Comment by ezst

19 hours ago

My ThinkPad (T480s) is turning 8 this year, and only got its first battery replacement last month. I've been carrying it with me everywhere, on every single trip (office or holidays alike), on all continents. In that same timespan, I used up 3 backpacks and 2 suitcases along the same routes. All I want for its replacement is not to cost an insane amount of money because of the made-up by AI components shortage, and maybe now that I'm older I would prefer a smaller form factor like the X1.

16 comments

ezst

Reply
tasuki  19 hours ago

I've had a X1 since 2017. The CPU is pretty weak, but it's still solid overall. Still on the original battery too (yes the capacity has gone down from 57 Wh to 25 Wh). I've gotten other computers through work since, but the X1 is still my favourite laptop! In fact I'm typing on it now.

  • nirui  17 hours ago

    I'm curious how much slowdown a "weak" CPU can cause for real-life programming task, assuming the CPU is at least gen 4 Intel.

    I never used a mobile/power-efficient CPU myself, but I do use old CPUs. For example, this I5-4210M on my T440p, it's obviously not fast compare to newer ones, but when writing code on it (Go and a bit of Rust), I don't really feel a day-or-night level difference. Sure, it's slower, but not unbearably, in fact for most cases I barely notice it.

    • nehal3m  17 hours ago

      My boss used to have an apt sticker on his ThinkPad that said 'My other computer is a data center'. In my case that's also true; I just use local I/O for KVM but the heft is in whatever I'm SSH'd into.

      I daily a T480 at home and an X280 on the road. Swapped the batteries for fresh ones last week, they do around 6 hours on a charge for my use case and they run Linux so personally I don't see any reason to upgrade any time soon.

      1 reply →

    • estimator7292  10 hours ago

      Put it this way, I only retired my 2013 T530 last year. I think 3rd gen i5 2C4T.

      The main limitation for my daily development was simply RAM. The system topped out at 2x8GB. Otherwise, I could run android studio and all my modern JetBrains stuff pretty well. Slow, but good enough.

      Compile times were of course terrible, but most of what I do is small embedded firmware type stuff so it never took too long.

      But as siblings mention, for anything super heavy it was just an ssh terminal into a beefy server. At a certain point, two real cores is just not enough.

      I did upgrade it to the top-spec 4c8t processor right at the end, but it ran way too hot. Between keeping the system on the edge of thermal throttling and the halved battery life, it was not worth the money :(

    • physicles  12 hours ago

      Desktop CPUs have a lot more punch than their equivalent mobile parts.

      My current dev machine is an X1 carbon from 2019. Compiling go code is slower than I’d like, some JavaScript-heavy websites like Jira take a couple extra seconds to load, and the GPU can drive a 4k monitor but it isn’t snappy.

      Still, the form factor is perfect, and my next upgrade will be exactly the same machine but more powerful and with a brighter display with the same 2.5k resolution.

nullhole  17 hours ago

Where did you get the battery?

Lenovo no longer sells T480 batteries afaict, and 3rd party vendors are a (dangerous) crapshoot.

  • estimator7292  10 hours ago

    I got an extended battery at Microcenter on clearance for $5 last year. Best Microcenter find ever.

    My previous one came from ebay. As long as you don't buy one that's suspiciously cheap you should be good. Spend more than you think it's worth.

leipie  10 hours ago

I have gone through quite a few over the years. The oldest I still have are a W530 and X230 Tablet. The former I just reinstalled with Gentoo for one of my kids. Still very usable. The keyboard and trackpoint is very enjoyable, better than later ones. My latest are an AMD X13 gen 4 and a ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II for the other devices with inferior keyboards ;)

dgxyz  18 hours ago

I went from a T490 to a T14 gen 3 (Intel). Was a nice upgrade. The GPU sucks, which I don't need or care about, but the rest is fine. I got a NOS one for a reasonable amount of money.

The X1 looks nice but colleagues had thermal issues with theirs and the CPU is a bit limp so I skipped that particular problem.

  • ezst  18 hours ago

    Yeah, it seems like the perfect device for me would be a X1 with current gen's AMD!

    • vkazanov  17 hours ago

      I wouldn't suggest going for a recent X1 as there are some driver issues on Linux.

      My current one is a Thinkpad 14s AMD. As somebody who had most smaller Thinkpads and Dells in the last 15 years, this is my favourite machine so far: great battery, a decent GPU, still a Thinkpad, perfect Linux support.

      3 replies →