Lenovo announced ThinkPads for 'better sustainability and extended repairabilty' | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo announced ThinkPads for 'better sustainability and extended repairabilty'

news.lenovo.com

68 pointsopengears91 comments

Do they solder the USB-C connectors on the motherboard still? Because that has been actually the only fatality in the T470/T495/T14 machines I have. There is no way of effectively repairing the connector other than throwing the motherboard away as the connector shell usually rips up traces when it goes.

Apple put theirs on a replaceable daughter board, which while annoying to get out, is possible with minimal tools. I’d expect the same if iFixit are crowing on this.

Edit: did some googling and found out that no they haven’t fixed this flaw. The USB-C ports are still directly soldered to the motherboard. More landfill and completely compromises this marketing. And it makes a mockery of iFixit supposed 9/10 score.

Source: https://www.ifixit.com/Document/sunTY6dbbJvOMRjP/Repairabili...

Are there often problems with these connectors?

Asking because I bought a "broken" thinkpad very cheap and the only thing that doesn't work is the USB ports that occasionally stop working.

Yes very regularly. Also on Dell machines from experience. Yubikey wore out both USB-C ports on a dell 5550 in under a year.

Is it USB-C fault in general or a peculiarity of the Dell? I'd be rather pissed if that happened to any laptop and wonder what the precautions should be.

I think it's a bit of both. The USB-C connector design isn't great. And some vendors have worse connector shells then others. Dell and Lenovo seem to have terrible ones. I haven't had any problem with Apple USB-C connectors or anything on Anker or Google Pixel devices.

I really wish they did design USB-C in a way like lightning. It was very difficult to screw up a lightning port unless you were really determined. At most the connector blade would snap off in the device thus breaking the cheap end of the connector, not the expensive end.

Thanks, feeling slightly better.

Actually I really don't like lightning cables but thinking about it now what I actually don't like is how the cables themselves break. I had only slight issues with lint in ports which I needed to pick out with a toothpick, never had a connector snap off or anything like that, but the cables failed all the time regardless.

Maybe if Apple weren't so stubborn about cable thinness we'd be in a different place right now.

The cables were crap yes I agree there. But case in point my mother has my 2015 phone 6s. It’s been through me and two of my kids already. We are all violent simian creatures who spend a lot of time doing silly things outdoors. But the port is still fine. I don’t think this will be the case for my iPhone 15 with USB-C

> Also on Dell machines from experience.

Yup, current personal laptop: had to send it back for a motherboard change due to the USB-C not charging anything. One year later almost the same problem but this time one of the port is still working.

Work latptop: exact same problem. USB port dead which necessitated a motherboard change.

Dell makes really poor quality laptops nowadays.

I don't know your particular model or situation and what the root cause would even be, but I have had issues with the USB ports that were later fixed in firmware, or one port that would stop working after a BIOS update until I disconnect the battery and wait a few minutes. Others on the Lenovo forums have identical/similar issues and resolutions.

I also had a functional laptop where they switched out the mainboard due to USB connector issues (which never showed up in BIOS tests).

Lenovo's approach to USB is a mystery.

Ifixit focuses on some weird criteria. Like pentalobe screws are annoying but not a real impediment to repair. Soldered NAND is a wear item and a WAY bigger deal.

iFixit are a business. They are driven on attention and sales. Not facts. Although some of the time they overlap.

I'm not going to denigrate them for being a business. They've done more for repairability and sustainability than most.

Repairability is a process not a factual end state, there are tradeoffs in design.

I will because their own products aren’t particularly good and their assessment of repairability on some products, as evidenced here, is likely biased by business relations.

I do a lot of repair work (ex EE / production engineer) and I’ve been shot by poor parts and tools from them. I look elsewhere first.

What I believe you are referring to is that most of the ifixit branded parts are white label with commensurate quality. This is not really a unique problem. Almost everything on Amazon/aliexpress is the same white label junk. Buying brand name parts sometimes implys a brand name level of QC but its increasingly not the case.

As for ifixit I would treat the products sold in partnership with the OEM differently from the ifixit brand ones.

Agree on all points. However sometimes the OEM branded parts are bundled in packs with iFixit tools. Notably with the Pixel parts as an example.

Honestly I'd rather go direct to vendor for parts or service and decent turnaround and there's only one that offers this I can name.

Ideally OEMs are best able to provide parts and service. The problem is too many have abused their position to restrict consumer choice. As long as parts and manuals are available to the user I've no problem with choice. The free market keeps everyone honest.

The problem is we have too many captured markets. I have a furnace yet as a user I'm not even allowed to see the manual. The HVAC people lobbied the EPA to make it hard for anyone but them to work on furnaces.

> Soldered NAND is a wear item and a WAY bigger deal.

"Citation needed". For anything resembling normal usage an SSD will last well beyond the economic lifetime of the rest of the components surrounding it. So why is it that big a deal to replace it?

I don't think anyone has worked this out yet.

Literally 99% of laptops out there die and/or are recycled with the stock configuration.

The first thing to go are the ports, batteries, screens, keyboards. I haven't seen an SSD failure in a decade now and we have thousands of them in production and on people's laptops.

My Macbook Air 2015's SSD failed and I had it replaced. And at the same time had its battery replaced for the second time.

I'm sure my usage would be excessive compared to a normal user, but I find SSDs last 2-3 years on average. I buy Samsung, perhaps that's the real issue

The problem is that there is no "normal usage" for a general purpose PC. It will run any software you want. I had a hyper-v bug that thrashed one of my SSD's and when the M1 launches they had a swap bug that thrashed them as well. The reality is that if something is a wear item a non zero part of the population will wear it out. To toss a perfectly good logic board for a suicidal SSD is absurdity.

This reminds me of Louis Rossman’s long-term use review of his Framework 13 (1); he was hard on it and killed some of the ports, but thanks to them being swappable, was able to just slot a new one in.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sw06swtgY0

I think somewhere in the middle of the framework and Lenovo is appropriate. I don't mind spending some time replacing ports but I do mind spending money on buying pluggable ones I'm going to plug in once.

Apple have the right approach (apart from having to remove the logic board to get at it): https://support.apple.com/en-us/103915 ... port boards are individually purchasable from https://selfservicerepair.com

> Apple have the right approach ...

Planned obsolescence through SoCs with no literature for system developers, soldered CPU, RAM, SSDs etc. and possible part-pairing on laptops and desktops was pioneered by Apple. I'd even go far as to say that the whole Right to Repair movement is an anti-Apple movement triggered by their hostility to consumer rights.

I think the planned obsolescence thing may not have any legs. My mother has a 9 year old Apple SoC in her pocket which is still getting software updates...

As for all the other things the claims are usable in both directions.

They're still dicks though!

Yeah. No. My mothers Macbook's display connector came loose after 3 years. No plausible way to fix it because the display cable is hidden under all the other components. Anecdotes aren't the best, but there ARE reasons Apple got this reputation.

Is your problem it couldn't be fixed or that you needed Apple to fix it?

You are forgetting John Deere’s contributions to these anti consumer practices

You are right. American farmers certainly deserve a lot of credit for advancing the Right to Repair movement in the US.

Looks like without a serial number you cannot even list the parts?

The swappable ports are my single favourite thing about the framework. I love them. I, personally, still use a microsd card reader all the time, and having one just there, not sticking out, is really useful.

I no longer need to carry a hub or dongle or whatever when I take my laptop places. Just a power adapter (though tbf I wouldn't even need that if Framework had figured out battery life better).

Though as much as I like upgradability, I'm not sure it will make financial sense to upgrade instead of buy a new machine.

> There is no way of effectively repairing the connector other than throwing the motherboard away

You're exaggerating. NorthridgeFix on YouTube has probably dozens of videos of him replacing USB-C connectors. Yes, he sometimes has to replace the traces with pad strips, but that's a long way to throwing the whole board away.

Not even slightly exaggerating. The repairs are overstated.

If you think these fixes last more than a few weeks you are probably mistaken. And due to the way footprints are designed for the shells there are occluded pins which can’t be resoldered or repaired. The end game is you have a USB-C connector that only works one way up on Thursdays when the moon is aligned with Jupiter.

uh you resolder the occulded pins the same way you solder occluded pins on say a BGA. With a heat and the right paste type. Its a bit tricky but should be doable. That said I like the framework solution better - hust protect the usb-c ports by adding a short extension.

Well you don't because there is a row of pads stuck to the bottom of the connector which is torn off the board. You can only resolder and patch up the other row on the end of the connector body. The row that is torn off the board will never work again.

Also you may be lucky if it can do power delivery after that. You would be really lucky if it still works as USB hole and you'd be blessed if TB works over it after. They are pretty much transmission lines not DC.

People grind the multi-layer sandwich of iPhone connectors and BCP, restore traces on multiple layers and then get everything back so the phone is working.

It's surely less trouble to restore just a USB port.

Which people? How many are willing to guarantee such a repair will still work a year from now?

Charlatans preying on the poor and cheap I suspect.

As an actual qualified EE who used to design high speed digital and RF boards I can tell you that they might not even be working properly straight away, let alone a year from now. You'll just find out in a year what the damage to your data was.

Quite surprisingly - the ones who make a living repairing the phones.

> How many are willing to guarantee such a repair will still work a year from now?

Ah, yes, everyone should prefer to throw the device away because the repairman didn't bid his head what the repair would outlive the repairman, device and device owner, amirite?

I bet you could get one of those magnetic usb-c 100w power connectors and fix this flaw for the most part simply by virtue of a breakaway connector that put minimal strain on the laptop.

Of course, those connectors don't carry data, so for connecting to a dock you would still be sol.

> DIMM, keyboard, SSD and WWAN

Basically a return to the status quo of 10 years ago, isn't it?

I am inclined to believe that this (as well as Dell's Concept Luna) is a direct result of Framework's existence and may not have happened without them in this form.

Probably, and that's not a bad thing.

I know that my next laptop would have been a switch from ThinkPads to Framework, and it probably still will be, but I know that there are plenty or organisations that can't move to Framework so having Lenovo fix this is great for many reasons.

Yeah, it's great to see this kind of impact on other, way bigger vendors.

Those four things have almost always been replacement in many it not most thinkpads. This feels like pure marketing spin.

Actually, they had been moving towards towards soldering ram and SSD. So this is kind of a positive step back. Thanks frame.work ...!

HP EliteBooks 840/5 and 640/5 also have all that and hp publishes very nice videos how to take the machine completely apart

> Basically a return to the status quo of 10 years ago, isn't it?

couldn't help but imagine: this is the start of the transition to LAAS - laptop as a service (via subscription/advertising). :)

It is like Bio being back to how we used to buy food before the big supermarket chains, although more expensive than it used to be.

I use my laptop on a laptop stand on the couch and bed. Every time I slightly shift positions, the lap detection mode is triggered through the accelerometer (even though it's not on my lap) and the power limit throttles to 11W. You can clearly tell Lenovo does not dog food their own products, nor do they care about them. They've also released broken bios updates which ends up bricking devices. I can find links if people want to know more, but I have stopped recommending ThinkPads to friends and family. The quality is no longer there.

This is not a company that cares about their products - just one that attempts to extract the maximum possible value out of its consumers.

I just replaced my daughter’s T14 gen 3 with a MacBook Air M2 because the thinkpad lasts 2 hours on battery and gets hotter than satan’s nuts. Terrible machine.

Weird, my AMD T14 gen 3 lasts 6-8 hours and doesn't get hot at all.

Yeah that's because it's not the Intel variant :)

Incidentally I get about 13 hours on my MBP.

I have to use a Mac for work.

I'm fine not being subjected to MacOS in my spare time.

It's the other way around here. I always run a different platform at home to work. It's part of keeping sane in this industry.

Then again the latest macOS broke me completely. But it's not like Microsoft haven't done that several times...

Which is why I'm doing great with Fedora on my personal ThinkPad.

Consider yourself lucky.

I've wasted at least a full work week's time figuring out whether speaker/keyboard/suspend/lid/forcepad/stylus/overheating/GPU/scaling/dock/HID audio/application problems in my Z13 Gen 1 were caused by Lenovo, one of Lenovo's partners, the Linux kernel, Fedora, Wayland + GNOME, or just cosmic radiation.

Still not enough for a long workday though.

No one is productively producing for over 8 hours non-stop.

True, but longer days happen once in a while and not having to carry a charger is nice.

To me it got bad around the time they gave up the docking station port and switched to USBC for that. We have such models at work now and they had multiple failures, like one USBC port dying, which was hilarious to figure out first because the docking station uses two, so it still half worked. Then the keyboard on one died. Another colleagues speakers died.

We had lots of models from the T series before, and while they were not all perfect they still worked perfectly and we usually got to take them home when they were replaced and they kept working for years to come after the inevitable battery swap.

Yup, planned obsolescence. Apple does it way more but it's still unacceptable. Might as well go with any other brand then since they're charging a premium anyway.

Ironically, when I have the laptop on my lap, there is enough clearance between my legs to let air through. If I put the laptop on a mattress, it gets ridiculously hot because it doesn't activate lap mode and the mattress makes a great seal on all of the chassis bottom edges.

It's also a mismanagement of resources that someone is writing IMU drivers and some [clearly imperfect] decision logic, some other person is routing that IC onto the motherboard, the thing will need to be documented and bugfixed (and not necessarily by the same people that designed and wrote the thing), it adds another supply chain constraint, the whole subsystem is an unnecessary power consumption (even if it's optimized to 50 or 20 uA)...

There are much bigger fires to extinguish at Lenovo with their hardware/firmware/vendor/driver choices, and a handful of people are spending finite engineering resources on "lap mode."

Yes. Complete mismanagement and ruins user productivity but can't disable it "due to legal". No gamer would allow this to happen on their gaming laptops (nor afaik have been sued) but according to Lenovo no office worker can put their laptops on their laps with more than 11W TDP being delivered to the laptop. It's crazy.

The laptop stands readily available on amazon allow for airflow while being on a mattress, for example. Just poor design where you can tell they don't care about their products. I will be replacing this unit with either Framework or a Tong Fang laptop which costs half as much but delivers twice the sustained TDP (54W) even when not on lap detection mode, provides proper cooling via 2 fans/vacuum chambers and comes stock with PTM7950 - all things Lenovo keeps on devices that cost 2k+.

ThinkPads/Lenovo no longer take pride in their products. It's a milking machine.

Lenovo announced new ThinkPads with "better sustainability and extended repairabilty'. The Intel variants are the L14 i Gen5, L16 i Gen1, L13 2-in-1 Gen 5, X13 Gen 5 and X13 2-in-1 Gen 5. AMD variants of the L14 Gen 5 and L16 Gen 1 have also been announced (but with sadly no TB4, but USB-4 only). The press release further reads that "One of the key features of the new ThinkPad L14 Gen 5 and L16 Gen 1 is enhanced repairability, with support from iFixit who have delivered a preliminary score of 9 out of 10.".

Still no left-and-right charge ports. Why Lenovo, why is this so hard?

Because it would add multiple dollars to the BoM.

And traditional docking stations, I mean the ones you snap the laptop on. I find them incredibly useful with my older thinkpads, and they solve the problem brilliantly.

Does it run completely with free software without binary blobs? Any advancements in this regard? This is very important for sustainability in the long run.

I had my department at the time buy me a P53 against their wishes; they wanted to get me a Dell workstation, since they had a partnership with Dell which included fast repair service etc.

I thought the P53 was the most reliable high end laptop I could get and was supposed to have an amazing keyboard. Instead, the keyboard was average at best and the trackpoint much worse than my older Dell workstation. Then, it was one hardware/firmware problem after another, until a small water spill put the cherry on top: wrecked performance and now it cannot boot if not plugged in.

Once upon a time, Thinkpads had great, water-resistant keyboards and a solid build with reliable ports, but now this has become a fairy tale. The article does not really address any of this. I am never buying a Thinkpad again, although I really don't know what my options are :( I hear Dell is tanking the quality of their high-end workstations too.

As usual "these new laptops are designed to optimally run Windows 11 and are poised to elevate productivity and streamline professional tasks."

Although apparently they are "Windows 11 Pro, Linux certified", so lets see.

At least we get our RAM, battery and harddisks components back.

Don't forget to put the Wi-Fi card back in a slot!

I didn't want this stupid, buggy Qualcomm Wi-Fi adapter in my AMD ThinkPad (probably one major cause of 6.7.x suspend hanging) and wanted to switch it out with an AX210, but I can't because it's soldered on.

I'm frustrated with my T14s Gen 3 AMD/P14s Gen 3 AMD -- the LCD panel is attached with tape[1] (!!) and my LCD panel has slipped down a few times. I dislike single-use adhesives. I wish for them to go back to screwing in the panel into the lid.

[1] https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/t14s_gen3_x13... page 101 (labelled page 95)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish

> Lenovo began to bundle the software with some of its computers in September 2014

Is this a threat even if I choose the option to purchase a computer without an OS?

Even if not that still tells you that you are not just buying a product but also are a product in Lenovo’s eyes

It wasn't in ThinkPads.

It wasn't only in Lenovo.

It was baked into the BIOS.

It only affected Windows, but Windows executed this pre-boot section and wouldn't allow it to be bypassed so reinfected after a reinstall.

It's removed by Windows Defender since 2015.

Is it a threat? Not at this point, but it should bring into question any Microsoft "secure computing" when they enabled this sort of behaviour with no way for users to protect themselves.

key takeaway:

> Komodia was founded by Barak Weichselbaum, a former programmer for Israel's IDF Intelligence Core

> "[...] are AI PCs ready to take AI workflows to the next level"

Every single thing has to be rubber-stamped with the magic word.

Part of me is sick of it, but another part of me is happy -- once it's overused enough to make everyone sick of it, it'll become an "avoid" word (e.g. we're starting to see this with "blockchain"), and then it'll go away.

I guess it's nice that it may be easier to repair, but Thinkpads have always been reasonably repairable, even if a bit fiddly. They also last a long time in my experience (current one is at 8 years old, same as the last one I had).

I just hope they upgrade their 1992 speakers to something useable.

Oh, and stop leaving the EQ/optimization to drivers or Dolby Access. Those don't make it into Linux.

My X1 gen 6 carbon has a broken USB charging port, which I could live with, but today the thunderbolt port also broke. Battery is also dead.

Just buy an old thinkpad not whatever this is.

To be fair, I have a T430, but we need modern alternatives for 2024 and beyond. Personally I want to see a laptop with AMD CPU, AMD dGPU and Thunderbolt 4 ports.

I use a x201 and a T430 fine in 2024. Your modern alternative is to get a macbook

Can I have replaceable 95WHr of battery as there was previously?

Ctrl+f "CAMM" 0 results

Guess not

Amazon.com/s?k=camm+memory

0 results

Sounds pointless.

LPDDR will never come in SODIMM. Hardly pointless.

It is when there's no way for users to even replace it at this point!

Do I want one? I sure do. Can I justify it? I can not.

I want to like linux desktop, I do. But Linux desktop feels more like it's part of the project and less like a tool.

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