Lenovo ThinkPad W500

W500 - 3 years, nothing x230 - replacement battery, screen died (easy replacement), handrest cracked, still usable T460p - 5 years of light use, nothing T470p - 3 years, nothing Legion Y520 - keyboard stopped working partly, bought a replacement and noticed it's basically impossible to replace, then bought a second one, this time a complete top case - replacement was a chore, but fine Overall: still a happy Lenovo customer

The last reliable laptops I had were IBM T40 (my first one) and IBM/Lenovo W500. I ran a bootstrapped software company and they didn't fail me. After that I briefly had a Samsung ultrabook (that was semi-reliable) and then a Dell XPS 13 that one day had a screen crack when I opened it. Then I switched to MacBooks when M1 came out: first keys got stuck in my M1, then the screen bezel spontaneously cracked on an M2 just when the warranty ended and I was in Europe. Apparently now Apple laptops are luxury items, you have to wipe the keyboard from dust before closing the lid. I do not care about cost, I just need something that won't suddenly break when I am abroad and need to do something important. I miss those American IBM ThinkPads.

I had an X220t once. It was a great machine, but I kept my W500 instead. The latter is even better built and easier to disassemble. I like its keyboard quite a bit more as well. To me, the T/Wx00 line was the last of the best the brand had to offer.

Are Lenovos still built like tanks? Comments on their product pages are mixed. Plus they are switching towards some wonky (for me at least) keyboards. I have a W500 that I love but fear I won't be able get something as solid in the future as Lenovo becomes Dell.

Who am I: Freelance programmer - mostly web stuff. Also working on a potential startup involving text classification. Hardware: a Thinkpad W500. It's a very solid machine with lots of CPU, GPU and screen resolution. My only complaint is that the audio ports are on the front. No need for a desktop or any kind of subnotebook, though I do occasionally wish this machine had a couple dozen more cores. OS: Ubuntu 10.10. Pretty much stock. Gnome, Compiz, etc.... A few notable oddities: I have the WM configured to raise only on title/border clicks; inner clicks focus without raising. That solves some of the same problems as tiling. I also have the whole trackpad set to work as a scroll surface, as I always use the trackpoint for a mouse. Dev tools: Emacs, Git, Slime, Clojure, Ruby, Common Lisp on occasion, and sometimes I pretend to know Haskell. Occasionally have to deal with PHP, Javascript, Java and other cruft. Other languages on occasion as appropriate. Other stuff: Chrome, Firefox, Quassel, Thunderbird (I actually like Evolution better, but it got unstable about my 3gb inbox), Virtualbox with WinXP and Win7. Dream setup: the Thinkpad W510 looks pretty good. It's just like my W500, but with more memory slots, more cores and the audio ports on the side where they belong. It would also be nice to have a big, fast SSD and enough money that I could do all my heavy-duty number crunching on an EC2 cc1.4xlarge instance.

Primary: Thinkpad W500. Core2 Duo T9600 (2.8 GHz, 6M cache), 4GB memory, 15" 1680x1050, Ubuntu 10.04. I only have a couple complaints about this machine. The big one is that the screen can't compare to the 1600x1200 IPS panel of my old T60p. Yes, I did prefer the 4:3 aspect ratio. The audio ports being located on the front is also annoying. Secondary: Mac Pro (borrowed). Two dual-core Xeon 5150s, 5GB memory, headless most of the time. I use this machine to do the heavy lifting for my text classification work. My experimental data set fits in memory on my laptop, but leaves uncomfortably little free space. It also makes my lap warm. The Mac being about 50% faster in practice than my laptop is a nice perk.