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Comment by lvl102 | Hacker News Reader

I still wonder what could have been if IBM just kept the Thinkpad lines. Those IBM-designed Thinkpads were built like tanks. Industrial. Legendary keyboards. I really miss those machines. I had some of the best coding sessions on them and can’t help but think Thinkpads played a role in creating that experience.

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The skeptic in me thinks that long lived, upgradable, serviceable, resellable laptops would never have survived long anyways. It’s far more profitable to sell new machines to people and businesses after 3 years. Those long lived tank laptops were actually just too good.

I think we're seeing a resurgence of that in https://frame.work/ -- from a startup, not a big name like IBM.

This laptop trend could combine with phones starting to legitimize spare parts, DIY and iFixit style businesses, into something great.

IBM was selling service contracts too, which increased their incentive to make the machines last. Some businesses (and governments) would still be willing to shell out the money for that kind of quality.

Lenovo still offers up to 5 years, next business-day onsite service for the Thinkpad line that is somewhat reasable. Unfortunately, the battery warranty is an additional line item. Usually the 3 year NBD onsite option with battery is about $250 for a T14 or X13.

If I remember correctly, people regularly shelled out $5,000 plus for those Thinkpads. They had some insane “Rolls-Royce” type of support for business executives.

I don't know, I think they would've gone with cheaper and cheaper materials and ended up with pretty much what Lenovo has nowadays.

Dell and HP also had great business machines. I'm particularly fond of the Elitebook 8530/8730 - built like tanks, easy to repair, good keyboards, and still so thin for the time (even today, they look and feel good).

Quality went downhill ever since - newer models are still pretty good, but not as good as older ones. More plastic, fewer screws, trash keyboards, just kind of average for the price.

I'll give HP some credit for being the last out of the 3 major business laptop manufacturers to put 2 SO-DIMM slots on their flagship laptops (EliteBook 8xx series). Everyone else has moved to soldered RAM or 1 slot with soldered RAM.

They also still use 4 RAM slots and an MXM slot for the graphics card on their ZBook workstations. Sadly the CPU is soldered and availability of MXM cards seems to be extremely limited nowadays.

One of my college seniors had one. It was such a beauty with that small yellow light bulb protruding from the top. Absolutely gorgeous experience.

I used to want one so much, none of the laptops since have ever enticed me like that, the MacBooks I use since then are nothing compared to that. Computing was so much fun those days (rosy eyed fallacy likely).

I can't recommend picking one up enough. You can own an x201 with a first-gen i5 for ~80 bucks, I paid $50 for mine without memory or an HDD, and then outfitted it with a 256 gig SATA SSD I had laying around and maxed out it's memory at 8 gigs. Totally worth the price and novelty of owning a tiny laptop like that!

The quality has noticeably deteriorated after Lenovo brought the Thinkpad line but then in general the quality of electronics is only getting worse not better.

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