▲ 88 points
back
96 comments
I want to love thinkpads, but the fact that in 2021 you still have a display lottery frustrates me to no end. You buy a MacBook Pro you get an A+ display. Thinkpad? You might get one with the good display, you might not.
> You buy a MacBook Pro you get an A+ display.
And play another lottery with potential faults in the keyboard or display cable or some other random component, with Apple refusing to do anything for years until after a class action lawsuit they decide to fix a specific batch of laptops from the year 2016. Or maybe it actually does work, but then the cooling is insufficient to actually get the computing power suggested by the spec sheet.
Apple makes good devices, but the combination of those prices with this attitude towards the customer is a dealbreaker for me.
I'm glad the Framework laptop is a thing, it's the only good example in an industry going towards unfixable devices, broken by design.
Yes, Thinkpad's FHD is horrible. So I put a QHD display on my T480s, and my eyes love 'em. The last Mac I used was Mac Air Retina 2012, switched just because of the matte screen.
Yes, display lottery is still true.
For this reason I just ended buying an HP, the display is exactly what the description said it would be. 300 nits, brigthview.
No surprises, no a thousand bucks lottery ticket sold with "but it has a good keyboard".
It's very easy to replace the displays on these business line thinkpads.
Oh how I love the 4k thing they put on my p17...
If you read this blog post and think "Nice! I will buy the same Thinkpad and use Linux", then be aware that the previous generation P14s has serious issues with power drain in standby[0]. These issues have been not been resolved since September 2020.
In large parts of Europe, the second generation P14s is not yet available. So buyer beware!
[0] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/T14-AMD...
I had the same issue with the ThinkPad T14 AMD. Left it in my backpack for two days and the battery was completely drained.
What made it worse: Lenovo's own USB-C Gen 2 Dock would refuse to charge the battery when it was drained. I had to borrow a friend's MacBook Pro USB-C charger to get the battery up to a reasonable charge.
(Yes, the dock does provide enough power for charging the laptop.)
I was in the mood to get a "mobile workstation", and ended up buying an HP Omen gaming laptop, which had an i7, 16GB of RAM, and discrete GPU. The idea was to be able to run one or more VMs and do hardcore development. And maybe play a few strategy games.
In the intervening years, I have hardly used the laptop for the purposes I had initially intended, though I do occasionally play strategy games on it.
I've mostly been using an inexpensive Chromebook as a remote Linux terminal, and then logging into remote machines to do development. With a little GNU screen startup script, it is easy to resume where I left off, regardless of my location.
I like the idea of using a web terminal to work on a remote, much more capable host. I found however Chromebooks (only tried the old Samsung ARM abased one and the original Pixel) lacking for this purpose. The Samsung ARM was clearly made for a price-point and while a good value at the the time, not worth further discussion today. But even on the (then) flagship Chromebook, the keyboard is just so-so (and lacks page up/down keys!), doesn't offer Ethernet and the screen is terribly reflective and a wee bit small (nice aspect ratio though). Not sure how current Chromebooks fare, but colour me skeptical.
That setup sounds really appealing!
How does the startup script work? Does it install software, and does it require root access on the dev machine?
Do you have multiple remote machines, or just one you use often?
I have the same laptop with the 4K IPS display and the AMD 5850U, and I am pretty happy with it.
On Ubuntu I had to install the Wi-Fi driver manually [0], tweak the grub config to make the screen brightness control work [1], and install gnome-screensaver to make suspend/resume work properly. Maybe things would work better out of the box on Pop!_OS?
Otherwise, it's pretty good. It does not heat up much compared to the previous Intel laptop I had, and it is plenty fast.
I was not able to make Howdy [2] work properly, and the fingerprint reader was not reliable compared to my MacBook, however.
[0]: https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89
[1]: Add this to the grub file : GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="amdgpu.backlight=0"
The wifi issue was pretty much what made me give up on the Thinkpad and go back to the Macbook, where I can set up my work environment pretty quickly and not have to deal with other random issues…
Magnificent ThinkPad model. Too bad the soldered-on RAM precludes the possibility of using ECC modules. The Pro version of the Ryzen CPU means ECC compatibility.
afik not a single ryzen laptop uses ECC from the factory and documentation on compatibility is pretty horrible; this is the only thing stopping me from making the leap.
Good laptop, but with a few small drawbacks:
- No vapor chamber cooling, just regular heat pipes
- Monitor has thick borders
- Not 16:10
- Fn/Ctrl are swapped (all thinkpad laptops)
- Thinkpad's fingerprint readers never worked reliably to me
- I personally prefer USB-C network adapter instead of the bulky RJ45
- 720p camera, but most of laptops have a bad web cam...
- I assume it will have very average speakers. Usually Lenovo puts a "DOLBY SOUND" label on laptops with improved sound quality.
Fn/Ctrl can be swapped in BIOS
Large bezels to easily adjust the screen position without touching it, and RJ45? Exactly like I like them. Sorry! %)
Unfortunately, putting a good camera into a laptop is a challenge. With the screens / lids being so thin, nothing really good, like a phone camera, can fit in.
And I also don't trust biometry auth anywhere. Biometry should be a login, not a password, because you can't revoke or replace it.
Wouldn't the dongle be even bulkier than a built in RJ45?
Lenovo's web site is especially frustrating. They expect customers to know the differences between ThinkPad, IdeaPad, Yoga, etc, and then between the subdivisions like ThinkPad E vs P vs X, etc.
It would be far more customer-friendly if Lenovo made it very easy to say, show me all 15 inch laptops with any dedicated graphics card, and let's go from there.
Almost all laptop makers' websites are absolutely horrible. The worst I've seen is Dell's, where for some reason every ~10 seconds a distracting popup jumps into the screen. And the device comparison feature is useless, it just shows the same summary as usual but side by side. I had to look for minutes to see that a price difference between two models came from the 13" and 15" size difference...which was a single digit difference in a ~10-item list without any highlighting.
It's weird how manufacturers are imitating Apple at every step unless it's an improvement in UX.
But all of them are great, people in this "thread" are aiming at P series and XPS laptops, but from a performance perspective these aren't that great.
I'm on my 3rd Thinkpad (P52, P1 Gen 2, P17) and had a Dell 17" XPS 9700 in the mix. The Dell was horrible. It's intake vents were on the bottom so if you put it on a soft surface like a couch or bed, it would immediately overheat to the point of turning off within 5 minutes. I tried everything. Never got the webcam or speakers to work in Linux. Keyboard sucked.
But every Lenovo I use is fantastic. I like the rugged look and bulkiness. I don't buy my laptop to look cool; I buy it to code, run vms, compile fast, and get work done. Lenovos have excellent Linux compatibility and the best keyboards anyways.
Duh, I didn't notice you can configure ThinkPads, might have gone that route if I knew. I ordered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro that is sadly limited to 16GB, but otherwise seems to be a huge success. High-res 90Hz 16:10 display, 5800H, good Linux support out of the box. I just hope the memory won't become a constraint. At least it was considerably cheaper than ThinkPads at 960€.
I considered this one but IMO not having dual-channel memory on such a super strong CPU is crippling it. :(
Plus yeah, 16GB is too small.
If it wasn't for that, it is IMO the perfect programmer laptop.
A few months ago, I bought a nicely packed and customized P14s Gen 1 in France (Qwerty !) with 16GB and 400 nits for under 1000 euro.
Wow that's a great deal. Via some discount coupons or was it second hand?
I have a P14s with a 4750U and it flies through Pop!_OS. Wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anybody.
Given the 4k display, is a 16x9 aspect ratio acceptable for a premium laptop? There's no way in which I find the 16" 16x10 screen on a MacBook Pro to be too large. It even fits into a generic bag designed for 14" laptops due to being thin. A 15" 16x9 is only 1/2" narrower than a 16" 16x10, and a 15.4" is only 1/8" narrower. Physical vertical space for the screen is 'free' and glaring when seeing that blank space between the 16x9 screen and the keyboard.
I suppose if you always use twin vertical terminal windows all is well. Graphical apps (and web pages) often consume too much vertical space and isn't always feasible to get that back.
I bought this exact model the other day, two days later it was cancelled and a refund was issued as they no longer had the 4K panel in stock. Looks like I'm going to miss out on these AMD CPUs this generation and have to go with an XPS 13 instead.
How did you buy it if the website shows a message that it is not available yet?
I have one of the newer Dell XPS 15 laptops. Installing linux was a breeze, upgrading the storage and memory took less than half an hour, and the display is gorgeous. The downsides are that it's performance is certainly throttled quite a bit, and it's awkward sitting it on your lap due to its sharp edges and density (far less comfortable than my MBP). It's certainly been a good experience overall, but I think once thinkpad moves over fully to more reliable displays in the 16:10 ratio I'd probably choose those.
I've bought numerous Thinkpads and I still can't find myself using them daily because of the awful trackpads. It's not even the tracking, it's the amount of force you need to put on the trackpad to get it to register a click. Also the lack of media keys on Thinkpads is outdated and annoying. If Lenovo fixes these two things I'd gladly use a Thinkpad as my daily laptop.
I tried to order the P14s with the AMD 8 core for a new hire at work recently, but unfortunately had to cancel the order after they told me there would be 4+ months of shipping delays. It's too bad the supply chains are still struggling to keep up. We ended up getting an E15 instead, since it could arrive within 2 weeks, but it's about 1/2 the specs we wanted.
> There's only one company in Slovenia that does warranty repairs and takes the law-specified 40 working days to finish their job (replacing a battery, for example).
Is there a law that says that repairs must be done within 40 working days and so the repair shop takes the full 40 days? Is this because they have no competition or are supply/resource constrained?
For a small and light laptop with 40 GB RAM and a 8+ hour battery life that's linux first, I have to say I'm happy with my System76 lemur pro 9 that I bought in March 2020. No 4K but I don't need it on this machine.
No key replacement service, but lenovo will actually sell a replacement keyboard for you[0]. And they have videos on their website on how to replace the parts.
Where did you buy it and for what price? For me it just says 'coming soon' on the official homepage.
Is the P14s exactly the same as the T490? I'm looking at the photos online and the ports and layout is identical to my T490 that I am typing this comment on. I wonder if I can swap the internal components / motherboard?
Having to build out-of-tree drivers to get that Realtek WLAN card to work sounds like a real pain, it's good that Lenovo ditched that stupid PCI ID whitelist. (I think? I haven't had a ThinkPad in quite a while.)
I bought a T14s at the beginning of the year after 5 year of XPS 13 9350. I'm happy with the T14s but from a design perspective (eg bezel wise), it's a step back- especially considering the 5 years in between.
I own one of these. Upgraded from my Surface Book 2. No complaints so far, except that the Fn key is where the Ctrl key should be and I keep pressing the Fn key :)
Are the trackpads anywhere close to macbooks yet? My XPS 13 is still awful and my previous thinkpad is worse than the XPS.
I want to give thinkpads a try, but I just don't trust Lenovo enough.
I have used a Thinkpad as my laptop, and I would say that it is worth the buy. It is relatively better compared to other laptops in that similar price range.