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Laptops · Lenovo ThinkPad

Lenovo ThinkPad T440p

15owners with an opinion
83%of verdicts positive
4/1positive/negative since 2024
7 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for software and reliability.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 7 years
I got myself a T440p because the 4th generation is the last one with replaceable display, battery, RAM and CPU. They're quite heavy but that's not an issue for me. Best bang for the buck I ever spent. Bought it around 2015 in used condition for around 250EUR, then upgraded CPU, RAM, batteries (2x as of now), got a bigger SSD and HDD (512GB+4TB) and got an IPS display and a touchpad of the T480 which fits in there. I just love that laptop. Superb linux support once you figured out how to setup the synaptics driver configs with synclient. Oh and it's also the last generation (afaik) that can run coreboot as a BIOS. Overall I probably spent around 800EUR on it, but considering its lifetime (sold in 2013-today) I say it's definitely worth it. So many "Ultrabooks" and Macbook Pros died on me before, because I always overstressed their GPUs. There's a German Thinkpad wiki that contains all kinds of quirks and potential problems you can get, it's an amazing resource. The tldr is you should update the BIOS first and update the firmware of your dockingstation with windows running, and then install linux to be safe. [1] [1] https://thinkwiki.de/ThinkPad-Modelle edit: Oh and I used an external m.2 adapter to PCI-e occasionally when I have to do ML related work when I'm not at home on my tower. It kinda works but performance is limited to somewhat PCI-e 4x speed even when it says 8x mode is being used.
Likes it
It took me a while and a few regrettable purchases to come to terms with this, but you hit the nail on the head here. I tried to replace an old ThinkPad T440p with a Pinebook Pro at one point. It wasn't even a sidegrade, struggled with video playback, had a very small amount of soldered RAM that made web browsing difficult. I'd love to move away from x86 but maybe it'll be another decade before any of the affordable stuff is worth using. It really is hard to beat a ThinkPad from eBay. Even 4 years old or newer you can get quite performant machines for under $1000. On the less low-end there are the Apple Silicon machines, but Asahi needs a bit more time to bake as well. I'm still hopeful for the future, but will be more cautious in actually embracing it from now on.
Likes it
I truly despise the few recent generations of laptops vendors like Lenovo has put out. Plastic clips instead or (or in addition to) screws, flimsy on-board connectors, plastic bottom covers. At the same time the thermals are still horrible enough for them to ship them with accelerometers that trigger throttling to excessive heat. Recent ThinkPads have soldered WiFi chipsets as well. Leaving only the cellular modem and the NVMe storage replaceable. I have a T14 that has a slower WiFi chipset than my T440p. Almost none of the benefits of PC but all of the downsides. I hope Apple eats into their market share hard.
Likes it
I went from a X200 to work on my hobby OS 5 years ago, to a T440p with 16 GB of RAM for my daily computing, then upgraded to a T480 that I could fit with 64GB of RAM, and I finally added a X270 for a more compact form when I'm outside. They were all very inexpensive due to their age (when RAM was still cheap) and I'm really happy about them, I work from a console and a browser, they are perfect for my usage. I wouldn't use any other kind of laptop.
Neutral
> but I have my dad who is very non-tech savvy who after about a day with gnome actually said it's the first desktop environment that he liked more than Windows 95. more anecdotes, but I had the same experience with getting my mother in law on Linux. she is 75, and hadn't used a computer since her old job, and she used Windows XP, i believe she said, there. a couple of years ago, she wanted a bigger screen device to use for her internetting since her eyesight isn't what it used to be (her primary computing device was always her Android phone otherwise). my wife and I got her a thinkpad t440p, set her up with Debian GNOME, showed her how to use the Software Centre and install her stuff and update the machine, and off she went. haven't had a call to fix anything at all. she says she likes the experience better than the computers she remembers using at work running Windows.
Doesn’t like it
That brings back my memory (again) installing Mandriva on my old old old computer which has a NVIDIA TNT2 graphics card. It was a completely nightmare back then to install driver for it in order to get it to output at the correct resolution and refresh rate... Now I have a Thinkpad T440p with a GeForce GT 730M dGPU which NVIDIA no longer provide driver for newer Linux kernels, so I have to use slower nouveau driver. Ah, something never change.
Likes it
>* USB-C DP mode and the fingerprint sensor doesn't work. This is an Asahi Linux limitation, but I've seen various parts of the hardware not working when using other Linux distributions on laptops as well. I feel this is a common occurrence. This really is a special case, they've had to write new drivers for everything in the Apple Silicon Macs and they haven't gotten that working yet. I have in fact been waiting on this feature for a few years now as I want to use a MBP with the lid closed and two monitors plugged in, but currently only the HDMI works and not most USB-C functionality. This is not at all the norm in x86_64 land where more normal hardware is used. I'm still using a ThinkPad T440p and thinking about getting a T14 gen 5 due to the MBP I got a few years ago not being satisfying/fun to use, comparatively. As for Discord and AirPods and such, the more proprietary stuff you need, the worse time you'll have. Though I just saw something in the news that might help with the AirPods. Check out LibrePods. https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods
Likes it
>(as is required for the 99% of users who need nonfree blobs) If you forgo the built-in WiFi, the ThinkPad T440p (Haswell) works fine without any blobs (speaking from experience). I think all newer gens need iGPU blobs, sadly, but I wanted to point out a viable middle ground between modern Nvidia gamerware setups and Librebooted X200s that can barely browse the web.
Neutral
My kids have an old Thinkpad T440p that's their Scratch/Roblox/Minecraft machine, and overall it works well enough running Ubuntu (originally 22.04, then 24.04, now 25.04). But it has been far from seamless: - the built in bluetooth and wifi can't be used at the same time; for a while we mitigated this with a USB wifi module, but that eventually broke and so now bluetooth is just disabled. - it's hard to figure out what apps and app data are shared between users. AFAICT there's one Steam install my kids are sharing, but each one installs their own copy of a game, which is terrible for disk usage. - a bunch of games don't work, especially from non-steam sources like Epic and Itch.io. I've heard about the Heroic Launcher, and I will try it at some point, but it's just... one more fiddly thing to have to mess with. - several Minecraft launchers / mod-managers have been tried, but I can't seem to keep my Microsoft account logged in on there, so I eventually just put my password on a sticky note so they could re-auth it whenever needed (fortunately I don't use it for anything else). - unattended-upgrades pulled a new kernel and the thing just panicked on startup until I went into the grub menu to get the previous one and reverted. - until 25.04 the power management story was terrible, the machine would chew through the whole (newly replaced) battery in less than an hour. As a competent nerd I've been ~fine with all this, but it's honestly right on the edge of acceptable. I expec…
Likes it
I've had countless Lenovo laptops over the years. They were amazing up until about 2012 or so. They used to be built like tanks, could survive anything, upgradeable in every way, repairable and affordable (especially used.) There was a span of over a decade where $250ish would buy you a fairly powerful used Thinkpad in decent shape, and it would last you forever because they were indestructible. My Thinkpads went diving with me into canals, oceans, piles of mud, bogs and other non-OEM-recommended-environments and they always survived. Worst case you might have to replace one component, which you could do with a swiss army knife in about thirty seconds. All of those things built tons of goodwill that carries on in people's minds today. I say 2012 is the dividing line because that's when they released the Yoga, which was a big step in a new direction. I actually owned multiple Yogas, and didn't hate some of them, but they had nothing in common with Thinkpads. In 2012 they also released the X230, which was more locked down than the X220, which the enthusiast community hated. The decline after 2012 was sort of slow - I bought a T440p (released 2014) after my X230 got stolen and I found it was pretty decent, certainly pretty durable - but Lenovo's main focus had clearly shifted towards the new and shiny. These days they're just another Windows laptop OEM, which is to say: built and engineered like crap, weirdly expensive for what you get, horribly ugly, software full of ads and sp…
Neutral
I think what you're describing is still the case, but the way you described it isn't quite accuratie. The default kernel used is linux-libre. If you need more hardware support and binary blobs, you use regular linux, the same one basically all the other distros use. You're not using an unofficial fork of anything (or some might argue the default is more of an unofficial fork). You do have to go out of your way somewhat to get the standard linux instead of linux-libre, and I don't believe you can just load your required firmware into linux-libre instead. It's one of the FSF-approved distros so there are indeed strict guidelines (FSDG) on proprietary software, often to the point that it puts people off, and the official IRC and probably the mailing list as well don't talk about the non-free bits, yes. However if you join the #nonguix IRC channel or use the guix channel (like a repo or PPA) of the same name you'll find many of the same faces from the core community there. It's just a bit hush-hush due to the guidelines. Remember Guix System is a step more extreme than Debian, so even something like Debian's official non-free repo is not allowed. Personally I have run Guix System on a ThinkPad X220T and ThinkPad T440p which are old enough to not really need any blobs aside from the ones for WiFi, and you can remove or replace the card in them. I believe any machine newer than this is going to need blobs for the integrated graphics or other things. I have been debating whether I'd…
Likes it
I bought Thinkpad T440p for about 200 eur used. It was actually pawned by someone so I bought it locally no shipping was needed. It is an excellent device and hardware wise very powerful - i5-4300M, 8GB of RAM, 250GB SSD. Got lucky and it had battery with still 85% capacity left so that makes it run for about 2 hours, which is great. Only drawback it has is low resolution screen.
Neutral
I'm not used to measuring computer temperatures in F, so that doesn't mean much to me (I only use it for outside temperatures pretty much). My concern would be thermal throttling as I have seen on many ThinkPads rather than it becoming a bit uncomfortable. I'll probably use my future MBP mostly stationary at a desk with the lid closed. I am semi-regularly dealing with temperatures in the 80-90s in celcius with my ThinkPad T440p in a docking station. From a glance at your links it looks like they didn't get anywhere near that in their testing, so I probably have nothing to worry about, but I guess when the M2 Max comes out I'll give some thought to getting the bigger model, even though I don't tend to like overly large things. With ThinkPads I would absolutely not want a numpad (often on 15" models but not 14"), but it looks like Apple doesn't put those on any laptops anyway.
Likes it
My T440p started life in 2013 as a work PC in an engineering firm. Was then retired and sold for scraps to an employee, a friend of mine who later passed it on to me. I splashed out and bought a brand new, higher res display on eBay, less than USD 100 and the quality keeps blowing me backwards. Plus 8GB more RAM for a total of 12, and a new 1TB Samsung SSD, and soon perhaps a battery replacement. And they can damned well pry the thing from my cold, dead hands. It's just a superbly well designed and satisfying piece of machinery to handle. Meanwhile, a much newer Lenovo is sitting largely unused except for the occasional batch job and some audio processing.
Neutral
Laptop model: Thinkpad T440p CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-4710MQ CPU @ 2.50GHz × 8 RAM: 12GB Screen: 14" Matte Personal comments: Debian works well. Wish I upgraded the screen. Battery life is meh ~4hrs and drains while sleeping. Bit thick and takes a lot of space in backpack. Intermittently, the fan will sound like it's hitting something and make a terrible whirring noise. Gets taken care of by a few spurts of compressed air. Used as my 'desktop' at home. --- Laptop model: Mackbook Pro 2015 CPU: i5 - 2.7ghz RAM: 8GB Screen: 13" Personal comments: Decent battery life and works well for travel. Good keyboard like T440p. Not a fan of the OS but hardware-wise works very well. Used as my personal travel laptop. --- Laptop model: Mackbook Pro 2018 CPU: i7? RAM: 16GB Screen: 15" Personal comments: Very good battery life. 15" is bigger than I'm used to, but I've started to appreciate the screen real estate without external monitor. Probably my least favorite laptop to use simply because the keys consistently double tap and I can't feel for fn keys (fn, volume, brightness). Work-provided laptop. In summary, I'd lean towards a Thinkpad carbon for the ideal combination of portability, keyboard, and ability to run Linux. Never appreciated quality screens until using Macs - will definitely be upgrading future laptop screens.
Recommends it
An older Thinkpad till some decent Ryzen based 4K laptops come out next year. I just got me a T440P. Put in 16G, SSD (can put 2 more SSDs for a total of 3), its got a socketed i7 and a removable 9 cell battery for easier upgrades. I upgraded the default display (garbage) to a 1080p display (really simple ..done with a screwdriver) and this thing is a beast with Manjaro Linux and KDE or i3. I also have an x230 with OpenBSD. My old 2015 retina MBP is going to my dad who has a shitty old windows 10 spyware laptop.
Likes it
Been a Macbook user for 8+ years. I used to like their products, but recently I can't stand them. The MagSafe chargers are very unreliable, and yes, USB-C with the extra dongles is annoying. The overall build quality seems to have gotten much worse recently. 2 weeks ago I bought a Thinkpad T440p and installed OpenBSD. Love it! The one thing I miss is Sublime Text, which I have gotten quite used to, but I'm sure I'll get used to Emacs again.
Doesn’t like it
The number of people recommending MacBooks makes me cringe a little. Sure the build quality is good, but I can't live with the keyboard's crippling lack of keys and the need to constantly use the mouse in OSX. Lenovo isn't fairing much better these days - I have a T440p, and the lack of the 'menu' key (between right-alt and right-ctrl) drives me nuts. The lack of Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Delete on the Mac also drives me crazy. For those of us who live on the keyboard and hate to touch the mouse (too slow and inefficient), these days are dark times.. Also: why aren't we seeing >16 GB of ram in laptops yet? I realise workstation laptops are at 32, and possibly 64 GB now, but why are some brands going backwards from 16GB down to 12 and even 8? As for my recommendation? There isn't a single laptop on the market that I like, I'm sad to say. Lenovo dropped the ball, and dell's build quality isn't up to par. I'd look at an HP workstation, or maybe one of the Lenovo W541's, although the keyboard isn't much better than on a MacBook. The Chromebook Pixel 2 (the top spec one) is such a tantalising glimpse of what could be - just shoehorn in more hard drive space, add a mini-DP port and an RJ-45, and most people would be good to go...if they fixed the keyboard. Sorry for the rant! Just overly frustrated with the state of the market.. Won't someone just release a standard workstation laptop without following all the keyboard/mouse trends?!?
Likes it
I have personally tested 40+ business laptops(Lenovo, HP, Dell) in 50+ dimensions (performance, display, wlan, heat,...) . In our assessment Lenovo came first, then HP and closely after Dell. The difference between consumer and business laptops is enormous in terms of reliability and how long they last, even from the same manufacturer. In our experience, the only "consumer" laptops which can keep up with the mentioned business laptop brands are from Apple. PS: Check out projektneptun.ch for reasonable configurations of Lenovo/HP/Apple laptops. I own a Lenovo Thinkpad T440p.