ThinkPad T420

I still think my (coming up for) thirteen-year-old Lenovo T410 laptop is my 'peak-laptop' machine, even though I have replaced it with a more modern Lenovo P53. And that was mainly due to the P53 having a slightly larger display screen with 4K pixels. And it took me twelve months or so to finally settle on the P53.

The T410 was just a more enjoyable machine overall to use.

I had a T410 for a while, really enjoyed the 14 inch size and the keyboard. However the screen was relatively poor, not bright and poor viewing angles.

As nice as some of old-ish business and workstation laptops like Thinkpads, Latitudes, and Precisions are in some ways, one aspect that’s looking increasingly aged is battery life and brick size. I don’t necessarily need my laptops to be powerhouses, but it’s nice to not need to carry the charger brick most of the time, and on the odd occasion I do it’s better if it’s not literally a brick.

I have a circa 2008 15.4” Precision that I’ve upgraded quite a lot thanks to its modularity and expandability, and it’s still pretty serviceable except that even with a brand new larger-model battery it’d be a stretch to get 4-5 hours of life out of it, and its charger brick is monstrous. It’s a stark contrast to a 16” M-series MBP, which is also a high-performance (if not quite workstation) class laptop, but gets somewhere between 2-4x the battery life and can charge up overnight with a compact 30W USB-C phone charger without any adapters.

It’d be interesting if one of those projects that retrofits old ThinkPad shells with modern mainboards were built around an ultra-efficient ARM SoC instead of the usual x86 fare. That’d address the issue pretty well.

I am a long time ThinkPad user. I've replaced screens to add IPS, re-pasted CPUs, changed out 'clunkpads' and all the rest.

Not so long ago, my employer bought me a Dell Latitude. I think it's a 54xx. It has a pen-capable touchscreen and it is the best laptop I've ever owned. I don't care if it ever gets upgraded.

T420 can be modded easily to have 1080p full hd IPS screen, 4C8T ivy bridge CPU and 16GB ram. The only thing it's missing is usb3 which can be solved with a cardbus extension card. W520's full hd screen is not IPS (and can't be modded) so viewing angle is somewhat limited (but still ok for a laptop of its age). The discrete GPU on w520 is indeed better than the integrated GPU in ivy bridge but still hopelessly outdated for pretty much any graphics intensive task today so you are probably better off saving some battery life by not having it.

Btw X220 can be modded to have a 2K 16:10 display (I'm using one rn), although it's a nontrivial mod. W520 is the only model that can't (or at least hasn't) be modded at all.