The appeal of Thinkpads is that they're more or less predictable. Some manufacturers tend to swing wildly from "really great" to "terrible and flimsy" from gen

The appeal of Thinkpads is that they're more or less predictable. Some manufacturers tend to swing wildly from "really great" to "terrible and flimsy" from generation to generation. Thinkpads may, like everything else, be slowly enshittifying, but you can pretty much buy one at random and it probably won't creak when you pick it up, or overheat due to insufficient cooling capacity. On a per-model level they also tend to be very well documented. Knowing that it comes with specific wireless and GPU choices is important for Linux support, and is the sort of thing that they don't do with some cheap consumer laptops. I wish there were other manufacturers that did the same thing. I've heard good things about some specific commercial-grade Dell and HP ranges, but it seems like they don't have the same broad range... and often no trackpoint-alike.