Lenovo ThinkPad X230t

I disagree. My thinkpad x230t is still going strong nearly 10 years later (extreme example). With 16GB of ram and an SSD it's still a decently capable machine. If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc. But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten faster, but the internet is still usable on a 10 year old machine. I've replaced my battery once already, but consider your keyboard/screen are likely things to break at any point in time with accidents. And we're comparing this to apple, a company that has been basically DRM'ing components - even if you can buy the replacement you can't use it without it being "programmed" by apple. EDIT: Also note that the bare minimum models from 10 years ago are likely too slow nowadays, I mean to compare this to the medium-upper range devices of the time, potentially with relatively low cost upgrades like an SSD.

My qualms with modern Thinkpads are as follows: No SD card slot (standard on many MacBooks so it's not like it's a niche feature) BIOS always displays at max brightness no matter what, blinding you when you're up too late, and always beeps when you go into boot selector or bios options, even if you have beeps disabled. Overall, compared to golden age ThinkPads like my old T60, T420,x230t, the BIOS is very uncomfy, which matters if you like to play with operating systems. The trackpads get disgusting so quickly, even if you washed your hands like 10 minutes ago. You cannot keep those things clean, they're like this, cheap soft plasticky material... Could do a lot better in this area. That weird little camera lip thing they're doing might be the ugliest thing I've ever seen on a laptop Some of them have the fans exhaust on the right side, so if you try playing a video game on them with a mouse it will make your hand uncomfortable.

Bought an X220 years back and it unintentionally became my main laptop for a few years. Sold it on in much worse condition (I kept the keyboard) at a profit and got an i7 X230T instead, which has also somehow gone up in price since. the X230 didn't last as long, the efficiencies of the M1 macbooks were too good to ignore. Gave it to my mother since because she wanted "an old laptop that just works"

I'm in this camp, perhaps a little more extreme: my daily driver laptop is a ThinkPad X230T, which I think is from 2011 or 2012. It is separate from a home lab - which I don't currently have, but which I'll use hardware from a few years ago if I ever need again. The only thing that can kill older hardware is software bloat - honestly, the web is the biggest culprit here.

I'm on a thinkpad x230t from over a decade ago, running Linux. It is a bit less vintage than yours, but I can confirm that for the princely sum of £200 on ebay, I can run a window manager and pretty much any software I want. It replaced a £1500 starbook, which stopped powering on about a month after the warranty expired. Not quite the same point as you, but I'll agree on something: old hardware that lasts is miraculous.

I know this is nuts, but I recently bought a thinkpad x230t from 2012 when my StarBook died after a year, and it is the best laptop I've ever used.

0. Linux compatibility, I am not super picky about getting everything to work perfectly but I should be able to trust that the software I prefer to use will run and my laptop will connect to wifi and play audio properly and so on. 1. IPS screen (mostly a given nowadays, but this wasn't always so) 2. Trackpoint, I hate trackpads. Pretty rare option so I could possibly be convinced otherwise if the trackpad is particularly good. 3. Decent keyboard, any laptop will always be primarily a text processing machine for me. (tablet version) 4. User serviceability, with battery and RAM being highest priority but expandable storage is nice too, and all other replaceable parts are a nice bonus. 5. General ruggedness, the whole point of a laptop is being able to travel with it and it's the kind of tech I expect to last me for years. 6. Battery life, though I am not super picky about this. 7. Everything else including performance, higher resolutions than 768p, thinness, appearance, touchscreen (roughly listed in order of preference). Posted from my trusty Thinkpad X230t which is the only laptop I'm aware of that ticks nearly all my boxes. It's bulky and makes a vacuum cleaner noise when compiling and the battery only lasts 4-5 hours of normal use, though. Still, good enough for web browsing, various forms of text processing, watching videos, listening to music and the vast majority of what you might use a computer for. I did look into the Framework laptop recently but while it's probabl

At the current stage, no one should be using a RISC-V machine as their main machine. That's why I mentioned Framework, because with Framework, if the investment was a failure, I can just get a X86 board and the rest is not a total lost. However, even through Framework ships to Taiwan, importing product from Taiwan to China is not significantly easier than importing from the US. I still need to handle shipment forwarding and customs etc. Plus, my knowledge is, Framework discourages/bans shipment forwarding. So before I can get the product in an official and legitimate way, I'll just keep waiting. The tablet mentioned in the main article while promising, it just can't interest me as a consumer. For it's starting price at $149, I can buy a secondhand ThinkPad X230t to run Ubuntu 24.04 and it's also a tablet (arguably the best tablet in the entire tablet history in the entire tablet universe so far). Maybe the Chinese government should buy those tablets as work equipment to prevent their employees/personals from playing Microsoft Solitaire during work hours.