The X220 ThinkPad is the best laptop
bt.ht
bt.ht
Then for modernisation: 4k OLED, USB-C charging + docking, actually decent webcam and mic.
Ideally in X220 and T400-esq form-factors to choose from.
Instead I have a MBP M2 because Thinkpad just ain't Thinkpad anymore and that is sad.
If they made anything close to the expandability of these, I’d be buying that as well.
I'm currently running a P14s, and while I have a few minor gripes around the fan and thermals overall I'm pretty pleased.
* 2xTB4, HDMI, 2xusb3, 3.5mm jack, I could have opted for a card reader if I still used PIV/CAC for Kerberos but I carry a yubikey these days
* I prefer the newer Thinkpad keyboards, they have less play (as in wiggle) in the keys
* Linux support out of box is great
* Display and scaling work well with Wayland (sway)
* Linux power consumption is great, <4W idle with minor TLP tweaks and blacklisting the proprietary Nvidia driver
* The touchpad has improved over the years, specifically around the texture of the material and the sensitivity of tap to click
* The i7 processor is honestly overkill in a laptop
it's everything you (and i) want from a laptop -- a reasonably modern (10th gen intel; sadly there probably won't be a more modern one) laptop in an x200 shell (i even ordered a touchpadless palm rest).
it's been my main driver for half a year now without any issues.
I know people have upgraded[1] or put a FW13 mainboard in an old T-series chassis before,[2] but several of those features (hw cam/mic kill switches, field repairability, 3.5mm jack, USB-C PD, tall 4K display, Linux support) are already in a Framework, and the rest could feasibly be implemented in a modern case with appropriate accommodations for FW hardware built in.
1: https://kitsunyan.github.io/blog/frankenpad-story.html
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/145f3qc/i_got_the...
I'm torn on this, I've been a longtime Mac user and am due to upgrade my old mbp to something. Imo the current line of mbp is objectively the best hw+sw laptop experience for the money, but at the same time I would prefer to go the foss route out of principle
If the trackpad were maybe 15% bigger and it had USB-C charging it'd be the perfect machine. I'm not even bothered by the screen, 1366x768 is plenty.
But the damn worldwide web keeps marching on their mission to make the most bloated software in the universe. I should be able to keep using the machine forever with unchanged software, but the web demands more and more, it's running away from me.
The day we fix that issue will be great. So much less e waste. Computers were fast enough for most reasonable tasks years ago.
You can't run the most minimal current Linux kernel on a 30 year old laptop either.
Of course various client telemetry frameworks say it sucks but if no one is complaining then of course it doesn't make business sense to optimise them and carry on making it slightly worse until someone finally does moan about it.
But everything being crap is not an excuse to keep delivering more crap.
> You can't run the most minimal current Linux kernel on a 30 year old laptop either.
I wouldn't bet on that after seeing what some people have done with Gentoo.
And you only need to go back 5-10 years to find devices failing to run many websites and electron apps smoothly. My old laptop has an i7 CPU from 2016 and couldn't keep up anymore. And even on my new hardware from 2022 many things feel a bit sluggish.
Not exactly the same, but I was able to run a fairly recent version of OpenBSD (6.x) on a 486 DX2-66 with 32MB of RAM this year. Not bad for a CPU from 1992 (32 years ago).
Writing a Python application isn't that hard, but your frontend dev will more than likely be experienced in JS than Python+QT and push for that.
Vala could have been great as a way of making C more accessible, shame it didnt really pick up.
but best laptop in the World?
I do use mine, occasionally, it's a great work horse around the house for network things as it has an ethernet port.
but TBH I use my X1 laptops more, the ability to USB-C charge is near critical now, and the X220 lack of USB-C as well as low res screen really does mean it's not a machine of this age, it was probably the best laptop of the non-USB-C age... but now it's dated, and only has niche use.
https://www.tindie.com/products/mikepdiy/lenovo-charging-por...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07PJ3J5MY/ref=pe_27063361_48705...
which is absolutely fantastic.
What you are looking for is a USB-C with PD support, which means that the devices can negotiate the amount of power that is being sent!
Also I personally think the keyboard topic is totally oversold. I'm quite content with the stock X230 keyboard, and I would swap in a heartbeat if I wanted to (it's two screws). And my previous laptops were T22/T60/T61, so I do know the difference.
I love mine - I have 64gb of ddr4, a 10th gen intel i7, NVMe SSD, an incredible keyboard, a nice screen, and three interchangeable 6 hour batteries. It was my daily driver for a long time, up until very recently. If they can make a Ryzen-based one I'll be all over it.
...a bulky, heavy 13" laptop with a horrendously noisy fan, an outdated processor, no bluetooth, no camera when everything is done over video, shitty speakers, shitty 18080p 13" TN 4:3 screen, 6 hours of battery life vs 12-18 in current laptops, and so on.
Fool, money, etc.
That said, I would hope no one would read this article and think an x220 is actually a good computer for most modern uses.
Saying that if you mostly live in a terminal with a ssh connection to another machine, they'll do very well!
Thanks for sharing the link to them anyway, I at least appropriate it!
Finally, an XPS 13 with good battery support (assuming ARM) and good Linux power handling will, probably, be the best notebook available. (would love if they remove the XPS 13 fan and there are more non-moving part notebooks)
* One generation newer CPU (3rd gen, Ivy Bridge, die shrink)
* Additional USB 3.0 port
* Optional backlit keyboard
Both are solid laptops. I bought my X230 in 2016 for about $400USD and with how much I've used it, it has paid for itself. Nearly 8 years of solid service. I "upgraded" mine slightly:
* USB-C pigtail adapter with tiny 65W GaN charger
* USB 3.0 ExpressCard for total of 4 USB 3.0 ports
* Passive microSD adapter that lives in the SD slot
* mSATA SSD for simple dual booting
One can also Coreboot the machine to support newer Intel AC wireless adapters, but I don't do anything that would benefit from it.
However, despite the flak island keyboards received, I really like the X230 keyboard. It feels fast, accurate, and responsive. Plenty of travel, and I enjoy the backlight.
The poster is right, I dropped both an X220 and a MacBookAir (from similarly high desks), and the ThinkPad had no scratch despite being plastic, whereas the MacBookAir now has a dent. (I would not mind repeating the involuntary experiment with rugged (military versions) of DELL laptops when the occasion comes.)
The T series was built like a tank - a WWII era tank that could take a beating, have bits and pieces crack and break, but chug along until you could get the (cheap!) replacement part shipped. I have a stack of T60 series laptops I think I could keep going for another 50 years just by robbing parts from donor laptops as needed.
The repairability just was second to none. Both in parts availability and design of the laptop itself. A cracked bezel happened, but was a 10 minute and $20 repair.
I started my first real "professional" job in tech, and while packing/moving for said job I somehow had an entire gallon of windshield wiper fluid spill directly into the (running) fan port of my work-issued T42 I had left on the floor of my minivan. I pulled the battery in a panic, but after taking everything apart and drying it all out - it worked fine for at least a decade. I was hooked on the series ever since.
Team Ultrabay, represent.
I wish they would not make the new laptops that tight and thin. I like low weight, but would not mind a little thickness, if I can open it and clean it easily, change the paste, upgrade easily, have external battery, more room for venting and so on. These are very practical features.
On a related note, I just don't understand the madness of having battery inside the laptop in gaming laptops these days. The heat kills them. These are mostly portable desktops and I can't find any new gaming laptops that have external batteries anymore so that I can use them on just external power. In the rare occasion, it ends up as a very premium feature. These things were basic features in the past.
Yeah I'll pass. But for sure you have extremely useful VGA port if you want to burn your eyes with CRTs.
The primary use case for that VGA port was projectors installed in conference rooms. At its time in many cases the only thing you got was some VGA cable.
But how to replace the X220 keyboard? I tried a Nuphy Air60, which has great mechanical action, but weird cheap feet that peel off and get lost, and weighs a relative ton in a backpack. Replaced that with a flimsy $10, 100g bluetooth keyboard to replicate the MacBook/XPS typing experience instead, and it’s… good enough. Literally weighs nothing, I like that.
I also have a thinkpad with archlinux, but a 10 year newer model (T14). The CPU is fine. But it also has 16GB of RAM, and I wish there was more, it doesn't even take that many firefox+chrome tabs to fill it all up.
I would never say they could be my daily driver or come close to the capabilities of today’s machines.
But for me they really have a place. For hobby and random uses they are great. For a machine to hook up to various amateur radio equipment or some arduino gizmo or to try out that random Linux distro or hobby/toy OS… In this kind of role this machine absolutely rocks.
.. but I’ll die on Apple hill, clutching my 2012 aluminium i7 Macbook Pro running Snow Leopard, with it’s glorious glassy trackpad, 1000BaseT cable still connected.
It does take a while to become fast and precise, but when I was, it worked wonderful.
Up till then I mostly ignored it, mainly because I was used to trackpads. but that stupid red wart on my keyboard turned the experience from massively frustrating to actually usable.
So a niche use case to be sure. but it is definitely a feature I look for now.
See also: trying to use a touch screen in a moving vehicle.
I also think people overstate the "build quality" of old ThinkPads a lot. They have a bunch of really thin plastic parts all over the place that have a tendency to crack easily. Yes, they're repairable, but they show wear a lot more than your average modern aluminium unibody machines.
- The chassis has a bunch of weak points so build quality is not overall excellent and that shows after some time. Especially bad is that part above the screen where the antennas are mounted inside. It's made out of plastic and is only flimsily connected to the magnesium back panel at either side, if it breaks you have to replace that whole back panel.
- That Sandy Bridge CPU turned out to be an exceptionally future proof choice but after >10 years it shows its age. Even if it's fast enough for your use case, modern CPUs are just much more power efficient.
- USB 2.0 only, except on the i7 motherboard, not the most popular configuration so harder to source for a good price. Alternatively an express card can be used but did not have that good of an experience with those, also the mounting mechanism on the X220 is not sturdy enough.
- Good luck finding a proper battery pack nowadays. Even if you still find an original one, after years in storage they tend to loose capacity quite fast. Most third party ones are garbage from day one.
~: free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 2946 1736 101 271 1575 1210
glad to see there's not even an attempt to defend this.
My current gen P14s has awful keyboard keys. There's barely any travel whatsoever so while I agree with your premise, things really did used to be better...
Hot swappable batteries on the X240 was quite the rush
I agree with that one, those models had their build quality issues and for today's standards they are simply outdated overall.
> Just wait, eventually the X230 and X240 will be called "some of the greatest thinkpads ever made, built like tanks".
I don't think so for those models. The X230 is more or less just a refresh of the X220, except for the "new" keyboard. The X240 had no physical trackpoint buttons but instead that universally hated "clickpad" (did only last one generation I think). Also X240 onwards switched to those Intel ULV CPUs so you did not really get much more performance and if I remember correctly repairability also diminished a bit.
There were a few thinkpad models in the last decade which stood out and were you could legitimately argue that a newer model is not necessarily better in many aspects. The X220 was one of them. Similarly, in another category, the T440p which offered an insane amount of (after some years low cost) upgrade options.
But as said, last decade, now those are just old laptops.
When a non-technical friend asks me what laptop to buy, I pause, and eventually yell them to buy a used Lenovo Thinkpad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38257284#38262457
I feel that any laptop that doesn't have at least a thunderbolt port is obsolete in this day and age.
It's not the port itself, it's just a handy way for me to determine a cut-off for when a laptop is too old, green m&m style. If it doesn't have a thunderbolt port, it's probably missing other necessary features I might require too.
my current laptop (X230T) doesn't have one and it works fine, I love the little thing, but my next laptop will definitely have one. I feel you need to have at least one foot in the current world.
Maybe 1080p screens? if it has a 1366x768 panel, it needs to burn in a fire.
Just use whatever gets the job done.
The ThinkPad X220 will always have a dear place in my heart.
However, the resolution is horrible (1366x768), the CPU is slow, it's heavy, mine has no USB3 and the charger is quite bulky.
That's easily fixable nowadays for laptops needing up to 100W, you can buy some USB-C adapter and use a modern GaN charger.
whoever decided flip hinges were what everyone wants is the devil.
also, please rethink tablet and phone sizes. 7inch tablets are handheld.
For the MBP in comparison: Better screen, performance, battery life, OS that actually mostly works, connectivity, sound. The keyboard isn't that bad either...
As for ports, I don't need 'em. Last thing I want to do is drag a fucking drunken octopus around with me.
Even as a ThinkPad fanboy this ancient ThinkPad love is getting into self-flaggelating religious drivel territory.
They're not bad. Definitely better than the soggy ass Dell and Lenovo keyboards at least. But I would still rather have a proper keyboard with some travel. But the whole laptop experience is a compromise generally so I'm willing to live with it.
My daily driver keyboard is an Apple Magic Keyboard on my Mac mini and that's fine as well. I only use it so I don't have switch back and forth between a different keyboard and the MBP when I need to.
As for the Cherry MX, not a fan either. I tried a few over the years of different switch variants (at great cost) and they actually hurt you if you have to do some serious work on them after a while. When I say serious, a lot of my existence these days is hacking out large quantities of LaTeX and switching between that and paper. The MX boards are just too high, too noisy and too expensive.
Got to say the best keyboard I've used in recent years though is a Cherry Stream TKL. That's actually surprisingly good and very cheap (£25). It'll annoy the purists here because it's a rubber dome SX switch.
(I currently use Cherry MX browns, interested to learn what's better since I thought non-cherry switches were bootleggy)
Honestly the Macbook keyboard for me is just as bad as every other laptop. Thinkpads or XPS are the exact same mediocre experience you get from the the MBP.
One of my friends loathes everything Apple does (on principle, basically) and has tried several times to convince me that the ThinkPad X-series is just as good (or better) than an M-series MacBook Pro. Testing it out for a bit, there’s just no comparison. Even leaving the software aside, the hardware is just leaps and bounds better from Apple.
> hardware is just leaps and bounds better from Apple.
Dollar for dollar comparison? Not my experience.
I disagree. I own two M2 MB pros: 14" and 16" and a T14 gen2 with a 4K display. T4 display is definitely better, for starter it's matte.
Only place where MB shines is battery life. Even track-pads on newer Lenovos are decent.
Matte screen option was simply taken away, leaving these people with the choice of sticking to an old computer or monitor, or upgrading. I for one am content to keep my old laptop with its nice screen and keyboard, and do any heavy lifting on a different computer. It's quite easy - ssh, x11, VNC, etc.
As your entire workload is apparently developer based, knock yourself out with a matte screen but I don't want one as I do both that side of things and the art side of things...
It's not about tolerating it but about the superior contrast possible and the quality of the coating, something Apple get spot on.
But it really reads like it’s genuine.
Maybe a solid article that’s just 10 years (at minimum) too late.
(Edit: old commercial Unix person. I never liked GNU stuff. Sorry!)
Oh okay, so it’s the best sub-tier laptop on the market. MacBooks still on top, got it.
What I care about:
- OLED screenshortcut
- ECC RAM (min 32G, ideally 128G)
- having a touchscreen
- having a trackpoint
- having physical page up and page down keys
An internal 4G LTE module is nice to have, but not required. The ability to remove the M2 storage to quickly transplant it into something else if needed is nice too, but if there's a switch to turn the laptop into a giant thumbdrive even if the OS/screen/keyboard is dead, that'd be ok too
On every single metric, the MacBook is bottom tier for me: it's only offering battery life, which I don't care about.