I have the ThinkPad p16s AMD gen 2. What it lacks in name it makes up for with being the most headache-free computer I have ever had (including a Macbook).
Everything works pretty well out of the box, it never really overheats, Linux support required basically no effort with NixOS, the keyboard feels pretty nice, the screen is bright and easy to read, and fortunately I bought it when RAM prices weren't insane so I got the 64GB model.
I haven't tried repairing it yet but considering how well it's been working I'm not even sure I'll need ever need to. If this laptop gets stolen, I will likely just buy another ThinkPad, I'm a complete convert.
I own T14s Gen4 Intel and Linux support is perfect, even fingerprint reader works. Zero complaints. I'm mostly using it in clamshell mode connected via USB-C to display with backwards charging, it all just works! I'm also using secureboot with my keys, I cleared all MS keys and it didn't brick the laptop.
My only grievance is a bit buggy firmware. When I turn laptop on or reboot, speakers will randomly be muted (not a problem after OS boots, but for example in UEFI it'll either beep or not beep and that's random). UEFI interface was a bit buggy regarding mouse control, for example I've used to touch and drag things in boot order, but it didn't work and I have to actually press touchbar button down and keeping it like that move cursor. But touch drag works in other places. Not a big issue bit the first time I encountered it, I spent good few minutes trying to make sense of it, as I thought it just does not allow me to reorder boot entries or something like that. But these are small issues and once you've installed OS, you never deal with that.
Oh, and another complaint is that their BIOS update procedure is super weird. I have to find computer with Windows, download some exe, unpack things, find some BAT file and write to USB drive things, then boot from it. Theoretically they publish stuff to fwupd but I don't like this service. My best BIOS update experience was on Asus PC. I just put some bin file onto FAT32 USB drive, entered UEFI configuration, chose "update", selected that file and that's about it. Super easy, every manufacturer must implement this workflow.
Anyway I'm satistfied owner and my next laptop will likely be Thinkpad. Mostly because its stellar Linux support, but also because I didn't have any major issues with my current laptop.
T14s Gen4 AMD user here w/secureboot enabled. Just used fwupd to upgrade BIOS two days ago, because I didn't realize the BIOS boot-order lock was preventing it. Rebooted, changed setting, rebooted, upgraded firmware automatically, rebooted, changed setting back. Yes it took 30 minutes, but I don't expect I'll need to do it again.
While most of the hardware works, hibernate doesn't, which annoys me. Fingerprint scanner also only works randomly at login, Linux issue I assume. Machine was crashing once a week (logs suggest it was AMDGPU related), but not since the firmware update, so fingers crossed that's fixed. In retrospect I wish I got the L14, didn't realize I would need more RAM at the time.
What’s wrong with fwupd? I’ll admit that that the CLI is not exactly awesome, but it seems like a fairly clean implementation of the actual UEFI spec for updates.
I disabled possibility of updates in my BIOS, so I must first enter BIOS, enable updates in BIOS, then I have to tinker with my boot configuration as I'm using secureboot with custom keys and no bootloader, I also need to allow changing UEFI boot variables, well, lots of things I just don't want to do for my setup. A lot of moving parts with zero sense over something as simple as update from the USB drive.
Basically right now my setup is super simple and restricted and I have to make it significantly more complicated and insecure to allow fwupd to work.
> Linux support required basically no effort with NixOS
My main requirement for a next laptop is running NixOS (coming from Macbook land). It’s probably this or one of the new XPS models, but not clear what NixOS support looks like there.
I've never had an issue with 60hz. 30hz is unusable but 60hz has always been good enough for me; the Sega Genesis and SNES had 60hz and that's always been good enough for me.
Even 50hz is fine. I'd go so far as to say, barring any medical or sensitivity issue, if any person prioritizes a 120hz screen they are a victim to habit or marketing.
It adds zero value to the experience, and you're just looking for things to be annoyed by / brag about.
Modern displays are already cutting edge. They have improved in every way that's meaningful in the last 35 years. Refresh rate is just not meaningful enough. "35 year old performance" it most certainly is not. You just seem hellbent on using this arbitrary (to most people) benchmark as a filter.
FYI, I run my 17 pro almost exclusively on power saving mode to cap frame rates because the battery life extending by 30 mins is more infinitely more valuable than frame rate over 50. I've capped my fancy monitor's frame rate to 60 so it matches my macbook air. And it's all fine in this world, nothing here is "one notch above unusable".
My toilet seems to work fine, and I think it's 35 years old.
But in general I agree, just with different variables. I'm ok with 60hz but I won't use a screen less than 4K. Part of the reason I bought the ThinkPad is because it was one of the few I could find at a reasonable price that had a 4K screen.
No. I guess everyone has different levels of sensitivity to refresh rates. It is immediately noticeable and very distracting to me when using a 60hz display.
It's not acceptable on a high-end laptop nowadays (120hz minimum). Imagine the reduction in headaches, fatigue and nausea if we stopped tolerating this penny-pinching.
Not with Linux, typically. If you don't have drivers included in the kernel, it requires a lot of effort to get things working. I've done it many times, so now I will generally only buy laptops that have decent Linux support. [1]
I've had the laptop for about two years now and it still runs just as well as the day I bought it. I'm very happy with it.
[1] No I will not stick with Windows. Please feel free to read through my comment history to see why, but TL;DR I just don't like it.
I've had linux on every laptop I've owned for years, and I haven't really had a problem with any of them running linux, except for display port support on a dell xps.
Aside from that one dell laptop, though, I generally avoid HP and dell entirely, so perhaps that's why.
^ this comment is more relevant than people might think. HP regularly deploys broken BIOS updates and literally bricks your laptops. Happened in 2023 I think 7 times that year, and one time even right in the next week. Our IT got so fed up and ditched any HP laptops because of it.
That advice doesn't hold up very well when in recent years we've had multiple instances of a BIOS update being necessary to deal with the problem of "the CPU gets fed too high a voltage and dies prematurely". That's happened to both Intel and AMD desktop CPUs.
It's a real problem that BIOS updates for consumer systems never come with a meaningful changelog, so evaluating whether a particular update is a good idea or not is basically impossible.
I would strongly advice against buying HP laptops if you want to install linux because MX linux worked well on mine pre-owned HP, Zorin OS worked well but somehow I could not install AntiX linux and secure boot of HP troubled me too much and I could install OpenBSD on it but each time I would restart then it would kernel panic and I would havento reinstall. Combined with a long holiday when I left it at home. Now my HP is practically bricked. It is not starting
I built a tower several years ago and it had CPU temp issues from the start. I RMA’d the cooler, reapplied the thermal paste a couple times, reassembled the whole build, etc. It wasn’t my main machine, but every time I sat down to use it the CPU would run hot and thermal-throttle. It’s an i9 with P/E cores, so I just chalked it up to Linux power management woes. A couple months ago I was on the brink of selling it for parts, but updated the BIOS as a Hail Mary. Totally fixed it.
I guess I did “ have a specific bug that needs fixed”; I just didn’t know it!
People don't have a choice to update their BIOS, as updates like this are automatically installed, by both Windows and the underlying Intel ME tools.
(And I'm trying to avoid talking about microcode updates, which is a whole other story of fuckups)
Regarding Thinkpad BIOS: I have a Raspberry Pi Zero and a self soldered RP2040 programmer [1] in my travel kit for a reason. When travelling, a lot of the Cellebrite rootkits rely on an OEM BIOS, so they typically reflash your BIOS in the "we gonna check your laptop" phase.
When CAMM was announced, they (Dell) mentioned that one of the reasons for soldered RAM was due to electrical tolerances not being met anymore with regular DIMMs at the speeds they were reaching. CAMM was designed to avoid this, and ensures that each trace has the same length so there aren’t timing issues.
I’m no expert but it sounds plausible to me. From a manufacturing perspective, it makes sense that they’d want modular RAM so they can configure them at point of sale instead of having to manufacture multiple motherboards with only RAM sizes being different.
Yeah I read about that too. Makes sense as faster cpus demand faster responses from ram and the timing has to be right. I think it came up with a gamers nexus video on the steam machine.
Looks like the T14 Gen 7 is the first T14 to have a CAMM socket. The previous model has SODIMM DDR5-5600, more power hungry? Prior to that it was the more expensive P1 Gen 7 that had LPCAMM2.
Regarding the T14 and T16, I'm frustrated that in my market (AU), they don't sell better screens than 1920x1200. I'd like to have a brighter 3k or 4k screen.
The LPCAMM2 seems to be limited to the Intel models, according to the pc mag article.
It did worry me though, as I had also never heard of it. Is it highly available like more regular DIMM or SODIMM ram?
That is usually my concern with things like the modular ports and replaceable keyboards too. By the time I actually need to replace anything it could be 10 years from now, could I actually source these parts easily?
Regardless, that is a excellent problem to have compared to other less repairable laptops. I have been running my current laptop for 10 years, by the time it's unrepairable I might switch to this.
If this model of laptop is produced in high volume, at minimum it means that dead ones can be used for parts to cobble together a smaller number of functional ones. Well, unless it turns out that a design flaw means a few parts in particular are almost always the first to go...
I thought the issue with the soldered on RAM wasn't the fact that it was soldered, but that manufacturers would use chips that are not easy to source and in some way serialised.
So even if you got larger chips, you would still have to figure out other parts to swap that tell the CPU it's 32GB now, not 24GB.
Being soldered on is a huge issue to 99% of people and businesses wanting to repair or upgrade something.
I don’t have the tools or skills to replace soldered on memory chips when they fail. Nobody at my place of work does. Nobody was doing that type of work in a warranty centre I worked in either.
I’d need to buy an entire motherboard which will much more expensive, and likely more time consuming, than swapping a couple of memory modules.
Do folks have any security concerns with Lenovo? An IT leader at a medium-large US bank recently told me they won't use Lenovo due to security risks from Chinese firmware (or something to that effect, referencing and older incident I don't recall). I've only seen such policies with defense players ten or so years ago.
That said, I've owned them personally for 10+ years, so looking for objective thoughts outside repairability as the article covers.
Would that not be a concern for most computers? Aren’t most of these motherboards manufactured in China (or at least close proximity to China? Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.)
But older Thinkpads (not sure about newer (~5 years old) ones, certainly not brand brand new models) have great support of alternative firmware such as coreboot and libreboot, other projects that disable Intel ME and the like.
This commitment by Lenovo must have been driven by customer demand -- in this case, the IT departments. I wonder how much of that demand may be attributed to questions about comparisons to Framework. Even if Framework is not mainstream, it has mindshare among the IT-crowd.
Framework is a great concept but they will die due to poor execution. If I hadn't already recently bought a Framework (and knew what I do now about them) I would've held out for one of these new Lenovos. I don't think Framework can compete if one of the established players joins the game.
For me, Framework is super cool as a brand, both for the quality of their product and the ethos that backs it. When everyone else in the coffee shop has an apple or another brand so widespread that you don't even notice it, the gear is something different. I like that.
> We noted a similar lack of modularity on the Wi-Fi module, where repairs or upgrades will be impractical at best.
I'm the current owner of a T14s (gen3 AMD) and the non-replaceable wifi chip has been my biggest pain point with it. I'm somewhat disappointed to see them give this 10/10 score with that problem unresolved.
according to lspci it's a Qualcomm QCNFA765 and it works great under Linux...until you suspend the machine. after it wakes up from suspend, it will only stay connected for a few seconds to a minute before dropping the connection and re-establishing it.
I've replaced wifi chips in other Thinkpads I've owned, so I naively assumed this would be the same as well - just swapping out the M.2 card. but no such luck, it's soldered in place.
I ended up using systemd to rmmod-then-modprobe the ath11k_pci module when the system resumes from sleep. this is annoying because it adds a delay of several extra seconds before the machine is ready to use, but none of the "smaller hammer" workarounds I attempted worked at all.
I agree with the other comments here saying that it smells of AI-generated marketing puff-piece --- ThinkPads have always been very repairable, with the official service manuals published (which is more of a guide to disassembly/reassembly, but that's sufficient especially given the availability of (leaked) schematics). Older Dell Latitudes are not too bad either.
Nice very cool. Unfortunately, the blog post looks like it's been generated by an LLM.
> Going from a high score to the highest score isn’t usually about making minor tweaks. It requires fighting for every small, boring, consequential decision—the ones that determine whether a repair isn’t merely possible or practical, but within easy reach.
Ifixit, the same guys that gave the new Macmini 8/10 for repairability? They're totally biased to mainstream products IMHO especially Mac products.
Then they give this Laptop a 10/10. One look at the internals and without a shadow of doubt it's not as as repairable friendly as framework laptop.
Not sure what they are smoking.
Yea someone else said it but bios updates on certain models can be hit or miss. But definitely better than dell or hp. I'd take Asus over Lenovo any day for bios though.
One of the worst places are company "About pages". I've come across new products, some linked here; interested, I click through to the "about us" page, only to find meaningless marketing fluff that tells me zero about the people behind the product. That's a signal to me to close the tab and move on.
I'm not in a refresh cycle, but I would seriously consider this platform having used the older X series, and found them workhorses. I destroyed an X30 keyboard and the replacement was fast and easy. Bringing that experience into the modern era is a good thing.
One thing which worries me, is how easily the Qualcomm core platforms run novel OS because I don't see indications they are avoiding blob dependency either in the core, or in peripheral control. It will probably be fine if you run the Lenovo tailored linux release, but if you want to run a BSD or something else you might find either you're on a slower path, or you have less battery life, or you simply can't drive some devices. (I am a user not a kernel/devicedriver developer so if I misunderstand blobbyness and why things like wifi cards often don't work please don't hate me)
But for hardware replacement? This is ace! I like the other sources which people use too, but Lenovo has a worldwide warranty, and has agents almost everywhere so your ability to be on-the-road, pick up a phone, quote a number and get a part is significantly enhanced. (in my experience)
I switch from ThinkPad to Framework because they couldn't send me a replacement keyboard. They want me to send the keyboard back to get a refund but I never receive it so... I never did get a refund.
Later, Framework send me a laptop in 1 week and later a replacement screen in less then a week. It's been 3 years ago now.
I'm rocking a framework 13" intel 12th gen still and I love it. The only issue I had was being part of the few that got a batch of bad hinges. I didn't know there was a replacement program I could have used and just replaced them myself with the heavier hinge option. At this point I have every expansion port thing they offer and keep them in my bag. My laptop can have any I/O I want :) pretty cool.
My sister just ordered a battery & some hinges for her Framework and they practically overnighted it to us here in Alaska. They included a colorful sheet of stickers, too - fun!
This is great. I’m still rocking a nearly 10 year old T470s. Great machine with Linux on it, still snappy enough- Tailscale is there when I need to do serious work (on my desktop at home!)
I replaced the batteries a few months ago and it was painless.
I have a T470. I have changed the screen (after I dropped water on it and shorted it), changed the batteries after 5 years, increased the RAM, and added an M2 drive. All of these were painless operations. Couldn't be happier with my purchase.
Same here. The only problem is that I "only" have 24Gb of RAM. I wish I could upgrade but it's a hard limit. And keyboard quality seems to have been degrading over the years since 2020. Is this new model good in terms of keyboard?
If you are ever bored, maxing out a T440p, T430, or T480 is a fun exercise and not very difficult nor expensive. CPU, RAM, SSD, coreboot, modern LCD panel, Liteon keyboard. Load with Linux, BSD, OpenCore.
And then the year after this is released, will they sell you new mainboards with the rest of the laptop, so you can upgrade just the parts that need updating?
The last time my ThinkPad 755C was in the way and shuffled around as part of re-arranging, it still booted up.
The only other device I've owned which might have that sort of longevity is my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 (which I quite miss for its transflective display).
Really wish the Lenovo Yogabook 9i was in the ThinkPad line and that it had a Wacom EMR stylus....
Yikes. Has iFixit jumped the shark? An AI generated press release on behalf of Lenovo, who is (from my perspective) essentially paying them for good PR? And this paid relationship - Lenovo paying iFixit - isn’t disclosed until the very last line of the article, so you have to first read 1500+ words of AI slop?
That made me start looking into their scores. The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds _worse_ than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.
Thank you for saying it. There was somehting nagging me after a while. Even the quotes from Lenovo read as being AI generated, which begs the question if the quotes are real or paraphrased of factual at all.
You’re welcome. It’s a real shame IMO. I used to be a huge Lenovo guy, until the quality of the products dropped off a cliff a decade and change ago. Disappointing to see that instead of making a better product they decided to pay iFixit to write AI-generated puff pieces.
Lenovo had a couple black eyes back-to-back. It was 10 years ago now, but trust takes a long time to build and can be lost in an instant. They lost my trust and I don’t see them getting it back.
My first laptop was an IBM Thinkpad, and while it was a great piece of hardware, I don’t see myself ever buying another one as long an Lenovo owns the brand.
I recall Dell and Sony doing something similar. Maybe not with ads but had some kind of root kit. Then again, if you have an Intel processor I guess it’s already somewhat compromised.
I represent pricing in $/warranty year. (If you want me to believe the product is worth more, stand by it in the form of a warranty. But if a company isn't going to put their warranty where their mouth is, well.)
Lenovo used to warrant their product; my previous Thinkpad, which came with a then-pathetic (Thinkpads used to be four year warranties!) 3 year warranty, for ~$1200, or $400/warranty year.
I can't mock up a purchase for either laptop reviewed, as neither are available at any price. So, we'll do the predecessor. Those start at $1300/y; that represents an increase in price of ~14% YoY … which obviously is not tracking inflation.
That's enough to put smaller manufacturers who don't benefit from large supply chains, like Framework, in spitting distance.
But is it comparable? The base screen is "45%NTSC", and AFAICT from the reviews, the consensus is "don't do it". The other option is an sRGB screen. The base SSD is half the size now, but it is also upgradable to 1 TiB if you fork over $. The OS can be removed now, which actually knocks $90 off the "base" price! The dGPU is just quite literally gone. And nine years later, and the RAM is still the same size, but as we all know, software definitely hasn't gotten more bloated in the past nine years.
So, oddly, my current Thinkpad is down for the count right now. After 9 years, it suffered the first real HW failure: the motherboard. The first one took ~3 weeks to ship, and it was defective. The next one only took ~2 weeks, and the patient is still in surgery, so fingers crossed?
My biggest repairability question: … have they fixed the power brick to not have the cable melded into the brick? The cable is what breaks, and it costs probably like $3.50, but because it's molded into the main AC/DC converter brick, you have to scrap the entire thing and Lenovo charges for those like they're made from the tears of angels. If you just make a connector there, you raise the cost of the brick a few cents, maybe a few dollars … and save $50? $60 down the road in repairs, and untold amounts of eWaste.
Shocking. I quit Lenovo around 2019 after the T490 soldered stuff on and ditched the second removable battery, Apple-style. That was it for me. T480 has been pretty good and even supports an eGPU over Thunderbolt. Have to give it another look.
Yeah, I was shocked that a keyboard replacement of my company issued X1 is basically a full teardown. When it was time to replace my private laptop a year later, I opted for the L-series, which is much better in that regard and also much cheaper. Keyboard replacements are a pretty standard thing for me, because I don't like my local layout and if you limit yourself to buying with the layout you want, you can only go to Apple or Framework nowadays.
I don't like betting on newcomers. While they may have some good ideas that improve the industry overall, there is a lot of long-term learning that newcomers can't yet benefit from. That usually leads to silly mistakes and quality problems. The useful aspect of newcomers is the credible threat they pose to the old guard of taking a portion of the pie away if they don't innovate. But I don't feel like spending my own money on that.
This is great and should be applauded, but repairability is but one aspect of many in a good laptop. I wonder if other aspects had to suffer to achieve this, and if they did by how much. The answer to that question could make or break the laptop for many users.
> Lenovo tells us, “The biggest challenge in getting to a 10/10 was balancing repairability with all the other expectations of a commercial device: performance, reliability, thermal efficiency, form factor, and design integrity. Repairability isn’t achieved by a single change: it requires many small, intentional decisions across the entire system, and each of those decisions can introduce trade-offs.
Yes, however companies say a lot of things. We'll need to see some hard numbers and reviews based on real world usage to know if their claims ring true.
All the repairability in the world is moot if the laptop isn't good enough to sell itself on its other merits. If it turns out to be hot and loud or have poor battery life for example, that's going to steer many to buy elsewhere.
Probably because this is not repairability, but rather dividing device into smaller not repairable parts that can be replaced by purchasing parts from the manufacturer at inflated cost.
I love this. T14 gen 7 was the first NB I a actually bought for myself, and it's great to know that USB-C ports can just be replaced that easilly without soldering and that it was designed from the start with repairability in mind. Non-A USB ports is something that always ends up failing.
Shame the keyboards have a copilot key. That doesn't sound so bad until you see that the thing emits a key chord, not a scancode, making it annoying to remap. But you can.
The most annoying part is that the key matrix isn't set up to 3-key rollover with the copilot key like it would be for a real modifier key. (I'd assumed they'd just keep the matrix they used when there was a modifier in that spot. Nope.) Consequently, some key combinations, e.g. ralt-rcontrol-spacebar, don't work. Press them, nothing happens. Infuriating.
Once you see it you can't unsee it. Although maybe this how corporate blogslop has always been, and we're just now noticing now that it's infected everything.
> "These are not complaints, merely observations."
> "There are repairable laptops, and then there are ThinkPads."
> "iFixit approached the relationship as collaborators, not critics."
> "[...] they didn’t declare victory and go home. They kept pushing."
> "Designing for repairability doesn’t mean compromising innovation or premium experiences; when done well, it actually drives smarter innovation, better modularity, and more resilient platforms."
> "It would be one thing to make a highly repairable but low-volume niche device or concept. Instead, Lenovo just threw down a gauntlet by notching a 10/10 repairability score on their mainstream-iest business laptop."
> "This is [...] how repair goes from being an enthusiast’s “nice-to-have” to being baked into procurement checklists and fleet-management decisions."
There's a desperate grasping for drama and simplicity about it -- same as most mass-media news stories. I recall reading somewhere that the two watchwords of journalism are "simplify, and exaggerate". Maybe add to that: "Make all your metaphors cliches, so the reader doesn't have to think about what is meant."
Yeah, it's weird. It's like one person writes articles for the whole world. Probably will be fixed in a few AI iterations to present more styles, but right now it's everywhere. Articles, even forum posts.
I found a way to 'de-smell' LLM copy: tell it to take a second pass that processes the text output with the William Burroughs cut-up method. Works well for a small subset of use cases.
Presumably the smelly AI text problem is just ... a problem that will be solved. Or maybe we'll just get used to it.
I believe it's already a solved problem especially with base models (pre RL) but they still push the LLM voice either to make it easy to identify or because they think it's likeable, so it's not that OAI, anthropic, Google can't get rid of the assistant voice it's that they don't want to
I recently destroyed the screen on a Google Pixel during a repair following a shoddily-written set of iFixIt instructions. I wish I had checked the comments, where many people complained that the instruction was wrong.
It was about a very fragile part of the process, and so it seemed like an error of omission that seemed atypical for iFixIt. It made me suspect the instructions might not have been wholly human written. I feel a bit vindicated for that suspicion.
The most generous interpretation I can have for this type of article is that it's a second-order phenomenon. If it was written by a human, it was written by one who consumes a lot of AI generated content and whose standards for what they produce have slipped.
I’ve only tried doing a phone repair per iFixit’s instructions once, and the instructions sucked. They explained in excruciating detail how to take the phone apart and then the instructions just ended. No details on reassembly.
Ah, yes, everything needs to be phrased as an existential crossroads now. Same thing the other day when I was debating between olives or pickles on my pizza.
Not GP but I'm personally hoping that if I'm inevitably doomed to be exposed to this horseshit every day that it becomes tolerable to read. For world-shaking language-based superintelligences, they can't write to save their very expensive lives.
What annoys me the most is that the information has become much less dense. There's a lot of unnecessary repetition.
I feel like I need to feed every article through an LLM just to get a summary of it.
It indicates a baseline competency of the AI user or whomever they are trusting to use it and it will hurt brand trust and trusting humans even more.
I'm glad I haven't let AI write much for me, its better for it to help me develop my ideas and writing and do the work to learn, explore and end up with something where my brain is in the gym.
.
Passive generation might not always map well to passive consumption
Metal and glass are overrated. Glass cracks, metal bends and stays bent... Plastic, especially high quality plastics combined with a magnesium chassis in a ThinkPad, is way more durable.
I have the ThinkPad p16s AMD gen 2. What it lacks in name it makes up for with being the most headache-free computer I have ever had (including a Macbook).
Everything works pretty well out of the box, it never really overheats, Linux support required basically no effort with NixOS, the keyboard feels pretty nice, the screen is bright and easy to read, and fortunately I bought it when RAM prices weren't insane so I got the 64GB model.
I haven't tried repairing it yet but considering how well it's been working I'm not even sure I'll need ever need to. If this laptop gets stolen, I will likely just buy another ThinkPad, I'm a complete convert.
I own T14s Gen4 Intel and Linux support is perfect, even fingerprint reader works. Zero complaints. I'm mostly using it in clamshell mode connected via USB-C to display with backwards charging, it all just works! I'm also using secureboot with my keys, I cleared all MS keys and it didn't brick the laptop.
My only grievance is a bit buggy firmware. When I turn laptop on or reboot, speakers will randomly be muted (not a problem after OS boots, but for example in UEFI it'll either beep or not beep and that's random). UEFI interface was a bit buggy regarding mouse control, for example I've used to touch and drag things in boot order, but it didn't work and I have to actually press touchbar button down and keeping it like that move cursor. But touch drag works in other places. Not a big issue bit the first time I encountered it, I spent good few minutes trying to make sense of it, as I thought it just does not allow me to reorder boot entries or something like that. But these are small issues and once you've installed OS, you never deal with that.
Oh, and another complaint is that their BIOS update procedure is super weird. I have to find computer with Windows, download some exe, unpack things, find some BAT file and write to USB drive things, then boot from it. Theoretically they publish stuff to fwupd but I don't like this service. My best BIOS update experience was on Asus PC. I just put some bin file onto FAT32 USB drive, entered UEFI configuration, chose "update", selected that file and that's about it. Super easy, every manufacturer must implement this workflow.
Anyway I'm satistfied owner and my next laptop will likely be Thinkpad. Mostly because its stellar Linux support, but also because I didn't have any major issues with my current laptop.
Re firmware updates, I've had the same problem and written a blog post about how to update the firmware on ThinkPad under Linux without a Windows computer. Find it here: https://random.xdiez.com/it/2024/02/03/Lenovo-BIOS-update-do...
T14s Gen4 AMD user here w/secureboot enabled. Just used fwupd to upgrade BIOS two days ago, because I didn't realize the BIOS boot-order lock was preventing it. Rebooted, changed setting, rebooted, upgraded firmware automatically, rebooted, changed setting back. Yes it took 30 minutes, but I don't expect I'll need to do it again.
While most of the hardware works, hibernate doesn't, which annoys me. Fingerprint scanner also only works randomly at login, Linux issue I assume. Machine was crashing once a week (logs suggest it was AMDGPU related), but not since the firmware update, so fingers crossed that's fixed. In retrospect I wish I got the L14, didn't realize I would need more RAM at the time.
What’s wrong with fwupd? I’ll admit that that the CLI is not exactly awesome, but it seems like a fairly clean implementation of the actual UEFI spec for updates.
I disabled possibility of updates in my BIOS, so I must first enter BIOS, enable updates in BIOS, then I have to tinker with my boot configuration as I'm using secureboot with custom keys and no bootloader, I also need to allow changing UEFI boot variables, well, lots of things I just don't want to do for my setup. A lot of moving parts with zero sense over something as simple as update from the USB drive.
Basically right now my setup is super simple and restricted and I have to make it significantly more complicated and insecure to allow fwupd to work.
Second that. Both AMD p16 and p14 are amazing NixOS machines.
> Linux support required basically no effort with NixOS
My main requirement for a next laptop is running NixOS (coming from Macbook land). It’s probably this or one of the new XPS models, but not clear what NixOS support looks like there.
There's actually a compatibility listing and the hacks required to make them work! https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware
In the case of my ThinkPad, you can see there is literally no extra work required: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/blob/master/lenovo/t...
Still, doesn't mean you shouldn't look into other brands, obviously. Take a look at that repo to see if there's obvious compatibility stuff.
Why are they so allergic to >60hz displays though? There is zero chance that I'm buying a laptop with a slideshow display like that in current year.
I've never had an issue with 60hz. 30hz is unusable but 60hz has always been good enough for me; the Sega Genesis and SNES had 60hz and that's always been good enough for me.
Is there any other area where you would tolerate 35 year-old performance as "good enough"?
My requirements when buying a laptop are evidently higher than one notch above "unusable".
Even 50hz is fine. I'd go so far as to say, barring any medical or sensitivity issue, if any person prioritizes a 120hz screen they are a victim to habit or marketing.
It adds zero value to the experience, and you're just looking for things to be annoyed by / brag about.
Modern displays are already cutting edge. They have improved in every way that's meaningful in the last 35 years. Refresh rate is just not meaningful enough. "35 year old performance" it most certainly is not. You just seem hellbent on using this arbitrary (to most people) benchmark as a filter.
FYI, I run my 17 pro almost exclusively on power saving mode to cap frame rates because the battery life extending by 30 mins is more infinitely more valuable than frame rate over 50. I've capped my fancy monitor's frame rate to 60 so it matches my macbook air. And it's all fine in this world, nothing here is "one notch above unusable".
> Refresh rate is just not meaningful enough.
Until the bloody compositor updates the screen based on it or worse based on half of it.
My toilet seems to work fine, and I think it's 35 years old.
But in general I agree, just with different variables. I'm ok with 60hz but I won't use a screen less than 4K. Part of the reason I bought the ThinkPad is because it was one of the few I could find at a reasonable price that had a 4K screen.
Are you a gamer? Otherwise it's really not easy to notice a "slideshow" at 60 Hz.
No. I guess everyone has different levels of sensitivity to refresh rates. It is immediately noticeable and very distracting to me when using a 60hz display.
It's not acceptable on a high-end laptop nowadays (120hz minimum). Imagine the reduction in headaches, fatigue and nausea if we stopped tolerating this penny-pinching.
Moving the mouse around at anything below 90Hz is pretty rough.
Majority of laptops works "pretty well out of the box".
Not with Linux, typically. If you don't have drivers included in the kernel, it requires a lot of effort to get things working. I've done it many times, so now I will generally only buy laptops that have decent Linux support. [1]
I've had the laptop for about two years now and it still runs just as well as the day I bought it. I'm very happy with it.
[1] No I will not stick with Windows. Please feel free to read through my comment history to see why, but TL;DR I just don't like it.
I've had linux on every laptop I've owned for years, and I haven't really had a problem with any of them running linux, except for display port support on a dell xps.
Aside from that one dell laptop, though, I generally avoid HP and dell entirely, so perhaps that's why.
In 2013 I bought a laptop that I kept five years that had an Nvidia Optimus.
I never really figured out how to get the discrete card working consistently, and since then I haven't bought a laptop with an Nvidia card.
I've had issues with wifi cards and sound drivers and the like as well, though it's going a lot better now than it was a decade ago.
I urge you to try HP.
^ this comment is more relevant than people might think. HP regularly deploys broken BIOS updates and literally bricks your laptops. Happened in 2023 I think 7 times that year, and one time even right in the next week. Our IT got so fed up and ditched any HP laptops because of it.
Never update your BIOS unless you have a specific bug that needs fixed.
I remember a Thinkpad BIOS update ended up destroying both undervolting and overclocking, and required a "chip-clip" programmer to revert.
That advice doesn't hold up very well when in recent years we've had multiple instances of a BIOS update being necessary to deal with the problem of "the CPU gets fed too high a voltage and dies prematurely". That's happened to both Intel and AMD desktop CPUs.
It's a real problem that BIOS updates for consumer systems never come with a meaningful changelog, so evaluating whether a particular update is a good idea or not is basically impossible.
That advice holds up very well when taken along with "don't buy the very first major release".
I would strongly advice against buying HP laptops if you want to install linux because MX linux worked well on mine pre-owned HP, Zorin OS worked well but somehow I could not install AntiX linux and secure boot of HP troubled me too much and I could install OpenBSD on it but each time I would restart then it would kernel panic and I would havento reinstall. Combined with a long holiday when I left it at home. Now my HP is practically bricked. It is not starting
I built a tower several years ago and it had CPU temp issues from the start. I RMA’d the cooler, reapplied the thermal paste a couple times, reassembled the whole build, etc. It wasn’t my main machine, but every time I sat down to use it the CPU would run hot and thermal-throttle. It’s an i9 with P/E cores, so I just chalked it up to Linux power management woes. A couple months ago I was on the brink of selling it for parts, but updated the BIOS as a Hail Mary. Totally fixed it.
I guess I did “ have a specific bug that needs fixed”; I just didn’t know it!
People don't have a choice to update their BIOS, as updates like this are automatically installed, by both Windows and the underlying Intel ME tools.
(And I'm trying to avoid talking about microcode updates, which is a whole other story of fuckups)
Regarding Thinkpad BIOS: I have a Raspberry Pi Zero and a self soldered RP2040 programmer [1] in my travel kit for a reason. When travelling, a lot of the Cellebrite rootkits rely on an OEM BIOS, so they typically reflash your BIOS in the "we gonna check your laptop" phase.
[1] would totally recommend serprog, it's awesome: https://codeberg.org/Riku_V/pico-serprog
my dell is hot garbage from work
> LPCAMM2 memory that’s fast, efficient, and easily serviced [0]
Today I Learned about LPCAMM2, which is refreshing, seeing soldered-on memory always felt like some kind of slide into disposable barbarism.
[0] https://www.ifixit.com/News/95078/lpcamm2-memory-is-finally-...
When CAMM was announced, they (Dell) mentioned that one of the reasons for soldered RAM was due to electrical tolerances not being met anymore with regular DIMMs at the speeds they were reaching. CAMM was designed to avoid this, and ensures that each trace has the same length so there aren’t timing issues.
I’m no expert but it sounds plausible to me. From a manufacturing perspective, it makes sense that they’d want modular RAM so they can configure them at point of sale instead of having to manufacture multiple motherboards with only RAM sizes being different.
Yeah I read about that too. Makes sense as faster cpus demand faster responses from ram and the timing has to be right. I think it came up with a gamers nexus video on the steam machine.
Looks like the T14 Gen 7 is the first T14 to have a CAMM socket. The previous model has SODIMM DDR5-5600, more power hungry? Prior to that it was the more expensive P1 Gen 7 that had LPCAMM2.
Regarding the T14 and T16, I'm frustrated that in my market (AU), they don't sell better screens than 1920x1200. I'd like to have a brighter 3k or 4k screen.
The LPCAMM2 seems to be limited to the Intel models, according to the pc mag article.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/lenovo-thinkpad-t14-gen-7-hands-o...
It did worry me though, as I had also never heard of it. Is it highly available like more regular DIMM or SODIMM ram?
That is usually my concern with things like the modular ports and replaceable keyboards too. By the time I actually need to replace anything it could be 10 years from now, could I actually source these parts easily?
Regardless, that is a excellent problem to have compared to other less repairable laptops. I have been running my current laptop for 10 years, by the time it's unrepairable I might switch to this.
If this model of laptop is produced in high volume, at minimum it means that dead ones can be used for parts to cobble together a smaller number of functional ones. Well, unless it turns out that a design flaw means a few parts in particular are almost always the first to go...
Yeah I learning about LPCAMM2 memory was far more interesting than the repairability score.
I thought the issue with the soldered on RAM wasn't the fact that it was soldered, but that manufacturers would use chips that are not easy to source and in some way serialised. So even if you got larger chips, you would still have to figure out other parts to swap that tell the CPU it's 32GB now, not 24GB.
Being soldered on is a huge issue to 99% of people and businesses wanting to repair or upgrade something.
I don’t have the tools or skills to replace soldered on memory chips when they fail. Nobody at my place of work does. Nobody was doing that type of work in a warranty centre I worked in either.
I’d need to buy an entire motherboard which will much more expensive, and likely more time consuming, than swapping a couple of memory modules.
Do folks have any security concerns with Lenovo? An IT leader at a medium-large US bank recently told me they won't use Lenovo due to security risks from Chinese firmware (or something to that effect, referencing and older incident I don't recall). I've only seen such policies with defense players ten or so years ago.
That said, I've owned them personally for 10+ years, so looking for objective thoughts outside repairability as the article covers.
Would that not be a concern for most computers? Aren’t most of these motherboards manufactured in China (or at least close proximity to China? Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.)
But older Thinkpads (not sure about newer (~5 years old) ones, certainly not brand brand new models) have great support of alternative firmware such as coreboot and libreboot, other projects that disable Intel ME and the like.
Reminds me of the film Armageddon 1998, where the Russian astronaut had some complaints:
<in reference to hardware buttons in the spaceship control panel>
USA astronaut: "This is an American aircraft, you don't know the parts"
Russian astronaut: "Ah, American parts, Russian parts... all made in Taiwan!"
Perhaps, but lots of (older) Thinkpads are supported by Libreboot, so that cuts down on the binary blobs significantly.
The bigger threat is the US, which injects spyware capabilities into every AMD, Intel and Nvidia die.
Maybe? The Lenovo Superfish thing was pretty bad.
Anyway, every die? citation needed.
Also. If true, what's the alternative?
This commitment by Lenovo must have been driven by customer demand -- in this case, the IT departments. I wonder how much of that demand may be attributed to questions about comparisons to Framework. Even if Framework is not mainstream, it has mindshare among the IT-crowd.
Framework is a great concept but they will die due to poor execution. If I hadn't already recently bought a Framework (and knew what I do now about them) I would've held out for one of these new Lenovos. I don't think Framework can compete if one of the established players joins the game.
For me, Framework is super cool as a brand, both for the quality of their product and the ethos that backs it. When everyone else in the coffee shop has an apple or another brand so widespread that you don't even notice it, the gear is something different. I like that.
The replaceable Thunderbolt sockets connecting to an internal Thunderbolt socket are a direct... homage to Framework.
> We noted a similar lack of modularity on the Wi-Fi module, where repairs or upgrades will be impractical at best.
I'm the current owner of a T14s (gen3 AMD) and the non-replaceable wifi chip has been my biggest pain point with it. I'm somewhat disappointed to see them give this 10/10 score with that problem unresolved.
according to lspci it's a Qualcomm QCNFA765 and it works great under Linux...until you suspend the machine. after it wakes up from suspend, it will only stay connected for a few seconds to a minute before dropping the connection and re-establishing it.
I've replaced wifi chips in other Thinkpads I've owned, so I naively assumed this would be the same as well - just swapping out the M.2 card. but no such luck, it's soldered in place.
I ended up using systemd to rmmod-then-modprobe the ath11k_pci module when the system resumes from sleep. this is annoying because it adds a delay of several extra seconds before the machine is ready to use, but none of the "smaller hammer" workarounds I attempted worked at all.
I agree with the other comments here saying that it smells of AI-generated marketing puff-piece --- ThinkPads have always been very repairable, with the official service manuals published (which is more of a guide to disassembly/reassembly, but that's sufficient especially given the availability of (leaked) schematics). Older Dell Latitudes are not too bad either.
ThinkPads have definitely not always been very repairable. The t480 was the last solid option, and it went downhill from there.
Nice very cool. Unfortunately, the blog post looks like it's been generated by an LLM.
> Going from a high score to the highest score isn’t usually about making minor tweaks. It requires fighting for every small, boring, consequential decision—the ones that determine whether a repair isn’t merely possible or practical, but within easy reach.
Ifixit, the same guys that gave the new Macmini 8/10 for repairability? They're totally biased to mainstream products IMHO especially Mac products.
Then they give this Laptop a 10/10. One look at the internals and without a shadow of doubt it's not as as repairable friendly as framework laptop.
Not sure what they are smoking.
Yea someone else said it but bios updates on certain models can be hit or miss. But definitely better than dell or hp. I'd take Asus over Lenovo any day for bios though.
I, as a non-native speaker, don't associate this with LLMs, but with corporate advertising texts.
They're basically the same thing. Machine language, just generated by a different kind of machine, one social, the other a transformer model.
One of the worst places are company "About pages". I've come across new products, some linked here; interested, I click through to the "about us" page, only to find meaningless marketing fluff that tells me zero about the people behind the product. That's a signal to me to close the tab and move on.
At the same time, at least to me, the text reads like a transcript from one of their YouTube tear downs.
There are those times we may be seeing the source of LLM language training. I had the same reaction of sounding like one but agree it's likely not.
LLMs copied this style of writing, no doubt by training on blog content. Blogs have been doing it forever now...
I'm not in a refresh cycle, but I would seriously consider this platform having used the older X series, and found them workhorses. I destroyed an X30 keyboard and the replacement was fast and easy. Bringing that experience into the modern era is a good thing.
One thing which worries me, is how easily the Qualcomm core platforms run novel OS because I don't see indications they are avoiding blob dependency either in the core, or in peripheral control. It will probably be fine if you run the Lenovo tailored linux release, but if you want to run a BSD or something else you might find either you're on a slower path, or you have less battery life, or you simply can't drive some devices. (I am a user not a kernel/devicedriver developer so if I misunderstand blobbyness and why things like wifi cards often don't work please don't hate me)
But for hardware replacement? This is ace! I like the other sources which people use too, but Lenovo has a worldwide warranty, and has agents almost everywhere so your ability to be on-the-road, pick up a phone, quote a number and get a part is significantly enhanced. (in my experience)
I switch from ThinkPad to Framework because they couldn't send me a replacement keyboard. They want me to send the keyboard back to get a refund but I never receive it so... I never did get a refund.
Later, Framework send me a laptop in 1 week and later a replacement screen in less then a week. It's been 3 years ago now.
What do you think of the build quality of your Framework? Have you had any issues over the last 3 years?
I'm rocking a framework 13" intel 12th gen still and I love it. The only issue I had was being part of the few that got a batch of bad hinges. I didn't know there was a replacement program I could have used and just replaced them myself with the heavier hinge option. At this point I have every expansion port thing they offer and keep them in my bag. My laptop can have any I/O I want :) pretty cool.
Hmm, framework 13 and Linux… loves nothing more than to drain while off. I’m getting really annoyed by that
Are there non-Mac laptops that still support real sleep? I'm worried about replacing my beater XPS.
My sister just ordered a battery & some hinges for her Framework and they practically overnighted it to us here in Alaska. They included a colorful sheet of stickers, too - fun!
Lenovo (and their subsidiary Motorola) seem to be on a consumer friendliness streak
This is great. I’m still rocking a nearly 10 year old T470s. Great machine with Linux on it, still snappy enough- Tailscale is there when I need to do serious work (on my desktop at home!)
I replaced the batteries a few months ago and it was painless.
I have a T470. I have changed the screen (after I dropped water on it and shorted it), changed the batteries after 5 years, increased the RAM, and added an M2 drive. All of these were painless operations. Couldn't be happier with my purchase.
Same here. The only problem is that I "only" have 24Gb of RAM. I wish I could upgrade but it's a hard limit. And keyboard quality seems to have been degrading over the years since 2020. Is this new model good in terms of keyboard?
If you are ever bored, maxing out a T440p, T430, or T480 is a fun exercise and not very difficult nor expensive. CPU, RAM, SSD, coreboot, modern LCD panel, Liteon keyboard. Load with Linux, BSD, OpenCore.
> nor expensive
With OpenAI completely destroying the component supply chain in 2026 I think this requires citations
DDR3 was not so much affected as DDR4 or DDR5.
I have a hard time finding a good battery.
I bought an internal and external battery and the external one quickly started bloating.
I had al of these. The CPU is the weakest component here, and only T480 supports 32 GB RAM.
(Typing this from a T14 gen 1.)
I've got a T480s that has 40GB of RAM (32GB SODIMM + 8GiB soldered). Works fine. Is the T480 different?
T480 has 2 RAM slots and S has soldered RAM and 1 slot.
OTOH unofficially T480 (not S) can work with two 32 GB SODIMMs. I did not try that.
(I wish the AMD-based thinkpads supported ECC RAM. Ryzen 7 mobile CPUs technically allow for that.)
My T480 running NetBSD: [ 1.000000] total memory = 65411 MB
> disassembling, evaluating, and feeding back ... listened, iterated, and shipped. they didn’t declare victory and go home. They kept pushing.
Not even an attempt to clear the ai smell out of this piece.
And then the year after this is released, will they sell you new mainboards with the rest of the laptop, so you can upgrade just the parts that need updating?
The last time my ThinkPad 755C was in the way and shuffled around as part of re-arranging, it still booted up.
The only other device I've owned which might have that sort of longevity is my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 (which I quite miss for its transflective display).
Really wish the Lenovo Yogabook 9i was in the ThinkPad line and that it had a Wacom EMR stylus....
I have used not thinkpads but Lenovo IdeaPad from 2023. Very fragile. It has caused me to run many times to the repair shops.
Whereas Lenovo laptops (non Thinkpads) from 2007 and 2021 are very solid nearly unbreakable.
> One of the biggest repairability wins: fully modular, individually replaceable Thunderbolt ports.
I think I'm going to cry...happy tears. :')
Yikes. Has iFixit jumped the shark? An AI generated press release on behalf of Lenovo, who is (from my perspective) essentially paying them for good PR? And this paid relationship - Lenovo paying iFixit - isn’t disclosed until the very last line of the article, so you have to first read 1500+ words of AI slop?
That made me start looking into their scores. The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds _worse_ than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.
iFixit makes sense when you think of it as a content mill made to sell overpriced screwdrivers.
Thank you for saying it. There was somehting nagging me after a while. Even the quotes from Lenovo read as being AI generated, which begs the question if the quotes are real or paraphrased of factual at all.
You’re welcome. It’s a real shame IMO. I used to be a huge Lenovo guy, until the quality of the products dropped off a cliff a decade and change ago. Disappointing to see that instead of making a better product they decided to pay iFixit to write AI-generated puff pieces.
What matters next is parts supply at affordable prices — like car manufacturers do.
The best part about ThinkPads is the refurbished market that'll get you modern dev machine that'll work for you like a horse for years for 300 usd.
Picked up a T14s in Shenzhen for ~$250 US and it’s a screamer. Best thing for sure
For me, ThinkPads won't be "back" until they have at least swappable batteries.
Aren’t these the guys that preinstalled a root certificate to MITM you ads? Not something that can be casually forgiven.
Lenovo had a couple black eyes back-to-back. It was 10 years ago now, but trust takes a long time to build and can be lost in an instant. They lost my trust and I don’t see them getting it back.
My first laptop was an IBM Thinkpad, and while it was a great piece of hardware, I don’t see myself ever buying another one as long an Lenovo owns the brand.
That’s how I feel about Notepad++ they had an update which would hijack your keyboard and type a message can you open the new window.
“Trust arrives on foot, and leaves on horseback”
I recall Dell and Sony doing something similar. Maybe not with ads but had some kind of root kit. Then again, if you have an Intel processor I guess it’s already somewhat compromised.
Do they still block third party PCIe (eg, wifi) devices in their firmware?
> There are “repairable” laptops, and then there are ThinkPad T-series laptops
By elevating ThinkPad T-series above other laptops by reputation, do iFixit weaken their notion of objective repairability ratings?
They've also become eye-wateringly expensive.
I represent pricing in $/warranty year. (If you want me to believe the product is worth more, stand by it in the form of a warranty. But if a company isn't going to put their warranty where their mouth is, well.)
Lenovo used to warrant their product; my previous Thinkpad, which came with a then-pathetic (Thinkpads used to be four year warranties!) 3 year warranty, for ~$1200, or $400/warranty year.
I can't mock up a purchase for either laptop reviewed, as neither are available at any price. So, we'll do the predecessor. Those start at $1300/y; that represents an increase in price of ~14% YoY … which obviously is not tracking inflation.
That's enough to put smaller manufacturers who don't benefit from large supply chains, like Framework, in spitting distance.
But is it comparable? The base screen is "45%NTSC", and AFAICT from the reviews, the consensus is "don't do it". The other option is an sRGB screen. The base SSD is half the size now, but it is also upgradable to 1 TiB if you fork over $. The OS can be removed now, which actually knocks $90 off the "base" price! The dGPU is just quite literally gone. And nine years later, and the RAM is still the same size, but as we all know, software definitely hasn't gotten more bloated in the past nine years.
So, oddly, my current Thinkpad is down for the count right now. After 9 years, it suffered the first real HW failure: the motherboard. The first one took ~3 weeks to ship, and it was defective. The next one only took ~2 weeks, and the patient is still in surgery, so fingers crossed?
My biggest repairability question: … have they fixed the power brick to not have the cable melded into the brick? The cable is what breaks, and it costs probably like $3.50, but because it's molded into the main AC/DC converter brick, you have to scrap the entire thing and Lenovo charges for those like they're made from the tears of angels. If you just make a connector there, you raise the cost of the brick a few cents, maybe a few dollars … and save $50? $60 down the road in repairs, and untold amounts of eWaste.
Re: the power brick, do these things not charge off USB C? Insane if not.
The "small ones" do. The larger P models require a beefy 220W proprietary power supply.
Sure they might be repairable now, but after Superfish I can't trust Lenovo.
This was my thought as well. I'm surprised people are so easy to forgive and forget
Edit: a link[1] for those that aren't familiar
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...
Looks like it only affected their consumer lines and not the ThinkPads.
Didn’t Dell and Sony have similar controversies?
Shocking. I quit Lenovo around 2019 after the T490 soldered stuff on and ditched the second removable battery, Apple-style. That was it for me. T480 has been pretty good and even supports an eGPU over Thunderbolt. Have to give it another look.
Nice, also my thinkpad required a full dismantle to change the keyboard, so I am rightly pissed given it's a premium product.
Yeah, I was shocked that a keyboard replacement of my company issued X1 is basically a full teardown. When it was time to replace my private laptop a year later, I opted for the L-series, which is much better in that regard and also much cheaper. Keyboard replacements are a pretty standard thing for me, because I don't like my local layout and if you limit yourself to buying with the layout you want, you can only go to Apple or Framework nowadays.
I went with Framework this time, I use linux so I love that if I have a problem with the wifi card on my laptop, I can just replace it
I don't like betting on newcomers. While they may have some good ideas that improve the industry overall, there is a lot of long-term learning that newcomers can't yet benefit from. That usually leads to silly mistakes and quality problems. The useful aspect of newcomers is the credible threat they pose to the old guard of taking a portion of the pie away if they don't innovate. But I don't feel like spending my own money on that.
I tried so hard to live framework. Now I barely like them. Too many concessions, but the price just sucks.
Of the four I bought for employees. Two have had serious issues.
What kind of issues? That is concerning.
I love that they have way less thermal throttling than the X1 I had before
they've been the framework laptop since before there was a framework laptop.
worldwide onsite service response times and parts availability are top notch as well.
This is great and should be applauded, but repairability is but one aspect of many in a good laptop. I wonder if other aspects had to suffer to achieve this, and if they did by how much. The answer to that question could make or break the laptop for many users.
The article states:
> Lenovo tells us, “The biggest challenge in getting to a 10/10 was balancing repairability with all the other expectations of a commercial device: performance, reliability, thermal efficiency, form factor, and design integrity. Repairability isn’t achieved by a single change: it requires many small, intentional decisions across the entire system, and each of those decisions can introduce trade-offs.
Yes, however companies say a lot of things. We'll need to see some hard numbers and reviews based on real world usage to know if their claims ring true.
why are you so negative?
All the repairability in the world is moot if the laptop isn't good enough to sell itself on its other merits. If it turns out to be hot and loud or have poor battery life for example, that's going to steer many to buy elsewhere.
My framework hat tips you. Still drains while “off”.
Probably because this is not repairability, but rather dividing device into smaller not repairable parts that can be replaced by purchasing parts from the manufacturer at inflated cost.
Is there any laptop that you can replace individual pieces of the motherboard? Laptop motherboards are all the same.
I haven’t seen anyone use one for years. I thought they killed it long ago.
Are these still a Chinese brand? Lenovo changed hands a bit so IDK now.
Geopolitics might've forced Lenovo to rebrand in India from China.
A recent move saw India's leader break with BRICS to flag with West Asia Israel
I love this. T14 gen 7 was the first NB I a actually bought for myself, and it's great to know that USB-C ports can just be replaced that easilly without soldering and that it was designed from the start with repairability in mind. Non-A USB ports is something that always ends up failing.
What about P series?
Shame the keyboards have a copilot key. That doesn't sound so bad until you see that the thing emits a key chord, not a scancode, making it annoying to remap. But you can.
The most annoying part is that the key matrix isn't set up to 3-key rollover with the copilot key like it would be for a real modifier key. (I'd assumed they'd just keep the matrix they used when there was a modifier in that spot. Nope.) Consequently, some key combinations, e.g. ralt-rcontrol-spacebar, don't work. Press them, nothing happens. Infuriating.
Since I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T15g, I get very recurring BSODs, for various reasons. I hate it. Windows 11 is probably to blame as well.
I love my Thinkpad!
Hooray! Now can we get a decent OS for them?
(No, not Windows.)
(No, not Linux.)
TempleOS?
Does it mean I can buy chips that are on the boards and solder them if they go bad?
It sounds like repairability means dividing device into smaller not repairable parts and make extra money off of it.
For instance, can I get those replaceable ports on Mouser?
Repairwashing.
Damn, everyone is using AI for copyediting now aren't they? Once you notice the patterns you see it everywhere.
* "This isn't X. It's Y"
* "Some sentence emphasizing something. Describing the same thing with different framing. Describing it a third time but punchier.
* The em-dash of course
* A hard to describe sense of "cheesiness"
I only hope the models get good enough to not be so samey in the future.
Once you see it you can't unsee it. Although maybe this how corporate blogslop has always been, and we're just now noticing now that it's infected everything.
> "These are not complaints, merely observations."
> "There are repairable laptops, and then there are ThinkPads."
> "iFixit approached the relationship as collaborators, not critics."
> "[...] they didn’t declare victory and go home. They kept pushing."
> "Designing for repairability doesn’t mean compromising innovation or premium experiences; when done well, it actually drives smarter innovation, better modularity, and more resilient platforms."
> "It would be one thing to make a highly repairable but low-volume niche device or concept. Instead, Lenovo just threw down a gauntlet by notching a 10/10 repairability score on their mainstream-iest business laptop."
> "This is [...] how repair goes from being an enthusiast’s “nice-to-have” to being baked into procurement checklists and fleet-management decisions."
There's a desperate grasping for drama and simplicity about it -- same as most mass-media news stories. I recall reading somewhere that the two watchwords of journalism are "simplify, and exaggerate". Maybe add to that: "Make all your metaphors cliches, so the reader doesn't have to think about what is meant."
Yeah, it's weird. It's like one person writes articles for the whole world. Probably will be fixed in a few AI iterations to present more styles, but right now it's everywhere. Articles, even forum posts.
I found a way to 'de-smell' LLM copy: tell it to take a second pass that processes the text output with the William Burroughs cut-up method. Works well for a small subset of use cases.
Presumably the smelly AI text problem is just ... a problem that will be solved. Or maybe we'll just get used to it.
I believe it's already a solved problem especially with base models (pre RL) but they still push the LLM voice either to make it easy to identify or because they think it's likeable, so it's not that OAI, anthropic, Google can't get rid of the assistant voice it's that they don't want to
We've gone the wrong direction on the verbosity scale.
Unless I'm reading for pleasure, I want everything in concise summaries. I don't need flowery language. Or even complete sentences.
Maybe an LLM verbosity slider that dynamically truncates text we don't need. I'll dial mine down.
https://justsendtheprompt.com
I recently destroyed the screen on a Google Pixel during a repair following a shoddily-written set of iFixIt instructions. I wish I had checked the comments, where many people complained that the instruction was wrong.
It was about a very fragile part of the process, and so it seemed like an error of omission that seemed atypical for iFixIt. It made me suspect the instructions might not have been wholly human written. I feel a bit vindicated for that suspicion.
The most generous interpretation I can have for this type of article is that it's a second-order phenomenon. If it was written by a human, it was written by one who consumes a lot of AI generated content and whose standards for what they produce have slipped.
I’ve only tried doing a phone repair per iFixit’s instructions once, and the instructions sucked. They explained in excruciating detail how to take the phone apart and then the instructions just ended. No details on reassembly.
>A hard to describe sense of "cheesiness"
This is the "Reddit" factor. I picked up on it being LLM written with this sentence:
"This is the treacherous, final-boss stage where repairability usually dies,"
Ah, yes, everything needs to be phrased as an existential crossroads now. Same thing the other day when I was debating between olives or pickles on my pizza.
Now that I know pickles are a pizza topping, maybe.
LLMs bring up the “final boss analogy a lot too. I’ve gotten that in my own prompts
> I only hope the models get good enough to not be so samey in the future.
Why would you hope to be more easily fooled?
Not GP but I'm personally hoping that if I'm inevitably doomed to be exposed to this horseshit every day that it becomes tolerable to read. For world-shaking language-based superintelligences, they can't write to save their very expensive lives.
> everyone is using AI for copyediting now aren't they?
If the studies that say that humans prefer AI writers are to be believed then you'd be a fool not to
What annoys me the most is that the information has become much less dense. There's a lot of unnecessary repetition. I feel like I need to feed every article through an LLM just to get a summary of it.
If only a human could edit the output before posting.
Ironically, the editors probably haven't opened a text editor for months.
* "This isn't X. It's Y"
I find that Gemini uses that phrase way too much.
Ugh I have actually started hating Gemini for this specifically.
Em dashes aren’t an actual tell IMO. Many people use them.
Surely you mean: Em dashes aren’t an actual tell IMO — many people use them.
Maybe he isn't one but has a close friend who is? That would describe me.
Em dashes aren’t an actual tell IMO: many people use them.
There are dozens of us!
— dozens!
It is though if the rest of the prose is trash.
Jokes on you—humans write trash all the time.
I don’t mind the AI generated aspect. I mind the lack of carrying that it looks like AI slop.
It indicates a baseline competency of the AI user or whomever they are trusting to use it and it will hurt brand trust and trusting humans even more.
I'm glad I haven't let AI write much for me, its better for it to help me develop my ideas and writing and do the work to learn, explore and end up with something where my brain is in the gym. . Passive generation might not always map well to passive consumption
No thanks. I don't like all their awful plastic. Make it from metal and glass.
Mine has a magnesium chassis, did that change along the way?
Metal and glass are overrated. Glass cracks, metal bends and stays bent... Plastic, especially high quality plastics combined with a magnesium chassis in a ThinkPad, is way more durable.