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ThinkPad X1 Carbon

www3.lenovo.com

291–300 of 540 posts

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#291
post #5

As someone who is constantly on the road, having a built in sim card for connectivity is something I'm super excited about. This could be the 2016 MBP we wanted, but switching to windows still sounds difficult.

Why do you find that better than tethering to a phone? The last thing I want is a separate mobile account for my laptop.

I have a 4th generation x1 carbon, and having a built in sim card is way nicer. With 2 clicks I can connect to 4g vs getting my phone out, turning tethering on, and then connecting to my hotspot. (Not to mention the extra battery drain from tethering).

Project Fi allows you to add extra data sims for free, so the cost is the same as tethering.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#292
post #232

I want to be excited by a good non-Apple laptop. But they're all just so terribly designed. They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy, have grills and screw holes and uneven surfaces and stickers everywhere. I had a T530 for a few years at my first job and just hated it. It had fantastic specs but it felt awful and unreliable and like I had to babysit it. I got a 2015 MBP to replace it after IT damag…

My "plastic" dell latitude laptop feels more solid than my macbook pro 13. Plus is has way more comfortable keyboard compared to mac (at least for me).

Linux runs pretty well on my e7440.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#293
post #259
post #57

It is almost perfect. I would love real 4 core i7 with 8MB L3 cache CPU for laptops, instead of the 2 core (4 threads) with 4MB. Edit: 6th generation of mobile Intel CPUs have models with 4 cores and 8MB of L3 cache (i7-6970HQ), using 45W [1]. However, in 7th generation there are only 2-core models [2]. [1] http://ark.intel.com/products/family/88392/6th-Generation-In... [2] http://ark.intel.com/products/family/95544/…

They'll have the 4C model in the T470p http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Classic-ThinkPad-models-...

Thank you! :-D

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of developers love their Macs and I don't get it. For me OSX 10.6 was the last decent one. Mission Control is garbage compared to Expose. I got so frustrated with it that I started running Linux in a VM on my Mac as my primary system. I also got into tiling window managers, which killed every going back to Mac/Windows. Today's Dell and Lenovo laptops are good Linux dev machines. I've never had a problem with pu…

Mac OS X 10.6 was great. I remember when Apple released it saying, 'no new features'. Just bug fixes and speed improvements. We need one of those again.

Snow Leopard was super stable. I can't remember a single crash.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's the keyboard? I'm so so sad that most laptops' keyboards are terrible... You can't imagine. I so much would love to buy an ASUS or similar laptop as the one you purchased, especially since they are affordable, but every time I check some laptops, their keyboards are beyond terrible. It's a shame, really. I will have to stick to Thinkpads.

If you really cared about the keyboard, they all suck. Get an external mechanical keyboard. I've used one with Cherry MX blue switches at two jobs and no one has threatened to murder and/or fire me yet. Guess I'm lucky. :)

On Cherry Browns, my managers believed that I was more productive because they could hear lots of key noise.

I have Cherry Blues at home but wouldn't dare use them in an open-plan office environment - far too noisy.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Errr.... T530 had titanium cover and endoskeleton chassis. My friend routinely walks over his while it's powered on, as a demonstration. How is it possibly an example of a "plastic, flimsy, bendy" laptop? Yes it has screw holes and grills... it's a working-person's laptop :). The new ones don't, because they're becoming more like apple - which means I cannot as easily replace battery, hard drive, memory, etc as I do…

Yes, this is Hacker news. Since when did having screws accessible to the user become a bad thing?

When they became less fashionable and calling yourself a "hacker" because you use social media became fashionable.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#297

I want to be excited by a good non-Apple laptop. But they're all just so terribly designed. They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy, have grills and screw holes and uneven surfaces and stickers everywhere. I had a T530 for a few years at my first job and just hated it. It had fantastic specs but it felt awful and unreliable and like I had to babysit it. I got a 2015 MBP to replace it after IT damag…

Errr.... T530 had titanium cover and endoskeleton chassis. My friend routinely walks over his while it's powered on, as a demonstration. How is it possibly an example of a "plastic, flimsy, bendy" laptop? Yes it has screw holes and grills... it's a working-person's laptop :). The new ones don't, because they're becoming more like apple - which means I cannot as easily replace battery, hard drive, memory, etc as I do…

There are so many factors to consider in a laptop: CPU and TDP, memory, disk, screen size and quality, size and weight, keyboard, track-pad, maintainability, OS, price ...

Different people give these factors different weights according to their resources, needs and preferences.

There is one more factor - the image the laptop projects. To each his own, but if you give the image a high score compared to the other factors - be honest about it.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#298
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a look at the ZenBook range. The range looks decent, but the 15'' has a hard drive (!) (no option to choose SSD only, apparently), a numeric keypad (!!) and the highest-performing model is a dual-core i7 with 16GB RAM — so aside from the price, not a good alternative to a MBP. (I find the shiny brushed aluminium look to be embarrassingly tacky, though not quite as bad as the rose gold model.)

Not true, you can find them with SSDs. For example heres a revieew for one: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ZenBook-Pro-UX501VW-Notebo... Also unlike in Macs you can buy extra RAM to go above 16GB.

Thanks. Weird, I didn't find that model on Asus' site.

Shame about the keyboard not coming in different variants, though. I am sure that some people like numeric keypads, but ever since my first PC cirka 1992 I've always hated them. It's the last thing I need on a small laptop.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#299
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to this generation of the machine, but I've had a decent experience with Ubuntu on the 3rd gen Carbon X1. I have constant issues with the wifi, though... networkmanager needs to be restarted a couple times a day or else the OS will just lose connection and say wifi is disabled. There is also a general sluggishness, especially when web-browsing, that I have not yet tracked down. All in all, though, it is…

Interesting that your wifi experience sounds terrible, but you've given it a "decent" rating. For me, wifi concerns are among the most important. Thanks for the feedback.

This is pretty standard for any wifi connection in Ubuntu for me over 3 machines with 3 different wifi cards in 16.04

You get to restart network manger so it will do things like list wifi networks or reconnect to a network after suspend, it gets fixed for a few weeks, and then the issue comes back a few patches later.

sources:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+b...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+b...

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Razer Blade has similar unibody metal chassis as Apple laptops and is not coated in stickers. I have the Blade Stealth and its just as sturdy and sleek as the Apple equivalent.

I never hear anyone mention the Razer Blade's and yet they seem to be the best looking and spec'd non-Apple notebooks by far. They are almost too good to be true. What's the catch? Have you had any issues running Linux on them?

As a gaming laptop they're not great. The reason is that, for example, one model had a GTX 970M, which sounds good but the thermal performance is such that the GPU is near constantly throttled resulting in questionably worse performance than similarly sized and specked machines with a 960M part.

That's just poor thermal design. You know you just don't get that with MacBooks (you don't get a 970M either of course).

Personally I'm passing on this generation of MBPs. Will Apple wait another 2 years to update them? I'm just not convinced that this isn't now an iPod market for Apple.

Instead I ended up getting a Dell XPS 15. Having a Linux subsystem is pretty nice. It's nowhere near as polished as the Apple experience but for $1300 (including upgrades) I got the base machine and put a Samsung 950 Pro and 32GB of RAM into it, so that's nice.

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