My Favourite Laptop | Hacker News Reader

My Favourite Laptop

blog.jsbarretto.com

206 pointsibobev159 comments

My daughter has the same laptop (I bought it for her a long time ago). When she brought it with her when visiting me in Canada from Australia this summer, she asked me to look at it because Win10 wouldn't let her in and she needed her files and pics.

So, I booted a Fedora USB and backed up her files. When I asked her if she wanted me to install Fedora Workstation on it to continue using it, she said "Yes!" because "She loves this laptop and doesn't want to buy a new one."

Fedora runs beautifully fast on this system with 8GB of RAM and will probably last her a long time.

Every Windows laptop I have ever had where I installed Linux on it, I swear its lifespan is infinitely longer than if I kept Windows on it. My wife has Macs that are older than my oldest laptops / desktops I can still turn on. Windows is just abysmal for hardware.

I've had the same experience. My Macs last forever -- I can milk 7-8 years out of a Mac before replacing it (currently at 4 years on my current machine, an M1 MBP). Historically, a comparable Win machine lasts me three-ish years, if I'm lucky. I've stopped buying Win hardware, though, so it may have gotten better.

I know, I know: anecdata.

Beautiful! I also have one, running Fedora i3 Spin (which I had no idea was a thing until recently) and it's been great!

My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.

My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.

Ever since Dell launched their Ubuntu laptops, I've had nothing else (since 2012?) I'm on my fourth now, an XPS*. They all still work.

* It's not called XPS anymore, though.

Like Land Rover owners, I’m always shocked that people look to buy a thing that has plenty of spare parts.

I’d much rather buy a thing that doesn’t need them. Two decades of laptops, never replaced a single thing or had an issue. Shot, I have not had a single app crash or system crash in 5+ years. Also two decades of driving around the world without a single breakdown.

The spare parts availability is not really about failures. It’s often about upgrades (and sometimes downgrades). Also there are accidents.

You want to downgrade your laptop?

Maybe I’m a sucker , I have to ask.

Why?

One case: I had a (work provided) 15 inch laptop with a 4k touch screen. I didn’t like touch (never used it once) And 4k was a pain, but I don’t remember why exactly (tiny icons) or mixed dpi with an external screen.

So you modified the hardware on a work provided laptop instead of just running the screen at a different resolution?

And like Kawasaki KLR650 owners, I always look for things that I can easily fix myself and have plenty of spare parts on the market. "Zen or The Art of Laptop Maintenance", I suppose!

Obligatory "Don't forget the doohickey!"

But in all seriousness, the KLR is such a great example of this mindset. Find the tool that suits your needs, learn how it works and how to maintain it, and you're set for life.

There's no laptop that doesn't need spare parts. Even if some model is known for reliability, it doesn't matter when you're suddenly the unlucky one. Or when it drops on the ground and something cracks. Not that I have perfect information, but in a calculation similar to insurance - I'd rather have something a little bit less reliable but with cheaper spares/repair than "perfectly reliable" but needing a full replacement. (Or apple's "we can replace all of the inside or all of the outside")

I originally bought my MacBook Air M1 just as a transitional computer because my old, incredibly expensive Intel MacBook Pro had been stolen, and I was waiting for a newer MacBook Pro model. But I grew so fond of the Air that I couldn't bring myself to part with it again. It's lightweight, has incredible performance (more powerful than the most powerful Intel-based Pros), the battery lasts a long time, the keyboard is comfortable, and the design is more curved than the Pro (and the newer Air models), which means it doesn't dig into your wrists.

I've owned an M1 Pro since its release and it's still going strong. I was going to see how long I could run it for. My bet was that by staying on Sequoia and/or installing Linux, I could run it for a ridiculous amount of time. I've met developers in the past with 12 year old Macbooks.

But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to.

The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).

One of the things of an M1 Pro I depend a lot on is fingerprint reader (ie TouchID) and sadly that won't work on Asahi or any such distro on a mac. That's one reason I've not tried it again. Because I just come back to it (I am also used to keeping kinda long mac passwords).

Aslo, when I parted ways with my last employer I was given this 16GB piece as a temp laptop and the 32GB Pro (iirc M2 or M3) was in repair (sound issues). The "parting" happened during the repair. The IT helpfully suggested if I want they could delay all that if I don't sign the F&F settlement (great team; good to okay company). But I just wanted to get done with all that. I regret it though – I could certainly live without that mac's speaker working, but living with 32GB and local models isn't that nice :D

Despite all the sound and fury online, Golden Gate will also run just fine on the M1. They're barely less powerful than the current Neo - and usually have more RAM.

These laptops have a lot of life in them yet.

I was in the same boat with an M1 Pro I loved, but the display on mine died, and a replacement is about £800, which is bonkers. So now it's tethered to the monitor on my desk.

If the display died, it'd make a pretty good homelab server.

you can send me your M1 and I'll run it to the ground and let you know how much it lasts xD

No worries mate, what's your address, credit card details, and SSN?

Me too, base model M1 Pro from 2021 still runs like a dream.

I feel like I'm only gonna get pushed off this thing from software support being dropped.

Thirded. My sole regret is only getting 16GB of RAM.

I just replaced a battery on a mid 2012 retina macbook pro and set it up for my kids to use and I was amazed and how much it does basically everything just fine, which for them means playing videos and some light gaming. screen looks great still, keyboard is actually a bit nicer than the current one with a bit more travel. Speakers are terrible though.

If that m1 today came out as a 12” retina MacBook (2lb) it would be the first Apple product I’d ever line up for.

Neo is way too bulky/heavy.

I keep looking to see if there’s something better than my m1 air 13”. Even this post had me looking. But the m1 is “triple” the multicore speed of an 11th gen intel in a 12” Lenovo. And almost double the battery life with no active cooling. Luckily I ordered 16 gigs of ram. Should have ordered 256gb storage but I can live with it.

I’m happy to see more pushback against consumer culture, and I’m happy this system meets the needs of the author.

Of course, the other part of this are people who use computers to do much heavier workloads.

There are a pretty large list of activities where every time you have some significant gain like ~50-300% performance gain, there may be legitimate justification to buy the new hardware.

As a person who plays games as a hobby I’m pretty much buying a new GPU/processor anytime there’s something affordable that will double my frame rate or anytime there’s a game that comes out that I can’t play or won’t play at decent settings.

My old hardware is never wasted, someone else buys it and uses it until it physically degrades too much to be used.

Computers as a hobby or working device are a heck of a lot less expensive and wasteful than a lot of other activities even if you go crazy on consumerism.

Think about the weight of your laptop and how that compares to the weight of just one gallon of gasoline. Surely a week to a month of commuting is worse for the planet than buying a brand new laptop, right? For the record, I don’t actually know for certain whether it is, but that seems like a fair guesstimation.

From a cost standpoint, $100 is damn impressive to have a working functional laptop that gets your work done, but arguably $1000 or $2000 isn’t a whole lot of monkey, either. That kind of money is roughly equivalent to one round trip ticket to Europe, renting a minivan for a week or two, a month of daycare or rent/mortgage, etc.

It’s both a lot of money and not a lot of money at the same time.

Roughly 80% of the total energy consumption of a PC with a 3 yr lifespan is in the fabrication. Creating electronics is very resource intensive. Unlike other products, where the majority of energy and pollution lies in the usage, the majority of the impact of electronics lies in the fabrication.

Barring accidental damage and major defects, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a PC with a 3 year lifespan, that’s incredibly short. Even if you buy a new laptop every 3 years and trade it in, the trade-in contractor is definitely reselling that to someone who is going to use it unless it’s in seriously rough shape.

From what I can tell from a quick google search, producing one laptop is about 5-10,000MJ, about 70% of the energy used over its lifetime, pretty much just as you said.

This is about a month or two worth of household electricity usage.

It is equivalent to driving somewhere between 1,000-5,000 miles in a car depending on whether it’s gasoline or EV.

I think my guess was somewhat close. The average American is driving roughly 14,000 miles per year per person according to the federal highway administration. Most are doing so in a gasoline car, so we might surmise that buying a laptop is equivalent to about a month or two of an average person’s driving habits.

In my opinion that is one of those numbers that is both a lot and also not a lot at the same time.

My favorite and most beloved laptop was the T60 with an IPS display. It was rock-solid, had a docking station, a swappable CD drive and battery, and PDF manuals for disassembly. I wish I could buy something cool now to run a *nix OS, but I cannot find anything good besides the MacBook Pro.

sounds like you might appreciate the ethos behind https://frame.work/

Might not meet your spec reqs but have you looked into?

Yeah, I know about them. They look like MacBooks, and I really think the old ThinkPad design from the Yamato was perfect. I also miss the trackpad, as I'm a heavy keyboard user.

If there were an option to fund a clone of an IBM-era T43/T60, I'd gladly contribute to it. :D

Thanks anyway for your help!

I have several Thinkpads, but my favorite is a T420s.

AFAIK, it was the last of the line that had sculpted keytops, it feels good to type on. It's a damned shame that the newer ones have those chicklet keys.

i7 with 16GB RAM, HDD replaced with SSD. Runs Fedora like a top.

Very nice, I've got an X220 with an i7 and, agreed, the keyboard is so good. No generation since has been as good, though the xx30 ones are a close runner-up. Downhill ever since IMO.

The latest ones are really terrible. The T490s was still passable, decent key travel. But the T14s gen3 I have now is super shallow and lacks feedback. It's like an apple keyboard :(

I've had it for 2 years now and I still hate typing in it when it's not docked. It's horrible.

I wanted to keep the 490s but my work didn't let me, couldn't buy it either.

The stupid thing is that the 14s isn't even thinner. The base is thinner yes but the screen is almost double the thickness as before which wastes all the gains. Besides, the X1 carbon had a decent keyboard and was thinner and lighter. Not sure about the latest models of that though.

I think Lenovo just stopped caring about making good hardware.

I find the thinkpads extemely cool, and I envy the customization / repair options soo much.

That said, I switched to a macbook pro last year and these machines are like from another world. I want to get things done instead of fiddling with the machine and, famous last words I know but, this thing just works.

Yes, it'll be e-waste the moment a small thing breaks, and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world, so it's no competition to the thinkpad.

I hope framework eventually delivers the best of both worlds.

I don't think Framework aims to be a laptop that you just set it up and forget. You own everything and that comes with some concessions. Things won't always work, software will always be tricky to make fully compatible, etc.

But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.

That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago

> I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago

It really has. I bought a MacBook Pro in 2011 and used it throughout college. Worked great. I gave it to my friend’s little sister when she started college, and she ended up using it throughout her undergrad. She loved it, zero issues. So, that one MacBook got at least 9 years of use.

Fast forward to 2020, my wife needs a laptop for law school. I figure a MacBook pro would be the simplest, easiest, and most reliable option. It wasn’t. Not only had the cost gone up (I paid ~$1,300 for my MacBook pro, while hers cost ~$2,000 for the same options, but less), but using Microsoft apps like excel, word, and powerpoint was such a hassle sometimes. The apps kept signing her out or didn’t have certain options (like formatting) that were available in the Windows versions. Installing and working with third party apps that some of her professors and classes required was also a hassle, and those apps worked inconsistently. I remember having to give her my laptop a couple of times just so she could get her work done. The battery life was significantly worse compared to my older MacBook. Her MacBook seemed so much slower, couldn’t handle as much, and was overall a crap experience. The simplicity, reliability, and ease of use that used to separate Macs from windows laptops, especially for the average user, just didn't seem to be there anymore. It’s like whatever worked before, they got away from it.

So, anytime I hear someone say, “a MacBook is the best” these days all I think is, “yeah, nah, it’s crap, just like everything else, but slightly more expensive crap.”

2020 was when the ARM-based chips came out. Did you get her an Intel-based or M1-based mac? Because from 2017-2020 the Intel-based Macs were absolutely awful. I've owned several of them. The keyboards were terrible and they were slow.

I still have 2019 Macbook Airs sitting around, and I consider them completely unusable.

My wife has owned a 2020 M1 Macbook Air since then, and it's still working really well. To the extent that every time we talk about upgrading, we end up agreeing to wait.

I still have a 2019 mbp 16” .. i9 something with 32GB of RAM and a 2GB radeon 4xxx, which was my work machine until I got an M1 pro… set it up to replace my son’s 2015 macbook air and HOLY SHIT this thing feels slow. I can’t wrap my head around how they can be this bad. Like swimming in syrup.

First of all they need to offer shipping to anything but US / CA and parts of Europe. Would love to give them a shot but they seem to absolutely refuse to ship to Japan.

>and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world

An equivalent brand-new ThinkPad isn't really much cheaper. Maybe is more expensive actually. Repairability though is indeed terrible on Macbooks. Neo is the most* repairable and even that is mid (6/10 on iFixit; quite a jump from <=4 Pros have been getting forever).

*Something certainly related to EU's Right To Repair directive.

I replaced my MBA M3 15" with a Thinkpad X13 G6 AMD, running CachyOS. Much lighter, and the freedom from Apple's increasingly buggy and enshittified OS is priceless.

My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).

Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.

My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).

I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.

Thinkpad + Trackpad sounds all kinds of wrong. See that glorious red knob in the middle and those 3 buttons above the trackpad? That is what god intended. Now go and spin up some Emacs and a Sly + SBCL session and do the lord's work!

Macbook Air mid-2012 here. 8GB. I use Nixos without a desktop env, this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete. I have a 3090 in a desktop for messing around with LLMs but that's headless.

> this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete

(Almost) same here, mid-2012 MBP here, running Solus with 12Gb RAM and a 500Gb SSD.

I don't get around to using it much because I have a lighter hand-me-down Dell something-or-other that works well enough for the little I do on laptops, but after two GPU replacements under AppleCare and a post-warrantly recall, my 2011 17" MacBook Pro is still running, triple booting Sequoia, Linux, and Windows 11.

Windows was fun to set up because this particular model had broken ACPI tables such that the only way to get all hardware working in Windows short of hotpatching the firmeware is via BIOS rather than UEFI boot, which surprisingly works fine if you use a the Windows 10 first-stage installer to install Windows 11, which surprisingly works fine because all the first stage does is partition and set up the disk and restore an image, and it doesn't care much about the contents of the image.

This set-up does require maintaining valid GPT and MBR partition tables, of course, and since Windows only sees MBR, it can only see four partitions, which isn't a big restriction in practice so long as I have plenty of free space in a partition accessible from all three OSes, which I do.

The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?

IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.

Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.

Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.

Two-finger tap acts as the right-click. Also clicking and holding the bottom-right corner.

But I don’t pretend that any of these gestures make trackpads usable.

Alas, as a Linux user, X11 doesn't seem to do that sort of thing: a 2-finger tap is nothing at all according to xev. 2-finger and 3-finger trackpad clicks are basically unreliable left and right mouse button clicks.

I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.

Depends on your laptop and exact trackpad model. I have a T470 and the trackpad works fine. That said, it does have three physical buttons (for working with the trackpoint), which I use with the trackpad when I want to do complex drag and drop operations.

ThinkPads seem to still have physical buttons for clicking:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...

My X1 Carbon Gen13 has physical mouse buttons - I totally love them.

They're enshittified now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92bdOcsBVpQ

The ThinkPad is still the only recent-ish laptop you can actually buy with a trackpoint and a full-size ethernet port.

The trackpoint of old is my favorite input method for laptops. But the trackpoint of new is not like the trackpoint of old. I still prefer it to the trackpad personally, just because it's so ingrained in me, but I no longer try to convince friends and family. It's on its way out, culturally, because of said enshittification.

The HP Fury 16 has buttons below the touchpad. Maybe there are no other new laptops with buttons in that position.

The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.

Maybe it's just me but I find the buttons below the spacebar far more convenient to use together with the touchpad.

Yes, they are. The first generations of HP ZBooks had both the ThinkPad stick and the touchpad, so they had two rows of buttons, one below the space bar to be used with the stick and one below the touchpad to be used with the touchpad. ThinkPads usually have both the stick and the touchpad but only the buttons for the stick.

I thought i was crazy looking for mouse buttons in laptops, seems like the cool thing to do is leave them out.

Everyone trying to make a laptop that looks like Apple but doesn't work like one.

I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.

It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.

At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.

I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.

I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.

The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.

Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.

I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.

Tell us the make and model, please :)

What OS are you running on it?

Stock Ubuntu.

My old T420 still works and I still always smile when using the keyboard on it. Pure bliss.

I use a t14 gen 2 now but I still have my t420 w/ extra disk in the bay in my closet. Recently took it out and man, it's still the best keyboard I ever used.

Siemens Nixendorf Scenic Mobile 300, 133 MHz Pentium (before we had to number them), 16 MB of RAM, 800×600 passive matrix LCD, released 1997. I caused a major scandal at my high school since nobody on the staff had ever contemplated the scenario whereby a student turned up with a computer of their own. I dual booted Windows NT 4.0 and Linux (2.2 kernel I think).

Oh, the simple things in life!

I was told by the professor giving intro to programming during my compsci first year in 1997 that I was not allowed to bring my laptop into school, and I had to use the (much slower) computers that the school provided to do my coursework, because it would not be fair otherwise to the other students who lacked such luxuries.

In hindsight I think he was doing me a kindness because for sure that laptop would have ended up stolen.

As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.

I built my own web tmux type thing running on a beefy metal box (for rust builds) that I access over tailscale. I was using HAPI, but I wanted to simplify and use rust for the back end and my own elm-like front-end to improve performance. I haven't published it since it's pretty specific to my workflow (I ruthlessly keep it as simple as possible), but you can think of it like a Herdr type thing in the browser. It also has a phone interface and I generally use speech instead of typing as a lot of my compositions can be stream of thought.

I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...

Have you run into any situations where you couldn't reach back to your server? I still have an m3 macbook pro w 64gb ram that I use for local qwen when my internet isn't great ie getting stuff done on a plane. Not sure if I'd feel a loss going to MBA and having a 24gb ram max or if it would be good for me to disconnect and just read a book instead

Not really. The connection speed doesn't have to be great. It's nice if it is, but you can function on slower connections no problem. That means if my land internet goes out, my phone hotspot is good enough as a fallback. I can go to a coffee shop or w/e. My dev box is not at home, it's on a rack, backed up.

Yeah I just remote access my agent via cloud relay. There is no need in my experience for the laptop to have any oomph at all.

And once Anthropic has an outage you gonna be what...twiddling your thumbs?

Could be self hosted. I built and architecture using a remote gateway for my homelab.

This is how you justify dragging around some 2.5kg diving board of a laptop all the time?

Any machine thick or thin will do. Just write code so it uses resources properly and maybe, just maybe write it by hand unless you unhooked your brain and leave it to a hallucinating ma ch one that needs a “harness” to remotely do what you want.

And I’d rather “lug around a 2.5kg diving board” than using a fuckton of water and power in some remote data center thank you.

Edge device energy efficiency is unbelievably bad compared to backend data centers.

So is living in more than 10sqm. Gonna cram as much people into one apartment as possible to maximize utilization and make more space for data centers.

I built a mobile client for agents called Cosyra. For this use case I'd say use chat to prompt an agent because it will queue the message for when you have internet and sends it as an https request so it's pretty lightweight. You can check it out here: cosyra.com

So any cuck-coding machine serves the purpose?

I had a fujitsu lifebook that was 10 years old when I bought it and it lasted another 8 or so after that. I'd maxxed out the ram to 8GB, replaced the missing stylus and bought a new battery. It had a fantastic display that was brighter and had a wider viewing angle than the system76 gazelle I replaced it with. And the swivel hinge connector was soo solid.

I now have a framework 13 that I'd rate slightly higher than that fujitsu (it's lighter and the changeable ports thing is a truly wonderful idea), but it's a bit of a toss-up.

Had Lenovo (X220), followed by two top XPS 13" (lighter), then the first M1 (8gb), M1 Max (64gb!), and M3. Battery, weight, Linux-like, and UX (in that order) made the M1 practical to carry and reconverted my M1 Max into a server for LLM and computation. The M3 sometimes also work as a computing server in tandem. I would love to carry again my XPS 13" with Linux but the battery duration and lifetime makes it unusable for mobility.

Interesting, I was surprised to go back down this far to see another XPS. I got my first employer provided one pre-Covid, but its battery died around then. Around Covid, I wasn't as mobile so I was fine with something clunkier, and then afterward, I was thinking about what to buy -- but was like, you know what -- let me get a new battery for the XPS and see how that fares.

And that's what I'm still using right now.

When I saw this headline, I thought "I bet it's an old Thinkpad" :)

I have 3 personally, one for work. My T470p is probably the best one, given some tradeoffs (some annoying pressure points on the screen which happened on two replacements and some occasional flakiness with power) I got a cheap T480 when I thought the T470p was a lost cause (thankfully just a screen replacement) and one of the USB-C ports is dead. I can still charge with the other one, but that's annoying. But, the square plug remains to be fantastically reliable.

There is a certain odd interest I have in these, but that died off. Buying capable but older and much cheaper equipment, particularly when I don't have niche needs, has become the best option for me (particularly if I can update the software on it)

Not exactly the same model, but I really like the X280. I've bought a couple of refurbished X280s to give to friends and family whenever they need a working laptop for light office/internet/email use. Really nice laptops, super lightweight and durable, yet incredible affordable.

For anyone still running these older ThinkPads, where do you get new batteries from? I've not yet replaced any of mine but the aftermarket world for these seems rife with super-sketchy knockoffs that I'm certain will not be trustworthy. Any recommendations for known-good manufacturers of batteries for X230-X270 era? I'm in NA but I don't really care where I have to order from, I just want batteries that actually even vaguely resemble OEM reliability.

Edit: Ohh I see someone started a thread on this already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50340218

NA? Which country is that?

"NA" == North America, one of the seven continents on our planet. I figured I'd mention a broad geographical boundary since shipping within a singular landmass is often more economical than shipping between disparate continents.

Thanks for clearing that up! Here in ZH we never use that abbreviation. Much obliged!

North America

Ah no way! I figured it might be an old ThinkPad, but coincidentally it's the exact laptop on the desk next to me at this very moment! In my case running OpenBSD rather than Linux, but still. Oh and I've got i5-5300U vs. the OP's i5-5200U. 8GB as well which as OP says is plenty. Good times :) My only real criticism on this machine is the display, a bit low-res at 1366x768 and just not the nicest to look at, but definitely gets the job done. To be fair I like the look & feel of the X230 better, but those are just really feeling the age even on a more efficient OS and lightweight GUI (i3 ftw).

I'm hard on laptops, but my desktop is running an i7-2600 from 2011:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/52213/i...

No complaints. It was the peak of Intel consumer products in my opinion. I might upgrade it to 32GiB while I still can. (DDR3 is cheap.)

I have a pile of newer dead Intel machines (laptops and desktops). I don't have anything nice to say about them.

My absolute favorite is neither my M1 (whose screen broke overnight for no reason after 13 months, just outside of warranty) nor the ThinkPads many love but...

My milspec LG Gram with 24 GB of RAM: I know, I know, milspec means nothing etc. But...

A friend of mine literally stepped on it by mistake: no problem. There s an online video about someone throwing one down concrete stairs: keeps working just fine.

It s also lighter than any Mac laptop.

It s old now and may not have the fastest CPU but this laptop can and does take serious beating without breaking a sweat.

Amazing machine

My favorite laptop is a $90 Samsung Chromebook I bought around 7 years ago from Walmart clearance section during Black Friday.

I used it to remotely connect to hpc cluster to monitor my machine learning experiments.

It was unused for a while, then we had a baby. He used it to watch videos, absolutely battered it. This thing is indestructible. He grew older and started practicing IXL on it too.

These days we use it for doing monthly finances, viewing camera feeds and SD card contents. Son is now in kinder, at some point he might start using it for school work.

"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."

Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.

I use a T480 as my daily driver and recently upgraded to a 72wh battery after the old 24wh pack died. I bought a Lenovo-branded Total Micro battery off of CDW to ensure I was actually getting what I paid for, as the last battery was a cheap knockoff that barely lasted a year. The 72wh battery was about a $10 difference to the 48wh battery and will easily last 10 hours but could last 14 hours with conservative use.

This is the specific battery I bought: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...

Same here. A T480 as my personal laptop. 4 core/8 thread i7 CPU, 24GB ram and 512GB NVMe.

Works for all my daily tasks, and light development. Feels nice and responsive.

I’m running arch Linux and my custom hyprland-fork, which I’m using for a more retro look and a little bit more mouse-affordances than Hyprland wants to provide.

Couldn’t be happier!

FYI brendo, here is the working link: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...

Whoops, thank you. I was one digit off; must have hit backspace when I pasted the link.

I’m also on the look for one for my x220.

I’m pretty sure any original looking battery at this point is either fake or stored for so long it does not make sense to buy one.

Last time I almost bought a KingSener, but it’s really hard to find long term reviews on batteries.

It depends on the model, but usually people claiming long stretches are on low brightness, Bluetooth off, CPU undervolt and using something like TLP.

Since 2020 t14/t16 thinkpads no longer have a user swappable battery without removing screws. So you can get a 50wh standard battery or 82wh. Before 2020 you could get a slightly larger 96wh battery with a bump out, plus the small internal battery.

A power bank with a usb-c 65w pd will work for most laptops. Many of these will be 100wh/20000mah or 150wh/30000mah, to meet airplane limits.

The T480 is on par with this thing - you have two batteries, one is external and you can upgrade it to a beefcake pack if you desire, it has the 8000 series intel CPU which is fast enough. It has awesome expansion etc. I prefer the AMD T14's these days, but they lack a lot of the features I liked that this person calls out. One bigger internal battery, it's easy to replace if you (when you?) need to, and has USB4 on the later models.

I switched from the X250 to a T14 gen2 AMD and god did they do a bad job with the linux drivers. 5 years after release and the trackpoint still has a third of the refresh rate of the x250 (or even windows on the same machine) which makes it very hard to use properly (for me, its too slow but increasing the speed makes it loose accuracy).

Also, for some reason the wifi is really buggy (disconnecting and reconnecting after ~5 minutes, not connecting at all for some APs). Maybe its me but the intel wifi chipsets are just far more reliable.

Trackpoints, Lenovo equips their laptops with at least two kinds: Synaptics, the good one, unfortunatelly the last laptop I had with this was more than 20 years ago, the R40 that still works in my garage. And since that time I have been struggling with Elantech which leaves a lot to be desired. My R40 is really precise while current T14 is really bad. Maybe I'm bad at configuring it, but I gave it a lot of time and the R40 is really way ahead still. What a shame.

And you can switch out the original trackpad for a glass one, which is much nicer.

more importantly, usb c charging.

also T49x are the same as T48x but with superior amd cpus

my previous favorites were an X220 and a T480s. The T480s ran for 8 years, started losing bits of rubber from the screen area, to be replaced this year by a framework 13 pro, which will probably be my favorite lap for another 8 years, or maybe more (depending on how you accept the ship of theseus)

Reading about so many people daily-driving laptops built around a decade ago, if not more (which includes myself, happy owner of a T480s), and not suffering any major penalty in terms of overall usability and battery life, it really shows that the returns of having more CPU power/smaller lithography have been marginal for a very, very long time (CPUs haven't been an enabler for new use-cases/a major incentive to upgrade a laptop in recent history, AFAICT).

That's not to say there hasn't been progress in this space, but I'm also amused by the many comments along the lines of "my 2020 M1 is so revolutionary that it's all I need in 2026" in every other Apple thread. Probably all we've been needing has been some 14/10nm 8th/10th Gen Core i7 in a decent package? And about package, how come that this era's ThinkPads and pro Dells/HPs get a bigger "love-factor" than their contemporary intel MacBooks?

Now, reading more into it¹, it appears that what Intel was shipping 8th-generation Intel Core i5 8257Us (i.e. a 2017 Coffee Lake chip) in its MacBook Pros for as late as 2020, before switching over to the M series. No wonder they weren't getting much love!

¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(Intel-based)#Tech...

I have a T460s and just yesterday I installed bazzite on it. It's incredible how fast the little boy still is! Sunshine and Moonlight (in house game streaming) is running fine and has almost zero latency!

Yeah, for my last few laptops, (Mac) I didn't replace them because they were too slow; I replaced them because they stopped getting software updates. (I don't want to switch to Linux on them.)

I suspect that on-device AI might drive some of us to upgrade, though. I really don't like that AI requires a network connection (and subscription for non-trivial use.)

Reminds me of my hunt for a X260 years back.

https://www.theprohack.com/2020/09/how-i-got-myself-capable-...

An old x220 (which I have), but a bit more modern and fully OpenBSD supported would be my dream.

It would be amazing to have somebody put together a modern laptop kit build around the x220 keyboard with a modern screen. it didnt last long, but the dimpled texture on the x220 trackpad was something I really liked, and i still miss having a middle click scroll button on trackpads. it was so nice to hold down a button and put slight pressure on the trackpoint to slowly scroll a webpage.

I'm not 100% on it but I believe an ips x230 is considered the pinnacle. the x240 is slower than the x230 because it was when strong optimization for power savings started to occur.

Agreed. I had an x201 and an x250. The 250 main board eventually stopped working (I think due to flex when the laptop was picked up from one corner repeatedly -- a known issue from what I understand). My x201 still runs great (with occasional refreshes of the thermal paste). A version of the x201-x220 era machines with modern internals would be my dream machine.

And honestly, I am still daily driving that x220 with NetBSD and a T480 with OpenBSD and they do everything I need. Also running a Panasonic SV7 with OpenBSD.

All of them definitely not current gen beasts but if I can't make my shit run there, then what the hell am I even doing?

Definitely. I have openBSD on my X201 and use it pretty regularly. That being said, I'm not sure I'd want to edit photos on it, so I have a newer machine for that (a used lenovo "micropc").

I mean, there is the expensive option for the x210ai if you don't know about it https://www.tpart.net/about-x210ai/

Thanks. I did hear about it a couple years ago, but I think I was put off by the expense and the presentation of the page (spelling, etc.). The latter felt like a bit of a red flag, but maybe I was just looking for an excuse to save the money :)

You mean this ?

>https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1nf5pii/x210ai_is...

I think my favorite still has to be the MacBook Air 11”. Wish they’d make that size again.

I had one of these in university, and those were the days. I remember coding Lisp on iTerm2. I dug up two photos I have of using it.

https://imgur.com/a/SO19Rke

That was my first Mac! I loved it but those bezels were a doozy. I think that same form factor with a larger screen would be perfect. Although I wonder how close the Neo compares.

If they made what you’re describing with an a20 or something I’d instabuy one

I have one of these maxed out at the time (512GB disk, 8GB RAM, fastest processor) and it runs Mint pretty well. It's a great light-task computer. But yeah those bezels.

the new 13" has to be close to the same size with the lack of bezels, doesn't it?

No not at all. It’s substantially larger and heavier.

I had the same with X230. A lovely laptop that still serves as a home server after 10 years or so from being bought, and it was already used, post-lease machine back when I bought it.

MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS

> MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS

Asahi Linux if you want to.

The thing will old laptops from last decade is shitty screen color. I love my t420, but the screen is literally too painful to look at for a long time.

So my favorite one is the thinkpad t14g1, with ips screen, and lightweight

I look forward to when these 5th-generation Intel chipsets are "jail broken" and the totality of device functionality is accessible with a management engine binary compiled from purely open source code.

You can install Libreboot on 8th gen Thinkpads now, if that helps:

https://libreboot.org/docs/install/t480.html

I love that Libreboot can run a ThinkPad T480. I was amped the day that news came.

I am hopeful that AI tools can liberate the entirety of silicon in the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 9th and later generations boards as well.

I gave my T590/i7/16gb to my son.

I’m keeping my 2013 i5/4gb MacBook Pro. I love the keyboard and display. Just changed the battery. Runs great with endeavourOS!

Looking on eBay, it looks like I'm spending quite a bit more than $100 to get an old thinkpad of this era.

My favorite laptop is the Framework 16.

>I bought mine second-hand for about £100 in 2018. They’ve only got cheaper since then.

You'll be surprised. Due to surge in popularity within the last few years, in part thanks to youtubers, it's gotten hard finding old ThinkPads at this price, let alone cheaper. They've gone from their function over form and low used cost due to corporate surplus as their main appeal, to being geek-y lifestyle objects, not much different than Apple products for the mainstream. They're great machines but paying ~£150 for 10yo system, not even with great specs, is laughable.

My X41 from 2005 has the same trackpad and “trackpoint” and still runs Debian Bookworm just fine.

You should swap it for an M1 MacBook Air. The walmart spec is so cheap used.

I don't have the bravery to write an ode to my favourite laptop, the MacBook 12 inch.

Why is this the favorite when the years older x230 takes up to 16GB ram ?

The x250 can also take up to 16gb ram, at least in most CPU configurations. Some models (the i3 at least) cannot.

Many people like the x220 best, because it has the old-style keyboard (does the x230 as well?). The x250 has surprisingly similar performance but much better battery life.

Which is better? I don't know, but I bought a x250 back in 2015 and am still using it as my personal laptop. It only sees light duty these days.

> does the x230 as well?

No, but you can fit an X220 keyboard into the X230.

(I didn't click on the link yet.) Is it a ThinkPad?

I got a Dell Latitude 5520 about five years ago. I chose it because it seemed pretty repairable/upgradeable, with two NVME SSD slots, two RAM slots and an easily replaceable battery. And those features have indeed served me well.

But I have been quite disappointed in the build quality of the laptop itself. The thing is literally falling apart. A lot of paint is chipping off both the keyboard and the body, and there are two sizeable cracks in the side of the laptop which don't currently affect operation but which are getting bigger over time. Lately the touchpad has started to give me issues as well.

I use my laptop a lot but I'm not particularly hard on it - it occasionally moves from my home desk to my sofa, basically never leaves the house. I also have a different laptop for work. In hindsight I think maybe I should have gotten a Thinkpad, but when I was looking around I remember the newer Thinkpads only having one free RAM slot with the other soldered in which turned me off. Also I quite like larger laptops and numpads which limits me somewhat.

Can't wait for someone to build hackerlaptops.org

I still own and use my original X250, which I bought new in 2015. I recently replaced the batteries and swapped out the internal Wi-Fi adapter for a €20 AX210NGW. It's almost laughable how easy both upgrades were. Everything works out of the box with every Linux distro I've tried, including the fingerprint sensor.

I prefer the keyboard on my T430, but the much better screen, slimmer form factor, and still pretty good keyboard make the X250 one of the best devices I've ever owned.

Dual batteries: my X250 on Linux, I'd like to set it up so when the external battery gets to 20% or less, the internal battery starts draining and the external no longer discharges. Can't work out how to do it. Tried Gnome/KDE and Debian/Fedora. Anyone cracked this?

PS: Mine was £100 as well, seems to be the going rate here in UK or was.

Thinkpad. 250 vs t480

My favorite laptop is my Samsung Chromebook Plus (V1), released in early 2017. ARM based. Good battery life. Light. Touch screen. I replaced the battery and keeps running strong. Sure is 32 bit and Google disowned the OS long ago. It will be a sad day the day I let it go.

don't buy it. I invested quite a bit into this rabbit hole, I ended up loving new macbook air much more. I've used this kind of a laptop for a few years

Wait until he discovers Macbook Air

Nipple .

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