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ThinkPad X1 Carbon

www3.lenovo.com

281–290 of 540 posts

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Errr.... T530 had titanium cover and endoskeleton chassis. My friend routinely walks over his while it's powered on, as a demonstration. How is it possibly an example of a "plastic, flimsy, bendy" laptop? Yes it has screw holes and grills... it's a working-person's laptop :). The new ones don't, because they're becoming more like apple - which means I cannot as easily replace battery, hard drive, memory, etc as I do…

Yes, this is Hacker news. Since when did having screws accessible to the user become a bad thing?

The screws are accessible on my MBP 2015. They are just not in recessed screw holes, and are flush with the body of the laptop.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy The Carbon X1 is made from carbon fiber. It super-robust and light-weight at the same time. It feels light years ahead of the super-heavy aluminium-nonsense Apple is trying to peddle. Count me happy my laptop doesn't double as a bench-press.

When we got accepted into YCombinator back in 2011 (Mailgun), I remember PG looking at our Thinkpads running Linux and asking something along the lines of "what's wrong with you?" , with almost [1] all YC teams using Macbooks. I wonder if it's the Valley culture? There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad [2] for programmer productivity: the keyboard, the UltraNav, the swappable batteries (you can f…

> there is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad

Isn't this one of those YMMV kinda things that really depends on the person, though? It seems equally wrong to say that no one could be productive on a MBP as it is to say that no one could be productive without a MBP.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we got accepted into YCombinator back in 2011 (Mailgun), I remember PG looking at our Thinkpads running Linux and asking something along the lines of "what's wrong with you?" , with almost [1] all YC teams using Macbooks. I wonder if it's the Valley culture? There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad [2] for programmer productivity: the keyboard, the UltraNav, the swappable batteries (you can f…

I don't understand it either, the thing that always gets me is most developers setting up vagrant on their Mac just to get a working environment. Cut the bullshit and just run Linux on the bare metal, your program will run faster, and your laptop battery life won't be halved. You will have to claw my x201 out of my cold dead hands, I've not found a single notebook (even the newer ThinkPads) that are as comfortable to…

> Cut the bullshit and just run Linux on the bare metal,

I run Linux on Linux via vagrant, it's not about my program running faster it's about isolating a client projects dependencies from each other so when I have to work on that system that is still in production on PHP Current-1 or Ruby-1 I don't have to fuck with my host OS at all.

In fact I have very few developer bits and bobs installed on the host (mostly just JetBrains stuff) and all the actual tooling is run in the VM, this makes for far easier deploys for myself since my process is

pull projectname/(site||name), pull projectname/vagrant, vagrant up.

It takes me less than 30 minutes from reinstalling to having half a dozen projects with all their weird dependencies and cruft installed and I never have to worry about breaking something else or needing to blow away a machine for some reason.

I'm happy to trade some performance for running damn near everything in a guest OS for that.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#284
I've had the X1 Carbon 3rd gen (Refurbished) for a few years now as my personal laptop. I don't do much heavy lifting with it, mostly League of Legends, Counter-strike, and some side programming. But it's my favorite laptop I've used. The 14" size is perfect for me and I like the feel of the rest of it. Performs well and didn't break the bank.

(I've always owned windows PCs, though I've used MBP at work for 2 years now, and have had a MacBook Air that I resold because it was too small and didn't have a niche to fill after my ultrabook and my ipad.)

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Linux is a bit finicky on it? I use a Surface Book as my main computer and it's absolutely wonderful. I get a PC in tablet form with a pressure-sensitive stylus when I want a tablet and I get a moderately beefy laptop with a dedicated GPU when I want a laptop.

> I use a Surface Book as my main computer I've heard that it's fantastic hardware but had lots of software and driver teething problem, what's your experience with that?

Picked up my SurfaceBook the day they were launched - there were definitely teething issues, sometimes the detaching process would fail, there were sleep issues (not sure if Intel cops the blame for that one).

All of these issues have been resolved with firmware updates by about 3 months after launch - reliability has been rock solid from then on out. Can't recommend it enough.

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#287

I want to be excited by a good non-Apple laptop. But they're all just so terribly designed. They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy, have grills and screw holes and uneven surfaces and stickers everywhere. I had a T530 for a few years at my first job and just hated it. It had fantastic specs but it felt awful and unreliable and like I had to babysit it. I got a 2015 MBP to replace it after IT damag…

Errr.... T530 had titanium cover and endoskeleton chassis. My friend routinely walks over his while it's powered on, as a demonstration. How is it possibly an example of a "plastic, flimsy, bendy" laptop? Yes it has screw holes and grills... it's a working-person's laptop :). The new ones don't, because they're becoming more like apple - which means I cannot as easily replace battery, hard drive, memory, etc as I do…

At least on the T-models I'm aware of, the important parts are still easily accessible. And the rest is also replaceable, it just may require some more work.

Here's for example the maintenance guide for T560 http://ok1.de/thinkpad/HMM/t560_p50s_hmm_en_sp40k04930.pdf

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're always some sort of plastic, feel flimsy and bendy The Carbon X1 is made from carbon fiber. It super-robust and light-weight at the same time. It feels light years ahead of the super-heavy aluminium-nonsense Apple is trying to peddle. Count me happy my laptop doesn't double as a bench-press.

When we got accepted into YCombinator back in 2011 (Mailgun), I remember PG looking at our Thinkpads running Linux and asking something along the lines of "what's wrong with you?" , with almost [1] all YC teams using Macbooks. I wonder if it's the Valley culture? There is no way a Macbook can compete with a proper Thinkpad [2] for programmer productivity: the keyboard, the UltraNav, the swappable batteries (you can f…

I used to be a strong Thinkpad adherent. But then Lenovo really jumped the shark, and I moved to a MBPr 2012 which was not even remotely in the same class as my T410s it was so much better.

Maybe they are better these days, but I need to spend more time with one. But they changed the keyboard, the trackpads were almost laughable, and the battery life was an utter joke - not even enough juice for a MSP-LAS flight. Not to mention (at the time) laughable resolution, and miserable build quality compared to the IBM nameplate T-series.

I'm looking for a nice 14-15" laptop like an old T60 that is built like a tank with amazing battery life.

It's tempting for me to try the T-series line again, especially if they bring back the classic keyboard they so stupidly did away with. But for some time it was utterly stagnant and more or less unusable trash.

I want to like the X1 Carbon

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#289
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 300 nits, the display is going to be mediocre at best. Even the P50 4K display which I think is supposed to be 350 nits is dim and really quite awful. HP and Dell have much nicer screens these days.

Good point. My trouble with the display isn't so much brightness but contrast and color range. I can attribute that partially to the touch layer, but, in all honesty, I just find it an eyesore in general. I use the same wallpapers on my Mac and Windows machines (a set of coloured trianglify patterns), and EVERYTHING looks so much nicer on the Mac that it's just sad.

>coloured trianglify patterns

I searched for this on Google to have a look and found a neat tool which I think is worth sharing.

https://qrohlf.com/trianglify-generator/

Re: ThinkPad X1 Carbon

#290
As someone looking to replace my 2013 13" MBP this is almost exactly what I want.

Enough has already been written about the new MBPs and why many of us will no longer consider them. I've already tried the Kaby Lake Razor Blade Stealth but returned it due to shocking quality and support issues. I considered the Asus Zenbook but it has too few ports to be a serious contender and the HP offerings all have screens with a lower resolution than I want.

I've always avoided Lenovo, party because Apple were building machines I wanted and partly because my experience of Lenovo to date has been low end cheaper models which suck. I'm willing to give them a chance at the upper end with this though. The sooner to market with this the better

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