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Laptops · Lenovo ThinkPad

Lenovo ThinkPad P53

8owners with an opinion
71%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
4 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and battery; criticized for comfort and performance.

What people wrote

NeutralOwned 2 years
When you need one. No matter how long you wait, there will always be another chipset coming out, or a lower price. A week after you lay your money down, so it seems. Get off the treadmill. I tend to buy as good a machine as I can afford and then hold that machine for many years. I use this same philosophy for buying cars, I've owned both a SAAB and a Mercedes for 14 years each - two cars, 28 years - not bad at all. A Lenovo T410 bought in 2010 is still quite usable. I have only upgraded the storage from 500gig to 2 terabytes, and have repaired the keyboard over those twelve years or so. It's now my 'spare'. I bought a P53 with 5 terabytes of SSD and a 4K display as its replacement two years ago.
Recommends it
Choose the computer with the most-supported peripheral hardware. Not some weird peripheral chip. You don't need to be mucking around supporting some unusual WiFi chip, for instance. So, that's generally an Intel-Chip based machine. Myself, I am partial to Lenovo hardware, with Intel-based peripheral chips. I usually buy them new from Lenovo* and customise the build. But then, I'm flush enough to do that. YMMV. * Current machines: P53 laptop, M70T desktop. With LinuxMint installed by me. Throw away the Windows installation. It's done its job nicely, by giving you a subsidised set of hardware.
Doesn’t like it
I had my department at the time buy me a P53 against their wishes; they wanted to get me a Dell workstation, since they had a partnership with Dell which included fast repair service etc. I thought the P53 was the most reliable high end laptop I could get and was supposed to have an amazing keyboard. Instead, the keyboard was average at best and the trackpoint much worse than my older Dell workstation. Then, it was one hardware/firmware problem after another, until a small water spill put the cherry on top: wrecked performance and now it cannot boot if not plugged in. Once upon a time, Thinkpads had great, water-resistant keyboards and a solid build with reliable ports, but now this has become a fairy tale. The article does not really address any of this. I am never buying a Thinkpad again, although I really don't know what my options are :( I hear Dell is tanking the quality of their high-end workstations too.
Doesn’t like it
I really like the idea of using an SD card for the home directory, because that's the thing that changes constantly, and it's a pain trying to synchronise the home directory over several machines. With one instance, that's backed up regularly, it makes life fairly simple. Now I just have to work out the mechanics of implementing it smoothly. I have an archive disk/directory that holds all the 'write once, keep forever' stuff like photos, music, ebooks, etc. That can be rsync'd periodically and that won't take much time because the archive grows fairly slowly over time, and rsync will only need to transfer those relatively few additions. I'm also somebody who prefers the feel of my old Lenovo ThinkPad T410 from back in 2010 to my much later P53. Perhaps I should resurrect it with the upgrading of its 2TB hard drive to a 2 or 4 TB SSD. I must look into that.
Doesn’t like it
> Most of the 160-200 million laptops sold each year are replacement purchases. The average laptop is replaced every 3 years (in business) to five years (elsewhere). 3 My 5.7 years per laptop experience is not exceptional. This is one of the many aspects I don't like about how laptops are designed today. Even with OEM desktops like my Dell Precision T1700, it's still serviceable and fixable today without a whole lot of effort. For both my Dell and Supermicro workstations, they basically last 10+ years, and I've got a lot of options to keep them going; I wish I could say the same about laptops. I really wish I could get a new 2k screen for the old Dell Latitude E6530 I have -- it's built a lot more robustly than my newer latitude. I really would like to see our government mandate user serviceable parts (kind of like how the EU apparently mandated replaceable batteries, which is a huge win), as there's so many older designs that would continue to chug along with a few fixes, like IBM era Thinkpads or some the more robustly designed Latitudes. Lenovo has been going the wrong direction lately...I have sworn them off after having a two P1s and a P53, which were gently used and taken care of, die in under 2 years.
Neutral
I still think my (coming up for) thirteen-year-old Lenovo T410 laptop is my 'peak-laptop' machine, even though I have replaced it with a more modern Lenovo P53. And that was mainly due to the P53 having a slightly larger display screen with 4K pixels. And it took me twelve months or so to finally settle on the P53. The T410 was just a more enjoyable machine overall to use.
Neutral
Is this statement not a bit overrated? I'm running on same computer since 2011, at the time of building it I 'beefed it up' with 24Gb of RAM with option to upgrade to 64Gb (which I had not done yet). Installed Arch Linux on it and am still using it actively after 11 years of service without any problem (here I must say thank you to OSS community since it's the software that 'just works' allows for this). Now my kids use it too, and they don't put as much care as I do. When I was buying my thinkpad p53 so I can work while travelling I 'beefed it up' with 128Gb of RAM hoping it will last me at least a decade... Unless you meant servers in data center, and even those I know from first hand experience are serving for much longer than 2 years and are still far from being obsolete.. On the other hand I guess this might be true for gaming rigs.
Doesn’t like it
I run Ubuntu on my P53. It's almost great, but has really bad issues with the keyboard. Occasionally a key will get "stuck" (in some non-mechanical way) and I can't use the keyboard without logging out and in again. I believe it happens a lot less frequently after some BIOS updates, but I think there's a trade-off where keypresses are sometimes missed. Sometimes I think I typed something right, but when I read back there are missing letters. It's not quite bad enough for me to do anything radical like get a new laptop, but it's pretty bad. Maybe I'm unlucky somehow.
Likes it
Have you used it without the dock? Because my experience with daily driving Linux at work for 10+ years with Thinkpads has been the complete opposite, with the exception of NVidia's driver garbage (which is just a problem with NVidia generally). My current work system is a P53 that has an Nvidia GPU though and it's been working very very well for me through updates and the like via dkms. The only other problem on that list I've encountered was within the first month or so after buying my T14s suspend support was a problem. A bad dock can introduce a lot of problems.
Likes it
I'm on thinkpad P53 since 2019, beefed up with 128Gb of RAM, running Arch on it. Had no problems with this laptop and overall good experience (though, my expectations are not high when it comes to OS, I don't mind scripting it or fixing it on my own when something does not work). It's more a mobile workstation than laptop, mainly because of Nvidia GPU for CUDA. Before making this purchase I was considering a few Dell models as I had good experience with multiple Dell laptops, but 128Gb capable motherboard won and I don't regret it. I have never used MackBook before, so I'm not judging if it would be better or not (I guess maybe more expensive? And maybe it's more of a hassle to run Arch on it?)
Likes it
What a strange sequence. For my own part, I have never used Windows as my day to day machine. I moved from MSDOS to a UNIX Desktop in 1992 then to a Linux Desktop in 2001. I don't know why others seem to have problems with UNIX/Linux Desktops. My take is that the 'super-duper Windows users' must take the time and effort to 'UNLEARN their Windows Thinking' but they don't bother taking that first step. Consequently every problem for them is a nail that they must hit with their only tool, a hammer. 3. Why is my battery life so bad? I bought a Lenovo P53 laptop last year. For quite a while I thought that my battery icon on the panel ('taskbar' for you Windows types) was faulty because my battery just seems to go on and on.
Neutral
Lenovo with Intel hardware peripherals is probably the most suitable for installing Linux on. At a pinch, Nvidia displays can be used, though you are constricted to using Nvidia's proprietary Linux drivers which they tend to provide whenever they finally bother to get around to doing. I have just replaced my 10-year-old Thinkpad T410 with a Thinkpad P53. I hope it will be as versatile as my older machine.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have used a slogan that is usually associated with Apple to ThinkPads running Linux. FWIW, I was a huge fan of the IBM ThinkPads when they still had the great keyboards. So what happened to me is that I was excited when I heard about the close collaboration RedHat and Lenovo were doing on the P53 series ThinkPads. And if you have a P53 the experience is pretty good. Not sure about other models. I've installed various Linux distros on many laptops, and even though I could usually get everything working, the deal breaker for me was often battery life. I wonder what kind of battery life the people with RHEL on a P53 are getting.