What do you see as having gone downhill?

I'm using an X1 Carbon Gen 11, and for my purposes at least, it's an improvement over every previous generation.

I'd love to switch to a Framework one day, but I'm not willing to use a laptop without mouse buttons. (I don't care about the TrackPoint at all; I do care about having physical mouse buttons.)

I've been keeping a list of problems with my gen10:

1. The laptop overheats easily. It is usually hot to the point of being painful to touch. It has melted the adhesive of the rubber strip on the bottom, which has fallen off.

2. The trackpoint is malfunctioning. Several times a day, the mouse cursor will jump to the top of the screen, and be stuck there until I wiggle the trackpoint fully in all directions.

3. There's coil whine and clicking from some part of the power intake.

4. Battery life is extremely poor, usually on the order of ~2 hours.

5. Sometimes the trackpad buttons will stop working. You have to put the laptop to sleep and wake it up again to get them back.

6. Plenty of random freezes and black screens.

I switched a couple years ago from X1 after I spent months without a working mic and had to get my screen replaced twice and it still didn't work.

I went with the ASUS Zenbook. It's not perfect in terms of Linux drivers or support but they are built solidly. I would pick them again over Dell, HP or the Chinese rebrands.

I've happily used Asus for the past 5 years. Great linux support and no serious hardware issues. The only negative is that one of the arrow buttons came of my ExpertBook B5 after 1 year but it was easily glued back. Otherwise linux works like a dream and the price was good as well.

Anecdotal, I've had an Asus ROG laptop for close to 10 years now and it's still mint except for the battery. Aluminium frame and solid with Linux (even bluetooth works on Ubuntu, imagine that). I'd replace the battery and keep using it, but I'm not sure if it's worth the investment at this point given that it's DDR3. But when I go out to buy a new one, it'll probably be a TUF or something.

Asus may have deplorable predatory customer service, but if I buy the thing from a local reseller they have to deal with that instead of me if something goes wrong, so it doesn't really affect me haha.

I used an X1C6 for years before switching to X1 Yoga 6 recently.

The X1C6 had the potential to be a great laptop, except it was plagued by charging issues from the beginning and was limited to 16GB of RAM.

The X1Y6 is perfect; I can't find a single issue with it.

Framework is my new thinkpad nowadays. Just saying

The funny thing is that Thinkpads got their reputation during the period that they were nose diving in quality.

There hasn't been a decent one since the t440 and the only way to get that to a good standard was by modding the hell out of it.

The t61 was the last good one.

Framework is not quite at that quality but it's better than any other laptop made in the last 10 years.

'Looks over at stack of T61 15" display refurbished laptops'

Yup, the are awesome, I'm on my second decade of driving them, should be able to get another decade out of the supply.

I'm not sure why you'd say that. Framework still hasn't gotten their s0ix standby stuff fixed for all generations.

Used a t480s for 5 years and it was awesome. And now my t14 gen3 is doing pretty fine as well. What are the issues you are running into?

What's better about the T440 compared to the successors up to the T480? I'd consider the T440 a low point due to the lack of TrackPoint buttons.

You could quite easily use a t420 keyboard in a t440 with a few pins masked which was the last traditional thinkpad keyboard.

Actually I may be getting the numbers wrong, it could be the t430 that I was thinking about. It's been rather a long time since I did any brain surgery on thinkpads.

Hows the build quality with framework laptops? I fear that making it so modular might have required engineering tradeoffs with regard to build quality and endurance.

I got one in March 2022 and it's still kicking. Had to replace the heat sink and the keyboard this year. The support is kinda slow on the response, but the hardware itself is pretty nice.

Worse than the IBM thinkpads, on par with early lenovo thinkpads, better than 2020 think pads (which is the last time I used one).