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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Thinkpads do not have this crapware installed and can run Linux exceptionally well. You should look into one, because they're the best engineering laptop on the market.

Thinkpads have excellent keyboards, are user serviceable, support SIM cards, have tons of ports, are rugged yet lightweight. The manuals have hardware break downs to help you reinstall battery, RAM, drives, modems, etc.

The machines last forever. I have a few that are over a decade old and are still a joy to write software on.

Thinkpads are truly at another level.

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Thinkpads do not have this crapware installed and can run Linux exceptionally well

It's still supporting a company that thinks it's OK to install crapware on their consumer machines. Machines intended for the people least able to mitigate the problem.

Even if someone's not an Apple fan, he's right to send his money to another company.

Perhaps, if Lenovo sees Thinkpads selling more, they might think the market prefers solid machines and rejects preinstalled crapware. People voting by buying what they actually want, you know.

> It's still supporting a company that thinks it's OK to install crapware on their consumer machines.

I still use an Android phone even though I despise what Google has done for the open internet. Amp, unsemantic HTML5, promulgation of video ads, Chrome monoculture, dropping XMPP and RSS, search ad extortion, tracking, recaptcha, YouTube bad behavior, the app store monopoly / protection racket, etc. They still do great work in many areas, and you can't cut off the nose to spite the face.

At the end of the day, I'm buying a tool that lets me effectuate the changes I want to make. I buy the best tool that works for me. Thinkpads are marvelous, and you should try one.

Thinkpads are marvelous, and you should try one.

I have two at work that I use for testing. But for the kind of development I do, I need different tools. It's a shame, too, since I'm an old school IBM fan. I bring the ThinkPads to our testers in an IBM-branded backpack built for two laptops.

Two 90's laptops? What's that, like nineteen modern ones?

The pressure on Lenovo, Google et al will never be sufficient to force them to change if people don't retaliate forcefully enough.

If people don't react strongly, even to the point of temporarily damaging their own interests, companies can keep incrementally making things worse without provoking a reaction, by providing more goodies with along with the crap.

Fool! Don't you know that Apple is the only technology company that cares about you, and to buy from anyone else is to reward the enemy for being your enemy? :)

This. I was once such an avid Thinkpad fan, but several bad Lenovo practices and horrible experiences with their other machines have made me distrust this company so much that I've resisted the Thinkpad temptation for years now.

I'll call BS. Granted, this was a few years ago, but the W520 and W530 had quite a few issues with the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC), and you had to boot them with `nox2apic`. Additionally, although they had both integrated and discrete graphics cards, only the discrete was routed to the video out (no mux). Switching wasn't good on Linux, so you basically had to force discrete only, which knackered the battery life.

All machines can have issues. By all means, shop around and buy the best machine for your use-case. But brand loyalty is misplaced.

Yes, definitely fo the research for the specific model vs Linux compatibility.

Discrete graphics is always a source of pain in current laptops (ever since the dgpu designs stopped being directly connected to displays), avoid.

Until I read this, Thinkpads were at the top of my list for a new laptop. But even if they didn't do this on Thinkpads, the fact that Lenovo did this at all, does not reflect well on any of their brands.

Not to mention a 3 year on-site warranty (pretty much..it slightly varies on region) as standard on a T series.

My 470P was expensive for a windows laptop at £1368 (I went for the 2560x1440/nvme/i7-7700HQ) but the peace of mind of having it fixed within days combined with the build quality still makes me happy with it as a purchase.

> You should look into one, because they're the best engineering laptop on the market.

Dell Precision line may not have the great TP keyboard, but otherwise it's hard to beat a 7740, for example, performance-wise. If anything the Thinkpad P73 and Precision 7740 are similar spec-wise (7740 has marginally faster processor i9-9880HK vs. i9-9880H, and GPU, RTX 5000 vs. 4000), with the P73 coming in at 1lb heavier.

Though you'll pay through the nose for the 7740 with maxed out specs. Just for kicks I configured the following machine:

  CPU: i9-9880HK
  GPU: RTX 5000
  HD:  4 X 2TB SSD (RAID 0)
  RAM: 128GB
  SCREEN: UHD 3840 X 2160

A mere $21K USD :)

Linux is not a comparable desktop experience to macos.

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