I got a 2nd hand x220 years ago, and it refuses to die. Running cachyOS currently.
My next laptop will certainly be a thinkpad.
Is there a version that doesn’t have the AI cuntery baked into it?
What is this about? Ai down to the bios? Confused at this
“AI” built into the CPU :(
I wonder if this will shut up the “they don’t make them like they used to” crowd.
Edit: i knew that wouldn’t be the case. It didn’t need this thread as proof.
No socketed CPU, soldered WiFi chip, no PCMCIA slot.
At least it seems like the clit is still there.no PCMCIA slot.
Alright, Gramps. Let’s get you back to bed.
Predictable. Here’s a related issue, see if you spot the pattern.
And how is having a PCMCIA slot going to help with that?
Not until everyone starts doing it. This used to be the norm.
Well they dont lol, they are super flimsy these days and most stuff is soldered on. Its good if this turns out to be the start of the return to good thinkpads, but i wouldnt get my hopes up yet.
What exactly is soldered on that shouldn’t be? If you want a processor that’s user replaceable, you should just get a PC. If RAM, SSD and the ports are user replaceable, that sounds pretty good to me.
Why should it be?
Have you ever carried a laptop on actual travel? Like sprinting across a train station to catch your connection? You’ll definitely learn to appreciate a smaller lighter laptop.
Have you ever carried a laptop on actual travel?
that’s what I wanted to ask but with PCs after your suggestion above
That’s what the T14s is for, no?
My first laptop was a briefcase. There is such a thing as a happy medium. You could design light laptops that have replaceable parts, but they don’t do that because that would give choice back to the consumer and most manufacturers whole business model is to have you discard your computer and buy a brand new one every few years.
And how is having a socketed processor going to help with that? Even in Framework laptop, you have to swap out the motherboard. And even then, a laptop will never be something that lasts for decades. Technology moves on.
And even then, a laptop will never be something that lasts for decades.
My T410 runs fine.
And how is having a socketed processor going to help with that?
which “that”? Obviously, it would increase repairability and longevity. it wouldn’t help with sales if you meant that, actually it’s likely that it would decrease sales because of longevity.
I’ve got two laptops, a personal one, and one from work. They’re both Lenovo laptops.
My personal laptop can be repaired, you can slip out the battery and replace it without even using a screw. There’s actually two batteries, one is internal and does require some screws to be removed but it’s not very difficult. Anyone who wants to can easily do that. The same goes for the fan and cooler, RAM, and SSD, network card, keyboard, screen, and trackpad. There’s probably a bunch of other things that can be easily replaced that I just haven’t looked into.
My work laptop is from 2022, so it’s about 4 years old now. It doesn’t have a second external battery. Opening it up is a bit tougher, and you can’t replace things as readily.
They have roughly the same dimensions, and weigh about as much. I don’t really see the added value to me as a consumer with this newer laptop.
I allready hate it. Just from looking at the pictures. Give me full size lan, i dont wabt my thinkpad wipping while typing, just so its 0.2cm thinner
The machine doens’t wobble because there’s an Ethernet plugged in. The flappy thing is just to maintain the curve. I dont think it even touches the table when plugged in.
So they fixed it? Nice.
It says full size rj45?
I can’t speak to previous versions of the hinge port, but as a network engineer who is constantly using it I’ve had no complaints with the one from my 2024 model.
The complaint about the one I have on my work ZBook is that removing the cable is more fiddly
wipping?
Like a table where one leg is longer than the other three.
“Wobbling”
Thank you!
That is not called “wipping”, that’s not even a word.
Maybe he meant whipping?
Then it would just be nonsense, and looking at their reply to other comments I doubt they ment whipping.
Whipping around is a regular idiom.
It means turning with suddenness.
Does the ram comes with a torque key?
Who needs catalytic converters with all this RAM around?
the ram slots need those wire mesh cages for catalytic converters
Ok but how long is it going to be supported? If they abandon the idea its just a particularly expensive regular laptop, even if they keep supporting it you’re locked into ThinkPads ecosystem. It’s not truly repairable until its a standard that doesn’t rely on the benevolence of a single company.
What ecosystem? pretty sure the “ecosystem” is standardized computer parts for thinkpads.
So to go down the bullet point list:
- Swappable battery: I’m going to assume its a generic battery and therefore the best possible option here since I know some (a lot of) laptops have weird proprietary batteries. Point for Thinkpad.
- Industry standard m.2: Even notebooks can do this.
- Easy keyboard replacement: This looks like a lock in? Of the laptops I’ve seen where you can swap the keyboard, which is actually quite a few but in a really dodgy looking way, the keyboards look very different from this. Point for looking WAY easier but might take it away again if this keyboard really is proprietary.
- Swappable memory: I’ll give you that many notebooks solder this in but its easy to find a regular laptop with swappable memory.
- Streamlined display repairs: Much like the keyboard this looks awesome and WAY less jank than normal way you have to do it but it also looks like a proprietary part.
- Modular cooling system: I don’t really know enough to say on this one, most laptops have a cooling system you can take out with similar form factors but I doubt they’d work well with random parts from other machines, then again I doubt this laptop would work well with random parts from other laptops either so your still probably locked into buying the correct one from ThinkPad.
- Modular ports: This is actually pretty awesome, though again where else am I even going to get these modular ports.
Ultimately its still good, the stuff that’s already common has been made way easier and some new options have opened up for repair and replacement, I can’t really blame thinkpad for being the only ones providing this hardware when they’re the only ones making a laptop that would use it in the first place, its still an ecosystem lock in to a degree though even if its not an intentional one. It would be nice to see some competition in the space.
Yeah, it is still a laptop in the end. More repairable than most but still a laptop. I just had a problem with the “ecosystem” wording as this is best used to describe unrepairable pieces of crap that refuses third party parts (looking at you, Apple).
Perhaps do some homework. ThinkPad have dominated in business for decades for good reason
Think-pad? Pshh, a momentary gimmick.
(My very first laptop was a ThinkPad with 256mb of RAM, 100 years ago. My current laptop is a ThinkPad with 32gb of ram)
Thinkpads had 3rd party replacement parts for the last 20 years.
They still don’t seem anywhere near as rugged as the tanks that were the IBM thinkpads and Early Lenovo Thinkpads. Which is a shame. The OG thinkpads were some of the best built laptops there were. Still better than some of the other cheap crap that passes for a laptop these days, but still a shell of its former glory.
I have a lower end, but capable gaming laptop. R7, 1Tb Nvme, 32Gb, RTX… It is easy to open, service, expandable, with space for a SATA 2.5, for example. Spill proof, lighted kbd, etc.
It’s kind of built like an old school ThinkPad. A tank.
And that’s why I’m getting rid of it.
The thing IS a tank.
I really use it as a laptop, I do onsite stuff, so I lug this thing around all day. Many use these as “transportable”. I don’t, I have a beefy workstation at home, so the laptop generally lives in its backpack.
So, for me, a professional grade, light but sturdy, and repairable machine is just what the doctor ordered.
If you need rugged, some gamer laptops are pretty tough and accessible, but you will pay the chunk tax.
If you REALLY want rugged, get a proper ruggedized laptop, and carry it around.
Happy for them, I’m sure the 100 people that still can afford computers will appreciate it.
Thinkpads are usually acquired as enterprise retire their stock, 2 or 3 year old devices for a fraction of the new price.
Thinkpads are generally invredibly cheap due to scale. You can also refurbished last years model for under 400 usd.
Hey… people win the lotto all the time! So for brief moments throughout the day there’s probably 101-107 people in the world who can still afford one!
It wouldn’t be difficult to make Lenovo laptops more repairable. I’ve had two, and both required taking the whole thing apart to replace the keyboard, the part most likely to have problems. I hate that about them.
Conversely, I replaced the battery in a T740 last week for a client .
8 screws total, including keyboard, and battery (2, and not glued).
I wouldn’t give this one a 10/10, but 7-8/10, probably.
Nice to work with, captive screws all around the shell, so no lost screws, no bullshit “screws under rubber feet” like HP loves to do…
Only gripe is that the usb c is not on a daughterboard. Or power and ports for that matter.
Traditionally, the business class T-series thinkpads were always easy to take apart and replace parts. All of the used lenovo thinkpads I’ve ever owned had marked screw holes on the bottom for the keyboard, which would let me slide it out without having to remove the case or anything.
The consumer Lenovos that weren’t based on the older IBM thinkpad designs were more standard designs like you describe.
Nice to see this pop up as Apple announce their 5yr plan to flood the world’s landfills & scrap yards with 8gb fused ram Neo’s.
Hasn’t Apple been soldering everything to the motherboard for ages now?
Oh yeah…for well over a decade. If you’re REALLY lucky the proprietary form factor m.2 is user replaceable and not just sad bits soldered direct to the PCB. (Edit: I really really hate Autoassume, that’s supposed to be “SSD bits”… I’ll leave it as is because it’s funny)
My wife has a 2017 MacBook Air, at some point in the last few years it stopped getting system and security updates. She didn’t notice until she got a pop-up from Chrome saying that her OS is no longer supported. Completely ignored it until around October last year when some websites stopped working and gave an error indicating out of date certificates.
(There’s a lot in those last 3 sentences that is wildly troubling to me…)
Took me from October until mid-January to convince her to TRY Linux. So I went to buy her a new m.2…and paid an extra £20 on top of standard because of the proprietary form factor. Luckily I bought before the major price hikes…got a 256gb m(ac).2 for ~£90. Would have just backed up her files and wiped the original drive but she wanted to be able to switch back to her exact installation if she didn’t like Linux…and the new drive is double the capacity 👍Good grief what a stupid future we live in.
And “sad bits” makes perfect sense.
I’m glad i switched to mint on my laptop, I hope it only continues to improve. If only we could self-manufacture the hardware, too…
At this point I’m so fucking fed up with the industry gatekeeping users, colluding against us, outright ABANDONING us because the fucking AI firms “bought all of our manufacturing output”, I don’t think I would even mind that much if I have to sacrifice a closet, or a whole room of my house, to contain the much bulkier homebrewed DIY electronics.
If 64 gigs of RAM a couple friends manufactured in their garage had to take up the space of a refrigerator – not a mini-fridge, i mean a whole fucking full scale kitchen appliance, I WOULD RATHER MAKE ROOM THAN PAY THOSE FUCKING CORPO PARASITES EVER AGAIN.
I mean…yeah…I guess I could live with homebrew tech on a scale of 64gb of ram being the size of a full fridge…but where the fuck do I put it?! Between the my wife and I there’s barely enough space for us and just our stuff in the house we own…😒🖕 Fucking Big Corpo Tech is in bed with Big Housing to conspire against the space required for Big HomebrewTech to be a contender…
*as usual
Get repairability too bad they start at 1200 USD
That’s a pretty standard starting price for a decent laptop. Or at least it was a few years ago.
I tend to buy T-series laptops once they are about 5 years old, and still have tons of life left in them.
I’ll probably be looking for a T14 Gen 2 this year. Nothing wrong with my T495 'cept that my kid spilled water on it but fortunately only killed the hall sensor.
In fact, I thought the laptop was dead but I. Noticed a little corrosion on the hall sensor board, unplugged it, laptop started right up.
And it’s still got plenty of life in it to hand down to my kid for Minecraft and such.
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Ripper job on Lenovo’s part; I’d give them flack for using LPCAMM2 instead of SODIMM but honestly, it is ultimately the better choice for laptops and it’s totally cool to see it instead of soldered RAM.
Ideally they’d bring back the old keyboard layout based on the T25, but that’s more or less nitpicking at this point. The Powerbridge battery system would be cool to see make a comeback and a swappable WIFI module would be cool (they kinda brush is off in the article but I think replacing and upgrading the WIFI module would be a nice thing).
My personal problem are the speakers; although ever since getting my hands on an M1 Pro MacBook I’m kinda spoiled in that regard.
It looks like the AMD model still comes with SO-DIMM. Was hoping for AMD + LPCAMM2 + repairability, but I guess you can’t have everything yet.
Seems like the AMD models are always more of an afterthought to lenovo; when I bought my P14s Gen 5 the AMD version still was based on an older chassis design compared to the all new intel design
I was wondering what they meant when talking about the WiFi chip. Is it replaceable but just annoying to get to or is it soldered to the board? I thought typically WiFi chips tended to be one of the few replaceable parts.
It is soldered to the board
I’d give them flack for using LPCAMM2
Why would you do that?
Because it’s a new-ish standard that few manufacturers use (I’m only aware of Dell and Lenovo using it) and thus, it could be harder and more expensive to replace them than normal DDR5 sticks (although those are expensive right now as well so eh).
But ultimately, they offer more benefits than drawbacks.
Yeah, but at the same time, it has WAY better performance than traditional SODIMMs. The primary technical reason laptops had RAM soldered for so long was because the transfer speed became problematic with that physical format under DDR5. LPCAMM2 removes that bandwidth constraint, and maintains user serviceability.
The primary technical reason laptops had RAM soldered for so long was because
Profits.
technical reason
Technical != financial
Yes, but if you are running Windows on them, do they still inject Chinese state-sponsored malware into Windows on every boot from UEFI/BIOS storage?
They were caught doing this on several occasions, to the point where Lenovo products are forbidden across significant swaths of the U.S. government and military.
Source?
One example of many.
You must be new to tech to not remember this. Wasn’t all that long ago.
Not even remotely the same thing OP is claiming. It’s their own windows flavor version with auto start script. It’s bad but not that bad.
Read it again. It occurs even with a full system wipe and re-install from Microsoft-direct media, or even a full hard drive swap. It is wholly independent of what is on the hard drive, the only restriction being that it can only successfully run when injected into Windows.
Trust me bro *tm
Err… were they? I remember vulnerabilities and a ban from SOME of the US gov agencies, but not clear if it was because of spying concerns or because they wanted a US supplier.
They can’t be a 10, only framework gets a 10. Nothing compares.
My memory was fuzzy, but I think it wasn’t UEFI but apps/drivers, but j could be wrong
You are correct, however they were malicious in nature and loaded on every boot from the UEFI/BIOS. They required Windows and auto-terminated the install if they already existed.
How this hasn’t killed all serious interest is beyond me.
Very few people, relatively speaking, have heard anything about this whatsoever. That’s how.
Goldfish memories by most muggles and normies.
Plus the latest shiny and feature FOMO.
And then you have procurement who are told to get the most at the least cost, allowing state-owned companies to undercut most competition. Without clearly-specified guidelines that exclude dangerous tech, most rank-and-file salarymen will be told by Dilbert bosses to order the hardware or look for a different job.
How would you recommend someone shop for a laptop? Any good guides?
Don’t listen to what the other guy is saying, it’s all bullshit. His vocabulary betrays this wonabe haxxor with bad ideas about everything and weird choices, and his suggestions are the same.
So, some of rakabis’ advice is pretty good. I’ll just say that if you’re wanting to get away from being locked into a computational ecosystem with an even worse support lifetime than windows devices, avoid buying a Mac. A 2018 MacBook stopped receiving 90% of updates in 2024.
Caveat that by saying that older MacBooks, i.e. pre Mac made chips, are usually pretty reasonably priced on the used market. If you’re willing to switch to Linux then there’s even really good support for the hardware, with basically every distro working on MacBooks with Intel chips out of the box. The only part of deploying Linux on my wife’s 2017 MB Air that was REALLY a headache was the webcam. There’s info on every step to get the drivers installed and everything working, it’s just not all in one place, and a little outdated.If you have the money and want simplicity, reliability, and interoperability, go for a Mac. Just clench your sphincter and maximize the RAM; min. 32Gb ought to be minimally appropriate for a 7-8yr lifespan of basic duties. And FFS, go for what your current data uses up ×2.5 or 1Tb, whichever is larger (vital performance reasons in that). Don’t get the smallest storage unless third-party upgrade options exist like for the Mac Mini M4. And remember: all RAM and a lot of storage is integrated these days, which is why you should always max it out; there is no upgrade path except wholesale replacement of the machine. CPU is largely immaterial unless you are doing truly heavy lifting like video editing or AI, so that can often be the lowest choice.
If you want freedom and truly unconstrained system, some form of Linux/BSD on a Framework system is the way to go. Or if a desktop, hand-assemble it yourself.
If you are going to stick with Windows, go for a business-class Dell. Trust me, it’ll be almost as $$$$ painful as a Mac, but these little f**kers are built to last. At least you can upgrade the RAM and on-board storage, although I honestly recommend not going under 32Gb for anything other than basic tasks. It’ll be a lot more zippy with 32Gb even if you spend the first week tearing all the AI and built-in spyware out of Windows.
Running a business class Dell on Debian. Fantastic machine.
Lenovo, you say…?
Its global headquarters are in Beijing, China, and its North American headquarters is in Morrisville, North Carolina, United States;[
Nah… I’ll stick to MSI
no noes chinese made hardware, it might have chinese spyware and all my data will be sent to the CCP! letme just continue using my AMERICAN HARDWARE with AMERICAN SPYWARE while sending all my information to the us government and copos instead of the CCP! walks away holding AMERICAN PHONE with always on cameras,mic and gps <3 At least when your data is sent to the ccp, its most definitely not going to affect you if you’re not in china.
I’m not in America either
What a shitty ragebait comment you just wrote. You should be ashamed.
Buy European. Fuck dictatorships. China and America both.
EDIT: MSI is headquartered in Taiwan, btw. I hope that rubs you the wrong way.
EDIT 2: What the fuck did I just reply to? This account has been up for 9 months and this is its only comment
Lenovo not dropping the ball on their thinkpad reputation but improving it. Very impressive
The issue I had with my previous Lenovo Thinkpad wasn’t that it wasn’t repairable when it broke, it was. The issue was that the cost of just replacing the keyboard was prohibitively high. Higher than the cost of a new laptop. So it became e-waste.
