Ten Years of ThinkPadding
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127001.me
The X13 does not have a 32-core APU. The highest spec available is the 4750U with 8C/16T.
> By the way, the latest MacBook Pro comes with an Ethernet port. We loved the jokes about iDongle; how about ThinkDongle?
The latest MacBook Pro does not come with an Ethernet port. It is however very annoying that Lenovo requires a proprietary dongle to use the built-in Ethernet controller.
> The removal of the SD cards slot and Ethernet port has made recent ThinkPads a suboptimal choice for traveling photographers and some IT professionals.
The removal of the SD card reader on the X13 AMD Gen 2 is bizarre, but they can and do still offer Ethernet via a dongle.
> would you read about the update procedure after you’ve done multiple BIOS updates for the same machine already? Even if you would, would you pay much attention to the Notes section?
Yes, but I'm probably weird because I like to know what the vendor fixed and whether the firmware update might remove features that I use (shakes fist at Dell).
I own an X13 AMD Gen 2 (20XH), and I think it's a great laptop with some small caveats.
Pro:
- 1600p matte display looks amazing
- proper support for S3, very low S3 power consumption
- super quiet, I never hear the fan and the laptop is never uncomfortably hot (even doing heavy things like compiling buildroot)
- amazing performance for a laptop (5850U)
Con:
- no SD card reader (seriously, why?)
- proprietary dongle for Ethernet
- Ethernet is only GigE
- Came with MediaTek 7961 WiFi, which while supported by mainline Linux, the performance is trash (~30MBit on 802.11ac). Luckily it's only M.2 so you can replace it with something like the AX201
> The latest MacBook Pro does not come with an Ethernet port.
Thank you for catching all this. Fixed.
> - 1600p matte display looks amazing
I agree, matte display is great. And as I said, I calibrated mine.
> - proper support for S3, very low S3 power consumption
Strange, I've seen reports on the Lenovo support forums that Gen 2 laptops are also susceptible to the battery drain in S3. Was it always like this? Or was it fixed with some firmware update?
I am not sure. The first thing I did when I received my X13 AMD Gen 2 (20XH) was update the firmware to the latest available version at the time (1.14) and I haven't had any issues.
I thought we moved past whatever technical limitation it was that required matte surfaces on flat displays? It's like having Vaseline smeared on the screen, diffusing all the colour - why would you actively want that?
The issue is, like you said, the smearing and contrast, which was a bigger issue with newer, high DPI displays.
That being said, I do believe there are solutions - I have used 4k Matt displays that don't have the aforementioned issue, I think most glossy displays are there for there as a form over function thing.
Glossy displays are still annoyingly reflective and good antiglare coatings are exceedingly easy to damage
Why some manufacturers would want to use glossy on any non-touch device is beyond me.
Colour vibrancy and sharpness. A matte screen is literally a defuser between you and the actual content.
And displays arent high-resolution enough for it to be a big deal anyway.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Best-Notebooks-with-the-Be...
I mean it is great and all top places are pretty similar, but "nothing comes close" is just completely wrong.
Utter garbage in my opinion.
For my digital-artist friends, they do prefer the over-bright glossy displays since it's actually a critical need for their process.
I already said why: reflections and glare make for a terrible work experience. That's why matte is the default preference for most people.
> Like if you wanted it blurry you could have done that in software.
The "grains" (for lack of a better word) in a matte coating are truly microscopic. They don't make anything blurry. I get the impression that either you're just trolling or you've never actually seen a matte display.
Is there any movement for a smaller standardized connector? Even small phones could benefit.
It's got about the same specs as my main webdev laptop -- which is a Thinkpad X200t -- with a modern GPU.
It's got a mechanical keyboard and a trackball!
[0] https://source.mnt.re/reform/mnt-reform-layerscape-ls1028a-s...
Same how you can't go to TSMC and be like "hey, you guys are making millions of M1 chips for Apple, ca you sell us some of those pls?"
Or how did you imagine such a scenario would play out for Framework?
> - Came with MediaTek 7961 WiFi, which while supported by mainline Linux, the performance is trash (~30MBit on 802.11ac).
It works perfectly for me on Fedora 35 (kernel 5.15), with consistent speeds around 800-900Mbps. The AP is an ASUS RT-AX86U.
Also somewhat surprisingly, while Intel AX200/201 is faster as it supports 160MHz (I had it before), the MT7961 has been more stable for me, both speed-wise and bug-wise, so far anyway. But YMMV.
> Luckily it's only M.2 so you can replace it with something like the AX201
I believe X13 Gen 2 has soldered WiFi, not M.2.
According to the hardware maintenance manual: "Wireless LAN card (for selected AMD models)" [1]
I can confirm from the internal photos I have of my X13 AMD Gen 2 (I swapped the stock SSD for a SK Hynix P31 Gold 1TB) that the WiFi is indeed M.2 socketed.
[1] https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/t14s_gen2_x13...
I was originally looking to buy one of the X13 Gen 2 Intel models that have it soldered, I must've thought it applied to AMD as well.
I guess I'll try out Intel AX210 then, to see which one actually works better for me.
I learned to very carefully examine and in most cases wait for community feedback on BIOS updates after an HP update (that could not be rolled back) introduced a massive touchscreen delay on their 608 G1 tablet rendering mine effectively useless.
the mediatek card was garbage; not just slow (ping times were 3x normal), but caused my machine to insta-reboot under git clone of a large repo in Windows 10, and simply dropped the wifi link in Manjaro during same op, so it's unlikely to be driver related.
kinda bizarre that they don't offer this card as an option on AMD builds and force mediatek upon you. the AX210 is a great card which supports monitor mode & packet injection.
Previously I've read that this whitelisting was due to the fact FCC would certify the laptop with the particular adapter as a whole, and replacing the wifi/wwan adapter, or adding WWAN where there wasn't one, would make the whole device "uncertified".
Do you still have to hack the firmware to bypass thee wifi whitelist? Whitelisting hardware is an engineering offense punishable by death in my book.
Erm... "only"?! I've never seen anything faster than 1GB ethernet in a laptop before, or even in a consumer desktop/tower.
Am I missing something?
I own a GPD Pocket 3 which has it: https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3
And 10GbE is basically limited to the MSI Katana: https://geizhals.de/?cat=nb&xf=31_LAN10g
Going forward, both AMD and Intel have built 2.5 gbe controllers into their cpus and chipsets, so if partners want to use it, it's there. As such you will see it start to be rolled out even in consumer products over the next couple years. The initial rollout was hampered by a few "light errata" with intel's controller implementation (basically it didn't work at 2.5 gbit speeds at all, oops) but we're a couple gens into it now and it's going forward. AMD has one on their chips as well (if not faster, I want to say AMD has 10gbe in their dies for Ryzen Embedded usage).
(expecting it in a 2020-era product, however, is perhaps not reasonable, like I said this is something that has changed mostly in the last year or so. Although granted a Thinkpad is not a consumer product so maybe it should have been ahead of the curve. But I don't think multigig had penetrated even professional spaces that well in 2020, except perhaps 10gbe in certain high-end segments.)
The gotcha with multi-gig has always been switches, very few cheap switches existed and the ones that did were mostly SFP+ and not 10GBase-T (i.e. you either need new wiring anyway, or you pay $50 a set for SFP+ adapters). This is somewhat better with 2.5gbe, there are now some 8-port switches under $200, but it's still a long way from 1gbe where you can get a nice 8-port for like $25. Hopefully it is a matter of volume and prices come down over time.
I'm a little miffed that 10gbe got passed over - 2.5gbe seems like a half-measure, and the wiring argument isn't very compelling to me. If they implemented 10gbe you could always allow fallback to 2.5gbe if that's what the signal quality can support (many <10 meter Cat5e runs are good enough for full 10gbe anyway) and it's a much more significant step than 1->2.5gbit. And the economy of scale here is significant, if consumer stuff goes 2.5 then that's what gets made and 10gbit remains expensive.
Anyway currently I am eyeballing the Netgear MS510TXM - this does pretty much what I want in terms of giving me a few SFP ports for fiber links (or server usage - SFP does have lower latency), a few 10gbase-T links for consumer PCs with Aquantia 10gbit nics, and a few 2.5 gbit ports for consumer junk. At $500 it would be nice if it was a 12-port, but it checks most of the boxes at least.
Still, as much as I'd like it myself, I can't imagine there is any push at all from consumers, and very little from prosumers. I guess it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing.
It's not every day you need multi-gig, but it is very nice when you do end up doing something big that hammers your network hard. You do need to be serving from a SSD or a NAS, neither of which are particularly unusual anymore, but I guess for most consumers they don't really work with "their media" at all anymore, everything has transitioned to the cloud for average consumer. Everything is streamed, and if you want to back up a steam game or something, you just delete it and re-download it if you want it later.
Bet that kinda sucks for people in Canada or australia on super limited data caps though, it's kind of a weird US- and euro-centric perspective.
As a prosumer, it's a bit of a mentality change, but for things like photo or video editing, you don't need to have tons and tons of fast storage on your local machine, you can push it off to to your NAS and just manage it like the rest of your data, which is a huge convenience thing (in terms of backups, and in terms of capacity). 4-drive or 8-drive NAS can push a ton of data even if random isn't quite as fast as a SSD (and that's why files get cached in RAM anyway).
What?!? I live in Canada and have not had a data cap in over 10 years. They might exist for some ISPs but they are generally high enough that I've never heard anyone complain or get charged.
(SFP has a limit of 7 meters for copper cables, I think it can go higher for active cables, but most people use fiber for longer runs)
If you just wanted to plug into a switch that was like 5 feet away, SFP copper cabling would actually reduce power a fair bit. Not really sure where fiber falls, but as far as copper, the problem is specifically the 10GBase-T leg, and if you include a 10GBase-T leg then you pay that power penalty regardless of whether it's via a native NIC or whether it's a SFP NIC with a module.
I do totally agree it would be a nifty idea though. It actually would bring down power for short connections, and a lot of laptop ethernet connections are "plug me into my desk switch" type use-cases anyway. Meanwhile, if you do want a longer connection, it doesn't limit your options because you can use a module.
But I suppose a lot of that has been subsumed into docks anyway. Thunderbolt 3 is absolutely fine for that hop to your dock. Related discussion but as a weirdo, I would actually rather have a more robust connector with longer distance support than Thunderbolt natively allows - if I could plug a cable and get 10 meters or so, that would solve some use-cases for me. Currently the only option is Optical Thunderbolt cables and everything I've heard is that they are absolutely flaky as hell and usually die after a year or so. I would love if I could use QSFP copper or something.
(my use-case is I want to have an external PCIe enclosure with the adapter for my Vive Wireless so the PC doesn't have to be in the room, but that would involve at least a 10 meter run for me realistically. Being able to run HDMI 2.1 over QSFP would also be neat because I could have my desktop run a 4K120 TV properly without having to have a dedicated HTPC there...)
Anyway back to SFP in laptops - you're right that it's pretty bulky. Even the "box" is big but it's also a very long connector physically, and the tab that protrudes even farther. The other thing that may not be immediately apparent is that it's not rated for all that many plug/unplug cycles. My QSFP cables have a "10 cycles" tag on them. Obviously they don't instantly die after 10 cycles, but still it's not something you are going to plug and plug every day for years. I don't remember if my SFP cables have one but I don't think it's significantly different. The SFP series are not a "consumer" connector, they are for servers that get racked once in a datacenter and then sit for 5 years, maybe have the cables re-organized once or twice.
It might well be something that you could fix with a "micro SFP" connector though. Slightly smaller box, much shorter, try to aim for higher cycle life. I think you would still retain a lot of the electrical benefits of SFP.
It's not very relevant for laptops, but SFP adapters also have an order of magnitude lower latency than base-T adapters. For things like your fileserver, it's preferable to use SFP if possible, that's why I mentioned I liked the Netgear MS510TXM above, 2 SFP links gives you one for your fileserver and one for a fiber link (to another switch perhaps), or you could do two SFP links and bond. There's some nice flexibility there.
Can you measure it for those of us, who are interested in finding exact numbers? You can use script - https://github.com/savchenko/powerdrain
For example on Fedora35-Linux 5.16(T14s AMD Gen1), I get following numbers:
Feb 07 12:13:22 weathertop systemd-sleep[5438]: [INFO] Discharge rate: 0.94741 W/h.
So basically a fully charged laptop will discharge itself when left in sleep for 2 days or so.
Do you have a script that doesn't rely on systemd? I run a distro without systemd (Artix) so I am unable to use the script you linked.
From my casual observations S3 seems to use around 8% per 24h.
yep, those mediatek cards aren't just slow, they's complete trash (see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30248380). i swapped it out for an Intel AX210 on my P14s Gen2 (Ryzen 7 Pro).
on linux you need Kernel 5.15.13+ for AX210 since the bluetooth side (connected over M2's usb bus) fails to come back up after waking from sleep or soft reboots. i dont think that patch was in 5.16.0 when i tried.
I dare say it's my most usable travel laptop outside of my work-issued Yoga, which it still trounces in terms of keyboard ergonomics. It absolutely dunks on the bargin-bin laptops I've tried out over the past few years, I think in part because of ergonomics but also because Arch on old (but well-supported) hardware feels snappier than Windows 10 on new (but low-cost) hardware.
In need of an quick alternative I bought a Dell XPS 13 9343. I like this a lot - it has a way nicer display, the form factor is just great for my needs, build quality is good and even the keyboard feels right (missing a trackpoint tho). Unfortunately it supports Microsoft's "Modern Standy", which is a fancy name for s2idle - which just doesn't work using Linux, at least I couldn't get it to work . When in s2idle it looses power and does not reliably wake up, in s3 it goes to sleep but needs a hard reset to wake up.
Waiting for my t470s now, as far as I know the latest Thinkpad generation stat supports classic s3 sleep.
*: Actually it lives on as a small NAS/Homeserver. It even packs three disks (M2 SSD, HDD in the HDD slot and an Ultrabay-HDD adpter).
I really miss the Ultrabay as well. I did the same thing, used to use it for a second HDD for extra storage.
Really though I miss the old old days when you could get an ultrabay battery. What do I need in a laptop more than storage? Battery life. I had a Fujitsu Lifebook which had an "ultrabay" (their version of it, at least) and that was the feature I used most for it.
It seemed to disappear all at once, I wonder if it was FAA regulations around flying with batteries that killed it or what.
Well, nowadays you can get a power bank with Power Delivery and charge your laptop via USB-C port
Moreover, that’s a relatively recent technology and there was a good decade (or more) between the point when bay batteries disappeared and usb-c charging became any sort of commonplace occurrence outside Apple products.
But I'm kind of glad, that it finally had an error. I wanted to buy a newer one for a long time, but I didn't want to toss out a perfectly functioning notebook and it was too beat-up to sell or even donate it.
Don't get me wrong; I'm proud of how far I stretched it (and it remains a respectable machine for what it is), but I just want to put this out there if anyone's thinking of trying to dump heavy modern web processing on the T420/T420s dinosaurs.
Well. Lenovo doesn't sell new batteries after fives years, uses dongle and doesn't provide any specs for third party manufacturers.
It is not possible to get an battery for X220/230, T420/T430 which is manufactured after 2017. At least I don't get anyone but Lenovo prints on the label "2020" :angrysmilie:
I was under the impression that laptop batteries usually have on-board memory for holding charging parameters and such, and if you remove the cells, the memory contents gets lost and you cannot charge the battery anymore?
EDIT: More questions: Do you need a spot-welder for this? And how do you get the battery pack open, since they are usually glued shut?
Some do, most don't. I've yet to see one that was that tricky, though I would suppose there must be manufacturers paranoid enough to put that in.
> Do you need a spot-welder for this?
If you want you can buy cells with strips already spot welded on so not necessarily. But it certainly doesn't hurt, they're not expensive though. K-weld is one of the better ones.
> And how do you get the battery pack open, since they are usually glued shut?
That can be a bit tricky depending on the manufacturer they may have the whole rim glued shut or maybe only a few strategic spots. I've yet to find one that I could not open, but some do take a bit of patience. And once you know how a particular model works the next one usually goes ten times quicker.
I realize that what is easy for me may be hard for others, but this being hacker news and the fact that there is a substantial intersection with the maker scene here I don't think such a subject is out of place.
Absolutely, your answers are much appreciated! I usually stay clear of fiddling with Li-Ion cells, as I have quite some respect for them, but I agree with you that replacing them yourself is probably safer than buying dubious clones.
> Yoga, which it still trounces in terms of keyboard ergonomics
My first laptop was Acer Aspire One (this one [0]). I still have it and I still use it, it's currently running Debian with Xfce. And the keyboard is still the best I've ever used, I genuinely prefer this keyboard over any desktop keyboards that I've tried and I've tried many mechanical including Cherry Brown switches. I get that the very low profile keyboards on modern laptops look nice, but I personally don't use the keyboard for its looks. Not to mention that my cat stepped on the "Enter" key of one of the newer laptops (Acer CB3-431) and she broke the butterfly shaped keycap stabilisation thingy making the button feel very inconsistent. I can't the replacement for just the bit that broke, I have to buy an entire new keyboard for it (~55€). The cat wasn't fat and she has walked over pretty much every keyboard that I've used, but that was the first one that broke...
It is this line of thinking that I personally think is the reason why a good number of people like and still use ThinkPads today.
[0] https://www.globalmediapro.com/dp/A25LT9/Acer-Aspire-One-AOA...
Personally 1.2mm was the minimum amount of key travel I could handle before a pain signal constantly sent to the back of my brain.
But the world loves to follow Apple, rightly or not. Hence we are getting thinner keyboard.
Windows has this setting "When I close the lid" which is set to "Sleep". In fact it should be renamed as "Drain the battery and heat the bag".
Being a happy MacBook user since they were called PowerBook, I never ever had any such issue with an Apple laptop. Not even, when they were using the same Intel CPUs.
Worse, some months ago I even found a Dell support forum post where they said, to not use sleep mode when putting your laptop away.
I believe, although I'm not 100% sure, that in addition to turning on the computer without the user consent, it also puts the machine in a strange state where it's neither on nor off.
According to the spec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstantGo, it's allowed to suck up to 7.5% of battery every day. As a matter of fact, my Surface device would lose more than 5% every day, and I'd find odd periods of wakeup in the sleep log (when the machine was supposedly fully shutdown).
Why? So that apps can communicate with the Internet while the machine is in sleep mode, or do periodic wakeups for other reasons. Another attempt to shoehorn the smartphone paradigm into desktops/laptops.
Does S0ix-related heat increase or decrease when laptop is in a faraday bag?
It's less about telemetry etc. (you could do it with age old ACPI timers), it's about people complaining laptop doesn't boot immediately from sleep when they open the lid - but also that on a system where power management support is heavily tested (read: not Linux) "Modern Standby" has less moving parts and is harder to break.
It's truly notoriously bad. I suppose it's designed that way to ensure a game won't black screen, but how hard would it be to make it a bit smarter? Ie when VSCODE or Terminal has focus, allow sleep.
My early 2020 16inch required lots of tweaking to prevent complete discharge every night and battery is sub 7500mAh now. It still happens several times a year and I am not sure why. I am probably not paying over 4000 EUR next time. User since the 2006 MB Pro.
The whole situation really corrodes my trust in Dell.
They consider an actually working laptop to be a premium feature reserved for the latitude business line.
Meanwhile the MacBook Air M1 just works. For each and every feature.
It's sad, but as a Windows Dev, the XPS15 still is a great machine. You just have to know and adapt to its bad parts.
That's still a thing? I thought they would have sorted that out a decade ago; my laptop from my first job (regular dell thing, I don't remember) was cooking in the bag and that's been over ten years ago.
There is just such an issue right now with macOS 12.2: https://www.macworld.com/article/610175/macos-monterey-12-2-...
I currently have to shut down my Mac mini every night instead of putting it to sleep because it routinely crashes and reboots in the middle of the night, lighting up the room
The short story is this: many devices are now active in a low-power state during sleep and can generate a huge variety of events that the OS is expected to receive and make a decision on. Sometimes the OS doesn't understand the event or there's a requirements issue (implementers did not understand/foresee the use case) and these can both result in the system waking for seemingly no good reason. For example, my issue with Linux seems to be the USB controller generating an event the driver did not understand or handle correctly. My issue with Windows seems to be more that a well-intentioned decision (newly connecting Bluetooth devices should wake up the system, which tends to make sense in the case of a mouse/keyboard) had an irritating implication in real-world use (BT headset that connects to multiple devices simultaneously would connect to and wake up my laptop when I was using it with my phone). Unfortunately the way events are implemented on Linux and I assume on Windows as well, there isn't really any support for "if the lid is still closed the system should stay asleep" and so once the system wakes up for an event, and there's no handler that causes it to go back to suspend, it tends to just sit there awake even though the lid is closed. There's no "new event" for the OS to handle since the lid state remains the same. I'm not sure if it's practical for the system to check the lid state in real-time instead of waiting for ACPI events about it.
For what it's worth I'd say my touchbar MacBook Pro does this more often than my Windows ThinkPads do, to the extent that pulling it out of my bag and discovering that the battery has gone completely flat overnight is probably a weekly experience. I haven't put much effort into diagnosing this so I don't know if it's a result of some odd software I'm using or something.
Sometimes an update is pending and the shutdown menu gives a choice "update and shutdown" or just "shutdown". So I pick "shutdown". It then updates anyway, including full restarts.
Sometimes there's no special options in the shutdown and upon shutting down, an update is forced. Even ones I did not postpone for too long.
Further, the "restart" option is really too close to "shutdown", especially on a very large screen. And there's no canceling once it starts.
My overall favorite was the x230, whereas the x240 was unusable due to an erratic touch pad (the cursor would jump around while typing code).
Nowadays I use an X1 at home and a MacBook (M1) at work, and the Mac wins regarding weight, speed, interoperability (WiFi, sound), battery and raw computer power, but the x1 wins with respect to keyboard, Linux support. I think the MacBook makes the better travel companion but the x1 makes the better dev machine (Linux is a "less odd" UNIX than MacOS X, speaking of paths, command names etc. memorized from varies Unices over the years). I would be keen to try out the X1 Nano, but the 1st generation is too similar to my existing box to consider an upgrade.
BTW, whatever happened to the "ThinkPad Classic"?
No future plans for "classic" appear to be on the roadmap.
I think it's more likely a SIM card slot. Lenovo has included these for quite some time (under the battery in the T460, for instance). That's not something you change every day, so needing a pin to open it makes sense (plus, it prevents against theft somewhat). Also, a lot of modems do not like you removing it while they are powered on, so having the lid prevent its opening sounds like a feature.
Pretty ridiculous.
It's easier to find the opposite: an external connector for the SIM card, and you leave the SD card in: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003822185179.html
These are often used on phones to use both two SIM card and one SD card on phones that have combo trays... Speak about usability :/
The utterly inconvenient access makes me think it must not have been intended for frequent swapping.
IE, it's probably not there to support photographers or drone pilots or any other activity that involves frequently swapping cards, and so it's not quite right to criticise it for being terrible at that. About like complaining that the trackpoint is terrible for CAD.
I have no idea what it's intended function IS though either. I just put a big card in there just because I could, and used it as shared space that both linux and widows could both access. It wasn't necessary nor the best way to do that. That can't be what it was meant for either.
Don't attribute to intent what can be adequately explained with LSD laced vodka enemas. For the last decade the design language of ThinkPads is an atrocious [and successful] process of making their users suffer.
I would throw decent money to anyone not subscribing to the current form over function trend. I want thick, sturdy, long battery live, proper palm rest, good old LAN port. Is that too much to ask for a modern laptop?
Another option is to upgrade the motherboard and/or LCD in an older Thinkpad chassis.
Right-to-repair legislation is slowly progressing in the US.
Glossy screens literally give me headaches, they only work in pitch dark ambient light.
Primarily, graphics acceleration doesn't work. Since Apple has never made a computer that uses Intel 11th Gen CPUs, the integrated graphics are borked. I suppose a tremendous effort to reverse engineer and inject a working driver /could/ work, it's probably not feasible.
[0]: https://community.frame.work/t/macos-on-framework-laptop/295...
[1]: https://community.frame.work/t/macos-on-framework-laptop/295...
For us occasionnal users just having one of those 5 in 1 adapters in the laptop bag is enough. The thinner/lighter form factor is more comfortable most of the time and said adapter can be shared accross different devices. If I do the count I have 5 laptops in my own, 2 personnal, 1 professionnal, the other 2 are used by my partner and kids. I am very unlikely to need to hook a RJ45 cable on all these laptops at the same time.
Sometimes I miss having the damn LAN port, but you're right, for datacenter and field work, heavy hardware is a no go. I do know a number of people in the field using macbooks air for the work.
Most gaming laptops nowadays also, sport a sober look (full black gaming laptops ala Thinkpad are usual), not the previously common "RGB-everywhere".
The lost upgradability in Thinkpads is even fully available in many gaming laptops, even some 14' ones have one-two RAM slots available.
The performance required for a professional laptop is fully there too, fast processors, lots of ram, several internal storage devices (in 15' gaming laptop is quite common one -upgradable - SSD plus a 2.5 bay sporting a much bigger HDD, accouting for several TBs in internal storage, almost unthinkable in most current "professional" laptops, specially if you want NOT to pay U$S 2000+).
And the guarantees usually span 2 years.
I think my future work laptop will be one of those amazing machines.
My X1 Nano and M1 Pro MBP are vastly better in those departments, hitting 450 and 500 nits brightness (with the larger going all the way to 1600nits for HDR content) which is usable in a much better range of environments. You’d have to be sitting in direct noon sunlight to really have a problem.
I wish the minimum bar for screen brightness would increase, 200-300 nits really just doesn’t cut it with fewer of us working in artificially lit offices with almost no sunlight.
My only concerns would be:
1. Paying the "gamer" tax. I assume these are going to be higher priced because they're targeting a culture big on edgy aesthetics and with plenty of disposable income.
2. Do the GPUs on these come on discrete cards that can be removed? I have no need for a gaming GPU... On my current laptop, I removed the nVidia GPU it came with and just run the laptop on the integrated Intel graphics. Zero problems with it ever.
Regarding the discrete GPU, I actually don't know if you can remove it from budget gaming laptops, I'd think you usually can't, but there are some expensive Alienware gaming laptops which I think could allow this.
As it was mentioned, the brightness could be a pain point, I'd double check about it in notebookcheck (the site).
You say it as if it was a good thing. I expect at least 8 years of use from a laptop and having such a short guarantee says a lot about reliability.
Gaming laptops are known for being especially focused on performance over reliability.
It’s thicker than the previous generation with more ports, with batshit crazy 20 hour battery life.
Or, if you’re my cable installer, you can still buy Panasonic Toughbook and similar jobsite laptops that have those features, but they’re a niche.
What do you need a physical LAN port for? In my experience that need is incredibly occasional, especially when compared to the need to actually go somewhere (these are laptops after all).
Modern Wi-Fi speeds are so fast and reliable there truly isn’t a need to use a wired connection regularly even if you are “professional.”
There are Wi-Fi routers that will beat 1Gb speed and maintain close to 1Gb even 75 feet away: https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-fast-is-wi-fi-6/
You want long battery life and a dedicated LAN port but why do you need long battery life if you’re just gonna sit connected to the wall?
We used to lug around laptops that had empty space inside just in case you wanted to pop in a PCMCIA card, which seems pretty insane when you think about it from a modern perspective. Empty space in a portable device for the chance that you might want to add an expansion card. Obviously, USB has long since decimated the need for something so, dare I say, crazy!
I think what you want is to go back in time for nostalgia’s sake. These old school features are gone because they’ve been supplanted, not because some big bad evil laptop OEM removed it to save a buck.
But they don't want to do that, because leaving hardware at the office translates to much higher insurance costs and makes them a bigger target for theft.
But like, 32 core, 64-128GB workstation with all the ports and storage you'll ever need is very possible and attainable on a fixed workspace, along with 4K 120Hz matte color-calibrated displays and the best keyboards money can buy.
Laptops are an unfortunate compromise. I get it, and I can work with it, but I'd rather have a desktop.
> because leaving hardware at the office translates to much higher insurance costs and makes them a bigger target for theft.
Not sure I buy that. Laptop loss and thefts resulting from being out in public must be way higher than the incidence of thieves breaking into locked and alarmed commercial office buildings just to steal computers.
In 2020 I sold my last Thinkpad, an AMD T495s. The M1 MBA destroyed my tolerance for another Intel laptop entirely.
Other features such as user-replaceable RAM and storage, and a great keyboard, are dearly missed and make me feel like we've gone in the wrong direction. I love my M1 MacBook Air, but not _because_ of the thinness and the things that have been sacrificed to achieve it.
I haven't used a thinkpad in the last 8 or so years -- but I do miss the keyboard on some of my early models (eg: t40p)
While I'm here: other features I miss include the Thinklight, literally everything about the keyboard (layout, not being chiclet, key depth), dedicated trackpad buttons, the lid latch, …
The way you replace a MBP battery is you take it to apple and have them do it for you. It makes absolutely no sense to pay to have it cracked open and serviced and then put a $30 ebay shit battery in it that will fail in 3 months - which if you're not going to an apple service center, is probably what you're getting. $200 isn't cheap but a genuine lenovo OEM battery (one which even still may have been sitting on a shelf for years and the cells are no longer at their best) will cost you about $125 from a legitimate source. $200 for a fresh battery with installation isn't really all that bad. For something with a 3-5 year lifespan, that's just the cost of using the device, same as a phone.
I like serviceable devices too, and I think the parts should have to be made available to the market, but batteries and screens are two areas where I "get it" in terms of the protectionism around parts supply. There's a huge difference between the OEM and the aftermarket parts in these areas, and customers are going to want to know why YOUR device is draining THEIR battery in 30 minutes all of a sudden. Don't you know they just had the battery replaced last month!? It's YOUR fault! Regardless of whether it actually is, you've got a lot of extra service work and a lot of upset customers. Louis Rossman is a cool guy and I'm sure he personally is careful to only use legitimate parts (or at least be upfront that it's not an OEM part) but he's only presenting his half of the story there.
I'm all for keeping things as user replaceable as possible, but personally I'm only using OEM batteries from now on.
I was always under the impression that Thinkpad fans specifically sought out the older laptops (obviously people do buy the newer ones, but people who are specifically fans of Thinkpads rather than it just being another laptop). I know thats certainly the case for me. I never even considered that someone who considers themselves a thinkpad fan, or even collector, would rush out to buy the latest one.
>Keeping something as it is may not seem such a significant achievement. Still, under marketers' pressure backed by various polls and data (I imagine), Lenovo kept the signature part of the ThinkPad line. And I celebrated this decision of theirs with every model they released over these years.
I am also very glad they kept the trackpoint, although I never use it, because I love having physical mouse buttons, and especially a middle mouse button for opening new tabs, which I use constantly (despite more and more fancy SPAs thinking that opening things in a new tab is not a necessary functionality for a website to have). I hate tap-to-click and drag and drop operations are also just a million times nicer with physical buttons
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=doEZMNXz1JY
Caution: harsh language and harder truths. All completely justified.
I'd love to know how this was received at Lenovo, because this should be part of every new hire's onboarding.
I will not be upgrading them until after I can confirm that this mess has been fixed.
I no longer care whether blame lies with Lenovo or with Intel's reference platform. The product is so broken that it is fundamentally unfit for my use case.
It could have been better: firmware issues (as mentioned in the article and other posts, power management is a joke), very poor Windows performance (UI lag during network streaming due to the NT kernel only hammering CORE0), embarrassing Linux desktop experience (after so many years it's still such a massive train-wreck).
I just don't have the time to deal with all this, all while attempting to get some work done.
I also made the mistake of optioning mine with the PrivacyGuard screen, but that's on me. I actually can't wait till I can justify upgrading.
Performance is great on the "original" AMD one, 8 cores, 32GB of RAM!
Are you buying many from different providers hoping to land one good in the pack? How can you have a kind of minimal confidence that it will not be a security hazard?
I think the answer is that many don't, including me. I don't really need to use my laptop on the go as much, so I just carry around that giant ass power brick.
Past that, I think the next best answer is you crack open the pack and you replace the cells yourself. The aftermarket packs are total garbage.
But my X1 Carbon Gen4 (I don't upgrade too often) was terrible. I never thought I would be one to say this: it was probably the keyboard I disliked the most.
Now rocking a Dell XPS 13 (7390) and it's great. The light keyboard is fine. I've tried colleagues Apples of varying styles and never like the keyboard or trackpad. (Included because I consider the Dell design to be superficially similar, or at least both are in contrast to the IBM/Lenovo nice keyboard philosophy of yesteryear).
I hear more negative reports about more recent XPS 13s than mine but I'm still not going back to Lenovo.
This might be true of the x series, but the T series still has an RJ45 and a microSD
I owned T440s (note the "s" for slim version), but later switched to T490 exactly for this reason. The non-slim T490 is actually thinner than the T440s was, because of the miniaturization trend, and has all the right ports (alas, still no external battery). Absolutely no power, suspend, etc issues at all under Arch.
Lenovo has sold us lemons in the X series since they started fucking up their keyboards after the X220. The X230 is still usable, but - X240 and later - not really. The poster does note this fact, but still claims the thinning of the chassis over the years is a good thing... Wrong :-( This sentence:
> it’s easy to argue that the X220’s design from the top picture is the least practical.
is the opposite of the truth. For a decent keyboard you need key travel, and for key travel you need travel height. Now, could you save a bit of height by battery improvements or rearrangements? Or by display thinning? Sure, but the Lenovo killed the keyboard for an extra 6mm or so.
> X270 ... just looks so much more pleasing to my eye
Come on. Really? Are you a fashion model?
> Proprietary charging port
It's true that the switch to USB-C allows for more flexibility. However - I personally liked how the port was round, and thick, so you could very easily get your plug in without having to lean in and take a closer look. But can't really complain about that I suppose.
> Touchpad
This may be the most controversial take I have on Thinkpads, but personally, for me, this is mostly and annoyance and something I tap by mistake. And something which takes space away from the keyboard... I'm perfectly fine with my trackpoint.
The best part of the thinkpads is the sheer amount of corporate corpses on the market which keeps the parts available and cheap.
The times I tried other laptops it felt so much different and difficult, I carried a wireless mini-mouse for that.
Big problem for me is USB-C. I don't like small, fragile connectors directly soldered on motherboard. USB-A is on separate board. I don't know why USB-C has no separate board.
Trackpoint on AMD models has terrible in linux support. Sample rate of trackpoint is max 40Hz, because it's in fallback mode (PS/2 protocol). Touchpad can't be disabled in BIOS and low rate is because is muxed with trackpoint to single PS/2 interface.
S0ix don't work. No opportunistic sleep. Minimal power usage on battery with AMD-5850u, LCD at minimum brightness (4k panel) is 3W. Standard power usage while i am working is 3.5-4.5W.
Maybe the market research from posts like these are anecdotal, but it still screams that there is a market for old ThinkPad-style designs. Is this request too niche? I am not sure, but I would love to think that manufacturers should just see from these that good, old designs work well for people and people will want to buy those designs. I would and I would be excited over that.
I've been thinking about getting this laptop. I am a little hesitant because it is far more of a project than other laptops, but it seems to give me that Thinkpad x200T vibe.
I am a web dev, and I've been considering pairing this with an Apple Ipad as a sort of second screen / browser.
it looks like framework managed to do a fine macbook clone; what would it take them (or someone else) to clone thinkpad next?
Holding out until Framework gen 2 comes out, either with AMD or Intel 12th gen.
Feels to me like framework is going to take all the Linux users. Wouldn't be surprised if they release a keyboard with a track point too.
Hope they put attention into proper S3 sleep. What a massive industry regression in the last 5 years.
I got the 4k one which in retrospect I'd switch for the 1440p (for battery life), but either way it's a pleasure to use.
I cannot relate to battery drain when sleeping. I can leave the laptop asleep for 4+ days and it still retains enough battery to use it (maybe 20-30%).
Add to this all the general ThinkPad problems like locked-down Wi-Fi card slots, mediocre battery life and fans that are running all the time.
I’m not sorry at all I jumped ship back then. I still use the Late 2013 MacBook Pro now. It’s certainly not perfect but just so much better. But that’s just for me.
- Hotkeys, like brightness adjustment, not working on some versions
- Wifi not working (I found a driver on github that I wasn't able to get working)
- Really short battery life, even after fiddling with sleep mode in the bios
- Choppy touchpad controls
I might have had better luck with an intel model (this one was AMD), or with a slightly older model that's had more time to be tested and supported, but it definitely wasn't the "just works" experience I was hoping for
I used to obsess over the Carbon X1 when it was new. I have a smaller Carbon now but man nice computers. I also like that I can take it apart pretty easily to replace stuff. The keyboard is nice too.
Never got into the red mouse thing though.
It’s painful to admit, but I came to the same conclusion for similar reasons.
I’ve owned ThinkPads off and on since 2000, most recently an x280. I still have a rock solid T400 in my workshop, and a modded T440s (added trackpad buttons), but I’ve sold off all the rest and am now pondering whether to buy some version of the X1 Carbon. I've given up collecting old gems like the x230 because, despite all the wonderful features, the screen and battery just don't cut it for me anymore.
This is not entirelly lenovo's fault though - the latest T-series are eyeing 1 kg and with the laws of physics not having changed, it is impossible to deliver the same sturdiness. My next one is going to be a P-series. Let's hope it still has some quality.
Flaws:
- There is cosmetic degradation
- The laptop is gradually losing hassle-free hardware support from the latest popular Linux distributions. (Trackpoint crashes randomly in Ubuntu; Sleep/power management has never worked properly).
- I had to replace the keyboard after 3 years (the keys mechanically wore out and became loose). I had difficulty finding new replacement keyboards recently (although this is more an indictment of the UK's trade situation).
- The buttons on the main touchpad are slowly failing; Near as I can tell it isn't possible to replace these without replacing the entire "top case". I use an external mouse to slow the decline.
That's disappointing. How well do Debian and Fedora hold up from that POV? Even if support has also regressed there, those are probably the distributions where tracing and reporting that regression would be easiest.
I’m much happier with the t450.
Sadly the new Macbook pro keeps the design. I'm getting sick of hitting page up/down accidentally when navigating code.
I should also mention I do in fact use Arch btw.
Also, it seems as if AMD based laptops in general have been crippled compared to Intel based ones. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel forces the laptop makers to cripple AMD based laptops, with the choice of discrete GPU, screen sizes, quality or resolution.
I'm happy to move to ARM Macbook M1 Pro, leaving AMD and Intel behind.
In that first year, discrete GPU maxed out at RTX 2060 while Intel laptops would get RTX 2080 (mobile, of course.) Screens were all 1080p while Intel laptops paired with 4K, and they were often lower refresh rate (i.e. the 240Hz gaming ones were all Intel). Brightness was often 250-300 nit with any AMD laptop, but Intel offered some with 500 nits. Keyboards were lucky to be backlit, let alone per-key RGB! Those were some of the most recognizable differences (specific to my shopping), but others were here and there.
In 2021, things shifted. The highest end gaming laptops were often available with the AMD CPU (APU), with 300Hz screens, higher brightness, etc.
Intel still makes Thunderbolt an effective Intel-exclusive, even though it's technically feasible on AMD laptops. But laptop OEMs have started taking AMD much more seriously in the past couple of years.
(Eventually I got a Lenovo Legion 5 - just over $1k with a Ryzen 4800H, 16GB, 512GB, 144Hz 300-nit 1080p screen, RTX 2060 6GB. Of course the options are a lot higher end now, but also a lot more expensive!)
Funny enough Windows 10 on it runs just fine while CentOS is slow as molasses. On SSD. Go figure.
I missed the heyday of IBM Thinkpads but the apparent blind brand loyalty and cult like following they have now is unneeded and allows Lenovo to get away with crazy things like 1368p screens is crazy.
I've broken it a few times dropping it. And being able to download the manual, order parts and then repair at home has been really nice. I hope lenovo understands that this is a big feature of thinkpads.
They are still available in the channel but it's hard to know whether you are getting the real thing or not.
Also as I was able to buy a warranty for over 5 years where they came in my office and replaced stuff without shipping and long waiting :) Had to use this once after a year when the mainboard broke (cpu freezed)
Battery time is still ~6h (bought the extra large second battery and was ~12h initially)
The keyboard + display are great (the display is now after >5 years a bit white in certain spots but nothing critical). The CPU speed isn't that great but ok. The sound is really really bad :)
I really wish manufacturers still understood there are people out there who don't mind a bit of extra weight or adjusted form factor for more battery. Sure, with new charging standards I can just use an external backup battery to charge the laptop but it's annoying to have another extra separate thing to carry around when it used to just be an optional part of the system.
It’s an excellent low power second option.
By far the biggest advantage of Thinkpads, not mentioned at all in this article, is their spill-resistant keyboards. When I just had my X1E, I accidentally spilled an entire mug on tea over it. I turned it off, watched the tea spill out of the bottom, let it rest for a while just to be on the safe side, opened it the next day to check it and dry it off, and when I turned it on, everything worked fine as if nothing had happened. I suspect I could just have continued working with the tea in the keyboard, but I'm not taking that risk.
A kid once spilled lemonade over my Macbook, and that was an expensive new motherboard.
The battery life of my X1E is absolutely terrible. There are probably good reasons for that: it's a very powerful laptop in a very thin body, so little room for battery, lots of power, which also needs to be cooled. And on top of that, I've got a 4K OLED screen that probably eats a ton of power. 4K on a laptop is a mistake. Too much power in a thin laptop is also a mistake; it's either noisy, overheats, or throttles.
My battery life really seems to be just 2 hours. I can take it places, but I have to plug it in if I want to do anything at all.
About screens, the article says:
> However, 1920×1080 of their recent 13-inch display model yields a lousy 170 PPI. It’s enough for me, but it is just an average offering even for 2020 when it was released. What’s terrible about this is that Lenovo does not offer better options.
I don't know about 13 inch models, but Lenovo definitely does offer much higher resolution for the 15" X1E. But 4K is way overkill. For 13 inch, HD should be plenty.
My biggest frustration with my X1E, however, is my laggy mouse. I think it's tied to the hybrid graphics (it can switch between builtin graphics and an nVidia GPU, and is supposed to do so cleverly, though I question that). Screen sometimes (but rarely) flickers rapidly between cooler bluish whites and warmer reddish whites. Switching graphics modes is done automatically and turns my screen black for a second. It does this when I plug/unplug power, for example.
Lenovo's onsite support has already replaced the motherboard for this, but that didn't fix it.
The mic is also often too quiet, but I think that's Windows. I keep finding weird mic settings in Windows (that are always hard to find) that keep turning down my mic to 20% or so for no good reason. Windows 10 mic support clearly sucks and should be much easier to find.
I think you mean Full HD? HD should be declared illegal on any device, if you would ask me.
The Ryzen 4x/5x chips handle these chassis nicely however and I'm unsure about new Alder Lake ones.
For my son, I got a Thinkpad E495 with a Ryzen 3700. It can go forever on a battery charge, but it lacks the spill-resistant keyboard as far as I can tell.
I do think this is going to be my last ThinkPad though, user-replicable RAM has been jettisoned on all subsequent X series machines, and the loss of the SD card reader is another kick in the teeth.
The new keyboard layout is garbage too, I miss the 7 row keyboard a lot. At the very least, I just wish I had my page back/forward keys back.
365, and X1 Carbon.
Here is my experience with the X1E:
# Business use & warranty:
For business use, Lenovo offers on-site repair. Lenovo will come to you and repair or replace a broken device. At a reasonable cost (~300 eur) you can extend this to a 3 year contract. Compared to Apple (who have zero options for on-site repairs, and zero extended warranty options for small business) this is infinitely better for professional use. Regardless of how many 'pro' titles Apple slap on their products, you basically get 0 service from them, even if you pay.
# Hardware:
- Coil whine. So. Much. Coil whine :-(
- Laptop comes with 2 M.2 slots, one occupied by the factory SSD. This allowed me to install a second SSD for a Linux/Windows dual boot. RAM is also user upgradable.
- Fans are noisy and ramp-up is very aggressive, might be able to tweak this.
- 4K display is gorgeous, though I am kind of bummed that there was no matte finish option when I ordered my gen 1 (matte OLED became available in gen 3).
- Keyboard is really good.
- Audio (speakers) are quite bad compared to a Macbook of any generation.
- After first month of use, the display started showing signs of damage (not just dirty) by keyboard imprints, even with careful use.
- Ethernet uses proprietary connector, you must buy a Lenovo dongle (though they are inexpensive IIRC)
- Charger has proprietary connector, X1E cannot charge via USB-C
# Linux support:
- WiFi, webcam and function keys work out of the box. Fingerprint reader does not, but have not made any effort to use it.
- Audio output switching often leaves driver for internal speakers in a weird state, causing a weird delayed noise/crackling effect during playback.
- The (insanely expensive) Thunderbolt dock (AN40) is unreliable under Linux. Most notably when laptop goes into standby. Hot-plugging almost never works. Even after all the firmware updates (which require a windows only utility btw). With an external display attached (DP, via TB3 dock) and the laptop in stand-by, the dock starts emitting some stray interrupt that will eat 100% CPU, ramping the fans up to maximum.
- The Linux ACPI driver is quite bad. Battery status is almost always 'unknown'. If battery status does display 'full', it usually reports $random percentage between 60 and 80%. Wake-up after stand-by has endless other problems.
- USB ports (internal, or on TB dock) regularly become unresponsive after stand-by. May be related to ACPI issues.
- The dual GPU (Intel + nVidia) situation remains a nightmare under Linux, though this is not Lenovos fault obviously.
# Windows:
- Lots and lots of bloatware out of the box
- Laptop regularly wakes up from sleep while in my backpack, burning 100% of the battery of you don't notice it.
- Otherwise works fine under Windows.
# Conclusion
So, concluding, my first-time experience is mediocre. Linux support isn't great, though the laptop mostly works as promised under Windows. The service and support of Lenovo is (in my experience) on-par with Dell, and light years ahead of Apple.
Due to the praise for Lenovo here on HN, I had high hopes for proper Linux support, but that was disappointing.
In 2019, when I bought the X1E, the offering by Apple was really bad, which made me look for other brand laptops. But if I was to buy a new laptop today, I'll probably go back to Apple. With M1 support shaping up (thanks Marcan!), it might even become a good Linux machine.
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/Linux-S...
With Linux 5.17 AMD should provided also something similar to pstate, which should improve the things further:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-P-St...
But Lenovo is still struggling:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lenovo-A...
I love ThinkPads. We've four in the family. Reasons:
* Haptic feedback of keyboard
* TrackPoint
* Maintenance Manual and spare part available for at least five years (ten would be better)
* Linux Support and Certification
Lenovo seems to follow the bad industry pratices from other manufacturers instead of looking closely why ThinkPads are superior. Internal batteries, solder main-memory, awkwardly placed card-slots, missing RJ45 are problems. They keyboard is still the top of the industry and more comfortable than many desktop keyboards, because of the precise haptic feedback and concave shaped key-caps. The substandard keyboard from Apple on the other side does provides only flat (cheap?) key-caps, no TrackPoint and has a lot of longstanding quality issues.
I'm also happily using and ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 AMD here with Linux. But from systems certificed for usage with Linux I expect more. I therefore also blame the lax requirements of Red Had and Lenovo. IBM (Red Hat), how about enforcing actual good support by Lenovo? I'm aware that all of that awkward, specially patched drivers on Windows are actually workarounds. And Microsoft enforce the sticker/label program. Maybe the complete industry should question there quality standards. I think most of power-management shall not be the duty of the operating-system but the firmware. Broken ACPI-Tables should thing of the past.
I've some Lenovo representative is reading. Most customers wont' tell you why the bought your product. But in long term the will notice the things. The will buy again if it was good. They won't tell you "keyboard has feature x" and "card-slot is placed nicely", they will just like it or not. And the server stats of ThinkVantage will most of the time not tell you anything about the Linux-Users. Most of the time not even for Windows within company networks. It is quality what make a company running for decades and not hoping on the the next industry trend.
I picked up an X2100 from Xue Yao last year and it's great to have modern components with the classic keyboard and chassis