Modern mainboard for traditional T60 ThinkPad
xyte.ch
xyte.ch
Personally I just want a Ryzen-powered mainboard, but figure there's sourcing reasons for why they're sticking to this intel generation.
Shenzhen markets were awash with old laptops when I was there a few years ago (I still have a tiny Sony Vaio I bought when I was there). There were giant stacks of things like obsolete Toughbooks, giant stacks of Thinkpads etc. along with obsolete servers being recycled.
Being able to recycle those robust, well made chassis with modern hardware is a great idea.
Of course, L refers to the current manufacturer and brand owner of Thinkpads. There, i lifted the veil!
> There is also the threat of lawsuit. As I’ve later learnt, 51nb was sued by big L on the pretext that the images and website contained trademarked terms. However, the real reason was revealed that 51nb actually owned the tp.cn domain name and big L wanted it for themselves. Even though 51nb actually won the lawsuit, it hurt their financials badly and they were very reluctant on continuing these projects.
[0]: https://www.xyte.ch/2021/11/09/t700-part-1-preparation/
OTOH maybe there is a real risk of getting sued, even if the lawsuit doesn't have merit. CentOS always avoided mentioning Red Hat and refered to the "upstream vendor". I think this was an agreement so that CentOS didn't show up as the first result for "Free Red Hat clone" and it was slightly less obvious to decision makers what it was.
They might be very much reasonable to behave as they do.
A modernization on all the internals in L's X60 is needed, too. Perfect size and strong body.
Does have MagSafe though, does it not?
However I haven't tried the post-butterfly models as I hardly visit stores anymore since Corona. So they're not back to the old quality still?
Or is it something similar to an Amiga accelerator board?
I don't know why these types of projects keep using mediocre Intel 11th gen quad cores though. I love old ThinkPads too, but I couldn't justify the expense for something that's already so outdated.
Maybe down the road there will be some affordable off-the-shelf Arm or RISC-V CPUs that would make for a neat drop-in motherboard upgrade for these old machines. Something really, really low power in a big honkin' ThinkPad chassis might have pretty incredible battery life.
These ThinkPad mods are pretty much all about the keyboard and overall form factor. The display has to be swapped out for something more modern, the batteries should probably be upgraded, obviously the entire motherboard is being replaced… It’s getting close to a ship of Theseus scenario. A lot of old 90s laptops have pretty brittle plastics too. ThinkPads in general seem to fare better than say PowerBook G3 display hinges. It’s a heck of a long road to go down for a sturdy laptop with a great keyboard and a ton of ports. If the motherboard could be made for under $500 with open source hardware I’d be tempted.
0: https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2021...
I expect the reason for the part choice is that supplies of the 12th gen chips are wholesale restricted to larger vendors such as lenovo, hp etc - but this is merely a suspicion and not something I have proof of.
I understand people get attached to these computers and I’ve paid more for old computers than it’d cost to get new (and more practical) ones, but it’s a different thing.
Absolutely beautiful machine. I am pretty sure it’s the greatest laptop ever built.