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Comment by magnio | Hacker News Reader

Insane that no ThinkPad appears in the best laptops list.

But agree that this is a good idea. I am clueless about monitors and found some nice recommendations there. Hope to see more improvements in the future.

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Are thinkpads still worthwhile? The latest versions don’t have as good of Linux or BSD support from a hardware perspective and the older versions are starting to be unattractive from a pricing/performance perspective (because of performance). I know there are upgrade kits for older models but last I checked that requires purchases from China (long shipping times, language barrier in ordering).

They stopped being worthwhile once IBM sold it to Lenovo. Still have T43P, probably the last of the great ones.

Can't speak for the newest ones, but the older ones still hold up with varying success. I love my X220, ran Fedora flawlessly and never had any issues with it. Eventually was forced to switch to something with a bigger screen (I used it exclusively as my personal machine for maybe 2 months), and went with a P50. Really nice machine, but sadly it comes with a (now very outdated) nvidia graphics card, so compatbility can be a bit shaky.

I also tried a T520, which was a solid laptop in principal (basically just a big x220), but in practice I had issues. The only way to get it with an i7 is to get a gpu with it, so I got the i5 and then upgraded to an i7 manually (nice to have a normal socketed cpu), but as it turns out the out-the-box i7 model comes with extra cooling to deal with the heat, which my own upgrade struggled with. After that, my 520 didn't see much more use. Maybe soon I'll downgrade it again so its more usable.

Edit: Think I got a bit distracted there with my own issues. Also tried the X240 and X250, and both are solid laptops as well. I dont use my X240 everyday, maybe once a week, but its been running strong for years now.

The trick I’ve found is to use something like this to get some model numbers - read up on the specs, and then start searching for the model number on Reddit and other places until I find people talking about it, then read as much as I can.

And also search “model number problem” too.

It’s not perfect but it usually works well enough.

It's a good one, but worth also making a collection of alt model numbers. Costco, for example, gets custom models just for it's stores, as does Best Buy in the US. Often the products are the same except for a color, though some include extras either in the box (a sleeve!) or in the product.

Yeah, once you start searching on a model, you often can find details about what that model actually is, and the various forms it appears (manuals, especially repair manuals, can be tremendous for this).

Search engine "item + problem" is where i always start. Of course, you get the 'piece of crap, took three months to get during covid' bs, but i really want to know how bad the item may be, as much as how bad the company may be ("didn't solve my problem").

It's using the past two years of comments, but ThinkPads have seen a severe decline before that. For example, the arrow keys are no longer a different shape from other keys.

Perhaps it's because Thinkpads have their own subreddit so a lot of mentions|questions|comments get siphoned off from a more general subreddit like /r/laptops

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