptop is an old X220T from 2011, which is a tablet hybrid (including touchscreen and Wacom pen/digitizer). I don't use it because of nostalgia or a love for retro computers, I use it because it's still an excellent experience all these years later. No modern laptop in the current price range can beat it.

I don't know if that's because the build quality was so great back then, or because Intel dropped the ball this past decade. I'm guessing it's a little of both, which is why I'm kind of conflicted right now: I love Thinkpads, but I'm also super interested to try out the new ARM-based Macbooks.

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I am sorry, but I find it ridiculous to claim that X220Ts had "great build quality".

When the X2x0 series were released we did complain A LOT about the drop in quality and reminisce about the good old Lenovo times. And of course people already complained about the Lenovo times vs IBM. And I ponder if people used to complain about the drop of quality in IBM times...

But seriously, the X220T specifically is crap. We bought 4 of them and NONE of them survived the first year, with a myriad of failures, including mute microphone/webcam, broken display flex cable, and screen that would not stand in place (it would just fall instead of staying open). Lenovo then replaced them with X230Ts and ALL of them had this issue where the microphone would have a terrible electric noise when the webcam was on (common issue too, google for it). By the time the X240 was released, we just gave up -- no trackpoint click buttons!!! what were they thinking!

A lot of people hated the X200 and the rest of the X2__ series because they owned the X60 or X61, which were the peak of ThinkPad quality. They X200 was when they moved from the best screens in the business to the most shit displays they could find falling off the backs of trucks, from decent keyboards to garbage keyboards, and of course with the X201 they started adding touchpads, which is apostasy, and it didn't help that their first touchpads were incredibly bad, contributing to the perception of the X201 as a piece of crap. Which it was.

Ah yes, how could I forget the damn display. It had so much ghosting, that for a while I thought I had the transparent terminals feature (this was a xcompmgr + gnome(2)-terminal feature) enabled. Imagine my huge surprise when it turned out I didn't had it enabled. It was just ghosting from when the window had been in focus, and it would stay for minutes!!

There is only one other display which I remember comparable in terrible quality: the early color Palm(Pilot)s. With viewing angles measured in arcminutes rather than degrees.

> No modern laptop in the current price range can beat it.

> I'm also super interested to try out the new ARM-based Macbooks

I’m having a hard time choosing between an old Thinkpad and the Pinebook Pro for a GNU/Linux laptop. Thinkpads have a better battle-tested durability + repairability reputation and Libreboot is a significant selling point to me. But x86 seems like it’s just beginning to fade into the past in favor of source-available ARM in the present and open-source RISC V in the future, and the Pinebook isn’t exactly terribly flimsy (magnesium-alloy outer shell, maybe inspired by Thinkpads) or expensive ($200).

Pinebook Pros are nice and cheap, but the hardware support is still very far from equivalent from what you have on x86 desktops. (GPU acceleration is hardly supported, sound issues, etc...)

https://boilingsteam.com/a-complete-look-at-the-pinebook-pro...

Up your budget about 100$ and you get get a 4th gen intel X1 carbon used. Very good laptop.

Recommend not going with the pinebook pro for real work. It is an excellent concept and I bought one to both support the cause and have an interesting toy. That’s about all it is though. Most significantly the trackpad is rubbish. It’s the worst I’ve ever used.

I like my Pinebook Pro, but it is slow compared to my T420, and maybe even slow compared to my X200.

The Thinkpads will also work out of the box with basically any kernel from the past 10 years, whereas the Pinebook requiers a patched kernel, patched u-boot, and a third patched component I didn't even know existed and don't remember the name of.

It's a pretty awesome device for $200 but it can't replace a real laptop IMHO, and hardware support is under active development.

X220 here; they are great. Battery life, performance (for what I do) etc are lovely almost 11 years after production.

A lot of modern software development is actually pretty light on computer power needs. Unfortunately I'm in the 'have compiled the Linux kernel 3 times today' camp for which that isn't true.

I do almost all my heavy lifting on a Lenovo tower under my desk. What it can't do, I use a cloud instance for.

They have bad screens compared to modern laptops, even the higher end IPS ones.

I put an IPS display into my x220. Still lower resolution, but I get away with it with a lot of tweaking. I have laptops with better screens but I usually use my x220 instead. I'd just say: YMMV :)

Yep, but I value other qualities more (unbreakable, pretty water resistant, long battery life, many ports, easy to swap hds/memory, cheap).

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