Agree that CPU and disk (and maybe ram) haven’t improved enough to warrant a new laptop, but a 3200x1800 screen really is an amazing upgrade I don’t want to downgrade from.
I love my new 4k screen for text stuff.. Sadly on linux it seems to be pain in the ass to scale this appropriately and correctly. Even more with different resolutions between screens. So far windows does this quite well.
The text looks much crisper, so you can use smaller font sizes without straining your eyes if you want more screen real estate. Or you can just enjoy the increased readability.
Note: YMMV. Some people love it and report significantly reduced eye strain and increased legibility, some people don’t really notice a difference.
well you have a much sharper font and can go nearer if you want (like with books). I get eye strain over time from how pixelated text can appear at evening to me. Also you can watch higher res videos and all in all it looks really crisp. See also you smartphone, mine is already using a 2k screen, and you can see how clean text etc is.
You may want to just get an 2k screen (and maybe 144 FPS?) as that may already be enough for you. I just took the gamble and wanted to test it. Note that I probably got a modell with an inferior background lighting, so it’s not the same around the edges when I’m less than 50CM away. I also took the IPS panel for superior viewing angle as I’m using it for movie watching also. YMMV
My RTX 2070 GPU can’t play games like destiny on 4k 60 FPS without 100% GPU usage and FPS drops the moment I’m more than walking around. So I’ll definitely have to buy a new one if I want to use that.
I also just got a new 4k monitor, and that’s bothering me also. It’s only a matter of time before I fix the glitch with a second 4k monitor… Maybe after Christmas
I ended up doing that. It sucks, but Linux is just plain bad at HiDPI in a way Windows/macOS is not. I found a mixed DPI environment to be essentially impossible.
This is where I’m at too. I’m not sure I could go back to a 1024x768 screen or even a 1440x900 screen even. I have a 1900x1200 xps 13 that I really enjoy which is hooked up to a 3440x1440p ultrawide.
Might not need all the CPU power, but the screens are so so nice!
Oh I’d love to have a 4k laptop. I’m currently using a 12” Xiaomi laptop from 2017 with 4GB of RAM and a 2k display. After adding a Samsung 960 evo NVMe and increasing Linux swappiness this is more than enough for my needs - but a 4k display would just be terrific!
Until March this year I was using an x200, partly because I’m a nerd and wanted to use libreboot and partly because it just kept working and working.
Most old laptops are fine for day to day use if you stick an SSD in there and maybe upgrade the RAM, get a not-too-bloated linux distro.
Now I have a T495, it’s fine. I miss the keyboard off the old one and it feels far less well built. I also miss the 4:3 screen.
The biggest thing that keeps the x200 in the cupboard now is the screen brightness. It’s a small detail, but it’s so so dim compared to anything you get on later models. In the light it’s hard to use, and I have a bright living room. I even replaced the panel which improved things, but not enough.
When I compare the two, the x200 at 100% brightness is about the same as the T495 at 10%.
Great writeup, lots of practical advice. I’ve dabbled in similar projects in the past and it worked well when I had efficient software for the things I wanted to do. The sharp edge I kept hitting over and over again is modern websites with lots of javascript. On the one hand advanced web applications are the saviour of the Linux desktop user—an opportunity to interoperate in the same services as your closed source peers—but on a 10–15 year-old CPU and with few GB of RAM it just sucks. If you enjoy playing with NoScript all day maybe it’s okay but I’m not willing to go that far. Until my usage patterns change I’m stuck on the treadmill even for my non-work computing.
Isn’t this overstating the impact of NoScript a bit? You generally turn it on for a website you want to use that doesn’t work with JavaScript disabled and that’s it. It works from then on.
For many “modern”, “user-friendly” websites, the JavaScript bits that are actually useful and have a functional impact over the website are actually only a (n often very tiny) subset of all the JS code that runs when you open that website. Lots of the JS code that runs is advertising and/or tracking code that you can disable and still not lose functionality. Once all that crap is turned off, 10 year-old CPUs can sometimes handle a page just fine, but you do have to fiddle with it a little and… yeah.
Oops, I don’t think that makes a difference – I think I was misremembering how NoScript works. I haven’t used it in a while.
Do you have an example of a page that you think doesn’t work well on 10+ age cpu? I have a cpu that was not the latest back in 2007 and there are a few tasks where it starts to show (such as multiparty videoconference in 4k or unaccelerated webgl vr) but haven’t had issues with run of the mill webapps yet.
There are more reasons to not buy a new laptop: in most cases, you are forced to buy a license for an unwanted proprietary operating system. Laptop CPUs are also equipped with malicious spyware technologies like Intel AMT/ME. By buying a new laptop, you vote with your money for these legacy and harmful technologies and unethical practices.
I am looking forward to laptops with OpenPOWER and RISC-V processors… Until that, I will probably not buy a new laptop.
Less harmful / compromise solution might be a DIY modular „laptop“ consisting of a portable display, keyboard, mouse, powerbank and a single board computer. It is all reusable components, SBCs are cheap and you can upgrade the parts as needed.
There are such machines available now: Puri.sm, System76, Pinebook Pro, MNT/Reform, EOM68, even the Novena - last three on Crowd Supply - and the Dell XPS 13 (but only for the preinstalled Linux). There’s even a group working on a PPC notebook.
I have spent a comparable amount of money as the author over roughly the same time period (~5000CAD: nx7010 (2003), Black Macbook (2009) and a 16G 2012 Retina MBP and it’s still running fine but the other day I hit my first resource limitation… storage space to do something (Docker for Mac needs a bunch). Yes I can order a bigger SSD (and probably should, 8.5 years is a long time for an SSD) but my wife is thinking about a machine (she only uses her 5 year old ipad and phone) so I am looking at a new machine and would hand down the MPB to her.
Thinking about the System76 Lemur. Its: User upgradable (assuming it’s not maxed out at order time), servicable (ie replace the battery), IME disabled, CoreBoot and linux preinstalled and has resonable specs otherwise. Whichever (and if) I order a new machine, I am targeting a 5-8 year life span for it.
ME disablement is misleading. It removes a lot of the functionality of the ME, but it’s still running, has to be running, and is still unauditable and unreplaceable (for now) code in the booth path (since it does bringup).
Yep but if it can’t be the ideal, then it should be as close as possible to the ideal. Ironically I am typing this on an even more closed system.
As an update I’ve ordered upgrades (4GB RAM and a 256GB SSD) for my wifes white Macbook (circa 2008) and a new (larger) SSD for my MBP. I’ll put linux on the Macbook so she’ll have something current software wise and I won’t be running out of space. I expect to get at least a couple years more out of each.
Check your local classifieds (or equivalent source) for companies that purchase and refurbish IT gear locally. Most big enterprises dump a ton of gear in bulk, every year, based on accounting needs.
There is a ton of really good hardware out there for a real discount. I’ve picked up quite a few surprisingly gently used Thinkpads for next to nothing this way over the years.
… as for the article … many of these laptops also have mSATA slots so you can also pick mSATA SSD instead of 2.5 SATA drive. The 2.5 SATA drives are cheaper but as those oldschool ThinkPads have many slots one can even create ZFS RAID5 on mSATA + internal SATA + caddy SATA drives if needed. Definitely doable in a ThinkPad W520/T520/T420/T420s laptops.
One of the most neat ‘hacks’ that I am aware of (for ThinkPad T420/X220/W520) is to remove the Bluetooth module and put there the adapter for additional internal USB-A 2.0 port [1]. This way you can either put there a tiny Pendrive USB for system boot or put there mouse wireless USB stick (like Logitech Receiver) and you have one more of the external ports available.
Other thing is adding two additional USB 3.0 ports to these laptops as they provide Express Card slot. Just use [2] and you have two additional ports. For some laptops that would be only USB 3.0 you have - like T520 or T420. Only T420s (all) W520 (all) and X220 (only i7 ones) have at least one USB 3.0 port.
Its also quite ease to replace T420s 1600x900 screen into the FHD screen. Its about $200 for the screen and $100 for the mod kit. W520/T520 already have variants with FHD screen.
Modding X220 for FHD is one step more since you need to use Display Port for it, but its doable.
Personally I only added mSATA SSDs and SATA SSDs to these laptops. I also added the Express Card USB 3.0 to W520 but IMHO its best use would be for Bhyve Passthru to have USB ports in the Bhyve VM as W520 already has 2 x USB 3.0 ports and 2 x USB 2.0 ports … but the FHD mod on T420s is tempting :)
There’s a lot about this article I like (and the site - powered by solar power and sometimes offline/ cute!) but the xenophobia towards Chinese people is not acceptable.
This seems like an overreaction to me. There’s exactly two comments about China/Chinese people:
The Chinese don’t have a reputation for building quality products
and
The Chinese may not have a reputation for building quality products, but they sure know how to fix things.
But:
statements exhibiting prejudice != xenophobia.
reporting on a reputation is just stating a fact: this is indeed the reputation Chinese (consumer?) products have. You can’t infer the author thinks the reputation is accurate, especially given how they acted (they bought the Chinese product anyway).
even if you believe the author does think the reputation is accurate: you don’t know how many experiences they have with Chinese products. Their belief in the accuracy of the reputation may be supported by their own experiences
A jab against the quality of products is not a jab against the people producing the product. Even if the author phrases it using the unfortunately common conflation of a country and its people.
it’s human and useful to generalize: a generalization isn’t necessarily problematic, unless the conclusions are extended too far. They aren’t suggesting you don’t buy Chinese products or only let things be repaired by a Chinese person, are they?
The Chinese don’t have a reputation for building quality products
The funny thing about this one is that not only does the person saying it come off as prejudiced, they’re also out of touch.
Almost any electronic device made today is built in China, with components also made in China. From high end Apple products down to bottom of the barrel knock offs. Just being made in Chna doesn’t say much about quality any more.
I agree with the parent, this also rubbed me the wrong way. Even just having “the Chinese” in your vocabulary is too much IMO, no matter whether it displays xenophobia or just unreflected prejudice.
The author’s native language is Dutch, in which it’s still idiomatic to say ‘the Chinese’ to mean ‘the Chinese people’. It used to be idiomatic in English as well, of course, but it has gathered negative connotations in the past few decades. That’s something his proofreader should’ve picked up.
As regard the statements about the quality of Chinese electronics and workmanship, yes, I could do without those as well.
The author’s native language is Dutch, in which it’s still idiomatic to say ‘the Chinese’ to mean ‘the Chinese people’. It used to be idiomatic in English as well, of course, but it has gathered negative connotations in the past few decades
Im curious how else you would say it? Would you attribute it to the country and not the people? i.e. China (or Chinese manufacturers) don’t have a reputation for quality?
Is the issue attributing it to a people as a whole?
Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand the issue.
There is a condescending tone at play though, which generalises Chinese people (e.g. the guy that repaired his laptop) to members of a group and refuses to treat them as individuals.
I don’t take issue with the literal meaning of those sentences, but given their tone and cultural context, I think it’s rather insensitive and unhelpful.
The second occurrence was referring to a repair shop they sent it to. So unless that shop was in China (I don’t think they say so, so I assume not) they’re referring to the ethnicity of the shop worker.
MacBooks are made in China, so if you can agree they’re at least on par with X60 build quality, the point falls apart. Perhaps you could say Lenovo chose a subpar Chinese supplier, but that hardly indicts the whole country.
I enjoyed my X200s until hardware failure & blue screens, and my old X61s is in a closet (some sort of display issue). Eventually, these machines wear out. I find MacBooks at least as well-designed/-built, and the M1 ain’t too shabby, so while I miss the 12” ThinkPads I’ll be fine.
I wrote my reaction to this on social media when I saw it earlier yesterday. Copying it here since I don’t feel like rewriting it; pardon the obviously flawed writing.
i used to do this for years, but stopped. i actually valued having useful battery life (yeah, you can throw a new battery in it, but power management on thinkpad has traditionally been awful) and throwing more batteries at it will destroy the lifespan of them (thinkpads traditionally sucked the ultrabay battery dry, because you guessed it, power management!) and a screen that wasn’t eye-straining to look at (my X230t came closest with the IPS panel but it is not a good panel.
as someone who’s used thinkpads for years, they are incredibly overrated. for the reasons above. if i were to do continue doing that, i’d probably go for let’s notes (ideally, but i’m not in japan) or latitudes (ugly as fuck, but better built and even more easily available). hell, i was livid when i got a thinkpad X40 (i like them smol) and it was thinner and lighter than all my newer thinkpads.
but i decided suffering like that on a laptop wasn’t probably sustainable if i wanted to use laptops. i’m a lot happier with the M1 MBA i have now. (i pretty much only bought it for the SoC, but was pleasantly surprised how nice of a laptop it is.) not only is it an actual measurable improvement in terms of performance, it actually gets good battery life, has a good screen that is actually ok to look at, and is light enough i can actually take it places, when most laptops are a pain to bring unless necessary. (hell, even the 2013 MBA i got this year outclasses my thinkpad of the same age in pretty much every metric.)
I have the same strategy since ~2010. I spend ~200 EUR / laptop / 5 years.
For my work - web design and development - the cheapest machine on the market is good enough. On that I run Linux to provide me a shell, a browser and a code editor. And occasionally Gimp / Inkscape to edit images and graphics.
I stopped little later. On 2011 laptops such as T420s/X220/W520.
Some make one step more and buy T430s/X230/W530 and mod them with T420s/X220/W520 keyboard.
I really like frankenpads such as T62 or X330 which use old cases with new motherboards and screens.
Currently there is no new laptop that would have a real 7-row keyboard. Not. Single. One.
The last one was ThinkPad 25th Anniversary Edition from 2017 but it was limited to 5000 units only.
If someone would now force me to get a new laptop I would get something with bright FHD screen and got a wireless mechanical 87 keys keyboard for it.
I really can not understand why Lenovo would NOT provide a permanent classic/retro line of X220/T420s/W520 successors such as the limited ThinkPad 25th Anniversary Edition from 2017 …
I also really miss ThinkPad X300/X301 as these were never really replaced by anything … and do not start with ThinkPad X1 Carbon - its a different kind of beast.
Not buying new laptops saves a lot of money, but also a lot of resources and environmental destruction. According to the most recent life cycle analysis, it takes 3,010 to 4,340 megajoules of primary energy to make a laptop
Facepalm.
Order the Printed Website.
The website is available in book form and is printed on demand. Two volumes are available (1,328 pages, 427 images).
The embodied energy of a sheet of paper is about 140 kJ according to the internets, coming to about 200 MJ for a book of 1338 pages. So if you only use the laptop for browsing that website, it’s probably more efficient to buy the book :)
You use the laptop to read not only this website, right?;) nor buying new laptop for each new site. But a book needs to be printed and delivered to each visitor of the site.
What if everyone on web will read web by books? We will be out of trees day one 🌲
This is just stupid activism without any meaningful impact on our planet. And if such people get some power… well, we all be fucked. Just take a look at greenpeace.
The author seems to anticipate a future of collapse; most of his writing is about technology that works without today’s complicated supply chains, or even electricity, like tile stoves (for me as a west-European, these are magical. I gather they are pretty familiar to those in Central and Eastern Europe) and wheel barrows From such a survivalists’ perspective, a printed book has advantages a laptop does not :)
As for stupid activism, the battle so far seems to be between the people who feel the environment is valuable, but never paid attention to bookkeeping, and the people who are otherwise famously good at bookkeeping, but insist there’s no value in doing it for the environment.
There’s a growing number of people jumping ship from the second to the first group, but given the choice, I’m siding with the first :)
“The environment” is a nebulous term covering everything from saving pandas to topsoil maintenance. The latter is a precondition for organised human civilisation; the former is a cute creature that natural selection wasn’t choosing (yes, slightly unfair to pandas, but they really are not good at being an animal even if you leave them their habitat)
My point is what we can consume as many energy as we want. No point in preserving planet as is. With high consumption we will get better economy which produces more money for scientist to develop fusion power, gmo food and maybe(maybe) if we lucky - immortality for humans.
No point preserving the systems that feed us and protect us from fire and floods, on the basis of some future technologies that may or may not come to fruition?
I’m not suggesting littering everywhere, or spilling oil to the ocean. Questions of priority. Just buy a new laptop if you will be more productive with it, add a value. Not just trying keeping footprint as low as possible. No truth in that.
Right, but these are points on a continuum, not separate. Littering is more convenient than finding a bin, and abandoning a stricken tanker is cheaper than rescuing it.
“Minimising your footprint” is not a good utility function by itself, but it’s currently ignored almost entirely by many.
That’s exactly what we’ve done! We have fusion power harvesters operating near the peak of what’s physically possible. These will provide effectively limitless energy, but we need to transition our economy to them in time.
Maybe a better economy will increase scientific output. But the annual operating budget of Delta Airlines is 40 billion. 28 years of development on ITER will have cost about 65 billion, and government spending is the only reason it happened at all. There’s no good reason to believe the market will allocate most of its energy and resources to bootstrapping a fusion economy.
Once my laptop specs included an SSD, 4 hyperthreads, and 4GB of RAM performance just got good enough.
I bought a Lenovo Carbon X1 around 2013 and in the last 7 years the only thing I noticed was that every once in a great while I wished I had 4 cores instead of 2 (8 hyperthreads instead of 4). Now that it’s no longer my main development machine, I actually think it will be a suitable personal computer for many years to come.
recommending these to fiends at the moment who are on low budget. any tips? best performance point / screen option? any maintenance tips, e.g. replacing battery?
Not too many tips since I don’t shop very often ; ), and I’m not sure what “low budget” is, but the laptop I mentioned before costed roughly 2k when I bought it and now can be had for < $400.
As a developer that laptop was my work and personal machine for about 5 years of working from home doing software development.
RE: maintenance: I’m lucky enough that I’ve had surprisingly few things break. I’ve replaced battery on a HP pavillion laptop from 2010 and it’s still going strong (it’s just heavy). My wife replaced the heat sink on the same laptop. I find that older laptops are more user serviceable.
In comparison I just haven’t had to do any service at all for my X1. Battery life is excellent, although it doesn’t really matter for me because I use my laptop like a desktop replacement. Power is always around.
I rode the “used Thinkpad” train for a long time, then finally bit the bullet and bought a new P1 Gen2 last year on mega-sale because: 1) it should last me 5-6 years pretty easily, and 2) there are multiple SSD and RAM slots so I won’t be storage or memory-constrained any time soon.
It replaced two old laptops and a power-hungry desktop workstation, and as long as I can get replacement batteries it should happily end up being my “used Thinkpad” in 4-5 years, and under full warranty for three of those.
For notebooks I only have 2-3 years old Thinkpads from my office, but I use them less and less. Why?
I turn 50 next year, and while one can buy glasses and lighting and external keyboards and stuff, I only can work longer hours at a proper workstation with decent display, a proper keyboard, and a proper display position for a straight spine.
The better and faster I learned typing the more I hate notebook keyboards.
You’ll will not notice during work, but after the work there is a huge difference. 8-10h at a notebook, and you can not focus your eyes properly to the distance at night (your eyes’ lenses will dehydrate while focussed in near field state during the day and need a whole night’s time to soak in fluids again during the night. Like your spinal discs which lose water during the day, and refill during the night).
The problems with notebooks are suboptimal keyboards with sometimes quirky layout, too glossy, too dark screens, cent-sized speakers, and much too short a distance between you and the display.
I stopped working while travelling about three years ago (2018 flu season) when I decided to become a car driver again, due to multiple infections in a row from the public transport systems.
So at the moment I have my home servers in the basement and a 32” screen with tilt/swivel stand, with a NUC Mini PC mounted to the VESA mount points. Kind of portable, but a hack… its not the fastest, the NUC’s WLAN reception is a joke, I find it more often in thermal throttling.
I’m fighting with myself to justify either a purchase like this https://acmeportable.de/products/megapac-l2 or to build a own transportable case for (display/mini PC board/psu/decent keyboard and maybe even proper speakers). This could also be done very light, with edges from ash wood, face areas from poplar plywood and stitched and glued together with copper wire like wooden canoes.
I used to use an X200s as my daily (with ultrabase), that computer was so enjoyable with the 1440x900 screen, excellent keyboard, and 10+hr battery life with a 9-cell (since it had a low-power core 2 duo chip).
Modern browsing got pretty sluggish on it towards the end, and I know I could mitigate that with NoScript but that is more and more difficult to do especially when we use GitHub here for work.
I miss the old thinkpad build quality a ton, but I can say screens have improved SIGNIFICANTLY which makes me feel less-bad, especially when 99% of the time I’m just docked to my desk with a 1440p ultrawide + mechanical kb + trackball mouse.
That said, I think that there’s reason for deep concern in the way software is considered and written: much of what it does could be concretized down to a very few elements if there was a mass will to centralize, remove cruft, and simplify.
Most of the critique given by the Lisp Machine users regarding the following operating systems is still valid and holds. I imagine Oberon OS devs would have a few things useful to say, but they aren’t as noisy.
I’m pretty much the same. My current main laptop is a Lenovo X230 ThinkPad with an X220 keyboard and ton of mods. Most recently I replaced the screen with an IPS version. I plan to keep it as a primary device till the late 2020s, if not early 2030s. I mostly use it to jump to other machines, which keeps the local load low.
I’m still rocking a 2014 toshiba tecra Z40-A-11L, with 8GB of RAM and an SSD. No plans to upgrade. I’ve had to replace the keyboard once, and I almost had to do it a second time after a key popped off (but I managed to bend the metal piece back into place). It’s also missing a few screws from the bottom plate - they tend to fall off. So the built quality is not amazing… but it has survived terrifying falls when I tripped with the charger cable - more than I deserve. I’m still in awe when I remember picking it up from the floor and seeing nothing had broken.
And in terms of performance, it does everything I need. Even if I lock the cpu frequency to 700MHz to save battery, it will be fast enough for the great majority of tasks. 1600x900 is the main downside.
Agree that CPU and disk (and maybe ram) haven’t improved enough to warrant a new laptop, but a 3200x1800 screen really is an amazing upgrade I don’t want to downgrade from.
I love my new 4k screen for text stuff.. Sadly on linux it seems to be pain in the ass to scale this appropriately and correctly. Even more with different resolutions between screens. So far windows does this quite well.
Wayland can handle it ok, but Xorg doesn’t (and never will) have support for per-display DPI scaling.
I don’t see myself being able to afford a 4k screen for a few years but if you just scale everything up, what’s the advantage?
The text looks much crisper, so you can use smaller font sizes without straining your eyes if you want more screen real estate. Or you can just enjoy the increased readability.
Note: YMMV. Some people love it and report significantly reduced eye strain and increased legibility, some people don’t really notice a difference.
I use a much nicer font on my terminals now, which I find clearer to read. And I stare at terminals, dunno, 50% of my days.
This is a Tuxedo laptop (I think it’s the same whitelabel as system86 sells) which don’t feel expensive to me.
Which tuxedo laptop has 4k?
I can’t find them anymore either. They used to have an option for the high res display. I go this one a bit over a year ago:
how was your driver experience ? I’ve had to re-send mine twice due to problems with the CPU/GPU hybrid stack. Though mine is now 3? years old.
Drivers are fine, it all simply works. Battery could last longer.
Yeah ok. I just ordered a Pulse 15. Also wanted a 4k display but didn’t see it anywhere. thanks
hah I’m also using a tuxedo one, but the font is far too tiny on that screen to work with everyday
well you have a much sharper font and can go nearer if you want (like with books). I get eye strain over time from how pixelated text can appear at evening to me. Also you can watch higher res videos and all in all it looks really crisp. See also you smartphone, mine is already using a 2k screen, and you can see how clean text etc is.
You may want to just get an 2k screen (and maybe 144 FPS?) as that may already be enough for you. I just took the gamble and wanted to test it. Note that I probably got a modell with an inferior background lighting, so it’s not the same around the edges when I’m less than 50CM away. I also took the IPS panel for superior viewing angle as I’m using it for movie watching also. YMMV
My RTX 2070 GPU can’t play games like destiny on 4k 60 FPS without 100% GPU usage and FPS drops the moment I’m more than walking around. So I’ll definitely have to buy a new one if I want to use that.
I also just got a new 4k monitor, and that’s bothering me also. It’s only a matter of time before I fix the glitch with a second 4k monitor… Maybe after Christmas
I ended up doing that. It sucks, but Linux is just plain bad at HiDPI in a way Windows/macOS is not. I found a mixed DPI environment to be essentially impossible.
This is where I’m at too. I’m not sure I could go back to a 1024x768 screen or even a 1440x900 screen even. I have a 1900x1200 xps 13 that I really enjoy which is hooked up to a 3440x1440p ultrawide.
Might not need all the CPU power, but the screens are so so nice!
And the speakers.
I love my x230, but I just bought an M1 Macbook Air, and god damn, are those speakers loud and crisp!
For me it’s also screen size and brightness that are important. I just can’t read the text on a small, dim screen.
Oh I’d love to have a 4k laptop. I’m currently using a 12” Xiaomi laptop from 2017 with 4GB of RAM and a 2k display. After adding a Samsung 960 evo NVMe and increasing Linux swappiness this is more than enough for my needs - but a 4k display would just be terrific!
Until March this year I was using an x200, partly because I’m a nerd and wanted to use libreboot and partly because it just kept working and working.
Most old laptops are fine for day to day use if you stick an SSD in there and maybe upgrade the RAM, get a not-too-bloated linux distro.
Now I have a T495, it’s fine. I miss the keyboard off the old one and it feels far less well built. I also miss the 4:3 screen.
The biggest thing that keeps the x200 in the cupboard now is the screen brightness. It’s a small detail, but it’s so so dim compared to anything you get on later models. In the light it’s hard to use, and I have a bright living room. I even replaced the panel which improved things, but not enough.
When I compare the two, the x200 at 100% brightness is about the same as the T495 at 10%.
I don’t think the x200 has a 4:3 screen. The last 4:3 was the x61s.
A lot of those laptops have a screen brightness setting buried in the BIOS, just in case you haven’t already seen it.
Great writeup, lots of practical advice. I’ve dabbled in similar projects in the past and it worked well when I had efficient software for the things I wanted to do. The sharp edge I kept hitting over and over again is modern websites with lots of javascript. On the one hand advanced web applications are the saviour of the Linux desktop user—an opportunity to interoperate in the same services as your closed source peers—but on a 10–15 year-old CPU and with few GB of RAM it just sucks. If you enjoy playing with NoScript all day maybe it’s okay but I’m not willing to go that far. Until my usage patterns change I’m stuck on the treadmill even for my non-work computing.
Isn’t this overstating the impact of NoScript a bit? You generally turn it on for a website you want to use that doesn’t work with JavaScript disabled and that’s it. It works from then on.
IME NoScript’s impact varies greatly depending on how much the thing you’re using spread its code out over different domains & CDNs.
For many “modern”, “user-friendly” websites, the JavaScript bits that are actually useful and have a functional impact over the website are actually only a (n often very tiny) subset of all the JS code that runs when you open that website. Lots of the JS code that runs is advertising and/or tracking code that you can disable and still not lose functionality. Once all that crap is turned off, 10 year-old CPUs can sometimes handle a page just fine, but you do have to fiddle with it a little and… yeah.Oops, I don’t think that makes a difference – I think I was misremembering how NoScript works. I haven’t used it in a while.
Do you have an example of a page that you think doesn’t work well on 10+ age cpu? I have a cpu that was not the latest back in 2007 and there are a few tasks where it starts to show (such as multiparty videoconference in 4k or unaccelerated webgl vr) but haven’t had issues with run of the mill webapps yet.
i’m curious what you consider “a few GB” – I’ve never had more than 4 and always seems like more than enough for the web?
There are more reasons to not buy a new laptop: in most cases, you are forced to buy a license for an unwanted proprietary operating system. Laptop CPUs are also equipped with malicious spyware technologies like Intel AMT/ME. By buying a new laptop, you vote with your money for these legacy and harmful technologies and unethical practices.
I am looking forward to laptops with OpenPOWER and RISC-V processors… Until that, I will probably not buy a new laptop.
Less harmful / compromise solution might be a DIY modular „laptop“ consisting of a portable display, keyboard, mouse, powerbank and a single board computer. It is all reusable components, SBCs are cheap and you can upgrade the parts as needed.
There are such machines available now: Puri.sm, System76, Pinebook Pro, MNT/Reform, EOM68, even the Novena - last three on Crowd Supply - and the Dell XPS 13 (but only for the preinstalled Linux). There’s even a group working on a PPC notebook.
I have spent a comparable amount of money as the author over roughly the same time period (~5000CAD: nx7010 (2003), Black Macbook (2009) and a 16G 2012 Retina MBP and it’s still running fine but the other day I hit my first resource limitation… storage space to do something (Docker for Mac needs a bunch). Yes I can order a bigger SSD (and probably should, 8.5 years is a long time for an SSD) but my wife is thinking about a machine (she only uses her 5 year old ipad and phone) so I am looking at a new machine and would hand down the MPB to her.
Thinking about the System76 Lemur. Its: User upgradable (assuming it’s not maxed out at order time), servicable (ie replace the battery), IME disabled, CoreBoot and linux preinstalled and has resonable specs otherwise. Whichever (and if) I order a new machine, I am targeting a 5-8 year life span for it.
ME disablement is misleading. It removes a lot of the functionality of the ME, but it’s still running, has to be running, and is still unauditable and unreplaceable (for now) code in the booth path (since it does bringup).
Yep but if it can’t be the ideal, then it should be as close as possible to the ideal. Ironically I am typing this on an even more closed system.
As an update I’ve ordered upgrades (4GB RAM and a 256GB SSD) for my wifes white Macbook (circa 2008) and a new (larger) SSD for my MBP. I’ll put linux on the Macbook so she’ll have something current software wise and I won’t be running out of space. I expect to get at least a couple years more out of each.
Check your local classifieds (or equivalent source) for companies that purchase and refurbish IT gear locally. Most big enterprises dump a ton of gear in bulk, every year, based on accounting needs.
There is a ton of really good hardware out there for a real discount. I’ve picked up quite a few surprisingly gently used Thinkpads for next to nothing this way over the years.
How would one find these listings? I regularly check craigslist, and rarely find these things
I’d guess the eBay listings for “thinkpad lot” hit close to the mark, who else would have 5 identical ThinkPads for sale.
I found mine through a combination of googling + “used thinkpad” and Yelp searches for “used laptops”.
I’ve also heard people having success checking for computer repair companies in their town and asking.
… as for the article … many of these laptops also have mSATA slots so you can also pick mSATA SSD instead of 2.5 SATA drive. The 2.5 SATA drives are cheaper but as those oldschool ThinkPads have many slots one can even create ZFS RAID5 on mSATA + internal SATA + caddy SATA drives if needed. Definitely doable in a ThinkPad W520/T520/T420/T420s laptops.
One of the most neat ‘hacks’ that I am aware of (for ThinkPad T420/X220/W520) is to remove the Bluetooth module and put there the adapter for additional internal USB-A 2.0 port [1]. This way you can either put there a tiny Pendrive USB for system boot or put there mouse wireless USB stick (like Logitech Receiver) and you have one more of the external ports available.
Other thing is adding two additional USB 3.0 ports to these laptops as they provide Express Card slot. Just use [2] and you have two additional ports. For some laptops that would be only USB 3.0 you have - like T520 or T420. Only T420s (all) W520 (all) and X220 (only i7 ones) have at least one USB 3.0 port.
Its also quite ease to replace T420s 1600x900 screen into the FHD screen. Its about $200 for the screen and $100 for the mod kit. W520/T520 already have variants with FHD screen.
Modding X220 for FHD is one step more since you need to use Display Port for it, but its doable.
Personally I only added mSATA SSDs and SATA SSDs to these laptops. I also added the Express Card USB 3.0 to W520 but IMHO its best use would be for Bhyve Passthru to have USB ports in the Bhyve VM as W520 already has 2 x USB 3.0 ports and 2 x USB 2.0 ports … but the FHD mod on T420s is tempting :)
References.
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32994301909.html
[2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32945347890.html
There’s a lot about this article I like (and the site - powered by solar power and sometimes offline/ cute!) but the xenophobia towards Chinese people is not acceptable.
This seems like an overreaction to me. There’s exactly two comments about China/Chinese people:
and
But:
The funny thing about this one is that not only does the person saying it come off as prejudiced, they’re also out of touch.
Almost any electronic device made today is built in China, with components also made in China. From high end Apple products down to bottom of the barrel knock offs. Just being made in Chna doesn’t say much about quality any more.
I agree with the parent, this also rubbed me the wrong way. Even just having “the Chinese” in your vocabulary is too much IMO, no matter whether it displays xenophobia or just unreflected prejudice.
The author’s native language is Dutch, in which it’s still idiomatic to say ‘the Chinese’ to mean ‘the Chinese people’. It used to be idiomatic in English as well, of course, but it has gathered negative connotations in the past few decades. That’s something his proofreader should’ve picked up.
As regard the statements about the quality of Chinese electronics and workmanship, yes, I could do without those as well.
Im curious how else you would say it? Would you attribute it to the country and not the people? i.e. China (or Chinese manufacturers) don’t have a reputation for quality?
Is the issue attributing it to a people as a whole?
Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand the issue.
I just wouldn’t make unsubstantiated claims about an entire country.
There is a condescending tone at play though, which generalises Chinese people (e.g. the guy that repaired his laptop) to members of a group and refuses to treat them as individuals.
I don’t take issue with the literal meaning of those sentences, but given their tone and cultural context, I think it’s rather insensitive and unhelpful.
The second occurrence was referring to a repair shop they sent it to. So unless that shop was in China (I don’t think they say so, so I assume not) they’re referring to the ethnicity of the shop worker.
MacBooks are made in China, so if you can agree they’re at least on par with X60 build quality, the point falls apart. Perhaps you could say Lenovo chose a subpar Chinese supplier, but that hardly indicts the whole country.
I enjoyed my X200s until hardware failure & blue screens, and my old X61s is in a closet (some sort of display issue). Eventually, these machines wear out. I find MacBooks at least as well-designed/-built, and the M1 ain’t too shabby, so while I miss the 12” ThinkPads I’ll be fine.
I wrote my reaction to this on social media when I saw it earlier yesterday. Copying it here since I don’t feel like rewriting it; pardon the obviously flawed writing.
I have the same strategy since ~2010. I spend ~200 EUR / laptop / 5 years.
For my work - web design and development - the cheapest machine on the market is good enough. On that I run Linux to provide me a shell, a browser and a code editor. And occasionally Gimp / Inkscape to edit images and graphics.
I stopped little later. On 2011 laptops such as T420s/X220/W520.
Some make one step more and buy T430s/X230/W530 and mod them with T420s/X220/W520 keyboard.
I really like frankenpads such as T62 or X330 which use old cases with new motherboards and screens.
Currently there is no new laptop that would have a real 7-row keyboard. Not. Single. One.
The last one was ThinkPad 25th Anniversary Edition from 2017 but it was limited to 5000 units only.
If someone would now force me to get a new laptop I would get something with bright FHD screen and got a wireless mechanical 87 keys keyboard for it.
I really can not understand why Lenovo would NOT provide a permanent classic/retro line of X220/T420s/W520 successors such as the limited ThinkPad 25th Anniversary Edition from 2017 …
I also really miss ThinkPad X300/X301 as these were never really replaced by anything … and do not start with ThinkPad X1 Carbon - its a different kind of beast.
Regards.
Wow, I did not think this was possible: https://www.flickr.com/photos/106799167@N06/10512559895/ (some remapping is required, apparently but not disastrous)
This is most important part - to flash EC (Embedded Controller) with modded firmware:
https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec
There are also hacked/custom BIOS files that have WiFi card whitelisting - so you can put ANY WiFi card instead of only the supported ones.
Here:
https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Custom_BIOS#Whitelist_Removed_BIOSes
Facepalm.
And this is okay. Who needs trees anyway.?
Trees are a renewable resource…
Let’s calculate it power consumption of growing a tree. Printing a book. Shipping wordwide. Recycling paper. Etc.
Nobody is forcing you to buy it. I imagine there aren’t many (if any) copies sold.
Assuming you don’t burn after reading, that’s some nice sequestered carbon you’ve got there.
This is a really bold claim.
What’s your problem with the lifecycle analysis comment?
The embodied energy of a sheet of paper is about 140 kJ according to the internets, coming to about 200 MJ for a book of 1338 pages. So if you only use the laptop for browsing that website, it’s probably more efficient to buy the book :)
You use the laptop to read not only this website, right?;) nor buying new laptop for each new site. But a book needs to be printed and delivered to each visitor of the site.
What if everyone on web will read web by books? We will be out of trees day one 🌲
This is just stupid activism without any meaningful impact on our planet. And if such people get some power… well, we all be fucked. Just take a look at greenpeace.
The proposal obviously isn’t that everybody uses books instead. The printed web site, like a lot of the authors work, is part art-project.
Perhaps if you took the time to read and understand the people you deride for “stupid activism”, you might understand them and what they want.
The author seems to anticipate a future of collapse; most of his writing is about technology that works without today’s complicated supply chains, or even electricity, like tile stoves (for me as a west-European, these are magical. I gather they are pretty familiar to those in Central and Eastern Europe) and wheel barrows From such a survivalists’ perspective, a printed book has advantages a laptop does not :)
As for stupid activism, the battle so far seems to be between the people who feel the environment is valuable, but never paid attention to bookkeeping, and the people who are otherwise famously good at bookkeeping, but insist there’s no value in doing it for the environment.
There’s a growing number of people jumping ship from the second to the first group, but given the choice, I’m siding with the first :)
Who is more valuable: environment or humans? I think philanthropy is in the corner. We should think of peope first. Not environment.
“The environment” is a nebulous term covering everything from saving pandas to topsoil maintenance. The latter is a precondition for organised human civilisation; the former is a cute creature that natural selection wasn’t choosing (yes, slightly unfair to pandas, but they really are not good at being an animal even if you leave them their habitat)
My point is what we can consume as many energy as we want. No point in preserving planet as is. With high consumption we will get better economy which produces more money for scientist to develop fusion power, gmo food and maybe(maybe) if we lucky - immortality for humans.
No point preserving the systems that feed us and protect us from fire and floods, on the basis of some future technologies that may or may not come to fruition?
I’m not suggesting littering everywhere, or spilling oil to the ocean. Questions of priority. Just buy a new laptop if you will be more productive with it, add a value. Not just trying keeping footprint as low as possible. No truth in that.
Right, but these are points on a continuum, not separate. Littering is more convenient than finding a bin, and abandoning a stricken tanker is cheaper than rescuing it.
“Minimising your footprint” is not a good utility function by itself, but it’s currently ignored almost entirely by many.
That’s exactly what we’ve done! We have fusion power harvesters operating near the peak of what’s physically possible. These will provide effectively limitless energy, but we need to transition our economy to them in time.
Maybe a better economy will increase scientific output. But the annual operating budget of Delta Airlines is 40 billion. 28 years of development on ITER will have cost about 65 billion, and government spending is the only reason it happened at all. There’s no good reason to believe the market will allocate most of its energy and resources to bootstrapping a fusion economy.
Once my laptop specs included an SSD, 4 hyperthreads, and 4GB of RAM performance just got good enough.
I bought a Lenovo Carbon X1 around 2013 and in the last 7 years the only thing I noticed was that every once in a great while I wished I had 4 cores instead of 2 (8 hyperthreads instead of 4). Now that it’s no longer my main development machine, I actually think it will be a suitable personal computer for many years to come.
recommending these to fiends at the moment who are on low budget. any tips? best performance point / screen option? any maintenance tips, e.g. replacing battery?
Not too many tips since I don’t shop very often ; ), and I’m not sure what “low budget” is, but the laptop I mentioned before costed roughly 2k when I bought it and now can be had for < $400.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-Thinkpad-3rd-gen-x1-Carbon-Core-i5-2-3-Ghz-8GB-512GB-Windows-10-Pro-Touch/254794454039?hash=item3b52eed417:g:y6YAAOSwQQ1fxUCR&autorefresh=true
As a developer that laptop was my work and personal machine for about 5 years of working from home doing software development.
RE: maintenance: I’m lucky enough that I’ve had surprisingly few things break. I’ve replaced battery on a HP pavillion laptop from 2010 and it’s still going strong (it’s just heavy). My wife replaced the heat sink on the same laptop. I find that older laptops are more user serviceable.
In comparison I just haven’t had to do any service at all for my X1. Battery life is excellent, although it doesn’t really matter for me because I use my laptop like a desktop replacement. Power is always around.
I rode the “used Thinkpad” train for a long time, then finally bit the bullet and bought a new P1 Gen2 last year on mega-sale because: 1) it should last me 5-6 years pretty easily, and 2) there are multiple SSD and RAM slots so I won’t be storage or memory-constrained any time soon.
It replaced two old laptops and a power-hungry desktop workstation, and as long as I can get replacement batteries it should happily end up being my “used Thinkpad” in 4-5 years, and under full warranty for three of those.
For notebooks I only have 2-3 years old Thinkpads from my office, but I use them less and less. Why?
I turn 50 next year, and while one can buy glasses and lighting and external keyboards and stuff, I only can work longer hours at a proper workstation with decent display, a proper keyboard, and a proper display position for a straight spine.
The better and faster I learned typing the more I hate notebook keyboards.
You’ll will not notice during work, but after the work there is a huge difference. 8-10h at a notebook, and you can not focus your eyes properly to the distance at night (your eyes’ lenses will dehydrate while focussed in near field state during the day and need a whole night’s time to soak in fluids again during the night. Like your spinal discs which lose water during the day, and refill during the night).
The problems with notebooks are suboptimal keyboards with sometimes quirky layout, too glossy, too dark screens, cent-sized speakers, and much too short a distance between you and the display.
I stopped working while travelling about three years ago (2018 flu season) when I decided to become a car driver again, due to multiple infections in a row from the public transport systems.
So at the moment I have my home servers in the basement and a 32” screen with tilt/swivel stand, with a NUC Mini PC mounted to the VESA mount points. Kind of portable, but a hack… its not the fastest, the NUC’s WLAN reception is a joke, I find it more often in thermal throttling.
I’m fighting with myself to justify either a purchase like this https://acmeportable.de/products/megapac-l2 or to build a own transportable case for (display/mini PC board/psu/decent keyboard and maybe even proper speakers). This could also be done very light, with edges from ash wood, face areas from poplar plywood and stitched and glued together with copper wire like wooden canoes.
Maybe as a pandemic project ;)
+1, my laptop is from 2015.
I used to use an X200s as my daily (with ultrabase), that computer was so enjoyable with the 1440x900 screen, excellent keyboard, and 10+hr battery life with a 9-cell (since it had a low-power core 2 duo chip).
Modern browsing got pretty sluggish on it towards the end, and I know I could mitigate that with NoScript but that is more and more difficult to do especially when we use GitHub here for work.
I miss the old thinkpad build quality a ton, but I can say screens have improved SIGNIFICANTLY which makes me feel less-bad, especially when 99% of the time I’m just docked to my desk with a 1440p ultrawide + mechanical kb + trackball mouse.
I have found that CPU increases are non-trivial.
That said, I think that there’s reason for deep concern in the way software is considered and written: much of what it does could be concretized down to a very few elements if there was a mass will to centralize, remove cruft, and simplify.
Most of the critique given by the Lisp Machine users regarding the following operating systems is still valid and holds. I imagine Oberon OS devs would have a few things useful to say, but they aren’t as noisy.
I’m pretty much the same. My current main laptop is a Lenovo X230 ThinkPad with an X220 keyboard and ton of mods. Most recently I replaced the screen with an IPS version. I plan to keep it as a primary device till the late 2020s, if not early 2030s. I mostly use it to jump to other machines, which keeps the local load low.
I’m still rocking a 2014 toshiba tecra Z40-A-11L, with 8GB of RAM and an SSD. No plans to upgrade. I’ve had to replace the keyboard once, and I almost had to do it a second time after a key popped off (but I managed to bend the metal piece back into place). It’s also missing a few screws from the bottom plate - they tend to fall off. So the built quality is not amazing… but it has survived terrifying falls when I tripped with the charger cable - more than I deserve. I’m still in awe when I remember picking it up from the floor and seeing nothing had broken.
And in terms of performance, it does everything I need. Even if I lock the cpu frequency to 700MHz to save battery, it will be fast enough for the great majority of tasks. 1600x900 is the main downside.