Low hanging fruit, but whatever. It is what it is.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I finally retired my old laptop for a ThinkPad X13 a few weeks ago and it’s been perfect for my use case. Build quality is solid, battery life is alright, it’s small and light, and everything worked out of the box with the preinstalled Ubuntu. After testing it all I slapped EndeavourOS in there and have had zero issues. Specs are solid and I got it for like $1200. Even the AMD integrated graphics are punching way above what I expected.
Just curious about what folks are complaining about with the newer Lenovo models.
You could buy a nice gaming laptop for that price. I thought the appeal of think pads was that you buy an old one cheap. It’s just me I guess but I don’t enjoy using them.
Maybe I could, but I’m not using it for gaming so battery life, portability, and fan noise don’t have to be sacrificed for a few more FPS when I wanna play something light on the road.
The Tim Taylor approach to hardware was great when I was a kid, less so in my 40s looking to do some moderate coding and radio projects on the road away from my massively overbuilt gaming rig I already own. This lil guy checks all those boxes. I was just wondering what specific hate there was on newer models.
Fwiw this meme isn’t piling on any Lenovo Thinkpad hate you’ve seen if I understand it correctly (which I may not)
I tried to buy a system 76 pangolin but they don’t ship to Australia (yet?)
Sad
But in Australia you CAN get an old Thinkpad, so…
Need grunt
System76 and Framework are mostly North America and Western Europe. Pine64 might sell in Australia.
Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.
I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.
The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.
I have got so many used ThinkPads. Everyone in my house has one.
Can I have one
Me too plz
Can I have one IBM ThinkPad 701 it’s old and it’s not like you’re using it anyways.
You get a ThinkPad! And you get a ThinkPad! Everyone gets a ThinkPad! :oprah_wave:
Lol ok enjoy your lenovobios and being trapped on x86 forever
What’s wrong with x86 all of a sudden?
ARM is still pretty damn experimental compared to x86.
Bullshit mostly. x86 is fine & has been getting a lot more power efficient (if you can get a work day’s worth of power, you have met the benchmark). Wake me up when RISC-V is here.
If you know anything about Lenovo you would know that if ARM laptops started to have high market share they would have like 35 mediocre models on offer in a year.
Some of the think pad lines are still good but their consumer offerings and a couple of the think pad lines are trash.
Thinkpad not always was lenovo’s
x220 ftw!!
are pinebooks even meant for regular use?
Opensource chromebooks. Yep.
Been ThinkPad User for over 10 years. Edge E135 X220 X260
This year was the first Time in about 16years I bought a non used machine and it was a framework. As much as I adore the good ol ThinkPad the recent developments regarding repairability/statement from Lenovo are turning me off more and more. And my framework makes me happy every time I use it …
So I don’t know.
as cool as they are the last time a good thinkpad came out was over a decade ago, so u are either just buying a normal laptop same quality as all the others or something so old its basically useless. They arent even cheap anymore cuz everyone wants them, its time to face reality refurbished thinkpads are no longer what they were they are no longer a good deal nor particularly good quality, u would probably be better off buying some random gaming laptop most of them are pretty well put together, easy to take apart and upgradable tho thick and heavy.
yea, thinkpads aren’t the only laptops that can be bought used
Some gaming laptops are good, but others are just as crappy as normal laptops. Is there even an alternative for a small laptop?
I have a decent gaming laptop It’s a pain in the ass for collage tho I didn’t buy it for collage but I also can’t really afford to buy something else
It’s too big and the battery life sucks
Basically the least portable laptop
Laptops can be compared to cars, you can buy an economical car (with higher range an lower costs, but less power) or a sporscar/muscle car (terrible economy, loud, but higher performance)
This simply isn’t true. They are still cheap even for decent stuff. I got a T15 Gen 2 when it was 2.5yrs old for about $400 on eBay. You’re not going to get an even remotely decent laptop in most cases for that kind of money. And to be clear, I love old Thinkpads. I have them going back to the IBM days.
Modern Thinkpads: -easy to work on -plenty fast for most things -still made of the carbon composite and magnesium chassis we like -hinges are beefy -upgradeable ram -available with GPU -lighter and easier to daily than any of the old chonks -replaceable keyboard, track pad and track point, and fingerprint -dual thunderbolt connection (and docks are stupid cheap… I find them for $30 sometimes)
Downsides exist but they’re not the end of the world: -one drive slot (drives are huge now, who cares) -8gb of RAM is soldered but the rest is not (max 40gb) -internal battery but laptop is faster and has better battery life than my maxed out T580
refurbished thinkpads are no longer what they were they are no longer a good deal nor particularly good quality
Off-lease enterprise laptops are generally the best deals available for a good laptop for not too much cash. When you can get something 3-5 years old for 1/3 the price of a brand new laptop and know it still has quite a bit of life left, its hard to beat.
Thinkpads were never cheap around here. Asus are cheap. The quality is many orders of different.
None of these have an OLED or DCI-P3 coverage so… pass
It seems there are OLED panels you can just buy and install into framework.
Got a T450 for less than a hundred bucks and the build quality’s something that no longer exists in this day and age. Almost every piece of hardware in that thing’s easily accessible and replaceable. It’s gonna be a sad day when it finally dies out and nothing else in the market could compare.
Any old laptop without Nvidia will suffice tho, upgrade WiFi card, ram, swap hhd for ssd, install your favourite distro and it’ll run like magic, if laptop have dying battery then also buy new one, or resolder elements and reset bms.
I got unbuntu on my xiaomi notebook with a nice oled screen. It worked almost immediately. Easier install then windows. I chose Ubuntu as my first linux because of lots of support.
As far as I heard, their designs are similar to macbooks, are the keyboards as terrible?
I think its a preference, I prefer the keyboard over mac. But the build quality and hardware is just really good for the price.
So all the qualities of XM phones and no drawbacks, like miui and official software support? Great.
my recommendation: a second-hand, 16 year old acer aspire one that runs windows xp, ms-dos and the 32bit version of puppylinux…if it works it works. (yeah its just my setup)
been working flawlessly on original hardware since 2008
i even play games and make music on that thing
Old ThinkPads, the poor man’s Framework.
