My daughter has the same laptop (I bought it for her a long time ago). When she brought it with her when visiting me in Canada from Australia this summer, she asked me to look at it because Win10 wouldn't let her in and she needed her files and pics.
So, I booted a Fedora USB and backed up her files. When I asked her if she wanted me to install Fedora Workstation on it to continue using it, she said "Yes!" because "She loves this laptop and doesn't want to buy a new one."
Fedora runs beautifully fast on this system with 8GB of RAM and will probably last her a long time.
Every Windows laptop I have ever had where I installed Linux on it, I swear its lifespan is infinitely longer than if I kept Windows on it. My wife has Macs that are older than my oldest laptops / desktops I can still turn on. Windows is just abysmal for hardware.
My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
Like Land Rover owners, I’m always shocked that people look to buy a thing that has plenty of spare parts.
I’d much rather buy a thing that doesn’t need them. Two decades of laptops, never replaced a single thing or had an issue. Shot, I have not had a single app crash or system crash in 5+ years. Also two decades of driving around the world without a single breakdown.
I originally bought my MacBook Air M1 just as a transitional computer because my old, incredibly expensive Intel MacBook Pro had been stolen, and I was waiting for a newer MacBook Pro model. But I grew so fond of the Air that I couldn't bring myself to part with it again. It's lightweight, has incredible performance (more powerful than the most powerful Intel-based Pros), the battery lasts a long time, the keyboard is comfortable, and the design is more curved than the Pro (and the newer Air models), which means it doesn't dig into your wrists.
I've owned an M1 Pro since its release and it's still going strong. I was going to see how long I could run it for. My bet was that by staying on Sequoia and/or installing Linux, I could run it for a ridiculous amount of time. I've met developers in the past with 12 year old Macbooks.
But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to.
The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).
I keep looking to see if there’s something better than my m1 air 13”. Even this post had me looking. But the m1 is “triple” the multicore speed of an 11th gen intel in a 12” Lenovo. And almost double the battery life with no active cooling. Luckily I ordered 16 gigs of ram. Should have ordered 256gb storage but I can live with it.
I’m happy to see more pushback against consumer culture, and I’m happy this system meets the needs of the author.
Of course, the other part of this are people who use computers to do much heavier workloads.
There are a pretty large list of activities where every time you have some significant gain like ~50-300% performance gain, there may be legitimate justification to buy the new hardware.
As a person who plays games as a hobby I’m pretty much buying a new GPU/processor anytime there’s something affordable that will double my frame rate or anytime there’s a game that comes out that I can’t play or won’t play at decent settings.
My old hardware is never wasted, someone else buys it and uses it until it physically degrades too much to be used.
Computers as a hobby or working device are a heck of a lot less expensive and wasteful than a lot of other activities even if you go crazy on consumerism.
Think about the weight of your laptop and how that compares to the weight of just one gallon of gasoline. Surely a week to a month of commuting is worse for the planet than buying a brand new laptop, right? For the record, I don’t actually know for certain whether it is, but that seems like a fair guesstimation.
From a cost standpoint, $100 is damn impressive to have a working functional laptop that gets your work done, but arguably $1000 or $2000 isn’t a whole lot of monkey, either. That kind of money is roughly equivalent to one round trip ticket to Europe, renting a minivan for a week or two, a month of daycare or rent/mortgage, etc.
It’s both a lot of money and not a lot of money at the same time.
Roughly 80% of the total energy consumption of a PC with a 3 yr lifespan is in the fabrication. Creating electronics is very resource intensive. Unlike other products, where the majority of energy and pollution lies in the usage, the majority of the impact of electronics lies in the fabrication.
Reading about so many people daily-driving laptops built around a decade ago, if not more (which includes myself, happy owner of a T480s), and not suffering any major penalty in terms of overall usability and battery life, it really shows that the returns of having more CPU power/smaller lithography have been marginal for a very, very long time (CPUs haven't been an enabler for new use-cases/a major incentive to upgrade a laptop in recent history, AFAICT).
That's not to say there hasn't been progress in this space, but I'm also amused by the many comments along the lines of "my 2020 M1 is so revolutionary that it's all I need in 2026" in every other Apple thread. Probably all we've been needing has been some 14/10nm 8th/10th Gen Core i7 in a decent package? And about package, how come that this era's ThinkPads and pro Dells/HPs get a bigger "love-factor" than their contemporary intel MacBooks?
Now, reading more into it¹, it appears that what Intel was shipping 8th-generation Intel Core i5 8257Us (i.e. a 2017 Coffee Lake chip) in its MacBook Pros for as late as 2020, before switching over to the M series. No wonder they weren't getting much love!
I have a T460s and just yesterday I installed bazzite on it.
It's incredible how fast the little boy still is!
Sunshine and Moonlight (in house game streaming) is running fine and has almost zero latency!
Yeah, for my last few laptops, (Mac) I didn't replace them because they were too slow; I replaced them because they stopped getting software updates. (I don't want to switch to Linux on them.)
I suspect that on-device AI might drive some of us to upgrade, though. I really don't like that AI requires a network connection (and subscription for non-trivial use.)
My favorite and most beloved laptop was the T60 with an IPS display. It was rock-solid, had a docking station, a swappable CD drive and battery, and PDF manuals for disassembly. I wish I could buy something cool now to run a *nix OS, but I cannot find anything good besides the MacBook Pro.
I have several Thinkpads, but my favorite is a T420s.
AFAIK, it was the last of the line that had sculpted keytops, it feels good to type on. It's a damned shame that the newer ones have those chicklet keys.
i7 with 16GB RAM, HDD replaced with SSD. Runs Fedora like a top.
Very nice, I've got an X220 with an i7 and, agreed, the keyboard is so good. No generation since has been as good, though the xx30 ones are a close runner-up. Downhill ever since IMO.
I find the thinkpads extemely cool, and I envy the customization / repair options soo much.
That said, I switched to a macbook pro last year and these machines are like from another world. I want to get things done instead of fiddling with the machine and, famous last words I know but, this thing just works.
Yes, it'll be e-waste the moment a small thing breaks, and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world, so it's no competition to the thinkpad.
I hope framework eventually delivers the best of both worlds.
I don't think Framework aims to be a laptop that you just set it up and forget.
You own everything and that comes with some concessions. Things won't always work, software will always be tricky to make fully compatible, etc.
But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.
That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
>and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world
An equivalent brand-new ThinkPad isn't really much cheaper. Maybe is more expensive actually. Repairability though is indeed terrible on Macbooks. Neo is the most* repairable and even that is mid (6/10 on iFixit; quite a jump from <=4 Pros have been getting forever).
*Something certainly related to EU's Right To Repair directive.
I replaced my MBA M3 15" with a Thinkpad X13 G6 AMD, running CachyOS. Much lighter, and the freedom from Apple's increasingly buggy and enshittified OS is priceless.
My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.
Macbook Air mid-2012 here. 8GB. I use Nixos without a desktop env, this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete. I have a 3090 in a desktop for messing around with LLMs but that's headless.
The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?
IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.
I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.
It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.
At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.
I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.
I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.
The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.
Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.
I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.
Siemens Nixendorf Scenic Mobile 300, 133 MHz Pentium (before we had to number them), 16 MB of RAM, 800×600 passive matrix LCD, released 1997. I caused a major scandal at my high school since nobody on the staff had ever contemplated the scenario whereby a student turned up with a computer of their own. I dual booted Windows NT 4.0 and Linux (2.2 kernel I think).
As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.
I had a fujitsu lifebook that was 10 years old when I bought it and it lasted another 8 or so after that. I'd maxxed out the ram to 8GB, replaced the missing stylus and bought a new battery. It had a fantastic display that was brighter and had a wider viewing angle than the system76 gazelle I replaced it with. And the swivel hinge connector was soo solid.
I now have a framework 13 that I'd rate slightly higher than that fujitsu (it's lighter and the changeable ports thing is a truly wonderful idea), but it's a bit of a toss-up.
Had Lenovo (X220), followed by two top XPS 13" (lighter), then the first M1 (8gb), M1 Max (64gb!), and M3. Battery, weight, Linux-like, and UX (in that order) made the M1 practical to carry and reconverted my M1 Max into a server for LLM and computation. The M3 sometimes also work as a computing server in tandem. I would love to carry again my XPS 13" with Linux but the battery duration and lifetime makes it unusable for mobility.
When I saw this headline, I thought "I bet it's an old Thinkpad" :)
I have 3 personally, one for work. My T470p is probably the best one, given some tradeoffs (some annoying pressure points on the screen which happened on two replacements and some occasional flakiness with power) I got a cheap T480 when I thought the T470p was a lost cause (thankfully just a screen replacement) and one of the USB-C ports is dead. I can still charge with the other one, but that's annoying. But, the square plug remains to be fantastically reliable.
There is a certain odd interest I have in these, but that died off. Buying capable but older and much cheaper equipment, particularly when I don't have niche needs, has become the best option for me (particularly if I can update the software on it)
Not exactly the same model, but I really like the X280.
I've bought a couple of refurbished X280s to give to friends and family whenever they need a working laptop for light office/internet/email use.
Really nice laptops, super lightweight and durable, yet incredible affordable.
My absolute favorite is neither my M1 (whose screen broke overnight for no reason after 13 months, just outside of warranty) nor the ThinkPads many love but...
My milspec LG Gram with 24 GB of RAM: I know, I know, milspec means nothing etc. But...
A friend of mine literally stepped on it by mistake: no problem. There s an online video about someone throwing one down concrete stairs: keeps working just fine.
It s also lighter than any Mac laptop.
It s old now and may not have the fastest CPU but this laptop can and does take serious beating without breaking a sweat.
My daughter has the same laptop (I bought it for her a long time ago). When she brought it with her when visiting me in Canada from Australia this summer, she asked me to look at it because Win10 wouldn't let her in and she needed her files and pics.
So, I booted a Fedora USB and backed up her files. When I asked her if she wanted me to install Fedora Workstation on it to continue using it, she said "Yes!" because "She loves this laptop and doesn't want to buy a new one."
Fedora runs beautifully fast on this system with 8GB of RAM and will probably last her a long time.
Every Windows laptop I have ever had where I installed Linux on it, I swear its lifespan is infinitely longer than if I kept Windows on it. My wife has Macs that are older than my oldest laptops / desktops I can still turn on. Windows is just abysmal for hardware.
Beautiful! I also have one, running Fedora i3 Spin (which I had no idea was a thing until recently) and it's been great!
My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
Ever since Dell launched their Ubuntu laptops, I've had nothing else (since 2012?) I'm on my fourth now, an XPS*. They all still work.
* It's not called XPS anymore, though.
Like Land Rover owners, I’m always shocked that people look to buy a thing that has plenty of spare parts.
I’d much rather buy a thing that doesn’t need them. Two decades of laptops, never replaced a single thing or had an issue. Shot, I have not had a single app crash or system crash in 5+ years. Also two decades of driving around the world without a single breakdown.
I originally bought my MacBook Air M1 just as a transitional computer because my old, incredibly expensive Intel MacBook Pro had been stolen, and I was waiting for a newer MacBook Pro model. But I grew so fond of the Air that I couldn't bring myself to part with it again. It's lightweight, has incredible performance (more powerful than the most powerful Intel-based Pros), the battery lasts a long time, the keyboard is comfortable, and the design is more curved than the Pro (and the newer Air models), which means it doesn't dig into your wrists.
I've owned an M1 Pro since its release and it's still going strong. I was going to see how long I could run it for. My bet was that by staying on Sequoia and/or installing Linux, I could run it for a ridiculous amount of time. I've met developers in the past with 12 year old Macbooks.
But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to.
The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).
If that m1 today came out as a 12” retina MacBook (2lb) it would be the first Apple product I’d ever line up for.
Neo is way too bulky/heavy.
I keep looking to see if there’s something better than my m1 air 13”. Even this post had me looking. But the m1 is “triple” the multicore speed of an 11th gen intel in a 12” Lenovo. And almost double the battery life with no active cooling. Luckily I ordered 16 gigs of ram. Should have ordered 256gb storage but I can live with it.
I’m happy to see more pushback against consumer culture, and I’m happy this system meets the needs of the author.
Of course, the other part of this are people who use computers to do much heavier workloads.
There are a pretty large list of activities where every time you have some significant gain like ~50-300% performance gain, there may be legitimate justification to buy the new hardware.
As a person who plays games as a hobby I’m pretty much buying a new GPU/processor anytime there’s something affordable that will double my frame rate or anytime there’s a game that comes out that I can’t play or won’t play at decent settings.
My old hardware is never wasted, someone else buys it and uses it until it physically degrades too much to be used.
Computers as a hobby or working device are a heck of a lot less expensive and wasteful than a lot of other activities even if you go crazy on consumerism.
Think about the weight of your laptop and how that compares to the weight of just one gallon of gasoline. Surely a week to a month of commuting is worse for the planet than buying a brand new laptop, right? For the record, I don’t actually know for certain whether it is, but that seems like a fair guesstimation.
From a cost standpoint, $100 is damn impressive to have a working functional laptop that gets your work done, but arguably $1000 or $2000 isn’t a whole lot of monkey, either. That kind of money is roughly equivalent to one round trip ticket to Europe, renting a minivan for a week or two, a month of daycare or rent/mortgage, etc.
It’s both a lot of money and not a lot of money at the same time.
Roughly 80% of the total energy consumption of a PC with a 3 yr lifespan is in the fabrication. Creating electronics is very resource intensive. Unlike other products, where the majority of energy and pollution lies in the usage, the majority of the impact of electronics lies in the fabrication.
Reading about so many people daily-driving laptops built around a decade ago, if not more (which includes myself, happy owner of a T480s), and not suffering any major penalty in terms of overall usability and battery life, it really shows that the returns of having more CPU power/smaller lithography have been marginal for a very, very long time (CPUs haven't been an enabler for new use-cases/a major incentive to upgrade a laptop in recent history, AFAICT).
That's not to say there hasn't been progress in this space, but I'm also amused by the many comments along the lines of "my 2020 M1 is so revolutionary that it's all I need in 2026" in every other Apple thread. Probably all we've been needing has been some 14/10nm 8th/10th Gen Core i7 in a decent package? And about package, how come that this era's ThinkPads and pro Dells/HPs get a bigger "love-factor" than their contemporary intel MacBooks?
Now, reading more into it¹, it appears that what Intel was shipping 8th-generation Intel Core i5 8257Us (i.e. a 2017 Coffee Lake chip) in its MacBook Pros for as late as 2020, before switching over to the M series. No wonder they weren't getting much love!
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro_(Intel-based)#Tech...
I have a T460s and just yesterday I installed bazzite on it. It's incredible how fast the little boy still is! Sunshine and Moonlight (in house game streaming) is running fine and has almost zero latency!
Yeah, for my last few laptops, (Mac) I didn't replace them because they were too slow; I replaced them because they stopped getting software updates. (I don't want to switch to Linux on them.)
I suspect that on-device AI might drive some of us to upgrade, though. I really don't like that AI requires a network connection (and subscription for non-trivial use.)
My favorite and most beloved laptop was the T60 with an IPS display. It was rock-solid, had a docking station, a swappable CD drive and battery, and PDF manuals for disassembly. I wish I could buy something cool now to run a *nix OS, but I cannot find anything good besides the MacBook Pro.
sounds like you might appreciate the ethos behind https://frame.work/
Might not meet your spec reqs but have you looked into?
I have several Thinkpads, but my favorite is a T420s.
AFAIK, it was the last of the line that had sculpted keytops, it feels good to type on. It's a damned shame that the newer ones have those chicklet keys.
i7 with 16GB RAM, HDD replaced with SSD. Runs Fedora like a top.
Very nice, I've got an X220 with an i7 and, agreed, the keyboard is so good. No generation since has been as good, though the xx30 ones are a close runner-up. Downhill ever since IMO.
I find the thinkpads extemely cool, and I envy the customization / repair options soo much.
That said, I switched to a macbook pro last year and these machines are like from another world. I want to get things done instead of fiddling with the machine and, famous last words I know but, this thing just works.
Yes, it'll be e-waste the moment a small thing breaks, and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world, so it's no competition to the thinkpad.
I hope framework eventually delivers the best of both worlds.
I don't think Framework aims to be a laptop that you just set it up and forget. You own everything and that comes with some concessions. Things won't always work, software will always be tricky to make fully compatible, etc.
But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.
That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
>and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world
An equivalent brand-new ThinkPad isn't really much cheaper. Maybe is more expensive actually. Repairability though is indeed terrible on Macbooks. Neo is the most* repairable and even that is mid (6/10 on iFixit; quite a jump from <=4 Pros have been getting forever).
*Something certainly related to EU's Right To Repair directive.
I replaced my MBA M3 15" with a Thinkpad X13 G6 AMD, running CachyOS. Much lighter, and the freedom from Apple's increasingly buggy and enshittified OS is priceless.
My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.
Macbook Air mid-2012 here. 8GB. I use Nixos without a desktop env, this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete. I have a 3090 in a desktop for messing around with LLMs but that's headless.
The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?
IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.
Two-finger tap acts as the right-click. Also clicking and holding the bottom-right corner.
But I don’t pretend that any of these gestures make trackpads usable.
ThinkPads seem to still have physical buttons for clicking:
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.
It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.
At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.
I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.
I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.
The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.
Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.
I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.
My old T420 still works and I still always smile when using the keyboard on it. Pure bliss.
Siemens Nixendorf Scenic Mobile 300, 133 MHz Pentium (before we had to number them), 16 MB of RAM, 800×600 passive matrix LCD, released 1997. I caused a major scandal at my high school since nobody on the staff had ever contemplated the scenario whereby a student turned up with a computer of their own. I dual booted Windows NT 4.0 and Linux (2.2 kernel I think).
Oh, the simple things in life!
As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.
I had a fujitsu lifebook that was 10 years old when I bought it and it lasted another 8 or so after that. I'd maxxed out the ram to 8GB, replaced the missing stylus and bought a new battery. It had a fantastic display that was brighter and had a wider viewing angle than the system76 gazelle I replaced it with. And the swivel hinge connector was soo solid.
I now have a framework 13 that I'd rate slightly higher than that fujitsu (it's lighter and the changeable ports thing is a truly wonderful idea), but it's a bit of a toss-up.
Had Lenovo (X220), followed by two top XPS 13" (lighter), then the first M1 (8gb), M1 Max (64gb!), and M3. Battery, weight, Linux-like, and UX (in that order) made the M1 practical to carry and reconverted my M1 Max into a server for LLM and computation. The M3 sometimes also work as a computing server in tandem. I would love to carry again my XPS 13" with Linux but the battery duration and lifetime makes it unusable for mobility.
When I saw this headline, I thought "I bet it's an old Thinkpad" :)
I have 3 personally, one for work. My T470p is probably the best one, given some tradeoffs (some annoying pressure points on the screen which happened on two replacements and some occasional flakiness with power) I got a cheap T480 when I thought the T470p was a lost cause (thankfully just a screen replacement) and one of the USB-C ports is dead. I can still charge with the other one, but that's annoying. But, the square plug remains to be fantastically reliable.
There is a certain odd interest I have in these, but that died off. Buying capable but older and much cheaper equipment, particularly when I don't have niche needs, has become the best option for me (particularly if I can update the software on it)
Not exactly the same model, but I really like the X280. I've bought a couple of refurbished X280s to give to friends and family whenever they need a working laptop for light office/internet/email use. Really nice laptops, super lightweight and durable, yet incredible affordable.
My absolute favorite is neither my M1 (whose screen broke overnight for no reason after 13 months, just outside of warranty) nor the ThinkPads many love but...
My milspec LG Gram with 24 GB of RAM: I know, I know, milspec means nothing etc. But...
A friend of mine literally stepped on it by mistake: no problem. There s an online video about someone throwing one down concrete stairs: keeps working just fine.
It s also lighter than any Mac laptop.
It s old now and may not have the fastest CPU but this laptop can and does take serious beating without breaking a sweat.
Amazing machine