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Laptops · Lenovo ThinkPad

Lenovo ThinkPad T440

13owners with an opinion
54%of verdicts positive
3/5positive/negative since 2024
3 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and build quality; criticized for display and performance.

What owners wrote

Recommends itOwned 3 yearsStill going
I went this route albeit differently. I purchased an older model Thinkpad T440 for about $300 off eBay a few years ago, and it's one of my favorite laptops to have still. 8GB of RAM, 4th gen mobile Intel i7, 240GB SSD. I've been using it for probably about 3 years now as my travel laptop. The keyboard on it is really fantastic, but the touchpad is not something I'm proud of.
Doesn’t like it
I have it not only because of hardware, but because of color matching for photography/processing RAW images. That's as close to 'professional' as I get to using macOS for personal use (photography is nothing more than a personal hobby, for me). I also use macOS at work. Plainly, the machines offered are better (MBPs vs. Thinkpad T440s) and come with less impactful EDR. They're simply faster. I do need to fall back to my T440 every now and then. It's not a great experience. That's not the fault of Lenovo or Windows, though. It's just how IT manages the laptops. But IMO Finder is a piece of trash. The Dock sucks (moves around monitors), how full screen apps are handed sucks... anyway, there's lots of UX issues with macOS. Generally there are 3rd party free and pay-for solutions for all of this... it's just that now I gotta get all this 3rd party stuff and due to the security model, often grant them high level privs.
Likes it
14 is a indeed very long. Let’s instead assume 12, it’s 2013 and you got a top specced T440 with 4th gen i7. That’s actually not bad and the build quality is like a tank as all Thinkpads. Nothing I would use as daily driver myself but having used many other thinkpads of that generation I can see why others are still getting by with it today. Since we are talking about OS support. 4th gen Intel isn’t supported by Windows 11, so you’d have to upgrade to Linux.
Likes it
Always love how arrogant Linux users are: "You can't possibly experience something different from me" I wanted to make a genuine effort to get into using Linux because it's the only OS I'm not super comfortable admin'ing. I bought a secondhand Lenovo t440 and installed Linux Mint on it. Everything seemed to work well, boot was nice and quick, no issues with WiFi chipset or sleep and battery life was at least okay. It was fine for browsing the web with Firefox for my normal web browsing, and made a great netflix machine. Then I kept trying to do other things. I was playing with Blender at the time and despite the laptop being old at the time, it Mint installed a broken intel graphics driver. It couldn't render anything without artifacts and was unusable. The fixed driver was older than the release of Mint I was using. Why didn't Mint install an up to date driver? I wanted use my steam controller to control mouse and keyboard input exactly like you can on any windows machine. In Linux, it required you to hand edit some config files to allow Steam to even communicate with it's own controller. Like what the fuck? Why? I wanted to dual boot Windows to play more steam games (this was before proton) but if you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, you have to install windows FIRST. Otherwise you have to be an expert in x86-64 boot semantics to do the configuration required. So this was impossible without reinstalling everything. So fine, I decided to just install Windows on it. Windo…
Doesn’t like it
> docked operation (TB4 dock) maybe Linux but could also be specific to the Dock, many docks are not tested against standards but just Windows and/or Macs and sometimes just one of them, too. > I have a long history with ThinkPads and never ran into problems with them. I have a long history with them too, but I did ran into problems in more recent (T440, T480s) models. E.g. their USB-C charging ports are _very_ prone to breaking when there are frequent slight amounts of up/down force and there are only two and you need one working for charging to work. I have "bricked" one laptop this way and the only way to repair it is to go to a repair shop which can solder replacement ports on it... Not an issue I ran into with the framework the USB-C ports didn't break due to wear (yet) and even if they did they are trivial to replace (as you just replace the expansion card they are on).
Doesn’t like it
T25 keyboard will go into T470 with a tiny bit of dremeling. I think it's a bit more work to get it into T480. I have a couple of T420 and T420s at home; I did use T530 at work back in the day, but don't have one now as I find it lacks in portability compared to T450+ generations (plus a personal perspective that if you're gonna have all that 15+" space, you might as well have full keyboard - but that's very much subjective:). T440/T540 was an abomination upon all that is holy, having witnessed two separate consulting architects slam laptops on the desk in frustration over its trackpad "buttons"! Which is why the T470/570/480/580 seems to be my own sweet spot right now - lightweight enough to be portable, still runs modern stuff well enough, and easily replaceable battery/memory/SSD:).
Doesn’t like it
Ha, just a minutes before this post I thought again why I recently decided not to bother with upgrading my T440: despite the upgrade (replacing the ugly 1366 panel to a proper FullHD, IPS one) wouldn't cost me much (around $50 for the panel and probably another $50 for the work and maybe cleaning) it would be still a decade old laptop with an anemic i3-4010U (2c/4t 1700MHz), the awful Intel(R) Wireless-N 7260 and a fucking pedal instead of the touchpad. Sure, I can replace the wireless card too (if Lenovo would allow me and I would find the proper one if it doesn't) but at this point... It's easier to add another $50-100 and just buy something a more modern. But hey, if my main notebook would fail, just as JGC, I would be fine with it because it's a glorified terminal: > a lot of my computing needs being offloaded to the cloud https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/core-i3-4010u.c1607
Likes it
Thinkpads are great, the problem is the price, specially overseas because of the exchange in countries which currency value have lowered in comparison to the dollar. Any Thinkpad was barely affordable and this situation became worse. A X1 Carbon is a dream, but it costs 5-7 times more than a low cost laptop (and low quality as well). A T490 is 3-4 times more expensive than a low cost laptop. I'm typing this comment in my lovely T440, but my next laptop will probably not be a Thinkpad. They are great, but having one doesn't payoff nowadays (YMMV).
Likes it
Running an old T440 Thinkpad to do my work programming. Mostly doing data analysis. Never ran into an issue with any kind of speed or capacity, and I love the keyboard. I have a gaming laptop as well that I don't bother to carry around. It's just not necessary unless you're doing GPU programming or model training. Even then, I'd rather just work with a cloud instance. Devs, you're supposed to know how to make a computer meet your needs! Don't outsource it to someone else. Even 5+ year old computers run pretty damn quick if you use a lightweight linux distro.
Likes it
Don't know if it's the 'best' but I've got El Capitan working smoothly on my second-hand Thinkpad T440. The trackpad and display are crap compared to a MacBook Pro, but hey, it was less than a sixth of the price for similar specs. Took about an evening of tinkering and reading the TonysMac86 forums (really helpful community) to set up and has been trouble-free since. Sleep/wake works with the lid and it even supports dual batteries. Battery life is good too. Hackintoshing a laptop is harder than a custom-built desktop as you don't have much choice over the hardware. For example often the internal wifi and bluetooth cards aren't supported - I have to use a USB dongle on mine. However, there's some good resources on TonysMac on which laptops are the most compatible.
Doesn’t like it
Agree on ThinkPad, but attention the models from this year on (model names finishing with 40) don't have physical trackpoint/-pad buttons anymore, the keyboard layout is less accessible, the models with touchscreen reflect so much you get headaches after 30 minutes. I sent back a T440 and bought a used T430. I am too worried about my next model.
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
I personally would recommend to go with the T440 series, as it's the last generation of Thinkpads where you can replace all hardware parts yourself. But it's core i-based, so it needs some work regarding Intel ME etc. The Linux support is amazing, the only thing with Thinkpads is the synaptics driver which needs a config file to make it work as you want it to. The thinkwiki contains a lot of information about all models, including a list of known problems. [1] Before you install Linux on any laptop, I would recommend to check for BIOS compatibility. Sometimes there were OEM versions out there where the EFI vars could be deleted and then it's bricked unless you flash coreboot or reflash the original BIOS on it with an adapter. If you want to go full tinfoil and libre, why not switch to a pinebook? [1] https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:Models
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
Thinkpads are fantastic, but no matter what you do, do not purchase any of the T*40's (T440, T540, etc) - Lenovo fucked up that round of releases hard (tried to move from discrete touchpad keys to integrated touchpad). If you're a developer that's a fan of running your own systems, Thinkpads can generally run Linux systems with minimal effort (seriously - I bought an X220 recently, and getting Windows working on it was more effort than getting Arch Linux to work). /r/Thinkpad is also a fantastic resource if you want purchase advice.