ThinkNext Design
thinknextdesign.com
thinknextdesign.com
I never used a mobile/power-efficient CPU myself, but I do use old CPUs. For example, this I5-4210M on my T440p, it's obviously not fast compare to newer ones, but when writing code on it (Go and a bit of Rust), I don't really feel a day-or-night level difference. Sure, it's slower, but not unbearably, in fact for most cases I barely notice it.
I daily a T480 at home and an X280 on the road. Swapped the batteries for fresh ones last week, they do around 6 hours on a charge for my use case and they run Linux so personally I don't see any reason to upgrade any time soon.
But I also saw people (usually X series users) complaining on YouTube saying something like their "mobile" CPU is trash etc. My thinking is, if the slowdown is actually insignificant for real-life use cases, then I rather have longer battery life than better performance.
My current dev machine is an X1 carbon from 2019. Compiling go code is slower than I’d like, some JavaScript-heavy websites like Jira take a couple extra seconds to load, and the GPU can drive a 4k monitor but it isn’t snappy.
Still, the form factor is perfect, and my next upgrade will be exactly the same machine but more powerful and with a brighter display with the same 2.5k resolution.
The main limitation for my daily development was simply RAM. The system topped out at 2x8GB. Otherwise, I could run android studio and all my modern JetBrains stuff pretty well. Slow, but good enough.
Compile times were of course terrible, but most of what I do is small embedded firmware type stuff so it never took too long.
But as siblings mention, for anything super heavy it was just an ssh terminal into a beefy server. At a certain point, two real cores is just not enough.
I did upgrade it to the top-spec 4c8t processor right at the end, but it ran way too hot. Between keeping the system on the edge of thermal throttling and the halved battery life, it was not worth the money :(
The X1 looks nice but colleagues had thermal issues with theirs and the CPU is a bit limp so I skipped that particular problem.
My current one is a Thinkpad 14s AMD. As somebody who had most smaller Thinkpads and Dells in the last 15 years, this is my favourite machine so far: great battery, a decent GPU, still a Thinkpad, perfect Linux support.
Lenovo no longer sells T480 batteries afaict, and 3rd party vendors are a (dangerous) crapshoot.
My previous one came from ebay. As long as you don't buy one that's suspiciously cheap you should be good. Spend more than you think it's worth.
You can absolutely get 'buy it for life' backpacks and luggage for a few $000
https://www.briggs-riley.com/collections/carry-on-luggage still have a great repair and warranty deal for example.
When I finally replaced it with a Framework a few years back I've regretted every second of it.
The ThinkPad still lives. I refurbished the batteries and slapped ChromeOS Flex on it and donated it to a Ukrainian refugee who needed a Chromebook for school. It'll probably live another 10 years.
I loved that thing to death. And I'm just happy it is still being used.
With its non-chiclet keyboard, I type 12+ hours every day, never any discomfort.
Last year, I bought a late-model ThinkPad, to experimentally try replacing the T520. So I could have some local GPU compute, and not have to stockpile dwindling rare high-spec replacement units, in my minimalism lifestyle. But I haven't yet felt motivated to try out the new one, and see whether I can move to a not-as-good keyboard layout and a suspicious key action.
ChromeOS made me throw up a bit but the recipient made me smile. May it serve them well.
I now have a second hand T480s which is also a wonderful machine, but not as amazing as that T430s. I gave my T430s to my mother who uses it to run software (albeit via Windows now) for her sewing machine.
Replaced the keyboard (orange juice spillage), screen (upgraded to a higher resolution panel), hdd (to an SSD of course), RAM, Wifi adapter (Wifi 6) as well as the battery.
I now use an X1 Nano and while it's nice (and very light!) I am sad that the upgradability is nowhere near as good.
_Thinkpad: A Different Shade of Blue_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad
I've always regretted not getting one of the tablet Thinkpads, and it kills me that the Lenovo Yogabook 9i is two technologies away from being perfect for me (needs to have a Wacom EMR stylus, and to have a Trackpoint)....
I am just waiting for linux to get sorted out on it and then I will buy. It might not be perfect but it looks pretty great. I mainly wish it had a headphone jack, bluetooth is not great for working on music.
It's t14 that are 14", it's in the name.
I really like my T14.. Gen2? Some Intel 11th Gen cpu from a few years back. Still getting driver and firmware updates through regular windows updates, which is neat.
Well, you can't have a t4xx or t14 with 16" display. It's like saying you want a apple pie, but you really don't like apple, and want banana.
Battery life is slightly worse, driver support is perfect - every peripheral I've tried is perfect, performance and security are top-notch.
My two complaints are battery life and compiling Rust code taking a bit longer. But everything else is better on Thinkpad.
I use a Thinkpad and MacBook Pro interchangeably.
Note: I use an X1 Carbon, so that's more like a MacBook Air. They're not 1:1 and my complaints are partly due to my choice.
And everything works on it on Linux, even obscure things like fingerprint sensor, various bizarro Fn key combos, all the various HW accelerations (video encode/decode via vaapi), etc. I didn't find anything that would not work.
This deep software/hardware integration means Apple absolutely destroys everyone at battery life. No contest. If you want to optimize for battery life, Apple is the choice.
The deep integration also makes Apple's security quite good. Obnoxiously so as they make even common operations like downloading software off the web take extra steps.
That being said as soon as you stray outside of a pure Apple ecosystem, Linux wins in my experience. Plugging a Logitech mouse into my MacBook prompted me to install Logitech keyboard drivers... Not only was the device type wrong but drivers?! ...for a simple input device?! I haven't had to worry about printer, mouse, keyboard, webcam, usb mic, drawing pad, etc drivers in years. Simple devices almost universally Just Work in Linux without having to install or configure anything. It's mind boggling when I touch Windows or macOS and am greeted with proprietary drivers for something like a basic laser printer.
But there's plenty of counter-examples: Nvidia requires their proprietary driver to fully utilize their hardware, but the driver is much better than it used to be. My understanding is that no one on Windows really enjoys dealing with Nvidia drivers either, so it's probably a similar scenario.
At the end of the day I use both Linux and macOS regularly and prefer Linux overall. My Macbook Air's battery life and lack of fans does make it unbeatable for actual lap-top computing, and when I want to look and sound good on a Zoom call I can always count on its builtin camera and mic. So I basically use my Macbook as a laptop form factor iPhone or iPad, which I think is Apple's intent and fills a niche for sure.
The best thing I've done for my in practice battery life on Linux is enable aggressive suspend to hibernate, but it still doesn't compare to the all day use I get out of the MBP.
Driver support is really good, everything works, but it obviously can't compete with the 'perfect' driver support you get with macOS.
Performance is again really good but it's not M* performance, nothing is, but I'm happy with it. The OS is perfectly snappy and responsive.
Security is also quite good, Linux has fantastic TPM support now so you get passwordless full disk encryption. Fingerprint reader works and is well integrated into popular DEs. But it's not TouchID or Apple's secure coprocessor, SIP level extra. And just in general the Linux security model without SELinux or Flatpak sandboxing is user-based so you don't get protection against software you run behaving naughtily. The antivirus story is also not as good / nonexistent, but I've never really cared about those so nothing lost for me.
The advantage of the Thinkpad is you get to run Linux, it's about half the cost of the MBP, it's more than good enough as a daily driver, and you get all the full sized ports with no adapter.
Lenovo, on the other hand, has been a hit or miss for awhile. I had a T570, which was horrible; one problem after the next. It's just a source of parts now. There are some design issues with the T480 (no center screw in the front/bottom). Also with the T480 is, what it seems to be, the slightly flaky USB-C connectors. The external keyboard (non-bluetooth), while very useful for 2 years, has always been a struggle with the flimsy micro-usb, leaving me to hack that. But now, I somehow now lost an important key on it, I just gave up and bought a nice Tex Shinobi. The only stable-ish one is the one I am on now, a T470p. It's not been perfect, but it's the best designed TP I had (my T430s is overall good, except for battery power, but the internals for those old machines are a chore to get through.) I have a P14s at work. It's OK, but nothing to write home about.
If all these TPs die, and Framework has a trackpoint version + delivers to my country, I would like to get that instead.
My previous X1 Extreme Gen 1 (2018) had annoying coil whine and screen backlight bleed. One of the key caps broke off after a couple of years. Eventually I ended up doing a full keyboard and battery replacement.
My current X1 Carbon Gen 13 is nice and light, has no coil whine, but it's still made from cheap plastic. Considering it's a $2k+ machine, it sure doesn't feel like it.
In comparison, ThinkPads from the IBM era were built like tanks. Still plastic, sure, but they felt solid, and were reliable workhorses for years.
At this point the only thing keeping me on ThinkPads is the TrackPoint, but since trackpads are decent on Linux nowadays, I think I'm ready to finally ditch the brand. Some of the new Dell and HP machines look interesting. Frameworks seem nice, but I've read many issues about their build quality, and they're not cheap either.
Very happy with them.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the most annoying issue of all: the TrackPoint still drifts on every modern ThinkPad! This was a big issue on IBM ThinkPads, and Lenovo hasn't bothered to fix it in all this time. I've had it on my 2018 X1 Extreme, and now on this 2025 X1 Carbon. It's enfuriating that such a high profile functionality has such a glaring issue for such a long time. Just shows Lenovo's lack of care and attention for this brand.
I had no idea David did the swooping mid-1990s AS/400s, I have a couple of those in my system collection and they definitely have an aesthetic.
I used a Macbook for about 2.5 years in between. Didn't like it (hardware was decent. Software was terrible). I also bought a Dell latitude (which was okay and is being used now as headless machine at my workplace for tinkering).
But my primary machine is a Thinkpad and I don't expect to see that changing in the near future.
I'd be interested to hear which software was terrible on mac and what was the better alternative on your side of the fence?
I suppose I could have learnt how to use it and become efficient but even the possible gains seemed very poor and I didn't think it was worth the investment. I used the smallest subset of features I needed to get my work done and that was enough.
I've taken to just buying multiple 2-3 year old "tested" units again (plenty of NOS ones out there) and keeping them alive via ebay which is what I was doing around the X201 era. Same with the desktops - mine is a 2019 M720T ThinkCentre that cost me $150 equiv a couple of months back (before the RAM pricing went mental)
I had a brief affair with Apple, culminating in a fairly nice M4 MacBook Pro, but quite frankly it scares me carrying that around and I really do not like Tahoe (Sequoia was fine). Back to Debian stable on the T14 gen 3 it is...
Inversely, I am convinced that is largely what has made Apple so successfully at the core, controlling the OS did not limit them to all the technical reasons that, e.g., windows OS based scrolling and the track pads were/are so horrible, resolution limitations, and inconsistent design and styling of the OS that subordinated the value or beauty of any hardware design to the OS level that users interacted with… subordination to Microsoft.
It’s essentially unconscionable that they likes of IBM, Dell, HP, etc did not get together and at the very least develop their own OS and also aggressively counter the de facto monopoly stranglehold of Windows on government, which then caused the domination among corporations.
Similarly unconscionable is also the European failure and subordination to the USA/Microsoft by not fostering at least an alternative to Windows that its corporations and governments can operate on. There has been nothing but talk and tiny little forays into adopting open source, but absolutely nothing that could even rise to being a real alternative to Windows or even MacOS.
Yet. The current US 'situation', combined with US tech spying means those little forays are getting seriouser and seriouser. It's going to be somewhat slower due to languages, and induvidual governments wanting 'their' version (of spying on their populations), but the beginnings are begun.
It was a linux user's dream. I swapped out the spinny HDD with an SSD. It had hotswappable batteries, a spill resistant keyboard with a drain system, and I ran every linux distribution I could get my hands on, eventually settling on the xfce flavor of Ubuntu.
I still have that machine, and will keep it for my son when he's older. I plan to replace the battery and SSD with something more reliable. These days I use an m2 macbook air for portability... but that thinkpad is still something I will treasure for years.
Nub scrolling? A three button mouse on a trackpad? I can't be the only one who wants this.
There are dozens of us. Dozens!
They were all very inexpensive due to their age (when RAM was still cheap) and I'm really happy about them, I work from a console and a browser, they are perfect for my usage. I wouldn't use any other kind of laptop.
My solution was to buy a Lenovo ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II and pair it with my MacBook over Bluetooth. An added benefit is that I can keep the MacBook on a stand, avoiding the wobble you get when typing directly on it.
I also use an Apple Trackpad alongside this setup, since I find it hard to beat for certain tasks.
"Lenovo Finally Listened: The Most "ThinkPad" ThinkPad Ever?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVqQD8a38YQ
If the thinkpad team and lenovo guys read this, keep it as long as possible
I can really tell the difference when I type on the mac and on my thinkpad. I think the thinkpad's keyboard is wayy better keytravel
Only downside was the cooling: the fan was constantly spinning and producing noise akin to a plane taking off.
I never owned another mouse as laggy and imprecise. Its design is good, but its basic mouse functionality is just very bad.
- You can easily remove the upper part which is hold by magnets - It is very easy to clean that way - You can store the receiver inside the mouse, very handy for transport - It runs on AA batteries, which hold for a while, and you can easily replace them if you need to
So the design definitely has some positives, but it isn't worth much if the mouse is laggy and imprecise (independent of the surface you use it on). And I am not talking about games or other real-time stuff, just too laggy for office work.
I've seen a few 'consumer' laptops - HP DV6000, several Acers - go bad this way with parts on the board loosening. What these models had in common was that none of them had a stiff inside frame but consisted of a plastic bottom on which the guts were screwed down and onto the back of which the screen hinges were mounted with 2-3 screws each. This was capped with a plastic top into which the keyboard was mounted. With all parts removed the top and bottom shell are quite flimsy so any stiffness in the finished product depends on all parts being screwed down tightly. Now add those screwed-down hinges on the back which make the thing flex every time the screen is opened and closed, lift the thing using one hand every now and then which causes it to flex as well and you have a recipe for loosening parts - especially BGA components - on the mainboard.
Yes, I also have seen it on laptop from that area. Often the hinges.
Never on thinkpads though. Also not on modern "plastic" thinkpads, people in the office walk around with them only holding at the screen.
The outside is a very durable rubber material. Certainly more durable than my Macbook Pro
Metal will bend and deform. Dent.
Plastic will yield, then crack.
You can then replace the cracked component, because the plastic took the vast majority of the force so the metal frame on the inside that holds everything together is fine. Same way you have squishy muscle to absorb impacts that might break your bones. Same way cars have crumple zones.
I've been a Mac user primarily for 20 years. I've had or used extensively every generation of PowerBook and MacBook since the G4. I have two Thinkpads (T420, A485) and they both feel as solid as anything I've had from Apple, except when my MacBook Air slid off my couch onto its back corner, it misaligned the lid permanently, and my Thinkpads bounced.
Not sure if it still exists
Everything was fine, but then each person was asked to stand and briefly mention something they were thankful for. About half way through one of the oldsters mentioned their health problems - "I'm thankful they aren't worse" - sigh. Every person after that had to list every health problem they had, and every health problem everyone in their family had. It took like an hour and we were waiting to eat.
What HDD make? ThinkPads of 2.5" HDD era usually have cushioned drive caddies, and (IIRC) some head-parking when the laptop detected shock. https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1hp1cq6/active_pr...
> The second one was delivered with bad RAM. Support denied help because of wrong FRU Number. The whole thing went back to the dealer.
Did you get it sealed from the Lenovo factory, or could your dealer have replaced the factory RAM? (That could also explain "wrong FRU number".)
> The third one died in a loud bang of the power supply and died with it.
Bummer. Do you recall the model or design?
I once had a Lenovo AC adapter eventually go bad (out of buying and using dozens of them), and fortunately didn't take the laptop with it.
And I once ripped the laptop-side connector off an old one that I was abusing pretty hard, and then tripped over the cable (but laptop was fine).
Other than that, the rest of them have worked great, even some 20 year-old ones I still have and use.
> The trackcap was horribly to use - an example of bad design par excellence.
The TrackPoint? Could you say specific criticisms of the design?
I consider it mostly a personal preference thing. A lot of people love TrackPoint, and consider it a hard requirement for any laptop they'll personally use. A lot of other people prefer trackpads, and have more options for laptop brands.
(Disclosure: I know the inventor of TrackPoint, but that's not why I use it.)
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It was a good design, in critical environments small goose-neck lights are typically used, even if the buttons and indicators are backlit. I still prefer it to backlit keyboards which, with decreasing thickness, increasingly compromise the quality of the keyboard (I have tested this with later chicklet models running through all available keyboards for a few era ThinkPads). Having a small amount of ambient light is easier on the eyes, especially the yellow-shift on the X40, and you can run the screen at minimal brightness to increase battery life and whatever health benefits this all has.
I reported this issue to Lenovo and was stuck in the typical service desk loop of hell. Once I escalated the issue with our Lenovo representative the issue got some traction, but there wasn't any real progress for months and the troubleshooting remained nothing but superficial. Not a single expert got in touch with us to get some real and in-depth hardware debugging logs or whatever you need to truly analyse the hardware faults.
Ultimately, my employer decided to stop follow up on that with Lenovo and to just deal with it. We continue to buy these crappy laptops and monitors despite all the issues they cause us and shove the money down Lenovo throats, like any real company would. /s
A quick Web search shows examples from more recent models with any OS.
I was traveling at the time. Mayor inconvenience.