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Comment by Scene_Cast2 | Hacker News Reader

I love the hackability of Thinkpads circa that generation.

it's incredibly repairable. I still use the t480 for modern workloads because I've been able to switch out the battery, the fan, the keyboard with fairly abundant aftermarket parts.

sadly my t480's usb c port is no longer able to charge the device, do you know of a way to fix it without replacing the mobo / getting god tier soldering skills? i'm kinda attached since i did a bunch of upgrades like two heatpipes and glass touchpad, sad to see my laptop from college die for a reason like the port dying

You probably have a bad Thunderbolt chip. No way around it besides SPI flash (which is honestly pretty easy):

https://gitlab.com/MobileAZN/lenovo-t480-thunderbolt-firmwar...

there's both the bad firmware issue and ports physically failing on a lot of t480s

I have the same issue. For all the talk of USB-C's supposed design for redirecting damage from the ports to the connector, it failed pretty badly here for probably thousands of people. Never had these issues with a barrel connector.

The problem I always had with barrel connectors is that they get loose, sometimes very quickly, and this experience has been near-universal. Even the more fancy barrel-with-center-pin connector found on some PowerPC PowerBooks and iBooks wasn’t immune.

USB-C is definitely no panacea when it comes to durability, though. I’ve had better luck with Lightening and wish the USB-C connector took more inspiration from it.

This happens often on old ones. Its kind of a consumable part unless you get a magnetic usb-c adaptor. the sub-board is replaceable but does need soldering....not god tier skills at all though, I think most people with some soldering experience could do it as it's just a few pins, but I guess it's not plug and play. It's really the one weakness in this model.

Pretty sure USB-C being on a sub-board only applies to t480s not t480.

On virtually all t480's I've seen having a broken USB-C port it was only the left one (some people don't even realize there are two!) so you can charge using the second one and since it has thunderbolt you could connect a dock and both charge and have e.g. a monitor on one port(obviously?).

On my current t480 I also succeeded in slightly bending the port shell tighter and using a USB-C cable with tighter tolerances to get the port to be usable for charging again, but it's a not guaranteed trial and error solution.

what a small world! i did the port bend thing after the issues first popped up, but eventually that stopped working as well.

interestingly, when i try to charge from right / thunderbolt port, it doesn't seem to work / the led doesn't turn on, and I saw another post with a thunderbolt flash guide that i might look into. thanks to you and everyone else who commented, i think i have a new sidequest to end the weekend with : )

There was an old version of firmware that would brick the thunderbolt port. Something about every connect/disconnect cycle would write tons to the port's eeprom eventually bricking it.

I don't think there is a fix, it's more a case of if your T480 still works, get a newer firmware installed asap.

yeah, same thing happened to my daily driver T480s, so I took precautions and now I use magnetic adapter on TB port since if that's gone whole computer is gone

I despise these new USB-C ports, never had such thing happen on proprietary Thinkpad ports over decades

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