Thinkpad General

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A Humble Ewok said:
Do the post-IBM Lenovo physical housing hold up, or are they just skating on the established reputation of the Thinkpad while lower quality like Doc Martin boots?
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Nah, they're trash, nowadays Lenovo is trying to turn them into Macbook clones (They did away with the expandability and user-serviceability and want to make them thin for no fucking reason).
 
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A Humble Ewok said:
The main issue I have with laptops is I can maintain the underlying electronics and hardware better than the actual physical housings. My Toshiba satellite works just fine, but the plastic is coming apart and has a loud as fuck fan, so it stays as a "house laptop" relegated to being a pornostash machine Do the post-IBM Lenovo physical housing hold up, or are they just skating on the established reputation of the Thinkpad while lower quality like Doc Martin boots?
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I've had a T60 (just post acquisition), T400 (several years post acquisition) and a 2013 vintage (8 years post acquisition) X-series machine for a while. See no real quality difference.

Now, obviously:
  1. All 'convertible laptops' that turn into tablets are complete garbage that will fail immediately unless used by middle-aged women who just leave them in one place
  2. 'Ultrabooks' are garbage in general
Lenovo quality has gone down because the market wants stupidly light stupidly small plastic overly integrated garbage. Even then, if you really spend, the X1 Carbon is probably one of the least bad of the Ultrabook business laptops. Yes they have stupid integrated batteries, yes the RAM and SSDs are soldered, and early models had bad battery life, newer not so much, but I've seen those hold up to hard use by men who would break other girly toy Ultrabooks like twigs within a couple months.

Blaming a decline in quality on Lenovo or Chinamen in general is a little ridiculous, frankly. Chinese didn't ruin Lenovo, morons worldwide ruined Lenovo. If you can't hold up a 5 pound laptop in the air and respond to emails while heading to a meeting you shouldn't be using a computer.
 
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3119967d0c said:
I've had a T60 (just post acquisition), T400 (several years post acquisition) and a 2013 vintage (8 years post acquisition) X-series machine for a while. See no real quality difference.

Now, obviously:
  1. All 'convertible laptops' that turn into tablets are complete garbage that will fail immediately unless used by middle-aged women who just leave them in one place
  2. 'Ultrabooks' are garbage in general
Lenovo quality has gone down because the market wants stupidly light stupidly small plastic overly integrated garbage. Even then, if you really spend, the X1 Carbon is probably one of the least bad of the Ultrabook business laptops. Yes they have stupid integrated batteries, yes the RAM and SSDs are soldered, and early models had bad battery life, newer not so much, but I've seen those hold up to hard use by men who would break other girly toy Ultrabooks like twigs within a couple months.

Blaming a decline in quality on Lenovo or Chinamen in general is a little ridiculous, frankly. Chinese didn't ruin Lenovo, morons worldwide ruined Lenovo. If you can't hold up a 5 pound laptop in the air and respond to emails while heading to a meeting you shouldn't be using a computer.
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Thanks I'll keep that all in mind. As for consumer demands, the shrinking of electronics also has a lot to do with power usage. Smaller wires = less power consumption. Course smaller devices = more fragile (or at least feel like it), and smaller also = harder to fix. Even if you know how to solder, its going to be tiny as fuck surface mounted components, in a very tight space, on a small device. It can be done, but it makes the barrier much higher for most power users that weren't maintaining computers in the 70's and 80's, when almost all chips were soldered directly onto the motherboard (and even then, the size of machines and components made it much easier to solder stuff on and off).

And really I don't blame business people wanting lighter stuff due to flight travel.
 
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I just got a T430 and replaced the HDD with a SSD and got it to max 16 GB RAM for around ~200 Maple Pesos. I wanted to get a UltraBay caddy, but I probably have to wait for the Wuflu to take it course within Xi's Wonderland beforehand.

With the ThinkPad autist enthusiast community, the T430/X230 series is consider the beginning of the end, as the old IBM keyboard was replaced with a newer chiclet-style keyboard. I cannot say if it is a downgrade or not, but I have no trouble with the new keyboard. The rest is working out fine as well.

Here's what I remember about old ThinkPad models from my research. Note that the T-series is the standard ThinkPads, X-series is the more compact version and P-series is the workstation model, I believe.

T60/T61 - last IBM ThinkPad, last model with 3:4 aspect ratio
T400/T410 - Lenovo models, can't really think of anything distinctive about them
T420 - last model with the classic keyboard, one that can be easily corebooted.
T430 - first model the chiclet keyboard, has USB 3.0 standard, is hard to coreboot, IIRC.
T440 - features a TrackPad with a single button, removed separate volume controls. This was widely hated, and was removed in future models.

Also, here are some useful links:

Lenevo Support - Official support page

Thinkwiki - Wiki with information on various ThinkPad models.

Some YouTube channels covering ThinkPad topics:

Laptop Retrospective - Has reviews of various ThinkPad models, along with other laptops.

Sebi's Random Tech - Zoomer that has gotten the ThinkPad meme because, unsurprisingly, he is poor. Unlike a lot of vocal old ThinkPad people, he uses Windows on his machines, so it's nice for that perspective.

AA Computers and Technology - Another Zoomer that does some ThinkPad stuff. Hasn't been as active, must be doing actual work in the real world instead.
 
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Wingus Dongshire said:
Just get a System76 laptop, major OEMs are all shit
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They seem pricey, but knowing they build specifically with Linux in mind is very nice for me. I was looking at their top of the line laptop a couple years back but never pulled the trigger because they were using Intel CPUs. Everything else looked really solid.

Just checked and they are still using Intel CPUs 😞
 
Kot Johansson said:
I seriously hope none of you kiwis owns any nuPads
Recent Lenovo ThinkPad laptops have a problem with defective Thunderbolt Controllers (archive)
Update: Lenovo responds | ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 failure: What's happening, why it's happening, and how to fix it (archive)
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Holy... shit! As much as a travesty as this is, I'm relieved to learn that I wasn't the only one suffering from this issue.

Maybe ""Power Level" idk, but I used to work for a company in their IT department from 2016 to 2018 that rolled out X1 Carbon 5th Gen laptops to the sales department along with that Thunderbolt 3 Docking station for their cubicles so they could use the dual monitors/mouse/keyboard/ethernet connection when they weren't out and about. Around a week or two after I set up the docking stations, we got multiple emails in the ticketing system for a variety of issues...
  • Ethernet port stopped working on the docking station
  • one of the monitors/both monitors were flickering on/off randomly/every few seconds
  • laptop wouldn't communicate with the docking station due to the firmware just not responding
  • USB ports gave out randomly
Me and the IT director was constantly on conference calls with Lenovo about these issues that kept happening on an almost daily basis, even when the Level 2/Network Admin tried setting them up, it wouldn't work. Even after we tested the rest of the newer ones in the little "IT Workshop" area for like 3 days with no failures, laptop constantly connected and powered on, they still crapped out. Lenovo's response was almost always "oh we don't know why that keeps happening, so we'll just send you replacements and/or swap the board inside the laptop", and when those didn't work, finally after a month or two of constant back-and-forths with them, they finally admitted that they really couldn't give us an answer because the docking stations have Intel parts, and they were waiting for Intel to get back to them regarding how to fix the issue. Before I left the company, the problem was still not fixed.

The fact that these articles were posted THIS YEAR about the issue being resolved (which even then I'm skeptical about the whole "being resolved" part) is very telling about BOTH Lenovo and Intel as a whole, especially Intel who already had bad press due to "Meltdown and Spectre", but I guess they like to continually fuck up every chance they get.
 
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lol, writing flash memory to death with your software is pajeet level. Jeez. Wanna bet the programmers who did this didn't know such flash memory has only a relatively limited number of rewrites? That's what happens when programmers don't know the hardware.
 
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Ive got the p52 with the p2000 card for heavier duty engineering work, i wanted a more workstation quality laptop and the swappable batteries was important to me. I havent had any issues, except it was really a cunt about livebooting from a usb for a while. I do wish i knew about system 76 before buying it though. I love pop!os and those prices arent bad for what you get.
 
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Snatching the thread here for a sec.

Im currently doing some cadding and other engineering related shit. I had a 4 year old lenovo that i could run solidworks 2011 on. But i want something fresher whats the best thinkpad/laptop to buy in the used market? Budget like 300-1000 dollars.
 
Stumbled upon a T61 for around $40, the seller didn't provide much information (I couldn't even figure out whether it's 16:10 or 4:3 from the photos lol), but I checked with him that it doesn't have an nvidia card and the bios is not locked. I'll go and look at it tomorrow and if it has nothing wrong with it I'll probably buy it. Anything I should look out for?
 
Zeftax said:
Stumbled upon a T61 for around $40, the seller didn't provide much information (I couldn't even figure out whether it's 16:10 or 4:3 from the photos lol), but I checked with him that it doesn't have an nvidia card and the bios is not locked. I'll go and look at it tomorrow and if it has nothing wrong with it I'll probably buy it. Anything I should look out for?
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> $40
A nigger who wants to steal your wallet/car.
 
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