I lost all trust and respect for Lenovo after the Superfish debacle. I'm a PC user and wouldn't buy one of their machines on principle. But I wouldn't have said that 6 months ago. Lenovo's user-serviceable and utilitarian design are pretty awesome, and their keyboards are among the best.
Lenovo's batteries really suck. They lose life a lot quicker than Apple's batteries and are very expensive to replace, especially since the primary and optibay batteries tend to die around the same time. At least they're user replaceable.
I'm a fan of Dell's laptops lately. Many newer Dell laptops have good Linux support. Oddly, I think Dell Alienware laptops are great as portable workstation laptops because they're powerful and can stay cool, but YMMV.
"Many newer Dell laptops have good Linux support."
I've been buying higher-end Dells for a while. If you get something based on an Intel chipset, Linux support is generally quite solid, even if it isn't explicitly claimed. Based on my experience with my last three laptops and what I hear from everyone else, I often think there's really two Dells, the "cheap at all costs" consumer end and the business/"prosumer" end that makes, if not gear that gets as much love as old-school IBM, perfectly serviceable stuff. I'm typing this on an at-least-three-year-old Studio 17, and it barely even shows wear. Battery's croaking, of course, but that's hardly Dell's fault (and it's not like it instantly died or anything). Also the fact you can get full service manuals is really nice... even if you're comfortable with hardware, trying to blunder your way through dissassembling a modern laptop if you need to, say, clean out the fan, is no fun.
Yep, and you can find used Latitudes or whatever their current equivalent is, usually with some half-way decent dedicated Quadro or FirePro GPU, for really good prices on used markets. I can usually find corporate liquidators who have tons of them for $300-600 for something recent and decent. The older Latitudes like the D830 are tanks too; user (or IT-department)-serviceable everything, parts cheap on eBay if you need, module bay batteries, magnesium chassis, metal hinges, good keyboard, no stupid clicky trackpad...they got a lot right.
Swap in an SSD and max out the RAM and they're awesome linux workhorses.
> I often think there's really two Dells, the "cheap at all costs" consumer end and the business/"prosumer" end
When you install Windows drivers, Thinkpads say something about Lenovo Japan, while others (like Ideapads) say Lenovo Shenzhen. HP Elitebooks are well made while consumer HPs are really poorly designed/constructed.
I lost all respect for them when I tried using the trackpad on their newer laptops. After a year of use it still took me multiple attempts to right-click on something. My brother just disabled his and learned to use the nipple. I can't imagine how an established company could make an essential part of a laptop that unusable.
Basically everyone wants to mimic Apple superficially. Apparently Lenovo thinks people are buying W540s because they look like MacBooks[1]. It wasn't enough to ship the X1 all weirded out, they had to go fuck up the rest of the line, too.
Lenovo even had a blogpost where they claimed "most users adapt" in a short amount of time. Not that there was any benefit, just that they needed to modernize the design and it wasn't that harmful. Idiots.
The X201t is like the pinnacle of their design. 16:10 screen (important if you use Windows, especially inside a RDP app - 1366x786 just doesn't have enough vertical pixels).
The X201 also had a FULL keyboard. They used every cm of the laptop to fit all the keys in. The newer X series 12", they remove keys, and added blank space around the keyboard. Here they are trynna cram stuff in, and they literally throw away 2-3 keys worth of space.
Lenovo is just beyond incompetent in designing things at this point. I don't know about the sales side, but since everyone else in this space is just as bad, it probably doesn't harm them. But if Dell ever wakes up and says "oh, hey, maybe we should make real laptops", they'd steal away ThinkPad's marketshare pretty quickly.
Oh and just to insult us on top of all these bad changes, they ship utterly crap panels with some of the laptops. I bought a T440p last year, and I absolutely hate it. It has a viewing angle of 0 - there's no point at which you can view it and get anything remotely decent.
1: I've tried MacBooks... the ergonomics are terrible, as is the heat. Beautiful displays though.
Lenovo changed from producing business notebooks to consumer centric stylish notebooks that tries to mimic Apple notebooks.
Very sad, given that IBM ThinkPad and later Lenovo ThinkPad up to T420/X220 where very good robust devices and had a great build quality including a good keyboard and screen. I would pay premium price for a T420 series notebook with a brand new Intel i7 chipset that support 16+ GB RAM (or the T60p series style with a 4:3 display).
I've posted this on another thread, but it looks like Dell is trying to make real laptops. The newest XPS ultrabooks have received rave reviews, and some of them even ship with Linux preinstalled [1]. That said, my personal laptop is a Lenovo T440s, because IMHO Lenovo still wins on upgradeability. I was able to buy a base model, and in short order had the RAM upgraded to 12GB (the max this model supports) and swapped out the hard drive with a SSD from Amazon. I'm not sure how feasible that is with any of the other laptops being discussed here.
I just bought an X250 after searching around for an alternative. The XPS 13 looked pretty good and I was about to buy it ... but no physical nipplepoint buttons. Maybe next time I'll be willing to risk it. (Yeah, the X250 looks like it has plenty of downgrades from the X201, but it's better than a T440p, and at least it's a known quantity whereas Dell has an even worse rep...)
I'm typing this on an X230, with 16GiB RAM. I busted the screen recently and considered an X250... it's such a shame that "ultrabook" means "one DIMM slot" these days, i.e. they max out at 8GiB RAM - same as I was using in '2009 on my old X61s!
Luckily replacement screen parts are quite affordable these days. And before anyone complains, I do use all this memory, currently dom0 has 4GB free.
Good news! There are 16GB SODIMMs from "I'M Intelligent Memory". You'll have to look around to figure out what model exactly, but people have put them in new X series and they work.
Every recent laptop I've tried with a clicky trackpad has been absolute crap. The texture will be too rough or too sticky, the click won't work half the time, the right-click is hopeless, some try to do clever things with multi-finger gestures which usually triggers the mfg-provided crapware launcher, and they're too small.
Apple got the clickpad pretty much perfect, except for when they get dirty or bent. Nothing else that I've used comes within a mile. Trackpads on laptops were not amazing, but usually workable before everyone went clickpad-crazy. Now, it seems like you have to hunt to find something with buttons so you can actually use it. I can't imagine that any of these are getting good feedback, yet it's been a trend for a few years now. PC mfgs make me sad.
I personally also prefer a traditional ThinkPad keyboard, trackpad and trackpoint (up to T420/X220 series).
I won't buy any notebook with these slim keys, that might look stylish and fashionable. I need a business notebook for work and IBM ThinkPad and early Lenovo ThinkPad were robust and very good at that.
The first manufacturer that learns from their recent mistakes, be it Lenovo/HP/Dell/etc, will be the winner.
But if it takes too long, maybe someone should start a kickstarter campaign and produce truly business notebooks without any compromises with a 1500-2500$ price tag. A traditional keyboard, trackpad, trackpoint, robust plastic frame, maybe even a 4:3 IPS screen (1600x1200 or higher).
I don't mind clickpads, but the one on the 450s is shockingly bad. I use my rMBP a lot on the train, and I never realized how good the Apple trackpad was at smoothing inputs until I tried to use the 450s on a rough patch of the northeast corridor.
Totally agreed re: the newer trackpads. Those things used to Just Work (tm) 10 years ago, now it's a gamble whenever you buy a PC laptop.
As a general rule, physical buttons and total lack of multi-touch support seem to go hand-in-hand with good ol' quality... but even that is not a foolproof rule.
With the new touchpad, the trackpoint is useless because it badly positioned.
The trick is to use the multitouch pad like in a mac and forget about the trackpoint. It is actually not bad, you got pinch to zoom, two finger scroll, etc. Actually is better than the trackpoint sometimes.
That being said, I will change it for a W541/T541 ultranav touchpad asap. But not sure if I will keep it. Getting used to the pinch-to-zoom.
With libinput 0.14 you can just use two fingers for a right click, and three fingers for a middle click. Anywhere on the pad.
Edit: as you can see with Macbooks, clickpads are not the problem. Drivers are the problem. With the right drivers [0], the T440s clickpad is very precise, clicking doesn't move the cursor, and scrolling is pixel-perfect.
Same. The touchpad on my x230 was terrible--hours of forum searching and 2 driver updates never fixed it. I'm happy that I learned to use the nub, but it just felt ridiculous that Lenovo hadn't figured out how to make a functioning touchpad.
Tried that on my T440p. It sorta works. Unfortunately clicking makes the pointer move, so I end up clicking the wrong thing. All. The. Time. It's comically bad.
I ran into the same thing with a T440 we got for a customer, but he didn't care because he just carries a wireless mouse from exam room to exam room with it.
Made working on it a bit surreal recently though until I figured out that he'd stuck the mouse in his pocket and was walking by in the hallway.
I'm using Windows too. I tried playing with the settings and using default or various drivers. Accurately getting right vs left click is nearly impossible (takes 3 tried on average to right click) -- I simply don't use it as a laptop.
It seems all hope is lost with Lenovo ThinkPad. They simply don't understand what a keyboard layout means nor why it's important to group keys and create keys with different sizes. Also the slim keys are bad in many ways. The omission of the F-keys, the omission of the audio&mic-keys. ThinkPad was easy to open using just 2 screws. Replacing parts was easy. Forget that with their new consumer style T430+ series.
I personally give Lenovo one more chance for a "T460" in 2016, but I doubt it will resurface the T420 series style. I would support a kickstarter campaign that sole goal should be creating a premium business notebook "IBM ThinkPad style".
> I lost all trust and respect for Lenovo after the Superfish debacle
Wipe the default OS. Install your own. Problem solved.
I don't buy laptops for the software (I can deal with that), but for the hardware. Anyway most OEM installs are filled with crapware, it's faster to just wipe everything in the first place.
Interesting aside - I went down the rabbit hole of trying this just a few days ago. Called support to ask where I could find the Windows product key so I could do a wipe/install. Mark from Lenovo "informed" me of several things:
- re-installing Windows would void all warranties
- re-installing Windows would result in a non-working laptop because Lenovo drivers are not available anywhere
- I should under no circumstances re-install Windows because it would "break everything, because it's not Microsoft Windows on these laptops, it's Lenovo Windows".
So I guess the moral of this story is, if you have to call Lenovo and Mark answers the phone, hang up immediately and try again.
If you don't care about Windows, a Linux install will not require any drivers at all and everything will be recognized (even the specific function buttons). The only thing that require additional tweaking on the x220 is the fingerprint reader but I'm not planning to use it (security issues).
What model is this? Typically all of the needed software is right there for easy download from the site, or you can often just install their System Update to and it'll offer you the various packages.
Superfish is not an annoyance; it is a MASSIVE breach of trust and Lenovo as a company needs to die over this. We as a community need to do everything we can to make sure that Lenovo never sells another product to people we have influence over ever again. If companies can get away with this behavior, they'll keep doing it.
Dell actually has a line of laptops that ship with Linux [1]. You don't get a choice of distro (they ship with the latest Ubuntu LTS), but the fact that it ships with Linux out of the box means that the hardware has all been pre-verified for Linux compatibility, and installing a new distro should be a matter putting in the install media and grabbing a cup of coffee.
I guess my mileage varies in so far as buying a used Thinkpad doesn't benefit Lenovo any more than it benefits Dell or Apple. Anyway any computing device that comes bundled with an OS that automatically connects to cloud services is collecting data. Hell, that's what made Chromebooks viable.
I purchased a Dell XPS13 (the late 2013 version) recently. It's fantastic. My only complaint in Linux is that the palm rejection isn't working all that well.
I have the XPS13 convertible and on windows I've completely got all the palm rejection turned off. It was far too sensitive and I couldn't tab to click on things too soon after typing.
Used Thinkpads have been very, very good to me over the years. For most of the last decade I bought used Thinkpad T42's for $100-$200 (see the empirical depreciation curve here [1]), beat them up for a year or two, then swapped the hard drive into a fresh machine when I finally and inevitably killed the old one. No downtime, no waiting for repairs, no tears shed over the death of a fancy laptop.
If you're on a budget, or in situations where repair downtime is unacceptable (eg travelling and working internationally) it looks from this guide like a master + spare from the T4xx-T5xx series is your ticket.
I follow a similar philosophy. At the moment, I have two near-identical factory-refurbished x220's, each of which I've upgraded with an IPS screen, 16 GB RAM, and an SSD. One stays at home, and I use the other at the client site.
Even with the upgrades, they still cost me little enough that I wouldn't mind too much if one died, and I've always got at least one spare and ready to go.
Used Thinkpads have been very, very good to me over the years
I use a MacBook Pro but have recommended Thinkpads to Windows-using friends. A couple years ago I actually knew a site that re-sold decommissioned corporate models for okay prices and very low bullshit. Wish I could remember the name.
If you're interested in running a fully libre system, any GM45 thinkpad (x200, t400) can be made to run libreboot by following some very thorough guides. If you're willing to go even older than gm45, the T60 and X60 can be made to run libreboot without even opening them up.
In the past few months I built myself an x200 with a brand new 9 cell battery, 128gb SSD, new keyboard, and 8gb ram for less than $200.
Knowing that you're running a fully free system is priceless.
Then the answer is "no" because there has not yet been a system made that RMS will not nitpick in some way or another. The microcontroller that runs the LED on the back of the screen will not come with source code and so forth.
The case of the toaster is very clear: we can't tell,
except by taking it apart, whether it has a processor and
software or a special-purpose chip. Since that we can't
tell the difference, it makes no difference: therefore, a
program that will never be changed is equivalent to a
circuit. I don't care whether a toaster or microwave oven
contains software.
In your example, unless the microcontroller which controls the LED can be upgraded, then for all intents and purposes, RMS considers it a circuit which cannot be modified.
One need to look at it from the perspective of property ownership rather than inherent ability of the device. If someone has bought a device, at that point they should be in control of the property. If the manufacturer can exert control which you don't have, then they are de facto owners of the device after sale.
Its the difference between me selling you a computer you own and control, and giving you a user account while retaining root control for myself. The first is a sale and transfer of ownership, and the other is me renting out cloud access. From a perspective of rights, liberty, autonomy, control, and privacy, a toaster and a TiVo is two completely different kind of devices. One is your property which you control, and the other is someones else device which you have bought permission to use.
Last, let me clarify with an example. Let say I rent you a coffee machine on indefinite period of time, on the condition that you pay me $1 per cup. Simple concept, common practices in many offices, and it is easy to understand who the property owner of the device. Now lets change the setup by actually selling the device to you, but where DRM restricts the device so only my coffee is permitted, which just happens to add an extra cost of 1$ per cup compared to other brands. Has anything actually changed?
Anecdote here: I recently bought a x200 and installed libreboot, I decided to go full on tin hat and removed the wlan modem and replaced the wifi card with one with no DMA access.
The computer now boots into GRUB (loaded in the motherboard ROM) and from there loads grub in the disk drive.
When I received the laptop the battery was dead, wouldn't last one second. After libreboot it seems that linux energy management is less conservative and the battery now is charged and lasts 3h+.
However, if you're going to be running Linux you might avoid the W500 (and T400?) with switchable graphics - the W500 uses the ATI Catalyst and apparently the switching under Linux doesn't work - even if you're running on the Intel graphics the ATI graphics processor is running at 100% with expected impacts on temperature (less effect on battery life, because it's going to go into thermal shutdown anyway).
Apparently with the x10 series they switched over to NVidia and I've been told those work better.
"The coreboot project distributes proprietary code/blobs on some computers; this can include things like CPU microcode updates, memory initialization code and so on. The project also actively recommends that the user install additional blobs in some cases (such as the video BIOS or Intel ME)." http://www.libreboot.org/docs/index.html
Personally, I think there is zero point in skipping microcode updates when you are already executing non-free microcode when the CPU comes out of reset.
Yeah, this just seems like burying one's face in the sand to me. Every Intel CPU runs non-free software. It's nice that there are attempts to remove and/or replace Intel ME, but that's just step 1; Intel's microcode, which has never been decrypted or reverse engineered, undoubtedly contains a lot of very software-like bits, and with the upcoming SGX, those bits are suddenly going to get quite hostile to the owner of the device, by locking the OS out from inspecting running programs. Running from ROM or from a blob provided by firmware ought to be considered immaterial; it's not like Stallman would be okay with running Windows as long as he stuck to version preinstalled on his device and never installed any updates.
I believe AMD is no better. But ARM CPUs are getting faster and faster, and most of them have no upgradable microcode, which probably means little or no microcode at all; if you truly believe in free software, get something with one of those (and hope you can avoid the nightmare of ARM SoCs' GPUs). Having the HDL source to the CPU would be even better (see lowRISC), but one step at a time...
Excellent quote. We have four in the house at the moment but I'll be donating two to my sister's favourite charity over the summer. I use ex-corporate recycled ones and the X60s are showing their age a bit.
UK: An ex-corporate X200 from one of the big re-furbishers comes in at around £90 delivered to your local Argos. Debian has no issues apart from the need to install non-free wifi firmware.
They are still doing them and still do the Argos thing
Use the ebay search term 'WINDOWS 7 IBM Lenovo X200 Laptop Core 2 Duo'
The URL is one of those very long ones with numbers in that never work properly. I got the 2Gb X200 one and it is fine with Debian SID and an encrypted hard drive (LUKS).
I killed a Thinkpad by dripping some water on it, just a couple drops of condensation from the outside of a glass of water. F1 key stopped working, the trackpoint mouse buttons started clicking constantly so I had to rip them off. The A key needs to be hit hard to work. The wifi constantly drops now. The only thing that happened was dripping some water on it.
Granted, it still works, just not well. However I have a pre-iPad Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t that has seen pretty constant use as my daily driver Xubuntu laptop for almost five years now. I've probably put thousands of running hours on it and it still works like a (slow and ancient netbook) dream.
They're tough, but certainly not completely indestructible. I thought they were until the water incident.
You may have gotten water into the circuitry of the keyboard, but that's its own replacable unit and has a tray (with the elsewhere-mentioned water holes) to protect the interior of the laptop. Particularly for intermediate models it may be worth picking up a replacement keyboard and dropping it in - not so sure if it's an old T60 or the like.
Yeah I'm comparing the cost of replacing the keyboard and the wifi card versus just donating it and getting a new laptop that doesn't have the Nvidia Optimus and some other features I'm not fond of (and a less power-intensive processor).
The keyboard and the wifi card together would only be like $60 though, which is really nice.
Which era of Thinkpad? Someone spilled a full glass of red wine all over my X31 while it was turned on and it was fine the next day (same machine survived much other abuse, including being thrown down a flight of stairs). That machine is still running and the keyboard is still better than even most of the newer Thinkpads.
I agree that they accumulate, but not necessarily that they don't break. I've recently recycled a 600e (working), a T30 (working), and a T61 (motherboard dead). There was a massive build quality difference between the (brilliantly solid) 600e and the T61. I'm hanging on to an x61s for the time being, since it still works and it's quite small.
I still love the design ascetic of these laptops and I wouldn't be surprised to find myself buying one in the future.
The T61 was the first laptop I bought and it completely put me off of Lenovo. Complete piece of shit -- broke multiple times even after I had them repair it and I even waited like 4 months for my order to arrive because they had some sort of manufacturing problems.
Lenovo crippled their best form factor, the T4x0, by giving the most terrible panel they could find. Even looking dead on at the thing, the colors wash out and shift. Why couldn't they have used the 13" MacBook Air panel?
Getting the 1600x900 screen gives you a usable resolution but the panel is still terrible. Dim, headache inducing....
Other than that those machines are great. Light, small (if not really that thin), lots of slots and bays, huge used market, spare parts galore, lots of battery options, incredible keyboard and the track point, great Linux compatibility.... The only other bad aspect is the touchpad is mediocre.
It's hard to understand exactly how bad the panel is until you've used it. The color shift is worse than anything I've ever seen on any display, and the resolution was terrible, but the real kicker is the space between every pixel. It's like a black grid with colored specks in it.
With the advent of great, cheap ARM processors and Coreboot getting ported to ARM, the barries of entry should be a bit lower. Frankly, while Apple tends to produce great hardware, they are far too optimised for consumers vs developers. E.g., brittle aluminium + glass vs Thinkpad's magnesium + carbon fiber.
They also seem to have killed off the awesome Thinkpad X-tablets :(
I wish it was also a bit less plasticky; something like Macbook Air + Nub + Old Thinkpad keyboard + Black Rubberized body + WACOM would be a dream come true. Hardware upgradeability on top of that would be epic.
The Thinkpad Yoga 12 has a Wacom model. I highly recommend it as a drawing tablet, with the caveat that I sent mine back because it wasn't getting enough use rather than I didn't like it. (I use an X200 Tablet instead, because for my use case I couldn't rationalize $1300.)
I've tried various ThinkPads, but I keep coming back to macs. Linux on ThinkPads (or any laptop) is hit-and-miss. Sometimes, things work perfectly. Sometimes, they don't. I really don't like spending time messing with drivers or config files to get my wifi, bluetooth, hibernate, power saving, etc working. I don't want to carefully research hardware to ensure it's supported. I just want to use my computer, and I'm willing to throw money at the problem instead of time.
And over the past decade, Apple's hardware has gotten really good. Their trackpads have always been nice, but the new force touch version is the indisputable best. Current Apple laptops contain many clever design decisions that most of us don't explicitly notice, but together make the machine feel first-rate.
This is unlike my ThinkPad x140e, which has idiotic design galore. The microphone is placed in the palm rest, making it nearly useless. Typing makes speech inaudible. The keyboard lacks an LED for caps lock, yet there are annoying always-on LEDs in in the palm rest and lid. Instead of gradually ramping fan speeds up and down, it switches between discrete levels, causing unnecessary distraction. And while it's one of Lenovo's smallest laptops, it's comically huge and heavy compared to my MacBook.[1]
Obviously, these two machines are apples and oranges. They target different users and price ranges. It is unfair to compare them. Still, it's frustrating to see so many bone-headed design choices in the ThinkPad. Just a little more thought and testing could have made it a much better machine. Sadly, this is true even for Lenovo's most expensive models. The X1 Carbon comes with useless stickers on the palm rest, and peeling them off leaves a residue that requires solvents to remove. These annoyances may be small, but they add-up to give an impression of tackiness.
You simply never experiences a real ThinkPad - meaning the ThinkPad T4xx/X2xx/W4xx business notebook series that originated from the IBM ThinkPad T40/T60 series.
Your older notebook is just a low budget consumer device with the ThinkPad brand name attached. Sad, but true, Lenovo recently transformed also their business notebook series to low quality consumer style form factors. The last good devices are the T420/X220 series.
I've also used the X1 Carbon and the X230. Both had many small issues (and a few big ones) that made them feel like alpha-quality prototypes. Even simple things like trackpad gestures and scrolling were borderline-unusable. Instead of scrolling proportionally to my finger movement, their trackpads just triggered a "scroll mouse wheel" event, moving up/down by 3 lines. Options like smooth scrolling did nothing but add an animation in the 3 line movement. It's ridiculous. An iBook from 2005 has better trackpad scrolling.
I'm surprised by the "no true ThinkPad" responses. How am I supposed to know which ThinkPads are real ones? Apparently the X220 is, but not the X230? The only differences seem to be some keyboard tweaks, the trackpad, and newer CPUs.
Lenovo decreased the build quality with every iteration. The original IBM ThinkPad T60 was rock solid. The Lenovo T400/T410 and X200/X210 were great too, but already with thinner plastic case. The T420 and X220 were the last good series. The T430 and X230 came already with a bad keyboard&trackpad and was made of less durable plastic. It all started with the faulty T410s (mind the "s") which plastic was way too thin. The X1 is not a ThinkPad, just a generic notebook with its name attached. Maybe Lenovo changes their product strategy, then one can buy new products again.
The x140e is not a real Thinkpad. The fact that it hasn't got the Thinkpad keyboard should be your first clue. Sadly Lenovo doesn't make it easy.
Linux on Thinkpad is rock solid, but you have to get a real Thinkpad and not just something Lenovo slapped the name on. Get something from the series that existed before Lenovo bought the brand, the descendants of the T60/X60. Nothing with non-Intel CPU/GPU.
There is Linux/Thinkpad wiki which is fairly regularly updated. Look at that before you buy unless you know which models are from the Thinkpad lineage.
(But, Linux on Apple? Didn't even know that worked. Don't they source their own parts for which there are no Linux drivers? My laptop is my one tool, I don't want to download drivers. That's supposedly what Windows users do. I have no time for it.)
It certainly has a TrackPoint and maybe a slightly compressed keyboard. It's somewhat ruggedized too for grade schoolers to slobber on. Why isn't it a real ThinkPad?
I previously read about your experience with the X140e,[1] which is "certified pre-install for Ubuntu"[2] rather than "certified for Ubuntu"[3]. (I made note of your previous post in my personal wiki.) It sucks that hardware that is "certified pre-install" can have so many issues with vanilla Ubuntu. I definitely learned from your experience and plan to avoid hardware that is "certified pre-install".
Yes, I would agree about the X140e. (The 'e' stands for economy == cheap) The problem is that Lenovo calls just about anything a Thinkpad these days. The inner circle is what you find in this list. You will see that the X1_0es are not listed.
I have an X120e, and I bought it since it was the absolute cheapest I could find that still had some "Thinkpadness" to it. I can see that the model line went downhill from there.
I agree that the X140e is the least ThinkPad-y of the recent ThinkPads. I didn't mean to single it out, but it's the ThinkPad I've used the most. I've also tried the 2nd-gen X1 Carbon and the X230. Those had similar design flaws. If anything, the X1 Carbon was worse. Seriously, the keyboard was a nightmare.[1] Like the X140e, the X230's fan ramped up/down in discrete increments instead of continuously varying. The fingerprint reader was useless. One particularly annoying bug in the X230 was its headphone jack. I don't know what kind of worthless shielding it used, but I could hear the SSD and CPU working. That sort of noise is literally unheard of in macs from the same period. I've used netbooks with better audio quality.
Again, it's a ton of small things that need to be done right to impress a feeling of quality. I would love to see that sort of quality from a company other than Apple, but lately I'm coming up empty.
1. Caps lock was replaced with home/end. Escape moved to backtick/~, which was placed between right ctrl and alt. Backspace and delete were put right next to each other. Oh, and all the function keys were removed. See http://college.wfu.edu/itg/wp-content/uploads/keyboard.png for the whole horror show.
Watch someone march into an unrelated Mac thread, announce they only use Thinkpads, and get downvoted straight into the gray. Some opinions are allowed on HN, others are not.
I got a T400, shoved 8 GB of RAM in there and a 128 GB SSD. Cost me Under $250 including upgrades. The thing is built like a tank, and while the CPU is a tiny bit old it holds up well on Windows 8, and really the only "problem" with that machine is the lack of dedicated GPU (even for non-games).
I will say, all used laptops have badly aged batteries. I get about three half to four hours from a 9(!) cell battery on the T400. That's bad by most metrics but good for the age of this thing.
PS - The matte display and keyboard feel makes it all worth while.
- X61 still running strong on ubuntu, 32G ssd too small for anything else. 1024x768. ~$75
- X200s that I loved. 1440x900. Windows and Crunchbang Linux. Rare but routine video/display issues & blue screens. :( 128G SSD went into the T61p. ~$220
- T61p too heavy to pick up. 1920x1200. With 8GB and an SSD, it's not slow at all. Display hinge has half an inch of play. Still running windows. ~$250
I won't buy another Thinkpad. I would buy a Dell Precision M4800 (to replace the T61p) and I still like 11" MacBooks (to replace the x200s). Needless to say old Thinkpad batteries are shot, though 1440x900 and 1920x1200 look(ed) great.
I recommend strongly against buying a Dell, specifically the M4800.
I ordered two for my business recently. I chose the Intel AC 7260 network adapter, which turns out to have all kinds of problems connecting reliably to 802.11n networks (the vast majority). On my laptop specifically, the motherboard and/or video card had major problems resulting in failure to shut down, an endless cycle of video adapter driver crashes and re-initializations resulting in system lockup, problems waking up from sleep, etc. I returned mine for a replacement, only to find the keyboard was absolutely horrendous--keys would double-press (bounce) almost every other key when typing fast and with moderate to heavy pressure. Upgrading the BIOS did not help as it apparently did with other Dell models.
Also, Dell refuses to refund my money on the now two defective laptops because I'm outside of the 30 day refund window. They wouldn't make an exception. I told them I was never purchasing a Dell again. I can (and did) buy a 2014 MacBook Pro with better specs for the same price and now I'm running Windows in Boot Camp (for .NET development) with flawless performance. Combined with a 3-year Apple Care agreement, I never have to worry about being nickeled-and-dimed over way-too-short refund periods.
In short, avoid Dell. They are shipping substandard hardware and are even getting things that should be commoditized to perfection (the keyboard) wrong.
As well as dubious wireless adapters Dell also shipped a USB GigE adapter for some XPS15 models that doesn't work for more than a few hours before the adapter crashes and needs to be power cycled by removing and reinserting it. I had a customer with one XPS15 that contained both the terrible wireless and terrible external wired network adapter.
The story gets better though, Dell shipped a demo model of a new XPS15 recently and we discovered the improved USB3.0 GigE adapter that it ships with is now stable, so got them to swap the older ones out but customers shouldn't really be testing hardware that is unable to perform its basic function reliably.
This has been my life's torment over the past several weeks. There really didn't seem to be a reasonably-priced option that "just worked" except the MacBook Pro. Combined with Apple Care, it means I won't have to go through what I just went through again. And just to be clear, I vastly prefer Windows 8.1 over OS X. My primary tasks are .NET and iOS development, so this isn't a biased decision. I /wanted/ to find a PC manufacturer that made great laptops, but I read too many horror stories for all the top models, and experienced some of my own with the M4800.
The M4800 is kinda tough to run Linux on, but I still recommend it. I have not yet run it without the Nvidia kernel driver, but that may have to do with my choice of graphics card. I would tell you which one this is, but it's so new it's not in my 'lspci' results.
I bought a used X220 not too long ago and I am very satisfied with it (using it with Linux Mint at the moment). The keyboard is excellent and much better than most laptops out there. Almost everything can be replaced in this laptop (I changed the LCD screen for an IPS one, I added a lot more RAM that it had in the first place, the battery is removable) and it runs very fast overall for most uses (except gaming for obvious reasons). It's quite light and portable as well, and it had enough extensions ports to be useful (not like a Mac).
Compared to what you get nowadays for about the same specs (or worse) but a more expensive price tag, I think it's a very good deal.
I've been religiously buying & accumulating all T-series (T500, T510, T520..). They are good machines & well built but I wouldn't call them maintenance free. Often I've had to replace parts that required medium to high skill. Also the older siblings get very hot and are only fit to be used with an external keyboard.
Having used three generations of ThinkPads at work over the past five years (T60, T410, T440), I've been pleasantly surprised (with the notable exception of the trackpad on the T440 - dear god, what a terrible experience) with the build quality and reliability of each of them.
I recently snagged a used T420 on eBay for ~ $180. After selling the memory and screen that came with it and adding _more_ memory, a higher resolution screen and a SSD I had lying around, I've now got a fairly beefy box that runs Hyper-V like a champ and can chew through video encodes for ~$250. Oh, did I mention it runs for 5 hours on the 6-cell battery it came with?
Certainly doesn't hurt that you can't go more than 100 yards in my town (near Washington, DC) without running in to a closet stuffed full of them.
For a reliable workhorse, hard to go wrong with a used T410-430.
I loved IBM ThinkPad and early Lenovo ThinkPad for their high build quality and their robustness.
But the T430 and later models got worse and worse. The also changed the traditional good keyboard with trackpoint to a cheap slim keyboard you can find in every other notebook.
I would buy a new T4xx notebook if the focus again on high quality business notebooks and not lower quality fashionable stylish notebooks.
Thinkpads for life! Typing out this comment on a T420 right now, and a couple of weeks ago I bought an IBM-era vintage A20M from eBay to tinker around with. Couldn't imagine not having a trackpoint on my laptop.
Love the ThinkPads that have the 7-row keyboard and are devoid of trackpads (TrackPoint only), such as the X200. Those and the unibody MBP are the yin & yang of desirable laptops as far as I'm concerned.
I think the X201 was the last one you could have ordered without a trackpad at all, and I believe it was also among the last ones you could order with the tricolor IBM logo instead of the lenovo brand. I have one here that hasn't booted in a while because I usually use my X220, but I think the X201s is a rather handsome machine.
For all other models you can disable the trackpad in the BIOS, rendering it harmless.
Actually, the feature is present on a lot of Lenovos (even non-thinkpads). My anecdotal experience it that it works quite well.
However it's only accessible from their energy management tray program on Windows, so if you do a clean Linux install right away, you won't even know about it. You need to try the kernel module pointed out in the sibling comment.
Also supported on older X series in Linux (the tp_smapi kernel module), and probably on many others. It's also possible to set the thresholds from Windows once and they'll persist even when you turn off the laptop.
Really great to read through this. I'm a first-time Thinkpad owner and purchased an X230T [0]. I immediately installed Ubuntu 14.10 and moved all development into virtual machines and things have been fairly smooth. Owning a less svelte machine really doesn't affect me, but the bumps in the road running Ubuntu can get tiresome. Random setting changes after "security" updates e.g. enabling slow keys under accessibility (confusing!). Taking three hours to finally configure a printer and even then, the prints look like they were run through an antique Instagram filter. All in all, hanging out in Firefox and Terminal all day is mostly solid though.
x200s have an IPS screen, I think. It's the x201 with the crappy screen (which I'm writing this on...). You can switch out for a nicer panel if you're willing to put the effort in, but if you're looking to buy, may as well look for other models.
There's no other model that surpasses an X201 though :(. I'd pay a lot of money to get an X201 with a Broadwell chip and a 1920x1200 screen. That's all I ask.
I have an X61T with the SVGA+ AFFS-IPS screen (1400x1050). The colors are the best I've ever seen on a screen, and at 12 inches the PPI is the same as my smartphone. Laypeople are genuinely impressed by it and will comment. The "retina" displays on Apple tablets are better, but people aren't used to seeing that kind of quality on a 2007-era laptop.
No, the X200s only came with TN screens. I actually swapped my 1400x900 TN screen for a 1280x800 AFFS. (In order to do this, you have to swap the entire screen assembly for a X200 one, _then_ swap out the standard panel for a HV121WX4-120. You have to do this because the 1400x screen uses an LED backlight.)
I wish there was someone who figured out how to use the old 7 (8 if you count cursor keys) row keyboard with the newer thinkpads. I can't adjust to another layout than the one with the 6 keys pos1/end/inesrt/delete/pgup/pgdown in the upper right corner.
The default Realtek wifi card in t440/t440s (maybe also some other models) does not yet have a stable Linux driver, wifi keeps dropping. (The most recent driver from github is a bit better, it only drops a couple of times per hour, the default driver in Ubuntu 14.10 drops in like 5-10 minutes.)
If you're replacing WiFi cards in ThinkPads, check into which cards are supported by the unit - there's a whitelist that varies by each model. I learned the hard way trying to get someone with one of the cheaper models onto 802.11a with a replacement card - the new card was used in other models, but the laptops he had only shipped with one type of card and a correspondingly short whitelist.
You can find hacked firmwares to remove the whitelist functionality, but that depends on your willingness to run hacked firmware.
Jesus that should be made illegal on laptops. MSI did that with the wireless card. (Won't buy a product from them again) There is no reason that I shouldn't be able to switch out what's in the mini-pci slot.
Debatable but understandable. They whitelist cards that they tested and certified the laptops with, which may actually be significant / required for some devices. The problem device for me was a ThinkPad Edge something, I believe the lists for the better systems are significantly larger.
If they don't support the 3rd party card you put in there: Who cares? I'm not going to expect them to support the wireless functionality if I subsitute out the wireless card. What do they need to whitelist cards for?
I have a X230 that had one of those Realtek cards. It would drop a lot and be rather funky since I run linux 99% of the time. Then it finally died in February so I spent $13[1] for a replacement non-realtek. It has worked absolutely great, even with a minimalist Arch setup.
I do my hobby programming daily on a ~10 year old T42 that I got for free. It's blazing fast for my purposes, and with a 4:3 screen, a real keyboard and a nipple mouse it's a pleasure to use.
The screen contrast is what finally convinced me to switch from a T61 to an X230, even though it was giving up 1.5 inches of screen height. I can't wait for this shortscreen fad to be over.
Still, build quality wise, it feels like I haven't seen the end of the T61 (when this thing inevitably falls apart).
Somewhat tangential: any recommendations for an Arch Linux install? My old IdeaPad V570 is wearing down and I'm thinking of replacing it in the near future. Either used or new.
For the most part I have simply booted Ubuntu install images and had no problems at all. On some models I reprogram the fan controllers because I don't like the fan noise and the defaults are too conservative on thermal margins anyway.
I'm using arch on T430s and T440p. wicd didn't play well with wifi card/driver on T430s- no wifi after resume. It works fine with NetworkManager though (or maybe driver was updated in the meantime).
I'd recommend a Tx30(s/p) depending if you want 14" or 15" screen. Just get one with a resolution >1376x768 and a good CPU. You can easily upgrade the rest.
T420. should only run about $275 refurbished. you want intel graphics. fill it with 8Gb memory. simply great with Archlinux. with a 9cell battery and standard hard-drive tuning (consider swapping in a SSD sometime) you can easily get 8hours on a charge.
I use the x230 and all the hardware works right out of the box. Pretty much the only manual setup i did was for laptop power management and a xsessionrc to disable the touchpad since I always use the red dot.
I've still got my x61s. I don't use it a whole lot, but I'm continually impressed how well it still works (running ubuntu 14.04 now). It's nice to keep around when traveling on vacation when I don't want to lug around my macbook pro, and, should it break or be stolen, I wouldn't worry about it so much.
That was a looong time ago, like T40p long time ago. Then they went through a period of offering AFFS displays that were kinda weird -- good measurable specs but made my eyes hurt for some reason. Then a period of claiming that nobody was willing to make IPS panels at an economical price which Apple proceeded to prove to be a lie.
Lucky enough to have a late model nVidia T61, running perfectly since the day I bought it. It's had a few upgrades since then, more RAM and an SSD but it's still an amazing laptop.
Lenovo's batteries really suck. They lose life a lot quicker than Apple's batteries and are very expensive to replace, especially since the primary and optibay batteries tend to die around the same time. At least they're user replaceable.
I'm a fan of Dell's laptops lately. Many newer Dell laptops have good Linux support. Oddly, I think Dell Alienware laptops are great as portable workstation laptops because they're powerful and can stay cool, but YMMV.