Comment by than3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by than3 | Hacker News Reader

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This is a completely unacceptable question to ask because even you must know that what you've described doesn't touch at all on what your specific requirements would be in the device.

Without knowing what your specific requirements and expectations are its impossible to provide targeted information to help you make an objective decision. Everyone else is selling something that may not even be applicable to you.

As for the soldered RAM, I've heard good arguments for and good arguments against it, dealing with security, or usability which are often trade-offs. An older model allows you to flash the BIOS with an open source alternative and to remove any backdoor functionality that may remain in Intel ME, AMT, or any of its related subsystems.

You also do not mention how old the T480 is, we can surmise based off its original manufacturer date that its older but components have limited life and part of the cost of buying something new is the guarantee it will continue working, and that its usable life has not been expended.

I've seen T480s that are running just as fast today as they were when they were brand new. The owners of these took extra steps to make that happen. Controlling heat play's a crucial factor, removing design defects are another. The pristine ones I've seen have fixed the fan failure by rewiring the fan power cables so they don't get routed over a heatsink (i.e. where IBM itself used kapton tape right on top of the heatsink), or replaced the low-grade CPU thermal paste with a more heat conducive binder.

The local vendor doesn't know how old these T480 are, it would be clear on place, upon order delivery. The supplier provides 2 year warranty for this refurbished Thinkpad T480 and a 6 month warranty for the battery. Given these warranties it seems not to be very old.

T480s were manufactured in 2018, any third-party (non-manufacturer) warranty is of limited value. So at best they may be 5 years old which is pretty decent.

The problem with warranties these days is they are setup to simply replace the hardware, and not provide quality hardware in the first place.

Things I've noticed, most places which offer a third-party warranty will ensure the process for obtaining the warranty benefits is difficult and onerous, where it might take several months to get the replacement, and in the meantime you have no laptop, and then they only replace it with a like-model which may have the same problem, they'll do this multiple times for the length of the warranty, after which you'll almost certainly need to replace the device, while accounting for periods of time that you may not have the device. Unfortunately, many manufacturers have gone this route as well in recent years offering a 1 year manufacturers warranty and then 2-3 year support warranty. You used to be able to get business class laptops with a 3 year manufacturer warranty and it was manufactured so it wouldn't fail in that time (with quality components).

You'll have to decide what amount of risk you are willing to take. A new device is a lot easier argument to enforce a warranty, you'll still run into the issues with delays on the process if it fails, but there may be other tradeoffs for your use, you'll have to decide.

Coreboot also doesn't support the T480, looks like the T440P was the last model they support, but I could be wrong on that.As always do your due dilligence.

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