Lenovo ThinkPad X250

I still own and use my original X250, which I bought new in 2015. I recently replaced the batteries and swapped out the internal Wi-Fi adapter for a €20 AX210NGW. It's almost laughable how easy both upgrades were. Everything works out of the box with every Linux distro I've tried, including the fingerprint sensor. I prefer the keyboard on my T430, but the much better screen, slimmer form factor, and still pretty good keyboard make the X250 one of the best devices I've ever owned.

The x250 can also take up to 16gb ram, at least in most CPU configurations. Some models (the i3 at least) cannot. Many people like the x220 best, because it has the old-style keyboard (does the x230 as well?). The x250 has surprisingly similar performance but much better battery life. Which is better? I don't know, but I bought a x250 back in 2015 and am still using it as my personal laptop. It only sees light duty these days.

I’ve been using my 10-year-old ThinkPad X250 and a decade-old workstation without feeling any need to upgrade. However, the possibility of running powerful local LLMs that require a lot of GPU or unified memory has finally increased my interest. It's my impression that laptops likely won’t see the major leap required in that area to run truely large LLMs for another 5–10 years, but I expect workstation capabilities to advance more rapidly, meaning I may upgrade in the next 1–3 years. My current workstation setup includes 22cores/44threads decade old xeon plus four decade old Titan X GPUs with a total of 48GB VRAM, which is enough to run a decent local AI model, but I’m finally wanting more capacity. I haven’t been this interested to upgrade in a decade. NVIDIA’s new DGX-class offerings might convince me, depending on pricing and supply, although waiting a few more years to let things stabilize could be what I do. Still, it’s an exciting time for hardware, especially now that there’s a tangible reason to invest in more power for local AI.

My personal laptop is a Thinkpad x250 from 2015. That is "only" 8 years old at this point, but I have every intention of continuing to use it for the foreseeable future.

Thinkpads are amazing value for money if you don't mind getting them used. I bought an x250 (i5-5300U with HD5500 integrated graphics) off eBay and fitted it with an IPS screen and extra RAM - cost me just a little over £200 in total. I initially put Fedora on it but switched to Lubuntu. Have been using it as my daily driver for almost a year now with no issues of note. My x250 meets all the requirements you mentioned, except that it has a Mini DisplayPort instead of HDMI. The ports vary somewhat between models and series so I'm sure there's one that fits all your needs.

> I have no idea how Lenovo's ThinkPad T series differs from ... My personal rundown and how they get assigned: E - Educational / Lower office personnel spec L - Office personnel you hate spec, but don't offer the E because they might complain. T - Give this to all the technicians because they can't take care of anything and it will survive typically. P - Give this to the engineers who believe having an RTX gpu will actually help them so that they are happy, and to the CAD operators who actually need it. X - Smaller/Ultrabooks before the term got started, now somewhat a blurry line because T series have gotten lighter/thinner. But the X1 Carbon sure is a great way to spend a ton of money for a light laptop when a T-series would suffice. Personally I stick to older used X series (currently x250) because I just enjoy a small laptop and they are dirt cheap now.

This is, unfortunately, the sort of thing that motivates QubesOS. We are, as humans writing code, not good at complexity, and as Apple's lockdown mode admits, parsing complicated stuff, even when you design security boundaries around it, is hard to do properly. Lockdown just punts a ton of complexity entirely out of the system, and the tradeoff is rather substantially improved security against a wide class of attacks. QubesOS design philosophy is essentially, "Everything in a booted OS image must be assumed to be able to, some way or another, access everything else in there." So you have various silos that have extremely limited communication between them (you can "push" from one VM to another, but you can never "pull" from another VM, the framebuffer is simple, etc). You're totally free to add sandboxing as useful, but it's not considered a full security boundary. Hardware virtualized VMs are, on a fairly stripped down Xen that removes a lot of attack surface in terms of legacy device emulation and other features they don't need. Apple has done a lot of security focused improvements over the years, but modern computers and OSes are just so complicated that even they struggle to get it right regularly. And the attackers only need one mistake to achieve their goals. :( //EDIT: As far as practicality goes, I do daily drive QubesOS as my main computer on a 2C/4T laptop with 16GB RAM - old X250. There are plenty of things it's not great at, but I'm not heavy on the "vi…

A used Thinkpad. (or any other used non-consumer grade laptop) Most companies either rent their laptops or somehow sell them after a couple of years. They are usually in good condition and often the reseller gives you 1-2 years of warranty. I've bought a used X250 for <300€ a couple of years ago and I could not be much happier. Of course, the specs could be a bit better, but for most of my tasks (HW + embedded Linux dev) it's sufficient. For everything else i can spin up some beefy server somewhere in a couple of minutes. And since the hardware is on the market for quite some time, driver issues are mostly resolved. Bonus: used Docking stations and spare power supplies are cheap and the battery can be hot-swapped. Bonus2: since it's already slightly beaten down, making another scratch doesn't hurt as much as if it would've been a shiny new macbook. edit: I think the official term is "refurbished". I can't see myself ever buying a new device again.

Thinkpad X250, admittedly at max specs, did 21 hours in 2018. My T470 from 2020 did over 27 hours at max charge. M-series Macs is when MacBooks stopped sucking at battery life without sleeping and wrecking state every moment they could.

Yes and no. I try to very consciously decide whether a new device is really needed and whether I get what I need out of it and how long I expect it to last. For instance, I still run a Thinkpad X250 from ~2015 due to the replaceable battery and ability to swap batteries without shutdown. Yes, the CPU feels a bit slow after all the mitigations, but it's ok, I can compile remotely if need be. For phone on the other hand, I decided to buy a back then new Pixel 6 due to the promised 5 years of security updates and good chances that I will be able to continue with it using LineageOS or so. TV is ~6 years old by now, panel is still great, so I will switch it to a chromecast once the AndroidOS eventually breaks down inevitably. But tbh, I don't think I've even been different, I always hated the trend to seem fashionable with MacBooks and completely ignore issues like waste or maintainability (even of simple things like battery).

For work, HP Zbook 15 with Windows 10. It's a decent laptop. It's bulky and I don't care for the keyboard, but it performs well and I usually have it in a docking station. At home, Thinkpad x250 running Linux Mint. At one point in time I enjoyed experimenting with many different distros, but now I use Mint because it mostly "just works" out of the box. I don't know what will replace the Thinkpad. Since I don't currently use it for work, it's fine that it is old - it works and doesn't need to be replaced yet. From many stories I've heard about modern Thinkpad's, I doubt whether I would buy another. Maybe my next personal laptop will just be a tablet with a keyboard case.

I haven't used any of the current-gen thinkpads, but the x250 (thats probably the most recent I've used) from 2016 has a very nice keyboard

Just a few months ago I replaced nearly the same laptop (Thinkpad x61 in my case, with SSD and 4GB RAM upgrades). It has served me well for 6 years (I bought it secondhand), but it started to definitely show its age. It started to have difficulties playing youtube videos and the like, these consuming a lot of CPU, and consequently battery life started to drop to below 2 hours (plus the aging battery didn't helped), and fan noise started to get somewhat annoying. It also had some scars like marks on the screen or partially broken keys (I've not necessarily treated it well, compressing it in bags or having dropped it on more than one occasions). It is still usable, and I will convert it for other uses (mpd server probably). But it was time to replace it with a newer laptop, the new one is a secondhand Thinkpad x250, and it's definitely an improvement, quiet, more powerful, 6 to 8 hours autonomy. I hope it will last about as long as the x61 that served me so well.

When I were looking for a new laptop, I got a new ASUS TP301UA first. But was very unhappy with the keyboard. It was bending in the middle when typing, and had overall uncomfortable floppy feeling. The camera was a joke too. The general impression was that on paper the specs looked great, but it was underwhelming in practice. I returned it and got a used (like new) Thinkpad X250 for under $450 and cannot be happier. Computer feels rock solid, great components. Installed Linux, all works smooth, my best laptop so far. (It's a small-screen portable laptop, try to check it out, and if you like bigger screens, you may consider other series of Thinkpad, maybe). (Also, for me, getting used to the mouse buttons positioned above the touchpad took about one week or so.)

ThinkPads are the only real option. I can't stand the heat and bad ergonomics of Apple's stuff (the keyboard is weird, the trackpad feels off, the metal gets way too hot). And no nipple mouse, if you're into that. And dongles/lack of ports are silly - I care more about functionality than showing off my laptop's sleekness. T series (14") have better keyboards, but the 12" form of the X series is great. It's mostly a choice of X260 vs T460s (or the x70 models coming out this month). The X1 is interesting if you wanna look flashy, but lack of user serviceable parts isn't too attractive. I usually run my X250 with throttling turned on, and TPFanControl to keep the temps down so the keyboard stays nice and cool. Biggest problem: ThinkPad screens suck. The T470s will have a 3K screen so that might be better than what they've offered before. 16:9 really sucks though. If they'd just ship a 16:10 or3:2 "Retina" quality screen I'd be so very happy. Some people just like Apple's design though. I don't get it but there's no accounting for taste. So if you can stand the keyboard and heat, go for it? Edit: ThinkPad service is fantastic. Get the next business day business warranty. Any hint of something I just call them up and they come out and replace it all. Excellent.

> The other major reason I went with the x250 is that I'm a big fan of the trackpoint. The trackpoint is the only thing that keeps me on Lenovo laptops (Carbon X1, probably P50 next). I keep the touchpad disabled on my laptop.

I was going to get the XPS 13, but decided to perform some upgrades on my desktop at the same time. So to save a few bucks I got an X250 from Lenovo, and I've been very happy with it. It's a little bulky since I also got the large second battery, but the battery life is absolutely phenomenal, and everything works great on Arch.

ThinkPad X250, maxed-out battery pack. I adore this laptop, it runs like a constant stream of freshly melted butter. It's so light I no longer have to worry about "lugging a laptop", and most times I pick it up and carry around with just two fingers. It has taken a few beatings — filled backpack falling laptop-side-first onto a railing from a height of a half-metre, dropped/slipped from a sitting desk to the floor, thrown across a (small) room and (upon a failed catch) rolling on its side — but there's no sign of damage, either in appearance or running. I almost forgot! When I got this laptop, my typing speed jumped by nearly 50%! I was using a Dell Inspiron (from 2010) before, and although the keyboard on it is terrible for typing, the ThinkPad has really good keys and typing is just such pleasure on it. I have plans to upgrade a few components as time progresses: bump RAM up to 16GB, replace either the smartcard reader or the WWAN modem with an M2 SSD, that's about it. One con is getting used to the extra long battery life. I used to intentionally and lazily not pack the charger, which is actually quite light, and then after a long day find myself with low battery and no charger. Another is the small SSD this particular unit came with, but I'm planning on replacing that.