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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to defend the T430 from a T430. Yes, it was a bad purchase when I made it (and when the author made it), but you can buy them for $100 a piece now on Ebay. Keyboards you can probably buy 20 for $50. Since they are from the dawn of Thinkpad's bullshit, they hardcoded the hardware choices you could make for upgrades into the firmware. Awful. But 1vyrain (https://1vyra.in/) came along and fixed all that.

A T430 doesn't even feel underpowered these days, and has a (horrible) webcam (that can be improved a bit by judicious software postprocessing.) With a dining room table, a router running OpenWRT, 4 T430s, and a 5-10 year-old gaming PC as a server to compile things on/serve things from/etc., you could start a little software company and your biggest expense would be the table.

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The 35 watt processor in the T430 is just way too easy to get toasty.

The T440 or above with a 1080p screen upgrade and trackpad replacement is so much nicer to use since it cooks your legs less, has a nicer screen, is lighter, thinner and still able to take hard falls without issue.

> The 35 watt processor in the T430 is just way too easy to get toasty.

Definitely true, but I don't use laptops on my lap very often. I also have a fear that

> lighter, thinner

may mean harder to get into and repair/replace things.

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edit: let me let these people argue in favor of the T430...

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/r88wag/my_almost_...

I really enjoyed my T460s from a job back in 2017. My main complaint was the rather anemic 2c/4t CPU.

I have a LG Gram 15 that is pretty decent, but very wobbly/flexy. It's saving grace is the lightweight of it.

My 16" MBP M1 Max is phenomenal, but very heavy, and I move it 5-10x daily.

I plan on replacing it with the ~2025 MBA 15". My wife's 13" M1 MBA is great, but the 13" is not nearly as comfortable for a single display as the 16".

I have a T420 gathering dust in a drawer. It was my everyday laptop in college for a couple years but then I switched to buying used Thinkpad tablet PCs for taking notes. I eventually went back to it last year and upgraded a few parts but regretted how hot the thing got with such poor battery life. It was fine running in a docking station but wasn't great on the move which is annoying if I want to use it in bed or on the couch. I remembered how much I disliked the thing so I bought a used X280 and am overjoyed with the purchase.

I am running a T420 and 99% of the time it is so cool the fan doesn't even kick in. But yeah when you start to push it - it can get toasty. Work load really determines a lot here.

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