Comment by angyrold | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angyrold | Hacker News Reader

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I think the T series is great. I have a T460 (bought off ebay for $140). I had an extra SSD, some old ram sticks I stuck in there and it works great. The dock off of Amazon cost me approximately 20 bucks. The CPU maxes and never goes above 55 C (idles 37-40) and runs almost all my dev tasks as needed. The laptop is approximately the size of my 13" 2015 Macbook Pro (my wife currently has taken that one). I have two headless machines with GPUs if I want to game (via Parsec or Steam streaming) or use GPU for Python notebooks etc.

I've run Fedora and a custom Debian setup in the past (and currently am using Void Linux). Things mostly work with no real issues.

I think perhaps the mistake is paying premium with new and shiny things that haven't stood the test of time is the problem here? If you buy cheap (something that is a known quantity also), you're less likely to feel the b urn of walking away from the shiny / expensive new thing, right?

Note: I also have the X230 (bought off craigslist for ~$100, 2 years ago) and have given that to my dad who has used it happily for years now.

A group (person) going by "51nb" out of Shenzhen, PRC, produces limited runs of motherboards that fit old ThinkPad chassis and accept modern processors. They also have access to NOS chassis and occasionally offer models such as the "X210," a completely unofficial X201 with a FHD IPS and current gen i7.

Interesting! Do you mind sharing some URLs?

Found these: https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=128709

https://www.51nb.com

Seems about right. They're kind of elusive, since they probably have some connection to the Lenovo line in the PRC but are operating very unofficially. Links to offerings show up on Thinkpad forums and the Thinkpad sub-reddit, perhaps also on the Face Book.

There needn't be much of a connection to lenovo. It just uses a thinkpad chassis and the keyboard. It has its own EC which works with the thinkpad keyboard. It doesn't use the lenovo EC.

That is really interesting. I have an ancient T61p from I think 2008 running Fedora, which works fine for basic stuff. I would love to upgrade it because it's built like the proverbial brick shithouse and has a great keyboard and a 4:3 display (which would also need to be updated). But it's probably impossible without more or less completely rebuilding the laptop.

My work laptop is a T460S, and it has the worst build quality/reliability I've seen in the past 5 years. The case is definitely light duty, to the point where one of the batteries swelling deformed it. The battery swelling also causes intermittent disconnection of that battery and of the screen, which is frustrating on a laptop.

Sounds pretty annoying/awful. The S model is a little smaller/thinner and I think the T460 I have barely makes the cut with the chassis (it has a lot more plastic than I remember the T series having).

I think in most cases it's pretty easy to pry these things apart and swap the batteries out.

I’ve had a T480 since summer 2018. It is the worst computer I have ever owned, less reliable and poorer build quality than a $250 Acer netbook from 2010. I had to install Windows because of an error to update one of several firmware issues that have arisen with this machine — this one relating to Thunderbolt without which it could not provide external output over any port but HDMI, and there only at 30 Hz for 4K. And I think the throttling issue is still not fixed. The ports on the board are extremely flimsy and I’m going to have to send my machine in to fix them a second time. At the very least they have massive issues in developing and deploying quality firmware.

Posts like this make me anxious to step out of the MacBook Pro bubble even though I want to. Aside from the butterfly keyboard saga those devices have generally been built very well, whereas I read nothing but complaints about the Dell XPS / Lenovo T4XX / HP Spectre du jour. Ranges from flimsy build quality to poor screens to coil whine to rapidly degrading batteries.

In terms of build quality, Dell's Latitude business notebooks have been great for a very long time. I have one from 6-7 years ago that's still running strong.

I've also been really happy with my Razer Blade which I've used alongside a Macbook Pro for the last ~3 years.

I can’t say enough good things about dell latitude. It’s to the point that they are all I use. You can get a great laptop for ~400 on eBay and when stuff breaks or wears out you can actually fix it yourself using spare parts that are easy to find

My issue with T480 is that a few tabs broke off when I opened the chasis to upgrade the RAM. And now the palmrest is cracked in two places. And the worst thing is that to replace the palm rest, I would have to literally unassemble the whole laptop.

That's really sad an unfortunate. My experiences have been great but have been slightly older machines that stood the test of time.

I wish I could say this about my T460p. It’s mobo died right after the warranty expired.

A friend of mine runs an IT help desk team that manages a fleet of T series laptops and they have a lot of problems. You got a good one. It’s so unfortunate that these have a lot of problems, they are almost perfect.

It's nice that laptops are in a spot where you could get a nice one for $150. This year because of Covid, those prices have doubled because of the increase in demand for used laptops.

We are in the future. We want Ryzen 4000.

Lenovo just dropped the Thinkpad T14 and T14s with AMD variants a few days ago. The base model is way more expensive on the US locale of their site ($1500 vs. ~$1200 in France or ~$1000 in Taiwan), but the US variant also offers options/upgrades not available elsewhere (500-nit touchscreen display, 32GB RAM).

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