I owned one of these as my first work laptop and I cannot agree, it’s a decent laptop but not the best one by far. What I disliked the most was it’s abysmal display, dark, low resolution, bad color reproduction. As usual with Lenovo, it’s a lottery game with the screen and from the model number you cannot infer what manufacturer the screen is from. The keyboard was pretty good though, even though it had a lot of flex and feels pretty cheap compared to what you get nowadays. Also, I don’t get the point of carrying another battery pack, to swap it out you need to power down the machine. HP’s elitebook 8460[w/p] models could be configured with a 9-cell battery and an optional battery slice which gave them almost a full day of battery life. Those elitebooks were built like a tank but at the same time very heavy. Compared to the X220 they’re the better laptops in my opinion.
However, the best laptop is an Apple silicon MacBook Air. It’s so much better than what else is available that it’s almost unfair. No fan noise, all day battery life, instant power on and very powerful. It would be great if it could run any Linux distribution though, but macOS just works and is good enough for me.
I totally disagree, and I have both an X220 and an M1 MacBook Air.
I much prefer to the X220. In fact, I have 2 of them, and I only have the MBA because work bought me one. I would not pay for it myself.
I do use the MBA for travel sometimes, because at a conference it’s more important to have something very portable, but it is a less useful tool in general.
I am a writer. The keyboard matters more than almost anything else. The X220 has a wonderful keyboard and the MBA has a terrible keyboard, one of the worst on any premium laptop.
Both my X220s have more RAM, 1 or 2 aftermarket SSDs, and so on. That is impossible with the MBA.
My X220s have multiple USB 2, multiple USB 3, plus Displayport plus VGA. I can have it plugged in and still run 3 screeens, a keyboard, a mouse, and still have a spare port. On the MBA this means carrying a hub and thus its thinness and lightness goes away.
I am 6’2”. I cannot work on a laptop in a normal plane seat. I do not want to have to carry my laptop on board. But you cannot check in a laptop battery. The X220 solves this: I can just unplug its battery in seconds, and take only the battery on board. I can also carry a charged spare, or several.
The X220 screen is fine. I am 55. I owned 1990s laptops. I remember 1980s laptops. I remember greyscale passive-matrix LCDs and I know why OSes have options to help you find the mouse cursor. The X220 screen is fine. A bit higher-res would be fine but I cannot see 200 or 300ppi at laptop screen range so I do not need a bulky GPU trying to render invisibly small pixels. It is a work tool; I do not want to watch movies on it.
I have recently reviewed the X13S Arm Thinkpad, and the Z13 AMD Thinkpad, and the X1 Carbon gen 12.
My X220 is better than all of them, and I prefer it to all of those and to the MacBook Air.
I say all this not to say YOU ARE WRONG because you are entitled to your own opinions and choices. I am merely trying to clearly explain why I do not agree with them.
… And why it really annoys me that you and your choices have so limited the market that I have to use a decade-old laptop to get what I want in a laptop because your choices apparently outweigh mine and nobody makes a laptop that does what I want in a laptop any more, including the makers of my X220.
Probably because your requirements are very specific and “developer” laptops are niche market.
I don’t think my requirements are very specific.
I am not a developer, and I don’t know what a “developer” laptop is meant to be.
I don’t think it’s that niche:
a. Mine is a widely-held view
b. The fact there is such a large aftermarket in classic Thinkpads and parts for them, even upgrade motherboards, falsifies this claim.
It was not a specialist tool when new; it was a typical pro-grade machine. It’s not a niche product.
This change in marketing is not about ignoring niche markets. It’s about two things: reducing cost, and thus increasing margin; and about following trends and not doing customer research.
Comparison: I want a phone with a removable battery, a headphone socket, physical buttons I can use with gloves on, and at least 2 SIM slots plus a card slot. These are all simple easy requirements which were ubiquitous a decade ago, but are gone now, because everyone copies the market leaders, without understanding what makes them the market leader.
Whereas ISTM that your argument amounts to “if people wanted that they’d buy it, so if they don’t, they mustn’t want it”. Which is trivially falsified: this does not work if there is no such product to buy.
But there used to be, same as I used to have a wide choice of phones with physical buttons, headphone sockets, easily augmented storage, etc.
In other markets, companies are thriving by supplying products that go counter to industry trends. For instance, the Royal Enfield company supplies inexpensive, low-powered motorcycles that are easily maintained by their owners, which goes directly counter to the trend among Japanese motorcycles of constantly increasing power, lowering weight, and removing customer-maintainability by making highly-integrated devices with sealed, proprietary electronics controlling them.
Framework laptops are demonstrating some of this for laptops.
When I say major brands are lacking innovation, derivative, and copy one another, this is hardly even a controversial statement. Calling it a conspiracy theory is borderline offensive and I am not happy with that.
Margins in the laptop business are razor-thin. Laptops are seen as a commodity. The biggest buyers are businesses who simply want to provide their employees with a tool to do their jobs.
These economic facts do tend to converge available options towards a market-leader sameness, but that’s simply how the market works.
Motorcycles are different. They’re consumer/lifestyle products. You don’t ride a Royal Enfield because you need to, you do it because you want to, and you want to signal within the biker community what kind of person you are.
This is the core point. For instance, my work machine, which I am not especially fond of, is described in reviews as being a standard corporate fleet box.
I checked the price when reviewing the newer Lenovos, and it was about £800 in bulk.
These are, or were when new, all ~£2000 premium devices, some significantly more.
And yet, my budget-priced commodity fleet Dell has more ports than any of them, even the flagship X1C – that has 4 USB ports, but the Dell, at about a third of the price, has all those and HDMI and Ethernet.
This is not a cost-cutting thing at the budget end of the market. These are premium devices.
And FWIW I think you’re wrong about the Enfields, too. The company is Indian, and survived decades after the UK parent company died, outcompeted by cheaper, better-engineered Japanese machines.
Enfield faded from world view, making cheap robust low-spec bikes for a billion Indian people who couldn’t afford cars. Then some people in the UK noticed that they still existed, started importing them, and the company made it official, applied for and regained the “Royal” prefix and now exports its machines.
But the core point that I was making was that in both cases, it is the budget machines at the bottom of the market which preserve the ports. It is the expensive premium models which are the highly-integrated, locked-down sealed units.
This is not cost-cutting; it is fashion-led. Like womens’ skirts and dresses without pockets, it is designed for looks not practicality, and sold for premium prices.
Basically, what I am reading from your comments is that Royal Enfield motorcycles (I knew about the Indian connection, btw, but didn’t know they’d made a comeback in the UK) and chunky black laptops with a lot of ports is for people with not a lot of money, or who prefer to not spend a lot of money for bikes or laptops.
Why there are not more products aimed at this segment of the market is left as an exercise to the reader.
ISTM that you are adamantly refusing to admit that there is a point here.
Point Number 1:
This is not some exotic new requirement. It is exactly how most products used to be, in laptops, in phones, in other sectors. Some manufacturers cut costs, sold it as part of a “fashionable” or “stylish” premium thing, everyone else followed along like sheep… And now it is ubiquitous, and some spectators, unable to follow the logic of cause and effect, say “ah well, it is like that because nobody wants those features any more.”
And no matter how many of us stand up and say “BUT WE WANT THEM!” apparently we do not count for some reason.
Point Number 2:
more products aimed at this segment of the market
That’s the problem. Please, I beg you, give me links to any such device available in the laptop market today, please.
I don’t doubt there are people who want these features. They’re vocal enough.
But there are not enough of them (either self-declared, or found via market research) for a manufacturer to make the bet that they will make money making products for this market.
It’s quite possible that an new X220-like laptop would cost around $5,000. Would such a laptop sell enough to make money back for the manufacturer?
“Probably because your requirements are very specific and “developer” laptops are niche market.”
I’d suggest an alternate reason. Yes, developer laptops are a niche market. But I’d propose that laptops moving away from the X220 is a result of chasing “thinner and lighter” above all else, plus lowering costs. And the result when the majority of manufacturers all chase the same targets, you get skewed results.
Plus: User choice only influences laptop sales so much. I’m not sure what the split is, but many laptops are purchased by corporations for their workforce. You get the option of a select few laptops that business services / IT has procured, approved, and will support. If they are a Lenovo shop or a Dell shop and the next generation or three suck, it has little impact on sales because it takes years before a business will offer an alternative. If they even listen to user complaints.
And if I buy my own laptop, new, all the options look alike - so there’s no meaningful way to buy my preference and have that influence product direction.
“Neither I, nor anyone else who bought an Apple product is responsible for your choice of a laptop.”
Mostly true. The popularity of Apple products has caused the effect I described above. When Apple started pulling ahead of the pack, instead of (say) Lenovo saying “we’ll go the opposite direction” the manufacturers chased the Apple model. In part due to repeated feedback that users want laptops like the Air, so we get the X1 Carbons. And ultimately all the Lenovo models get crappy chicklet keyboards, many get soldiered RAM, fewer ports, etc. (As well as Dell, etc.)
(Note I’m making some pretty sweeping generalizations here, but my main point is that the market is limited not so much because the OP’s choices are “niche” but because the market embraces trends way too eagerly and blindly.)
Mostly true. The popularity of Apple products has caused the effect I described above. When Apple started pulling ahead of the pack, instead of (say) Lenovo saying “we’ll go the opposite direction” the manufacturers chased the Apple model. In part due to repeated feedback that users want laptops like the Air, so we get the X1 Carbons. And ultimately all the Lenovo models get crappy chicklet keyboards, many get soldiered RAM, fewer ports, etc. (As well as Dell, etc.)
This reminds me a great deal of my recurring complaint that it’s hard to find a car with a manual transmission anymore. Even down to the point that, last time I was shopping, I looked at German-designed/manufactured vehicles, knowing that the prevailing sentiment last time I visited Germany was that automatic transmissions were for people who were elderly and/or disabled.
This, but Asahi still has a long, long way to go before it can be considered stable enough to be a viable replacement for macOS.
For the time being, you’re pretty much limited to running macOS as a host OS and then virtualize Linux on top of it, which is good enough for 90% of use cases anyway. That’s what I do and it works just fine, most of the time.
Out of curiosity, what are you using for virtualization? The options for arm64 virtualization seemed slim last I checked (UTM “works” but was buggy. VMWare Fusion only has a tech preview, which I tried once and also ran into problems). Though this was a year or two ago, so maybe things have improved.
VMware and Parallels have full versions out supporting Arm now, and there are literally dozens of “light” VM runners out now, using Apple’s Virtualisation framework (not to be confused with the older, lower level Hypervisor.framework)
I’m using UTM to run FreeBSD and also have Podman set up to run FreeBSD containers (with a VM that it manages). Both Podman (open source) and Docker Desktop (free for orgs with fewer than, I think, 250 employees) can manage a Linux VM for running containers. Apple exposes a Linux binary for Rosetta 2 that Docker Desktop uses, so can run x86 Linux containers.
I’m not speaking for @petar, but I use UTM when I need full fat Linux. (For example, to mount an external LUKS-encrypted drive and copy files.) That said, I probably don’t push it hard enough to run into real bugs. But the happy path for doing something quick on a Ubuntu or Fedora VM has not caused me any real headaches.
It feels like most of the other things I used to use a Linux VM for work well in Docker desktop. I still have my ThinkPad around (with a bare metal install) in case I need it, but I haven’t reached for it very often in the past year.
the device is still better equipped to handle drops and mishandling compared to that of more fragile devices (such as the MacBook Air or Framework).
In my experience this isn’t true (at least for the Framework), and the post doesn’t provide any proof for this claim.
I’ve owned a ThinkPad X230, which is almost the same as the X220 apart from the keyboard and slightly newer CPU. I currently own a Framework 13. Although I didn’t own them both at the same time, and I also have no proof for the counter-claim, in my experience the Framework is no more fragile than the X230 and I feel equally or more confident treating the Framework as “a device you can snatch up off your desk, whip into your travel bag and be on your way.”
(I remember the first week I had the X230 I cracked the plastic case because I was treating it at the same as the laptop it had replaced, a ThinkPad X61. The X61 really was a tank, there’s a lot to be said for metal outer cases…)
The rugged design and bulkier weight help put my mind at ease - which is something I can’t say for newer laptop builds.
Confidence and security are subjective feelings, so if owning a chunky ThinkPad makes someone feel this way then good for them. Not to mention I think it’s awesome to keep older devices out of e-waste. However, I don’t think there’s any objective evidence that all newer laptops are automatically fragile because they’re thin - that’s perception as well.
However, I don’t think there’s any objective evidence that all newer laptops are automatically fragile because they’re thin - that’s perception as well.
It’s a reasonable null hypothesis that a thicker chassis absorbs more shock before electronic components start breaking or crunching against each other. Maintaining the same drop resistance would require the newer components to be more durable than the older ones, which is the opposite of what I’d expect since the electronics are smaller and more densely packed.
It’s been years since my x220 died, but IMO the trackpad on the framework is leaps and bounds better than the trackpad on the x220. (Though, the one caviat is that the physical click on my framework’s trackpad died which is a shame since I much prefer to have physical feedback for clicking. I really ought to figure out how hard that would be to fix.)
The x220’s keyboard is maybe slightly better, but I find just about any laptop keyboard to be “usable” and nothing more, so I’m probably not the right person to ask.
From my recollection: keyboard of the X230 about the same, trackpad of the Framework better (under Linux).
The X230 switched to the “chiclet” keyboard so it’s considered less nice than the X220 one (people literally swap the keyboard over and mod the BIOS to accept it). I think they are both decent keyboards for modern laptops, reasonable key travel, and don’t have any of the nasty flex or flimsiness of consumer laptop keyboards. But not the absolute greatest, either.
I remember the X230 trackpad being a total pain with spurious touches, palm detection, etc. None of that grief with the Framework, but that might also be seven-ish years of software development.
It really depends on each person’s priorities, but personally I could never go back to a computer that didn’t have a high resolution display.
With everything scaled up, text is really crisp and easy to read without straining my eyes. If I need to, though, I can dial back the scaling a bit and fit more onscreen.
I was very fond of my X220 and would still use for it if it wasn’t stolen from me, but even at the time the display was disappointing and the trackpad was dreadful. It wouldn’t call it the best, certainly not now.
Most modern laptops have fully functional trackpads with gesture support. Apple’s even have proper haptics, so you can push the whole thing with a uniform click instead of the hinged designs most have. I used to be a TrackPoint diehard, but I don’t miss it after using a MacBook.
While I certainly prefer the ThinkPad TrackPoint over traditional trackpads, I must admit, the MacBook’s trackpad is surprisingly usable with just my thumbs and without my fingers leaving the home row.
How odd. My home desktop is an iMac, but I have no other Mac laptops, because I hate modern Apple keyboards and pointing devices. Then, when I smashed my right arm to bits in April, $WORK lent me an M1 MacBook Air, becasue it can take dictation. I now have fairly extensive experience of using a modern Apple trackpad on current macOS.
It has made me appreciate my Thinkpads running Linux much much more. The experience, for me, is horrible. I find it a crippled and deeply frustrating input device. It’s moderately good at things I don’t want to do, such as zooming, switching between full-screen apps, or switching virtual desktops, and it’s really bad at things I do all the time pretty much every day: middle-clicking, right-clicking, highlighting, dragging.
Unlike most other laptops, the Thinkpad comes with a superior input device: the trackpoint. It requires less finger movement and it has 3 mouse buttons. That is why many people, including me, simply disable the trackpad.
No, I understand that. What I mean is that the x220 has flaws that make it not a good contender for “best laptop”, even if you’re only interested in the trackpoint. A laptop that has a borderline unusable trackpad (the x220) is certainly inferior to one that uses that space to make the trackpoint experience better (the x200). A poor attempt at both is worse than excelling at one.
In general, it’s a 2011 laptop. This means several things:
Back then, trackpads were much smaller. It was normal for its time. For me, it wins by having physical buttons; I have also had an X240 at work, and used an X230, and the 220 beats both because it has physical buttons which are more use. It supports multitouch, and it works fine for two-fingered scrolling, which is about the only type of gesture I ever use.
For its time, the screen was reasonable. It seems small and low-res now but it was acceptable for its time.
Because it was 6 years old, my first one cost me a princely £150 in 2017. My second one cost me £250 in 2022, but it is the Core i7 model, it’s in mint condition, and it came with a docking station.
But because it was a premium executive machine when new, they still work very well. My i7 machine has two SSDs in it (one SATA, one miniPCI) and 16GB of RAM, and the RAM cost about £20. I used my i5 one last year when I had to make a bus trip, and I wrote for the entire journey; its original 11 year old battery kept it working for a 3 and a half hour bus journey. And because it’s external I can trivially easily replace it, and even carry a spare.
So its limitations are explicable due to its age, but its age also brings benefits.
Since at least the x40 generation (Haswell) it’s all been decent Synaptics multi-touch trackpads. Nothing extraordinary, but nothing bothersome either, more than fine.
Yeah, I was surprised the article didn’t mention anything about screen mods. When the X series went from 1400x900 -> 1366x768 it kinda made them a joke in my mind, but luckily my X200s kept working forever. Nowadays I’m on a modded X210; I haven’t looked into screen mods yet but I absolutely would have if I were stuck with 1366x768.
I’ve owned a total of 4 X220/X230 laptops over the years (I group them together since the line blurs once you start modding them). I even have a pile of batteries which, combined, would give me over 24h of battery life. My best one has maxed out specs and a 13.3” IPS LCD upgrade (with bezel shrunk to fit).
I love them, but they’re not daily-driveable in 2023 unless you live in the stone age in terms of software choices.
I daily-drive a 2021 M1 Pro MBP running Asahi and I love it. It has an excellent display, I can run full-fat IDEs, bloated electron apps, compile large codebases, spin up (aarch64) VMs, without breaking a sweat. It is better than an X220 on all axes except price. (Yes, even build quality. I’m not gonna do drop tests, but the macbook feels much more robust)
I don’t know why people deify thinkpad keyboards. Once you’ve used a modern macbook for a while, thinkpads feel all mushy.
I run GNOME 44 as my DE, and it has fancy multitouch trackpad gestures for switching between windows and workspaces. “lightweight” tiling window managers etc. simply cannot compete in terms of usability and convenience.
Now I’m curious what you mean by “stone age in terms of software choices”. Yes, in the other comment I argued that they’re becoming slow, but my i7 x230 is still fully functional with the latest Debian stable and a few other things I’ve added via nixpkg.
I am not trying to use it as my daily driver compiling C++ code all day, but I use it to browse, watch videos, develop things in my spare time. I don’t notice it being too slow for that.
they’re not daily-driveable in 2023 unless you live in the stone age in terms of software choices.
This is flatly not true. I daily-drive an X220 and T420, both with Ubuntu 23.04, and both are perfectly fine.
I detest Electron apps and try to avoid them. I do not use any development tools. I use VMs a lot and they handle it fine.
I detest GNOME and never use it if I have a choice, but with a lighter desktop that isn’t written in bloody Javascript – see my comment about Electron apps – the ?x240 series is 100% usable today.
Why do you detest and avoid electron apps? Is it because they run poorly on your hardware? If so, you are letting your hardware limit your software choices. I don’t enjoy the treadmill that is software bloating to fit the capabilities of modern hardware… but it’s here whether you like it or not.
If you want to only run “lightweight” software then fair enough, I can’t argue with that, but in my experience you limit your productivity and enjoyment by doing so.
Because they are huge, inefficient, slow, chew up resources I want for other things, they do not follow native platform UI guidelines – indeed, they can’t, because they aren’t native apps – and they are generally a sign of lazy developers using inappropriate tools.
Example: Balena Etcher. I just downloaded it to check. It is a 224.3MB app. It does one thing: it writes ISO images to USB keys.
I have an old laptop here that has 2 different OSes with 4 different GUIs installed onto its uncompressed 80MB hard disk. You do not need 224 MB to write a file to a disk. In fact you need about 40 characters:
dd if=myfile.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progress
Here is a counter-example of an app that does the same thing:
If you do not see that this is a bad thing, and an app that takes nearly 5000x the space as a native app, and uses a framework with 60,000 known bugs to do it, is undesirable, then I do not know how to communicate with you.
Complaints about the screen resolution are a matter of aesthetics, unless you work on visual digital media. In practice, a low resolution is often easier to use because it doesn’t require you to adjust the scaling, which often doesn’t work for all programs.
That said, the X220 screen is pathetically short. The 4:3 ThinkPads are much more ergonomic, and the keyboards are better than the **20 models (even if they look similar). Unfortunately the earlier CPU can be limiting due to resource waste on modern websites, but it’s workable.
The ergonomics of modern thin computers are worse still than the X220. A thin laptop has a shorter base to begin with, and the thinness requires the hinges to pull the base of the top down when it’s opened, lowering the screen further. The result is that the bottom of the screen is a good inch lower than on a thick ThinkPad, inducing that much more forward bending in the user’s upper spine.
The top of the screen of my 15” T601 frankenpad is 10” above my table and 9.75” above the keyboard. Be jealous.
Complaints about the screen resolution are a matter of aesthetics, unless you work on visual digital media.
A matter of aesthetics if the script your language uses has a small number of easily distinguished glyphs.
As someone who frequently reads Chinese characters on a screen, smaller fonts on pre-Retina screens strain my eyes. The more complex characters (as well as moderately complex ones in bold) are literally just blobs of black pixels and you have to guess from the general shape and context :)
Complaints about the screen resolution are a matter of aesthetics, unless you work on visual digital media.
I strongly disagree here. I don’t notice much difference with images, but the difference in text rendering is huge. Not needing sub-pixel AA (with its associated blurriness) to avoid jagged text is a huge win and improves readability.
Good for you. Your eyesight is much, much better than mine
I’d be pretty surprised by that, my eyesight is pretty terrible. That’s part of why high resolution monitors make such a difference. Blurry text from antialiasing is much harder for me to read and causes eye strain quite quickly. Even if I can’t see the pixels on lower resolution displays, I can’t focus as clearly on the outlines of characters and that makes reading harder.
As an X220 owner, while I concede someone may like the aesthetics of a low-resolution screen, the screen is quite bad in almost all other ways too. But you’re definitely right about aspect ratio. For terminal use a portrait 9:16 screen would be much better than 16:9. Of course external displays are better for ergonomics and nowadays large enough to work in landscape, too.
I wrote about this topic, but tl;dr the X220 is an overrated machine with its popularity inflated by /g/. There are better alternatives, even within the ThinkPad lineup.
Same. I have an i5 X220, an i7 X220, an i5 T420, an i7 T420, and a quad-core i7 W520. They are gorgeous machines and laptop design has got worse in all respects since them.
Had one of these and loved it, but don’t think I could ever go back.
The screen resolution is absymal compared to modern displays. I went through a total of three different battery cells (replacements brought on eBay). Lack of modern connectivity ports is also a set back with most things I own now being USB-C.
Aside from these issues … sure I could continue to daily drive it, but it’s just painful.
IMHO you’re better off buying a refurb X13 (my current machine) or similar, which can be snapped up pretty cheaply.
Wrong :), the *30 series are the best with a quad core and keyboard mod and eDP LCD mod. BGA rework for x230 and t430s. T430/530/W530 are more DIY friendly.
I used a couple of T410s and later multiple T420s for about 10 years — they are pretty comparable to the X220. Those laptops were great, especially the keyboard but the screens are aweful when compared to most modern laptops.
I now use an HP Envy x360 and it’s a much better laptop in every way
the screen is great,
the keyboard is good enough (offset from center by 1 key sucks),
the trackpad is amazing — the best I’ve ever used (including mac), I don’t miss the trackpoint,
the AMD CPU is great and GPU is amazing for embeded,
battery life is 6-8 hours,
speakers are very good, especially compared to Lenovo’s,
USB C docks.
I gave away my last T420s last year and I can’t ever imagine using something like it again. It was a great laptop for its time though.
edit: the build quality is really nice, much better than modern Lenovos, and slightly better than the T420s. I broke a T410s and two T420s, the screen is the weak point.
I almost agree! I’ve opted for the X230 instead (typing this comment from one), though I have an X220 as well, which I do agree has a better keyboard! Such awesome computers. Perfect for OpenBSD, too :) I’m using i3wm, similarly resource-efficient.
What I’m wondering is, where does one get a new 9-cell X220/X230 battery (in Canada especially)? I don’t know how to filter between horrible/questionable knockoff things and can’t tell what’s legit. My X230’s batteries are all like 1-2hour life at absolute best, unfortunately, which means I never use any of them unplugged.
The x230 seems to be nearly identical but I prefer the newer keys. Also it’s far from indestructible but I could easily replace the battery twice and the screen once. Replacing the upper plastic body (around the keyboard) is something I’ve not done (yet) and I still use it. I love the small form factor but for traveling I’d love if it were lighter…
It’s definitely in the top 5, but it’s getting slow (so same should be true for the x220. Also runtime on battery. The best? I’m not sure.
Are there any other used laptops in the same tier? I wanted one of these bad in 2017 but couldn’t afford one as a student, and people are still super fond of these. Since most used laptops are probably destined to be e-waste, it’d be nice to find other well built laptops that play nice with the linux kernel and are upgradable. It feels like there has to be at least one other (extra points for not just saying another thinkpad but maybe that’s all there is?)
I owned one of these as my first work laptop and I cannot agree, it’s a decent laptop but not the best one by far. What I disliked the most was it’s abysmal display, dark, low resolution, bad color reproduction. As usual with Lenovo, it’s a lottery game with the screen and from the model number you cannot infer what manufacturer the screen is from. The keyboard was pretty good though, even though it had a lot of flex and feels pretty cheap compared to what you get nowadays. Also, I don’t get the point of carrying another battery pack, to swap it out you need to power down the machine. HP’s elitebook 8460[w/p] models could be configured with a 9-cell battery and an optional battery slice which gave them almost a full day of battery life. Those elitebooks were built like a tank but at the same time very heavy. Compared to the X220 they’re the better laptops in my opinion. However, the best laptop is an Apple silicon MacBook Air. It’s so much better than what else is available that it’s almost unfair. No fan noise, all day battery life, instant power on and very powerful. It would be great if it could run any Linux distribution though, but macOS just works and is good enough for me.
I totally disagree, and I have both an X220 and an M1 MacBook Air.
I much prefer to the X220. In fact, I have 2 of them, and I only have the MBA because work bought me one. I would not pay for it myself.
I do use the MBA for travel sometimes, because at a conference it’s more important to have something very portable, but it is a less useful tool in general.
I am a writer. The keyboard matters more than almost anything else. The X220 has a wonderful keyboard and the MBA has a terrible keyboard, one of the worst on any premium laptop.
Both my X220s have more RAM, 1 or 2 aftermarket SSDs, and so on. That is impossible with the MBA.
My X220s have multiple USB 2, multiple USB 3, plus Displayport plus VGA. I can have it plugged in and still run 3 screeens, a keyboard, a mouse, and still have a spare port. On the MBA this means carrying a hub and thus its thinness and lightness goes away.
I am 6’2”. I cannot work on a laptop in a normal plane seat. I do not want to have to carry my laptop on board. But you cannot check in a laptop battery. The X220 solves this: I can just unplug its battery in seconds, and take only the battery on board. I can also carry a charged spare, or several.
The X220 screen is fine. I am 55. I owned 1990s laptops. I remember 1980s laptops. I remember greyscale passive-matrix LCDs and I know why OSes have options to help you find the mouse cursor. The X220 screen is fine. A bit higher-res would be fine but I cannot see 200 or 300ppi at laptop screen range so I do not need a bulky GPU trying to render invisibly small pixels. It is a work tool; I do not want to watch movies on it.
I have recently reviewed the X13S Arm Thinkpad, and the Z13 AMD Thinkpad, and the X1 Carbon gen 12.
My X220 is better than all of them, and I prefer it to all of those and to the MacBook Air.
I say all this not to say YOU ARE WRONG because you are entitled to your own opinions and choices. I am merely trying to clearly explain why I do not agree with them.
… And why it really annoys me that you and your choices have so limited the market that I have to use a decade-old laptop to get what I want in a laptop because your choices apparently outweigh mine and nobody makes a laptop that does what I want in a laptop any more, including the makers of my X220.
That is not fair and that is not OK.
It’s perfectly fair to like the X220 and other older laptop models, that’s simply personal preference.
Probably because your requirements are very specific and “developer” laptops are niche market.
Neither I, nor anyone else who bought an Apple product is responsible for your choice of a laptop.
The core of my disagreement is with this line:
Comparison: I want a phone with a removable battery, a headphone socket, physical buttons I can use with gloves on, and at least 2 SIM slots plus a card slot. These are all simple easy requirements which were ubiquitous a decade ago, but are gone now, because everyone copies the market leaders, without understanding what makes them the market leader.
If there was a significant market for a new laptop with the features similar to the X220, there would be such a laptop offered for sale.
There’s no conspiracy.
I didn’t claim there was any conspiracy.
Whereas ISTM that your argument amounts to “if people wanted that they’d buy it, so if they don’t, they mustn’t want it”. Which is trivially falsified: this does not work if there is no such product to buy.
But there used to be, same as I used to have a wide choice of phones with physical buttons, headphone sockets, easily augmented storage, etc.
In other markets, companies are thriving by supplying products that go counter to industry trends. For instance, the Royal Enfield company supplies inexpensive, low-powered motorcycles that are easily maintained by their owners, which goes directly counter to the trend among Japanese motorcycles of constantly increasing power, lowering weight, and removing customer-maintainability by making highly-integrated devices with sealed, proprietary electronics controlling them.
Framework laptops are demonstrating some of this for laptops.
When I say major brands are lacking innovation, derivative, and copy one another, this is hardly even a controversial statement. Calling it a conspiracy theory is borderline offensive and I am not happy with that.
Margins in the laptop business are razor-thin. Laptops are seen as a commodity. The biggest buyers are businesses who simply want to provide their employees with a tool to do their jobs.
These economic facts do tend to converge available options towards a market-leader sameness, but that’s simply how the market works.
Motorcycles are different. They’re consumer/lifestyle products. You don’t ride a Royal Enfield because you need to, you do it because you want to, and you want to signal within the biker community what kind of person you are.
Still no.
This is the core point. For instance, my work machine, which I am not especially fond of, is described in reviews as being a standard corporate fleet box.
I checked the price when reviewing the newer Lenovos, and it was about £800 in bulk.
But I have reviewed the X1 Carbon as a Linux machine, the Z13 similarly, and the Arm-powered X13s both with Windows and with Linux.
These are, or were when new, all ~£2000 premium devices, some significantly more.
And yet, my budget-priced commodity fleet Dell has more ports than any of them, even the flagship X1C – that has 4 USB ports, but the Dell, at about a third of the price, has all those and HDMI and Ethernet.
This is not a cost-cutting thing at the budget end of the market. These are premium devices.
And FWIW I think you’re wrong about the Enfields, too. The company is Indian, and survived decades after the UK parent company died, outcompeted by cheaper, better-engineered Japanese machines.
Enfield faded from world view, making cheap robust low-spec bikes for a billion Indian people who couldn’t afford cars. Then some people in the UK noticed that they still existed, started importing them, and the company made it official, applied for and regained the “Royal” prefix and now exports its machines.
But the core point that I was making was that in both cases, it is the budget machines at the bottom of the market which preserve the ports. It is the expensive premium models which are the highly-integrated, locked-down sealed units.
This is not cost-cutting; it is fashion-led. Like womens’ skirts and dresses without pockets, it is designed for looks not practicality, and sold for premium prices.
Basically, what I am reading from your comments is that Royal Enfield motorcycles (I knew about the Indian connection, btw, but didn’t know they’d made a comeback in the UK) and chunky black laptops with a lot of ports is for people with not a lot of money, or who prefer to not spend a lot of money for bikes or laptops.
Why there are not more products aimed at this segment of the market is left as an exercise to the reader.
ISTM that you are adamantly refusing to admit that there is a point here.
Point Number 1:
This is not some exotic new requirement. It is exactly how most products used to be, in laptops, in phones, in other sectors. Some manufacturers cut costs, sold it as part of a “fashionable” or “stylish” premium thing, everyone else followed along like sheep… And now it is ubiquitous, and some spectators, unable to follow the logic of cause and effect, say “ah well, it is like that because nobody wants those features any more.”
And no matter how many of us stand up and say “BUT WE WANT THEM!” apparently we do not count for some reason.
Point Number 2:
That’s the problem. Please, I beg you, give me links to any such device available in the laptop market today, please.
I don’t doubt there are people who want these features. They’re vocal enough.
But there are not enough of them (either self-declared, or found via market research) for a manufacturer to make the bet that they will make money making products for this market.
It’s quite possible that an new X220-like laptop would cost around $5,000. Would such a laptop sell enough to make money back for the manufacturer?
The brown manual wagon problem: everyone who says they want one will only buy them 7 years later used.
“Probably because your requirements are very specific and “developer” laptops are niche market.”
I’d suggest an alternate reason. Yes, developer laptops are a niche market. But I’d propose that laptops moving away from the X220 is a result of chasing “thinner and lighter” above all else, plus lowering costs. And the result when the majority of manufacturers all chase the same targets, you get skewed results.
Plus: User choice only influences laptop sales so much. I’m not sure what the split is, but many laptops are purchased by corporations for their workforce. You get the option of a select few laptops that business services / IT has procured, approved, and will support. If they are a Lenovo shop or a Dell shop and the next generation or three suck, it has little impact on sales because it takes years before a business will offer an alternative. If they even listen to user complaints.
And if I buy my own laptop, new, all the options look alike - so there’s no meaningful way to buy my preference and have that influence product direction.
“Neither I, nor anyone else who bought an Apple product is responsible for your choice of a laptop.”
Mostly true. The popularity of Apple products has caused the effect I described above. When Apple started pulling ahead of the pack, instead of (say) Lenovo saying “we’ll go the opposite direction” the manufacturers chased the Apple model. In part due to repeated feedback that users want laptops like the Air, so we get the X1 Carbons. And ultimately all the Lenovo models get crappy chicklet keyboards, many get soldiered RAM, fewer ports, etc. (As well as Dell, etc.)
(Note I’m making some pretty sweeping generalizations here, but my main point is that the market is limited not so much because the OP’s choices are “niche” but because the market embraces trends way too eagerly and blindly.)
This reminds me a great deal of my recurring complaint that it’s hard to find a car with a manual transmission anymore. Even down to the point that, last time I was shopping, I looked at German-designed/manufactured vehicles, knowing that the prevailing sentiment last time I visited Germany was that automatic transmissions were for people who were elderly and/or disabled.
I think the reasons are very similar.
The move to hybrid and electric has also shrunk the market for manual transmissions.
I’ve done my time with manual. My dual-clutch automatic has at least as good fuel economy and takes a lot of the drudge out of driving.
All of this! Well said, Joe.
https://asahilinux.org ;)
This, but Asahi still has a long, long way to go before it can be considered stable enough to be a viable replacement for macOS.
For the time being, you’re pretty much limited to running macOS as a host OS and then virtualize Linux on top of it, which is good enough for 90% of use cases anyway. That’s what I do and it works just fine, most of the time.
Out of curiosity, what are you using for virtualization? The options for arm64 virtualization seemed slim last I checked (UTM “works” but was buggy. VMWare Fusion only has a tech preview, which I tried once and also ran into problems). Though this was a year or two ago, so maybe things have improved.
VMware and Parallels have full versions out supporting Arm now, and there are literally dozens of “light” VM runners out now, using Apple’s Virtualisation framework (not to be confused with the older, lower level Hypervisor.framework)
I’m using UTM to run FreeBSD and also have Podman set up to run FreeBSD containers (with a VM that it manages). Both Podman (open source) and Docker Desktop (free for orgs with fewer than, I think, 250 employees) can manage a Linux VM for running containers. Apple exposes a Linux binary for Rosetta 2 that Docker Desktop uses, so can run x86 Linux containers.
I’m not speaking for @petar, but I use UTM when I need full fat Linux. (For example, to mount an external LUKS-encrypted drive and copy files.) That said, I probably don’t push it hard enough to run into real bugs. But the happy path for doing something quick on a Ubuntu or Fedora VM has not caused me any real headaches.
It feels like most of the other things I used to use a Linux VM for work well in Docker desktop. I still have my ThinkPad around (with a bare metal install) in case I need it, but I haven’t reached for it very often in the past year.
In my experience this isn’t true (at least for the Framework), and the post doesn’t provide any proof for this claim.
I’ve owned a ThinkPad X230, which is almost the same as the X220 apart from the keyboard and slightly newer CPU. I currently own a Framework 13. Although I didn’t own them both at the same time, and I also have no proof for the counter-claim, in my experience the Framework is no more fragile than the X230 and I feel equally or more confident treating the Framework as “a device you can snatch up off your desk, whip into your travel bag and be on your way.”
(I remember the first week I had the X230 I cracked the plastic case because I was treating it at the same as the laptop it had replaced, a ThinkPad X61. The X61 really was a tank, there’s a lot to be said for metal outer cases…)
Confidence and security are subjective feelings, so if owning a chunky ThinkPad makes someone feel this way then good for them. Not to mention I think it’s awesome to keep older devices out of e-waste. However, I don’t think there’s any objective evidence that all newer laptops are automatically fragile because they’re thin - that’s perception as well.
I owned both a X220 and a X230 and I found the X230 to be much less durable than the X220, so the framework comparison might not quite stand up.
Oh that is good to know, thanks. I’d assumed they were mostly the same construction.
It’s a reasonable null hypothesis that a thicker chassis absorbs more shock before electronic components start breaking or crunching against each other. Maintaining the same drop resistance would require the newer components to be more durable than the older ones, which is the opposite of what I’d expect since the electronics are smaller and more densely packed.
How does the framework’s keyboard & trackpad measure up against the Thinkpad’s?
It’s been years since my x220 died, but IMO the trackpad on the framework is leaps and bounds better than the trackpad on the x220. (Though, the one caviat is that the physical click on my framework’s trackpad died which is a shame since I much prefer to have physical feedback for clicking. I really ought to figure out how hard that would be to fix.)
The x220’s keyboard is maybe slightly better, but I find just about any laptop keyboard to be “usable” and nothing more, so I’m probably not the right person to ask.
x220 keyboard is peak laptop keyboard
try x200 it’s better.
I own both an x220 and an x201, full disclosure, I don’t find them better than my 2020 MBP, but not because of the keyboard….
I meant that the x200 keyboard is better than the x220 keyboard
From my recollection: keyboard of the X230 about the same, trackpad of the Framework better (under Linux).
The X230 switched to the “chiclet” keyboard so it’s considered less nice than the X220 one (people literally swap the keyboard over and mod the BIOS to accept it). I think they are both decent keyboards for modern laptops, reasonable key travel, and don’t have any of the nasty flex or flimsiness of consumer laptop keyboards. But not the absolute greatest, either.
I remember the X230 trackpad being a total pain with spurious touches, palm detection, etc. None of that grief with the Framework, but that might also be seven-ish years of software development.
I’ve tried both.
The Framework’s input devices are, for me, very poor.
It really depends on each person’s priorities, but personally I could never go back to a computer that didn’t have a high resolution display.
With everything scaled up, text is really crisp and easy to read without straining my eyes. If I need to, though, I can dial back the scaling a bit and fit more onscreen.
I was very fond of my X220 and would still use for it if it wasn’t stolen from me, but even at the time the display was disappointing and the trackpad was dreadful. It wouldn’t call it the best, certainly not now.
you’re not supposed to use the trackpad, you can disable it in the bios :)
“the feature is so bad that I recommend removing it” doesn’t scream “best laptop” to me.
Most laptops don’t even let you disable it, and provide no alternative. Can’t see how that’s better.
Most modern laptops have fully functional trackpads with gesture support. Apple’s even have proper haptics, so you can push the whole thing with a uniform click instead of the hinged designs most have. I used to be a TrackPoint diehard, but I don’t miss it after using a MacBook.
You still have to take your hands off the keyboard to use it though, right?
While I certainly prefer the ThinkPad TrackPoint over traditional trackpads, I must admit, the MacBook’s trackpad is surprisingly usable with just my thumbs and without my fingers leaving the home row.
How odd. My home desktop is an iMac, but I have no other Mac laptops, because I hate modern Apple keyboards and pointing devices. Then, when I smashed my right arm to bits in April, $WORK lent me an M1 MacBook Air, becasue it can take dictation. I now have fairly extensive experience of using a modern Apple trackpad on current macOS.
It has made me appreciate my Thinkpads running Linux much much more. The experience, for me, is horrible. I find it a crippled and deeply frustrating input device. It’s moderately good at things I don’t want to do, such as zooming, switching between full-screen apps, or switching virtual desktops, and it’s really bad at things I do all the time pretty much every day: middle-clicking, right-clicking, highlighting, dragging.
There are countless laptops with a trackpoint and also a functioning trackpad.
Yeah, and the best of them are ThinkPads.
I think you are misreading the point here.
Unlike most other laptops, the Thinkpad comes with a superior input device: the trackpoint. It requires less finger movement and it has 3 mouse buttons. That is why many people, including me, simply disable the trackpad.
No, I understand that. What I mean is that the x220 has flaws that make it not a good contender for “best laptop”, even if you’re only interested in the trackpoint. A laptop that has a borderline unusable trackpad (the x220) is certainly inferior to one that uses that space to make the trackpoint experience better (the x200). A poor attempt at both is worse than excelling at one.
I disagree, as you might expect.
For one thing, you need to place in its context.
In general, it’s a 2011 laptop. This means several things:
So its limitations are explicable due to its age, but its age also brings benefits.
The point of the article is that it’s the best laptop today and that its age doesn’t impact that.
At the time I was disappointed by both the trackpad and the display.
OK, that’s fair.
Quality multi touch trackpads and gestures are too good. I’ll never go back to a Lenovo laptop unless it has one.
Since at least the x40 generation (Haswell) it’s all been decent Synaptics multi-touch trackpads. Nothing extraordinary, but nothing bothersome either, more than fine.
… and it can be heavily modded into FullHD screen and several other things:
More about X320/X330 here:
Yeah, I was surprised the article didn’t mention anything about screen mods. When the X series went from 1400x900 -> 1366x768 it kinda made them a joke in my mind, but luckily my X200s kept working forever. Nowadays I’m on a modded X210; I haven’t looked into screen mods yet but I absolutely would have if I were stuck with 1366x768.
I’ve owned a total of 4 X220/X230 laptops over the years (I group them together since the line blurs once you start modding them). I even have a pile of batteries which, combined, would give me over 24h of battery life. My best one has maxed out specs and a 13.3” IPS LCD upgrade (with bezel shrunk to fit).
I love them, but they’re not daily-driveable in 2023 unless you live in the stone age in terms of software choices.
I daily-drive a 2021 M1 Pro MBP running Asahi and I love it. It has an excellent display, I can run full-fat IDEs, bloated electron apps, compile large codebases, spin up (aarch64) VMs, without breaking a sweat. It is better than an X220 on all axes except price. (Yes, even build quality. I’m not gonna do drop tests, but the macbook feels much more robust)
I don’t know why people deify thinkpad keyboards. Once you’ve used a modern macbook for a while, thinkpads feel all mushy.
I run GNOME 44 as my DE, and it has fancy multitouch trackpad gestures for switching between windows and workspaces. “lightweight” tiling window managers etc. simply cannot compete in terms of usability and convenience.
Now I’m curious what you mean by “stone age in terms of software choices”. Yes, in the other comment I argued that they’re becoming slow, but my i7 x230 is still fully functional with the latest Debian stable and a few other things I’ve added via nixpkg.
I am not trying to use it as my daily driver compiling C++ code all day, but I use it to browse, watch videos, develop things in my spare time. I don’t notice it being too slow for that.
This is flatly not true. I daily-drive an X220 and T420, both with Ubuntu 23.04, and both are perfectly fine.
I detest Electron apps and try to avoid them. I do not use any development tools. I use VMs a lot and they handle it fine.
I detest GNOME and never use it if I have a choice, but with a lighter desktop that isn’t written in bloody Javascript – see my comment about Electron apps – the ?x240 series is 100% usable today.
Why do you detest and avoid electron apps? Is it because they run poorly on your hardware? If so, you are letting your hardware limit your software choices. I don’t enjoy the treadmill that is software bloating to fit the capabilities of modern hardware… but it’s here whether you like it or not.
If you want to only run “lightweight” software then fair enough, I can’t argue with that, but in my experience you limit your productivity and enjoyment by doing so.
Because they are huge, inefficient, slow, chew up resources I want for other things, they do not follow native platform UI guidelines – indeed, they can’t, because they aren’t native apps – and they are generally a sign of lazy developers using inappropriate tools.
Example: Balena Etcher. I just downloaded it to check. It is a 224.3MB app. It does one thing: it writes ISO images to USB keys.
I have an old laptop here that has 2 different OSes with 4 different GUIs installed onto its uncompressed 80MB hard disk. You do not need 224 MB to write a file to a disk. In fact you need about 40 characters:
dd if=myfile.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progressHere is a counter-example of an app that does the same thing:
https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/usbimager
It’s a 255kB download and takes 603kB unpacked.
Balena Etcher is four thousand two hundred and thirty three times bigger to do the same task.
That is why I don’t like Electron apps. I do not want a dozen embedded copies of Chromium with ten thousand bugs per app on my computer.
Oh, hang on, I am wrong. I checked. I thought 10,000 bugs was harmless hyperbole.
It is in fact 62,350.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list
If you do not see that this is a bad thing, and an app that takes nearly 5000x the space as a native app, and uses a framework with 60,000 known bugs to do it, is undesirable, then I do not know how to communicate with you.
Complaints about the screen resolution are a matter of aesthetics, unless you work on visual digital media. In practice, a low resolution is often easier to use because it doesn’t require you to adjust the scaling, which often doesn’t work for all programs.
That said, the X220 screen is pathetically short. The 4:3 ThinkPads are much more ergonomic, and the keyboards are better than the **20 models (even if they look similar). Unfortunately the earlier CPU can be limiting due to resource waste on modern websites, but it’s workable.
The ergonomics of modern thin computers are worse still than the X220. A thin laptop has a shorter base to begin with, and the thinness requires the hinges to pull the base of the top down when it’s opened, lowering the screen further. The result is that the bottom of the screen is a good inch lower than on a thick ThinkPad, inducing that much more forward bending in the user’s upper spine.
The top of the screen of my 15” T601 frankenpad is 10” above my table and 9.75” above the keyboard. Be jealous.
A matter of aesthetics if the script your language uses has a small number of easily distinguished glyphs.
As someone who frequently reads Chinese characters on a screen, smaller fonts on pre-Retina screens strain my eyes. The more complex characters (as well as moderately complex ones in bold) are literally just blobs of black pixels and you have to guess from the general shape and context :)
I strongly disagree here. I don’t notice much difference with images, but the difference in text rendering is huge. Not needing sub-pixel AA (with its associated blurriness) to avoid jagged text is a huge win and improves readability.
Good for you. Your eyesight is much, much better than mine.
I am typing on my right hand monitor right now. It is a 27-inch (1440 × 2560) Apple Thunderbolt Display.
My left screen is a Built-in Retina Display and it is 27-inch (5120 × 2880).
Left has 4x the pixel density of right.
At 30-40cm away, I can’t see any difference between them.
If I peer with my nose 2cm from the screen the left is marginally sharper but I would hate to have to distinguish them under duress.
I’d be pretty surprised by that, my eyesight is pretty terrible. That’s part of why high resolution monitors make such a difference. Blurry text from antialiasing is much harder for me to read and causes eye strain quite quickly. Even if I can’t see the pixels on lower resolution displays, I can’t focus as clearly on the outlines of characters and that makes reading harder.
I think you would be hard pressed to demonstrate a measurable difference in readability, accounting for what people are used to.
You accidentally double posted this comment.
thanks
As an X220 owner, while I concede someone may like the aesthetics of a low-resolution screen, the screen is quite bad in almost all other ways too. But you’re definitely right about aspect ratio. For terminal use a portrait 9:16 screen would be much better than 16:9. Of course external displays are better for ergonomics and nowadays large enough to work in landscape, too.
I wrote about this topic, but tl;dr the X220 is an overrated machine with its popularity inflated by /g/. There are better alternatives, even within the ThinkPad lineup.
The only missing piece for X220 in its time was 1600x900 or 1920x1080 screen IMHO.
I have a W520 that is a tank. A few years old at this point, but still can run most everything needed.
Classic ThinkPad keyboard FTW.
Same. I have an i5 X220, an i7 X220, an i5 T420, an i7 T420, and a quad-core i7 W520. They are gorgeous machines and laptop design has got worse in all respects since them.
Had one of these and loved it, but don’t think I could ever go back.
The screen resolution is absymal compared to modern displays. I went through a total of three different battery cells (replacements brought on eBay). Lack of modern connectivity ports is also a set back with most things I own now being USB-C.
Aside from these issues … sure I could continue to daily drive it, but it’s just painful.
IMHO you’re better off buying a refurb X13 (my current machine) or similar, which can be snapped up pretty cheaply.
To be honest all *20 series ThinkPad laptops are the best.
You can get T420s for get thinner 14 size 1600x900 laptop with additional CD-ROM bay battery when needed.
You can get W520 for a 15 inch power horse with Nvidia GPU - even today its quite decent hardware with 4C/8T and up to 32 GB RAM.
I use FreeBSD on W520/X220 daily:
The only thing I could migrate to are:
T25 Anniversary Edition
FrankedPad T25 (modified T480 with T25 keyboard)
X330 with FullHD screen and X220 keyboard
Its so sad that NONE manufacturer currently does not provide laptops with these INS/DEL HOME/END PGUP/PGDN keys at the top right of the keyboard.
MSI GT80 Titan was interesting laptop with mechanical ten-key-less keyboard … but its huge 18.4 inch heavy laptop with two GPUs :)
Wrong :), the *30 series are the best with a quad core and keyboard mod and eDP LCD mod. BGA rework for x230 and t430s. T430/530/W530 are more DIY friendly.
No.
Ew, no.
Useless.
FFS.
No. Just… Absolutely NO. LOL
I used a couple of T410s and later multiple T420s for about 10 years — they are pretty comparable to the X220. Those laptops were great, especially the keyboard but the screens are aweful when compared to most modern laptops.
I now use an HP Envy x360 and it’s a much better laptop in every way
I gave away my last T420s last year and I can’t ever imagine using something like it again. It was a great laptop for its time though.
edit: the build quality is really nice, much better than modern Lenovos, and slightly better than the T420s. I broke a T410s and two T420s, the screen is the weak point.
My first requirement of a laptop is a 3:2 screen aspect ratio. I won’t consider otherwise.
I almost agree! I’ve opted for the X230 instead (typing this comment from one), though I have an X220 as well, which I do agree has a better keyboard! Such awesome computers. Perfect for OpenBSD, too :) I’m using i3wm, similarly resource-efficient.
What I’m wondering is, where does one get a new 9-cell X220/X230 battery (in Canada especially)? I don’t know how to filter between horrible/questionable knockoff things and can’t tell what’s legit. My X230’s batteries are all like 1-2hour life at absolute best, unfortunately, which means I never use any of them unplugged.
The x230 seems to be nearly identical but I prefer the newer keys. Also it’s far from indestructible but I could easily replace the battery twice and the screen once. Replacing the upper plastic body (around the keyboard) is something I’ve not done (yet) and I still use it. I love the small form factor but for traveling I’d love if it were lighter…
It’s definitely in the top 5, but it’s getting slow (so same should be true for the x220. Also runtime on battery. The best? I’m not sure.
Are there any other used laptops in the same tier? I wanted one of these bad in 2017 but couldn’t afford one as a student, and people are still super fond of these. Since most used laptops are probably destined to be e-waste, it’d be nice to find other well built laptops that play nice with the linux kernel and are upgradable. It feels like there has to be at least one other (extra points for not just saying another thinkpad but maybe that’s all there is?)
dumbest shit i’ve seen in weeks.
I would tend to agree. It’s nice that Lenovo has the manuals, but so does System76. This is just an editorial.
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