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Comment by flatiron | Hacker News Reader

If you don’t travel much I always recommend used thinkpads coming off lease on eBay. Higher end models used by business people who probably used them as PowerPoint display devices. They aren’t usually light or fancy, but they are cheap and powerful. Every 3-5 I spend ~$400 on one as my personal device and never disappointed. I like them more than my work macbook pros but they are not as portable.

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The problem I have with thinkpads is the same as I have with almost all OEM windows machines---the branding is impenetrable. Like, which one is the good one? Is it the T series? The E series? The X series? The QZT series? Which is the Thinkpad X̡̨͟T͏̧͢Y̶̨͏7̷̀5̶̷Q̵̶͡͠͝Q͠͡ mark XZY? Is that the best one or the worst one? And you can't look at the prices to tell, and just assume the most expensive one is the best one, because the prices are for the current generation, and you're looking on eBay on the last generation. Screw that.

The original XTRAs system was like:

X: portable for Japanese(B5, 12”)

T: portable for American/European(A4, 14”)

R: office typewriter for secretaries(A4, 15”)

A: office computer for bosses(A4, 15”)

s: experimental ultraportable

Post-Lenovo acquisition system is:

X1xx: junks for kids

X1C : MacBook killer for China(14”)

X2 : stretched office typewriters for Japanese(12” wide)

T : Proper American Portable™️(14”)

R: Still office typewriters

A: X2 but uses AMD CPU

W: the most best ones that you order only by accident Yoga: ones that flips fragile keyboard exposing 11, 13, Flex, Helix, Tablet, whateverett: experimentals

The only ones you’d care are X1C, X200, or T400 depending on your region, religion and body size.

Not going to solve your problem but...

Actually, the convention is really simple, when they follow it. It goes [model line] [Screen size] [Intel CPU generation] [0 for intel, 5 for AMD CPU of same vintage] + Yoga if flippy

Model lines: X is premium business, T is mainstream business, E is economy, L is legacy/economy (extra ports). So by looking at "L380 yoga" you know it's a 13" convertible with lots of ports and an 8th gen Intel CPU.

That is actually really cool! Except for the "if they follow it" part, which rather threatens to scupper the whole thing. :-)

No 10th gen CPUs?

Thinkpad T4##/s(14”), X2##(12”) or x1c(12” + thin) series are the ones to look at. Others not really much of a reason to bother and are in much less supply.

There's no "good one", since the different series represent design tradeoffs other than just price. Some people want the lightest device, some the most powerful, others want the longest battery life. You can't have it all.

If you just took the most expensive ThinkPad, you'd probably end up with a P-series workstation, which is far from most people's definition of "best". And that's okay.

Don't forget business-grade laptops have good keyboards ;-) I find Thinkpad keyboards great, btw.

The X220 cost nothing (last one I got was 50euro from ebay) and, with Linux, have very long battery life. Put in a good ssd and extra memory and it for the feel (I did not benchmark) will outperform the Go for everything I do.

Also the battery can be swapped so you can take 2 for travelling.

They are not heavy but they are bulky indeed.

Are there specific sellers that you follow?

Greencitizen. Find sellers that sell broken stuff for parts. Those are the honest people. If everything is perfect on their profile you know it’s not. If there’s a lot of broken stuff for parts the stuff they say works usually works.

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