Lenovo ThinkPad X230

Yeah I was daily-driving a 2012 machine (X230) until 2024, when I then switched to a 2018 ThinkPad which I'm still using.

Only for consumer-grade stuff, which is basically disposable garbage that's obsolete the day you purchase it, which is about what you get for $350 at Walmart. For any actually decent laptop designed for enterprises/businesses, this is not true, they still have steel hinge pins and plastic-over-metal hinge bodies. Doesn't really matter if you buy Dell, Lenovo, Apple, business-quality laptops don't have these issues, but they do start at around $1000/unit. The problem with any discussion around electronics longevity is that it's a bimodal market. You have the stuff that generates the bulk of revenue, which is generally meant to be purchased as a "fleet" by businesses or MSPs, and you have the stuff that generates the bulk of the actual devices, but at most lower BOM cost (meaning lower quality) which is targeted at "consumers". Anybody who is even a little bit technical has already noticed this simply due to the difference in experience between the laptop they're issued at work vs what they may have once had at home, and likely has opted to bite the bullet and pay for quality. Once you are on the higher end of the bimodal distribution, longevity is a significantly different challenge. I have an X230 laptop I bought new in 2012 that is still in use weekly and functions completely fine. My much newer M3 Macbook Pro is significantly more powerful, but is completely unnecessary for what that laptop is for. That's 12 years of usage without any sign of slowing down, and since…

I'm still on a x230 I've bought 12 years ago (which was also manufactured in around 2012) as my personal daily driver. I replaced the keyboard once as I preferred the x220 one, replaced the battery every 4 years, and wouldn't even consider "upgrading" to something else. I mostly write C, Guile and Perl code in Emacs on this machine and spend another large chunk of my time in a terminal emulator, so I'd even argue that my hardware requirements haven't really changed during the last decade and probably won't for yet another.

I agree with TFA. Probably the best value for the buck is a 3 year old high-end Thinkpad (T or X series); you can often find one for €250-350, as many businesses will be replacing whatever is at the end of their 3 year cycle. I've been getting a new one roughly every 3-5 years and they definitely stay good enough for another 5. My latest score is a T495 (replacing an 11 (!) year old X230); it has 4 cores (8 threads), 24GB of memory, two NVMe drives, 4-5 hours of battery (~270 cycles), full HD 400 nits screen, and a GPU that actually handles some games. It's definitely less powerful than my M1 Mac mini, but it's good enough to the point that I'm not missing the extra horsepower all that much, even when doing "Actual Work" (it can get tad hot tho). Also, developing software on less powerful hardware has another, indirect benefit: your software tends to suck less, because you have less cycles to waste.

I had the same with X230. A lovely laptop that still serves as a home server after 10 years or so from being bought, and it was already used, post-lease machine back when I bought it. MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS

Yes. I used an x200 which was unfortunately damaged. I tried to repair it but it didn't recover. I bought an x230 off ebay. It was a factory demo piece which was refurbished. I did that in 2014 and did so because Ineeded one urgently. I replaced it about a month ago with an X1 carbon. The battery is shot and it overheats when I run too much on it. However, for day to day stuff, it's superb. Runs Debian and chugs away without many problems.

Report back: After a bit of trial and error, I quickly realised that for this workflow to work, full screened applications is the best way. This is because my focus is less interrupted when my laptop's DPI complements my external display's DPI. And since I don't like having to strain my eye sight too much when working on my laptop, I'm still running my 10 year old ThinkPad X230 with a 1366x768 IPS display, which is pretty comfortable for those long 10+ coding marathons. For that reason, my chosen external display had to feel similar when working on my desktop keyboard on mouse. So I picked a 4k 32" Dell Ultrasharp, that I run at 1920x1080. I sit really far back. Relaxed coding lounge sort of thing. I've been using this design for a couple days now, and it has done wonders for my creativity and productivity. I must thank you again. If you're wondering about the low resolution preference, it's because it allows me to use my keyboard's built-in mouse more effectively ([0] ThinkPad Wireless TrackPoint Keyboard II), and thus I never have to lift my hands off the keys. This alone has increased my productivity significantly. Keyboard shortcuts are fast becoming my friend. Debian for the win. Oh I decided to take the lounge coding concept a little further, so I've also plugged in a KMV switch, allowing me to switch displays between the external monitor and the 120" projector with a press of a remote button. So depending on where I feel like sitting, my wireless keyboard follows me. C

Years of observation tells me that this is not a industry issue rather than consumer issue - We have failed to equip normal people with adequate sense of understanding/appreciation of non-straightforward things. With more and more customers not even wanting to read a user manual, businesses that give customer option to repair, in general, does not survive. Take X230 as an example, I spent $6xx in 2012 to buy it, equiped with 128GB ssd and 4GB memory and I spend around 300$ to upgrade it 1TB SSD/16GB Ram, plus something like $200 over the years for various things like fans, batteries. Even in 2021 I am not feeling it is slow, while I have probably made $1.5M worth of software work with that thing. BTW, none of these repair or upgrades is difficult in any sense. Do I want to buy something like again if it exists, surely I will. But do majority of people care? No. And during 10 years span, an average Apple user likely spent over 10K on laptops, while lenovo gets $600. I just do not know how such business can continue.

I've been on a non stop thinkpad streak since 2005 or so. T42 (IBM), X200, X230 and now X1 carbon. I used a thinkpad X200 back in 2014 or so and it got completely destroyed due to a spill. I replaced the memory, keyboard etc. but was unable to get it to work again. Also, the monitor had developed a few dead scanlines so I decided to buy another one. This was my primary work machine so I needed something quickly. I got another x230 off ebay. It was a piece used for demos at shows so it was refurbished. Threw Debian onto it and started work 2014. I used it straight till 2022 or so. It was my primary machine. I replaced the battery, added RAM. Then the fan got damaged and the front plastic plating got cracked so it was no longer presentable. I bought an X1 carbon but gave the laptop to my son. We bought a fan, thermal paste and some plastic parts for the casing, a new battery etc., watched a few youtube videos and fixed it up. It's still running and they play casual games on it. It's now atleast 10 years old and still going strong. It's a very strong machine with great longevity. Though I feel that the newer ones are not as good as the old and the X1 is definitely less repairable than its older cousins.

Seconding this. I paid closer to $700 for my Thinkpad X230 in 2011 and it's still going strong with Arch Linux. Not much of a gaming laptop, but it's been very solid fox nearly six years now.

x230 from 2013 - still best laptop I ever used. I have a T460p here for testing that I could upgrade to, but apart from the bigger screen everything feels just a tad worse. I also have a FSC S710 in active use, but only because it's there and I'm too cheap to replace it.

I bought an x230 from Lenovo's outlet about 2 years ago. i5 with 4gb of ram and a 500 gb sata drive. I threw in an m2 SSD and 16gb of ram and it's great. I'll eventually replace the 500 gb sata drive with an SSD but for now it's fine and the total cost was probably $600. Has to be close to half of that now.

I bought a x230 last year as my non-gaming computer, and I really like it. I bought it for 117€, it was pretty beaten up. The display is the cheap TN panel, has a light spot in the center, and the keyboard doesn't match my locale. However, it has the top-level i5. (i5-3380M, I think). I also bought a docking station at a bargain. This year, I bought a new IPS display, a matching keyboard and a new screen bezel for it. I'll hopefully be able to use it for some more years - I really love the form factor.

I bought an X230 Thinkpad a year ago, and I'm quite pleased with it. I wanted an SSD, but I found it was cheaper to select the cheapest hard drive they had and then buy an SSD from Newegg than to get the SSD from Lenovo. Replacing the drive was quite easy, not like a tablet or cell phone. It goes without saying, but you should do the same for RAM. A month or so after I bought it, the fan stopped working. Their customer service was quite good. They sent me a box so I could return my laptop, and they fixed the fan and shipped it back at no cost to me.

After being loyal to ASUS for many years, I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad x230 in January. I like it, but there are some things to nitpick: https://plus.google.com/106336989542410513415/posts/PR4efB7D... I wrote about the decision process that led me to choose that model: https://plus.google.com/106336989542410513415/posts/avV5eL1P... And earlier, I wrote about why I gave up on getting an ASUS machine. (TLDR: Windows 8 refused to dual-boot. I felt ripped-off but too weary to fight it into working.) https://plus.google.com/106336989542410513415/posts/jfDVKGyx...

I have an X230 which was upgraded with a quad-core CPU (i7-3612qe), 16gb RAM, SSD, and 1080p screen, and it makes a pretty decent around-the-house laptop. I'd rate it pretty highly; it's not quite as fast as my 6th gen X1 Carbon but the X1 is starting to get quite flaky.

I only very recently upgraded from an X230 with X220 keyboard It was a close call between a totally new machine and a display mod though

Love the Thinkpad line. It's kinda the hackers laptop of choice. > X220/X230 These are pretty solid with dual batteries. Also popular for OpenBSD and 9front, the latter of which I run on an x230 (it stopped charging the removable battery :-/) You can get about 2 hours off the internal and 6~8 with a big fat removable battery, maybe more if the OS and drivers can properly throttle hardware power settings. I have an X1 carbon 5th gen and it's quite light but not useful for 9front without some Ethernet driver tweaking (likely some phy bits need twiddling.) Instead I tossed Debian on it and run 9front in a VM if I need a local CPU. So far it just seems to work including Ethernet (via a dongle) and WiFi.

I have a x230 at hand, mainly to quickly diagnose my car. I bought it used some years ago, including the dock, and I still love it. Sure, resolution is limited, and so is the power. But it gets the job done, and also has this useful thinklight on top of the bezel, which helps reading printed stuff in the dark. I'll hold on to it as long as I can.

I see the appeal in having a device that's "just a screen" for e.g. reading, but my preferred reading device size is smaller than my preferred laptop size. So I have two separate devices: my X230 and my Pixel C. IMO each one is suited to its own task and I use both of them equally often.

I agree and I do not agree. I still sometimes use a Thinkpad X230, and wait- a G4 PowerBook, and they are fine machines for many tasks. Yet even those have soldered CPUs, simply because of design constraints. You don't need to have to train models. You want to play a game like Factorio, that, of all things, is bottlenecked on memory bandwidth - you must update each entity in a huge world on every tick, at 60 UPS, and yes, the game is insanely well optimized (check the dev blog). You don't have to play Factorio, but you also technically don't need DMA.