this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Piggyback question from OP but can someone give me a QRD on what's so great about ThinkPads? I've seen them in a lot of recommendation threads but they don't seem like anything special to me. What am I missing?
They have great Linux support, generally are pretty repairable (they will have repair manuals and extra parts for you to order), and they are usually lease laptops, which means if you don't mind getting a used laptop you can get top of line laptops from a few years ago for a fraction of what they are worth. I've gotten thinkpads for years, generally only spending up around $200 on a laptop I use for a few years quite comfortably.
The repairability can't be overstated. I helped a buddy upgrade a ten year old HP laptop, and it took something like 20 screws, 8 ribbon cables, a keyboard lift and a mobo removal to upgrade the nvme drive, ram and battery. Overall time start to finish, including troubleshooting was 4 hrs, and that's after I found a guide for it.
I upgraded my thinkpad by removing 6 screws from the bottom cover. The ram,nvme and battery were all exposed and accessible. My upgrade took 10 min.
Yeah, it's huge. I recently replaced the screen of a friend's ThinkPad as a favour. I was a tad anxious because I've not done a repair on this scale before, but I said yes because of how famously repairable ThinkPads are.
The screen repair was way more involved than the upgrade you describe, but it didn't take me more than half an hour, and that was me being extra cautious. The great thing about a laptop that's known for repairability is the abundance of documentation you can find online, it becomes a self reinforcing cycle after a certain point
They've been around for ages and are nearly synonymous with "enterprise" computing for a lot of people. I've had several through work. Although one, which is still my "carry around" laptop, was never great and still isn't, they've largely been solid. Even this one is going on 6-7 years.
Still using my 2014/2015 model thinkpad (bought used in 2019), still feels brand new.
Durability is the game, and since they're usually for work/ bought by a company for the whole office they are usually taken care of when bought used.
Some say they are Nokias 3310 among laptops.
From all the people I knew that ever had them, they still have, very often still use and eventually compare any other / newer laptops with them.
Tough as hell, good to great keyboards, Trackpoints are the bomb if you do work in an enterprise environment (more text than graphics)
trackppints?