Laptop recommendations
Low hanging fruit, but whatever. It is what it is.
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View original on sh.itjust.worksLow hanging fruit, but whatever. It is what it is.
85 replies
I have got so many used ThinkPads. Everyone in my house has one.
Can I have one
You get a ThinkPad! And you get a ThinkPad! Everyone gets a ThinkPad! :oprah_wave:
Me too plz
Can I have one IBM ThinkPad 701 it's old and it's not like you're using it anyways.
Step 1: You marry him
Old ThinkPads, the poor man’s Framework.
Rather proto-Framework
I tried to buy a system 76 pangolin but they don't ship to Australia (yet?)
Sad
But in Australia you CAN get an old Thinkpad, so…
Need grunt
System76 and Framework are mostly North America and Western Europe. Pine64 might sell in Australia.
Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn't saying much.
I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn't always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.
The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.
What did you order? Seems the Pangolin is the only one they are still waiting for approval on
Pangolin is the only laptop they haven't got RCM approval on for Australia yet
I got unbuntu on my xiaomi notebook with a nice oled screen. It worked almost immediately. Easier install then windows. I chose Ubuntu as my first linux because of lots of support.
As far as I heard, their designs are similar to macbooks, are the keyboards as terrible?
I think its a preference, I prefer the keyboard over mac. But the build quality and hardware is just really good for the price.
So all the qualities of XM phones and no drawbacks, like miui and official software support? Great.
Refurbished ThinkPads are available in countries where Framework, System76, and Pine64 do not ship.
Besides, ThinkPads are really well-built machines that perform well for everyday tasks at a fraction of their (or the aforementioned competition's) original price.
I love my two machines, which are from before Lenovo took over completely. Their keyboards, port selection, and repairability are almost unparalleled compared to today's competition.
as cool as they are the last time a good thinkpad came out was over a decade ago, so u are either just buying a normal laptop same quality as all the others or something so old its basically useless. They arent even cheap anymore cuz everyone wants them, its time to face reality refurbished thinkpads are no longer what they were they are no longer a good deal nor particularly good quality, u would probably be better off buying some random gaming laptop most of them are pretty well put together, easy to take apart and upgradable tho thick and heavy.
This simply isn't true. They are still cheap even for decent stuff. I got a T15 Gen 2 when it was 2.5yrs old for about $400 on eBay. You're not going to get an even remotely decent laptop in most cases for that kind of money. And to be clear, I love old Thinkpads. I have them going back to the IBM days.
Modern Thinkpads: -easy to work on -plenty fast for most things -still made of the carbon composite and magnesium chassis we like -hinges are beefy -upgradeable ram -available with GPU -lighter and easier to daily than any of the old chonks -replaceable keyboard, track pad and track point, and fingerprint -dual thunderbolt connection (and docks are stupid cheap.. I find them for $30 sometimes)
Downsides exist but they're not the end of the world: -one drive slot (drives are huge now, who cares) -8gb of RAM is soldered but the rest is not (max 40gb) -internal battery but laptop is faster and has better battery life than my maxed out T580
Off-lease enterprise laptops are generally the best deals available for a good laptop for not too much cash. When you can get something 3-5 years old for 1/3 the price of a brand new laptop and know it still has quite a bit of life left, its hard to beat.
yea, thinkpads aren't the only laptops that can be bought used
Thinkpads were never cheap around here. Asus are cheap. The quality is many orders of different.
Some gaming laptops are good, but others are just as crappy as normal laptops. New smaller thinkpads are still good enough, if you need a small laptop.
I have a decent gaming laptop It's a pain in the ass for collage tho I didn't buy it for collage but I also can't really afford to buy something else
It's too big and the battery life sucks
Basically the least portable laptop
Laptops can be compared to cars, you can buy an economical car (with higher range and lower costs, but less power) or a sporscar/muscle car (terrible economy, loud, but higher performance)
Depends on what you do. my daily driver is a $20 x200. works great for my needs. But I don't game
I have a Framework and it beats the shit out of every Lenovo I have ever used.
Thinkpad not always was lenovo
Are you trying to say that the Thinkpad line was owned by IBM in the 90's? Because...so what?
I was originally planning on getting a Surface Pro 11 or other ARM laptop as my next laptop, but one day I was thinking about an old CLEVO P150HM1 which tore everything apart, and outperforms my 2015 T450, while being made in 2009. Needless to say, I got a lot more tolerant of the idea of buying an X86 laptop as my new laptop. I also realised that the price range an SP11 involved also allowed for a Framework Laptop 13. I'm saying all this to not conflict with the rest of my comment history, but in summary: Long live the Framework!
EDIT: This probably won't happen, I've been seeing some γαμάτα deals for newer ThinkPads here lately.
Any old laptop without Nvidia will suffice tho, upgrade WiFi card, ram, swap hhd for ssd, install your favourite distro and it'll run like magic, if laptop have dying battery then also buy new one, or resolder elements and reset bms.
buy any AMD laptop, replace the wifi card, install your favorite distro and it will run like magic.
You get a new, capable, and power-efficient device, while not bothering with damn old ThinkPads or giving insane amount of money to s76.
until it gets completely fucked due to a form-over-function cooling system and hits 101C (NBLK-WAX9X)
Thermal pads might help.
...because HUAWEI doesn't ship their laptops with thermal paste, apparently.
Power governor on balanced and somehow I'm at like 60c. Power governor on battery saving and it's like 45c. Sometimes it cools passively. This is not sh1ntel.
my experience: power governor on balanced and somehow i'm at like 90c.
It works well enough if you don't mind the occasional disconnect and slow connection to wifi, which is true for a lot of people like me. It's still pretty annoying to deal with sometimes, just not enough to go replace the WiFi card or anything.
AMD laptops almost always ship with mediatek wifi cards. Cuz the alternative is intel, and I guess that's not cool with AMD.
But mediatek's wifi cards are a steaming pile of bovine excrement. Bluetooth issues, wifi dropouts, drivers not being mature until a year after the release.
Save your self the pain, buy an Intel wifi card for 20$ and upgrade it right after you bought the laptop. Might as well add RAM and storage. Takes an hour of work, 20 minutes of which is watching a YT video on how to do it.
35 of the remaining 40.is fucking with those tiny ass antenna connectors and wishing you'd never even bothered with the damn thing
https://system76.com/laptops
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks.tuxedo
Been ThinkPad User for over 10 years. Edge E135 X220 X260
This year was the first Time in about 16years I bought a non used machine and it was a framework. As much as I adore the good ol ThinkPad the recent developments regarding repairability/statement from Lenovo are turning me off more and more. And my framework makes me happy every time I use it ...
So I don't know.
My work laptop is a Dell Precision. It was a "data science" model that came with Ubuntu. Wiped Dell's modified Ubuntu and put vanilla Ubuntu on it and now running Nixos. Works great. There was a weird period when using triple monitors with their dock had an intermittent issue on boot where resolutions and monitors were not being detected. Cause was Nvidia drivers. It eventually got resolved and it was easy enough to rollback the drivers to one that worked.
This should be on a t-shirt
The older models were also very repairable and customisable. Most newer ones aren't. This is a problem for some users.
Opensource chromebooks. Yep.
until you get one with an i5-5300U soldered to the board T~T
Dell E6400 can be flashed with libreboot without tools and is easily obtainable from Ebay.
https://libreboot.org/
I like my system 76!
Maybe I'm missing something, but I finally retired my old laptop for a ThinkPad X13 a few weeks ago and it's been perfect for my use case. Build quality is solid, battery life is alright, it's small and light, and everything worked out of the box with the preinstalled Ubuntu. After testing it all I slapped EndeavourOS in there and have had zero issues. Specs are solid and I got it for like $1200. Even the AMD integrated graphics are punching way above what I expected.
Just curious about what folks are complaining about with the newer Lenovo models.
Fwiw this meme isn't piling on any Lenovo Thinkpad hate you've seen if I understand it correctly (which I may not)
You could buy a nice gaming laptop for that price. I thought the appeal of think pads was that you buy an old one cheap. It's just me I guess but I don't enjoy using them.
Maybe I could, but I'm not using it for gaming so battery life, portability, and fan noise don't have to be sacrificed for a few more FPS when I wanna play something light on the road.
The Tim Taylor approach to hardware was great when I was a kid, less so in my 40s looking to do some moderate coding and radio projects on the road away from my massively overbuilt gaming rig I already own. This lil guy checks all those boxes. I was just wondering what specific hate there was on newer models.
Got a T450 for less than a hundred bucks and the build quality's something that no longer exists in this day and age. Almost every piece of hardware in that thing's easily accessible and replaceable. It's gonna be a sad day when it finally dies out and nothing else in the market could compare.
None of these have an OLED or DCI-P3 coverage so… pass
It seems there are OLED panels you can just buy and install into framework.
It looks all theoretical—you could say similar about any laptop at that rate of buying a random panel & popping it in while praying it works. If you don’t have a plan for the original panel, congrats: you created e-waste since the OEM isn’t selling what you need. Maybe they should just offer a tested version since there is obvious demand.
my recommendation: a second-hand, 16 year old acer aspire one that runs windows xp, ms-dos and the 32bit version of puppylinux...if it works it works. (yeah its just my setup)
been working flawlessly on original hardware since 2008
i even play games and make music on that thing
x220 ftw!!
Heck yeah
Good luck opening more than like 5 browser windows on those old thinkpads
The refurbished thinkpads you find are usually three years old after the companies who lease them buy new ones for the users.
You can do a lot of things with a three year old thinkpad...
ah fair enough, my bad, I thought people are always talking about the older style thinkpad
here it's typically early-to-mid 2010s thinkpads being sold, so you're probably getting a laptop with horrible performance
4th and 6th gen intel isn't too bad yet (which would be early 2010s), especially for a Linux desktop/laptop. I wouldn't go older than that just because 4th and 6th gen is so readily available for so cheap, but they certainly aren't anywhere near e-waste yet. Mid-2010s would be more like 7th-9th gen Intel which is newer than all but one of the computers in my home.
I literally use a laptop with a mobile i7-6700 as a daily web browsing computer (and I tend to keep over a hundred tabs open) and really don't feel any slowness. I've got a desktop with an i5-4590 running 5 different Minecraft servers (a couple of which have over 300 mods running) plus most of my homelab services as well. They're not for the graveyard yet!
well, the i5-5300u definitely is, at least for my use cases. it took so long to compile a diesel-actix rust project that the battery died before it finished (it was at 100%), and it can't even run fucking Minecraft. even a raspberry pi can run Minecraft!
Wait why are you compiling on battery?
In what way? My wife plays minecraft with several hundred mods on a (desktop) i5-4560 and I have 5 Minecraft servers running on a desktop i5-4590, and I've played plenty of Minecraft on my laptop with a i7-6700u (vanilla, lightly modded, heavily modded, etc.) so I'm confused by what you mean by "can't run Minecraft"
power strip died and i hadn't realised.
different cpu. I'm talking about the i5-5300U specifically. Not some other i5 of the era. Also, this doesn't really matter but you're addressing 4th and 6th gen, while the i5-5300U is, obviously, 5th gen.
Yes it is a different CPU, of almost the exact same age and architecture. I don't have a 5300u otherwise I'd be able to compare directly. I'm pointing to similar processors (remember this was about the time that Intel stagnated. They didn't improve much from Haswell (4th gen) until about Coffee Lake, and kept continuously refreshing Skylake (6th gen) for years. By memory 5th gen was just rebadged Haswell as well) I do have that I have relevant experience with.
On the Minecraft front I don't think it's the processor, I suspect you either have a configuration issue, or a thermal budget limitation. I had a Ryzen laptop that was really good, except it did not have the thermal capacity to maintain a workload, and would throttle itself all the way down to 600Mhz if I was doing something CPU and GPU intensive for a long time (such as running a bunch of VMs and trying to browse the web while using an external monitor)
You can install linux on it, you know? Everyone installs linux on thinkpads, you know?
Lol ok enjoy your lenovobios and being trapped on x86 forever
If you know anything about Lenovo you would know that if ARM laptops started to have high market share they would have like 35 mediocre models on offer in a year.
Some of the think pad lines are still good but their consumer offerings and a couple of the think pad lines are trash.
Thinkpad not always was lenovo's
My oldest Thinkpad I still own is an X60, and other than the hardware problems, the plastic on the thing is becoming so old it's brittle and breaks every time you try to take the thing apart. I love it and my T60p dearly, but they're past their final days.
What's wrong with x86 all of a sudden?
ARM is still pretty damn experimental compared to x86.
Bullshit mostly. x86 is fine & has been getting a lot more power efficient (if you can get a work day’s worth of power, you have met the benchmark). Wake me up when RISC-V is here.
I got some used chromebooks on Ebay for $40 each (3855u, 4gb ram, 32gb ssd), I would recommend them if you don't have any money to spend on a laptop. It's not going to be running anything super demanding, but its shocking how much it can do.
Some things I have run on it and had a decent experience: Blender, FreeCAD, Portal, TMNF through proton, Celeste, Minecraft Java, MuseScore