171–180 of 595 posts
I too had a Thinkpad T400, in about 2013. Compiling my undergrad university course code made the music I was listening to skip. Modern software sucks, I can not imagine using a core2duo to do any task other than ssh/word processing
I wish that Framework could attain the same lofty levels of "second hand market success" that ThinkPads enjoy. A lot of the "Thinkpad fans" I've talked to genuinely want them, or respect them for similar reasons they enjoy the ThinkPad legacy. ThinkPads are durable but every day they get older, slower and more difficult to source parts for as collectors entrench themselves and the requirements of operating systems (a…
> enough Thinkpads on Earth to probably stretch end-to-end around the moon and back LD, average distance between Earth and Moon = 384,399,000 m [1] C = circumference of moon = 10,917,000 m R := approximate round trip distance = 2LD + 0.5*C = 774,256,500 m n = total number of thinkpads on earth Alas, T / R, the ratio of total thinkpad distance T to our lunar round trip distance R, is at most about 0.11 . This is with…
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My new company of about 100 persons uses ThinkPads as their 'standard issue' laptops. Which I guess is great. I have a T480 privately. But modern ThinkPads are not as great as before, and I was just thinking about if the Framework might make a nice 'standard issue' laptop for the company. I guess it might be just fine!
When would you define as “before”? I’ve had a thinkpad on and off and I’d describe the quality as consistent. People talking about old Lenovos being good quality are often talking about in the pre-IBM days which is far more likely to be nostalgia at this point.
Also the Fn key is where the Ctrl key should be, which is endlessly annoying as a user of different laptop brands.
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When would you define as “before”? I’ve had a thinkpad on and off and I’d describe the quality as consistent. People talking about old Lenovos being good quality are often talking about in the pre-IBM days which is far more likely to be nostalgia at this point.
Not sure what GP means but I gather the x230 era (2012?) has a cult following. I picked one up a few years ago when a laptop died and I didn't have the cash for something new: it is still my daily driver and I'm not replacing it til it dies. By contrast, I know someone who got a T480 second hand and it lasted six months. My guess is the 2012 era was when the change happened
Among a few: The keyboard switch from the old 7-row (whose pinnacle was at the x220/T420 era with double-height esc and del) to the new 6-row (with later ever decreasing key travel) to the current x9 (which is basically just a yoga keyboard with no trackpoint, no key grouping, and the loss of pgup/pgdn). Things like the modular battery options vanished. The case got flimsier over time with e.g. the magnesium rollcage first vanishing from the display, then from the base. (And no - from enterprise experience - the carbon fiber composite isn't generally "as good or better", esp. for failure modes like punctual force on the display. Or...grabbing the laptop by the display and using it to fan your BBQ, which doesn't faze my old X41 :) ).
Having run some hardware for about 20 years (recently deceased), the problem that eventually happens is that newer OSes drop support for old hardware. If you hit some weird bug on your setup on a new OS release, there won't be anyone to help you fix it[1]. So then you're stuck on an old OS. In time, that means you can't run the latest userland software either, which relies on more modern OS features (eg: your Firefox…
Thanks to Linux I have kept my memory need low (8GB IIRC)
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It won't get you to the moon, but you can squeeze out a little more distance by arranging them corner to corner.
We must either increase the production rate of T480-size thinkpads by around 9x or get Lenovo to release at least one special edition extreme widescreen thinkpad specialised for lunar round trips
My main use these days is recording and mixing music through an interface from 2014. With Reaper the experience is even better than when I picked the laptop up back around 2010.
The tightness of hardware integration isn't a bug, it's genuinely a feature; In fact, it's the defining feature that makes Apple hardware great. Socketed RAM, CPU, and Storage just weren't worth the tradeoffs, namely size, weight, cost, and performance. Including those modular interfaces just wasn't worth it when the internal interfaces would be obsolete within 5 years, and the average user was replacing sub-componen…
The whole setup (allegedly) fits inside original chassis, too, and disk speeds are about the same. So the only real tradeoffs for Apple are cost and the fact that user can swap in third party parts instead of paying obscene prices Apple charges for spec upgrades.