Comment by tasuki
16 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.
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.
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.
I don't remember the T480 I had was any slow, except of course when running games. So I do agree that the machine is still capable for most use cases today.
But I also saw people (usually X series users) complaining on YouTube saying something like their "mobile" CPU is trash etc. My thinking is, if the slowdown is actually insignificant for real-life use cases, then I rather have longer battery life than better performance.
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 :(
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.