Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability • Hacker News Board

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#201

Post by bondant » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC

megous wrote: post #38

I love this. T14 gen 7 was the first NB I a actually bought for myself, and it's great to know that USB-C ports can just be replaced that easilly without soldering and that it was designed from the start with repairability in mind. Non-A USB ports is something that always ends up failing.

> it's great to know that USB-C ports can just be replaced that easilly

Yes exactly! To me it's surely the biggest win. It's very easy to break them when the power chord is plugged in. I'm really pleased that we will now be able to fix them without having to change the whole motherboard (which surely very few people do because of expansive and how ridiculous it sounds)

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#202

Post by samusiam » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

alabhyajindal wrote: post #4

Nice very cool. Unfortunately, the blog post looks like it's been generated by an LLM. > Going from a high score to the highest score isn’t usually about making minor tweaks. It requires fighting for every small, boring, consequential decision—the ones that determine whether a repair isn’t merely possible or practical, but within easy reach.

I can recall reading human-authored text like this for more than a decade.

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#203

Post by batperson » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 11:20 AM UTC

huddert wrote: post #189

nirava wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 50hz is fine. I'd go so far as to say, barring any medical or sensitivity issue, if any person prioritizes a 120hz screen they are a victim to habit or marketing. It adds zero value to the experience, and you're just looking for things to be annoyed by / brag about. Modern displays are already cutting edge. They have improved in every way that's meaningful in the last 35 years. Refresh rate is just not meaningfu…

"Even 4gb of memory is fine", "even 720p is fine", "even 2ghz CPU is fine", "even a membrane keyboard is fine", "even USB 2.0 is fine", "even 2 hours battery life is fine"... Yeah it's all "fine". If these were the specs of the only laptop available to me then yeah it would be "fine". I could get things done. One or more of those things are deal-breakers for an awful lot of people. For me, a rubbish display is a deal…

These are business class laptops, there's no dedicated GPU. Where are you're going to utilize this high refresh rate? I'm pretty sure 99% of the time the integrated graphics would be working hard to churn out 120 frames of static views.

I bet the vast majority of people would be perfectly happy to have 60hz display, longer battery life, and save a few bucks at the same time.

Funny bonus anecdote: I reinstall my OS in december, only a few weeks ago did I realize it wasn't set to 144hz but 60hz, since I was busy with work since and didn't play any games I did not even realize.

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#204

Post by latexr » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 11:59 AM UTC

aloha2436 wrote: post #128

latexr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I only hope the models get good enough to not be so samey in the future. Why would you hope to be more easily fooled?

Not GP but I'm personally hoping that if I'm inevitably doomed to be exposed to this horseshit every day that it becomes tolerable to read. For world-shaking language-based superintelligences, they can't write to save their very expensive lives.

> I'm personally hoping that if I'm inevitably doomed to be exposed to this horseshit every day that it becomes tolerable to read.

Thank you for replying, but that doesn’t answer the question. Why would you want to make made up bullshit output more tolerable to read? Being intolerable to read is a feature, it’s a useful signal to know a piece of text may not have had human review, and that you should spend your time reading something else.

I use that same strategy with website consent banners. If a website is so invasive that they go out of their way to make rejection hard (which, by the way, is against the law), I know it’s a company not worth supporting.

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#205

Post by latexr » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 12:01 PM UTC

sureMan6 wrote: post #97

p1necone wrote: post #18

Damn, everyone is using AI for copyediting now aren't they? Once you notice the patterns you see it everywhere. * "This isn't X. It's Y" * "Some sentence emphasizing something. Describing the same thing with different framing. Describing it a third time but punchier. * The em-dash of course * A hard to describe sense of "cheesiness" I only hope the models get good enough to not be so samey in the future.

> everyone is using AI for copyediting now aren't they? If the studies that say that humans prefer AI writers are to be believed then you'd be a fool not to

Depends on the type of human you want to attract.

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#206

Post by Markoff » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 12:04 PM UTC

cbenz wrote: post #12

WD-42 wrote: post #10

This is great. I’m still rocking a nearly 10 year old T470s. Great machine with Linux on it, still snappy enough- Tailscale is there when I need to do serious work (on my desktop at home!) I replaced the batteries a few months ago and it was painless.

Same here. The only problem is that I "only" have 24Gb of RAM. I wish I could upgrade but it's a hard limit. And keyboard quality seems to have been degrading over the years since 2020. Is this new model good in terms of keyboard?

You can have more than 32GB RAM in T470s (btw. I'm using T480s with 40GB RAM)

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/bibx3p/t470s_supp...

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#207

Post by Epskampie » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 12:30 PM UTC

huddert wrote: post #160

mushufasa wrote: post #29

This commitment by Lenovo must have been driven by customer demand -- in this case, the IT departments. I wonder how much of that demand may be attributed to questions about comparisons to Framework. Even if Framework is not mainstream, it has mindshare among the IT-crowd.

Framework is a great concept but they will die due to poor execution. If I hadn't already recently bought a Framework (and knew what I do now about them) I would've held out for one of these new Lenovos. I don't think Framework can compete if one of the established players joins the game.

I've got a framework 13, pretty happy with it. Everything works as expected under the newest ubuntu. Build quality is good enough for me.

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#208

Post by bigtex » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 12:35 PM UTC

doubled112 wrote: post #47

varispeed wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the issue with the soldered on RAM wasn't the fact that it was soldered, but that manufacturers would use chips that are not easy to source and in some way serialised. So even if you got larger chips, you would still have to figure out other parts to swap that tell the CPU it's 32GB now, not 24GB.

Being soldered on is a huge issue to 99% of people and businesses wanting to repair or upgrade something. I don’t have the tools or skills to replace soldered on memory chips when they fail. Nobody at my place of work does. Nobody was doing that type of work in a warranty centre I worked in either. I’d need to buy an entire motherboard which will much more expensive, and likely more time consuming, than swapping a co…

In the almost 30 years of using Mac’s at home and various desktop pc’s in the workplace I don’t think I have ever seen ram fail. Replaced plenty of old school failed disk drives however.

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#209

Post by wink » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 12:55 PM UTC

epalm wrote: post #101

Aren’t these the guys that preinstalled a root certificate to MITM you ads? Not something that can be casually forgiven.

I would agree if I booted the preinstalled Windows even once and not install Linux the minute it arrives.

Like, no, we should absolutely not forget that, but the impact for me is low, and I prefer to have the superior hardware.

Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability

#210

Post by doubled112 » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

bigtex wrote: post #208

doubled112 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being soldered on is a huge issue to 99% of people and businesses wanting to repair or upgrade something. I don’t have the tools or skills to replace soldered on memory chips when they fail. Nobody at my place of work does. Nobody was doing that type of work in a warranty centre I worked in either. I’d need to buy an entire motherboard which will much more expensive, and likely more time consuming, than swapping a co…

In the almost 30 years of using Mac’s at home and various desktop pc’s in the workplace I don’t think I have ever seen ram fail. Replaced plenty of old school failed disk drives however.

Lucky. Working in repairs I was only seeing the ones that didn’t work, and I’ve seen failures of just about everything. It probably skews my experience.

One time upgrading workstations, 4 of the 20 Corsair kits were sent for RMA. Those aren’t great odds.

I would guess that soldering them to the board reduces the points of failure, the slots can and do fail. However, I’ve also seen soldered components coming off as the cause of failures, but it is usually a part that gets hot combined with a design flaw.