My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
My favorite and most beloved laptop was the T60 with an IPS display. It was rock-solid, had a docking station, a swappable CD drive and battery, and PDF manuals for disassembly. I wish I could buy something cool now to run a *nix OS, but I cannot find anything good besides the MacBook Pro.
I originally bought my MacBook Air M1 just as a transitional computer because my old, incredibly expensive Intel MacBook Pro had been stolen, and I was waiting for a newer MacBook Pro model. But I grew so fond of the Air that I couldn't bring myself to part with it again. It's lightweight, has incredible performance (more powerful than the most powerful Intel-based Pros), the battery lasts a long time, the keyboard is comfortable, and the design is more curved than the Pro (and the newer Air models), which means it doesn't dig into your wrists.
As I have done more ai coding where I'm just reviewing a PR and giving feedback to a model that runs on a studio in my home, I wonder if eventually something like this as a thin client would be nice. Has anyone done something similar? I think most of the time I wouldn't have enough internet to access my server, I also might not be wanting to code in the first place.
I built my own web tmux type thing running on a beefy metal box (for rust builds) that I access over tailscale. I was using HAPI, but I wanted to simplify and use rust for the back end and my own elm-like front-end to improve performance. I haven't published it since it's pretty specific to my workflow (I ruthlessly keep it as simple as possible), but you can think of it like a Herdr type thing in the browser. It also has a phone interface and I generally use speech instead of typing as a lot of my compositions can be stream of thought.
I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...
Have you run into any situations where you couldn't reach back to your server? I still have an m3 macbook pro w 64gb ram that I use for local qwen when my internet isn't great ie getting stuff done on a plane. Not sure if I'd feel a loss going to MBA and having a 24gb ram max or if it would be good for me to disconnect and just read a book instead
Not really. The connection speed doesn't have to be great. It's nice if it is, but you can function on slower connections no problem. That means if my land internet goes out, my phone hotspot is good enough as a fallback. I can go to a coffee shop or w/e. My dev box is not at home, it's on a rack, backed up.
I built a mobile client for agents called Cosyra. For this use case I'd say use chat to prompt an agent because it will queue the message for when you have internet and sends it as an https request so it's pretty lightweight. You can check it out here: cosyra.com
I find the thinkpads extemely cool, and I envy the customization / repair options soo much.
That said, I switched to a macbook pro last year and these machines are like from another world. I want to get things done instead of fiddling with the machine and, famous last words I know but, this thing just works.
Yes, it'll be e-waste the moment a small thing breaks, and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world, so it's no competition to the thinkpad.
I hope framework eventually delivers the best of both worlds.
I don't think Framework aims to be a laptop that you just set it up and forget.
You own everything and that comes with some concessions. Things won't always work, software will always be tricky to make fully compatible, etc.
But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.
That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
> I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
It really has. I bought a MacBook Pro in 2011 and used it throughout college. Worked great. I gave it to my friend’s little sister when she started college, and she ended up using it throughout her undergrad. She loved it, zero issues. So, that one MacBook got at least 9 years of use.
Fast forward to 2020, my wife needs a laptop for law school. I figure a MacBook pro would be the simplest, easiest, and most reliable option. It wasn’t. Not only had the cost gone up (I paid ~$1,300 for my MacBook pro, while hers cost ~$2,000 for the same options, but less), but using Microsoft apps like excel, word, and powerpoint was such a hassle sometimes. The apps kept signing her out or didn’t have certain options (like formatting) that were available in the Windows versions. Installing and working with third party apps that some of her professors and classes required was also a hassle, and those apps worked inconsistently. I remember having to give her my laptop a couple of times just so she could get her work done. The battery life was significantly worse compared to my older MacBook. Her MacBook seemed so much slower, couldn’t handle as much, and was overall a crap experience. The simplicity, reliability, and ease of use that used to separate Macs from windows laptops, especially for the average user, just didn't seem to be there anymore. It’s like whatever worked before, they got away from it.
So, anytime I hear someone say, “a MacBook is the best” these days all I think is, “yeah, nah, it’s crap, just like everything else, but slightly more expensive crap.”
First of all they need to offer shipping to anything but US / CA and parts of Europe. Would love to give them a shot but they seem to absolutely refuse to ship to Japan.
My "desktop" machine is actually an old T450 I bought used over a decade ago, running Linux Mint (Mate).
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.
Thinkpad + Trackpad sounds all kinds of wrong. See that glorious red knob in the middle and those 3 buttons above the trackpad? That is what god intended. Now go and spin up some Emacs and a Sly + SBCL session and do the lord's work!
Macbook Air mid-2012 here. 8GB. I use Nixos without a desktop env, this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete. I have a 3090 in a desktop for messing around with LLMs but that's headless.
I had the same with X230. A lovely laptop that still serves as a home server after 10 years or so from being bought, and it was already used, post-lease machine back when I bought it.
MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS
That was my first Mac! I loved it but those bezels were a doozy. I think that same form factor with a larger screen would be perfect. Although I wonder how close the Neo compares.
"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."
Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.
Since 2020 t14/t16 thinkpads no longer have a user swappable battery without removing screws. So you can get a 50wh standard battery or 82wh. Before 2020 you could get a slightly larger 96wh battery with a bump out, plus the small internal battery.
A power bank with a usb-c 65w pd will work for most laptops. Many of these will be 100wh/20000mah or 150wh/30000mah, to meet airplane limits.
I use a T480 as my daily driver and recently upgraded to a 72wh battery after the old 24wh pack died. I bought a Lenovo-branded Total Micro battery off of CDW to ensure I was actually getting what I paid for, as the last battery was a cheap knockoff that barely lasted a year. The 72wh battery was about a $10 difference to the 48wh battery and will easily last 10 hours but could last 14 hours with conservative use.
Same here. A T480 as my personal laptop. 4 core/8 thread i7 CPU, 24GB ram and 512GB NVMe.
Works for all my daily tasks, and light development. Feels nice and responsive.
I’m running arch Linux and my custom hyprland-fork, which I’m using for a more retro look and a little bit more mouse-affordances than Hyprland wants to provide.
Had Lenovo (X220), followed by two top XPS 13" (lighter), then the first M1 (8gb), M1 Max (64gb!), and M3. Battery, weight, Linux-like, and UX (in that order) made the M1 practical to carry and reconverted my M1 Max into a server for LLM and computation. The M3 sometimes also work as a computing server in tandem. I would love to carry again my XPS 13" with Linux but the battery duration and lifetime makes it unusable for movility.
Agreed. I had an x201 and an x250. The 250 main board eventually stopped working (I think due to flex when the laptop was picked up from one corner repeatedly -- a known issue from what I understand). My x201 still runs great (with occasional refreshes of the thermal paste). A version of the x201-x220 era machines with modern internals would be my dream machine.
And honestly, I am still daily driving that x220 with NetBSD and a T480 with OpenBSD and they do everything I need. Also running a Panasonic SV7 with OpenBSD.
All of them definitely not current gen beasts but if I can't make my shit run there, then what the hell am I even doing?
I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.
It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.
At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.
I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.
I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.
The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.
Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.
I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.
I look forward to when these 5th-generation Intel chipsets are "jail broken" and the totality of device functionality is accessible with a management engine binary compiled from purely open source code.
The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?
IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.
Alas, as a Linux user, X11 doesn't seem to do that sort of thing: a 2-finger tap is nothing at all according to xev. 2-finger and 3-finger trackpad clicks are basically unreliable left and right mouse button clicks.
I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.
The trackpoint of old is my favorite input method for laptops. But the trackpoint of new is not like the trackpoint of old. I still prefer it to the trackpad personally, just because it's so ingrained in me, but I no longer try to convince friends and family. It's on its way out, culturally, because of said enshittification.
My daughter got some low-end Dell laptop for her school machine and the touchpad w/o buttons is fucking excruciating. They had her using OnShape last year with that touchpad. I tried it and nearly gave the machine a toss in frustration. I had her use my older Dell machine w/ buttons to see how much less shitty it is (and then I gave her a USB mouse to use because OnShape with any touchpad is still difficult to use, IMO).
My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.
Neo is way too heavy.
I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...
That said, I switched to a macbook pro last year and these machines are like from another world. I want to get things done instead of fiddling with the machine and, famous last words I know but, this thing just works.
Yes, it'll be e-waste the moment a small thing breaks, and costs like a years wage in some parts of the world, so it's no competition to the thinkpad.
I hope framework eventually delivers the best of both worlds.
But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.
That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago
It really has. I bought a MacBook Pro in 2011 and used it throughout college. Worked great. I gave it to my friend’s little sister when she started college, and she ended up using it throughout her undergrad. She loved it, zero issues. So, that one MacBook got at least 9 years of use.
Fast forward to 2020, my wife needs a laptop for law school. I figure a MacBook pro would be the simplest, easiest, and most reliable option. It wasn’t. Not only had the cost gone up (I paid ~$1,300 for my MacBook pro, while hers cost ~$2,000 for the same options, but less), but using Microsoft apps like excel, word, and powerpoint was such a hassle sometimes. The apps kept signing her out or didn’t have certain options (like formatting) that were available in the Windows versions. Installing and working with third party apps that some of her professors and classes required was also a hassle, and those apps worked inconsistently. I remember having to give her my laptop a couple of times just so she could get her work done. The battery life was significantly worse compared to my older MacBook. Her MacBook seemed so much slower, couldn’t handle as much, and was overall a crap experience. The simplicity, reliability, and ease of use that used to separate Macs from windows laptops, especially for the average user, just didn't seem to be there anymore. It’s like whatever worked before, they got away from it.
So, anytime I hear someone say, “a MacBook is the best” these days all I think is, “yeah, nah, it’s crap, just like everything else, but slightly more expensive crap.”
Weak processor, 16gb ram, but good enough for browsing and running daily tasks, and it's simple enough to connect to more powerful machines when the need arises. And the docking station has HDMI and displayport. Hardware H.264 codec, and also HEVC and VP9, but alas only with the windows driver.
My big rig desktop is now in the basement, sleeping until I need to run LLMs or diffusion or a heavy compile. I also sometimes use it for Steam gaming, connecting to it via moonlight (which works surprisingly well, even over WIFI).
MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS
Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.
A power bank with a usb-c 65w pd will work for most laptops. Many of these will be 100wh/20000mah or 150wh/30000mah, to meet airplane limits.
This is the specific battery I bought: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...
Works for all my daily tasks, and light development. Feels nice and responsive.
I’m running arch Linux and my custom hyprland-fork, which I’m using for a more retro look and a little bit more mouse-affordances than Hyprland wants to provide.
Couldn’t be happier!
All of them definitely not current gen beasts but if I can't make my shit run there, then what the hell am I even doing?
It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.
At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.
I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.
I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.
The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.
Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.
I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.
Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.
But I don’t pretend that any of these gestures make trackpads usable.
I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.
The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92bdOcsBVpQ