A company I previously worked for was the authorized Dell break-fix partner/sub-contractor for the APJ region many years ago. Under this model, any Dell repairs covered by a Dell Support contract, either corporate or individual, would trigger the dispatch of our engineers to perform on-site repairs with the required parts, following initial diagnosis by Dell Level 1 support.
Despite the contract being rebid annually through an online auction process, the business remained phenomenally profitable. This was largely driven by the high failure rates of Dell hardware at the time, particularly laptops, and the fact that we were paid per break-fix incident, regardless of the underlying issue or long-term resolution.
Lenovo, however, studied this model, learned from Dell's mistakes (Lenovo hired away lots of Dell service managementfolks) and took a different approach. Rather than monetising failure, they focused on eliminating the root cause of high support costs by designing laptops with superior build quality, durability, and repairability.
At least in my view, Lenovo represents Dell 2.0, the model Dell should have evolved into, but didn’t.
For reasons unknown online technology forums have always had some kind of "underdog" that they cheer for. When the iPhone came out it was Nokia (which had a capacitive touch screen that Apple were just copying), with the Macbook it was the Thinkpad (Apple weren't making devices for real engineers because they didn't have the mousenubbin thing), Nvidia's Linux drivers were garbage (AMD is so much better because it's open source). Some kind of tech hipsterism drives this. But a lot of these proponents were just suffering under inferior tech. I know because I made the mistake of trusting them far too often and then switching to the mainstream thing and finding out that it was really freaking good.
The iPhone is pretty awesome, my Nvidia cards work way better under proprietary drivers on Linux than my AMD cards worked under either OSS or proprietary drivers, and the Macbooks are fantastic hardware. I got scammed by these tech hipsters.
I think there's a fair amount of variability in experiences. I switched to AMD after getting fed up with multiple Nvidia cards having odd issues (though I'd use Nvidia if I were doing ML work). Mac hardware as a general rule has always been at least decent (if not good or better), but Mac software has generally been going downhill, so if for whatever reason Mac OSX/MacOS was not appropriate, it's easier to set up what you need on a non-Apple machine (of sufficient quality) than install a different OS on the Mac.
For most of their history Macbooks were good looking, but overheating and throttling devices with some specifically unlucky generations being pure garbage due to design problems like butterfly keyboard and flexgate. Apple also have a long history of not admitting these design flaws.
Macbooks only became a really good option in last 5 years after switch to ARM and overall industry degradation towards not upgradable and not repairable hardware.
Also even though more than decade under Lenovo thinkapds became much more fragile, but they are still much better suited to survive water, dust and physical damage. This doesn't matter if you work in comfy home, cafe, office or co-working, but there are many people who have to use their laptops in moist or dusty environments.
PS: Written from M1 Air that I bought back in 2020.
Nokia devices never had capacitive touchscreens prior to the release of the iPhone; it took them two years to produce a response. In contrast, the LG Prada (the first phone-esque device to have a capacitive touchscreen) was announced four weeks before the iPhone.
There are also proponents of Chinese phones who are trying to convince everyone that ZTE/Xiomi/Honor/younameit phones are in no way inferior to iPhone/Pixel while cost 50-80% less. I honestly tried give them a chance - not even close.
No one reasonable is comparing budget model that cost 80% less is equivalent to a flagship model. The typical comparison is flagship to flagship where a PRC flagship cost 80% and generally has objectively superior hardware if you can live with the software, and tbf many people can't. Or a PRC midentry/flagship cost as much as an Apple/Pixel midentry/budget where the hardware difference is even more noticable. If you're not locked into the ecosystem, iPhone/Pixels are outright inferior, especially in regions where PRC brands have support.
Agreed. I used to own a ZTE Blade. It was an incredibly cheap smartphone and you could CyanogenMod it. Great phone in the performance per $ category. It was honestly the top tier phone in that category in 2010 or whatever. And I suspect these Chinese makes are likewise the top tier in that category. But that's not the category of the iPhone Pro.
I've been using one of those Chinese devices - a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro - for the last 8 years. The combination of good-enough hardware and AOSP-derived Android distributions do make some of these devices capable of lasting for a long time. This does not make them "better" than their more expensive counterparts but it does mean they're a much better value proposition. This is not limited to "Chinese" phones, it is also true for some devices by brands like Motorola. It also does not hold true for all devices produced by those 'Chinese" brands since it stands or falls with the device being supported by AOSP-derived distributions. Many of these devices become obsolete long before their time due to lackluster or missing software support by the vendor.
"Inferior" might vary more than you think. Especially when OSS/repairability/etc. is involved - it becomes a matter of what your personal weights are on values such as performance, UX, durability, "aesthetic choice", etc...
My personal preference is mouse > trackpoint / nub + 3 physical buttons > trackpad, but I know people who swear by an Apple "slab" trackpad even at their desktop computer.
> For reasons unknown online technology forums have always had some kind of "underdog" that they cheer for.
I've found it's usually a relation in sorts to the underdogs, in some way or another: a vengeance against the status quo, a sort of angsty reactance against it, or a desire to simply do the usual thing and signal yourself as "alternative". That's all the hipsterism is: a kind of counterculture. The author of this post is basically saying in the subtext "You're simply living off the scavenged technology of corporations and these computers aren't built for what you see in them. You are a stupid 20-something with false nostalgia," which I could argue is just a different sort of social signaling.
There is some truth in both sides of the Thinkpad culture argument. Thinkpads have excellent Linux support, ludicrously bad color gamut, questionable build quality generation-to-generation, but are always serviceable if not attractive. If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.
> If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.
You can get parts to customise an AR-15 to the hilt, field-strip and assemble it in minutes, replace any worn-out parts at will and if so desired assemble one from scratch using parts from many vendors. This sounds far more like working with ThinkPads than with those other machines you mentioned. I recently replaced a keyboard in one of the latter, it was a close approximation of one of the punishments Dante describes in the Divine Comedy. On a ThinkPad the same repair takes a few minutes and you get a better keyboard. Nope, this comparison does not make sense.
Your first two examples are more proof of the hype around the fruit factory and Jobs' "reality distortion field" than of what you mentioned. Nokia had been producing "smart phones" (Symbian devices with user-installable applications, cameras and other such "smart" features) for years when he first presented the mentioned device, IBM had been producing utilitarian box-like laptops for years before that other device you mentioned was presented. All examples show that fanboyism is rife in the world of technology, not just information technology but any such: tractors, cars, tools, audio equipment, musical instruments, look into any field and you'll quickly find camps around certain technologies and brands. Much of this is centered around the fact that those who have invested resources into acquiring and learning a given implementation wish for their choice to become or remain leading so as to defend their choice. This goes especially for those who invested time and money into "premium" brands and even more so when those brands have created "ecosystems" around their products which make it harder to escape should the choice turn out to have been the "wrong" one.
> Some kind of tech hipsterism drives this. But a lot of these proponents were just suffering under inferior tech.
Well put. futuraperdita put it well in his reply, too.
According to said hipsters, the underdog is always superior, and *THEY* who use the "popular" tech are just too corrupt/stupid to realize it. No, the superior technology doesn't always win. But *every single time*?!?
I have been 100% Microsoft-free at home for 30 years. I write this on a MacBook connected via mosh and tmux to several Linux boxes. But I do not believe, and have never believed, that the teeming masses that use Windows are being deprived, are stupid or deluded, or were swindled, bamboozled, conned, misled, fooled, or deceived into choosing such over Linux or MacOS.
When I was in high school, I got hit head on by a car while walking. It wasn’t going fast but I got thrown 1-2 feet in the air and landed hard on my backpack.
Both my Thinkpad and I (thanks to my Thinkpad) were totally fine, and I continued to use it for 4 more years.
That might be true for today’s laptops, but back then laptops had a lot more empty space to compress. Combined with a tough but flexible shell, the thinkpad might indeed have saved him!
Old IBM ThinkPads were actually nice laptops that held up to a lot of abuse. I can't touch anything made by Lenovo though. They've been caught more than once installing backdoors and malware (sometimes because they were paid to do it).
They've had many security issues since then, including another backdoor in 2025, but Superfish was probably their worst disaster because after it became public that every machine they sold with it was vulnerable Lenovo continued to deny it until they were finally forced to admit it and release a removal tool. That should have been the end of it, but the removal tool just uninstalled the bloatware itself while leaving the system changes it had made which introduced the vulnerability. That just gave the customers who were even aware of what was going on and downloaded the removal tool a false sense of security. Only after the media started reporting that failure did they eventually release a second removal tool that actually corrected the problem Superfish introduced. No way would I ever trust that company
I'm at my second E-series ThinkPad right now. My "old" one, from 2018, is still rocking and my son is happily using it.
Reason for the E-series: cheaper than T, good keyboards, easily serviceable/expandable and the feeling that it's build quality is a bit better than that of other laptops of similar price. Overall, very happy with them.
As a 20-something the writer wouldn't have even been a teenager yet when what was regarded as the golden era of second-hand ThinkPads was in swing.
>It’s rare for those teams of people to survive buyouts by foreign companies with their agency and independence intact.
ThinkPad enthusiasts were very vocal about how the Lenovo takeover impaired their later designs (200 and onwards).
I've always found it amusing to see the modern wave of people hyping ThinkPads as recent as the t480; which I've known greybeards to consider having no more in common with a "true" ThinkPad than name and colour scheme.
The trackpoint alone makes a thinkpad so comfortable to accurately and quickly get a lot done on for mouse workflows when no external mouse is attached, that nothing else comes close.
Especially in a bouncing moving vehicle. I find touchscreens(phones) and the trackpads nearly unusable in such an environment.
It is why was a bit horrified when I was watching the first spacex manned launch and saw their main interface was a touchscreen. I guess a mitigating factor in that case is the pilots probably don't have to fiddle with it during launch and it had one feature I would love if forced to use a touchscreen in a vehicle. A dedicated bar to stabilize your fingers on.
Trackpad != trackpoint. The track point is the little eraser nub pointer embedded into the keyboard. Many thinkpad enthusiasts disable the trackpad entirely.
What is the trackpoint equivalent of the two-finger scroll? I cannot imagine browsing the web without the two-finger scroll. Or pinch-zooming, how do you do that with a trackpoint?
The reasons I buy second hand thinkpads, is because I have expectations about the keyboard, and they're usually met.
I have expectations about the screen not being silly DPI and 'reasonable', and that's usually met too.
Bluetooth etc. works just fine.
Finally I have expectations on the fans not being like a total joke on most windows laptops... and that's usually fine too.
For the rest I want compatibility; lack of 'FML quirks'.
If only they could fix the absolute turd of audio quality in thinkpads, I think we'd be on par with Apple from my perspective. Although I've loved ARM processors lately and would always prefer a portable ARM machine than Intel.
Choosing thinkpads is really mostly about choosing the boring option, with the least amount of surprises, the dad option of laptops in a sea of disappointments.
The repairability and durability arguments should apply to HP and Dell business laptops as well, but they largely don't.
If I were getting a new laptop, I'd probably buy a Mac. But if I needed a Windows laptop, I'd buy a Thinkpad (one is currently my only Windows PC). It's not really upgradeable or modular (fixed RAM, SSD and battery not easy to change), but it is well-built and still pretty snappy despite being 6-7 years old.
I'll take a good trackpoint + three buttons below space bar over any and all trackpads. Can't stand using them.
Of course I also have separate thinkpad trackpoint II keyboard and a good mouse to use when on a stationary desktop - they're easy to carry along, too.
One of the last to fall to the 'clickpad' trend. Soon nobody will remember a time of serviceable laptop touchpads with physical buttons where you could precisely and efficiently accomplish real work; a time before the ubiquitous featureless expanse of a clickpad where erratic drivers reduce your interface to vague suggestions to the OS. What's the point of laptops if we have to plug in an external mouse anyway?
I have a haptic touchpad on my current X1 Carbon and actually don't mind it. The ancient Haswell-generation clickpads were terrible but the Sensel ones are underappreciated.
I would argue the real problem with clickpads is that they're a cost cutting measure (even the ones on macbooks). People were fed up with accidental taps, and manufacturers didn't want to pay more for a better trackpad.
The other evil part about trackpads is drivers that don't let you turn off the pointer acceleration because to do so would reveal how jittery the sensors really are.
This is why even now and even on the highest end laptops you must still either slow down your fingers or put up with endless overshooting/undershooting of the cursor movement. I deeply despise how "heavy" and slow the cursor feels on all macbooks for at least the past decade. This is the real reason why the fucking clickpad has to be so massive!
> where you could precisely and efficiently accomplish real work
Uhh, millions of people "precisely and efficiently accomplish real work" on MacBooks every day. Moving back to a tiny trackpad or nubbin with fixed location buttons feels incredibly inefficient and gross now...
Besides what the other poster said, trackpoint scrolling is amazingly good and life is just better in any programs which require a great deal of back and forth between keyboard and mouse; PureData is a good example, type a few words, select and move stuff, type a few words, select, move, repeat for hours on end.
Pointer accuracy and the possibility to keep your hands on the keyboard while navigating the cursor. Clickpads make it harder to get pixel-perfect pointer accuracy without compromising pointer speed since the act of pushing down on the pad to click invariably moves the pointer. A touchpad with separate buttons does not have these problems but those are becoming rarer and have not been available on your preferred device for a long time.
Thinkpads get eight or nine for repairabliity from ifixit while Macbooks get a four or five, basically because of storage replacability [1]. The pentalobe screw issue is moot for anyone with a spare $5.
Apple could easily fix this. Macs are generally good value except for the absolute rip-off that is storage. $400 to go from 1TB to 2TB is a ridiculous markup.
This is where EU should step in and force the right to replace the storage (hell even RAM) onto laptop manufacturers. And if Apple doesn't comply, then good riddance.
Typing this on a X1 gen 6 on my home; paid $230 for it a couple months ago. My impression is that it's a modern, perfectly adequate notebook, if a bit unexciting. But maybe that's because I'm an spoiled child, because I haven't thought for _one second_ how is it that they've made a multicore processor, several gigabytes of random access memory, a fairly decent well-lit keyboard and such a nice matte screen fit into this light, rather elegant device. I mean, for a laptop. I understand Lenovo, those greedy bastards, are the ones who assembled it in interest of achieving their own quarter projections, but now that I think of it, I'm sure there _several_ soulless corporations involved on it running the way it does! Intel is inside, that's for certain, but just ponder about the conditions, and for what financial purpose was tht wireless chip manufactured? What about that screen, huh! How was the lithium in the battery mined? Where? By whom? They weren't doing it _for me_, that I can acknowledge, and yet here I am. Typing on it. Hot garbage. Actually kind of liking it? Is it because I feel more at home here, in Void Linux, than on the Mac OS, even if it's so absolutely unnatural for mammal to "feel" such things in regard to, uh, process supervision and package management? Look, I'm not going to go full-on zen and start rambling about "you" being no more than a mundane abstract construct, but insofar as we agree on our individuation I can very much assure you that this Thinkpad, right now, exists for my benefit, and even though I have set boundaries on myself on developing a sentimental relationship with it (which kinda happened with an X220, I was younger then), even though its assamblage has required thousands years of avarice, violence and rapaciousness (as well of bits of love and care, for how they were all these person fed?) as an end product, for two hundred bucks, it is pretty fucking miraculous, and I myself am especially grateful for all those saccharine videos narrow-mindedly expressing their praises for it.
My first laptop was an IBM Thinkpad, Later I had some at work. But after they sold to Lenovo, and the Superfish and Lenovo Service Engine issues were discovered, I wrote them off. Thinkpads may be the best non-Apple laptops, but I simply don’t trust Lenovo and likely never will.
Every once in awhile I will try a non-thinkpad laptop and I regret it every single time. There's always at least one thing that just doesn't work well. Trackpad being unpleasant, dropped keys when typing fast, can't wake up from sleep in a timely manner, or who knows what else. Thinkpads aren't quite like Macbooks but at least all of their components work...
Actually the Microsoft Surface book/laptop line is really good in my opinion... It's just the Linux support is often (understandably) quite bad. Sometimes I psych myself into thinking I can stomach Windows for the "official, supported" laptop experience but it never lasts more than a few months before I cave and go back to Linux.
We use 99% Apple and used to have a rental contract. We switched to just buying new MacBooks outright every 3 years because it was cheaper. I think the number of “it needs repair and I’m losing working hours” scenarios was very low.
It probably helps that everyone including (especially) the CEO can reinstall an OS and manage their own dotfiles.
I have a 2020 Lenovo Legion and boy, those things last. I can easily open it to clean it (did it last month), add/remove memory or storage without specialized tools or software. All that I need is built into the bios (like disable battery for service, disable hybrid Intel Graphics/Nvidia to use just the GPU, disable secure boot), and the bios is still getting updates. I understand the price tag, especially for enterprise because every big manufacturer does this.
The only time I had something bad was one model that it has issues when powering, which I never tracked down if the root cause was the hardware itself or a driver issue.
The only other brand I have been as lucky were Asus multimedia laptops, and netbooks.
I've been thinking of creating a website to make it much easier to search for used thinkpads and sort by various specs. There used to be a similar website like it for servers that's long shut down.
Retarded reasoning. Of course companies care about their bottom line foremost, but if their business model for business segment incidentally aligns with providing consumers solid, repairable, or cheap 2nd hand, products then that's worth validating. I haven't owned a laptop for 5 years, but all my previous laptops were new thinkpads (Ts/Ws) and it was always relatively easy to find a sale, stack with some sort of education/work discount, get a pretty solid warranty for very competitive prices.
Great read. There is something special here that the author isn’t commenting on: the fact that cold hard business logic was allowed to lead to a sustainably (money-wise) better product without interference for decades is unusual.
Too often cold hard business logic is subverted by psychopathic short term executive thinking that says “we’re spending money on something good for the customer? I don’t care that it’s also good for us but I like the idea of a quarterly earnings report that doesn’t include that expense!”
The executive then takes their bonus and gets headhunted by the next F500 company where they apply the same strategy.
I mean, my company buys them, I know at least one other that does too. Both are too technical I think to bother with a hardware support contract. But others might!
the service business that will get fast turn over repair for a business to pay the premium they pay to levono/ibm isn't that easy to do. But yeah, I am sure they could create an ecosystem of reparability that would increase their sales
My understanding is that Dell/Lenovo share a lot of parts to keep the third party repair business viable, because they sell a lot of next day replacement contracts.
* Extended waranty and support with onsite fix 3 year
* Accidental damage insurance. 3 year
Get it all and consider that the ticket price. Then divide by 36 for the monthly SaaS-like price. Makes claude code seem cheap :)
I found it is worth it.
Especially as the home visit means no backup reinstall needed for many fixes, unless it is a full replacement. Such a time saver. And laptops are fragile. They need repair by default (think like a car not like a house double brick wall).
This is weird and I cant believe it was written in the year of our lord two thousand twenty six.
>Lenovo does not care about you.
>IBM did not care about you.
No shit.
>that IBM and Lenovo are the most kind, gracious corporations in the universe
I have never encountered this line of thought in the thinkpad enthusiast space. People like the design, not the company.
>when most of the laptops they worship were made less than ten years ago
The gold high standard in the Thinkpad enthusiast community was still the T60 last I checked. Released like 2006. I have a T61p at home for my own amusement. And you can still get bootleg parts like batteries.
>Simply put, because they have not thought for one second about a Thinkpad in any other context than their home, let alone about the general functioning of computers in a business setting…
No of course not. Because they like the design. If I could get myself a Cray 1 I would. I dont care about the business context.
>old laptops are disposed of, and treated basically as garbage.
No, what happens is that the finance/leasing company contracts someone to assess the current state of the hardware. Anything that's missing or severely damaged is billable to the lessor. Then what was turned over to the recyclers is sold on with a cut going back to the finance firm.
Some basic research here would have actually strengthened your core premise, because they get a small tasty bite of the secondary market.
>Thinkpads are Repairable because every minute of a field technician’s labor costs money for IBM/Lenovo, and cuts into the profit made on a service contract
Yes exactly. But this isnt the only business model available. Some businesses make laptops that are less repairable, or dont last as long. Nobody thinks the company wants to marry them. But in a marketplace you choose the product that closely aligns with your parameters. It doesnt matter why the company used those parameters.
>Notice, that nowhere in this explanation did I say “used to”, “once were” or “back then”. Because this cycle is continuous.
Oh no, you are telling me that they are continuing to make repairable laptops? Thats terrible. How will the thinkpad community ever recover.
>These are not magical virtues of a bygone age. These things aren’t even really “virtuous” at least in terms of motivation. Lenovo doesn’t care about “Right to Repair” any more than Apple, they just sell to a different market, and make their money in a different way.
I honestly see people clamoring for computers from specifically before Intel Management Engine\TPM\Secure Boot more than a vague mysterious bygone age.
>They’re typical companies, who just happen to have some good designers and engineers.
No shit. But this is true about every piece of hardware that has a fandom. Its no different in a Porsche group. Or people going on about old Cisco switches. Theres nothing new here. I dont think that JVC wanted to make beautiful love to me because I enjoy the design of the Videosphere.
>But Thinkpads didn’t materialize out of the virtuous ether
> There is something “special” about Thinkpads. It’s rare for such a long tradition of design and engineering to be allowed to continue inside mega-companies...
Not... really? They're mega-companies because of deliberate choices like that. Those choices are not the only way to get there, but they've found choices that work. I get that it's trendy to shit on successful businesses and be toxic about the crumbs you enjoy, but it's plain ignorant to call these things "accidents" or "coincidences" and nobody is forcing you to eat crumbs.
The later comparison to Apple is just as strange. Consumers aren't so particular and will buy anything at any price for almost no reason but marketing. All those people hyping Thinkpads may not be the original manufacturer, but they are selling them on eBay and effectively the vendors. They hype old Macs just the same.
A company I previously worked for was the authorized Dell break-fix partner/sub-contractor for the APJ region many years ago. Under this model, any Dell repairs covered by a Dell Support contract, either corporate or individual, would trigger the dispatch of our engineers to perform on-site repairs with the required parts, following initial diagnosis by Dell Level 1 support.
Despite the contract being rebid annually through an online auction process, the business remained phenomenally profitable. This was largely driven by the high failure rates of Dell hardware at the time, particularly laptops, and the fact that we were paid per break-fix incident, regardless of the underlying issue or long-term resolution.
Lenovo, however, studied this model, learned from Dell's mistakes (Lenovo hired away lots of Dell service managementfolks) and took a different approach. Rather than monetising failure, they focused on eliminating the root cause of high support costs by designing laptops with superior build quality, durability, and repairability.
At least in my view, Lenovo represents Dell 2.0, the model Dell should have evolved into, but didn’t.
For reasons unknown online technology forums have always had some kind of "underdog" that they cheer for. When the iPhone came out it was Nokia (which had a capacitive touch screen that Apple were just copying), with the Macbook it was the Thinkpad (Apple weren't making devices for real engineers because they didn't have the mousenubbin thing), Nvidia's Linux drivers were garbage (AMD is so much better because it's open source). Some kind of tech hipsterism drives this. But a lot of these proponents were just suffering under inferior tech. I know because I made the mistake of trusting them far too often and then switching to the mainstream thing and finding out that it was really freaking good.
The iPhone is pretty awesome, my Nvidia cards work way better under proprietary drivers on Linux than my AMD cards worked under either OSS or proprietary drivers, and the Macbooks are fantastic hardware. I got scammed by these tech hipsters.
I think there's a fair amount of variability in experiences. I switched to AMD after getting fed up with multiple Nvidia cards having odd issues (though I'd use Nvidia if I were doing ML work). Mac hardware as a general rule has always been at least decent (if not good or better), but Mac software has generally been going downhill, so if for whatever reason Mac OSX/MacOS was not appropriate, it's easier to set up what you need on a non-Apple machine (of sufficient quality) than install a different OS on the Mac.
> Macbook
For most of their history Macbooks were good looking, but overheating and throttling devices with some specifically unlucky generations being pure garbage due to design problems like butterfly keyboard and flexgate. Apple also have a long history of not admitting these design flaws.
Macbooks only became a really good option in last 5 years after switch to ARM and overall industry degradation towards not upgradable and not repairable hardware.
Also even though more than decade under Lenovo thinkapds became much more fragile, but they are still much better suited to survive water, dust and physical damage. This doesn't matter if you work in comfy home, cafe, office or co-working, but there are many people who have to use their laptops in moist or dusty environments.
PS: Written from M1 Air that I bought back in 2020.
I have the same machine and it still holds up great. The only (huge) downside is that you can't upgrade neither SSD nor RAM.
Nokia devices never had capacitive touchscreens prior to the release of the iPhone; it took them two years to produce a response. In contrast, the LG Prada (the first phone-esque device to have a capacitive touchscreen) was announced four weeks before the iPhone.
There are also proponents of Chinese phones who are trying to convince everyone that ZTE/Xiomi/Honor/younameit phones are in no way inferior to iPhone/Pixel while cost 50-80% less. I honestly tried give them a chance - not even close.
No one reasonable is comparing budget model that cost 80% less is equivalent to a flagship model. The typical comparison is flagship to flagship where a PRC flagship cost 80% and generally has objectively superior hardware if you can live with the software, and tbf many people can't. Or a PRC midentry/flagship cost as much as an Apple/Pixel midentry/budget where the hardware difference is even more noticable. If you're not locked into the ecosystem, iPhone/Pixels are outright inferior, especially in regions where PRC brands have support.
Agreed. I used to own a ZTE Blade. It was an incredibly cheap smartphone and you could CyanogenMod it. Great phone in the performance per $ category. It was honestly the top tier phone in that category in 2010 or whatever. And I suspect these Chinese makes are likewise the top tier in that category. But that's not the category of the iPhone Pro.
I've been using one of those Chinese devices - a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro - for the last 8 years. The combination of good-enough hardware and AOSP-derived Android distributions do make some of these devices capable of lasting for a long time. This does not make them "better" than their more expensive counterparts but it does mean they're a much better value proposition. This is not limited to "Chinese" phones, it is also true for some devices by brands like Motorola. It also does not hold true for all devices produced by those 'Chinese" brands since it stands or falls with the device being supported by AOSP-derived distributions. Many of these devices become obsolete long before their time due to lackluster or missing software support by the vendor.
"Inferior" might vary more than you think. Especially when OSS/repairability/etc. is involved - it becomes a matter of what your personal weights are on values such as performance, UX, durability, "aesthetic choice", etc...
My personal preference is mouse > trackpoint / nub + 3 physical buttons > trackpad, but I know people who swear by an Apple "slab" trackpad even at their desktop computer.
> For reasons unknown online technology forums have always had some kind of "underdog" that they cheer for.
I've found it's usually a relation in sorts to the underdogs, in some way or another: a vengeance against the status quo, a sort of angsty reactance against it, or a desire to simply do the usual thing and signal yourself as "alternative". That's all the hipsterism is: a kind of counterculture. The author of this post is basically saying in the subtext "You're simply living off the scavenged technology of corporations and these computers aren't built for what you see in them. You are a stupid 20-something with false nostalgia," which I could argue is just a different sort of social signaling.
There is some truth in both sides of the Thinkpad culture argument. Thinkpads have excellent Linux support, ludicrously bad color gamut, questionable build quality generation-to-generation, but are always serviceable if not attractive. If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.
> If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.
You can get parts to customise an AR-15 to the hilt, field-strip and assemble it in minutes, replace any worn-out parts at will and if so desired assemble one from scratch using parts from many vendors. This sounds far more like working with ThinkPads than with those other machines you mentioned. I recently replaced a keyboard in one of the latter, it was a close approximation of one of the punishments Dante describes in the Divine Comedy. On a ThinkPad the same repair takes a few minutes and you get a better keyboard. Nope, this comparison does not make sense.
macs are the hipster variant of lenovo.
Your first two examples are more proof of the hype around the fruit factory and Jobs' "reality distortion field" than of what you mentioned. Nokia had been producing "smart phones" (Symbian devices with user-installable applications, cameras and other such "smart" features) for years when he first presented the mentioned device, IBM had been producing utilitarian box-like laptops for years before that other device you mentioned was presented. All examples show that fanboyism is rife in the world of technology, not just information technology but any such: tractors, cars, tools, audio equipment, musical instruments, look into any field and you'll quickly find camps around certain technologies and brands. Much of this is centered around the fact that those who have invested resources into acquiring and learning a given implementation wish for their choice to become or remain leading so as to defend their choice. This goes especially for those who invested time and money into "premium" brands and even more so when those brands have created "ecosystems" around their products which make it harder to escape should the choice turn out to have been the "wrong" one.
> Some kind of tech hipsterism drives this. But a lot of these proponents were just suffering under inferior tech.
Well put. futuraperdita put it well in his reply, too.
According to said hipsters, the underdog is always superior, and *THEY* who use the "popular" tech are just too corrupt/stupid to realize it. No, the superior technology doesn't always win. But *every single time*?!?
I have been 100% Microsoft-free at home for 30 years. I write this on a MacBook connected via mosh and tmux to several Linux boxes. But I do not believe, and have never believed, that the teeming masses that use Windows are being deprived, are stupid or deluded, or were swindled, bamboozled, conned, misled, fooled, or deceived into choosing such over Linux or MacOS.
When I was in high school, I got hit head on by a car while walking. It wasn’t going fast but I got thrown 1-2 feet in the air and landed hard on my backpack.
Both my Thinkpad and I (thanks to my Thinkpad) were totally fine, and I continued to use it for 4 more years.
Physics says the thinkpad didn't save you if it was fine.
That might be true for today’s laptops, but back then laptops had a lot more empty space to compress. Combined with a tough but flexible shell, the thinkpad might indeed have saved him!
The thinkpad shell could have undergone elastic deformation which could reduce peak force.
Old IBM ThinkPads were actually nice laptops that held up to a lot of abuse. I can't touch anything made by Lenovo though. They've been caught more than once installing backdoors and malware (sometimes because they were paid to do it).
They've had many security issues since then, including another backdoor in 2025, but Superfish was probably their worst disaster because after it became public that every machine they sold with it was vulnerable Lenovo continued to deny it until they were finally forced to admit it and release a removal tool. That should have been the end of it, but the removal tool just uninstalled the bloatware itself while leaving the system changes it had made which introduced the vulnerability. That just gave the customers who were even aware of what was going on and downloaded the removal tool a false sense of security. Only after the media started reporting that failure did they eventually release a second removal tool that actually corrected the problem Superfish introduced. No way would I ever trust that company
That's why you install linux on it (or reinstall Windows).
I'm at my second E-series ThinkPad right now. My "old" one, from 2018, is still rocking and my son is happily using it.
Reason for the E-series: cheaper than T, good keyboards, easily serviceable/expandable and the feeling that it's build quality is a bit better than that of other laptops of similar price. Overall, very happy with them.
As a 20-something the writer wouldn't have even been a teenager yet when what was regarded as the golden era of second-hand ThinkPads was in swing.
>It’s rare for those teams of people to survive buyouts by foreign companies with their agency and independence intact.
ThinkPad enthusiasts were very vocal about how the Lenovo takeover impaired their later designs (200 and onwards).
I've always found it amusing to see the modern wave of people hyping ThinkPads as recent as the t480; which I've known greybeards to consider having no more in common with a "true" ThinkPad than name and colour scheme.
The trackpoint alone makes a thinkpad so comfortable to accurately and quickly get a lot done on for mouse workflows when no external mouse is attached, that nothing else comes close.
Especially in a bouncing moving vehicle. I find touchscreens(phones) and the trackpads nearly unusable in such an environment.
It is why was a bit horrified when I was watching the first spacex manned launch and saw their main interface was a touchscreen. I guess a mitigating factor in that case is the pilots probably don't have to fiddle with it during launch and it had one feature I would love if forced to use a touchscreen in a vehicle. A dedicated bar to stabilize your fingers on.
I find Thinkpad trackpads really bad compared to Apple but maybe that’s just a factor of how fast the settings are by default?
I think they mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick
Trackpad != trackpoint. The track point is the little eraser nub pointer embedded into the keyboard. Many thinkpad enthusiasts disable the trackpad entirely.
Trackpoint is the nipple/clit pointer nub, not the trackpad.
It's the Third Way that is not a mouse or trackpad. Oh, fifth I guess, with trackball and touchscreen.
Ah my mistake. What does it actually do? I’ve seen it but never used it.
It's a mouse, similar to a joystick.
There's nothing like Apple in that respect due to the fact they are using glass. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The trackpad is really bad compared with any other brand I've used.
I disable the thinkpad trackpad in the bios. You only need the nib.
What is the trackpoint equivalent of the two-finger scroll? I cannot imagine browsing the web without the two-finger scroll. Or pinch-zooming, how do you do that with a trackpoint?
The reasons I buy second hand thinkpads, is because I have expectations about the keyboard, and they're usually met.
I have expectations about the screen not being silly DPI and 'reasonable', and that's usually met too.
Bluetooth etc. works just fine.
Finally I have expectations on the fans not being like a total joke on most windows laptops... and that's usually fine too.
For the rest I want compatibility; lack of 'FML quirks'.
If only they could fix the absolute turd of audio quality in thinkpads, I think we'd be on par with Apple from my perspective. Although I've loved ARM processors lately and would always prefer a portable ARM machine than Intel.
Choosing thinkpads is really mostly about choosing the boring option, with the least amount of surprises, the dad option of laptops in a sea of disappointments.
TIL Thinkpads are New Balance of Laptops
Basically! Dad's safe choice.
The repairability and durability arguments should apply to HP and Dell business laptops as well, but they largely don't.
If I were getting a new laptop, I'd probably buy a Mac. But if I needed a Windows laptop, I'd buy a Thinkpad (one is currently my only Windows PC). It's not really upgradeable or modular (fixed RAM, SSD and battery not easy to change), but it is well-built and still pretty snappy despite being 6-7 years old.
I'll take a good trackpoint + three buttons below space bar over any and all trackpads. Can't stand using them. Of course I also have separate thinkpad trackpoint II keyboard and a good mouse to use when on a stationary desktop - they're easy to carry along, too.
One of the last to fall to the 'clickpad' trend. Soon nobody will remember a time of serviceable laptop touchpads with physical buttons where you could precisely and efficiently accomplish real work; a time before the ubiquitous featureless expanse of a clickpad where erratic drivers reduce your interface to vague suggestions to the OS. What's the point of laptops if we have to plug in an external mouse anyway?
I have a haptic touchpad on my current X1 Carbon and actually don't mind it. The ancient Haswell-generation clickpads were terrible but the Sensel ones are underappreciated.
I would argue the real problem with clickpads is that they're a cost cutting measure (even the ones on macbooks). People were fed up with accidental taps, and manufacturers didn't want to pay more for a better trackpad.
The other evil part about trackpads is drivers that don't let you turn off the pointer acceleration because to do so would reveal how jittery the sensors really are.
This is why even now and even on the highest end laptops you must still either slow down your fingers or put up with endless overshooting/undershooting of the cursor movement. I deeply despise how "heavy" and slow the cursor feels on all macbooks for at least the past decade. This is the real reason why the fucking clickpad has to be so massive!
> where you could precisely and efficiently accomplish real work
Uhh, millions of people "precisely and efficiently accomplish real work" on MacBooks every day. Moving back to a tiny trackpad or nubbin with fixed location buttons feels incredibly inefficient and gross now...
Having three physical trackpad buttons and the trackpoint are enough to keep me on thinkpads.
Can you explain to this ignorant Mac user what you get out of the physical buttons and trackpoint?
Besides what the other poster said, trackpoint scrolling is amazingly good and life is just better in any programs which require a great deal of back and forth between keyboard and mouse; PureData is a good example, type a few words, select and move stuff, type a few words, select, move, repeat for hours on end.
Pointer accuracy and the possibility to keep your hands on the keyboard while navigating the cursor. Clickpads make it harder to get pixel-perfect pointer accuracy without compromising pointer speed since the act of pushing down on the pad to click invariably moves the pointer. A touchpad with separate buttons does not have these problems but those are becoming rarer and have not been available on your preferred device for a long time.
Thinkpads get eight or nine for repairabliity from ifixit while Macbooks get a four or five, basically because of storage replacability [1]. The pentalobe screw issue is moot for anyone with a spare $5.
Apple could easily fix this. Macs are generally good value except for the absolute rip-off that is storage. $400 to go from 1TB to 2TB is a ridiculous markup.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...
This is where EU should step in and force the right to replace the storage (hell even RAM) onto laptop manufacturers. And if Apple doesn't comply, then good riddance.
Typing this on a X1 gen 6 on my home; paid $230 for it a couple months ago. My impression is that it's a modern, perfectly adequate notebook, if a bit unexciting. But maybe that's because I'm an spoiled child, because I haven't thought for _one second_ how is it that they've made a multicore processor, several gigabytes of random access memory, a fairly decent well-lit keyboard and such a nice matte screen fit into this light, rather elegant device. I mean, for a laptop. I understand Lenovo, those greedy bastards, are the ones who assembled it in interest of achieving their own quarter projections, but now that I think of it, I'm sure there _several_ soulless corporations involved on it running the way it does! Intel is inside, that's for certain, but just ponder about the conditions, and for what financial purpose was tht wireless chip manufactured? What about that screen, huh! How was the lithium in the battery mined? Where? By whom? They weren't doing it _for me_, that I can acknowledge, and yet here I am. Typing on it. Hot garbage. Actually kind of liking it? Is it because I feel more at home here, in Void Linux, than on the Mac OS, even if it's so absolutely unnatural for mammal to "feel" such things in regard to, uh, process supervision and package management? Look, I'm not going to go full-on zen and start rambling about "you" being no more than a mundane abstract construct, but insofar as we agree on our individuation I can very much assure you that this Thinkpad, right now, exists for my benefit, and even though I have set boundaries on myself on developing a sentimental relationship with it (which kinda happened with an X220, I was younger then), even though its assamblage has required thousands years of avarice, violence and rapaciousness (as well of bits of love and care, for how they were all these person fed?) as an end product, for two hundred bucks, it is pretty fucking miraculous, and I myself am especially grateful for all those saccharine videos narrow-mindedly expressing their praises for it.
My first laptop was an IBM Thinkpad, Later I had some at work. But after they sold to Lenovo, and the Superfish and Lenovo Service Engine issues were discovered, I wrote them off. Thinkpads may be the best non-Apple laptops, but I simply don’t trust Lenovo and likely never will.
Every once in awhile I will try a non-thinkpad laptop and I regret it every single time. There's always at least one thing that just doesn't work well. Trackpad being unpleasant, dropped keys when typing fast, can't wake up from sleep in a timely manner, or who knows what else. Thinkpads aren't quite like Macbooks but at least all of their components work...
Actually the Microsoft Surface book/laptop line is really good in my opinion... It's just the Linux support is often (understandably) quite bad. Sometimes I psych myself into thinking I can stomach Windows for the "official, supported" laptop experience but it never lasts more than a few months before I cave and go back to Linux.
Companies that hand out Apple laptops don’t have a hardware service contract?
Dell laptops must have one available.
The main argument is that thinkpads are high quality because it makes the service contract cheaper for Lenovo to fulfill.
But other non-repairable/poor quality brands thrives in the same market segment.
We use 99% Apple and used to have a rental contract. We switched to just buying new MacBooks outright every 3 years because it was cheaper. I think the number of “it needs repair and I’m losing working hours” scenarios was very low.
It probably helps that everyone including (especially) the CEO can reinstall an OS and manage their own dotfiles.
I have a 2020 Lenovo Legion and boy, those things last. I can easily open it to clean it (did it last month), add/remove memory or storage without specialized tools or software. All that I need is built into the bios (like disable battery for service, disable hybrid Intel Graphics/Nvidia to use just the GPU, disable secure boot), and the bios is still getting updates. I understand the price tag, especially for enterprise because every big manufacturer does this.
it has a clit mouse and I can take most units apart in 30 minutes.
that's the entire reason.
no need to get into supply chains and culture and hoodoo.
The myth has been reality for me since 2005.
The only time I had something bad was one model that it has issues when powering, which I never tracked down if the root cause was the hardware itself or a driver issue.
The only other brand I have been as lucky were Asus multimedia laptops, and netbooks.
I've been thinking of creating a website to make it much easier to search for used thinkpads and sort by various specs. There used to be a similar website like it for servers that's long shut down.
Good idea, especially if it caters for us in Europe, too.
>Thinkpads are “Cheap” because nobody who worships the things buys one new.
most wrong statement ever.
in fact with the entire 30th anniversary lineup was made to sell new units to fans, no one else cared.
Did the 30th anniversary lineup sell well?
Retarded reasoning. Of course companies care about their bottom line foremost, but if their business model for business segment incidentally aligns with providing consumers solid, repairable, or cheap 2nd hand, products then that's worth validating. I haven't owned a laptop for 5 years, but all my previous laptops were new thinkpads (Ts/Ws) and it was always relatively easy to find a sale, stack with some sort of education/work discount, get a pretty solid warranty for very competitive prices.
Great read. There is something special here that the author isn’t commenting on: the fact that cold hard business logic was allowed to lead to a sustainably (money-wise) better product without interference for decades is unusual.
Too often cold hard business logic is subverted by psychopathic short term executive thinking that says “we’re spending money on something good for the customer? I don’t care that it’s also good for us but I like the idea of a quarterly earnings report that doesn’t include that expense!”
The executive then takes their bonus and gets headhunted by the next F500 company where they apply the same strategy.
Framework should get in that same business.
I mean, my company buys them, I know at least one other that does too. Both are too technical I think to bother with a hardware support contract. But others might!
the service business that will get fast turn over repair for a business to pay the premium they pay to levono/ibm isn't that easy to do. But yeah, I am sure they could create an ecosystem of reparability that would increase their sales
My understanding is that Dell/Lenovo share a lot of parts to keep the third party repair business viable, because they sell a lot of next day replacement contracts.
The golden era modular ThinkPad had quality of life lived experience design https://youtu.be/FuybvW81QoM
This is ridiculous. High end second hand Thinkpads are much better and robust in my experience than new Lenovo laptops. Much better build quality.
This is why I like to think of true laptop price:
* Laptop price
* Extended waranty and support with onsite fix 3 year
* Accidental damage insurance. 3 year
Get it all and consider that the ticket price. Then divide by 36 for the monthly SaaS-like price. Makes claude code seem cheap :)
I found it is worth it.
Especially as the home visit means no backup reinstall needed for many fixes, unless it is a full replacement. Such a time saver. And laptops are fragile. They need repair by default (think like a car not like a house double brick wall).
Yep, my last laptop was a used thinkpad and my current laptop is too. Huzzah.
This is weird and I cant believe it was written in the year of our lord two thousand twenty six.
>Lenovo does not care about you. >IBM did not care about you.
No shit.
>that IBM and Lenovo are the most kind, gracious corporations in the universe
I have never encountered this line of thought in the thinkpad enthusiast space. People like the design, not the company.
>when most of the laptops they worship were made less than ten years ago
The gold high standard in the Thinkpad enthusiast community was still the T60 last I checked. Released like 2006. I have a T61p at home for my own amusement. And you can still get bootleg parts like batteries.
>Simply put, because they have not thought for one second about a Thinkpad in any other context than their home, let alone about the general functioning of computers in a business setting…
No of course not. Because they like the design. If I could get myself a Cray 1 I would. I dont care about the business context.
>old laptops are disposed of, and treated basically as garbage.
No, what happens is that the finance/leasing company contracts someone to assess the current state of the hardware. Anything that's missing or severely damaged is billable to the lessor. Then what was turned over to the recyclers is sold on with a cut going back to the finance firm.
Some basic research here would have actually strengthened your core premise, because they get a small tasty bite of the secondary market.
>Thinkpads are Repairable because every minute of a field technician’s labor costs money for IBM/Lenovo, and cuts into the profit made on a service contract
Yes exactly. But this isnt the only business model available. Some businesses make laptops that are less repairable, or dont last as long. Nobody thinks the company wants to marry them. But in a marketplace you choose the product that closely aligns with your parameters. It doesnt matter why the company used those parameters.
>Notice, that nowhere in this explanation did I say “used to”, “once were” or “back then”. Because this cycle is continuous.
Oh no, you are telling me that they are continuing to make repairable laptops? Thats terrible. How will the thinkpad community ever recover.
>These are not magical virtues of a bygone age. These things aren’t even really “virtuous” at least in terms of motivation. Lenovo doesn’t care about “Right to Repair” any more than Apple, they just sell to a different market, and make their money in a different way.
I honestly see people clamoring for computers from specifically before Intel Management Engine\TPM\Secure Boot more than a vague mysterious bygone age.
>They’re typical companies, who just happen to have some good designers and engineers.
No shit. But this is true about every piece of hardware that has a fandom. Its no different in a Porsche group. Or people going on about old Cisco switches. Theres nothing new here. I dont think that JVC wanted to make beautiful love to me because I enjoy the design of the Videosphere.
>But Thinkpads didn’t materialize out of the virtuous ether
And no one claims they did.
>But don’t treat these things like they’re magic
No one does.
> There is something “special” about Thinkpads. It’s rare for such a long tradition of design and engineering to be allowed to continue inside mega-companies...
Not... really? They're mega-companies because of deliberate choices like that. Those choices are not the only way to get there, but they've found choices that work. I get that it's trendy to shit on successful businesses and be toxic about the crumbs you enjoy, but it's plain ignorant to call these things "accidents" or "coincidences" and nobody is forcing you to eat crumbs.
The later comparison to Apple is just as strange. Consumers aren't so particular and will buy anything at any price for almost no reason but marketing. All those people hyping Thinkpads may not be the original manufacturer, but they are selling them on eBay and effectively the vendors. They hype old Macs just the same.