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I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

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Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#141

Post by herbst »

taffronaut wrote: post #29

I had a visitor over the holidays who needed to work but didn't have a laptop. I had 2x old T420 (released in 2011) so I combined the RAM and did a fresh OS install. My only hassle was finding a DP cable. Other than doubling the RAM, this was still a stock machine from 2011. CPU benchmark scores for this T420 are comparable/better than sub-£400 new x86 laptops available at big box stores which was the other short-ter…

I've used a T420 as daily driver until just recently. It went travelling around the world with me, fell from rather high places, got wet more than once and much more.

My new 460s is mostly just better because it's lighter. Performance plus is only noticeable in games and such stuff.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#142

Post by bungle »

archi42 wrote: post #135
maccard wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high This isn't true for all programmers. I'm a programmer, and until 3 years ago a good chunk of my day was spent waiting for compiles to finish. > Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe. Not even remotely close. I have an AMD threadrippe…

Thanks for taking the stand here; generally new laptops are fast and especially the M10 max seems like a nice rig that beats some desktops for some programmer workloads. Maybe even many desktops for most programmer workloads, IDK. But besides not all programmer workloads being equal, desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different. Also, I'd like to add memory constra…

My 2010 Mac Pro has 48 GB of RAM, this 2021 M1 Max has 32 GB. So not much has changed on that respect either. Except on 2010 I imagine it was struggle to get even 16 GB on a laptop.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#143

Post by bjarneh »

dotancohen wrote: post #112
bjarneh wrote: post #43

After upgrading the display, CPU, disk, RAM, fan, battery it's a bit click-baity to say you've gone back to a 2012 ThinkPad - but interesting read non the less. What surprised me the most is that Lenovo ships something as annoying as a loud fan (easily replaceable even for a home tinkerer). Of course they save a few pennies per laptop; but no laptop can ever be good if it's noisy. That was one of the main reasons why…

I've got a dozen ergonomic and mechanical keyboards. The feel of the keyboard is very important to me, just like a good fountain pen. So when my employer was giving to me a new Thinkpad I was excited. Thinkpad was the only laptop whose keyboard I could stand. This T-14 has a keyboard as horrible as any Asus. It looks exactly like the standard Thinkpad keyboard, but the key travel, the bottoming-out, the spring pressu…

The corner cutting seems to have started the moment IBM sold ThinkPad to Lenovo. The fact that ThinkPad used to sell laptop keyboards for desktop use, says it all:

http://www.notebookreview.com/picture/?f=48072

It didn't take more than a couple of years before Lenovo discontinued this gem either; in favor of a cheaper alternative (in terms of production cost).

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#144

Post by DoingIsLearning »

NGRhodes wrote: post #30

I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty, put new batteries in and they are usually far better in every way than anything new for the same price. Am currently very happy with my T460S, runs Linux or Win10 great. My previous machines that the kids use for school work and Roblox are x250 and x220, and previous to that I have an X200 and a T61, that all last…

> I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty

I am curious if this a US thing only. I mean, I've heard of company vehicles in second hand market but never company laptops. In my experience all these company laptops get decommisioned by IT never to remove any data, but I never really considered what happens at End-of-life for those.

A few questions:

1. Where do you find these retailers?

2. Where do you find suppliers selling new batteries for old devices?

(all of my previous attempts at finding replacement batteries for laptops and e-readers always resulted in very poor performance or even faulty battery packs)

edit: formating paragraphs for questions

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#145

Post by maccard »

archi42 wrote: post #135
maccard wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high This isn't true for all programmers. I'm a programmer, and until 3 years ago a good chunk of my day was spent waiting for compiles to finish. > Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe. Not even remotely close. I have an AMD threadrippe…

Thanks for taking the stand here; generally new laptops are fast and especially the M10 max seems like a nice rig that beats some desktops for some programmer workloads. Maybe even many desktops for most programmer workloads, IDK. But besides not all programmer workloads being equal, desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different. Also, I'd like to add memory constra…

> Also, I'd like to add memory constraints as an example of workload inequality: The M10 max only seems to support 64GB

That's a really good point. In my last job, our machines had 256GB of memory to fully utilise the 3990x cores.

> desktops also compromise high end platforms like your sTRX4, and those are a little bit different.

They're a little bit different, but they're still mainstream, readily available desktop envioronments. You can go on Scan here in the UK and order one of those systems just like you can order any other intel or AMD system.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#146

Post by znpy »

black_puppydog wrote: post #65

I find it funny how people seem to fixate so much on the fact that the author upgraded various components to say the title is misleading. As someone with apparently similar requirements, the take-away from this should be this: Even though significant work is required to keep these old machines working, some people prefer to do so. Crucially, they prefer it not because they love tinkering, but simply because the value…

> the value propositions of 2021/2022 hardware doesn't look better

I'm glad you managed to distill my feelings so clearly.

Most new things are just gimmicks, it's pretty rare that good innovations come into the laptop area.

Think of stuff like non-16:9 displays: older thinkpads had beautiful displays that were amazing for doing actual work. Now we're seeing 16:10 displays coming back, and it's awesome.

The ThinkPad T42 I had in high school had a 14" 1400x1050 display and writing documents was very comfortable. Then a dark age came, and all laptops had 16:9 displays... Editing a document in Word/Writer was a pain in the ass. Between the title bar, the windows icon bar (start menu and iconized applications) and the various office toolbars (and the f-ing ribbon toolbar) you could barely see the text you're writing. It was really moronic.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#147

Post by lproven »

duckmysick wrote: post #106
black_puppydog wrote: post #65

I find it funny how people seem to fixate so much on the fact that the author upgraded various components to say the title is misleading. As someone with apparently similar requirements, the take-away from this should be this: Even though significant work is required to keep these old machines working, some people prefer to do so. Crucially, they prefer it not because they love tinkering, but simply because the value…

It's a classic case of the Ship of Theseus. https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/shi...

No, it isn't.

The entire point of the "my grandfather's axe" or "my grandmother's broom" story -- of which Theseus' ship is the original -- is that there's nothing of the original left, but replacement was gradual so there's a feeling of continuity.

Whereas this is the original laptop with some upgrades. Same chassis, same motherboard, same screen, same (IMHO, bad) keyboard, but more RAM, more & faster disks, and a new CPU.

This is not Theseus' ship, where nothing was left.

The point of this story is that an end-user with normal tools can, at home, repair and upgrade a decade-old Thinkpad, but you can't do that with the new ones.

The subtext is that in fact CPU performance isn't increasing much any more, and hasn't in a decade and a half. GPU performance is a bit but most of us don't need it, same as most of us don't need lots of CPU cores in a laptop. SSD performance is improving, somewhat, yes. Size, a lot.

New laptops aren't that much faster than old laptops. Unless you're very demanding, old ones are good enough.

So laptop makers, who need people to keep buying new laptops or they'll go out of business, are making laptops that you can't fix or upgrade any more.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#148

Post by maccard »

bungle wrote: post #137
maccard wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high This isn't true for all programmers. I'm a programmer, and until 3 years ago a good chunk of my day was spent waiting for compiles to finish. > Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe. Not even remotely close. I have an AMD threadrippe…

Yes, definitely not true for all programmers. I guess with games, if you cannot get real time with instant compiles development experience with 120fps running 8k in debug mode, there is a room for improvement. I compared highend 2010 desktop to highend 2021 laptop on my use case (which is arguably much lighter). And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor (which is great, but not a leap from 2010 de…

> Yes, definitely not true for all programmers. I guess with games, if you cannot get real time with instant compiles development experience with 120fps running 8k in debug mode, there is a room for improvement.

Day to day that doesn't matter. I work on multiplayer games, and being able to run 8/12/16 clients on one machine at 10 fps at ultra low graphics is far more important than being able to run stupid resolutions. You do bring up another point though - GPU performance. Apologies for the links but I'm on my phone, but [0] and [1] have 3dmark benchmarks for the M1 GPU and an RTX 3090 GPU - the 3090 scores twice what the M1 GPU does. This might not be important to you, but it is to some people.

> And for my workloads, the laptop is no more a limiting factor

Ultimately that's all it comes down to. If you're not limited by the form factor/performance of a laptop power to you, but some of us are!

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-GPU-Benchmarks-an...

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3090-GPU-Be...

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#149

Post by vurpo »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #144
NGRhodes wrote: post #30

I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty, put new batteries in and they are usually far better in every way than anything new for the same price. Am currently very happy with my T460S, runs Linux or Win10 great. My previous machines that the kids use for school work and Roblox are x250 and x220, and previous to that I have an X200 and a T61, that all last…

> I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty I am curious if this a US thing only. I mean, I've heard of company vehicles in second hand market but never company laptops. In my experience all these company laptops get decommisioned by IT never to remove any data, but I never really considered what happens at End-of-life for those. A few questions: 1. Where…

I live in Finland, and simply by Googling in Finnish I can find several companies reselling used company laptops, and there's at least one local one that I can physically go to (I've bought a used monitor from there, and they always have stacks of ThinkPads in the store when I go in).

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#150

Post by salamandersauce »

zhdc1 wrote: post #117
javchz wrote: post #88

My main Laptop it's a T430, and from time to time I use a T440p. It's amazing how you can disassemble the whole thing with only one screwdriver and upgrade almost everything. The T420 keyboard mod it's what's stopping me from upgrading to a newer model. Don't get me wrong it's not mechanical or anything, but has the comfiest layout I have tried on any laptop so far. There are some drawbacks: * New batteries are rare…

> The display it's bad You can retrofit a 1080p lcd with a controller board and a little effort. > M1 Macbooks are probably the best cost-benefit laptop out there for a lot of people (battery, display, cpu power), and I kinda want to try one. But I don't feel comfortable voting with my wallet for Apple's practices, especially with how hostile they have been with the "right to repair" movement. I'm not a particular fa…

Faster hardware maybe but I think the ThinkPad has other benefits, like being easy to repair and upgrade. I'm extremely frustrated at my 2018 MBP, I stupidly went with the cheaper 256GB option and really wish I could just pop in a 1TB drive. Plus once the honeymoon period with macOS ended I'm now essentially stuck with an operating system I've grown to hate as support for Linux is dismal even with the latest kernel 3+ years on (No keyboard, trackpad, WiFi, Audio, suspend support plus more little issues!). An x220 or other ThinkPad should be very well supported. M1 macs have more interest from Linux devs right now but I'd be hesitant to pick one up unless it runs Linux perfectly now out of the box with most distros.

I have seriously contemplated picking up an X220 or some other old ThinkPad even though the hardware would technically be a massive downgrade.

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