Comment by bigpeopleareold
16 hours ago
I appreciate all the innovations that him and his team brought to the ThinkPad, since this is my main set of laptops.
Lenovo, on the other hand, has been a hit or miss for awhile. I had a T570, which was horrible; one problem after the next. It's just a source of parts now. There are some design issues with the T480 (no center screw in the front/bottom). Also with the T480 is, what it seems to be, the slightly flaky USB-C connectors. The external keyboard (non-bluetooth), while very useful for 2 years, has always been a struggle with the flimsy micro-usb, leaving me to hack that. But now, I somehow now lost an important key on it, I just gave up and bought a nice Tex Shinobi. The only stable-ish one is the one I am on now, a T470p. It's not been perfect, but it's the best designed TP I had (my T430s is overall good, except for battery power, but the internals for those old machines are a chore to get through.) I have a P14s at work. It's OK, but nothing to write home about.
If all these TPs die, and Framework has a trackpoint version + delivers to my country, I would like to get that instead.
IMO the ThinkPad brand died after IBM sold its PC division. Lenovo has kept it alive because it is a cash cow, but the machines have shoddy build quality and are ludicrously overpriced.
My previous X1 Extreme Gen 1 (2018) had annoying coil whine and screen backlight bleed. One of the key caps broke off after a couple of years. Eventually I ended up doing a full keyboard and battery replacement.
My current X1 Carbon Gen 13 is nice and light, has no coil whine, but it's still made from cheap plastic. Considering it's a $2k+ machine, it sure doesn't feel like it.
In comparison, ThinkPads from the IBM era were built like tanks. Still plastic, sure, but they felt solid, and were reliable workhorses for years.
At this point the only thing keeping me on ThinkPads is the TrackPoint, but since trackpads are decent on Linux nowadays, I think I'm ready to finally ditch the brand. Some of the new Dell and HP machines look interesting. Frameworks seem nice, but I've read many issues about their build quality, and they're not cheap either.
I have a framework desktop with a ThinkPad TrackPoint II keyboard ;)
Thinkpad T or X series had always been the best Linux laptops I've ever had. All of the hardware has always Just Worked, they have a nice selection of bios-level security features, and the build quality has always been just fine. Cases / keyboards / track point / touchpads never failed after 6-8y of owning each.
Very happy with them.