23 ms·

The laptop that won't die

184 points by ShikhaM 3y ago

thrtythreeforty 3y ago
https://archive.today/QJyfs https://archive.today/QJyfs
- thewarpaint 3y ago
  Thank you!
- bouke 3y ago
  I get stuck in a captcha redirect flow.
  - zarino 3y ago
    If you’re using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) that’ll be why: https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
    - Rogach 3y ago
      Doesn't look like it: $ host archive.is 1.1.1.1 archive.is has address 192.210.214.166 $ host archive.is 8.8.8.8 archive.is has address 192.210.214.166
zitterbewegung 3y ago
Anecdotal evidence is obvious but Lenovo has at least tried to keep up their quality (don’t buy anything other than the thinkpad line) but Mac durability in the long term may can have issues. I remember that I had to get a repair of two Mac’s I have owned (but one time Apple upgraded me to the newer version so that’s why I am loyal.)
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  I'll second this: Non-Thinkpad Lenovo laptops are poorly designed trash heaps. Thinkpads have largely retained the build quality that everyone brags on. My tl;dr advice for buying a computer on a budget is, get a T480s off of eBay. They are corporate cast-offs and there are so. many. of them. The R2v3 rating system has become popular. Get one rated C5 or better (cosmetic: minor usage marks only) and F4 or better (functionality: everything works). Spring for one with a backlit keyboard, and a power supply included if you want it turn key. As of this writing this should cost around $250 and the machine should be fairly future-proof including official Win11 support. And excellent Linux compatibility - my fingerprint reader doesn't work, but literally everything else works perfectly.
  - genter 3y ago
    I've done what you described multiple times. One other tip is buy one with a lower resolution screen, and then replace the screen with a higher resolution one. Be sure to research this, though, some of the highest resolution screens need a different mobo with a higher pin connector.
    - thrtythreeforty 3y ago
      While possible, I've never found the dollars-per-research-time conversion ratio to be particularly good for this upgrade. My advice is aimed at someone who doesn't want to become a thinkpad nerd (although that route is always available!). Is there any tl;dr equivalent for upgrading screens like you described?
    - NikolaNovak 3y ago
      I think that advice depends on whether you're looking for "a laptop" or "a project" :) I'm a massive thinkpad fan, as per sibling comments I have half a dozen in the room with me right now, but have never and don't plan to ever replace a screen. My time and hassle are worth more than $0-$30 I'd pay for one that already comes with higher res, and the risk / pain / fidgetiness is outside of my own personal threshold. Not so for others!! But my message is you don't need to replace screens and 3d-pring and dremel new keyboards to get value out of ThinkPads :).
aplummer 3y ago
I feel like this story is also relevant to the 2012 MacBook Pro and Air. My partner kept her air going for more than 10 years, and I saw people who for whatever reason (maybe keyboard or Touch Bar) hold on to those pros long past normal. So consider that another anecdote. Real data would be great here.
- Macha 3y ago
  Conversely I had a classmate who used to joke about the fact that by the end of our degree, his macbook air had become a 4 "page" (mac)book as both covers were splitting.
- jojobas 3y ago
  Thinkpads' longevity is largely defined by their repairability and upgradeability, to the point of Frankenpads. Not a single Mac was ever close.
  - xcv123 3y ago
    > Not a single Mac was ever close. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#PowerBook_G3_FireWire_(Pismo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#PowerBook_G3_Fire...
- seltzered_ 3y ago
  Still using MacBooks from that era - a big differentiator might be whether it has integrated graphics or is using a discrete GPU. The discrete GPU ones (i.e MacBook pro) can eventually fail due to the video ram chips getting loose.
  - sumuyuda 3y ago
    I had a 2011 MacBook Pro that I used until end of 2022 when the discrete GPU failed for the second time (first time in 2016 Apple replaced the logic board). Replaced it with a Thinkpad T480.
- kayyyy 3y ago
  +1 to this. got a 2012 MacBook Pro as a gift for middle school, upgraded to a 1tb drive and 8gb ram in high school, again upgraded to an ssd and 16gb ram after starting college in 2019. Kept using it until last year when I got a 16" M1. I still occasionally use it for Windows shenanigans, best gift ever.
ekianjo 3y ago
12 years is nothing! Thinkpads can easily last 2 decades.
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  12 years is 60% of 2 decades, so not quite 'nothing'.
dharmab 3y ago
I have a few of these I use in the garage. Slap an SSD and fresh battery in them and install a lightweight Linux and they're damn near perfect as a workbench computer. My only complaint is HD video playback can be a bit slow.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> 12-year-old Thinkpad has outlasted two high-end Macbooks Nice! Our two MacBook Air from 2013 died at about the same time, about six months ago. Despite putting in a faster SSD and changing the battery: eventually RIP is RIP (and thanks for the 10 years). Our recent MacBook Air M1 lasted... 13 months. Upon waking up one morning the screen was fuxx0red. Meanwhile my 2017 LG Gram's screen is ultra flexible and sturdy and can deal with pretty much anything you throw at it, including its previous owner (a friend of mine) waking up one morning and stepping on it by mistake. You can also throw it down concrete stairs and it'll keep working fine: (skip to 0:34... video not made by me but it's basically my experience with that Laptop) https://youtu.be/herYV5TJ_m8 https://youtu.be/herYV5TJ_m8 They're not cheap laptops. They're not "retina display". But, darn, can they take a beating. Not like the precious and ultra brittle porcelain that the latest Macbook are.
- deleted 3y ago
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- aetherspawn 3y ago
  I keep forgetting that LG is not HP and that, in contrast to HP, LG makes very durable and high quality things (especially white goods and TVs). Thanks for reminding me. I had never considered their laptop before. I would trust HP because their TV is quite ethical and ie compared to Samsung and other brands, it has never served me Ads and asks permission before collecting my data.
  - rfoo 3y ago
    LG Gram is also quite unique in that there's 16 inch variant with only 1.15kg. Right, a 16 inch laptop weight less than a Macbook Air.
noufalibrahim 3y ago
I can relate to this. I needed a laptop quickly and found a factory display piece on eBay. It was an x230. It must have been atleast a year old. I bought it. That was in 2013 or so. I'm still using it. Upgraded the Ram once. The current problems are a slow fan and a poor battery. I haven't fixed them yet but can probably do so. The thing still works. It's running an old Debian and is my primary machine.
- ddingus 3y ago
  I have the same machine the author shows in the picture. Agree completely. Also have a really old T60p. Might be close to 15 years old now. It has a bad fan. What I did was put the machine into passive cooling and spin the fan up at boot! Kind of like a jump start. Runs just fine.
  - neilv 3y ago
    If you want to make it like-new... The T60* fan is a few-dollar part on eBay (plus you'll need a little ordinary PC CPU heat sink thermal compound, and some tape), it's not too hard to replace, and there's documentation. If you download the Hardware Maintenance Manual (HMM) PDF for that model, IIRC, it'll tell you step-by-step how to replace the fan&heatsink assembly. Follow those instructions, but after you remove the assembly, just remove the thermal compound, pull the fan off, tape the new fan onto the old heatsink assembly, apply thermal compound, and resume following the HMM instructions for putting the 'new' assembly into the laptop. Edit: The latest version of the HMM I could find: https://web.archive.org/web/20210429114642/https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/42t7844_04.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210429114642/https://download....
    - ddingus 3y ago
      Thanks! I may do this. I still really like the old machine
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 3y ago
NikolaNovak 3y ago
Yup. The T420 itself is quite big and clunky these days; but I have a couple of T420s ('s' tends to be the slightly smaller version of any given generation of the mainstream T series) in active use around home, and have setup and given a few to friends and family as well They run Windows 10 perfectly fine once you put an SSD in, and they're small enough not to feel like 80's retro-futuristic Cyberpunk deck clunkers :-).
- GolfPopper 3y ago
  I'm posting from my X220 (circa 2013). It's a laptop of Theseus at this point, but bits of the original still survive. (The keyboard is the single most-replaced component, and I'm on my third motherboard.) I can't stand more modern laptops - I've yet to find a newer laptop keyboard that's comfortable to type on. Performance-wise, it's perfectly adequate to run Linux Mint or Windows 10. And I get a kick out of having an SSD, an MSata, and a M2 drive in the ExpressCard slot (plus the SD card, which I use for additional backup). And at 12"x9" its a very convenient carry size. (Only better carry laptop I've had was a Fujitsu P1120.) And yeah,
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    >>I've yet to find a newer laptop keyboard that's comfortable to type on. FWIW, the anniversary t25 has the good keyboard. It was expensive though not outrageous, so after talking it through with my wife, I bought it when it came out. It's still my primary driver, I use it 8++hrs a day for 6 years running(with no sign of stopping), so it mostly worked out. It's essentially a t470 so easy to maintain (external battery, SD card, and one screw for ram or ssd upgrade). Otherwise, everything after the '30 series had the modern random ridiculous layout. We had a standard for decades, then apple decided each laptop will have unique layout and we all blindly followed - muscle memory is for wussies who don't stare at their keyboard to type! Rant rant grouch grouch :)
    - GolfPopper 3y ago
      Thank you! That's very good to know.
syntaxing 3y ago
I have a X62 (x61 with a custom mobo with updated everything) sitting in a box now. My build is 6(?) years old and still works like a champ. But the battery is the main reason it’s in a box. You have to use it like a desktop and keep it plugged in within a hour or two which really defeats the purpose of a laptop…
sasaf5 3y ago
2012 Samsung Series 9 here, going strong with Debian Stable! I might end up ditching it for something with an OLED screen, but I am sure it will still be running fine.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  My Samsung qx410 died miserably (motherboard gave up the ghost) after only 2 years. Bought in 2010, died in 2012. Replaced it with a hand-me-down thinkpad t510 which is still going strong after 11 years. (Not my primary machine anymore of course but it still works quite well)
- jjkeddo199 3y ago
  I have a 2013 Samsung Ativ Book 6, the younger brother of your machine! The display broke twice, the keyboard is 85% unresponsive, HDD got replaced with SSD, and jampacked a larger (Ativ Book 8) battery inside. Physical issues aside, it runs Windows 11 passably for a backup PC -- Not bad!
YZF 3y ago
I just had my T420 die on me the other day. It simply will not power on. I do have some spare parts but I think I'll finally cave in and buy a new laptop.
- CmdrKrool 3y ago
  Try this 'one weird trick' if you haven't already. It sounds unlikely but it's worked for me with Thinkpads once or twice: http://www.masnick.com/2007/09/07/the-secret-thinkpad-powerbutton-code-to-bring-dead-laptops-back-to-life/ http://www.masnick.com/2007/09/07/the-secret-thinkpad-powerb...
  - YZF 3y ago
    I've tried it... No go.
- linhns 3y ago
  Leave it rest a couple of days. Maybe it can turn on again, I got that once on my T470
foobarian 3y ago
Author kinda summed up the problem a few paragraphs in. > I needed a machine that a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), So saying > If you want a modern, sexy, lightweight, high-powered laptop? Go get something pricey from Apple or Microsoft. should rather be > If you need to get modern work done, you will likely need to obtain a modern, high-powered laptop that the modern tools were designed for, and this will likely be something pricey, but not optimized for long service life from Apple or Microsoft.
- Swizec 3y ago
  Apple is pretty good at long service life. I recently had to upgrade the OS on my moms Air and it was a pain in the butt because she ignored updates for so long that all the SSL authority certs expired and the internet didn’t work. Plus Apple’s upgrade software was no longer supported by the servers – server wanted 2fa, moms laptop was too old to know what that is. After a few manual hops, she is now smoothly running the latest and greatest MacOS on a 9+ year old laptop. Everything works fine.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    I've had 3 Macs so far since work is on the Apple train. The first failed due to the discrete GPU desoldering itelf. The second didn't technically fail but the battery swelled up to the point the laptop was almost 1cm from closing at the edges. At least the latter problem is not so much an issue with a removable battery since it's, well, removable :-)
  - i5-2520M 3y ago
    They do Sonoma on 9 year old laptops? On the Apple site, they are saying only 2018+ laptops get the latest version.
    - opan 3y ago
      Likely using OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher.
- deleted 3y ago
shanghaikid 3y ago
macbook air m1 16gb 512, fast, quiet, long battery life. I don't think I will replace it in 10 years.
- adamking 3y ago
  and no moving internal parts + mostly sealed from dust. I'll do the same with mine.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Fwiw my 2012 mbp still runs. Takes in plenty of dust working outside and on account of the plastic hinge turning brittle and falling apart years ago. Once every two years I will open her up and blow her clean again. Thats about all the maintenance she needs today. Ironically it has somewhat stronger specs than gps new m1 air, considering I also have 16gb memory, but then 1.5tb of storage and 2 operating systems.
- mikae1 3y ago
  Until the SSD dies...
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  Nice machine but 1400€ while the laptop in the article is $200. So you could replace it 6 times and still come out ahead... and drive more than 1 external display. Also, I am not sure that the ram or storage won't become limiting within these 10 years, e.g. media is only getting larger (120GB+ for baldur's gate 3), LLMs,... . On a non-mac you can simply grab a 2TB ssd for like $100 and in 8 years can probably replace it with like 8 or 16TB for about the same price. Again, perfectly nice, quiet, fast machine with a decent display, but soldered stuff sucks. If that were not the case, I would consider upgrading to it from my current 5 year old machine (also 14" 2k HDR ips screen, 16GB ram and above mentioned 2TB ssd upgrade). However, paying 2000€ just to match the ram and storage of my 5 year old laptop is definitely off-putting and you also don't get OS upgrades for the full 10 years, right?
iwanttocomment 3y ago
This is bizarre. There's a hilarious contrast between the stated requirements for their laptop: >a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), b) had a high-resolution screen for my lousy eyesight, and c) had a 1-terabyte hard drive. And so then the article extols the virtues of buying a laptop that can't run Logic Pro, has a "fuzzily low-rez, which isn’t great for me, given my lousy eyesight" screen and was upgraded to only a 512GB SSD. What? Great job. You sure nailed those requirements. Yes, the 2016-2019 Intel Macbook Pros were terrible. I'm with you there. But you could have had a 2012-2015 Retina Macbook Pro, which would have run Logic Pro, all have remarkable high resolution screens, and can be outfitted with multi-TB drives with a little elbow grease. And were fairly indestructable! ... and then you won't want one of those if you have a 16GB Apple Silicon Mac.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- city41 3y ago
  Apple computers have a time limit if you want to keep using MacOS. My 2012 MacBook Retina still works great ... if I put Linux on it. Logic Pro is a great example. It requires MacOS 12 or greater. MacOS 12 will only run on 2015 or newer MacBooks.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    You can just run older logic thats compatible with like catalina or mojave. Thats what I do for adobe suite and its fine for my use cases. There are also third party patches to install more current os on older hardware.
  - iwanttocomment 3y ago
    ... and so do Windows machines. Windows 10 will EOL in July 2025. My Threadripper 1950X, still outperforming most of today's mid-range CPUs, isn't allowed into the Windows 11 world. Why? Who knows? But yes, I didn't realize that Logic Pro was no longer compatible with macOS versions before 12. So, if this person wanted an indestructible laptop that could run Logic Pro, have a hi-res screen and be upgraded to a 1TB drive, a 2015 Macbook Pro would certainly have been the thing. Hey look, they're $300 on Swappa! But yes, eventually, we all need to upgrade.
jeffbee 3y ago
Plastic makes such a difference. I can, and do, keep using Thinkpads that have been dropped, even when they get cracked. Because who cares? But a bent MacBook Pro is often ruined.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Depends on the mac. None of the corners on my 2012 are undented at this point. Even the lid with the screen. This thing has been down cement stairs. When you open it up you can see theres actually somewhat of a crumple zone. Not sure if the newer models are so bullet proof. One of my friends ran over his 2012 with an f150 and it still worked minus spiderwebbing on the screen.
chefandy 3y ago
My primary machine was a 2011 MBP until maybe 2018 and it was pretty sweet, but I'm pretty hard on my machines, and there was also a hardware issue that Apple wasn't able to fix. The Thinkpad I had working for IBM a-decade-and-a-half-ago was an absolute beast. I wish I could still get my work done on one of those old reliable machines, but having transitioned to heavy 3D Graphics stuff and working with game engines precludes this kind of thing. The increase in display capability alone has been a huge game changer for this work, let alone the kind of video cards you can get in these machines. The top-of-the-line 2022 Razer machine I use now will be essentially obsolete even for lightweight professional work within two years.
dws 3y ago
Keyboards are a matter of taste. To my fingers, the T420 is the last of the T series with a really good one. Older Thinkpads are easy to repair. I've replaced the keyboard once, and after near daily evening use for many years, I'm about to attempt to replace a failing fan. I'll miss this laptop when its time comes. It's run various releases of Ubuntu like a champ.
guestbest 3y ago
I have a MacBook 13 inch from 2011 that now plays YouTube videos daily for my daughter when she is eating and Netflix until we canceled the subscription. Still going strong with only a replaced battery and the hard drive replacing the dvd spot. I have an older 2004 Toshiba portage m200 tart also won’t die. The only thing that seems to die on these computers is the battery, which used to be a lot easier to replace.
- jamesgeck0 3y ago
  Yeah, my 2013 MacBook Air is similarly still trucking along. I wish it used a more standard storage medium; upgrading the chip did not look particularly cheap or easy.
  - windowsrookie 3y ago
    Storage is easily upgradeable in those MacBook Airs. It's a socketed SSD just like a PC laptop. (but a proprietary socket) https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-air https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-air
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    They don't make em like they did 2011-2014ish. Those things are insanely resilient to everything except the age-old keyboard vs liquid
- wanderingstan 3y ago
  I had a 2012 MacBook Pro that I used near daily as my non-work computer. Worked fine up to the Day earlier this year I dropped it onto a tile floor…
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Did the tile floor pull thru ok?
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Is that really a good habit for her to be building or a good association to be enforcing? Eating is already mindless enough for most people...
gh123man 3y ago
I had a T420 in college. One day in a CS class, I bumped my (uncovered) cup of coffee and it spilled into the keyboard. I knew the laptop had ducts to drain water out, but never tested it (for obvious reasons). I blotted up as much coffee as I could with some napkins and kept taking notes on the soaked keyboard. Worked like a charm. After drying it out, a few keys stopped working so I bought a replacement keyboard for ~$20 and swapping it out was rather fast (from memory). I use an M1 MBP now, but I still have that thing in the basement. It still works, and I loved it. I don't miss carrying it around though (or the hilariously short battery life due to forcing discrete GPU mode so I could dock it for multiple monitors at home).
- ShikhaM 3y ago
  Had a similar experience but with water and the laptop stopped working
  - zwaps 3y ago
    The spill has to remain in the keyboard area. Friend of mine in college spilled.. I think beer?.. on this Thinkpad. He instinctively grabbed it (me, across the room, yelling to keep it stable) and turned it to the side. The fluid got into the fan intake and boom, dead it was.
    - mcv 3y ago
      I spilled an entire mug of tea on my X1E when it was just new. That would have killed any Macbook, but the Thinkpad was fine. Turned it off, unplugged the power, let it drain through the bottom. Next morning, open it up, clean it out, turn it on, and it's fine. Even had time to make a photo: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/h0663l/good_thing_its_a_thinkpad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/h0663l/good_thing... Don't count on this too strongly though; not every Thinkpad is spill-resistant, unfortunately.
- znpy 3y ago
  > After drying it out, a few keys stopped working so I bought a replacement keyboard for ~$20 and swapping it out was rather fast (from memory). I had an X220 in university (same keyboard part as the T420). I did wash my keyboard multiple times using dish soap and normal tap water and I only killed a single keyboard (when I didn't wait enough for water to dry out). You could have most likely just washed the keyboard in warm soapy water, as long as you had enough patience to wait for it to be properly drier (2-3 days at least imho, depending on temperature in your home/area).
dunwaldo 3y ago
it looks like the little red eraser in the center has taken a beating
neilv 3y ago
That T420 was from the last generation of ThinkPads to have a real keyboard. And so long as you don't need a big GPU on-board, it's perfectly fine for most Linux-based developer workstation purposes.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  X220 for the compact version. With the 9 cell? Hnnnngg
  - segfaultbuserr 3y ago
    I recommend getting the X230 over the X220, if anyone decides to play with these old Thinkpads. I have both machines, and I found heat dissipation has been significantly reduced on the X230 for otherwise the same performance, thanks to Ivy Bridge's die shrink over Sandy Bridge. Most components from both machines are interchangeable with the exception of their bottom covers and motherboards (an EC firmware hack is available for interchanging keyboards and batteries).
    - emantos 3y ago
      Don't forget the USB3 of X230
      - varnaud 3y ago
        i7 version of the x220 has one USB3
        lproven 3y ago
        True, and my X220 has a cheapo USB3 card from AliExpress that gives it a few more USB3 ports. Cost about $5 or something.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      x230 can take 16GB RAM. only some x220s will. slightly different keyboard layouts also, wrt pgup pgdown
snitzr 3y ago
The 420 with Windows 7 is my personal idea of the peak of desktop computing. 2011 was also around the peak of computing in general considering it was right before social media turned hellish psyop and smartphones became distraction / disempowerment devices.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  Win 7 SP1 was peak desktop computing for sure. Actual desktop-first design without security kindergarten cancer that is every windows OS after.
  - lmm 3y ago
    What are you claiming was improved compared to Win2K? As far as I can remember everything after that was dumbed-down UI and pointless security clickthroughs.
    - kibibu 3y ago
      Win+arrow keys for docking to sides I use all the time. Much better multi monitor support. Grouping taskbar. Start menu that lets you search (ie to run notepad, press win then start typing note.. and hit enter)
      - krylon 3y ago
        The search box in the start menu was a huge improvement for me. And AeroSnap to a lesser degree. On MATE, I set Win+arrow keys to do the same thing.
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      Vista added a lot of usability features like window snapping and start search, but it's underlying OS was literally unfinished. 7 became what Vista, could've been and even Vista became usable when enough updates were applied. 7 disabled a lot of the security prompts for usability. It didn't remove them, it actually just automatically approved them. These days, most software doesn't need admin privileges anymore. You could always turn off all of the prompts if you wanted to, I think there were 4 levels of prompt severity?
quickthrower2 3y ago
The battery will die and need replacing. But otherwise a good choice!
eigenvalue 3y ago
I can’t even bear to look at a low DPI screen for more than a few minutes. Anything under 150dpi just looks so awful to me at this point. Basically ruins all older laptops from my perspective.
- nvy 3y ago
  I have one of the lcdfans modded Thinkpads. It's a "T70"—a T60 with an i7, 16GB of memory, the old style keyboard, a giant SSD, and, importantly, a high DPI display. It's an awesome machine but it might as well be a desktop because it's so bulky and heavy that I never take it anywhere. I travel with my M2 Mac but that Thinkpad sure is a sleeper.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Normal “low” DPI screens I can deal with, but the panels that used to be built into many ThinkPads until pretty recently are some of the worst screens I’ve ever used… washed out, terrible viewing angles, mediocre brightness. I have an old Dell workstation laptop and 15” MBP both manufactured around 2008, with 1920x1200 and 1440x900 panels respectively and they’re both much nicer to use than what you find in a lot of T-series Thinkpads, so it’s not even an age thing… Lenovo just used bargain basement panels.
  - BenFranklin100 3y ago
    Agree. I’m not sure the exact years, but starting around 2013 the T series screens were awful.
    - opan 3y ago
      Starting with the *40 gen they changed from LVDS to eDP screens and got access to better screens. This was the start of 1080p being available at 14" where it was only in 15" models before. There's a panel from one of the Razer Blade laptops that was popular to put in the ThinkPad T440p. 1080p IPS. Looks nice. On the older models you can also do a mod to sacrifice your DP port for use internally with an eDP panel. There's one for the X220 to do that. Although if you're okay with 1366x768, the X220 Tablet models all have IPS panels from the factory and don't look too bad.
RedShift1 3y ago
I'm still rocking a 2012 built HP EliteBook 8540w which I bought second hand in 2015. The weight of the thing is a little bit annoying and the battery is dead. It has never failed me, running Windows 10 now. It has always come back from standby and hibernate without fail. By far the most reliable computer I own. But it is showing its age though, not because of the hardware but because of software. Windows 11 doesn't run smooth on it unfortunately :-(.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  HP Elitebook 8460P of similar vintage owner here. I also bought it second hand, it came with an SSD and a bigger HDD (that died), I replaced the battery a few years ago, bumped the ram to 12GB (I should bump it to 16GB while memory sticks are still available) and it has been running on Fedora Linux for years. It is kind of a heaby brick brick but it works well, everything is still fairly smooth on Gnome with wayland.
BenFranklin100 3y ago
The x220 is another great thinkpad. You can also upgrade the screen to 1080 with a little hacking: https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=122640 https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=122640
paulpauper 3y ago
Toshiba laptops last forever too
noud 3y ago
I still have a working X60s from 2006. Really liked that laptop. Unfortunately, for modern standards, the battery life is not great, a couple of hours at most. And the resolution is just a little bit too low, 1024 × 768.
- olabyne 3y ago
  hey friend ! I gave my mom the X61t, from the same era. For what she does, it is a marvel, from XP to 7 to 8.1, I bought her an Ipad last year since 8.1 droppped the support. I think with an upgrade of 4Gb it could be still ok in 2023. Just avoid website full of JS and videos.
ramshanker 3y ago
I am in the same boat. Lenovo Z50-70 bought 2015. 8 GB RAM upgraded to 16 GB recently. It has got 4GB Nvidia graphics, does mild AI stuff as well. Hard Disc replaced with Samsung SSD few years back. Full HD screen. I even bought a 4K-27 inch monitor to connect to it last week. Thought it struggles to play beyond 1440p. Win10 works and is totally responsive. I hope it keeps going for 3 more years. :)
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Have a 12-year-old Lenovo desktop here, i5. Just put Windows 11 on it this weekend and it's even snappier than it was with 10 on it, which is nuts. I use it as my main development PC, run Photoshop, edit 4K video on it. It was basically in a Dumpster when I found it.
naet 3y ago
I had a T420s I think? It got me well through college and for some years after, although I eventually retired it. It was a workhorse that stood up to a lot of abuse being thrown around in my backpack every day. After I wasn't using it all the time I set it up as a dedicated server to mess with and kept it constantly plugged in and running for a few more years. I remember when the screen broke I got a perfect replacement for less than 40 dollars, and it was trivially easy to take the old one out and install the new one with a regular screwdriver and no other special tools. Similar experience when I broke the keyboard, easy to buy a new one and swap the whole thing out myself. I think I also replaced a battery when one started to drain a bit too quickly and the battery of course was something you just pop out and back in. Now with my new MacBook any of those is easily hundreds of dollars plus either needing a trained repairman or seriously risking I break something using specialized tools to melt the glue or pop out the bezel or something like that.
somat 3y ago
I still have an x131 that I use whenever I need something portable. running openbsd. it sleeps flawlessly, has three physical buttons, an actual ethernet jack. It's pretty great. The only problem was the radio, and that was mainly a problem because of lenovo infernal radio whitelist. It is not enough to get a radio that works, you have to get a radio from lenovo that works. still bitter about that. but I found a lenovo branded intel card and it has been smooth sailing for more than... ugg, ten years now, probably closer to 15. makes me feel old. But still a damn fine little laptop.
thot_experiment 3y ago
I have a crazy idea that would vastly improve modern laptop design. You would build in some sort of a reversible conduit interrupt device (may be lost tech but I hear rumors that it's possible) that would allow the end user to disconnect the battery. This would solve the #1 problem with laptops which is that sometimes I need to use the laptop and it's out of battery because it decided to turn itself on in my bag.
- baq 3y ago
  That’s only started to happening in the last few years. Before 2015 laptops had good manners - when they were told to shut down, they kept being shut down.
  - pbmonster 3y ago
    I thought I was alone with that problem. Do you know what the culprit is? What keeps randomly waking up modern laptops? It's so stupid, too. There is exactly one single case when I want my laptop to wake up with the lid closed: when I plug in the dock. Every single other case where it wakes up with the lid closed is a bug in my eyes.
    - amiga-workbench 3y ago
      Its the removal of S3 sleep states from the BIOS/ACPI tables. Now the processor is kept powered on (in a low power state) but any poorly written driver or software can jolt the machine back into a higher power state and superheat your backpack. Intel's rationale is that PC's should function like smartphones and you should be able to stay connected and receive notifications while asleep. I'm not convinced.
      - baq 3y ago
        I think that's actually MS who wants that. I'm not sure there's anyone other than them who's convinced. Fortunately I moved fully remote when COVID started so this hasn't been a problem and also switched to a mac last year - macs seem to be well behaved in this matter.
MichaelRo 3y ago
>> I needed a machine that a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), b) had a high-resolution screen for my lousy eyesight, and c) had a 1-terabyte hard drive. It was the only machine that fit the bill. For a time, I too fell into the trap of looking for "readily made laptop" with shiny specs, only to eventually notice that getting ripped off is an understatement. Like spot a decent CPU-specc'd machine but with with only 16 Gb RAM in 2023, want 32 Gb? Pay double! So I took my brother's advice, which I also use for TVs and what else: buy the cheapest brand that offers the specs. All sellers are required to provide 2 years of warranty and at entry level price, worst case you can buy a brand new and better spec'd device if it breaks just after 2 years. But it usually lasts a lot more, by pure statistics: to ensure it lasts 2 years on average, it must me a lot more sturdy than that. So what I do now? I'm buying "gaming laptops". For several things: - They have decent specs. Relatively powerful CPU, good cooling so the solder won't melt on the motherboard if I compile a long program (happened to my nephew actually). - I don't care about laptop's screen and weight. I'm a professional software developer which means 99.9% of the time the laptop sits on my desktop hooked to one or two 27 inch 4k monitors, along with a proper keyboard and mouse. And when it's not, it's just in my bag in transit to another desktop. When you look at LinkedIn pictures, people are being served the fairy tale of the "developer" who programs in bed or on a couch or in a coffee shop sipping a latte ... nothing but corporate bullshit. - And first and foremost, they are UPGRADEABLE. I can take the laptop WITHOUT LOSING WARRANTY, open it and add more RAM and another SSD. Which means that the price of getting a 32 Gb of RAM machine is now about $30-50$ more and not another time the price I paid for the laptop! Last laptop I bought was a Lenovo Legion 5, AMD Ryzen 5 6600H, 15.6" Full HD IPS 144 Hz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 4GB GDDR6 for €500. It's not the main purpose but I don't mind if I can play CS2 at 200 FPS in addition to programming on it :P
- m463 3y ago
  > I'm buying "gaming laptops". step 1: disable rgb. Honestly, I wish the "lunchbox" style laptops existed. EDIT: I remember dolch lunchbox style laptops from a long time ago (search for "dolch pac") EDIT2: wow, search for FlexPAC III Of course, if these were a thing, somebody would bring it to starbucks.
nirui 3y ago
This is another Thinkpad festival post? Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have this DELL Studio laptop released back in September, 2009, and it can still kick very well too if I decide to recruit it back to my "workforce". I retired it just 3~4 years ago because I got a T480. Heck, some of my code (old versions) for the same project that I'm currently working on is still on that laptop. Before it's retirement days, it work 24/7 a day every day all year around, burned through two power supplies, sometimes 90 degrees C on the poor Intel Duo Core CPU etc. But it never dies. So, me looking these Thinkpad posts, I never really feel quite impressed...
- felixhammerl 3y ago
  Wife uses a mid-2013 Macbook Air as a daily driver still after >10 years, works in academia. What happened is simply that CPU stopped being the thing that made stuff slow, so a mid-2010s upper midrange can still hold its own today, ssd was already good then, and memory plateaued around 8gb for entry level machines some 5 years ago. So as long as your thermals don't suck, your ssd doesn't smoke out, and your keyboard holds up, you can still use these machines today. If you maxed out memory then, that is.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Atleast for PC hardware, CPU development was severely stifled by lack of competition most of the 2010s. Intel had no credible competition until AMD got their shit together with Zen, and wasted no opportunity to rest on their laurels. This is also why both newer Zen and also Apple's new silicon is seemingly making such fantastic advances. It's essentially catching up to where we could have been all along if we had a healthier market.
  - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
    Even more so with desktops. I am running a 2014 CPU i7 4790k with 32GB RAM and a 1070ti. Due to it being a desktop w noctua cooler the temps never get high. Keyboard and mouse you just replace when worn out. This year I am thinking about upgrading. But my 2019 Thinkpad already feels slow... so I never got laptops for long use. They suck.
pmontra 3y ago
My ZBook 15 will be 10 years old next February. It's still the machine that pays my bills because it can be upgraded and repaired. I replaced the keyboard myself many times after the keys worn down (arrows or one on the left.) I upgraded the RAM to its max (32 GB) and replaced all its disks (HDD and DVDRW) with SSDs. It was born with 750 GB, it's 3 TB now. Furthermore its software got better along the years. It feels faster and the fan doesn't spin on much. It was born with Windows 7 which I replaced with Ubuntu 12.04 on the very first day. It's Debian 11 now.
10729287 3y ago
Those posts will just end up getting all the sneakerheads buying Lenovo laptops to flip them
walteweiss 3y ago
>Create an account to read the full story. The author made this story available to Medium members only. If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.
- omar_alt 3y ago
  I enjoy reading posts about second hand Thinkpads outliving modern laptops but it is ironic to put a blog post on lo-tech frugality behind a paywall.
deng 3y ago
I have a laptop from the 90s that still works. So a laptop that does not die is, in itself, not that big of a deal. The main reason why I pretty much exclusively buy old business Thinkpads is that they are incredibly serviceable, and you can get replacement parts for many years (and also very cheap if the laptop is older). Also, there's a big community for running Linux on Thinkpads, so the hardware is usually very well supported, including kernel modules for fan control and stuff like that. However, it's not all sunshine. Especially during the T4xx era, many business Thinkpads had absolutely terrible displays by default (can usually be replaced with a proper one, but adds additional cost). The T440 had a horrible trackpad where they ditched the dedicated buttons (again, can usually be replaced it with a proper one). So do some research before buying. Also, before buying from a commercial refurbisher, check if there's a Thinkpad community forum or similar in your area of the world, you'll often find stuff much cheaper there.
daniel31x13 3y ago
> If all you need is a basic machine for doing stuff on the web, making video calls (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, plenty of Linux-specific video-chat works tres well), listening to music or using Discord? It’s perfect. There's no doubt about it. > To be fair, I’m not using this machine as my main, daily laptop. If I did, it’s more likely something might have busted a while ago. Exactly! The thing that so many people misunderstand is the choice of machine for your work essentially represents a B2B business between you and the company selling these devices. When someone who truly needs a MacBook, that means they're usually making so much that the price of the machine they're spending on is little in comparison to the profit they're making from it. On the other hand yes, I do believe companies like Apple are really taking this too far. Side note: Don't get me wrong here, I also have an old Dell Precision, but not as my main, daily machine. It's just ironic how some people really try so hard to integrate these machines for their work environment.
causi 3y ago
Damn I miss mouse buttons below touchpads.
31carmichael 3y ago
I have a working IBM Thinkpad X30 from around 2000.
Aerbil313 3y ago
While everyone is bragging about their old ThinkPads, I am typing these on a Pi Zero 2W. I spilt coffee on my ~8 years old HP Laptop two weeks ago. While waiting for my parents to buy me an iPhone 15 Pro (with its USB-C to connect to the monitor) I am using a Pi Zero 2W + Asus Zenscreen Portable Monitor + 10.000 mAH Powerbank setup, connecting to my server via RDP. Github Pro student credits on DigitalOcean, all free. * Excellent power usage. Pi uses ~0.7 W and the screen is listed at 3.6W, though I believe it's actually ~7W. * Each part upgradable and replaceable in a whim. Can change your motherboard or RAM, or add an extra GPU or an entirely different machine, as all of them are up in the clouds! * Extremely lightweight, 0.75 kg. * Incredibly thin, 9 mm. Its stand is also its cover, requires no extra bag, except for the HDMI and USB cables. Powerbank? I carry it everywhere anyway. Keyboard? It has only a slightly larger surface area than an iPhone 15 when folded, can carry in my pocket, a cheap Chinese bluetooth one I had lying around (couldn't be bothered to troubleshoot the USB on the Pi.). * Unmatched connectivity, I have unthrottled datacenter internet, and I can use my phone's LTE connection to connect to the server without skyrocketing my cellular bill, as the only thing transmitted is the screen. School dormitory Wi-Fi is not the best, it introduces extra latency. OTOH, It lags while scrolling a web page. Bottleneck must be the CPU, because there is no lag when connecting via my iPhone 7. I used NoMachine with the same setup in the past and it had no such lag, could even play YouTube videos from what I remember. I also didn't overclock the Pi to the max and am not using a heatsink nor a fan, and didn't do any sort of performance tuning for the RDP at all. Because I can't be bothered, it works bearably for my school work, and gonna get my new iPhone next week anyway. Now don't ask me how I managed to re-pair the keyboard with the Pi when it got unpaired and the Pi's local IP got reassigned randomly, from Alpine Linux running in iSH on my current iPhone 7...
- regularfry 3y ago
  The problem I have with the zero 2w is that building anything on it seems to knock out the wifi. I've got a couple on the local network as terminals and if I try to build (e.g.) a recent python interpreter, the ssh connection dies to the extent that I have to power-cycle them. I presume they're just going into swap, but they never come back. Now that's not your use-case if you've got a remote server and all you're using them for is a thin client, but they aren't exactly usable as general purpose devices. I do like the sound of that setup, though. Portable monitor plus powerbank is neat, and I can't help wondering if that plus a wireguard network wouldn't be the right way to do things away from home. There are more efficient SBCs but if the screen is the big drain that's exactly the choice I'd make too.
mcv 3y ago
There are also older Macbooks that outlasted my Thinkpad. Maybe the X1 Extreme was a poor choice, but there are also a lot of people who say that Thinkpads just aren't as good as they used to be. Macbooks also went through a period of poor quality. I hope Thinkpad improves again in the future.
RalfWausE 3y ago
I use an Thinkpad R60 since about 11 years ago as my daily driver. Why? Because its - for me - the perfect laptop. Yeah, i know that there are more modern systems out there that would have a much better battery lifetime, are faster and lighter (and as the systems guy / head of it for my employer i tested quiet a few) but no laptop i tried so far has achieved the level of "thinkpaddieness" my old R60 has. I bought the R60 cheap at a time where i was unemployed and - to put it mildly - dirt poor. My previous desktop system (a quiet powerful gaming rig) was fried by an overcurrent due to lightning strike and this left me without a usable computer. Which is bad if you are looking for work and need to write applications and CVs. At that time it had an spinning 40 GB HDD, a cracked case, loose and wobbly display hinges, a battery life of about 15 minutes and an not very powerful Core Duo CPU. It was slow, looked like trash but it helped me getting back on track. After landing a new job i started to fix the R60 and make it a bit more usable. The first thing i did was to order a new battery. Thankfully, the Thinkpad has an easy changeable battery: Just turn it over, push the quick release and put in the new battery (a feature that is utterly missing on todays laptops). The next thing that i swapped out was the hard disk: At the time i had landed a new job but my financial situation was still very edgy, so i rummaged through local private ads until i found a very cheap (about 10 Euros) 120 GB HDD. This gave me a bit more "breathing room" and got me to a really usable - albeit slow - system i could run OpenBSD on. This was the setup i worked with for the next couple of years. At some point i had again the financial means to easily replace the system with something more up to date... but for what? I could code on this system and do everything i needed it for. A couple of years later (at this time the Thinkpad had already got an SSD and an major optical overhaul), on one morning the display was broken. On one half it displayed everything ok, on the other half it was more or less pixel mush. Thankfully, even that was no problem. I bought an replacement display of ebay for about 30 Euros (which came from an better model and had a better resolution), spend a few hours looking at a couple of repair videos on YouTube and read a bit i could easily change the display. Now, a major problem was the Core Duo CPU (being 32 Bit), a couple of months ago i looked into the matter if i could future proof the R60 a bit more... and yes, no problem! I found out that i could easily switch out the CPU for an Core 2 Duo, so i again looked into ebay and bought a brand new (ok, NOS) CPU for about 10 Euros, spend an lazy afternoon taking the R60 apart (and as i had it open already cleaningit) and switched out the CPU. The Core 2 Duo may be still an outdated design, but it was a major power boost and made especially surfing the modern web (a thing i try to avoid but is sometimes nescessary) much more palatable. So... with the story of the Thinkpad written down, will i at some time replace it? Yeah, very likely, but this is a day in the far future and even then i will perhaps go for something like the MNT Reform (in my mind a spiritual successor of the Thinkpads of the olden days). But as i said: Not now or in the foreseeable future
wazoox 3y ago
My 2009 Macbook still works fine, thanks. The battery is a spicy pillow and the Superdrive is dead, but it works, albeit slowly. It's mostly running Debian nowadays (the last supported MacOS release, 10.12, doesn't even run a modern browser nowadays). I also have a 2007 Sony VAIO in a cupboard running Ubuntu 20.04 just fine, as a backup. Its battery is only good as a UPS nowadays, but the computer works fine.
- lproven 3y ago
  I have a 2009 MBP. Its battery still runs for about 2h, its optical drive worked the last time I tried, and it runs 10.13 which means the current Firefox ESR still works. I am planning to try OCLP on it and see if I can get Big Sur working. That's the last macOS that doesn't want a GPU that supports the Metal APIs, and it should run the latest Firefox and Chrome for a few years yet.
imrehg 3y ago
I have a back-in-the-day (2011) maxed out Thinkpad X201, that was somewhere around $1.5k (whooping max 8GB RAM, etc... :) In the intervening 12 years: - I've replaced the disk at least 2x (going to SSD, and replacing a failed one with a current 1TB this year) - Replaced the cooling fan (1x? 2x? I don't remember) - Replaced the motherboard (that was fun: https://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2022/07/an-open-heart-motherboard-surgery/ https://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2022/07/an-open-heart-motherb...) - Tried to upgrade the wifi card for newer standards (that's a fail, as it seems to be locked down in the BIOS what cards the machine can use) - Managed to set a max frequency to the CPU so now I don't have a thermal shutdown, it works rock solid and still reasonable performance. It sounds like a lot of pain, but it's still my favourite device to work on ever since, ArchLinux humming away with XFCE. Not sure what my next machine will be, but this current one will give a run for its money...
- mkesper 3y ago
  Coreboot should help with newer wifi cards. It seems you need an external flasher for this model, though: https://libreboot.org/docs/install/x200_external.html https://libreboot.org/docs/install/x200_external.html https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200
  - walteweiss 3y ago
    Would appreciate anyone to help me understand how to flash Coreboot with external flasher, never did that.
- amiga-workbench 3y ago
  I patched out the BIOS whitelist from my X201 and ran the image through me_cleaner. All that stopped working was automatic fan control, I needed a daemon running constantly to set the fan speed. That thing has been catching dust for about 2 years now since I upgraded to an X270, which is a faster machine but is nowhere near as nice.
vinc 3y ago
My personal laptop is a Thinkpad T440p from 2013 with a modern SSD. I use mostly the command line and a web browser on ArchLinux. For my usage it is just as fast as my modern work laptop! I also have a Thinkpad X200 from 2008 and this one feel its age a bit so I use it to run my hobby operating system that only have a command line interface and no web browser. I like that both of them are compatible with Libreboot+SeaBIOS and I'm sad that this isn't the case for new models anymore. This together with the ability to disassemble them so easily make them perfect for me. I'm a bit worried about 10 years from now when I'll have to find a new computing platform.
dilliwal 3y ago
My thinkpad around 11 years old and another Acer Laptop 14 years old (my dad still uses it regularly) are still working but they are too slow for modern video calling softwares. If I have to do just regular coding and no video calling, they are still the best.
LeonM 3y ago
Reading this using a 2010 MBP, the first generation of retina ones without optical disk drive. I no longer use it for work for continuity reasons, but I could, it runs all my applications without breaking a sweat (back then this was the maxed out i7 option with 16GB ram) - Display was replaced under warranty after 2 years due to ghosting - Upgraded the 256GB SSD to a 1TB model after ~5 years - Had the battery replaced by Apple store after ~7 years - Mainboard was damaged by Apple store (USB no longer worked after battery replacement), after a lot of back-and-forth they replaced it under warranty So I'll admit, not much of the laptop is still original, but the fact that I can still daily it for my development workflow is impressive. This thing just won't die. For work I replaced the MBP with a Lenovo X1 Extreme, partially due to the praise of Lenovo here on HN. The total investment of the Lenovo was higher than the MBP, but I was planning on doing another 10 years with the Lenovo. Though the build quality is OK-ish, but I have never been satisfied with the it. Linux support (the main reason I bought Lenovo) is rather bad, the laptop gets very hot, fan noise and coil whine make it annoying to use. The battery completely died after just 2 years, and Lenovo could not supply a replacement (they actually recommended searching on Amazon for a aftermarket replacement!). SSD died after 3 years, luckily they are replaceable. One fan died after 4 years, had to source a used one from ebay since Lenovo no longer offers replacement fans. Had to replace the thermal compound on the heatsinks twice due to the laptop starting to overheat and shut down. I know, I know, sample size of one and YMMV, but I don't think I'll buy another Lenovo laptop after this one.
yCloser 3y ago
I see absolutely nothing special in a pc that lives 10 years. Most pc last that long. And my centrino-1 vaio laptop from 2004 is still alive
- Propelloni 3y ago
  Agreed. My dad (74 now) uses an IBM Thinkpad T23 (2001, fully upgraded to 1Gb of RAM) running Linux with an old version of Rocrail to control his model railroad.
deleted 3y ago
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aa-jv 3y ago
I too have a Thinkpad of this variety, living long and rocking onwards, but I also have a 2015 Macbook Pro running Ubuntu Studio that gives the Lenovo a run for its money. In this configuration, the Macbook Pro is my favourite since its a much more physically comfortable machine to work on. Point is, both of these machines are excellent, well-supported and Simply Work™ Great ..
ribit 3y ago
And we have a bunch of 15 year old Macs in the basement that outlasted any PCs we ever owned. What’s the point of these personal anecdotes? Lenovos build quality went down the drain in the last 10 years and their service is awful.
- baz00 3y ago
  I think the same is true of Apple stuff. I mean the current line of soldered SSDs, RAM and pain in the ass to remove batteries is quite frankly annoying as hell. And Apple service isn't much better (it has been 2 weeks and I'm waiting for them to refund AppleCare on something but they have a bug in their system that is preventing it that no one knows how to fix). As for Lenovo, at that price, I can usually just buy a whole replacement machine either new with warranty or new old stock for around 2/3 usual retail price and get it next day. I paid 730 GBP for my T14 gen 3 for example. And I got to stick bigger RAM and SSD in it and the battery comes out in 30 seconds. Granted the battery sucks but meh, you can't win everything.
  - wiredfool 3y ago
    The 2016+ era MBPs were awful. The previous 2 generations were good, but had their occasional issues. Like the drive cable on the unibody MBP. I got 7 years out of a 2012 Air. The jury is still out on the m1 era, but it's looking better. We'll know for sure in about 5 years.
    - baz00 3y ago
      Yeah agree there. I had a 2010 MBP that I rather liked. The M1 era isn't looking good based on the number of bricked/dead and iCloud locked machines I see on eBay either corporate discards or damaged and not worth repairing. Also low quantities of parts on the market as well. Older MacBooks and PCs were usually pretty heavily shredded for parts but the same is definitely not true for the new ones. I suspect we've entered a new era of e-waste more than anything.
      - mtillman 3y ago
shp0ngle 3y ago
I have such a laptop, but it doesn't survive update to Windows 11. Installing Windows 11 on old Thinkpad makes it go slow. Luckily, there is Windows 10 LTSC bought from dubious serial code reseller. (OK, they possiblly pirate it, but.... Windows 10 LTSC is so good I recommend it to everyone. And MSFT won't sell it to me legally...) edit: oh, this guy uses Ubuntu. I don't have nerves for Linux.
- baz00 3y ago
  Windows 11 is horribl.e My exit plan is to move to windows 10 LTSC. I have some MSDN keys. I'll worry about that one day in the future though. I just exited the Apple ecosystem so I'm still getting my stuff together. I also don't have the nerves for Linux. I want the computer to be a thing to solve problems not a thing to cause problems to solve :)
  - alexvitkov 3y ago
    You don't consider the first paragraph "a problem to solve"?
    - baz00 3y ago
      I'm slowly boiling myself into a portable software space. I have a couple of hard requirements that force me to use windows (or macOS) that i can kill in the next 2 years. I can put the LTSC migration off until 2025 and I can then push the LTSC EOL decision off until 2027. That's 4 years. A lot changes in that time.
  - graemep 3y ago
    > I also don't have the nerves for Linux. I want the computer to be a thing to solve problems not a thing to cause problems to solve :) That is only true of Linux for specific things like gaming, or if you cannot resist the temptation to try stuff and tinker. Even having moved to a relatively unstable/problematic Linux distro (Manjaro) do not find myself spending any more time solving problems than when I used Windows (which as a long time ago, so not applicable to current Windows).
jlokier 3y ago
I'm using a Macbook Pro retina from late 2013 as my daily driver, for work as a software developer and other things. It recently passed 10 years, being used every day including weekends. It's been great. I bought it when two non-Apple laptops failed on me within weeks of each other. A Fujitsu-Siemens which was also great until then, and a Compaq. I'd been avoiding Apple for years in line with the GNU project's stance, but after a big life event I decided to try it out. I transferred over my Linux installation from the previous laptops to a VM on the Mac, so I can four-finger-swipe between the two OSes as if they are running side by side. The Mac's 16GB RAM is bit tight these days but that's mostly due to memory used by Firefox with my many tabs. The 512GB SSD has been annoying for a long time as I filled it up fairly quickly, and rarely find the time to clean things up. When I bought it, I thought I'd be able to upgrade the SSD capacity a few years later at third-party prices, much lower than Apple's prices. But it turned out to be a non-standard interface with expensive upgrades, and I didn't end up upgrading, just living with it. A few keys are getting a bit unreliable, but not enough to make is unusable. The battery is still going surprisingly well after over 10 years of daily, intensive use, a lot of it on battery. It's down to 55% of design capacity. I think that's excellent compared with what I saw with the non-Apple laptops before, where I bought a number of third party batteries to carry around with me and swap, and they deteriorated faster. However the battery flakes out occasionally when the system is under load now. I'm getting the battery replaced by Apple in a few weeks, at their standard battery repair fee (which is reasonable), and as a handy side effect of how they do this the keyboard issues should be fixed. I'm in the market for a new laptop. But not because the current beauty doesn't work! It's just getting strained with not enough RAM and SSD for my needs now, and Homebrew no longer supported. (Especially precompiled binaries; some HB recipes fail to build, and some require several tens of GB free space to build and take over an hour per package, like I remember from my Gentoo days...). Whoever mentioned OpenCore Legacy Patcher, thanks for the reminder, that may help a lot! I held out for the release of the Apple M3 over the last few years. Previously waiting for the M2 after I decided to take the leap from x86 to ARM, but that dragged out, and then I decided it was expensive and to wait for the M3 to see what 3nm would get us. Now I'm excited to be planning to buy an M3 Max. I won't skimp on RAM or SSD this time, having learned it really slowed me a lot over the last few years, swapping (without realising for a few years this was why browsing was very janky), and often having to find things to delete to free up some space. Besides, the things I work on now use terabytes of storage, and for my tasks I think I'll find 128GB RAM useful too. I plan to keep using my trusty 10 year old 2013 MBP as my main local x88, for x86 development and testing, running x86 Linux and Windows VMs, and as a baseline for GPU graphics dev where I want to have something near the slow end to target to ensure the software runs well for people who don't have the latest devices.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
I have the exact model, but despite my best attempts at software, firmware, hardware maintenance it still overheats and takes about 5 minutes to boot up. Nothing to rave about.
shlip 3y ago
I have 2 Dell Inspiron 1525 from 2008, still kicking bottoms as DAW under Manjaro. I used to have a a Dell Latitude d630 from 2007 running Debian fine in 2018 but I gave it away. Compared to my 2008 macbook pro, that cost me 1400€ at the time, and suddenly died on me 4 years later for no obvious reason (this series was subject to a recall campaign due to its nvidia 8600 gpu, but I missed the elegibility window by a few months). TBH though, my dad uses a 2009 macbookpro with W10 and it runs just fine with an SSD. All in all, you never know, YMMV .
davidgerard 3y ago
We've been finding Lenovo is not great lately. We've had multiple X390 and now T14gen3 need to be sent back under warranty, some multiple times. Could be a batch of lemons coincidentally hit the UK with both models, or it could be that Lenovo's quality is not up the mark lately.
anonzzzies 3y ago
I cannot kill my x220. It keeps going. I use it a lot as it's a magical machine even though it's that old.
darkr 3y ago
I was using a ~2011 x220 as my personal laptop until 2021 or so, when I replaced it with an X1 carbon. This lasted almost 2 years until it stopped charging, and Lenovo wanted more than the laptop was worth to repair it. I've since switched back to the x220. Whilst I miss the extra memory and CPU grunt, it gets the job done. When this one finally dies I'm not sure what will replace it, but it certainly won't be another Lenovo.
- sva_ 3y ago
  I used an x1 carbon for about 9 years, and it is still running without issues.
throwaw33333434 3y ago
my 2013 is Macbook is still working fine. I can still watch 1,5h movie on it. It's doing better than 2017 shite.
t312227 3y ago
thinkpad x200s from march 2009 - steadily approaching 15 years -, still works great to read news-sites, browser hackernews, watch some vidos on youtube etc. ... using the current version of linuxmint / mate edition :))
phil21 3y ago
Unfortunately after a lifetime of being a Thinkpad fanboy to the point of absurdity, the T410s is the laptop that made me move to Apple and not look back since. The battery life on that thing was something to behold. Couldn't even last for regular "office work" during a 3hr flight. The T40 and T60 lineup has a very special place in my heart, and I have a few of those laying around still operating as "headless" servers. The integrated crash cart is great!
jhoechtl 3y ago
Medium is the epitom of the internet most of us do not want. Where have all the wordpress-sites gone?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vinckr 3y ago
That is nothing, I am still using my lightweight ENIAC from 1951. So far works perfectly and I only sometimes have to replace the power plant that runs it.
- pron 3y ago
  But did you at least upgrade it to support USB-C?
mettamage 3y ago
I'm so happy with this post. I needed to buy a cheap laptop for a family member and I went so all in on Mac a decade ago that I really don't know the lay of the land when it comes to Windows. I'll just get a Lenovo Thinkpad second hand :)
- marci 3y ago
  Avoid the T480S It has 2 internal batteries, and with older batteries, they can fail to switch from one to the other when they reach 0%. Models with a removable battery are a bit bulkier, but I think of greater value.
  - k9unit 3y ago
    I've got a $150 T480s. It only has one, non hot swappable battery. Though it can be easily replaced. The T480 non s has 2 batteries. One external and one internal. Unless you count the cmos battery, which can be replaced on either. The build quality on the T480s is also higher.
    - marci 3y ago
      My bad, it's the t470s
underscoring 3y ago
I knew what laptop this was going to be even before I clicked. Although for balance I did have a W520i that died. They're not all gold.
cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
The T480 was last non-Apple cargo cult, repairable design. The T490 and onward aren't good. The problem though of old hardware is lack of CPU features needed by some operating systems and the presence of hardware vulnerabilities, and the obsolete ports they contain like FireWire, slow USB, and PCMCIA.
mark_undoio 3y ago
We used to use refurbed Thinkpad X220s for all engineers in the business - cheap, widely available, capable enough and with a docking station to use as a desktop. They'd take 16GB of RAM, though the official spec said the maximum was 8GB. We moved onto L390 Yogas afterwards, which takes up to 32GB of RAM - I've been very happy with mine. Both have been pretty solid for me, though I think the X220 probably had a lot more rough treatment overall.
- mark_undoio 3y ago
  There's also quite a nice story on Libreboot running on them e.g. https://minifree.org/ https://minifree.org/ I've not tried that myself yet, though!
devX3 3y ago
220 240 was peak laptop hardware in comparison what we have now. Best keyboard, durability etc. still to this day use a x220 to code.
wrzuteczka 3y ago
My Bose QC 35 headphones are like that. I just replace the ear pads every few years and they are like new.
k3liutZu 3y ago
I just booted up my 2009 MacBook Pro since it's the only machine I still have with a CD/DVD drive. Some keys are not working (eg R, T, P, probably others) so I had to use the accessibility on screen keyboard. I was surprised it still booted up and I was able to use the optical drive.
sdflhasjd 3y ago
I was thinking about this the other day when I was using my 11 year old X1 Carbon. It was used an abused for most of those years and aside from the battery which doesn't have the life it used to, everything else works just as well as it did when it came out of the box (oh, and the 3G modem that will stop working soon) My 2017 MacBook Pro on the other hand was comparatively coddled, yet in spite of Apple's quality engineering... one of the keys doesn't work, the coating of the screen has worn in places, the USB ports don't hold cables without them falling out, the touchbar occasionally flickers, it can overheat with worse performance than the X1. Some of these are just luck (but the 2017 MBP was probably Apple's worst product in recent memory for me), but what can't be attributed to luck is the support. Okay, neither Apple nor Lenovo really supports either of those machines any more, but the Macbook will not receive the Sonoma update, and as a consequence at some point will no longer work with the latest XCode. The X1 on the other hand is still running the latest Windows 10 and probably will do for another 5 years.
- hackpelican 3y ago
  The 2017 MBP is indeed horrible hardware. You’ll find many testimonies of 2012-2015 MacBooks being incredibly resilient. The new 2019-2023 models are too recent to judge, but seem to be back on track resiliency wise.
fefe23 3y ago
> Create an account to read the full story. No. I shall not. > To make Medium work, we log user data. By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy. That's now how this works. Please don't use Medium, post to Medium, or share Medium links. Sites like this are a cancer on the Internet.
- kbns 3y ago
  including quora.
  - sparrowInHand 3y ago
    quora is ccp owned by now?
    - wutwutwat 3y ago
      [flagged]
- tim333 3y ago
  You can get it here without https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
- tonystubblebine 3y ago
  The author put this behind a paywall. How is that any different to you than Substack or the NYTimes?
  - scblock 3y ago
    Those are both unusable too. If only the author had put it on his own blog like in the good old days.
  - close04 3y ago
    The paywall is the author's choice and anyone is free to reject creating a Medium account, no damage done on either side. OP's second objection on the other hand looks less "rejectable" than a paywall because the damage is done before you have the chance to reject it: > By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy. Medium's implicit assumption that by clicking on their link the user accepted the policies is illegal under GDPR. It doesn't give the chance to reject before being tracked.
reify 3y ago
Create an account to read the full story. The author made this story available to Medium members only. If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us. Very unhelpful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I would have liked to read the whole story where is the non paywalled link?
cglace 3y ago
My M1 MacBook Pros keyboard and trackpad quit working after almost exactly one year. Apple now wants 600 to fix the issue. This is the closest I've come to considering abandoning Apple but I don't know what to switch to.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  My conclusion, drawn from decades of electronics purchases, is that AppleCare is the only extended warranty worth purchasing. It's only RARELY come up for me, but since I use my machine for work knowing I'm covered for 3 years is nice. This USED to be the period I'd keep a computer, too, but for about the last maybe 8 years (?) I find the upgrade-at-36-months thing isn't as much of a slam dunk as it used to be. I kept my last one like 4.5. My current one is 2-year-old M1 Macbook Pro, and it's still crazy fast to me. I can't imagine that's gonna change in a year.
  - windowsrookie 3y ago
    Apple allows you to extend AppleCare after the 3 years now. I still have Applecare coverage on my 2018 15" MacBook Pro.
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      I did not know this. Thanks.
- windowsrookie 3y ago
  My M1 MacBook Air has had two hardware failures now. Both would have cost over $500 each to repair without Applcare+. Applecare has been essential, but it adds extra cost on top of Apple's already premium prices. It has also made me loose trust in this machine. I had to buy an emergency laptop because I was in Europe and nowhere near an Apple store with the most recent failure. This is also the closest I have come to considering abandoning Apple.
  - cglace 3y ago
manchmalscott 3y ago
I don't have a medium account so I can only see the first paragraph ish, but I will comment that I used to daily drive a thinkpad T440p that I bought off ebay for ~$140, and ran arch linux on it. I was living the dream every article or think-piece like this seems to believe in. I now (for a laptop) use an M1 pro macbook pro. The reason why I was open to buying a new laptop at all is because I had gotten used to watching youtube videos at 2x speed, and it literally couldn't handle it. The video would freeze and the audio would keep going and the only fix was to refresh the page multiple times per video. I recently went on a week long trip, and needed a linux laptop, so I brought it with me, and was working on an OpenGL project. Practically every time I hit compile, the entire X session would freeze, to the point where the clock in the KDE taskbar wasn't even updating anymore, and the only fix was to hard reset the machine (I have never gotten magic sysreq working on that computer). I now have a framework 16 on preorder to be my linux laptop. I also never got the webcam to be detected by linux (looking in lsusb, lspci, etc) even though it was enabled in the bios, the battery life wasn't enough to make it through a day of classes on one charge, and it ran too hot to be comfortable on my lap. To its credit, the keyboard was nice, the trackpoint was fine, and when the trackpad died entirely, I was able to buy a new one (also on ebay) and swap them out without issue. With an SSD, it boots very quickly. That's about where my good things to say end. "Just buy a used laptop from over a decade ago" is not good advice. Operating systems, the apps we use, the websites we use, are no longer optimized for a 10 year old dual core with 10 year old intel HD graphics. You're better off saving that money to buy something newer.
- epicide 3y ago
  It's definitely good advice to be mindful of one's needs. I have my own personal anecdotes about getting burnt by underestimating my actual needs when attempting projects like daily driving an older laptop. At the same time, keep in mind that the biggest tradeoff tends to be convenience. For example, a YouTube script plus local video player, such as MPV, works a treat on these older machines. Even if some video formats don't work great, you a) actually have an option for converting [0], and b) you are dropping all of the cycles spent on the non-video-watching parts of a YouTube video page. Yes, that tends to make watching a 10 minute video kind of annoying when you spend a minute or two just on the overhead of downloading/opening/deleting it. Personally, I've sometimes found that to be a subtle push to read more text-based content instead of watching a bunch of videos. Similarly, it pushes me to favor longer-form videos that might involve more information and/or subtleties that the shorter videos might skip over (perhaps largely for SEO reasons). All of that might or might not be a net-positive or even a possibility depending on needs, of course. I've found a lot of personal motivation and fulfillment by looking for those sorts of alternate ways of doing things. Sometimes, slowing down (in more ways than just FLOPS) can lead you down rabbit holes that are not only fulfilling and interesting, but educational. [1] Your point that it's bad advice to "just buy an [old] used laptop" definitely stands, but I'll just amend it with the caveat of "... depending on your needs/uses". To each their own. [0]: There are also in-browser tricks/plugins for making the YouTube site itself lighter, but personally, I find throwing more instructions into the browser to be somewhat counterproductive. A bit like calculating how much extra fuel you need in order to carry the additional fuel, etc. The tradeoff is convenience, of course. [1]: I'm also lucky to no longer have to deal with things like customers breathing down my neck with deadlines. So if I spend an extra 5 minutes doing something that used to take me 2 minutes, that's fine.
arp242 3y ago
https://scribe.rip/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c https://scribe.rip/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c
AzzieElbab 3y ago
Somehow I knew this was about thinkpad b4 opening the article
electrondood 3y ago
I knew without clicking that was a Lenovo Thinkpad. Those things are beasts. Also, fuck Medium. "Log in to continue reading..." paywall. Okay, log in. "To continue reading, subscribe to $AUTHOR..." Useless waste of my time.
bluedino 3y ago
I'm more amazed that someone can live with that atrocious Lenovo screen for that long. I can live with the thickness, the not so great battery life (unless you go with that monster 'slice' battery), and the heat. But the screen... I went from a ThinkPad to a MacBook Pro in 2010. The screen was amazing. It was bright, it had viewing angles, it wasn't fuzzy... The trackpad, slimness, instant-on, speakers, and everything else was just icing on the cake. Later on, I picked up a 2560x1440 ThinkPad X1 and the screen was great, Lenovo had finally leveled the playing field. But there was a pretty big gap in my life where I went without a ThinkPad.
t0bia_s 3y ago
I have ThinkPad x201 since 2012. Still working as new. Few years ago it has "fan error" on boot. So I dissemble whole laptop to get to fan (reserve whole evening) and finally put a tinny amount of vaseline on the fan shaft, put new paste on CPU/GPU and it still works. Silent and temperatures wont go above 60°C. Power comsumption on idle is however high to nowadays standard. About 42W. I honestly cannot imagine more durable laptop that kids use today.
otterpro 3y ago
As much as I'm fan of Thinkpad and I hate the idea of buying modern laptop, I don't want to buy a decade-old laptop. I just want a modern-ish laptop with decent CPU and easily-replaceable battery, upgradable RAM and SSD. That leads me to Framework laptop (but it is so much more expensive than buying old thinkpad). Thinkpad T420 is already showing its age and is too slow to run some modern or cpu-intensive apps (I wish it weren't true). Also, eventually ARM cpu might take over the x86/64 cpu, and when that happens, I'd be sad but the T420 would be relegated to running Home Assistant or for playing retro emulation.
memsom 3y ago
My "just won't die" laptop is my trusty MacBook Pro 2012 pre-retina. I have owned it for 8 years and it is still perfectly usable. I can get it to run Ventura with OCLP and honestly, it is only that I now really, really need something with Apple Silicon for dev work that I am considering an upgrade. It is a beast and I believe it even has the original battery (I got it used, so not 100% sure.)
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Tommstein 3y ago
Writing this from my 2009 System76 laptop.
simonblack 3y ago
My 13-year-old T410 Thinkpad is also eternal. I've bought and thrown away several other laptops since I got that one back in 2010. I've upgraded it to an SSD 4TB from the original 500GB 2.5" HDD, and I replaced the keyboard when one of the arrow-keys stopped working for some reason. It was super expensive, but my goal with laptops is to buy something with sufficiently excellent build-quality that it’ll last for years. That's my philosophy too, both with computers and with cars. In words that's stated pretty much as: "Buy twice as good and buy half as often". Laptops I keep as long as possible, cars usually about 10 years or more. A Mercedes is hardly run in at 10 years of age.
m0d0nne11 3y ago
No, I will - of course! - not create a medium account. What a $hi++y obstacle to hit right in the middle of the posting.
- lproven 3y ago
  It's worse than that. I have a Medium account. I still couldn't read it. It doesn't just need a Medium account, it needs a PAID Medium account.
IYasha 3y ago
I did not read the article on purpose at first. Because I KNEW it would be ThinkPad! PS: guess what I'm typing this on :D

184 points by ShikhaM 3y ago

thrtythreeforty 3y ago

https://archive.today/QJyfs https://archive.today/QJyfs

thewarpaint 3y ago
Thank you!
bouke 3y ago
I get stuck in a captcha redirect flow.
- zarino 3y ago
  If you’re using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) that’ll be why: https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
  - Rogach 3y ago
    Doesn't look like it: $ host archive.is 1.1.1.1 archive.is has address 192.210.214.166 $ host archive.is 8.8.8.8 archive.is has address 192.210.214.166

zitterbewegung 3y ago

Anecdotal evidence is obvious but Lenovo has at least tried to keep up their quality (don’t buy anything other than the thinkpad line) but Mac durability in the long term may can have issues. I remember that I had to get a repair of two Mac’s I have owned (but one time Apple upgraded me to the newer version so that’s why I am loyal.)

thrtythreeforty 3y ago
I'll second this: Non-Thinkpad Lenovo laptops are poorly designed trash heaps. Thinkpads have largely retained the build quality that everyone brags on. My tl;dr advice for buying a computer on a budget is, get a T480s off of eBay. They are corporate cast-offs and there are so. many. of them. The R2v3 rating system has become popular. Get one rated C5 or better (cosmetic: minor usage marks only) and F4 or better (functionality: everything works). Spring for one with a backlit keyboard, and a power supply included if you want it turn key. As of this writing this should cost around $250 and the machine should be fairly future-proof including official Win11 support. And excellent Linux compatibility - my fingerprint reader doesn't work, but literally everything else works perfectly.
- genter 3y ago
  I've done what you described multiple times. One other tip is buy one with a lower resolution screen, and then replace the screen with a higher resolution one. Be sure to research this, though, some of the highest resolution screens need a different mobo with a higher pin connector.
  - thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    While possible, I've never found the dollars-per-research-time conversion ratio to be particularly good for this upgrade. My advice is aimed at someone who doesn't want to become a thinkpad nerd (although that route is always available!). Is there any tl;dr equivalent for upgrading screens like you described?
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    I think that advice depends on whether you're looking for "a laptop" or "a project" :) I'm a massive thinkpad fan, as per sibling comments I have half a dozen in the room with me right now, but have never and don't plan to ever replace a screen. My time and hassle are worth more than $0-$30 I'd pay for one that already comes with higher res, and the risk / pain / fidgetiness is outside of my own personal threshold. Not so for others!! But my message is you don't need to replace screens and 3d-pring and dremel new keyboards to get value out of ThinkPads :).

aplummer 3y ago

I feel like this story is also relevant to the 2012 MacBook Pro and Air. My partner kept her air going for more than 10 years, and I saw people who for whatever reason (maybe keyboard or Touch Bar) hold on to those pros long past normal. So consider that another anecdote. Real data would be great here.

Macha 3y ago
Conversely I had a classmate who used to joke about the fact that by the end of our degree, his macbook air had become a 4 "page" (mac)book as both covers were splitting.
jojobas 3y ago
Thinkpads' longevity is largely defined by their repairability and upgradeability, to the point of Frankenpads. Not a single Mac was ever close.
- xcv123 3y ago
  > Not a single Mac was ever close. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#PowerBook_G3_FireWire_(Pismo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#PowerBook_G3_Fire...
seltzered_ 3y ago
Still using MacBooks from that era - a big differentiator might be whether it has integrated graphics or is using a discrete GPU. The discrete GPU ones (i.e MacBook pro) can eventually fail due to the video ram chips getting loose.
- sumuyuda 3y ago
  I had a 2011 MacBook Pro that I used until end of 2022 when the discrete GPU failed for the second time (first time in 2016 Apple replaced the logic board). Replaced it with a Thinkpad T480.
kayyyy 3y ago
+1 to this. got a 2012 MacBook Pro as a gift for middle school, upgraded to a 1tb drive and 8gb ram in high school, again upgraded to an ssd and 16gb ram after starting college in 2019. Kept using it until last year when I got a 16" M1. I still occasionally use it for Windows shenanigans, best gift ever.

ekianjo 3y ago

12 years is nothing! Thinkpads can easily last 2 decades.

michaelcampbell 3y ago
12 years is 60% of 2 decades, so not quite 'nothing'.

dharmab 3y ago

I have a few of these I use in the garage. Slap an SSD and fresh battery in them and install a lightweight Linux and they're damn near perfect as a workbench computer. My only complaint is HD video playback can be a bit slow.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> 12-year-old Thinkpad has outlasted two high-end Macbooks Nice! Our two MacBook Air from 2013 died at about the same time, about six months ago. Despite putting in a faster SSD and changing the battery: eventually RIP is RIP (and thanks for the 10 years). Our recent MacBook Air M1 lasted... 13 months. Upon waking up one morning the screen was fuxx0red. Meanwhile my 2017 LG Gram's screen is ultra flexible and sturdy and can deal with pretty much anything you throw at it, including its previous owner (a friend of mine) waking up one morning and stepping on it by mistake. You can also throw it down concrete stairs and it'll keep working fine: (skip to 0:34... video not made by me but it's basically my experience with that Laptop) https://youtu.be/herYV5TJ_m8 https://youtu.be/herYV5TJ_m8 They're not cheap laptops. They're not "retina display". But, darn, can they take a beating. Not like the precious and ultra brittle porcelain that the latest Macbook are.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aetherspawn 3y ago
I keep forgetting that LG is not HP and that, in contrast to HP, LG makes very durable and high quality things (especially white goods and TVs). Thanks for reminding me. I had never considered their laptop before. I would trust HP because their TV is quite ethical and ie compared to Samsung and other brands, it has never served me Ads and asks permission before collecting my data.
- rfoo 3y ago
  LG Gram is also quite unique in that there's 16 inch variant with only 1.15kg. Right, a 16 inch laptop weight less than a Macbook Air.

noufalibrahim 3y ago

I can relate to this. I needed a laptop quickly and found a factory display piece on eBay. It was an x230. It must have been atleast a year old. I bought it. That was in 2013 or so. I'm still using it. Upgraded the Ram once. The current problems are a slow fan and a poor battery. I haven't fixed them yet but can probably do so. The thing still works. It's running an old Debian and is my primary machine.

ddingus 3y ago
I have the same machine the author shows in the picture. Agree completely. Also have a really old T60p. Might be close to 15 years old now. It has a bad fan. What I did was put the machine into passive cooling and spin the fan up at boot! Kind of like a jump start. Runs just fine.
- neilv 3y ago
  If you want to make it like-new... The T60* fan is a few-dollar part on eBay (plus you'll need a little ordinary PC CPU heat sink thermal compound, and some tape), it's not too hard to replace, and there's documentation. If you download the Hardware Maintenance Manual (HMM) PDF for that model, IIRC, it'll tell you step-by-step how to replace the fan&heatsink assembly. Follow those instructions, but after you remove the assembly, just remove the thermal compound, pull the fan off, tape the new fan onto the old heatsink assembly, apply thermal compound, and resume following the HMM instructions for putting the 'new' assembly into the laptop. Edit: The latest version of the HMM I could find: https://web.archive.org/web/20210429114642/https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/42t7844_04.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210429114642/https://download....
  - ddingus 3y ago
    Thanks! I may do this. I still really like the old machine
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
3y ago

NikolaNovak 3y ago

Yup. The T420 itself is quite big and clunky these days; but I have a couple of T420s ('s' tends to be the slightly smaller version of any given generation of the mainstream T series) in active use around home, and have setup and given a few to friends and family as well They run Windows 10 perfectly fine once you put an SSD in, and they're small enough not to feel like 80's retro-futuristic Cyberpunk deck clunkers :-).

GolfPopper 3y ago
I'm posting from my X220 (circa 2013). It's a laptop of Theseus at this point, but bits of the original still survive. (The keyboard is the single most-replaced component, and I'm on my third motherboard.) I can't stand more modern laptops - I've yet to find a newer laptop keyboard that's comfortable to type on. Performance-wise, it's perfectly adequate to run Linux Mint or Windows 10. And I get a kick out of having an SSD, an MSata, and a M2 drive in the ExpressCard slot (plus the SD card, which I use for additional backup). And at 12"x9" its a very convenient carry size. (Only better carry laptop I've had was a Fujitsu P1120.) And yeah,
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  >>I've yet to find a newer laptop keyboard that's comfortable to type on. FWIW, the anniversary t25 has the good keyboard. It was expensive though not outrageous, so after talking it through with my wife, I bought it when it came out. It's still my primary driver, I use it 8++hrs a day for 6 years running(with no sign of stopping), so it mostly worked out. It's essentially a t470 so easy to maintain (external battery, SD card, and one screw for ram or ssd upgrade). Otherwise, everything after the '30 series had the modern random ridiculous layout. We had a standard for decades, then apple decided each laptop will have unique layout and we all blindly followed - muscle memory is for wussies who don't stare at their keyboard to type! Rant rant grouch grouch :)
  - GolfPopper 3y ago
    Thank you! That's very good to know.

syntaxing 3y ago

I have a X62 (x61 with a custom mobo with updated everything) sitting in a box now. My build is 6(?) years old and still works like a champ. But the battery is the main reason it’s in a box. You have to use it like a desktop and keep it plugged in within a hour or two which really defeats the purpose of a laptop…

sasaf5 3y ago

2012 Samsung Series 9 here, going strong with Debian Stable! I might end up ditching it for something with an OLED screen, but I am sure it will still be running fine.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
My Samsung qx410 died miserably (motherboard gave up the ghost) after only 2 years. Bought in 2010, died in 2012. Replaced it with a hand-me-down thinkpad t510 which is still going strong after 11 years. (Not my primary machine anymore of course but it still works quite well)
jjkeddo199 3y ago
I have a 2013 Samsung Ativ Book 6, the younger brother of your machine! The display broke twice, the keyboard is 85% unresponsive, HDD got replaced with SSD, and jampacked a larger (Ativ Book 8) battery inside. Physical issues aside, it runs Windows 11 passably for a backup PC -- Not bad!

YZF 3y ago

I just had my T420 die on me the other day. It simply will not power on. I do have some spare parts but I think I'll finally cave in and buy a new laptop.

CmdrKrool 3y ago
Try this 'one weird trick' if you haven't already. It sounds unlikely but it's worked for me with Thinkpads once or twice: http://www.masnick.com/2007/09/07/the-secret-thinkpad-powerbutton-code-to-bring-dead-laptops-back-to-life/ http://www.masnick.com/2007/09/07/the-secret-thinkpad-powerb...
- YZF 3y ago
  I've tried it... No go.
linhns 3y ago
Leave it rest a couple of days. Maybe it can turn on again, I got that once on my T470

foobarian 3y ago

Author kinda summed up the problem a few paragraphs in. > I needed a machine that a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), So saying > If you want a modern, sexy, lightweight, high-powered laptop? Go get something pricey from Apple or Microsoft. should rather be > If you need to get modern work done, you will likely need to obtain a modern, high-powered laptop that the modern tools were designed for, and this will likely be something pricey, but not optimized for long service life from Apple or Microsoft.

Swizec 3y ago
Apple is pretty good at long service life. I recently had to upgrade the OS on my moms Air and it was a pain in the butt because she ignored updates for so long that all the SSL authority certs expired and the internet didn’t work. Plus Apple’s upgrade software was no longer supported by the servers – server wanted 2fa, moms laptop was too old to know what that is. After a few manual hops, she is now smoothly running the latest and greatest MacOS on a 9+ year old laptop. Everything works fine.
- foobarian 3y ago
  I've had 3 Macs so far since work is on the Apple train. The first failed due to the discrete GPU desoldering itelf. The second didn't technically fail but the battery swelled up to the point the laptop was almost 1cm from closing at the edges. At least the latter problem is not so much an issue with a removable battery since it's, well, removable :-)
- i5-2520M 3y ago
  They do Sonoma on 9 year old laptops? On the Apple site, they are saying only 2018+ laptops get the latest version.
  - opan 3y ago
    Likely using OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher.
deleted 3y ago

shanghaikid 3y ago

macbook air m1 16gb 512, fast, quiet, long battery life. I don't think I will replace it in 10 years.

adamking 3y ago
and no moving internal parts + mostly sealed from dust. I'll do the same with mine.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Fwiw my 2012 mbp still runs. Takes in plenty of dust working outside and on account of the plastic hinge turning brittle and falling apart years ago. Once every two years I will open her up and blow her clean again. Thats about all the maintenance she needs today. Ironically it has somewhat stronger specs than gps new m1 air, considering I also have 16gb memory, but then 1.5tb of storage and 2 operating systems.
mikae1 3y ago
Until the SSD dies...
diffeomorphism 3y ago
Nice machine but 1400€ while the laptop in the article is $200. So you could replace it 6 times and still come out ahead... and drive more than 1 external display. Also, I am not sure that the ram or storage won't become limiting within these 10 years, e.g. media is only getting larger (120GB+ for baldur's gate 3), LLMs,... . On a non-mac you can simply grab a 2TB ssd for like $100 and in 8 years can probably replace it with like 8 or 16TB for about the same price. Again, perfectly nice, quiet, fast machine with a decent display, but soldered stuff sucks. If that were not the case, I would consider upgrading to it from my current 5 year old machine (also 14" 2k HDR ips screen, 16GB ram and above mentioned 2TB ssd upgrade). However, paying 2000€ just to match the ram and storage of my 5 year old laptop is definitely off-putting and you also don't get OS upgrades for the full 10 years, right?

iwanttocomment 3y ago

This is bizarre. There's a hilarious contrast between the stated requirements for their laptop: >a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), b) had a high-resolution screen for my lousy eyesight, and c) had a 1-terabyte hard drive. And so then the article extols the virtues of buying a laptop that can't run Logic Pro, has a "fuzzily low-rez, which isn’t great for me, given my lousy eyesight" screen and was upgraded to only a 512GB SSD. What? Great job. You sure nailed those requirements. Yes, the 2016-2019 Intel Macbook Pros were terrible. I'm with you there. But you could have had a 2012-2015 Retina Macbook Pro, which would have run Logic Pro, all have remarkable high resolution screens, and can be outfitted with multi-TB drives with a little elbow grease. And were fairly indestructable! ... and then you won't want one of those if you have a 16GB Apple Silicon Mac.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
city41 3y ago
Apple computers have a time limit if you want to keep using MacOS. My 2012 MacBook Retina still works great ... if I put Linux on it. Logic Pro is a great example. It requires MacOS 12 or greater. MacOS 12 will only run on 2015 or newer MacBooks.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  You can just run older logic thats compatible with like catalina or mojave. Thats what I do for adobe suite and its fine for my use cases. There are also third party patches to install more current os on older hardware.
- iwanttocomment 3y ago
  ... and so do Windows machines. Windows 10 will EOL in July 2025. My Threadripper 1950X, still outperforming most of today's mid-range CPUs, isn't allowed into the Windows 11 world. Why? Who knows? But yes, I didn't realize that Logic Pro was no longer compatible with macOS versions before 12. So, if this person wanted an indestructible laptop that could run Logic Pro, have a hi-res screen and be upgraded to a 1TB drive, a 2015 Macbook Pro would certainly have been the thing. Hey look, they're $300 on Swappa! But yes, eventually, we all need to upgrade.

jeffbee 3y ago

Plastic makes such a difference. I can, and do, keep using Thinkpads that have been dropped, even when they get cracked. Because who cares? But a bent MacBook Pro is often ruined.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Depends on the mac. None of the corners on my 2012 are undented at this point. Even the lid with the screen. This thing has been down cement stairs. When you open it up you can see theres actually somewhat of a crumple zone. Not sure if the newer models are so bullet proof. One of my friends ran over his 2012 with an f150 and it still worked minus spiderwebbing on the screen.

chefandy 3y ago

My primary machine was a 2011 MBP until maybe 2018 and it was pretty sweet, but I'm pretty hard on my machines, and there was also a hardware issue that Apple wasn't able to fix. The Thinkpad I had working for IBM a-decade-and-a-half-ago was an absolute beast. I wish I could still get my work done on one of those old reliable machines, but having transitioned to heavy 3D Graphics stuff and working with game engines precludes this kind of thing. The increase in display capability alone has been a huge game changer for this work, let alone the kind of video cards you can get in these machines. The top-of-the-line 2022 Razer machine I use now will be essentially obsolete even for lightweight professional work within two years.

dws 3y ago

Keyboards are a matter of taste. To my fingers, the T420 is the last of the T series with a really good one. Older Thinkpads are easy to repair. I've replaced the keyboard once, and after near daily evening use for many years, I'm about to attempt to replace a failing fan. I'll miss this laptop when its time comes. It's run various releases of Ubuntu like a champ.

guestbest 3y ago

I have a MacBook 13 inch from 2011 that now plays YouTube videos daily for my daughter when she is eating and Netflix until we canceled the subscription. Still going strong with only a replaced battery and the hard drive replacing the dvd spot. I have an older 2004 Toshiba portage m200 tart also won’t die. The only thing that seems to die on these computers is the battery, which used to be a lot easier to replace.

jamesgeck0 3y ago
Yeah, my 2013 MacBook Air is similarly still trucking along. I wish it used a more standard storage medium; upgrading the chip did not look particularly cheap or easy.
- windowsrookie 3y ago
  Storage is easily upgradeable in those MacBook Airs. It's a socketed SSD just like a PC laptop. (but a proprietary socket) https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-air https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/macbook-air
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  They don't make em like they did 2011-2014ish. Those things are insanely resilient to everything except the age-old keyboard vs liquid
wanderingstan 3y ago
I had a 2012 MacBook Pro that I used near daily as my non-work computer. Worked fine up to the Day earlier this year I dropped it onto a tile floor…
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Did the tile floor pull thru ok?
Obscurity4340 3y ago
Is that really a good habit for her to be building or a good association to be enforcing? Eating is already mindless enough for most people...

gh123man 3y ago

I had a T420 in college. One day in a CS class, I bumped my (uncovered) cup of coffee and it spilled into the keyboard. I knew the laptop had ducts to drain water out, but never tested it (for obvious reasons). I blotted up as much coffee as I could with some napkins and kept taking notes on the soaked keyboard. Worked like a charm. After drying it out, a few keys stopped working so I bought a replacement keyboard for ~$20 and swapping it out was rather fast (from memory). I use an M1 MBP now, but I still have that thing in the basement. It still works, and I loved it. I don't miss carrying it around though (or the hilariously short battery life due to forcing discrete GPU mode so I could dock it for multiple monitors at home).

ShikhaM 3y ago
Had a similar experience but with water and the laptop stopped working
- zwaps 3y ago
  The spill has to remain in the keyboard area. Friend of mine in college spilled.. I think beer?.. on this Thinkpad. He instinctively grabbed it (me, across the room, yelling to keep it stable) and turned it to the side. The fluid got into the fan intake and boom, dead it was.
  - mcv 3y ago
    I spilled an entire mug of tea on my X1E when it was just new. That would have killed any Macbook, but the Thinkpad was fine. Turned it off, unplugged the power, let it drain through the bottom. Next morning, open it up, clean it out, turn it on, and it's fine. Even had time to make a photo: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/h0663l/good_thing_its_a_thinkpad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/h0663l/good_thing... Don't count on this too strongly though; not every Thinkpad is spill-resistant, unfortunately.
znpy 3y ago
> After drying it out, a few keys stopped working so I bought a replacement keyboard for ~$20 and swapping it out was rather fast (from memory). I had an X220 in university (same keyboard part as the T420). I did wash my keyboard multiple times using dish soap and normal tap water and I only killed a single keyboard (when I didn't wait enough for water to dry out). You could have most likely just washed the keyboard in warm soapy water, as long as you had enough patience to wait for it to be properly drier (2-3 days at least imho, depending on temperature in your home/area).

dunwaldo 3y ago

it looks like the little red eraser in the center has taken a beating

neilv 3y ago

That T420 was from the last generation of ThinkPads to have a real keyboard. And so long as you don't need a big GPU on-board, it's perfectly fine for most Linux-based developer workstation purposes.

calvinmorrison 3y ago
X220 for the compact version. With the 9 cell? Hnnnngg
- segfaultbuserr 3y ago
  I recommend getting the X230 over the X220, if anyone decides to play with these old Thinkpads. I have both machines, and I found heat dissipation has been significantly reduced on the X230 for otherwise the same performance, thanks to Ivy Bridge's die shrink over Sandy Bridge. Most components from both machines are interchangeable with the exception of their bottom covers and motherboards (an EC firmware hack is available for interchanging keyboards and batteries).
  - emantos 3y ago
    Don't forget the USB3 of X230
    - varnaud 3y ago
      i7 version of the x220 has one USB3
      - lproven 3y ago
        True, and my X220 has a cheapo USB3 card from AliExpress that gives it a few more USB3 ports. Cost about $5 or something.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    x230 can take 16GB RAM. only some x220s will. slightly different keyboard layouts also, wrt pgup pgdown

snitzr 3y ago

The 420 with Windows 7 is my personal idea of the peak of desktop computing. 2011 was also around the peak of computing in general considering it was right before social media turned hellish psyop and smartphones became distraction / disempowerment devices.

antisthenes 3y ago
Win 7 SP1 was peak desktop computing for sure. Actual desktop-first design without security kindergarten cancer that is every windows OS after.
- lmm 3y ago
  What are you claiming was improved compared to Win2K? As far as I can remember everything after that was dumbed-down UI and pointless security clickthroughs.
  - kibibu 3y ago
    Win+arrow keys for docking to sides I use all the time. Much better multi monitor support. Grouping taskbar. Start menu that lets you search (ie to run notepad, press win then start typing note.. and hit enter)
    - krylon 3y ago
      The search box in the start menu was a huge improvement for me. And AeroSnap to a lesser degree. On MATE, I set Win+arrow keys to do the same thing.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Vista added a lot of usability features like window snapping and start search, but it's underlying OS was literally unfinished. 7 became what Vista, could've been and even Vista became usable when enough updates were applied. 7 disabled a lot of the security prompts for usability. It didn't remove them, it actually just automatically approved them. These days, most software doesn't need admin privileges anymore. You could always turn off all of the prompts if you wanted to, I think there were 4 levels of prompt severity?

quickthrower2 3y ago

The battery will die and need replacing. But otherwise a good choice!

eigenvalue 3y ago

I can’t even bear to look at a low DPI screen for more than a few minutes. Anything under 150dpi just looks so awful to me at this point. Basically ruins all older laptops from my perspective.

nvy 3y ago
I have one of the lcdfans modded Thinkpads. It's a "T70"—a T60 with an i7, 16GB of memory, the old style keyboard, a giant SSD, and, importantly, a high DPI display. It's an awesome machine but it might as well be a desktop because it's so bulky and heavy that I never take it anywhere. I travel with my M2 Mac but that Thinkpad sure is a sleeper.
jwells89 3y ago
Normal “low” DPI screens I can deal with, but the panels that used to be built into many ThinkPads until pretty recently are some of the worst screens I’ve ever used… washed out, terrible viewing angles, mediocre brightness. I have an old Dell workstation laptop and 15” MBP both manufactured around 2008, with 1920x1200 and 1440x900 panels respectively and they’re both much nicer to use than what you find in a lot of T-series Thinkpads, so it’s not even an age thing… Lenovo just used bargain basement panels.
- BenFranklin100 3y ago
  Agree. I’m not sure the exact years, but starting around 2013 the T series screens were awful.
  - opan 3y ago
    Starting with the *40 gen they changed from LVDS to eDP screens and got access to better screens. This was the start of 1080p being available at 14" where it was only in 15" models before. There's a panel from one of the Razer Blade laptops that was popular to put in the ThinkPad T440p. 1080p IPS. Looks nice. On the older models you can also do a mod to sacrifice your DP port for use internally with an eDP panel. There's one for the X220 to do that. Although if you're okay with 1366x768, the X220 Tablet models all have IPS panels from the factory and don't look too bad.

RedShift1 3y ago

I'm still rocking a 2012 built HP EliteBook 8540w which I bought second hand in 2015. The weight of the thing is a little bit annoying and the battery is dead. It has never failed me, running Windows 10 now. It has always come back from standby and hibernate without fail. By far the most reliable computer I own. But it is showing its age though, not because of the hardware but because of software. Windows 11 doesn't run smooth on it unfortunately :-(.

prmoustache 3y ago
HP Elitebook 8460P of similar vintage owner here. I also bought it second hand, it came with an SSD and a bigger HDD (that died), I replaced the battery a few years ago, bumped the ram to 12GB (I should bump it to 16GB while memory sticks are still available) and it has been running on Fedora Linux for years. It is kind of a heaby brick brick but it works well, everything is still fairly smooth on Gnome with wayland.

BenFranklin100 3y ago

The x220 is another great thinkpad. You can also upgrade the screen to 1080 with a little hacking: https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=122640 https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=122640

paulpauper 3y ago

Toshiba laptops last forever too

noud 3y ago

I still have a working X60s from 2006. Really liked that laptop. Unfortunately, for modern standards, the battery life is not great, a couple of hours at most. And the resolution is just a little bit too low, 1024 × 768.

olabyne 3y ago
hey friend ! I gave my mom the X61t, from the same era. For what she does, it is a marvel, from XP to 7 to 8.1, I bought her an Ipad last year since 8.1 droppped the support. I think with an upgrade of 4Gb it could be still ok in 2023. Just avoid website full of JS and videos.

ramshanker 3y ago

I am in the same boat. Lenovo Z50-70 bought 2015. 8 GB RAM upgraded to 16 GB recently. It has got 4GB Nvidia graphics, does mild AI stuff as well. Hard Disc replaced with Samsung SSD few years back. Full HD screen. I even bought a 4K-27 inch monitor to connect to it last week. Thought it struggles to play beyond 1440p. Win10 works and is totally responsive. I hope it keeps going for 3 more years. :)

qingcharles 3y ago
Have a 12-year-old Lenovo desktop here, i5. Just put Windows 11 on it this weekend and it's even snappier than it was with 10 on it, which is nuts. I use it as my main development PC, run Photoshop, edit 4K video on it. It was basically in a Dumpster when I found it.

naet 3y ago

I had a T420s I think? It got me well through college and for some years after, although I eventually retired it. It was a workhorse that stood up to a lot of abuse being thrown around in my backpack every day. After I wasn't using it all the time I set it up as a dedicated server to mess with and kept it constantly plugged in and running for a few more years. I remember when the screen broke I got a perfect replacement for less than 40 dollars, and it was trivially easy to take the old one out and install the new one with a regular screwdriver and no other special tools. Similar experience when I broke the keyboard, easy to buy a new one and swap the whole thing out myself. I think I also replaced a battery when one started to drain a bit too quickly and the battery of course was something you just pop out and back in. Now with my new MacBook any of those is easily hundreds of dollars plus either needing a trained repairman or seriously risking I break something using specialized tools to melt the glue or pop out the bezel or something like that.

somat 3y ago

I still have an x131 that I use whenever I need something portable. running openbsd. it sleeps flawlessly, has three physical buttons, an actual ethernet jack. It's pretty great. The only problem was the radio, and that was mainly a problem because of lenovo infernal radio whitelist. It is not enough to get a radio that works, you have to get a radio from lenovo that works. still bitter about that. but I found a lenovo branded intel card and it has been smooth sailing for more than... ugg, ten years now, probably closer to 15. makes me feel old. But still a damn fine little laptop.

thot_experiment 3y ago

I have a crazy idea that would vastly improve modern laptop design. You would build in some sort of a reversible conduit interrupt device (may be lost tech but I hear rumors that it's possible) that would allow the end user to disconnect the battery. This would solve the #1 problem with laptops which is that sometimes I need to use the laptop and it's out of battery because it decided to turn itself on in my bag.

baq 3y ago
That’s only started to happening in the last few years. Before 2015 laptops had good manners - when they were told to shut down, they kept being shut down.
- pbmonster 3y ago
  I thought I was alone with that problem. Do you know what the culprit is? What keeps randomly waking up modern laptops? It's so stupid, too. There is exactly one single case when I want my laptop to wake up with the lid closed: when I plug in the dock. Every single other case where it wakes up with the lid closed is a bug in my eyes.
  - amiga-workbench 3y ago
    Its the removal of S3 sleep states from the BIOS/ACPI tables. Now the processor is kept powered on (in a low power state) but any poorly written driver or software can jolt the machine back into a higher power state and superheat your backpack. Intel's rationale is that PC's should function like smartphones and you should be able to stay connected and receive notifications while asleep. I'm not convinced.
    - baq 3y ago
      I think that's actually MS who wants that. I'm not sure there's anyone other than them who's convinced. Fortunately I moved fully remote when COVID started so this hasn't been a problem and also switched to a mac last year - macs seem to be well behaved in this matter.

MichaelRo 3y ago

>> I needed a machine that a) could run Logic Pro (the finest music-editing software available to humanity), b) had a high-resolution screen for my lousy eyesight, and c) had a 1-terabyte hard drive. It was the only machine that fit the bill. For a time, I too fell into the trap of looking for "readily made laptop" with shiny specs, only to eventually notice that getting ripped off is an understatement. Like spot a decent CPU-specc'd machine but with with only 16 Gb RAM in 2023, want 32 Gb? Pay double! So I took my brother's advice, which I also use for TVs and what else: buy the cheapest brand that offers the specs. All sellers are required to provide 2 years of warranty and at entry level price, worst case you can buy a brand new and better spec'd device if it breaks just after 2 years. But it usually lasts a lot more, by pure statistics: to ensure it lasts 2 years on average, it must me a lot more sturdy than that. So what I do now? I'm buying "gaming laptops". For several things: - They have decent specs. Relatively powerful CPU, good cooling so the solder won't melt on the motherboard if I compile a long program (happened to my nephew actually). - I don't care about laptop's screen and weight. I'm a professional software developer which means 99.9% of the time the laptop sits on my desktop hooked to one or two 27 inch 4k monitors, along with a proper keyboard and mouse. And when it's not, it's just in my bag in transit to another desktop. When you look at LinkedIn pictures, people are being served the fairy tale of the "developer" who programs in bed or on a couch or in a coffee shop sipping a latte ... nothing but corporate bullshit. - And first and foremost, they are UPGRADEABLE. I can take the laptop WITHOUT LOSING WARRANTY, open it and add more RAM and another SSD. Which means that the price of getting a 32 Gb of RAM machine is now about $30-50$ more and not another time the price I paid for the laptop! Last laptop I bought was a Lenovo Legion 5, AMD Ryzen 5 6600H, 15.6" Full HD IPS 144 Hz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 4GB GDDR6 for €500. It's not the main purpose but I don't mind if I can play CS2 at 200 FPS in addition to programming on it :P

m463 3y ago
> I'm buying "gaming laptops". step 1: disable rgb. Honestly, I wish the "lunchbox" style laptops existed. EDIT: I remember dolch lunchbox style laptops from a long time ago (search for "dolch pac") EDIT2: wow, search for FlexPAC III Of course, if these were a thing, somebody would bring it to starbucks.

nirui 3y ago

This is another Thinkpad festival post? Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have this DELL Studio laptop released back in September, 2009, and it can still kick very well too if I decide to recruit it back to my "workforce". I retired it just 3~4 years ago because I got a T480. Heck, some of my code (old versions) for the same project that I'm currently working on is still on that laptop. Before it's retirement days, it work 24/7 a day every day all year around, burned through two power supplies, sometimes 90 degrees C on the poor Intel Duo Core CPU etc. But it never dies. So, me looking these Thinkpad posts, I never really feel quite impressed...

felixhammerl 3y ago
Wife uses a mid-2013 Macbook Air as a daily driver still after >10 years, works in academia. What happened is simply that CPU stopped being the thing that made stuff slow, so a mid-2010s upper midrange can still hold its own today, ssd was already good then, and memory plateaued around 8gb for entry level machines some 5 years ago. So as long as your thermals don't suck, your ssd doesn't smoke out, and your keyboard holds up, you can still use these machines today. If you maxed out memory then, that is.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Atleast for PC hardware, CPU development was severely stifled by lack of competition most of the 2010s. Intel had no credible competition until AMD got their shit together with Zen, and wasted no opportunity to rest on their laurels. This is also why both newer Zen and also Apple's new silicon is seemingly making such fantastic advances. It's essentially catching up to where we could have been all along if we had a healthier market.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  Even more so with desktops. I am running a 2014 CPU i7 4790k with 32GB RAM and a 1070ti. Due to it being a desktop w noctua cooler the temps never get high. Keyboard and mouse you just replace when worn out. This year I am thinking about upgrading. But my 2019 Thinkpad already feels slow... so I never got laptops for long use. They suck.

pmontra 3y ago

My ZBook 15 will be 10 years old next February. It's still the machine that pays my bills because it can be upgraded and repaired. I replaced the keyboard myself many times after the keys worn down (arrows or one on the left.) I upgraded the RAM to its max (32 GB) and replaced all its disks (HDD and DVDRW) with SSDs. It was born with 750 GB, it's 3 TB now. Furthermore its software got better along the years. It feels faster and the fan doesn't spin on much. It was born with Windows 7 which I replaced with Ubuntu 12.04 on the very first day. It's Debian 11 now.

10729287 3y ago

Those posts will just end up getting all the sneakerheads buying Lenovo laptops to flip them

walteweiss 3y ago

>Create an account to read the full story. The author made this story available to Medium members only. If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

omar_alt 3y ago
I enjoy reading posts about second hand Thinkpads outliving modern laptops but it is ironic to put a blog post on lo-tech frugality behind a paywall.

deng 3y ago

I have a laptop from the 90s that still works. So a laptop that does not die is, in itself, not that big of a deal. The main reason why I pretty much exclusively buy old business Thinkpads is that they are incredibly serviceable, and you can get replacement parts for many years (and also very cheap if the laptop is older). Also, there's a big community for running Linux on Thinkpads, so the hardware is usually very well supported, including kernel modules for fan control and stuff like that. However, it's not all sunshine. Especially during the T4xx era, many business Thinkpads had absolutely terrible displays by default (can usually be replaced with a proper one, but adds additional cost). The T440 had a horrible trackpad where they ditched the dedicated buttons (again, can usually be replaced it with a proper one). So do some research before buying. Also, before buying from a commercial refurbisher, check if there's a Thinkpad community forum or similar in your area of the world, you'll often find stuff much cheaper there.

daniel31x13 3y ago

> If all you need is a basic machine for doing stuff on the web, making video calls (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, plenty of Linux-specific video-chat works tres well), listening to music or using Discord? It’s perfect. There's no doubt about it. > To be fair, I’m not using this machine as my main, daily laptop. If I did, it’s more likely something might have busted a while ago. Exactly! The thing that so many people misunderstand is the choice of machine for your work essentially represents a B2B business between you and the company selling these devices. When someone who truly needs a MacBook, that means they're usually making so much that the price of the machine they're spending on is little in comparison to the profit they're making from it. On the other hand yes, I do believe companies like Apple are really taking this too far. Side note: Don't get me wrong here, I also have an old Dell Precision, but not as my main, daily machine. It's just ironic how some people really try so hard to integrate these machines for their work environment.

causi 3y ago

Damn I miss mouse buttons below touchpads.

31carmichael 3y ago

I have a working IBM Thinkpad X30 from around 2000.

Aerbil313 3y ago

While everyone is bragging about their old ThinkPads, I am typing these on a Pi Zero 2W. I spilt coffee on my ~8 years old HP Laptop two weeks ago. While waiting for my parents to buy me an iPhone 15 Pro (with its USB-C to connect to the monitor) I am using a Pi Zero 2W + Asus Zenscreen Portable Monitor + 10.000 mAH Powerbank setup, connecting to my server via RDP. Github Pro student credits on DigitalOcean, all free. * Excellent power usage. Pi uses ~0.7 W and the screen is listed at 3.6W, though I believe it's actually ~7W. * Each part upgradable and replaceable in a whim. Can change your motherboard or RAM, or add an extra GPU or an entirely different machine, as all of them are up in the clouds! * Extremely lightweight, 0.75 kg. * Incredibly thin, 9 mm. Its stand is also its cover, requires no extra bag, except for the HDMI and USB cables. Powerbank? I carry it everywhere anyway. Keyboard? It has only a slightly larger surface area than an iPhone 15 when folded, can carry in my pocket, a cheap Chinese bluetooth one I had lying around (couldn't be bothered to troubleshoot the USB on the Pi.). * Unmatched connectivity, I have unthrottled datacenter internet, and I can use my phone's LTE connection to connect to the server without skyrocketing my cellular bill, as the only thing transmitted is the screen. School dormitory Wi-Fi is not the best, it introduces extra latency. OTOH, It lags while scrolling a web page. Bottleneck must be the CPU, because there is no lag when connecting via my iPhone 7. I used NoMachine with the same setup in the past and it had no such lag, could even play YouTube videos from what I remember. I also didn't overclock the Pi to the max and am not using a heatsink nor a fan, and didn't do any sort of performance tuning for the RDP at all. Because I can't be bothered, it works bearably for my school work, and gonna get my new iPhone next week anyway. Now don't ask me how I managed to re-pair the keyboard with the Pi when it got unpaired and the Pi's local IP got reassigned randomly, from Alpine Linux running in iSH on my current iPhone 7...

regularfry 3y ago
The problem I have with the zero 2w is that building anything on it seems to knock out the wifi. I've got a couple on the local network as terminals and if I try to build (e.g.) a recent python interpreter, the ssh connection dies to the extent that I have to power-cycle them. I presume they're just going into swap, but they never come back. Now that's not your use-case if you've got a remote server and all you're using them for is a thin client, but they aren't exactly usable as general purpose devices. I do like the sound of that setup, though. Portable monitor plus powerbank is neat, and I can't help wondering if that plus a wireguard network wouldn't be the right way to do things away from home. There are more efficient SBCs but if the screen is the big drain that's exactly the choice I'd make too.

mcv 3y ago

There are also older Macbooks that outlasted my Thinkpad. Maybe the X1 Extreme was a poor choice, but there are also a lot of people who say that Thinkpads just aren't as good as they used to be. Macbooks also went through a period of poor quality. I hope Thinkpad improves again in the future.

RalfWausE 3y ago

I use an Thinkpad R60 since about 11 years ago as my daily driver. Why? Because its - for me - the perfect laptop. Yeah, i know that there are more modern systems out there that would have a much better battery lifetime, are faster and lighter (and as the systems guy / head of it for my employer i tested quiet a few) but no laptop i tried so far has achieved the level of "thinkpaddieness" my old R60 has. I bought the R60 cheap at a time where i was unemployed and - to put it mildly - dirt poor. My previous desktop system (a quiet powerful gaming rig) was fried by an overcurrent due to lightning strike and this left me without a usable computer. Which is bad if you are looking for work and need to write applications and CVs. At that time it had an spinning 40 GB HDD, a cracked case, loose and wobbly display hinges, a battery life of about 15 minutes and an not very powerful Core Duo CPU. It was slow, looked like trash but it helped me getting back on track. After landing a new job i started to fix the R60 and make it a bit more usable. The first thing i did was to order a new battery. Thankfully, the Thinkpad has an easy changeable battery: Just turn it over, push the quick release and put in the new battery (a feature that is utterly missing on todays laptops). The next thing that i swapped out was the hard disk: At the time i had landed a new job but my financial situation was still very edgy, so i rummaged through local private ads until i found a very cheap (about 10 Euros) 120 GB HDD. This gave me a bit more "breathing room" and got me to a really usable - albeit slow - system i could run OpenBSD on. This was the setup i worked with for the next couple of years. At some point i had again the financial means to easily replace the system with something more up to date... but for what? I could code on this system and do everything i needed it for. A couple of years later (at this time the Thinkpad had already got an SSD and an major optical overhaul), on one morning the display was broken. On one half it displayed everything ok, on the other half it was more or less pixel mush. Thankfully, even that was no problem. I bought an replacement display of ebay for about 30 Euros (which came from an better model and had a better resolution), spend a few hours looking at a couple of repair videos on YouTube and read a bit i could easily change the display. Now, a major problem was the Core Duo CPU (being 32 Bit), a couple of months ago i looked into the matter if i could future proof the R60 a bit more... and yes, no problem! I found out that i could easily switch out the CPU for an Core 2 Duo, so i again looked into ebay and bought a brand new (ok, NOS) CPU for about 10 Euros, spend an lazy afternoon taking the R60 apart (and as i had it open already cleaningit) and switched out the CPU. The Core 2 Duo may be still an outdated design, but it was a major power boost and made especially surfing the modern web (a thing i try to avoid but is sometimes nescessary) much more palatable. So... with the story of the Thinkpad written down, will i at some time replace it? Yeah, very likely, but this is a day in the far future and even then i will perhaps go for something like the MNT Reform (in my mind a spiritual successor of the Thinkpads of the olden days). But as i said: Not now or in the foreseeable future

wazoox 3y ago

My 2009 Macbook still works fine, thanks. The battery is a spicy pillow and the Superdrive is dead, but it works, albeit slowly. It's mostly running Debian nowadays (the last supported MacOS release, 10.12, doesn't even run a modern browser nowadays). I also have a 2007 Sony VAIO in a cupboard running Ubuntu 20.04 just fine, as a backup. Its battery is only good as a UPS nowadays, but the computer works fine.

lproven 3y ago
I have a 2009 MBP. Its battery still runs for about 2h, its optical drive worked the last time I tried, and it runs 10.13 which means the current Firefox ESR still works. I am planning to try OCLP on it and see if I can get Big Sur working. That's the last macOS that doesn't want a GPU that supports the Metal APIs, and it should run the latest Firefox and Chrome for a few years yet.

imrehg 3y ago

I have a back-in-the-day (2011) maxed out Thinkpad X201, that was somewhere around $1.5k (whooping max 8GB RAM, etc... :) In the intervening 12 years: - I've replaced the disk at least 2x (going to SSD, and replacing a failed one with a current 1TB this year) - Replaced the cooling fan (1x? 2x? I don't remember) - Replaced the motherboard (that was fun: https://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2022/07/an-open-heart-motherboard-surgery/ https://gergely.imreh.net/blog/2022/07/an-open-heart-motherb...) - Tried to upgrade the wifi card for newer standards (that's a fail, as it seems to be locked down in the BIOS what cards the machine can use) - Managed to set a max frequency to the CPU so now I don't have a thermal shutdown, it works rock solid and still reasonable performance. It sounds like a lot of pain, but it's still my favourite device to work on ever since, ArchLinux humming away with XFCE. Not sure what my next machine will be, but this current one will give a run for its money...

mkesper 3y ago
Coreboot should help with newer wifi cards. It seems you need an external flasher for this model, though: https://libreboot.org/docs/install/x200_external.html https://libreboot.org/docs/install/x200_external.html https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200 https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200
- walteweiss 3y ago
  Would appreciate anyone to help me understand how to flash Coreboot with external flasher, never did that.
amiga-workbench 3y ago
I patched out the BIOS whitelist from my X201 and ran the image through me_cleaner. All that stopped working was automatic fan control, I needed a daemon running constantly to set the fan speed. That thing has been catching dust for about 2 years now since I upgraded to an X270, which is a faster machine but is nowhere near as nice.

vinc 3y ago

My personal laptop is a Thinkpad T440p from 2013 with a modern SSD. I use mostly the command line and a web browser on ArchLinux. For my usage it is just as fast as my modern work laptop! I also have a Thinkpad X200 from 2008 and this one feel its age a bit so I use it to run my hobby operating system that only have a command line interface and no web browser. I like that both of them are compatible with Libreboot+SeaBIOS and I'm sad that this isn't the case for new models anymore. This together with the ability to disassemble them so easily make them perfect for me. I'm a bit worried about 10 years from now when I'll have to find a new computing platform.

dilliwal 3y ago

My thinkpad around 11 years old and another Acer Laptop 14 years old (my dad still uses it regularly) are still working but they are too slow for modern video calling softwares. If I have to do just regular coding and no video calling, they are still the best.

LeonM 3y ago

Reading this using a 2010 MBP, the first generation of retina ones without optical disk drive. I no longer use it for work for continuity reasons, but I could, it runs all my applications without breaking a sweat (back then this was the maxed out i7 option with 16GB ram) - Display was replaced under warranty after 2 years due to ghosting - Upgraded the 256GB SSD to a 1TB model after ~5 years - Had the battery replaced by Apple store after ~7 years - Mainboard was damaged by Apple store (USB no longer worked after battery replacement), after a lot of back-and-forth they replaced it under warranty So I'll admit, not much of the laptop is still original, but the fact that I can still daily it for my development workflow is impressive. This thing just won't die. For work I replaced the MBP with a Lenovo X1 Extreme, partially due to the praise of Lenovo here on HN. The total investment of the Lenovo was higher than the MBP, but I was planning on doing another 10 years with the Lenovo. Though the build quality is OK-ish, but I have never been satisfied with the it. Linux support (the main reason I bought Lenovo) is rather bad, the laptop gets very hot, fan noise and coil whine make it annoying to use. The battery completely died after just 2 years, and Lenovo could not supply a replacement (they actually recommended searching on Amazon for a aftermarket replacement!). SSD died after 3 years, luckily they are replaceable. One fan died after 4 years, had to source a used one from ebay since Lenovo no longer offers replacement fans. Had to replace the thermal compound on the heatsinks twice due to the laptop starting to overheat and shut down. I know, I know, sample size of one and YMMV, but I don't think I'll buy another Lenovo laptop after this one.

yCloser 3y ago

I see absolutely nothing special in a pc that lives 10 years. Most pc last that long. And my centrino-1 vaio laptop from 2004 is still alive

Propelloni 3y ago
Agreed. My dad (74 now) uses an IBM Thinkpad T23 (2001, fully upgraded to 1Gb of RAM) running Linux with an old version of Rocrail to control his model railroad.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aa-jv 3y ago

I too have a Thinkpad of this variety, living long and rocking onwards, but I also have a 2015 Macbook Pro running Ubuntu Studio that gives the Lenovo a run for its money. In this configuration, the Macbook Pro is my favourite since its a much more physically comfortable machine to work on. Point is, both of these machines are excellent, well-supported and Simply Work™ Great ..

ribit 3y ago

And we have a bunch of 15 year old Macs in the basement that outlasted any PCs we ever owned. What’s the point of these personal anecdotes? Lenovos build quality went down the drain in the last 10 years and their service is awful.

baz00 3y ago
I think the same is true of Apple stuff. I mean the current line of soldered SSDs, RAM and pain in the ass to remove batteries is quite frankly annoying as hell. And Apple service isn't much better (it has been 2 weeks and I'm waiting for them to refund AppleCare on something but they have a bug in their system that is preventing it that no one knows how to fix). As for Lenovo, at that price, I can usually just buy a whole replacement machine either new with warranty or new old stock for around 2/3 usual retail price and get it next day. I paid 730 GBP for my T14 gen 3 for example. And I got to stick bigger RAM and SSD in it and the battery comes out in 30 seconds. Granted the battery sucks but meh, you can't win everything.
- wiredfool 3y ago
  The 2016+ era MBPs were awful. The previous 2 generations were good, but had their occasional issues. Like the drive cable on the unibody MBP. I got 7 years out of a 2012 Air. The jury is still out on the m1 era, but it's looking better. We'll know for sure in about 5 years.
  - baz00 3y ago
    Yeah agree there. I had a 2010 MBP that I rather liked. The M1 era isn't looking good based on the number of bricked/dead and iCloud locked machines I see on eBay either corporate discards or damaged and not worth repairing. Also low quantities of parts on the market as well. Older MacBooks and PCs were usually pretty heavily shredded for parts but the same is definitely not true for the new ones. I suspect we've entered a new era of e-waste more than anything.
    - mtillman 3y ago

shp0ngle 3y ago

I have such a laptop, but it doesn't survive update to Windows 11. Installing Windows 11 on old Thinkpad makes it go slow. Luckily, there is Windows 10 LTSC bought from dubious serial code reseller. (OK, they possiblly pirate it, but.... Windows 10 LTSC is so good I recommend it to everyone. And MSFT won't sell it to me legally...) edit: oh, this guy uses Ubuntu. I don't have nerves for Linux.

baz00 3y ago
Windows 11 is horribl.e My exit plan is to move to windows 10 LTSC. I have some MSDN keys. I'll worry about that one day in the future though. I just exited the Apple ecosystem so I'm still getting my stuff together. I also don't have the nerves for Linux. I want the computer to be a thing to solve problems not a thing to cause problems to solve :)
- alexvitkov 3y ago
  You don't consider the first paragraph "a problem to solve"?
  - baz00 3y ago
    I'm slowly boiling myself into a portable software space. I have a couple of hard requirements that force me to use windows (or macOS) that i can kill in the next 2 years. I can put the LTSC migration off until 2025 and I can then push the LTSC EOL decision off until 2027. That's 4 years. A lot changes in that time.
- graemep 3y ago
  > I also don't have the nerves for Linux. I want the computer to be a thing to solve problems not a thing to cause problems to solve :) That is only true of Linux for specific things like gaming, or if you cannot resist the temptation to try stuff and tinker. Even having moved to a relatively unstable/problematic Linux distro (Manjaro) do not find myself spending any more time solving problems than when I used Windows (which as a long time ago, so not applicable to current Windows).

jlokier 3y ago

I'm using a Macbook Pro retina from late 2013 as my daily driver, for work as a software developer and other things. It recently passed 10 years, being used every day including weekends. It's been great. I bought it when two non-Apple laptops failed on me within weeks of each other. A Fujitsu-Siemens which was also great until then, and a Compaq. I'd been avoiding Apple for years in line with the GNU project's stance, but after a big life event I decided to try it out. I transferred over my Linux installation from the previous laptops to a VM on the Mac, so I can four-finger-swipe between the two OSes as if they are running side by side. The Mac's 16GB RAM is bit tight these days but that's mostly due to memory used by Firefox with my many tabs. The 512GB SSD has been annoying for a long time as I filled it up fairly quickly, and rarely find the time to clean things up. When I bought it, I thought I'd be able to upgrade the SSD capacity a few years later at third-party prices, much lower than Apple's prices. But it turned out to be a non-standard interface with expensive upgrades, and I didn't end up upgrading, just living with it. A few keys are getting a bit unreliable, but not enough to make is unusable. The battery is still going surprisingly well after over 10 years of daily, intensive use, a lot of it on battery. It's down to 55% of design capacity. I think that's excellent compared with what I saw with the non-Apple laptops before, where I bought a number of third party batteries to carry around with me and swap, and they deteriorated faster. However the battery flakes out occasionally when the system is under load now. I'm getting the battery replaced by Apple in a few weeks, at their standard battery repair fee (which is reasonable), and as a handy side effect of how they do this the keyboard issues should be fixed. I'm in the market for a new laptop. But not because the current beauty doesn't work! It's just getting strained with not enough RAM and SSD for my needs now, and Homebrew no longer supported. (Especially precompiled binaries; some HB recipes fail to build, and some require several tens of GB free space to build and take over an hour per package, like I remember from my Gentoo days...). Whoever mentioned OpenCore Legacy Patcher, thanks for the reminder, that may help a lot! I held out for the release of the Apple M3 over the last few years. Previously waiting for the M2 after I decided to take the leap from x86 to ARM, but that dragged out, and then I decided it was expensive and to wait for the M3 to see what 3nm would get us. Now I'm excited to be planning to buy an M3 Max. I won't skimp on RAM or SSD this time, having learned it really slowed me a lot over the last few years, swapping (without realising for a few years this was why browsing was very janky), and often having to find things to delete to free up some space. Besides, the things I work on now use terabytes of storage, and for my tasks I think I'll find 128GB RAM useful too. I plan to keep using my trusty 10 year old 2013 MBP as my main local x88, for x86 development and testing, running x86 Linux and Windows VMs, and as a baseline for GPU graphics dev where I want to have something near the slow end to target to ensure the software runs well for people who don't have the latest devices.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

I have the exact model, but despite my best attempts at software, firmware, hardware maintenance it still overheats and takes about 5 minutes to boot up. Nothing to rave about.

shlip 3y ago

I have 2 Dell Inspiron 1525 from 2008, still kicking bottoms as DAW under Manjaro. I used to have a a Dell Latitude d630 from 2007 running Debian fine in 2018 but I gave it away. Compared to my 2008 macbook pro, that cost me 1400€ at the time, and suddenly died on me 4 years later for no obvious reason (this series was subject to a recall campaign due to its nvidia 8600 gpu, but I missed the elegibility window by a few months). TBH though, my dad uses a 2009 macbookpro with W10 and it runs just fine with an SSD. All in all, you never know, YMMV .

davidgerard 3y ago

We've been finding Lenovo is not great lately. We've had multiple X390 and now T14gen3 need to be sent back under warranty, some multiple times. Could be a batch of lemons coincidentally hit the UK with both models, or it could be that Lenovo's quality is not up the mark lately.

anonzzzies 3y ago

I cannot kill my x220. It keeps going. I use it a lot as it's a magical machine even though it's that old.

darkr 3y ago

I was using a ~2011 x220 as my personal laptop until 2021 or so, when I replaced it with an X1 carbon. This lasted almost 2 years until it stopped charging, and Lenovo wanted more than the laptop was worth to repair it. I've since switched back to the x220. Whilst I miss the extra memory and CPU grunt, it gets the job done. When this one finally dies I'm not sure what will replace it, but it certainly won't be another Lenovo.

sva_ 3y ago
I used an x1 carbon for about 9 years, and it is still running without issues.

throwaw33333434 3y ago

my 2013 is Macbook is still working fine. I can still watch 1,5h movie on it. It's doing better than 2017 shite.

t312227 3y ago

thinkpad x200s from march 2009 - steadily approaching 15 years -, still works great to read news-sites, browser hackernews, watch some vidos on youtube etc. ... using the current version of linuxmint / mate edition :))

phil21 3y ago

Unfortunately after a lifetime of being a Thinkpad fanboy to the point of absurdity, the T410s is the laptop that made me move to Apple and not look back since. The battery life on that thing was something to behold. Couldn't even last for regular "office work" during a 3hr flight. The T40 and T60 lineup has a very special place in my heart, and I have a few of those laying around still operating as "headless" servers. The integrated crash cart is great!

jhoechtl 3y ago

Medium is the epitom of the internet most of us do not want. Where have all the wordpress-sites gone?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

vinckr 3y ago

That is nothing, I am still using my lightweight ENIAC from 1951. So far works perfectly and I only sometimes have to replace the power plant that runs it.

pron 3y ago
But did you at least upgrade it to support USB-C?

mettamage 3y ago

I'm so happy with this post. I needed to buy a cheap laptop for a family member and I went so all in on Mac a decade ago that I really don't know the lay of the land when it comes to Windows. I'll just get a Lenovo Thinkpad second hand :)

marci 3y ago
Avoid the T480S It has 2 internal batteries, and with older batteries, they can fail to switch from one to the other when they reach 0%. Models with a removable battery are a bit bulkier, but I think of greater value.
- k9unit 3y ago
  I've got a $150 T480s. It only has one, non hot swappable battery. Though it can be easily replaced. The T480 non s has 2 batteries. One external and one internal. Unless you count the cmos battery, which can be replaced on either. The build quality on the T480s is also higher.
  - marci 3y ago
    My bad, it's the t470s

underscoring 3y ago

I knew what laptop this was going to be even before I clicked. Although for balance I did have a W520i that died. They're not all gold.

cvccvroomvroom 3y ago

The T480 was last non-Apple cargo cult, repairable design. The T490 and onward aren't good. The problem though of old hardware is lack of CPU features needed by some operating systems and the presence of hardware vulnerabilities, and the obsolete ports they contain like FireWire, slow USB, and PCMCIA.

mark_undoio 3y ago

We used to use refurbed Thinkpad X220s for all engineers in the business - cheap, widely available, capable enough and with a docking station to use as a desktop. They'd take 16GB of RAM, though the official spec said the maximum was 8GB. We moved onto L390 Yogas afterwards, which takes up to 32GB of RAM - I've been very happy with mine. Both have been pretty solid for me, though I think the X220 probably had a lot more rough treatment overall.

mark_undoio 3y ago
There's also quite a nice story on Libreboot running on them e.g. https://minifree.org/ https://minifree.org/ I've not tried that myself yet, though!

devX3 3y ago

220 240 was peak laptop hardware in comparison what we have now. Best keyboard, durability etc. still to this day use a x220 to code.

wrzuteczka 3y ago

My Bose QC 35 headphones are like that. I just replace the ear pads every few years and they are like new.

k3liutZu 3y ago

I just booted up my 2009 MacBook Pro since it's the only machine I still have with a CD/DVD drive. Some keys are not working (eg R, T, P, probably others) so I had to use the accessibility on screen keyboard. I was surprised it still booted up and I was able to use the optical drive.

sdflhasjd 3y ago

I was thinking about this the other day when I was using my 11 year old X1 Carbon. It was used an abused for most of those years and aside from the battery which doesn't have the life it used to, everything else works just as well as it did when it came out of the box (oh, and the 3G modem that will stop working soon) My 2017 MacBook Pro on the other hand was comparatively coddled, yet in spite of Apple's quality engineering... one of the keys doesn't work, the coating of the screen has worn in places, the USB ports don't hold cables without them falling out, the touchbar occasionally flickers, it can overheat with worse performance than the X1. Some of these are just luck (but the 2017 MBP was probably Apple's worst product in recent memory for me), but what can't be attributed to luck is the support. Okay, neither Apple nor Lenovo really supports either of those machines any more, but the Macbook will not receive the Sonoma update, and as a consequence at some point will no longer work with the latest XCode. The X1 on the other hand is still running the latest Windows 10 and probably will do for another 5 years.

hackpelican 3y ago
The 2017 MBP is indeed horrible hardware. You’ll find many testimonies of 2012-2015 MacBooks being incredibly resilient. The new 2019-2023 models are too recent to judge, but seem to be back on track resiliency wise.

fefe23 3y ago

> Create an account to read the full story. No. I shall not. > To make Medium work, we log user data. By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy. That's now how this works. Please don't use Medium, post to Medium, or share Medium links. Sites like this are a cancer on the Internet.

kbns 3y ago
including quora.
- sparrowInHand 3y ago
  quora is ccp owned by now?
  - wutwutwat 3y ago
    [flagged]
tim333 3y ago
You can get it here without https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
tonystubblebine 3y ago
The author put this behind a paywall. How is that any different to you than Substack or the NYTimes?
- scblock 3y ago
  Those are both unusable too. If only the author had put it on his own blog like in the good old days.
- close04 3y ago
  The paywall is the author's choice and anyone is free to reject creating a Medium account, no damage done on either side. OP's second objection on the other hand looks less "rejectable" than a paywall because the damage is done before you have the chance to reject it: > By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy. Medium's implicit assumption that by clicking on their link the user accepted the policies is illegal under GDPR. It doesn't give the chance to reject before being tracked.

reify 3y ago

Create an account to read the full story. The author made this story available to Medium members only. If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us. Very unhelpful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I would have liked to read the whole story where is the non paywalled link?

cglace 3y ago

My M1 MacBook Pros keyboard and trackpad quit working after almost exactly one year. Apple now wants 600 to fix the issue. This is the closest I've come to considering abandoning Apple but I don't know what to switch to.

ubermonkey 3y ago
My conclusion, drawn from decades of electronics purchases, is that AppleCare is the only extended warranty worth purchasing. It's only RARELY come up for me, but since I use my machine for work knowing I'm covered for 3 years is nice. This USED to be the period I'd keep a computer, too, but for about the last maybe 8 years (?) I find the upgrade-at-36-months thing isn't as much of a slam dunk as it used to be. I kept my last one like 4.5. My current one is 2-year-old M1 Macbook Pro, and it's still crazy fast to me. I can't imagine that's gonna change in a year.
- windowsrookie 3y ago
  Apple allows you to extend AppleCare after the 3 years now. I still have Applecare coverage on my 2018 15" MacBook Pro.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    I did not know this. Thanks.
windowsrookie 3y ago
My M1 MacBook Air has had two hardware failures now. Both would have cost over $500 each to repair without Applcare+. Applecare has been essential, but it adds extra cost on top of Apple's already premium prices. It has also made me loose trust in this machine. I had to buy an emergency laptop because I was in Europe and nowhere near an Apple store with the most recent failure. This is also the closest I have come to considering abandoning Apple.
- cglace 3y ago

manchmalscott 3y ago

I don't have a medium account so I can only see the first paragraph ish, but I will comment that I used to daily drive a thinkpad T440p that I bought off ebay for ~$140, and ran arch linux on it. I was living the dream every article or think-piece like this seems to believe in. I now (for a laptop) use an M1 pro macbook pro. The reason why I was open to buying a new laptop at all is because I had gotten used to watching youtube videos at 2x speed, and it literally couldn't handle it. The video would freeze and the audio would keep going and the only fix was to refresh the page multiple times per video. I recently went on a week long trip, and needed a linux laptop, so I brought it with me, and was working on an OpenGL project. Practically every time I hit compile, the entire X session would freeze, to the point where the clock in the KDE taskbar wasn't even updating anymore, and the only fix was to hard reset the machine (I have never gotten magic sysreq working on that computer). I now have a framework 16 on preorder to be my linux laptop. I also never got the webcam to be detected by linux (looking in lsusb, lspci, etc) even though it was enabled in the bios, the battery life wasn't enough to make it through a day of classes on one charge, and it ran too hot to be comfortable on my lap. To its credit, the keyboard was nice, the trackpoint was fine, and when the trackpad died entirely, I was able to buy a new one (also on ebay) and swap them out without issue. With an SSD, it boots very quickly. That's about where my good things to say end. "Just buy a used laptop from over a decade ago" is not good advice. Operating systems, the apps we use, the websites we use, are no longer optimized for a 10 year old dual core with 10 year old intel HD graphics. You're better off saving that money to buy something newer.

epicide 3y ago
It's definitely good advice to be mindful of one's needs. I have my own personal anecdotes about getting burnt by underestimating my actual needs when attempting projects like daily driving an older laptop. At the same time, keep in mind that the biggest tradeoff tends to be convenience. For example, a YouTube script plus local video player, such as MPV, works a treat on these older machines. Even if some video formats don't work great, you a) actually have an option for converting [0], and b) you are dropping all of the cycles spent on the non-video-watching parts of a YouTube video page. Yes, that tends to make watching a 10 minute video kind of annoying when you spend a minute or two just on the overhead of downloading/opening/deleting it. Personally, I've sometimes found that to be a subtle push to read more text-based content instead of watching a bunch of videos. Similarly, it pushes me to favor longer-form videos that might involve more information and/or subtleties that the shorter videos might skip over (perhaps largely for SEO reasons). All of that might or might not be a net-positive or even a possibility depending on needs, of course. I've found a lot of personal motivation and fulfillment by looking for those sorts of alternate ways of doing things. Sometimes, slowing down (in more ways than just FLOPS) can lead you down rabbit holes that are not only fulfilling and interesting, but educational. [1] Your point that it's bad advice to "just buy an [old] used laptop" definitely stands, but I'll just amend it with the caveat of "... depending on your needs/uses". To each their own. [0]: There are also in-browser tricks/plugins for making the YouTube site itself lighter, but personally, I find throwing more instructions into the browser to be somewhat counterproductive. A bit like calculating how much extra fuel you need in order to carry the additional fuel, etc. The tradeoff is convenience, of course. [1]: I'm also lucky to no longer have to deal with things like customers breathing down my neck with deadlines. So if I spend an extra 5 minutes doing something that used to take me 2 minutes, that's fine.

arp242 3y ago

https://scribe.rip/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c https://scribe.rip/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c

AzzieElbab 3y ago

Somehow I knew this was about thinkpad b4 opening the article

electrondood 3y ago

I knew without clicking that was a Lenovo Thinkpad. Those things are beasts. Also, fuck Medium. "Log in to continue reading..." paywall. Okay, log in. "To continue reading, subscribe to $AUTHOR..." Useless waste of my time.

bluedino 3y ago

I'm more amazed that someone can live with that atrocious Lenovo screen for that long. I can live with the thickness, the not so great battery life (unless you go with that monster 'slice' battery), and the heat. But the screen... I went from a ThinkPad to a MacBook Pro in 2010. The screen was amazing. It was bright, it had viewing angles, it wasn't fuzzy... The trackpad, slimness, instant-on, speakers, and everything else was just icing on the cake. Later on, I picked up a 2560x1440 ThinkPad X1 and the screen was great, Lenovo had finally leveled the playing field. But there was a pretty big gap in my life where I went without a ThinkPad.

t0bia_s 3y ago

I have ThinkPad x201 since 2012. Still working as new. Few years ago it has "fan error" on boot. So I dissemble whole laptop to get to fan (reserve whole evening) and finally put a tinny amount of vaseline on the fan shaft, put new paste on CPU/GPU and it still works. Silent and temperatures wont go above 60°C. Power comsumption on idle is however high to nowadays standard. About 42W. I honestly cannot imagine more durable laptop that kids use today.

otterpro 3y ago

As much as I'm fan of Thinkpad and I hate the idea of buying modern laptop, I don't want to buy a decade-old laptop. I just want a modern-ish laptop with decent CPU and easily-replaceable battery, upgradable RAM and SSD. That leads me to Framework laptop (but it is so much more expensive than buying old thinkpad). Thinkpad T420 is already showing its age and is too slow to run some modern or cpu-intensive apps (I wish it weren't true). Also, eventually ARM cpu might take over the x86/64 cpu, and when that happens, I'd be sad but the T420 would be relegated to running Home Assistant or for playing retro emulation.

memsom 3y ago

My "just won't die" laptop is my trusty MacBook Pro 2012 pre-retina. I have owned it for 8 years and it is still perfectly usable. I can get it to run Ventura with OCLP and honestly, it is only that I now really, really need something with Apple Silicon for dev work that I am considering an upgrade. It is a beast and I believe it even has the original battery (I got it used, so not 100% sure.)

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Tommstein 3y ago

Writing this from my 2009 System76 laptop.

simonblack 3y ago

My 13-year-old T410 Thinkpad is also eternal. I've bought and thrown away several other laptops since I got that one back in 2010. I've upgraded it to an SSD 4TB from the original 500GB 2.5" HDD, and I replaced the keyboard when one of the arrow-keys stopped working for some reason. It was super expensive, but my goal with laptops is to buy something with sufficiently excellent build-quality that it’ll last for years. That's my philosophy too, both with computers and with cars. In words that's stated pretty much as: "Buy twice as good and buy half as often". Laptops I keep as long as possible, cars usually about 10 years or more. A Mercedes is hardly run in at 10 years of age.

m0d0nne11 3y ago

No, I will - of course! - not create a medium account. What a $hi++y obstacle to hit right in the middle of the posting.

lproven 3y ago
It's worse than that. I have a Medium account. I still couldn't read it. It doesn't just need a Medium account, it needs a PAID Medium account.

IYasha 3y ago

I did not read the article on purpose at first. Because I KNEW it would be ThinkPad! PS: guess what I'm typing this on :D