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Comment by foob | Hacker News Reader

My tastes are fairly similar to yours. I'm curious which boxes aren't ticked by the more recent X200 series Thinkpads since the X230 in your view?

I recently purchased one, and I did a bunch of research before deciding which to get. I settled on an X270 because it's user upgradeable, supports two SSDs, has two batteries, has hardware VP9 encoding/decoding, includes a USB C port, and is hopefully much closer to the ruggedness of the impeccable X200-X230 range than the newer models. The only thing thing I felt like I compromised on was the lack of support for 32 GB of memory. I was able to purchase an i7 X270, 4TB SSD, 16GB RAM, and replacement batteries all for under $1k, and it blows any new laptop that costs twice as much out of the water for my needs.

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The X270 has a 6th or 7th gen dual core CPU. If you get an 11th gen i5 like you'll find in the sub-$1000 laptop range you'll get something that is literally twice as fast as even the highest end 7th gen i7. That is a lot of performance to leave on the table.

you'll find in the sub-$1000 laptop range you'll get something that is literally twice as fast

That's true, but it would require some combination of major compromises on the SSD, RAM, hot swappable battery, build quality, form factor, and keyboard/trackpoint. I'm almost never CPU limited in my day to day workflows, even on a 2nd gen i5, and I have cloud resources available when I need to do something CPU intensive like model training for work. It's a tradeoff that isn't right for everyone, but those other factors are far more important to me than the CPU.

X220 is my primary computer. It never uses more than 4 of the 16GB RAM. I ran the fan almost all the time at full speed tough. The killer app (in a bad sense) is Zoom. It kills the CPU and can't handle virtual backgrounds.

How much RAM is used is determined by you pattern of application usage (and OS), not by your choice of computer.

I know. I just wanted to emphasize on Zoom being the only thing that makes an otherwise perfect computer not powerful enough (for me of course).

I feel like the X-series Thinkpads after the X230 are an unhappy compromise, somewhat better in some ways and worse in others. The further away in time you get from the X230 the more they sacrifice things I care about.

The X270 feels more like a side-grade, trading in a certain amount of ruggedness and maintainability for a better screen and better battery life, but a pretty minor performance improvement.

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