Hooray! Now can we get a decent OS for them? (No, not Windows.) (No, not Linux.)
TempleOS?
*snort*
Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
231–240 of 255 posts
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ifixit, the same guys that gave the new Macmini 8/10 for repairability? They're totally biased to mainstream products IMHO especially Mac products. Then they give this Laptop a 10/10. One look at the internals and without a shadow of doubt it's not as as repairable friendly as framework laptop. Not sure what they are smoking. Yea someone else said it but bios updates on certain models can be hit or miss. But definite…
> Full disclosure: iFixit has an ongoing business relationship with Lenovo, and we are hopelessly biased in favor of repairable products. Bottom of the page
It should probably read "hopelessly biased over shinny new products that have the appearance of repairability over other products that are actually repairable so that we can promote companies that contribute to the unreparibility of technology without really holding the industry accountable"
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#233Their scorecard seems to get updated regularly, but based on current "non-legacy" scores we have:
10, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 and T16 Gen 5
10, Framework Laptop 12
10, Framework Laptop 16
9, Lenovo ThinkPad L16 Gen 2
9, Lenovo ThinkPad 13w 2-in-1 Gen 3
9, Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Gen 6
9, Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 7
9, Lenovo ThinkPad E16 Gen 3
9, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 6
9, Lenovo ThinkPad T16 Gen 4
9, Lenovo ThinkPad E16 Gen 2
9, Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 6
9, Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Gen 5
9, Lenovo ThinkPad T16 Gen 3
9, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5
8, Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 3
8, Microsoft Surface Laptop 7
7, Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 3
5, MacBook Air 13″ (M4)
5, MacBook Air 15″ (M2)
5, MacBook Air 13″ (M2)
5, MacBook Pro 14″ (M1)
4, MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5, 2025)
https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R_egXm7iwR0isCt_UxcG...
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#234Yikes. Has iFixit jumped the shark? An AI generated press release on behalf of Lenovo, who is (from my perspective) essentially paying them for good PR? And this paid relationship - Lenovo paying iFixit - isn’t disclosed until the very last line of the article, so you have to first read 1500+ words of AI slop? That made me start looking into their scores. The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a p…
Hey, I head the editorial team at iFixit and honestly appreciate the feedback. Totally fair to suggest we should've flagged our relationship with Lenovo at the head of the article. It's a tricky thing, to figure out how to message our business relationships with companies when we're also scoring their devices. I've added a fuller note about our business relationship with them to the beginning.
What Lenovo pays us for: They send us devices. We score them and report internally on their repairability. Lenovo has actually made their repairability snapshot reports public, so you can see some of the documents we've given them, for instance: https://www.ifixit.com/Document/sunTY6dbbJvOMRjP/Repairabili...
What Lenovo doesn't pay us for: Any particular score (they've worked really hard for the 10/10). This blog post/press release.
There are other companies paying us for similar services, and most of them do not get 10/10s or glowing coverage on our site. Companies don't get any extra credit for working with us instead of providing repair in another way.
To be clear, our repairability scoring is an objective system that involves engineers taking apart dozens of devices in each category to calibrate each scorecard. Making a new scorecard takes us hundreds of hours. Giving a score to a product using that scorecard is also a time-consuming human thing, disassembling a product, building out a disassembly tree (like the one in the snapshot I linked above), turning the process into something legible to our spreadsheets.
M5 MacBook vs. ThinkPad E14 Gen 7, the ThinkPad wins on modular storage, modular memory, battery replacement is dead simple, it’s easier to get inside, and you only need a Phillips screwdriver and a pry tool for most common repairs. A lot of the concerns you bring up ("easily breakable," "flimsy") are matters of durability. We generally prefer clips over glues, and we didn't find the clips to be unusually breakable in our testing. Durability matters, but we try hard to separate it from repairability in our scoring. Assemblies and soldered ports absolutely played into why the E14 Gen 7 didn't get a 10/10.
Re: AI-generated prose... we do indeed use LLMs to support our small team of human writers when drafting content. That said, we don't publish anything without multiple humans reviewing. In this case, we were thorough in our human fact checking, but I agree we missed the mark on style.
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#235Earlier 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.
> I don’t think I have ever seen ram fail.
I think making it impossible to upgrade is a somewhat bigger problem, at least while the machine is still in-warranty.
Traditionally, RAM has been one of the more-common upgrades to make as needs or budgets change, so soldering it in looks like planned-obsolescence.
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#236I have the ThinkPad p16s AMD gen 2. What it lacks in name it makes up for with being the most headache-free computer I have ever had (including a Macbook). Everything works pretty well out of the box, it never really overheats, Linux support required basically no effort with NixOS, the keyboard feels pretty nice, the screen is bright and easy to read, and fortunately I bought it when RAM prices weren't insane so I go…
For me, that’s the older(?) T15g Gen2. Maxed out a reasonable i7 /4k screen/16GB 3080 mobile configuration when SSDs and memory were dirt cheap.
Feels like the old A31p in practical grunt but thinner and easier to maintain.
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never update your BIOS unless you have a specific bug that needs fixed. I remember a Thinkpad BIOS update ended up destroying both undervolting and overclocking, and required a "chip-clip" programmer to revert.
Most of the laptop BIOS updates are now for CVEs and other security fixes, from my experience. You don't have much choice but upgrade.
These are for "security" against the user, to be fair.
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#238I absolutely loved the fact thsr ifixit repeatedly gave a disclaimer that they had a business relationship with Lenovo - no snark intended.
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
You're entitled to your preferences. In my opinion: Functional: - battery life - screen resolution (binary, 2k for laptops), brightness (binary: works in the sun or not), viewing angles (binary: good enough vs not), color (binary, good enough vs not) etc - connectivity options - ram - build quality etc etc Aesthetic: - color - finish - refresh rate - OS theming, animations and all that - material When you say "why wo…
I understand it not being a priority for a lot of people but it's odd to me that there appears to be resistance to it. It is very easy for you to reduce the refresh rate if you need to maximise battery life, but I have no option to increase it beyond what the hardware supports.
I wonder how much reduction we could see in eye strain, nausea, fatigue and headaches if higher refresh rates were normalised.
I remember one time showing a non-techy person the difference between a "Pro Motion" iPad Pro vs a lower spec iPad. They probably had no idea what refresh rates were before I took a moment to scroll up and down in the web browser for about 5 seconds side-by-side. They had their "ohhhhh" moment and bought the much more expensive Pro on that basis alone.
Enjoy your blissful ignorance, I guess?
Re: Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had linux on every laptop I've owned for years, and I haven't really had a problem with any of them running linux, except for display port support on a dell xps. Aside from that one dell laptop, though, I generally avoid HP and dell entirely, so perhaps that's why.
In 2013 I bought a laptop that I kept five years that had an Nvidia Optimus. I never really figured out how to get the discrete card working consistently, and since then I haven't bought a laptop with an Nvidia card. I've had issues with wifi cards and sound drivers and the like as well, though it's going a lot better now than it was a decade ago.
Weird. I must have uncommonly good fortune, as I don't think I've had Wi-Fi or sound issues for longer than that. I remember when I first tried out swaywm and having some sound issues because I also started moving to pipewore from pulseaudio, but nothing from an out of the box install of a decent distro.