Lenovo ThinkPad P52

6owners with an opinion

83%of verdicts positive

0/0positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance; criticized for portability and display.

What people wrote

Likes it

That does sound awful. I am longtime Firefox faithful. But I keep extension usage down to minimum- multi account container, ad block for YouTube, leechblock, clear url, zotero and fpl tools (fantasy football) right now. Tbh Firefox rarely bothers me nowadays with resource usage. I am confident I haven't had to restart Firefox since last November. My work laptop is a Lenovo P52 with 32GB of ram and win10. Home laptop is a Lenovo legion with 16GB of ram and win11. I had so many issues with performance in the past that I just trained myself to never keep resource-hogging stuff running in background that I am not actively using. I regularly have zoom and Firefox running while playing MMO games on home laptop. Firefox, SQL server etc. running in background while running multi-core data analysis on work laptop. I never had issues with Firefox, and if there's a memory crash I usually know what caused it. But it is down to hardcore discipline using the machines, and I understand it is not usual patterns for others.

Doesn’t like it

The thing is, there aren't really that many laptops designed to run Linux. Even offerings like these and those from System76 are actually made largely based on designs made to run Windows and adapted later. Sure, this feels like a cop-out and is not really of much aid to anybody, but it's only fair to note. Generally, I do not have dramatically worse battery life on Linux vs Windows, but I also did stop buying laptops with NVIDIA graphics. (Irrespective of Linux, these have given me tons of trouble. Even on Windows, external displays were a painful experience on my Thinkpad P52 no matter what mux settings were set in firmware. I guess it works out OK since NVIDIA on Linux is far from ideal at the moment.)

Likes it

I use MacBook Pro given to me for work and Thinkpad P52 for personal use where I boot Windows and Linux. I also have MacBook Air for occasional personal use. If I had to choose only one it would be the Thinkpad.

Likes it

I still love my Thinkpads. Run Linux and code endlessly on them. Gone through a P50, P52, P1G2, P17, and now a P16. Been very happy every time.

Doesn’t like it

At a previous job, I was the engineering manager for a new neo-bank and was on call 24/7 for it. I have a beefy Lenovo P52 that I hated carrying around and leaving in my car lest it get stolen. So I got a GPD Pocket. It fit very well into my back pocket. Not only did it work great for emergency situations (I ran Ubuntu MATE as well) when I needed to SSH into machines, check stuff on Datadog, edit code to make a quick fix, push code to our K8S environments and more, but I actually found myself frequently at coffee shops and bars coding away happily on it. It brought a certain amount of freedom and cool factor with it. It was a delightful little device with a very sharp and crisp screen, a surprisingly useful keyboard that combined well with my i3 environment, that I could actually be productive on (save for running our test suite which took around 30 minutes and sucked the life out of the battery). It also got a lot of onlookers asking questions about it, leading to those ever so fun random conversations that can lead to night long friendships over wine and coffee. I genuinely miss it and will probably pick up another one now that I just got hired as a CTO for another project with equally demanding on-call schedules and uptime requirements. Although I don't drink anymore so none of those fun conversations. Ce la vie.

Likes it

Thinkpad P52 here. Touchpad is good. Better than on my work MacBook Pro (2019) actually and very similar to touchpad on my own Air (2015).

Recommends it

ThinkPads every day of the week. I have a T430 that I have owned for about 6 years and a new P52 which is my daily work machine. Both running Linux with zero issues. I liked the comment below describing Hotels (Mac) Vs home (ThinkPads). It's true that if you can be bothered to tweak and install some stuff then you end up with something of your own. Your way. Never used Macs as old enough to remember the "no one got sacked for buying IBM" saying and it's true even if it is now Lenovo.

Likes it

I have owned Thinkpads since IBM days, testing the waters occasionally outside of the brand. My proposition is also a bit easier since I will only ever use Linux or FreeBSD (and never Windows or Mac). I stand by the W530, the P50, and most recently, the P52. I felt so strongly about my initial impression of the P52 that I bought one for myself to use for all of my personal work. Perhaps it's just a thing with the X1 Carbon? That being said, my personally-owned P52 is the first Thinkpad I've ever had that required me to re-paste the chips. For the benefit of readers, Thinkpads have a not insignificant chance (~5-10%?) you'll need to re-paste the thermal paste on the CPU and/or GPU, and this is the first one I've ever had that needed the re-paste. I have always re-pasted the chips perhaps the last ten years or so -- doing this while changing out the components (usually RAM and disk) with top-of-the-line components I buy separately because they're oftentimes hundreds of dollars cheaper if you install them yourself -- but didn't need to re-paste until this one, which would immediately throttle out under any kind of load. One more complaint: I wanted a P52 with a 4K display, but Lenovo refuses to sell a configuration with a 4K display that does not have that awful, terrible, shitty fingerprint-magnet glossy TOUCH screen. There is no way in hell I would use that glossy screen or a touch screen of any kind on my daily driver, so I was forced to stick with a "regular" HD displa