On a tangential note, I recently switched from an XPS 15 to a X1 Carbon. The thinkpad is a completely uncompromised device. It feels like a laptop from the future, where nothing sucks. The keyboard is great, the screen is great, the touchpad is great, the keys are all there, it's super light, but super solid, there's a bajillion ports. Anyone considering a new laptop should give a good look at thinkpads. They also have ridiculous sales from time to time - I got my X1C for about 50% of retail price.
I have a X1 Carbon that is a few years old now. About 2 years ago I dropped it (lid closed) from about 2 feet up (70cm). And it hit the tiled floor, pointy corner first. I thought "welp here go $2000". But no! A 2x3 mm part of the black surface finish chipped of and I see the bare silvery metal now. Oh and the tile cracked.
Have a similar, but slightly more horrific, story with a Thinkpad X230T. I was working from home after the birth of our first child (so... clearly not in my right mind...), and I decided it would be a good idea to carry my laptop on top of a way too full basket of laundry up the stairs to save an extra trip. I wasn't paying attention... tilted the basket at the very top of the stairs... and my Thinkpad rolls down the stairs along its edges... full steam ... and slams into the wall at the bottom.
I pick up the Thinkpad expecting the worst... and the only damage was a very slight opening along the seam of the external battery... not a scratch on the actual unit itself... no components jarred free... nothing...
I'm switching back to a macbook now, but I used to run a T480s with the WQHD screen and it worked really well. Good battery life, nice HIDPI screen, super durable. I brought it with me when I traveled and everything, never had any issues besides scratching the outside surface.
> unless your work requires you to use macOS, you have no reason to buy a Macbook
If hardware is all that matters to you, sure. But some people actually prefer the software experience of macOS to that of Windows, for a variety of reasons.
There is still the issue of software. Lots of programs that professionals use on a daily basis don't run on Linux and don't have good alternatives that do. Plus, macOS is much better designed and integrated (if that means anything to you), and generally more stable[0].
[0]: This seems to be less true every year, both because desktop Linux is becoming more stable over time, and because macOS seems to get buggier with every release. Still, as someone that uses both operating systems on a regular basis, my MacBook Pro is still marginally more stable than my Linux desktop machine on average.
First, I was talking about software that doesn't run on Linux but does run macOS, for the case where you don't want to use Windows but still need certain programs. For those users, the Windows "workflow" is already a deal-breaker, as is the lack of professional software on Linux, so macOS is the only choice.[0] I also didn't call out any specific software because there is lots of it besides the Adobe suite.
Second, can you elaborate? What makes Adobe run "horribly" on macOS? I admit I haven't used an Adobe product in years, but I used to do some design as part of my job, and I can't say it worked any worse on my Mac than it did on my Windows machine.
[0]: I recognize that this isn't necessarily a huge segment of users, but I for one would be hard-pressed to go back to Windows, even if it saved me a thousand bucks on a laptop.
The only software I could complain about on macOS is adobe software. I can't think of any software that gives a bad experience other than that...
If you deal with large photoshop files, and you only have say 8gb of memory. Windows will just get really slow when you move around the document.
On macOS it will crash randomly, and often. Premier you can be scrubbing the timeline, scrub too much, boom premier just stops working.
Lightroom (this is what I mostly used for editing photography) it generates a history of applying changes and removing them, if you begin toggling boom crash.
This is just personal experience, but I know alot of people who do graphic design and they now just have this natural reflex to constantly save their work allllll the time in fear of the software crashing.
Yet on Windows I don't recall any of that software ever crashing...
That's true, and it's really wonderful that you have that option, but it doesn't help if you prefer the software experience of macOS and/or need software that doesn't run on Linux.
The touchpad, speakers and display are significantly better on the MacBook. Also, Apple sell their hardware products at a single, clearly advertized price point. I hate how Lenovo make you fuss around with discount codes to get a fair price.
Lenovo is mainly a B2B company: their target customers are big corporations, they don't really do a good job when it comes to direct-to-consumers services.
Of course these are anecdotal. I got my IdeaPad U430 in 2014. Same year it slid off my bunk bed (6' high), first hitting the corner of my dresser before it fell on the hardwood floor. It cracked its spine in half and got a dent in the back of the screen so deep that part of the screen is bulging out. I was sure I would be buying a new laptop. To my delight, there was no functional damage to it, it's still my daily laptop today. My next one will be a ThinkPad when one of the components fail.
Had thinkpad for years as an office laptop earlier when it was IBM and then a while after it became Lenovo. Have Dropped them many times, no issues. They had a sensor where it will detect motion while you drop and park the hard disk head before it hits the ground, Also configured the sensor to use it like WII once. It was one of the best laptops i've ever used.
I've got multiple laptops -- including multiple ThinkPads -- and my 7-year-old W530 is still my favorite out of all of them.
The W530 was dubbed a "mobile workstation" (by Lenovo) and it really is a beast (hell, it's had 32 GB of RAM since day one, which is still more than what you can put in many laptops even today!).
At my previous job, I primary worked from home but when I did go to $work (the office, a customer's site, or one of our PoPs), I would often ride my Harley-Davidson Street Glide Special (midwest weather permitting). That machine -- which was also a beast, by the way -- vibrates like nothing you've ever seen! The W530 would get shoved into my backpack, which just barely fit in the saddlebags. Then, after arriving at my destination, I'd grab it, flip it open, and get back to work. Not once did I have an issue with it failing to do anything. It even accompanied me, in the saddle bag, on a 2,000 mile round trip!
I've had at least two (and perhaps three) MacBook Pros during the same time period but I would never have been brave enough to take one of them for a ride on the bike. I've got a feeling that many lesser laptops would not have survived.
(My next ThinkPad will almost certainly be whatever the current "mobile workstation" is, whenever the W530 finally gives up the magic smoke.)
A client once brought in a Thinkpad they ran over with a truck and the only damage was the soft copper heatpipes and fins were bent. I bent it back a little so the fan wouldn't scrape and it ran perfectly fine.
I used ThinkPads exclusively since 2000 but had a very bad experience around 2011 when the whole office upgraded to T410s machines and every single one (about a dozen) would die within a year the exact same way. They all got replaced and all died again, the second time out of warranty.
Something wrong with screen or the ribbon cable connecting the LCD screen caused the screen to die in a vertical strip about two inches from the left side. [1] You could press down on the bezel just under the distorted/dead strip to try to bring it back, but eventually even that would stop working. Referred to as MIGR-76367.
I actually haven’t bought a ThinkPad since that one. I switched to a MacBook Air running Bootcamp. I do miss the keyboard.
Had an x1 yoga in my backpack, padded backpack. Backpack fell off the desk and fell like 4 feet to the floor. Laptop was totalled - screen totally trashed etc. Was under warranty so got the whole thing replaced so it was back to like new within a week. But anecdotes are still just anecdotes lol.
I've fried two Macbook Airs by spilling drinks on them.
I've spilled more drinks on a single Thinkpad than all the other laptops I've owned combined. Everything just kept working.
Thinkpads are (/used to be) exceptionally well built. Including under-keyboard drainage.
(Typing this on a Pixel Slate with the Brydge keyboard, which leads to an interesting though: If I spill a drink on this keyboard, at worst I'll fry a completely separate bluetooth keyboard.)
My X1 Yoga too survived a fall that would have incapacitated any sane laptop (but Thinkpads are insane like that).
It's a good laptop and its performance remained snappy until recently (for a Gen 1 X1 Yoga). Still, I just switched... to a MacBook 12.
The killer feature for me is its silent operation - with better performance than my X1. Silence is such an overlooked design aspect, though perhaps I'm particularly allergic to fan noise. With current processor gens a fanless design is a must for any ultraportable that doesn't have a dedicated GPU. That's a relatively new development - the 2015 Macbook 12 was under-powered for some daily tasks but the 2017 is more than fine for those. Shame they stopped making them that year.
The screen is also a significant improvement (though I'm guessing Thinkpads screens have advanced since I bought mine) and the trackpad is no competition.
I'm worried about keyboard reliability but the typing experience is fine. I get along with most keyboards, with the strong exception of one pet peeve - mushy keys. The Macbook certainly doesn't have these.
My T530 survived flying off the roof of a car (in my unpadded backpack, to be clear) at 80mph when the straps for the roof bag ripped off cruising through Iowa. There was a small bit of plastic missing in one corner, otherwise nothing! To date that’s been my favorite laptop (aside from the bad screens thinkpads used to have).
I’ve dropped my 2018 MacBook Pro 13 at least 3 times, twice with the lid open, from a height of more than a meter (though onto a vinyl floor). It developed only a hardly noticeable dent.
I've been using Thinkpads for close to 20 years now, and it's more correct to say that their greatness comes from feeling like a laptop from the past: excellent ergonomics, upgradability, durability, ports. Indeed, my current machine (X230, 2012 model) already inspired some criticism for deviating from the IBM-style keyboard of its predecessors. Newer models like the X280 have even more complaints arising from the unswappable battery, soldered RAM, and lack of Ethernet port. Lenovo apparently faces the same thinness-over-usability marketing focus that afflicts all electronics today.
Hilarious. Long time Thinkpad fanboy here until I finally needed Lenovo support and it took 1 month to get a faulty part fixed under a next business day support plan.
The replacement was faulty. Replaced again (a little quicker this time) but there were still problems. They consider their job done. Never shopping Lenovo again.
Then for a new role I got a brand new XPS 13. Put Ubuntu on it and everything Just Works(tm). Very happy Dell user now. (Shame the sticker price is so high but it is a quality system.)
Also the Lenovo performance was never as good as it should have been. It turns out while it had a then current generation CPU it was a cheaper version than the competitors.
Yeah, I bought an X1C Extreme last year, part of the screen casing tore to the left of the screen, a freak issue I’m convinced was a defect. I tried to get a quote so my accidental damage insurance with my credit card could kick in for the repair—Lenovo wouldn’t give me a quote without paying because I didn’t have their support plan (this was like 3 weeks after I bought it).
The laptop still works fine, but I’ll never buy Lenovo again. Terrible company to deal with.
Same experience with the X1 Yoga. Power board issue. It took 6 weeks for them to finally tell me they couldn't fix it. They just refunded me, which was nice.
I just had a look (in the UK), and it doesn't look possible to go higher than 16GB of RAM, which is a deal breaker for me - I regularly go above that when running VMs and containers for dev and test work.
For such an otherwise powerful machine, I don't k ow why they'd limit it?
The X models are designed to be ultraportable, aka as thin and light as possible. As a result, they're not great machines for people who need lots of RAM, storage, etc.
You forgot about 15” X1E, which is a desktop replacement. It’s still light and portable but comes with higher specs. I have one with UHD screen, 32GB and 1TB. Same weight as a 15” MacBook Pro. Configured with an FHD screen, it’s lighter than MacBook.
I just switched to the X1E after using Mac for the past 20 years. I'm running Ubuntu 20.04.
It's an amazing machine: excellent build quality, screen, and variety of ports. The only thing I can complain about is the battery life, which isn't great.
You installed cpufreaq yet? It is a life saver and a battery saver too. I run most of the time with 4 cores, turbo disabled, and capped at about 50%. Makes a huge difference in battery runtime.
I was hoping for the best of both worlds - something with a 14" 3K display, very light (don't care too much about thinness TBH), but with a good processor and 32GB of RAM.
I regret getting the WQHD (2560x1440) screen on my X1 Carbon 7th gen. Text is too small to read without scaling, and I haven't figured out how to configure consistent scaling behavior across Wayland and XWayland applications.
I have the same configuration and leave display scaling at 100%, but set the font scaling factor to 1.5 in the Gnome Tweak Tool. In this way, all fonts in Wayland and XWayland apps have the right size and nothing is blurry. Only controls like window borders are a bit smaller than intended by the designer, but I actually prefer it that way because it's more compact.
Counterpoint, I also got the WQHD screen, on my T480, and it's great. I absolutely love the print-quality text in my terminals. "Scaling" is not a problem at all - I eventually figured out that the way to get flawless graphics is to ignore all "scaling" settings and simply throw an xrandr command in .xinitrc that forces the DPI to its correct value (144). For some strange reason X11 ignores the real screen DPI (which it knows perfectly well!) and forces it to 96, which is broken behaviour in 2020. Most of the rest of the software ecosystem is a team player, and respects the DPI setting (things that don't are broken - I believe GTK requires an environment variable, but QT respects it). "Scaling" is a broken concept - 12pt font should render at 12pts, no matter your screen size or resolution.
I have an X1 Carbon 7th gen with a 4k screen (3840x2160). I run it at 2x scaling on Wayland (sway) and I haven't had any issues with native Wayland apps. X apps are rendered at 1x and upscaled, making them blocky or blurry. Apparently there are some apps like Spotify that ignore scaling settings and always render at 1x, but I haven't run into them.
I use Windows, so consistent scaling wouldn't be an issue. I was more wondering with regards to battery life.
I'm pretty sure I'd prefer a WQHD screen to FHD, but am also pretty sure I wouldn't get any benefit of going to UHD. But at the same time, if WQHD has a significant impact on battery life, I'd probably stick with FHD.
I have a T480s with a 14" FHD (1920x1080) screen and the experience isn't good either. Wayland apps work with fractional 1.25X scaling but are laggy and have odd graphical glitches. XWayland apps are just blurry.
I think 1920x1080 is the perfect native resolution for 14", without scaling. It's a bit small on first look but you're closer to laptop screen than you're to a real monitor, so that turns out just fine for me.
It does get hot, and I'll admit I don't generally use it for sustained workloads, but I've never noticed the fans getting loud. This is just anecdotal but it seems like most of the heat is generated near the screen, above the keyboard, where you don't have as much contact with the machine.
Besides DDR4 SODIMM 32GB modules exist, if 32GB is what you want you just buy it off Amazon and put it in. Don’t have to mess around with “what they offer us the privilege to be able to purchase” like with soldered RAM.
Didn't fit their desired form factor for the X1, maybe. Their P53 line goes up to 128GB RAM and may be more suitable for your worklaod (I use an X1 but mostly use remote machines and don't need local VMs). I believe the construction is mostly the same as the X1 and T series Thinkpads, it's just bulkier and heavier.
The P series is such a workhorse. If I had purchasing power over my hardware at work, I'd crank one of those up and replace my workstation+laptop with it.
I believe Intel had some limitations on their support for the LP-DDR (low power) memory and that's why so many systems had the 16GB limit.
On light road-warrior machine like X1 they likely wanted to maximize the battery life. And supporting many types of memory on same model was not likely an option.
Memory power consumption is overlooked but real, and they increase as capacity increase, so if customers aren’t going to use up it makes sense not to offer too much capacity.
If you're interested in Thinkapds but find the X1 a bit limiting, check out the T-series or the P1. They're only slightly thicker but often have a much higher RAM headroom (and often can be easily upgraded by the user).
I use an x1 and this is my biggest issue with it; mine is from 2017 maxed out from the factory at 16gb and it’s amazing the ceiling has not been raised even three gens later.
That said, the forthcoming x13 mentioned in the linked piece goes up to 32gb, looks like. It’s only 0.25lb heavier and looks to be much less expensive. The catch is a smaller screen :-\
I do development work on it and haven't ran into any issues. That being said, if you need something a little more beefy, and a little less lightweight, the T line is the next place to look. There's also the X1 extreme. However, after the XPS15 I wanted something a bit more mobile.
I think the price is too high especially as you can still buy gen 7 which came out last summer fully loaded with 4K screen, 16GB ram 1TB ssd for about 2K. 32GB ram nor 2TB ssd are an option.
The highest end 13" with 2TB of SSD and 32GB of ram actually costs 3000
Reducing it to a TB SSD and 16 Ram leaves it at 2200 for the mac.
Unlike Apple, where sales are infrequent and minor, the prices on Lenovo's site are much higher than you'll end up paying if you wait for a deal (even from Lenovo).
edit: My X1C gen7 with 1080p screen, 10th gen i7, 16GB ram and 256SSD was the equivalent of just under $1200 USD
i have an x1 carbon and i hate it. There is an bug with the trackpoint and mouse pad that makes the pointer drift randomly. I have had my computer back and forth and replaced everything. It still drifts
Maybe new thinkpads are exceptionally bad, because I've used thinkpads daily for decades now and have never had this problem. X40, X61, numerous X61S's, X201S, X220, X230, X250, and mix of T-series machines back in the day, not once has this been an issue for me. And I abuse these machines to the point that I replace the worn-polished and sloppy keyboards, and often crack the chassis, they don't live an easy life under my hands.
The only remotely related phenomenon I've seen is after resting on the trackpoint steadily long enough, it learns that to be the new center as it's constantly adapting. So upon finally removing my resting finger, it will drift just long enough for the adaptive centering to update and the drift stops. But that's perfectly normal and very short-lived.
I have OP's problem (drifting trackpoint) with an x230. To be honest I had never looked it up or saw it mentioned before, I just kind of live with it. Sometimes the cursor randomly starts drifting and I have to play a little with the trackpoint to get it to stop. It is occasionally annoying but doesn't bother me that much. In any case, it is the x230, so looks like the problem isn't exclusive to newer models.
This makes me wonder if it has to do with the OS/driver configuration.
I've always run the trackpoints as PS/2 mice in Linux which is basically the legacy compatibility mode, and I don't use the touchpad. So I'm not running the Synaptics driver at all, and I do remember when I tried using the Synaptics driver on the X250 @ my previous employer it was very frustrating until I got rid of that and got things back in old-fashioned PS/2 mouse emulation mode. I wasn't having problems with drift, it was more click behavior and acceleration curves being very wonky.
But maybe if you're driving things at the Synaptics driver level there's a tighter integration and the OS/driver plays a bigger part in recentering the trackpoint. I'm just speculating here.
Kind of inherent to its nature, pressure sensing device like TrackPoint has too much precision and dynamic range to be hardware zeroed.
Instead the firmware takes average value over time and regard that as the current neutral, and if your finger is on it longer than that integration period, the sum of mechanical imperfection, planetary gravity, heat, whatever noise AND weight of your finger all combined becomes a new zero point.
The solution is to lift your finger off of TrackPoint and letting it wander until pointer stops. There’s nothing mechanically wrong or damaging in and around that, again, just how it is. Same as how digital kitchen scales or body weight scales need to calibrate itself upon powerup, except TrackPoint does it on the fly.
The problem with doing that is that it sometimes can drift for several minutes and thats super annoying when you are working on something, it really slows down you productivity.
That's something that plagued my ThinkPads since forever, made worse when they moved from the rounded trackpoint nub to the flat one. Easy fix, take out the rubber trackpoint nub and put it back (maybe clean the area a bit). Or disable it if you're more productive with the touchpad.
This has been a problem with trackpoints since as long as I can remember. Definitely saw pointer drift on a thinkpad running XP, and see it today on their latest. Wonder if they'll ever actually solve it.
This is a known quirk of Thinkpad trackpoints. Once in a blue moon, the mouse pointer drifts randomly; touching or nudging the trackpoint usually makes it stop. Regardless, it stops doing it on its own after a minute or two.
My old IBM 600X (1998 era) had this issue, as did my 2013 T430 and my current 2017 T470, although it hasn’t happened for a long time.
This was an eventual issue on my X61 in 2008 and on my T4something in 2018. It's a shame. I had to just apply a lot of pressure in random directions to the trackpoint to get it to stop, periodically.
Based on personal experience from using both Thinkpad T series and MS Surface Book, keyboard on Surface Book feels even better than the one on Thinkpad.
To add to that, trackpad on Surface Book (can only talk about the first gen one, haven't tried 2nd or 3rd gen yet) is also by far the best trackpad I've ever seen on a non-macbook laptop.
Exacty! The build quality on this thing is out of this world. Any time I unplug it from the dock and use it in more of a laptop mode, I get little dopamine hits all around.
I also love my X1 Carbon. Fantastic machine, and extremely affordable on the used market. The only reason I stopped using mine is because the BIOS is locked and I wanted to run Linux full time, and my model (gen 3) can't be reset like a lot of the other models (I can't remember what the process was). It's a great machine and after resale value, I spend ~$200 for two years of a solid machine, which I consider a win.
Are you saying you sold a two year old machine for $200 less than the price you paid for it when it was brand new? How is that possible? Even MacBook Pros don't have that good of resale value.
That may be the way to go but our office cheaped out and got discounted T490s. It's a great laptop minus the screen and trackpad...but management doesn't want to spend more than $800 on a laptop
Thinkpad range is great. But I made the mistake of getting one of Lenovo's desktop machines (Lenovo Yoga A940) to replace our dead iMac, and to give my daughter a system with a stylus etc. for doing artwork. On paper it looks good. In practice there's been issues. Bleed and dead pixels on the screen, occasional reliability issues. Didn't want to pour out the cash for the Surface all in one, but kinda wish I had.
Wish the Thinkpad quality would extend to their other products.
I bought an X1 carbon about a year ago and it has been an absolute nightmare for me. It's true that the keyboard is nice, the display is good etc. basically it is perfect on paper, but I have had so many issues caused by bad firmware from Lenovo (thunderbolt/HDMI failures, bluescreens). I've had the mainboard replaced 5 times, the trackpad replaced twice, and I am currently using a laptop with a trackpad I am not happy with and speakers that are broken and I'm genuinely afraid to let lenovo touch it again because it always comes back with some new issue. If you use the physical trackpad buttons to click, it causes the pointer to stop dead for a second or more, which means no drag and drop, no text selecting etc. Not a massive issue, but I bought the laptop partly for the good inputs, and now it is no different to any other laptop with no physical click buttons because I can't really use them the way I like. I'm lifelong windows/linux, so really don't want to go mac if I can avoid it, but it just doesn't seem like there is a single windows laptop manufacturer that focuses on quality or reliability. most surveys I see put the failure rates at double mac level.
mac simply won the laptop war. no contest. the only people using anything else haven't tried one or have no choice (my linux homies waiting for system76 to catch up get a pass). at least that was the case until apple went all in on usb-c :/
"no contest" might be a bit of an overstatement. I'd agree that there is no contest when it comes to quality, but this is definitely not the case regarding features. There are a huge number of features available from lenovo and other manufacturers that are simply not available from any mac laptop. connectivity is a total joke and I have no idea why they persist with the infuriating lack of ports, even on premium or "pro" models. no matte display options, faulty keyboards that take years to rectify (by reverting to a previous design no less) and not to mention the extortionate price of peripherals, total hostility to repairs. etc. etc. Carbon x1 is significantly lighter than a macbook air with a larger display, more connectivity and better travel on the keyboard.
As I mentioned in another comment, I've had at least two and perhaps even three ("loaded") MacBook Pros in the same timeframe that I've had my ThinkPad W530.
The MBPs have came and went but the W530 is still being used nearly every day.
Many of us (former) die-hard Apple fans have become disillusioned with Apple in the last several years.
nice, me too. donglegate is really the only reason im lurking in this thread and considering going back. the thinkpad given to me when i was a child still works(!) but it's gunky and the finish is a bit worn, while the mbp i've used every single day for the last 5 years is still going strong and looks brand new (apple did replace the screen under a recall).
this is just my own experience but i think they both have well-deserved reputations as being tough machines. i would sooner drop a thinkpad than a mpb, for sure, but i love using the macbook so much more. i think apple's problem is they stopped innovating, and while their systems should be getting cheaper as a result, they are getting more expensive. while thinkpad continues to grow.
Newer Mac Books have known issues with their keyboards. Not only do their keyboards feel almost like typing on a solid hunk of plastic, but those butterfly keyboards are very delicate, fail easily, and are very expensive to replace.
On my Thinkpad T470, when the keyboard goes bad (which, yes, happens about once every two years), replacing it requires a $50-$60 replacement keyboard, a single small Phillips screwdriver, and spending about 5 minutes installing the new keyboard.
been buying nothing but Thinkpads for years now, after a very positive experience with the X220 in the first place. My last thinkpad is a X1 carbon, and while it's a trade-off (thinner, less ports, no upgrade possible for RAM), the build is really solid (the keyboard is almost just as good as any other thinkpad's), and the case is a mix of metal and carbon fiber and feels extremely nice all around. It's also trivial to change the battery by yourself, this thing opens up for servicing with just a few screws. Really happy with my purchase.
I only run Linux on it, and I have never had any issue with hardware support (except fingerprint sensor which I do not use anyway). Note that I have heard that Linux support on X1 Carbon Gen7 is somewhat poor (the only one so far with such issues).
Lenovo frequently runs significant sales on their own site, often focused around holidays. I'd expect to see a significant sale for Memorial Day up next.
Seconded (well, eighth'd, if the rest of the comments are any indication). I got a 6th gen X1C at the end of '18 and it's brilliant. It'd be neat to have a Ryzen option on them in the future, as I have a desktop I build with an AMD CPU and love it.
What OS are you using? How was the switch from 15" to 14"?
I've had an XPS 15 running Ubuntu for about 2.5 years, and while it's certainly got a lot of objective things going for it, it's my least-favourite computer in the last ~15 years and I'm considering an update.
the XPS I had felt like a laptop from the past, the X1 feels like a laptop from the future.
The XPS's keyboard would multi press, the touchpad didn't work great, the hinge made it difficult top open the screen, the speakers kinda sucked. Don't get me wrong, it was a nice laptop, but felt very over hyped. A death by a thousand cuts. I felt a bit let down from what I expected after reading a bunch of reviews.
On the other hand, when I finally got the the X1C, I couldn't believe that there was so little hype about this laptop. All I would ever see online is stuff about macbooks and the XPS line, nothing about the X1C.
The X1 is such a solid machine. The interface is completely uncompromised, yet it is so light, it feels like I've just got a spiral bound notebook in my bag when I'm carrying it around. Feels like a leap ahead, rather than two steps forward, one step back.
No op but for me the clincher was vastly superior keyboard and the expansion capability with dual ssd/dual ram slots that made me go for X1 Extreme Gen 2. I have used Dell in the past and after using this Thinkpad, I have to admit that I find the latter to be of better quality overall.
Long time XPS customer. My last one had the very famous battery swelling in just a few months and Dell refused to replace the battery. On previous models for other customers they replaced it for free for what it is: a manufacturing defect. The keyboard and touchpad are also finicky, but that's not a deal breaker for me because I'm mostly on external.
All X1 Carbons I've owned and the one my partner owns have been so nice to use. I mean you just need to get one into your hands... The rubbery cover, very sturdy design, super lightweight, perfect keyboard, in the later models perfect screens too (2k Adobe RGB 100% and HDR just nails it).
And you can throw it everywhere, just travel with it and use everywhere due to it being so small and nice. And you can damage it and probably the floor tiles break before the laptop gets any real hit.
Edit: oh and Linux just works so great in any of those business ThinkPads. Any linux. I'll go with Arch typically, but even more exotic operating systems, such as OpenBSD just work with it (running it in one of my ThinkPads for some years, and the experience is great).
i sold my xps because the trackpad was glitchy. go to dell and count the number of driver revisions. its like a perpetual beta product. the nosecam lol. the bezels on xps are purdy tho.
they did! but not before i returned mine. the worst part was that your hands blocked the lens if they were on the keyboard... such egregious design(s) flipped me away from dell laptops
Black Friday is a good time. This past November I picked up a ThinkStation p720 for like 60% off. Not sure whether laptops are discounted to the same extent, but it's worth investigating.
At any time of year, see if you are eligible for their "Tickets At Work" program which offers sizable discounts. They sometimes even stack with seasonal sales...
what screen? i keep reading anything but the basic 1080 nukes battery life? i just cant imagine a laptop in 2020 doing 3 hours after having a mbp retina for the last 5 years which is capable of running all day
I would recommend the 4k panel. 4k in a 14" screen is overkill, but compared to other options the 4k panel has a wider color gamut, higher dynamic range, and higher brightness (500 nits). You can easily use it in direct sunlight. I'm writing this comment in a sunlit room and my brightness is at 34%.
Most of the complaints about battery life seem to be by people who keep the screen at a certain percentage instead of keeping it at a certain brightness. eg: There are reviews where someone keeps the screen at 70% brightness instead of 200 nits. That's like a car reviewer keeping the gas pedal pressed down 70% of the way and then complaining about fuel efficiency.
Edit: Oh and if you're curious about battery life, see my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23106156 You should expect 5-12 hours depending on what you're doing. You could go as low as 2 hours if you stress test the CPU while at max brightness.
FWIW I have a t480s with the 1440p display and am using Linux and my battery life is typically around 6 hours or so for regular use. If I start running more dev tools and building things it plummets as to be expected, but the display really doesn't seem to make much difference.
The biggest thing I miss from my MacBook is being able to open it after a week of being closed and still have battery. There's definitely something not going into deep sleep when I close the lid, but that's probably my fault.
To use no battery when sleeping, you'll want to configure hibernation. I haven't done this because I only suspend my laptop for 10-12 hours at a time. Also it's tricky if you're using disk encryption with a swap file.
I've been issued MBPs at my past few jobs. On each of them "all day" is about five hours, tops. You must not be doing a heckin lot of dev work if you actually get all day out of a single charge of an MBP battery.
maybe "all day" on mbp was an embellishment. but i'm reading things like 3 hours of web browsing time on the latest thinkpad displays! i've also seen comments in here it's not that bad. maybe a batch of bad batteries? i really would love to try one and get away from the mac ecosystem (mainly because of dongles, although one must ask, is an AC brick better? and why can't anyone else make a brick like apple, with tidy cables!)
I'm wondering how long, or if ever, it takes for reasonable people to resume buying Lenovo products after they got busted using a firmware-based rootkit to reinstall their manufacturer spyware onto a freshly formatted OS install (the same year they got busted preinstalling third-party adware, which resulted in an FTC settlement/fine).
Do you wait like a year or three? five? Do you never buy Lenovo again? What's reasonable? This isn't rhetoric: I'm legitimately asking for a figure, as well as a rationale, because I don't know the answer.
Personally I'm in the market for a high end laptop for running Linux, and I just couldn't see myself buying something from them ever, no matter how good their machines are, because I just don't trust the people in the organization who develop products to take system integrity seriously enough.
I don't like Lenovo. Their laptops have steadily declined by every metric I care about since the X220. But Thinkpads are still better (by those same metrics) than anything else I've come across.
Would be willing to buy something else. Anything else. But most other laptops out there have even worse keyboards (which I deeply care about), terrible form factors, specs that are stuck in 2010, awful support/warranty, no Linux support, or all of the above!
If someone builds something I'm happy with, I'll buy it. Price is not an issue. My laptop is my toolbox. I want it to work the way I like it. If it breaks, I need to have fixed preferably today, but tomorrow or the day after can be acceptable as well. That basically leaves Lenovo & Dell.
From what I can tell from their website, their idea of "support" seems to be RMA. I'm not going to be buying a laptop from someone who expects me to ship it to the other side of the planet so they can fix it. That's a hard pass for me. It's really hard to beat Lenovo (or Dell) next-business-day-on-site repairs.
Lenovo’s on site support is not that great though. I used it twice. Once for a broken drive, where they shipped me a new drive without any explanation or ever sending someone. Second time a broken keyboard a month ago, where they refused to send someone because I was working from home and not from a business address, and also refused to send the part (which is supereasy to install) because it was not marked as user-serviceable and then threatened they would revoke my remaining warranty if i bought the part direct and installed it myself. (I did it anyway.)
if only they werent plastic. my laptops would be toast after about a year but my mbp is going on 5 (did have to replace the screen, but was done under warranty)
I just looked at the System76 laptops, and they are strikingly similar to the Powerspec(Micro Center)/Sager laptops? Is the resemblance superficial or something else?
System76 uses Clevo/Sager laptops. However, they don't "just" pull off the shelf computers and put an OS on them, they're involved with the design of the laptops from the beginning.
This thread has more information from someone who works at System76.
My understanding is that the Thinkpad line is a bit segmented from the rest of the company. As a result, those poor decisions haven't effected the Thinkpad line. It helps also that I immediately switch everything over to Linux
I do understanding that it's entirely feasible for them to rootkit Linux from the BIOS and install malware onto their Thinkpads but I just haven't seen it happen yet
> I do understanding that it's entirely feasible for them to rootkit Linux from the BIOS and install malware onto their Thinkpads but I just haven't seen it happen yet
It’s not actually, because the mechanism which allows a vendor to provide “drivers” via UEFI is used by Windows only and nobody else. Windows exclusively is the target of such UEFI abuse.
Lenovo can put as much garbage and bloatware they want in the relevant UEFI firmware-sections, and Linux will simply ignore it, like it always have. No root-kit will be triggered.
As a Linux-user you are actually 100% immune against this abuse. As a ThinkPad-owner doubly so, since this major fuck-up only affected budget/non-Thinkpad product-lines.
Naw, that story is ridiculous. One person bought two "refurbished" ThinkPads from IBM and claims they found some stuff on them.
Show me one example - any example - of Lenovo installing any of this kind of stuff on a factory fresh ThinkPad, and then we'll have something to talk about.
Until then, I suggest ignoring biased and axe-grinding sources like "thehackernews".
I'm in the security industry and bought a ThinkPad (X1 Carbon) 6 months ago. It has the form factor and specs that I want.
What is the threat model? They will not be using the rootkit for hiding useland malware. Are they extracting my documents and misuing them? Are they performing MITM on my connections and doing something harmful? While the capability is there, I don't see the software being used in a way that will inconvenience me.
It is a weak point in the system, maybe someone else exploits it, but I have so much software that I can say that about. When looking at threats the question for me is what is most likely to get me owned. It will probably be phishing or a malicious document. That's not going to change based on the manufacturer I buy from.
If I do get owned by some targeted malware that uses a Lenovo driver for priv esc, well they were probably going to get me with or without that. As good as it would feel to boycott a company with poor security practices, I'm over running unrefined System76 laptops.
It did MITM to inject ads, including adding their cert to the trust store to MITM SSL connections.
Of course the software needed the private key to work, which they shipped to every laptop and was quickly put online.
All of the sudden banking at coffee shops on a lot of Lenovo models was no longer private.
I'm not sure if captured traffic could be retroactively decrypted, but I wouldn't doubt it. PFS support probably wasn't high on Superfish's priorities.
Superfish was never on Thinkpads, only Lenovo's consumer laptops. The Thinkpad division and the consumer laptop division seem to operate somewhat separately.
I do this all the time. My machine has a modern browser, up to date OCSP, HSTS already cached, all that. Could you please explain to me the danger or threats you are warning against?
Have you configured your browser(s) to "fail closed" when it comes to OCSP queries? CRL and OCSP behavior has been, well, "not ideal" since basically forever.
yes legitimate traffic is going to be fully encrypted thanks to TLS, the risk comes from attacks where you believe you're logging into your banking site securely when you're actually not. for example dns cache poisoning, ssl downgrade attacks, etc.
in the case of a starbucks, the AP itself is not necessarily secure (under a counter somewhere?) so it's possible users are connecting to a malicious AP.
the threat model depends on the level of risk: the convenience may outweigh those risks, it may not. for myself it is one of a few tasks i wouldn't engage in on a network i don't have more trust in, but in retrospect this advice was indeed probably too strong for most.
Again - who cares about dns cache poisoning when your cert chain is sound and your browser is sensible about cert downgrades (which all of them are now)? Who cares about how secure the AP is? It’s an encrypted, securely authenticated connection. That’s the whole point of the cert chain. The AP can be as malicious and evil as it wants - good luck usefully tampering with or impersonating my bank’s public key.
Again, what’s the threat model here? Exploiting a browser vulnerability? Maybe?
“ Are they extracting my documents and misuing them? Are they performing MITM on my connections and doing something harmful? While the capability is there, I don't see the software being used in a way that will inconvenience me.”
There are capabilities that can be misused, but I generally trust the companies with those capabilities to not misuse them.
Maybe Lenovo will include a sketchy driver, but I trust Lenovo to not use that driver to drop ransomware on my machine. In the same sense I trust Google with my location and emails. You may trust an AV company that can upload any file on your machine to not grab your tax returns and open a new credit card in your name.
Even if Lenovo starts intercepting my private web traffic or placing files on my machine there is only so much damage they can do. They are not about to frame me by dropping plans to overthrow the government in my downloads folder then blackmailing me to design more secure drivers for no pay.
There are threats I'm afraid of and a computer manufacturer, no matter how negligent, is not one of them. Is OP avoiding Intel too? Meh.
It seems to me this would be a function of available alternatives more than anything else. Some Lenovo products, as best I can tell, make for excellent Linux machines. What are the alternatives if that's your criteria? There are alternatives which might be acceptable depending on your other requirements for hardware, form factor, price, or geographic availability. But for some subset of requirements, Lenovo is still going to be the best option by a wide margin which is going to push someone to making that tradeoff. I don't think it's a function of time.
For me, it is never. I tend to trust people and companies to do the right thing, but when they violate that trust, they get on my permanent blacklist. I also don't fly United or park in Impark lots for the same reason. And I will never again turn off my ad-blocker after the Forbes fiasco, despite sites begging me to do so.
There’s a difference between being nit picky and blacklisting a company for being openly hostile to their customers. Will I ever create a new Facebook account? No. Will I ever open a Wells Fargo account after their habit of making faking ones? Nope.
Writing off a company for adding root kits to their machines out of the box seems to be perfectly reasonable.
Yes, most companies do something bad, sometimes and I'm all for forgive-and-forget if the error is understandable and they take steps to correct it. But doing something so way-out egregious as installing a rootkit on customer's machines speaks to a company culture that makes me extremely reluctant to do business with them again.
Probably. Dell/HP/Panasonic have equivelants that are nearly as good, but named differently. I don't know if those involve royalties to IBM or Lenovo. TEX Keyboards in Taiwan also makes a TrackPoint-enabled keyboard too.
So, make it a extra cost option and have the buyer pay for the license?
Or, copy trackpoints from outside of the patent window. A 20 year old trackpoint won't be as good as a modern one (probably, I'm not a trackpoint user), but it's better than no trackpoint?
Until upper management changes. They are the ones who encourage this behavior (if not directly, then indirectly so they have plausible deniability - see Wells Fargo - but still intentionally). Only when they change is there a hope of this sort of behavior changing.
I should be bothered in a theoretical sense, but I'm just not in a practical sense. I just bought a Legion series because it was the best deal (because Asus doesn't sell in my country). If I'm running Windows, I'm going to get random arbitrary bloat anyway, so I don't really see the mechanism as important.
The odd thing is that I don't remember this, do you have a link. I mean, I remember the Bloomberg article that claimed unauthorized physical embeds on PCBs from China. But I don't remember the Indestructible Lenovo Spyware scandal!
The trend seems unstoppable, windows telemetry is not optional, apple owns your system, google reads theough your personal information, etc. Pointing only to lenovo isn’t better than pointing to this general tendency of collecting our data non-optionally
It's a non-issue if you're not using windows. Basically it's a windows "feature" where if a certain ACPI table is present in the firmware, it will download and execute it. There isn't actually any malware/spyware executing on the firmware itself.
The intent is that manufacturers would use this to provide critical drivers for windows users. Stuff that wasn't on the retail OS cd, but you would need to get to windows update. Or something, I dunno. Of course, the race to the bottom being what it is, if you can get $20/unit to put sketchy garbage in it, it's going to happen. Just because you're paying for something doesn't mean you're not also the product.
AFAIK the original purpose was for anti-theft solutions (eg. computrace) to re-install themselves after a wipe. Before this, they would mount the boot drive and rewrite chkdsk.exe (which gets executed each boot) with their program. That way, their tracking software stays on the system even if you wiped the computer.
The original intent seems OK. Why the hell does this mechanism need the capability to execute arbitrary .exe files and not just load the most basic type of driver required (INF/DLL/etc. whatever Windows calls it)?
A DLL is also executable code; there's really no difference between that and running an arbitrary EXE. Inf files are slightly different, since they're just text-based configuration, but I doubt that you could get your theft-recovery (or whatever other) functionality using just configuration of something built-in.
When I play movies I've paid for on my iPad I've paid for, if I want to screenshot frames from them to share or reference or meme, the screenshots come out as black rectangles.
I wipe machines on arrival as a matter of course, so I never stopped buying Lenovo machines, but I only buy Thinkpads and AFAIK they were only pulling that shit with consumer-level machines (which are already a wasteland across most manufacturers—not an excuse, to be sure).
I still care because it's a strong indicator for the culture at Lenovo. If they were willing to do this then what else might they be doing that we haven't discovered yet.
Thank you for the reminder; I firmly believe in voting with wallets, and they haven't done enough to regain my trust after Superfish and the BIOS bloat installer fiasco.
The very first thing I do after buying any laptop is completely wiping everything and installing Linux or re-installing Windows.
I think it's best to always start from clean slate because even 'good' manufacturers put a tonne of shit in there. So in that sense, it doesn't really matter what the manufacturer does, apart from the terrible decision making that they should learn from.
They used to use firmware-based rootkit to reinstall their manufacturer spyware onto a freshly formatted OS install. So, not matter what you do, they will reinstall even if you format the hard drive.
While that's true for Windows (and I remember the reports so not arguing the point); it simply _CAN'T_ be true for every OS.
Consider using OpenBSD instead. The barrier to entry is higher, but worth it. Hell I'd be surprised if they could get that to run on linux without exploiting a 0day. Windows tries to be too helpful, and that's where the problems arises.
Your point is valid though; why trust them? If you follow that train of thought all the way down you'll be forced to live naked on a deserted island.
The only thing this does, is enable you to update your UEFI BIOS and other machine-firmware from Linux, without having to have a separate dual-boot OS like Windows (or bootable USB sticks) to do that one task, and it frees you from having to download and obtain proprietary firmware-installers/checks per device you want updated etc.
I consider it apt-get for firmware and use it all the time. Everything in one place, easy to keep up to date etc. It's great!
And very importantly: It does in no way enable the UEFI-abuse with bloatware "drivers" as outlined earlier, which is still a Windows-only phenomena, because Linux does not check for nor use these drivers.
Edit: Oh hey there Jeremy. Long time no see! Where did my good ol' IRC buddy go these days? :D
For all of its quirks, I love having a 3:2 display on the MateBook X Pro. Besides the Surface Laptop and Surface Book, there's not much else on the market with this aspect ratio.
Am I the only one who is upset that Lenovo T series has dropped external battery ? I am running Ubuntu on a T480 with an extra battery in my bag. I don't think any other laptop has ever given me as much joy. And I almost never run out of juice even though I always code without being plugged into a power source.
The workaround for this is that you can now get external USB batteries that support PD, and most Lenovos use USB with PD for their main charging cable, which means you can carry around a device that can charge your laptop on the go.
It's not as slick as the "swap batteries, now you're fully charged", but on the other side, the USB batteries can charged without the laptop, and you can pick the size you're willing to carry around.
I find the battery situation very frustrating. They put in way undersized batteries on everything except macbook pro priced models. Spec-wise a T14 is more than fine, but a 50 Wh battery is not enough if you actually use it unplugged for software development. You go to the T14s and suddenly the battery gets a bit bigger, in a machine that is supposed to be thinner and lighter. And if you go to the X or P series it gets bigger again. I can’t help but think they deliberately handicapped the affordable segment of their line-up with tiny batteries to upsell people.
I agree that was quite disappoint as it was one of the large reasons I bought my T470. And for those who are saying hey just use an external, that's great until your internal battery starts dying and replacing it becomes a nightmare (which for less tech savvy people it's much easier just to swap the external than dealing with the internal).
It is a bit unfortunate that they don't support Thunderbolt though. The ability to add an external GPUs/PCIe cards widens the horizon a lot for desktop-replacement systems.
Yeah, I believe they're switching to branding similar to the X1 Carbons across everything, so it'll be T14 generation 1, generation 2, etc.
I just hope this doesn't imply they're going to start making laptops a lot like other manufacturers (e.g. less durable, more soldered down components, ...)
I can't make any statements regarding quality, but regarding soldered RAM, unfortunately this practice has spread outside of the X1 Carbon lineup. The ThinkPad X280 and X290 have soldered RAM with no DIMM slots, and the ThinkPad T490 has soldered RAM but with an extra DIMM slot for some upgradeability (compare to my T430, which has no soldered RAM and instead has two DIMM slots). There are still some ThinkPads that don't have soldered RAM, such as the P53 and the P1.
Regarding storage, on the other hand, I don't believe the ThinkPad lineup has gone down the road of soldered SSDs, not even in the X1 Carbon lineup.
The last AMD laptop I bought froze randomly every few hours on Ubuntu, and there is no way to turn on my keyboard backlight on my Thinkpad T480 on Ubuntu. I gave up trying to fix these problems a while ago, and last time I checked nobody had found a fix for either issue for my specific laptop models. I'd be very hesitant to buy AMD or Lenovo before I had strong evidence that there are no serious issues on Linux.
I mean, buying a brand-new device and using Ubuntu 19.04 with the 5.0 kernel from a year ago and outdated packages is begging for trouble.
Since linux drivers live mostly in kernel space, for new devices I would imagine a lot of issues would be fixed by running the latest kernel or mainline for even newer hardware.
The newer Carbons and the X1 Extreme have had a rougher time than most Lenovo laptops. My T480 and T580 were pretty much perfect from the jump, but my X1 Extreme remains disappointing.
I installed Ubuntu 19.04 on X1 Extreme Gen 2 and didn't have any issues. Upgrades to 19.10 and 20.04 have been painless as well. Everything basically works.
No they don't. The newest X1 Carbon didn't have a working microphone in the Linux kernel at release. It didn't work in Ubuntu until about a year after it started shipping.
I have that X1 Carbon and you're correct, it doesn't work.
But I can't help but see that as a feature, no a bug. I can plug in my headphones with a mic when I need to, but having the hardware cover over the camera and no working microphone is nice.
To be fair, all of those are pretty old (the T520 is from 2011), so it's expected that they would work flawlessly---it's the very new X1 Extremes and a couple of other models that are problematic. For the most part, staying one generation back is enough to get very good hardware support.
My current generation T495 works perfectly with the latest Fedora and Ubuntu. The last revisions of Fedora and Ubuntu work perfectly except for the fingerprint sensor.
Still want to see a 4800H/4900HS with an RTX 2070 Max Q option...
Edit: and at least 32gb ram. It really feels like Intel is paying the laptop mfgs off on this one. Almost every AMD laptop this generation is gimped with single-socket ram upgrades and/or capped with RTX 2060 graphics.
What are you doing that needs such a wide CPU and beefy GPU? That's a real narrow niche between GPU-heavy gaming laptops, and cheaper many-cored desktops.
I would love a 4900 with no dGPU, myself. (wide-CPU compile workloads) The iGPU in these is plenty for my portable needs, especially at 1440p.
Ideally we'd have good external GPU support, so we choose to hook it up to a real heavy-hitter.
Does it really matter? The fact is, I use that much CPU/Ram for work tasks... and I'd like a 2070 as a baseline for the occasional gaming.
Since AMD systems are likely 1-2 years away from seeing good, broad Thunderbolt support (probably aligned with USB4), eGPU isn't an option. AMD currently does more, with less power than the Intel counterparts in the upper end classes of systems.
Find me a laptop with a 2070 Max Q that isn't at the higher price point that the AMD 4800H doesn't fit into.
I have an X1 Carbon Gen 3 tablet. I have had plenty of issues, but the trackpad is the best I have used since my MacBook Pro, and I don't think a better trackpad experience is better on Windows. Also better than the Surface line, though those would be the next best IMO.
I don't think as good, but I don't know for sure since I never use the trackpad on my thinkpad. The trackpoint (little red dot) is just so much more convenient for me.
The hardware is lovely, but the quality of the hardware support service is not what it used to be.
I recently had to get service for my current generation X1 Carbon.
Completely understandably, Lenovo are not currently able to provide on-site support at residential addresses. However, right now the best case for a depot repair appears to be around 3 1/2 weeks. Call center staff say that they have been prohibited from giving any kind of a timeline for a repair or even an escalation call-back by management.
Lenovo says this is due to Covid, but friends of mine (And a very chatty call center rep) report that it began in January when they moved their primary repair operation from Tennessee to Texas.
Like most PC manufacturers, Lenovo's exaggerates battery life claims. 15 hours is basically if you're idling the machine at minimum brightness with bluetooth and wifi disabled.
For example: Lenovo claims that my 7th gen X1 Carbon has "up to 18.3 hours" of battery life. Typically my laptop uses 5-10 watts. It can go as low as 2.5 watts if I dim the screen to its lowest setting, close all applications, and disable the radios. The battery is 52 watt-hours, so that would be 20 hours of "usage" before it runs out of juice. Really though, I get 5-12 hours depending on what I'm doing.
This is one of the many reasons I keep buying Apple laptops. Their stated battery life claims are usually pretty close or at least reasonable enough. Then I hear all these types of things about PC manufacturers are it just makes paying more for a MacBook a little less frustrating.
Luckily, there are usually third party reviews with accurate battery life claims, at least for more popular laptops (like any ThinkPad). You're right that Apple does do a good job of accurately advertising battery life. On the other hand, since thermals aren't great on most MacBooks, some of Apple's performance statistics are only accurate for the first few minutes until the processor starts to thermal throttle.
how long does it last while asleep? i can close my macbook and come back to it days later and she always boots right up. just curious if the thinkpads are similar
Macs will suspend to RAM and write the RAM state to disk, then use the RTC to wake up 1-3 hours later and power off the RAM to save battery.[1] Resuming from disk takes 5-10 seconds while resuming from RAM takes a second, which is why OSes don't just suspend to disk.
The generic name for this behavior is "hybrid sleep" or "hybrid suspend". It's when the laptop does everything it needs to hibernate (suspend to disk), but then just suspends to RAM.
Almost every laptop is capable of this. The limiting factor is software support. You have to deal with different hardware RTCs, different disk encryption setups, swap partitions vs swap files (and how big they are). It's complicated enough that I decided it wasn't worth configuring, so my laptop loses 3-4% of battery life overnight. That said it is possible on Linux, especially if you use a swap partition instead of a swap file in an encrypted disk.
I find the battery life in Lenovo laptops degrading very quickly, comparing to Apple macbooks. I used X1C 4th gen as well as X1 Extreme extensively, and their batteries are pretty close to dead, only delivering ~1-2 hours of work. At the same time, I'm typing this from a 2016 MBP, which is alive and well, batter is good enough still.
Maybe it's just Linux, which I run on Thinkpads. Overall as a system though, the difference is drastic, not in favour of Lenovo.
My X1C6 is ~2.5 years old, and I still get around 7 hours of battery. Screen is usually quite low brightness as I live in the UK and it's mainly terminal/VSCode/browser.
I used to have a couple of things tweaked like TLP etc but when I reinstalled from scratch with Fedora 32 I didn't do any of that. Still get awesome battery life, i'd definitely buy one of these newer Thinkpads in a year or so.
Much of the degradation comes from keeping the battery at full charge for long periods of time. Apple improves long-term battery life by lying about battery percentages and only charging once the battery gets below 90-95%. There's even a new option to only charge to 80%.
I get the same behavior in Linux with TLP.[1] I run "tlp setcharge 75 80" and my battery only charges to 80% (and only starts charging if it goes below 75%). If I think I might need power for a longer time, I can run "tlp fullcharge" and wait for it to fully charge.
TLP remembers these settings across reboots so I don't have to think about it.
There has been also complaints that if you have 4K display in Lenovo you are loosing quite much battery life. I haven't seen any definite tests about this though.
Lenovo's battery life promises are worthless, I'd confirm with a 3rd party review. My Thinkpad X1 is supposed to have a 9.5+ hour battery life. I have never seen 4, usually 3.5.
I have a X1 Carbon 3rd gen (2015) that is starting to get beat up (man is it durable though). I've been waiting to upgrade to a Thinkpad with a Ryzen 4000, so I'm super excited about these. I might switch to the T series though (for more RAM) and replace my aging desktop as well.
As an aside I've been running Ubuntu 16 for the last couple years no problem. Recently updated to Ubuntu 20 and it's been great so far.
My dream laptop isn't there yet, but this is hopeful. I want an X13 or T14 with an -H series CPU. I think the X13 is unlikely, but Asus has shown us that you can fit a 4900HS into a 14" laptop.
It's not an absolute necessity for me. I do my primary computing on a desktop, and always offload compute onto it from a laptop for anything heavy. It's nice to have some local grunt, though.
Ha, meanwhile I wouldn't buy a ThinkPad (or any other laptop) without it.
As for your question, I've never heard of at least the "real" ThinkPad series laptops (X/W/T/...) sold without the TrackPoint. Does it really bother you when typing? If it's the appearance, you can likely find a black nib for purchase or maybe remove the included nib and blacken it out.
I grew up a fan of the track point, back when trackpads were either nonexistent or hot garbage (at least on PC laptops). Which is to say I definitely “learned how to use it”. Then I switched to Mac laptops a decade ago. Since then I’ve got to touch the track point a few more times and it felt so dated. People still tout the precision, but I can get the same level of precision on a quality trackpad, plus much needed fluidity in general, not to mention multitouch gestures.
For me, it's not about precision. With the Trackpoint I can rest my hands on the Keyboard/Homerow and I can use the pointer without having to move my hands at all.
Overall I think you'd still be faster in keyboard, but gestures and such offer a lot in terms of simplicity which is a fair trade a lot of the time. If your workflow revolves around typing however, I would still put trackpoint above.
You can pull the rubber TrackPoint cover off and disable the sensor in the BIOS, but the trackpads on these laptops aren't always great (at least if you're used to MacBooks). I've learned to like it, but I can see how it might be a dealbreaker for some people.
Can anyone with experience in HP Elitebook laptops recommend which Thinkpad models I should look at? I like the idea of a Ryzen processor and I prefer ports/power over portability/pose.
Do these have soldered-on RAM, batteries, and/or SSDs? I usually end up upgrading my laptops over a period and the flexibility in being able to do this is important to me.
We won't know 'til they are released. But currently the premium for the higher end (and thinner) "T" series is the cpu and ram are soldered. There might be one blank ram slot, not sure. Ironically for the cheaper 'e' series, the ram is socketed (not sure about the cpu). So hopefully for the new 'e' and 'l' series, they'll stay the same. More than likely because the 'T' series are being pushed to be thinner and thinner, they will remain soldered.
They're beginning the rollout in the E-series which is their budget line of Thinkpads. Not sure what your metric is, but getting better than Full HD in a Windows portable for $639 is par. (Surface Go 2, being the one exception I can recall).
I'd pay 1,5k€ for a machine with really good specs (USB-C charging, good build, 15", good screen, preferably an AMD processor, good/great touchpad, perfect linux support, upgradable RAM), but haven't yet found a laptop that matches these requirements. I don't care so much about light weight, as I'm looking for a semi-workstation.
The closest thing I've seen so far is (apparently, it's almost impossible to even find out the model code this is supposed to have, I think it's GA401IV-HA026T?) the Asus Zephyrus G14. There's talk about a 15" version (heck, I'd happily take 17" or more), I sure hope it won't be more expensive.
You can't get it in any of them. The same T series that gets a 1440p screen with Intel doesn't with AMD. It's still a budget line. Maybe in one more generation we can go all the way and get a 4K X1 with a Ryzen.
