> Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh).
Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.
> Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack.
lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it. If this happens to me, you can bet I’m digging through Activity Monitor and killing the culprit before the fans can get fully ramped up.
I don't lie about battery life numbers. People like to say, "I get 9 hours of battery life." when they mean that they get 9 hours if they do doing nothing but let their computer idle with the brightness at minimum. 4 hours with a 55Wh battery is an average consumption of 13 watts. That's because my typical workflow involves running a VM containing cassandra & postrgres (among other services) and recompiling go and javascript. My coworkers with 15" MacBook Pros tend to worry more about battery life than I do.
My fan comment was a joke about Slack's efficiency. Of course compiling a bunch of go code will make the fan turn on. That will use up 100% of your cores on any decent sized project.
I get about 9 hours of battery life on my T450s and about 6 on my x220 under load, youtube, vms, coding. That is under load.
My idle times, browsing something like HN, or sitting in #emacs I get near 20 hours on my t450s and about 13 on my x220.
I think low low low idle power consumption is key to long infrequent charges. This is because the second you are not using your computer then it should also not be using power. For example, my t450s without adjusting the screen bigness idles at 2.8W, so tons of idle time with a 97WH battery.
You can't really optimize power for when you are using it. If you are compiling, you want the fastest compile time and use the most power. Same for other things that take power.
I go all weekend not charging my personal laptop and the only times I close the lid is when I am going to bed. Otherwise I leave the lid open, same brightness and walk away for hours and come back and continue where I left off.
So I see your point about people saying "I get 9 hours of battery life." doing nothing, but even 9 hours of doing nothing is fairly low, given I can make a 10 year old laptop get close to 18 hours, and a 4 year old one get near 21 hours "doing nothing".
I've just unplugged my x220 and it is telling me it has 4:36 battery remaining. I only have firefox open and not doing anything else, so that 4:36 is probably quite a significant overhead. It will drop as soon as I do something.. Yup, just fired up emacs and now it is saying 3:44 remaining.
Would you mind sharing what setup you have that lets you get such long battery life?
But get power top installed. Make sure in the 4th screen in power top and make sure all settings are to "good". I made a systemd unit to do this for me know boot. I also installed tlp and have it set it's settings. Some of those cross over into what powertop does.
I set some things on the i915 driver but that will have to wait until baby watch is over.
I have just installed powertop and updated the settings. It doesn't seem to have made any difference... but that's probably because I don't know what I am doing. I'll read up on it further. Thanks for the tip.
Not 100% sure, I'll have to look when I get home this evening. I think it may not be the thin one as it is thicker than the rest of the case, but don't totally know off hand what I should be looking at to determine it..
I don’t think it is possible to get the consumption of T450s on X220.
The T450s generation (and the generation before it) use ULV processors (ultra low voltage).
The processors used in the T450s generation have a TLP of 15W.
The processors used in the X220 generation have a TLP of 35W.
On the flip side, the processors in the X220 generation (and in the next generation) are powerful, which is a good thing if you need the power and if you have the laptop plugged most of the time.
The x220 gets about 80% my T450s, it also seems to compile emacs a few seconds faster... Later today I will try and post some screen shots of power consumption. The x220 for sure can last an entire day on battery.
At my previous job I had a T460p with the full-sized double battery setup, and I routinely got 12 hours actual use with room to spare, and this was on a more or less stock Fedora install without even bothering to do any real power consumption optimizations.
Modern T-series still have amazing damn battery life, and I’ve never found anyone else who comes close except Apple, or Android ARM hybrids like the old ASUS Transformer Prime with the double batteries.
I have horrible battery life on my T520, mainly because the battery is really old.
I wish to purchase a new battery for it and am looking for a place to buy a battery that
1. will ship to Norway without too high shipping cost, and
2. isn’t going to explode in my face.
Any suggestions?
Also, mbrumlow, what distro are you running? And did you customize it in anyway aside from using powertop that you mentioned, to get it to consume low amounts of power while idle?
Track down an OEM Lenovo battery from whatever source you can find. Unfortunately, the aftermarket batteries I've tried all died rapidly, due to cells dying or going out of balance or whatever. Never had an aftermarket last longer than 6 months before it was down to a half hour or something pitiful. Finally sucked it up and bought an OEM battery and two years later it's still giving a couple hours of runtime.
I actually just had the motherboard on my T450s go down. I was regularly getting 10 - 20 hours of development time with the 97WH battery (usually emacs, posgresql, rails and music).
You should be able to optimize and get even higher. I'm actually considering getting a new T480 (since it has the battery expanded slot), but I'm struggling to decide.
What OS are you running? I'm really curious on your setup if you're running Linux. I have the same Thinkpad but it's impossible for me to the the idle wattage like that.
That’s what I’m using, not mbrumlow. Also I just upgraded to 18.10 to get a newer kernel and a newer version of the r8169 module. That unlocked PC7 idle states and increased my battery life by 50%.
Long lasting battery is the feature I appreciate most from a laptop. My T430 with the extended slice battery gives me 7-10 hours, and could probably get another 3+ if I swapped out the CD drive for the Power Bridge battery.
Long live the ThinkPad.
Edit: This is with mostly casual use on an Arch Linux setup.
I think the next killer feature I want/look for in a laptop is the ability to see the screen in bright sunlight. It's a gorgeous day today and I would mind spending a few hours by the waterfront coding.
This year's models are doing away with replaceable batteries for the most part. T490 has a built-in 50 Whr battery and no ability to extend or replace that without removing screws. It also gets rid of the 2.5 in drive option, one of the RAM slots (but it adds a soldered one), and it replaces the full size SD with a micro-SD. All of that for a small reduction in weight and thickness.
So, basically, the thinkpad line is gone now, it's just another poor macbook pro knockoff. I expect to see articles like this one for years to come, given that there are almost no options left if you want power, expandability and battery life in a single laptop package.
Well if it was a MacBook, everything would be glued-in or soldered, but yes the trend is worrying. I guess the popularity of MacBooks, despite their form-over-function, is what is driving this. But surely they could have kept the T490 like the T480, especially as the T490s exists.
There’s maybe a billion-dollar opportunity there: maybe someone could invent a hybrid screen that switches from (O)LED to e-ink mode under bright lighting conditions.
Somebody did invent a hybrid screen, Pixel Qi, it was used in the Notion Ink Adam tablet from 2010.
But it wasn't a billion-dollar opportunity and Pixel Qi are so forgotten they were reported by the media as closed down, although might technically still exist (and might have released their IP to the public, I haven't read too far on it just now).
At least my 2013 MacBook Pro would get 10 hours of battery life with the screen at medium brightness, WiFi on, and using Safari and Word (which is not a particularly light workload given how heavy the web is these days). Working in Emacs/SBCL would result in even longer battery life. Unless you’re rebuilding Chrome from source every few minutes, the compile-edit cycle is mostly typing into your editor with short bursts of activity in-between. Even more so for languages with lightweight compilers like Go and JS.
> which is not a particularly light workload given how heavy the web is these days
I think a lot of this might be attributable to just how well power-optimised safari is. I could get 10 hours using safari when my macbook was new, but only 6 using chrome or firefox! Given that safari is speed-competitive with these browsers, it's very impressive.
What kind of numbers do you see in powertop between high and low load? (After running powertop --auto-tune and powertop --calibrate of course).
I've noticed the i7-8550U in my HP Envy can easily drive consumption up to 22W during a parallel compile even though I spend most of my time idling between 5 and 7W while editing text. The extra cores seem to consume a lot of power compared to my older 5th-gen laptop with 2 physical cores.
I also wonder if mobile Ryzen behaves similarly or if Intel just trashed their power/thermals in order to compete on core count.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to find benchmarks with power vs load stats. Most of them seem to be like "7 hours watching a movie in Windows" when I'd rather see "Battery is 55 Wh but computer uses 22W when all cores are 100% and 35W at 100% CPU and GPU". You know, like actual facts about the hardware rather than subjective usage experiences.
Powertop doesn't show any wattage numbers for me. I looked at gnome-power-statistics and saw that my laptop idles around 9 watts. That's all power consumption including the screen.
This afternoon I upgraded my kernel from 4.15 to 4.18. Then I removed the r8168 module that I'd tried to use to reduce power consumption. Using the open source r8169 module got me PC7 states. Now my X210 idles at 5 watts. I'm guessing I could go lower if I tweaked more, but this is a huge improvement in battery life. I'm glad I took the time to look into it.
I've gotten battery consumption figures as high as 30 watts when running something like `./minerd --benchmark --threads=8`. Intel claims the i7-8550U has a 15W TDP, but it can easily go above that if it has enough cooling.
I used to wonder why my ThinkPad sometimes ran for 12 hours and sometimes 5. Turns out that Google Docs has an animated cursor that doesn't just blink, it fades in and out using javascript. Animation cost several W on average. UX guys love animations because I dunno they are just psychos.
My office decided to move from Jabber (Pidgin / Adium) to Slack. Much of the office upgraded computers. Whether Jabber is negligible, Slack used más two to three Gb RAM. It’s simply the most inefficient software I have to Tun continuously on that PC
Their priority was probably shipping a cross-platform app as quickly as possible and gaining adoption. My hunch is they will eventually make native apps for Windows and Mac and drop Linux support.
FWIW, I "honestly" get about 7-8 hours out of my MacBook Pro when doing light coding (small C/C++ project builds every five minutes, tweaking my website, writing some shell scripts), and 4-5 when doing "heavy" work such as iOS development. I can eke out 10 or more hours if I only read Mail and Hacker News :P
> My fan comment was a joke about Slack's efficiency.
Try ditching chrome/ff for safari for most of your workload, I find that consistently gives me a few extra hours of battery, and I always have IntelliJ and VScode open and in use.
Yup, switching from Chrome or Firefox to Safari is the number one thing I recommend to people to improve their battery life on Macs. The less Electron they can have as well, the better, but it's slightly less on an issue because it's not running JavaScript trying to sell you ads.
My work laptop is a mbp 2018 (i9, 32GB). The battery life is abysmal. I typically get a little bit over 2 hours. I'm not going to lie though: I'm always running Atom or VSCode and there's lots of opened tabs in Chrome.
Chrome used to half my battery life on a MacBook Pro. On a brand new machine with a full battery I could program all day in Xcode if I forgot my charger until one day it was empty halfway the day. Finally I figured out it was Chrome that killed it so fast.
Did they reduce the battery size on newer models? My 2015 i7 mbp can get about 3 hours of Civ 6 (in strategic view), or 6 hours of regular dev workload. I remember it lasting longer a few years ago too.
Yes. The previous generation 15" MacBook Pro has a 99.5Wh battery. The 2016 & 2017 15" touchbar MacBook Pro has a 76Wh battery. The 2018 model was upgraded to 83.6Wh. Depending on which version you have, you get either 15% or 25% less battery than the older model.
Yes. Can't remember how much it shrank in Wh though. I had a 2016 which I ultimately sold after 6 months, then bought a 2015 of eBay. I get roughly 25-33% better battery life on the 2015 than I did with the newer model.
If you throttle the machine instead of using a fan the battery life only changes by less than half (about 25% in my experience) so machines with bad cooling which I feel like the sort of person who would exaggerate battery life would be more likely to use will actually get better battery life when performing more intense tasks.
>One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it.
Yeah, but try standing in their shoes: they too are probably wondering how you can bear getting worked up over such small things such as fans going off.
It admittedly sounds like a worse situation to be in (seeing that it means living one's whole life in constant irritation) than to have noisy fans.
>getting worked up over such small things such as fans going off
Fans spinning up is an indicator of something. Usually an indicator that the machine is under heavy load and you need to watch out for the things that come with machines under heavy load: slower performance, overheating, graphical artifacts, potential crashing, etc.
If my fans spun up when I was not aware my computer was under heavy load, I would believe something was wrong with my computer. If I spent any amount of time researching why my computer was under heavy load and my conclusion was that it was not under heavy load and that the fans just spun up for no reason, I think I'd be rightfully irritated.
Imagine a doorbell that rings randomly even if no one is at the door. In the grand scheme of things it's minor. But it shouldn't be happening, and every time it does I have to get up and walk to the window to see if someone is actually there. Every time the doorbell rings and no one is there, I'm going to get more and more irritated.
It surely is an indicator of something but if you have a modern laptop with factory configuration from one of the generic Windows laptop manufacturers, chances are it's an indicator that the power settings are set up for marketing/benchmarks and not real world use. Every single ultrabook and workstation laptop I've had outside of Apple products have been poorly configured, especially the Intel Turbo Boost settings.
I'm not an expert in CPU thermals by any means, but from what I've gathered, in order to eek out a tenth of a gigahertz for their marketing materials (with rapidly diminishing returns because physics), manufacturers usually set Turbo Boost Power Limits 5-10 (or more) watts too high. Since Turbo Boost usually maximizes a single core's frequency and the heat generated increases exponentially, it creates a very concentrated heat spike in the silicon. Even if the CPU heat sink is good enough to passively dissipate that much heat from all of the cores, the turbo boost hot spot forces the fans to spin up early before the CPU knows how long the boost will be needed (otherwise Turbo boost would significantly reduce the lifetime of the CPU). Combined with random scheduled OS tasks that take a split second of turbo to run a process and firmware configured with a minimum fan running time to avoid even more annoying pulsing, these power limits cause many mass market laptops to needlessly spin up their fans all the time.
It's ridiculous but I've been running ThrottleStop/the equivalent on Linux to under-clock every laptop I've owned since Turbo Boost was introduced. A small 10-20% reduction in turbo boost power limits is rarely noticeable unless you have a very specialized and irregular CPU-bound workload but it makes a significant change in the amount of heat it generates and gives the passive dissipation enough time to absorb a boosted workload instead of spinning up the fans in an emergency.
Turbo Boost power limits have to be changed using the Intel Tuning utility or a similar piece of software that sets the correct registers. Operating systems usually leave those lower level details to the BIOS so installing a new operating system won't do anything unless the system default is set correctly and some bloatware driver is updating it at boot. Usually the manufacturer does it in the BIOS so you have to overwrite it every time you boot; or they do it at the factory, in which case just setting the registers once will be enough (I believe they're nonvolatile?)
Most people will categorize crashing, overheating, and graphical artifacts as a more severe problem than "what's that small noise I hear once in a while".
That's too limited a view at the issue. Why is the CPU running that hard? If the user is not doing anything CPU-intensive, yet the fans spin up, clearly the CPU is hot, but why? What is it doing?
You say that's horrible, but I have never gotten more than around 5 hours from my MacBook Pros (my own and my work's). Maybe I could if the only thing I ran was Safari and iCal, but that's not my use case. If their number is from normal use, I'd consider it normal. :shrug:
iStat Menus (macOS app) gives you a HUD in the global top bar for things like network and CPU usage. It will quickly show you how many random apps and browser tabs will explode with resource usage over the course of the day. Or why your internet seems slow -- some app is saturating your bandwidth somehow.
Spotify, Slack, and Discord are major culprits, like if someone posts a single gif (are they animated manually by React?). But even some recipe website on a browser tab might go into 100% CPU usage because part of its ad-serving kit was blocked by ublock.
I consider it (or any app like it) essential for maxing your battery lifespan. Really wish it was built into macOS.
Activity Monitor itself also consumes a lot of CPU. And you tend to only use it when you've already suspected a problem, like when your fans start running.
What's nice about having a global CPU graph is that you get used to normal idling levels and will start to notice anomalies.
You're also just closer to the pulse of your computer. What exactly are normal bandwidth consumption levels over the course of a day? What speeds are you normally getting? Which apps and which actions seem to be the hardest on your resources? I think these are just nice things to know about the device you use every day like how you might get used to the sounds and feel of the car you drive every day.
For example, I often see HNers suggest that a good computer confers no benefits for web browsing. Meanwhile, I can say that web browsing is the most resource intensive thing going on in my computer. What your CPU graph as you click around the internet. Or when decoding a high res Youtube video or a muted autoplaying video on some news article. Or scrolling Facebook/Instagram.
I have an older machine that stutters while playing 720p+ Youtube videos unless the CPU is idle, and busier webpages take much longer to render and lock up the UI before I can click around. A better computer can save an impressive amount of time in the long run. It's not for nothing!
> Activity Monitor itself also consumes a lot of CPU. And you tend to only use it when you've already suspected a problem, like when your fans start running.
MacOS always tracks the energy usage stats so you don't have to keep activity monitor open, just look at the 'Average Energy Impact' column. iStats menu also uses a fair bit of CPU, similar to Activity Monitor, it's just split into a couple processes so it doesn't show as much, not that this is a reason not to use it, I love it and use it daily, it's not a good contrast point with the activity monitor.
My main point is that a global CPU graph helps you identify acute CPU consumption as it happens which is the main mechanism that helps me identify things like Spotify getting stuck in a spinlock or a browser tab devouring my battery. Seeing "Google Chrome" show up in Activity Monitor's energy chart when you check it periodically isn't as helpful.
Good point about iStat Menus consuming its own resources. It has two processes afaict with its main process staying below 1% CPU. I bet that number sees an increase once you start turning on more HUDs like the temp/fan sensors and jacking up the update frequency though.
> My main point is that a global CPU graph helps you identify acute CPU consumption as it happens which is the main mechanism that helps me identify things like Spotify getting stuck in a spinlock or a browser tab devouring my battery. Seeing "Google Chrome" show up in Activity Monitor's energy chart when you check it periodically isn't as helpful.
If you want to know 'what is using all by battery' after a couple hours using it, you want to know the average power usage by app, which activity monitor gives you. Battery life is the point of this thread, not random lock ups.
> Good point about iStat Menus consuming its own resources. It has two processes afaict with its main process staying below 1% CPU.
I wish we could just get rid of 'cpu %' as a metric on modern machines, or at least scale it based on P-state. Saying process X is taking Y% of the CPU is pointless if you don't also communicate the P-state, and chances are you don't even know which core the process is running. Point is, I'm sitting here almost completely idle and there are plenty of tasks 'using 3-5% of my CPU', of course the CPU is running at 800MHz no where near it's all core peak of 2.7Ghz, much less it's single core peak of 4.5Ghz. What does 1% CPU even mean in this world?
When I got the first Macbook Pro Retina in 2012, I would get ~10 hours on OSX. The newest ones I can't get ~4 hours from...
I also got the first Macbook 12" and I would get better battery life running Windows 10 than I would OSX. Windows 10 I would get ~12 hours or so. Windows 10 on the Macbook Pro drained the battery quickly though because you couldn't switch to integrated graphics.
If you tweak your power management daemon to force your CPU to stay in the lowest couple of SpeedStep levels, you can keep it much cooler at the expense of performance. This is effectively undeclocking on the fly. When you do something fancy, your CPU clock frequency will increase, but not enough to heat it to the point where the fans turn on.
Most MacBooks doesn’t turn their fans on until the aluminum bottom is tenderizing your lap (and/or melting the table). You could configure this on most non-Apple laptops, too, but running the fans earlier keeps temps down and probably extends the hardware lifetime.
Yep. My X220 runs at 800 MHz unless I’m watching a YouTube video, at which point it switches to 1.2 GHz-ish. I don’t let it get much above that level otherwise my battery life and temperatures suffer.
That's because it's a random chinese board that attempts to provide up to date performance but not focused on up-to-date thermals/efficiency.
If a modern 13.3 screamer with battery life is what you are looking for however, check out the just released Thinkpad x390. It's even more modern and the battery life is a staggering 17-18 hours.
It has a 15W CPU in it, it's not a screamer. It's not hard to have extremely long battery life in a laptop, just toss an extremely low power (15W or less) CPU in it and get the battery as close as you can to the somewhat arbitrary 100Whr limit that isn't really a limit but no one will sell a laptop you can't take in the cabin of an airplane.
What is hard however, is getting long life out of a performance laptop with a 45-60W CPU when you're capped to a 100Whr battery.
Slightly off topic; but on fans I recently got a totally fanless mini-pc (zotac) loaded it up with 16gb of ram and a tb ssd and the utter silence in my office is amazing. Since switching off apple (I used the fanless 'macbook' models for a while) I'd normally work with headphones, but I've found the difference to be noticeable.
FWIW it runs OpenBSD and is currently at 52C.. When doing a heavy compile or something it can get up to about 80. Mounted to the back of a monitor, can't even see it.
You should see my X62, the battery is so bad. I even bought a "brand new" battery and it last about 2 hours. We don't notice it but battery technology has really pushed forward since a decade ago.
Where did you buy yours? I bought an old X61 and the battery was crap. I can only find affordable genuine ones on eBay. The ones on Amazon were $200... So it didn't make sense to buy them
It was 4th generation Haswell (4000-series CPUs) that cut power consumption in HALF! In fact Haswell was so awesome Intel didn't make measurably better CPUs until 7th generation(Kaby Lake)!
I have a non-ssd Asus u36sd from 2011 running Windows 7 that still has around 5 hours of battery life with moderate screen brightness, a Jetbrains IDE running alongside a vagrant VM, Firefox, music etc, so I think you should or could do better.
My more recent Macbook pro at work is basically worst though, not sure why.
Even if it was an unused battery it might have been old and degraded. One of the problems with replacing batteries in older devices is that if the battery isn't produced anymore the replacements will not have full capacity either.
oh? I've tried this before, the battery charge/fuel gauge circuit entered a permanent fault state and none of the tricks I found online worked. It was an x61 battery.
Yep the fan spinning up when nothing special is happening is infuriating - for me 99% of the time it's Debian's "unattended upgrades" which I now realise I should just turn off since I update/upgrade/dist-upgrade relatively frequently anyway.
It's a bit clunky (as is 'apt' itself, tbh), but it should only ever install security updates and targeted bug fixes. You can configure apt relatively easily to have it download updated packages, but leave it to the user to actively install them (check out the apt configuration files in /etc/ - specifically the 'apt.d' folder).
As for Windows 10, it's in its own class of terrible design - try as they might, the Linux folks are nowhere close to matching it.
Yep it should only ever install some high priority security issues and such, and actually I suspect it's not actually doing anything complex itself (kicking off processes that perform the downloads + upgrades, but not actually applying them?) so it seems there's something weird going on :-(
If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.
Almost all the pixels on your screen are rendered through a GPU accelerated pathway, if they weren't even the desktop with no apps open would be rather sluggish.
If you can find an Acer c720 i3 it's a superb machine no fan and pretty fast, faster than an old ThinkPad and extremely comfortable to carry! It's still the number one selling Chromebook of all time! I have a 4GB RAM 256 gigabyte 2242 SSD and IPS display in mine! 7 hour battery life (new), 6 hours for most of the design life. Totally trivial to repair!
I've had good experiences with some chinese manufacturers (first hand experience, Jumper and Alldocube, heard of Chuwi and Xiaomi), they're putting out good quality very cheap products. I'd just go for metal/aluminum body if you can find it.
At this point, the real P series (p52/72), which used to be w series, are probably the only thinkpads that don't throttle. And those have other problems like the inclusion of an nvidia card and off-center keyboards. They've also devalued the T series now.
If it's about the same as the P50 I picked up, the NVidia card is not the default, so it only factors in if the user selects it. The off-center keyboard is a minor nit, I really wanted the numeric keypad (and love the keyboard in general).
The issue with the nvidia card is the wiring for external monitors. Thinkpads (at least my w530) seem to choose something extremely dumb where only the nvidia card can drive the external display. So you cannot just ignore the nvidia card.
> lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it. If this happens to me, you can bet I’m digging through Activity Monitor and killing the culprit before the fans can get fully ramped up.
At a place I used to work, laptops were routinely getting bricked by the anti-virus software. Basically it would run a scan, the laptop would overheat and die.
At some point, it seems like the "cure" can be more dangerous than what it's designed to fix.
> > Battery life is a little over 4 hours with the flush battery (55Wh) and 6-7 hours with the extended battery (80Wh).
> Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.
On the next line he says that with a newish kernel he can get 6 hours with the flush battery. That is not bad at all.
> Update (2017-03-17): I managed to get PC7 idle by upgrading my kernel to 4.18 and replacing the r8168 module with r8169. Battery life has increased significantly. I now get 6 hours with the flush battery and 10 hours with the extended battery.
With all the hype about the efficiency of ARM processors and Apple thinking of putting their custom designed processors in their laptops, I wonder if we'll ever get better battery life on our laptops.
I know nothing will be very significant, but I wish at least my laptop can stay for the whole day on battery.
As a part of our enterprise security improvement project, they removed local admin from all people who don't necessarily need it. They'll replace it with creds that can be unlocked for a short period of time, but that's not here yet, and honestly, I don't need it bad enough on my laptop to raise a stink.
I used to use SMC fan control on my older MacBook Pro to just run the fan at medium at all times. Definitely miss that you can't use it on the new touchbar MacBook pros.
Interestingly, macOS has been the only OS where I have not had this be an issue. 95+% of the time the fans are off, and rouge runaway processes are quite rare (which is not true of say Linux or Windows, in my experience).
I got a Thinkpad E485 ( wanted to try AMD Ryzen mobile) and with Ubuntu installed, I get about 2.5-3 hours on the battery, which is... I forget now. I think it's 48Wh.
acer aspire v17 nitro. ubuntu 18. Has both SDD and HDD. Four years old now, holding out till thanksgiving deals to go to a smaller laptop with longer battery.
I used Arch Linux on a Dell laptop and my fan is pretty predictable. I have never used Windows so I am curious. Does the fan really turns on when you don't expect it ?
This is a good time to bring up the fact there was never an industry-wide standardization effort for laptops. A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades: the laptop case, power supply, monitor, keyboard, touchpad could all be re-used without any additional effort. This improves repairability, is much better for the environment, and means higher-end components can be selected with the knowledge that the cost can be spread out over a longer period.
For desktop PCs, the ATX standard means that the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade often consists of just a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU.
A 2007 Lenovo ThinkPad X61 chassis is not that different to a 1997 IBM ThinkPad chassis (or a 1997 Dell Latitude XPi chassis). If the laptop industry standardized, manufacturers would produce a vast ecosystem of compatible components.
Instead we got decades of incompatible laptops using several different power supply voltages (and therefore ten slightly-differently shaped barrel power plugs), many incompatibly shaped removable lithium-ion batteries, and more expense and difficulty in sourcing parts if and when components break.
A little bit of forward thinking in the late 1990s would have saved a lot of eWaste.
Some parts such as batteries, storage, ram etc should at least be a standardized.
Manufacturers probably don’t want to standardize on the remaining motherboard/graphics/chassis/cooling because a laptop isn’t like an atx computer where you get modularity at the expense of wasted space. A laptop is basically a 3D puzzle with thermal components. Few consumers would buy a laptop with even a little wasted volume or weight, even if it meant better serviceability and upgradeability. Same with phones. We aren’t going to see modular phones beyond the concept stage either.
I generally agree with your comment. However, when you wrote,
> Same with phones. We aren’t going to see modular phones beyond the concept stage either.
I disagree. I'm writing this on a Fairphone 2, which I bought for its modularity & because running Lineage OS (or any other OS you choose) doesn't void the manufacturer's warranty. While I'm sure Fairphone's sales are small compared to the broader industry, I think they've shown a market exists for ethical, modular phones. I've seen other Fairphones in the wild here in France, as well as seeing them for sale on used goods sites like leboncoin.fr.
Batteries (or rather, individual cells) do have a standard: 18650. Unfortunately too thick for the ultra-thin laptops, but the older Thinkpads use them. I suspect safety is the reason why no one makes replacement laptop battery "empty shells" that take 18650s and have the appropriate balancing/protection circuitry to interface with a laptop, but then again you see mobile phone powerbanks being sold this way... go figure:
There's always beem a trickle of machines like that. The problem is that they're targeted towards industrial usage and RIOTOUSLY expensive.
https://www.bsicomputer.com/products/fieldgo-m9-1760 for example (the first vendor I saw that actually shows prices, as opposed to just request-for-quote)
It starts at nearly $2400 for a low-spec Celeron, and I'm not sure it even has an onboard battery.
What I could see as viable would be a micro-ATX case of similar dimensions, sold as a barebones for like $300-- use the extra volume from not accommodating ATX mainboards to store batteries and charging circuitry, which can be off the shelf because space constraints are minimal. Pop in some reasonably priced desktop components, and you'd have a competent luggable for under $1000.
> A standard form-factor means components would be re-usable between upgrades
We don't even have to go that far. Just ensuring that laptops can be serviced by their own users would go a long way to reduce e-waste. i.e. not soldering RAM chips to the motherboard, making it feasible to remove every single part (not gluing the keyboard to the MB for example), etc... instead of pursuing an ever thinner laptop design, which has practically no use.
MacBook Pros not being user serviceable at every component level doesn’t mean they’re not environmentally friendly - not by a long shot. In fact, building a device like that might even shorten lifespan in a laptop form-factor, not to mention no one wants to carry around a heavy, clunky machine so it likely wouldn’t sell anyway.
When people are done with their MacBooks they don’t just throw them out - they sell them or hand them down to their relatives/kids because they still work well enough, are supported by the manufacturer, are durable and have very high resale value in secondary markets.
Robust engineering, longevity, support, and resale markets do more for the environment than making components user-replaceable.
My old 2011 MacBook Air is still going strong and being used by my mother. If anything goes wrong, she can take it to the Apple store and get help promptly. She still gets software updates, and that thing can STILL be sold for ~$250-300 on eBay, Swappa or Nextdoor. If the machine breaks completely, she can take it into the Apple store to get it properly recycled in almost any part of the world.
That’s what minding the environment looks like. You have to look at the entire lifecycle of the product from the moment the raw materials are sourced all the way to making it easy to recycle when a product is end-of-life.
Apparently you haven't seen any of Louis Rossmann videos on Youtube. Let's say your grandma's MacBook stops working because of blown fuse on the motherboard. Something like that would take Louis 5 min to repair, but Apple store would just replace the whole motherboard and charge $$$. How is that environmentally friendly.
One: shout out your favorite YouTubist, I guess, but a repair Apple makes is a repair Apple has to support.
Two: it's much, much harder to support a repair done on-site with a soldering iron than it is to replace a part. These repairs are much more likely to fail under both normal and unconventional use and then will come back for more repairs--which are themselves, still, expensive to provide.
Three: waste concerns have to factor in what Apple does with the part after they do the swap. (I have no insight into what they do, but your comment ignores this.)
>> One: shout out your favorite YouTubist, I guess, but a repair Apple makes is a repair Apple has to support. <<
Saying he is my favorite Youtuber is a bit condescending. I mentioned him, because he is a loud proponent of the right to repair movement.
>> These repairs are much more likely to fail under both normal and unconventional use and then will come back for more repairs--which are themselves, still, expensive to provide.<<
If that was true, I am sure Apple would choose to repair parts instead of replacing them. ;)
> If that was true, I am sure Apple would choose to repair parts instead of replacing them. ;)
Of course it's true--everything from "that fan's just going to get dirty again, and faster, because it's been blown out but can't be re-sealed outside a factory" to "that solder joint is being done by somebody making fourteen bucks an hour, boy I hope I'm not relying on that long-term".
Why would a company that makes its money off of selling the closest thing to a unified end-to-end experience take the risk of a dissatisfied customer because of a frustrating defect remediation experience?
The quoted point is an example of a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple views its customers and how Apple makes its money. But stuff like that is a closely-held truth in the various repair-uber-alles communities on the web regardless of reality. (And then, as 'Operyl notes, your cited YouTubist attempts to shore up his own little slice of community by instilling in them the "enlightened"/"sheep" dynamic. Petty little cult leader, that.)
Sorry that you read some real distaste for that mess as condescension, but not sorry to voice that distaste.
>> Why would a company that makes its money off of selling the closest thing to a unified end-to-end experience take the risk of a dissatisfied customer because of a frustrating defect remediation experience?
You make it sound like Apple has never done it before.
Case in point: the overheating early 2011 Macbook Pros - a problem experienced by thousands of customers.
Apple basically pretended the problem didn't exist for well over a year (there was a gigantic thread about the issue in the Apple support forums). By the time they did issue their recall (or "repair order", if you want to use Apple's euphemism), a lot of people had already divested their dead Macbook Pros for a loss.
Mine had bricked just after my AppleCare expired, and I wasn't about to spend $500+ to get a replacement logic board (which basically had the same defect, except it was a brand new board. Source: I had replaced my logic board under AppleCare only to have the problem recur within two months). I was lucky that I didn't dispose of my Macbook Pro before the repair order, but I had bought a replacement laptop by the time it was issued (spoiler alert: it was my first non-Apple laptop purchase in a decade).
They also put up barriers to getting the repair order. You had to prove you had the heat issue and that it was causing crashes. Since mine was bricked, it was easy. But a friend of mine (who had two of the affected models) had to jump through hoops at the Apple Store to get his fixed.
Those early 2011 Macbook Pros were mostly high end 15" i7 models, meaning they were not on the lower end of Apple's Macbook Pro line. People paid good money for them. If Apple didn't have their heads in the sand and gave everyone replacements (i.e., a 2012 model, which didn't have heat issues) as the problem occurred, it would have been a rounding error for them. But they didn't do that.
>> fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple views its customers and how Apple makes its money.
Speaking from my one experience - I didn't feel like Apple was interested in my experience at all. While I never considered myself a fanboy, I was very loyal to Apple and totally invested in the ecosystem. After my experience with the 2011 Macbook debacle, I abandoned them completely. It meant writing off a lot of money spent on Mac software, mobile apps, etc.
He’s cringe at best, just as bad as the rest of them at worst. He’s playing for the camera, the audience. I wouldn’t take much of what he says seriously, but that’s just me I guess.
My son spilled milk on our 2015 MacBook Pro. Apple wanted $1,100 to fix it. it took two separate shippings to New York but Louis rossmann fixed it for $550. You need to wake up, grow up, and grow a brain. Apples excessive greed is real. the fact that you were lucky and haven't dropped or spilled anything on your laptop in The last 5 years is not evidence that apple is a great company!
I’m sorry, what? This is the exact shit I’m annoyed about. He is inciting stuff like this, telling his user base to call anybody that disagrees with them things like “sheep”, it’s even in his logo. I do not agree that the best thing to do is call people you disagree with “asleep” or “sheep,” or to “grow up/a brain.”
"User serviceable" doesn't imply that the user will actually perform any service. I would be willing to posit that for the vast majority of users, an ATX desktop is just as "serviceable" as a Macbook Pro. In the case of the desktop, if it breaks, they take it to their IT department or Best Buy and get a technician to fix it. In the case of the Macbook, they take it to their IT department or the Apple Store and get a technician to fix it. And the Macbook Pro is a darn sight lighter, more portable and more attractive to have sitting on your desk...
This is not taking into account that most people won’t know how to fix the problems that arise from connectors wiggling loose or the replaceable hard drive failing. Additionally, there’s also the problem of the connectors themselves wearing out and breaking: e.g. I have a Lenovo X220 that no longer charges because the power cord connector is broken.
That requires significant trade-offs in durability, weight, and design.
Not to mention you don’t want the typical user (forget the HN audience) to replace the components themselves.
Most professional users are on corporate enterprise device plans and you don’t want employees or the IT department replacing components either. It’s far better and cheaper to get the employee back up and running with a new machine while the one in need of repair gets shipped off under enterprise warranty.
In many cases, a well-designed, durable product can be repairable. While the actual earbuds were not wonderfully well-reviewed, the Samsung Galaxy Buds were both tiny and legitimately repairable: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds+Teardown...
And they were a shit product. As you yourself admitted. It doesn't help if something is supposedly "repairable" (by the 0.5% of buyers who might be inclined to do such things) if the product is such crap that it gets thrown away after a few weeks.
There’re upgrade-friendly laptops on the market. I’ve replaced RAM, disks, keyboard, LCD, CPU, wireless cards in my laptops. Soldered CPUs are unfortunately inevitable on modern ones, but many other components are still replaceable if you pay attention at the time of purchase. Usually voids warranty but I don’t care too much.
As a nice bonus it sometimes saves money. I’ve only picked my netbook for CPU (i3-6157U, 64MB L4 cache), GPU (Iris 550, 0.8 TFlops) and display (13.3” FullHD IPS). Upgraded to adequate amount of RAM (16GB) and larger and faster M.2 SSD. Both were too low out of the box, and even today there’re not many small laptops with 16GB RAM.
> Soldered CPUs are unfortunately inevitable on modern ones...
To be fair, even on desktop replacing a CPU on the same motherboard is a pretty niche thing in my experience. Not to say people don't do this, but most of the people I know upgrade both at the same time, either because of incompatiblity or because of substantial gains with the newer MB. So soldering the two together is not as bad as glueing keyboard to the motherboard in my eyes.
In some cases, upgrading a CPU prolongs useful life of the device.
The desktop I’m using now had i5-4460 at the time of purchase, eventually upgraded to Xeon E3-1230v3. Only going to upgrade motherboard after AMD releases Zen 2 desktop CPUs.
A family member uses a laptop that initially had i3-3110M. I’ve put i7-3612QM there, it’s comparable to modern ones performance-wise despite 6 years difference, e.g. cpubenchmark.net rates i7-3612QM at 6820 points, i5-8265U at 8212 points (because 35W versus 15).
I agree about glued keyboards. Keyboards are exposed to outside world and also subject to mechanical wear. The only thing worse than that is soldered SSDs. Makes data recovery very hard, and also rate of innovations is still fast for them, SSDs that will become available couple years in the future will be both much faster and much larger, upgrading them regularly makes sense for UX.
On a desktop it is possible to replace the motherboard, on a laptop not so much, so not soldering the CPU would at least give you the ability to upgrade the processor to the fastest supported by that motherboard .
My current weapon of choice is a Lenovo y50-70. Adding RAM is super easy, but I had to replace the keyboard at one point which was a nightmare since it was all glued and had small pins to hold it together, not to mention for some reason you have to disassemble absolutely everything before you actually get to it. In the end I basically just tore the thing out semi-carefully and the new one is just "pinned-in" (the glue isn't even needed).
Another adventure was the screen frame which was breaking more and more each time I opened it. For that I drilled holes in a few places and bolted it together with some really small nuts so it still closes fine. It was annoying but a fun experience, got me over my hardware tweaking anxiety for good. I doubt it gets crazier than drilling holes in your laptop.
So yes, laptops should absolutely be made easier to modify, the components get old really fast and I don't wanna buy the whole thing each time I want an extra bit of RAM or some small part gets broken. It's one of the things that make me steer way clear of Apple stuff.
> There’re upgrade-friendly laptops on the market.
yes, but very few, and going fewer and fewer as we speak. Even Lenovo which was famous for that ends up soldering RAM in their recent models and making the battery a hassle to replace while it used to be on the outside before.
Enterprise market is huge. Consumers like thin and shiny things, corporations don’t care, but they employ people with full-time job being counting expenses. Upgradeable laptops are good for them because they can get exactly right hardware without paying for what they won’t use. They rarely upgrade themselves, vendors do, but unless the laptop is designed upgradeable vendors gonna have hard time serving their enterprise customer’s requests, let alone doing it fast.
Update: and if you gonna install Linux, these laptops can always be bought without Windows license. Corporate customers use volume licensing, they don’t need these OEM Windows keys and not willing to pay for them either.
I doubt that enterprises (or even their vendors) do much upgrading. Instead, they have those machines on a refresh cycle and replace them every three years. They do, however, often prize repairability: if you have a fleet of hundreds of the same model of machine, it's easy to maintain spares of the components most prone to failure/damage.
Not always, sometimes you cannot see the proof because a company just doesn't offer any other options. If there was a modern laptop that ran macOS that was user upgradeable, I would absolutely get it in my next upgrade cycle. Alas, there isn't one.
Also companies aren't always superrational logic machines that have coldly calculated their every more; there's sometimes a lot of collective delusion going on that can leave their consumers in the cold, who then just make do with the best out of a bad lot that's offered. Recall the recent iPhones - suddenly every other phone had a notch even when it served no purpose; or the removal of audio jacks, for example. There was NO consumer preference expressed there, just one company that decided it that way for its own purposes, and others blindly copying it.
I'm not by any means knowledgeable on the hardware design front. But I think the notch was a hardware design solution to a problem (I'm not sure what it is but probably to fit more components or save space inside the phone for something) and all the others copied it because it was a clever solution to an existing problem and it didn't appear to affect users much.
Consumers "prefer" what the billions of pounds spent on marketing tells them to prefer.
If companies spent money telling consumers to value upgradability and not to buy new stuff all the time, then we'd value that more .. but that doesn't sell more stuff, it just helps save the planet, so why bother ....
Consumers don't know that they have the option to fix their machines. They are trained to toss devices (not just computers, but also cellphones, TVs, and appliances) instead of taking them to a repair shop.
In the defense of upgrade culture, you ever wonder where those old phones you trade in go? Phone companies have been turning them into profit by shipping them to the developing world. We live in an era where the even the most remote and impoverished places on Earth have, at minimum, a cell phone in their villages. And it's that crappy circa 2000 Nokia you had that plays snake. Now they can call emergency services on demand or keep in touch with long distance loved ones.
Are you serious? No one is using a 2000 Nokia, even in the third world. Do you think it's cheaper to collect phones in the first world, wipe them, test them, and ship them to the third world (assuming they could even connect to any cellular network) than to mass manufacture $15 plastic Androids?
Has Apple offered an upgrade able laptop alongside a non-upgradeable one?
Would be possible to draw that conclusion if they sold a new style MacBook Pro alongside an older style one with similar specs.
Yes. Between 2012 and 2016, Apple sold a version of the 2008-2012 unibody MacBook Pro that had an optical drive and upgradeable RAM, while simultaneously offering the Retina MacBook Pro, the first to solder the RAM to the motherboard. Arguably from a specifications standpoint the Retina MacBook Pro was the superior model due to its high-resolution display and its use of a fast proprietary flash drive (replaced with standard NVMe in later versions) instead of slower SATA flash drives. Eventually the unibody MacBook Pro would get long in the tooth due to lack of updates compared to Apple's annually-updated Retina MacBook Pro models, but it was still sold until it was quietly discontinued in 2016 upon the announcement of the controversial touchbar MacBook Pro.
Consumers are multi modal, though. Many can't be bothered to dig in and debug or want a sleek highly integrated product. Some others care less for those things and want an upgradeable, repairable product.
It's my hope that economic solutions will find the resources accommodate both modalities.
No, because such options are almost completely gone from the market. And I can't honestly believe that there is "no market" for it. It's an anomaly because most PC manufacturers are just trying to imitate Apple.
It makes sense to think this when looking at modern consumer tech, but I haven't met people who actually want that sort of thing. It always seems like people are having to settle.
The 2015s don't have the "a single speck of dust gets in the keyboard and disables a key" problem. All later models do. I don't think upgradeability factors into it much.
Modern intel (and probably most other) boards use hardware scramblers for other reasons (storing all zeros or all ones causes signal integrity issues / current spikes), and secure the scrambling routine with a different code at each boot.
So, unless I’m mistaken, cooling the ram and moving to another doesn’t work any more.
There are two types of scrambling here - one is the bitswapping and byteswapping that you use to make DDR3/4 routing possible. The other is the whitening function for high speed data that ensures you don't have long sequences of the same value without a transition. The latter is a simple pseudorandom scrambler with a fixed random seed generated at boot. It is not cryptographically secure. The former is a simple substitution and quite easy to reverse (and trivial if you have either a schematic or a board to reverse). Both are deterministic and extremely vulnerable to known plaintext attacks. This is not a security feature.
Source: I'm working on a DDR4 layout right now, and the memory controller scrambling and swapping functions are documented in publically-available intel datasheets (for example, see https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... sections 2.1.6 and 2.1.8)
Nobody is going to do this, because good components are a competitive advantage. I can’t see any good manufacturer wanting their good {trackpad, keyboard, case} either being put in a computer that undercuts them or being forced to dumb down their computer to fit the “lowest common denominator”.
To successfully define a laptop standard, it would have taken a consortium of companies. Likely companies which aren't necessarily in the business of selling integrated laptops themselves, but would benefit from the existence of a laptop standard.
It's likely companies like Microsoft (pre-Surface), peripheral manufacturers (eg, Logitech) and motherboard manufacturers (eg, Gigabyte) would have gladly got on board in that era.
It's likely too late to start this in 2019 (but I may be wrong). Certainly the late-1990s would have been the ideal time for this.
This doesn't work if the peripheral manufacturers are themselves big players (which they are): they can already afford fighting to secure a place in the oligarchy of big players and it's not in their interest to open up space for direct competitors. Whenever you become big enough, you start to share some substantial interest with any other big company: the one of not allowing smaller producers to step in.
As I understand it, only a handful of firms actually design their own laptops. Most of them buy from firms like Clevo or Quanta and maybe do final configuration (CPU/RAM/discs). So you'd really only need to convince them.
In a way, this is much like the situation with desktops-- Dell and HP was/is big enough to come up with their own custom mainboards and cases, but most smaller shops are going to go ATX.
I suspect part of the reason we didn't see much laptop standardization was that the second-tier manufacturers are weaker in the laptop sector than desktop, as well as being weaker as a whole than they were in 2000 when ATX was becoming a thing.
Outside of a few narrow gaming and workstation niches, there are few use cases where you can't find a suitable big-brand laptop, so the second-tier brands (and the manufacturers that supply them) are in a position of fighting for scraps, not one where they can start promoting the benefits of standardization.
This is likely worsened by the mindset that laptops are unupgradeable-- people bought ATX desktops figuring they'd buy new mainboards in 3 years, but generally assume the laptop is going to be stuck in place.
Because most money is in pandering to the lowest common denominator and scale, most manufacturers are starting to make their own hardware/software integrated combo. Apple did this, Microsoft is now doing it as well. Razer is going there, and all of them are (commercially) better for it. On the other hand, it's bad for 'us' (the more hacker-y users) as we have less options. It's why so many stick with sub-optimal solutions like Apple MacBooks (they are not ideal but the other off-the-shelf options are so much worse) or custom stuff (modified Thinkpads and Dell laptops). While the former isn't ideal, it's at least standard and scalable, while the latter isn't. Not really at least.
This would allow smaller players to step in and to start grinding some market shares of the big players. It would also turn the laptop market from a high margin market to a low margin one. Standardization is just not in the interest of any big player so it's probably never gonna happen. If you are a small player and want to go that direction you're probably gonna be bought out. The only way i see would be to somehow get pervasive open standards and libre schematics implementing them, and then cut out the big players and get several manufacturers to produce them. But that too is hardly gonna happen because of geopolitical problems: most of these manufacturers are domiciled in china and thus this move would cut to much income from western (and korean, japanese) countries. So for that to happen we would have to relocate some manufacturing industry and somehow not put them in the hands of any of our local big players. The problem here is not some problematic business decisions by companies, it's how we organized our economy. It would take radical changes in the economic/industrial policy to make that happen: much stronger anti-trust laws, which would keep companies smaller and force cooperation; public- instead of private-regulated prices so that you don't die to foreign companies' exportation when you start doing that; etc. This would drive cooperation up in all of the economy, take power away from multinationals, reduce waste, hinder "useless innovation". Long road ahead but i think that's what we need and that's what gonna happen at some point anyway: the capitalistic class may still be floating currently, but at some point the systemic crisis (financial instability, natural disasters, political instability, scarcity of energy and other basic resources) is gonna hit them too. What we have to make sure is that they don't get more out-of-sync with that than they currently are.
It’s interesting how competition used to be encouraged in the U.S. and now it’s pretty much the opposite. It’s all about consolidation, oligopolies and monopolies.
If standards lower margins and make entering easier, that’s what should be regulated for.
Adding more competition isn't an answer, because competition is about individual profit, thus monopoly. Neo-liberalism, global free market etc do encourage a world-wide competition: it's already the current trend. What you probably mean is some kind of "healthy/fair competition": the fact we need to add another adjective hints that this is about doing something to balance it. I argue this is about encouraging cooperation. A good balance between both leads to interdependence, which is exactly what we would like: a state where everyone has some possibility of moving around a bit, but where nobody is free to ignore what people they interact with have to say.
A ref i really want to push: "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" (1902, Kropotkine). There is a whole part mostly about the evolutionary analysis of altruism (the rest is about analyzing several human social orders throughout history: pre-medieval villages, medieval cities and 19c industrial cities).
There was a trend for a while of making business/power laptops much more configurable (I have an old Dell with a hard drive cage that swaps out without removing any screws). But most laptops are more about form rather than function; their design requires reworking all the internals to prevent getting a big clunky heavy box that overheats.
For very low-power machines you might have tons of internal space free, but more powerful laptops need complex heat management in addition to reducing size and weight. It's only now that we have very advanced fabrication techniques and energy-saving designs that we no longer have to hyper-focus on heat exchange.
If size and heat and weight weren't a factor, you can bet that a standard would have arose to manage interchanging parts. But soldered ram is a good example of why that's just not necessary, and can be counter-productive for reducing cost and maximizing form factor.
My experience has been limited by the fact that components increase at the same rate, and to get everything to place nice(r) with each other, you have to upgrade everything. "A new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU" is almost buying an entirely new computer. You save a few hundred bucks by keeping the PSU (or maybe change it too after 5 years) and casing, assuming the ports didn't change.
Being able to continue to use the display, keyboard, mouse/trackpad means you can choose higher-end components.
Even if you don't want to keep your widescreen DVI display from 2008, the interoperability means that when you drop it off at a e-waste center, it's more likely to be reused in its current state for a few more years, rather than immediately recycled (reduce, reuse, recycle!)
I do agree there is some degree of changes in interfaces overtime (like IDE to SATA to NVMe M.2), but if you build a system for a similar intended use case the changes within any given 5 year period are small. This means the upgrades you do over a 15 year period will go from a 2.5" platter drive to a 2.5" SATA drive, or from 800x600 to 1024x768 resolution display, but not both at the same time (with a different but significant set of components being shared every upgrade)
Standardization limits innovation. If we had standardized on laptop form factors in the late 1990s all laptops would still be an inch and a half thick, and all screens would still be 4:3.
The standard ATX form factor has been upgraded to reduce size over various years with the vast majority of accepted iterations maintaining the same mounting hole and IO panel locations. I literally have a mini-ITX board sitting in a case I purchased in 1999. This probably fits more into the fear you state in your comment with a reasonably new technology "forced" to consume more space than is necessary, but I think it argues for the opposite by showing that incremental changes to a standard format can allow for wide ranging compatibilities.
For an example, when ATX was altered by squaring the board to the shortest length (microATX), it didn't require a new case or a new power supply to be placed on the market in order to be consumed because it fit within the "too big" ATX case. Then when cases that only fit microATXe became abundant and another incremental change to the motherboard size to DTX, we again didn't have to release new cases or power supplies or IO cards to start to consume this version. It allowed consumers to purchase and use the boards until they decided they wanted to reduce their case size, amortizing the upgrade costs over months instead of requiring larger up front payments.
For desktop PCs, the ATX standard means that the entirety of a high-end gaming PC upgrade often consists of just a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and GPU.
And that's great, if you're into generic beige boxes.
It's been years since I put together my own IBM compatible computers. But in the time since then, I haven't really seen any innovation in desktops.
Yes, for a while the processor numbers ticked up, but then plateaued. Graphics cards push the limits, but that has zero to do with the ATX standard, and more to do with using GPUs for non-graphics computation.
The laptop and mobile sectors seem to be what is driving SSD adoption, high DPI displays, power-conscious design, advanced cooling, smaller components, improved imaging input, reliable fingerprint reading, face recognition for security, smaller interchangeable ports, the move from spinning media to solid state or streaming, and probably other things that I can't remember off the top of my head.
Even if you think Apple's touchbar was a disaster, it's the kind of risk that wouldn't be taken in the Wintel desktop industry.
All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...? I'm not sure. Even liquid cooling was in laptops in the early part of this century.
Again, I haven't built a desktop in a long time, so if I'm off base I'd like to hear a list of desktop innovations enabled by the ATX standard. But my observation is that ATX is a pickup truck, and laptops are a Tesla.
Nearly all of the tech you have in your laptop was developed, tested, and refined on desktops. PCI based SSD were in desktops before NVMe was a thing. Vapor cooled processors were on budget gaming PCs 10 years ago. Even the MacBook trackpad was based on a desktop keyboard produced by a company called fingerworks. High DPI monitors came first to desktop. High refresh rate came first to desktop. Fingerprint reader? Had one on my secure computer 15 years ago. Face unlock a couple years after that.
Desktop is still the primary place for innovation. Laptops use technology that was introduced and pioneered on desktop, then refined until it could fit in Mobile/Laptop. Don't get me wrong, there's probably more work in getting the tech into Mobile than developing it in the first place... But the genesis of the ideas happen on desktop.
Desktop has the opposite mix of freedom and constraints as mobile. Standard internals, but freedom of space. There are dozens of heat-sink manufacturers for PC... Dozens of small teams focused on one problem. There's some variation between chipsets, but nothing that requires major design changes. These teams can afford to innovate... And customers can afford to try new solutions. If the heat-sink doesn't perform, you're out 5% of the total cost. But there's no similar way to try things out for laptops.
For example... Should a laptop combine all of its thermal dissipation into one single connected system or have isolated heat management? It completely depends on usage and thermal sensitivities of the components... It was desktop water-cooling that gave engineers the ability to test cooling GPU and CPU with the same thermal system to determine where to draw the line.
>And that's great, if you're into generic beige boxes.
>All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...?
Have you ever built an ATX computer? I assure you, there are plenty of different standard form factor cases out there. The beige box thing was in vogue in the 90s, but today the big trends are sleek black with tempered glass.
And standard form factor desktop does not equal giant tower. You could also do a mini ITX build, a standard that's been around since 2001 for what it's worth.
High DPI displays? This implies high end displays weren't available to desktops first (they were.) A decent CRT could produce much higher DPI than LCDs could (in that era.) Part of the reason why Windows DPI independence sucks is because Microsoft implemented it super early in, without all of the insights Apple had to do it right, and now there's like 4 different DPI mechanisms in Windows.
All in all I'm not sure what really needs "innovating" so badly with desktop form factor. Do we need to solder our RAM to the main board, is that "innovation?"
You kind of say it yourself:
>that has zero to do with the ATX standard,
So would be the case for any form factor standard. It only dictates how things interoperate.
>All we've gotten from the desktop side in the last 20 years is more elaborate giant plastic enclosures, LED lights inside the computer, and...?
Improved efficiency and the demise of bulky storage devices has created a proliferation of small-form-factor designs. We have two proper standards in widespread use (mini-ITX and mini-STX) and an array of proprietary designs from Intel, Zotac and others. It's now possible to get a fast gaming machine the size of a Mac Mini, or a monstrously powerful workstation that'll fit in a shoulder bag.
Strawman. Nobody claimed the ATX standard enabled innovation. It enabled the reduction of e-waste as OP indicated. Think of this the next time you trash your innovative phone or laptop because the non-user replaceable battery/ram/ssd/display/whatever failed.
Novel form factors are often how laptop manufacturers distinguish themselves from their competitors. There is enough space within a desktop PC case to formalize a standard. As laptops get thinner and thinner, however, many engineering/layout tweaks are used to fit stuff within a thin chasis. Standardizing across different device models would be asking OEMs to stop putting efforts into competing with each other. And I say this as someone who has just had a catastrophic motherboard failure on their 8-months-old laptop and had to do a replacement that would've cost me a new laptop if outside warranty.
Because size and weight is an important distinctive feature for laptops. Customers pay more for smaller, lighter laptops. Using standardized components and chassis would mean a big competitive disadvantage.
Maybe we could try and write an open letter to companies and promise support even for less value at first. Chances are slim, but at least we would have done our part.
I have a Lenovo T430u running Kali, and it is rock solid. I love the keyboard, and I use the TrackPoint for CAD work in FreeCAD. I never feel like it is going to slip from my hands when I pull it from my backpack. It is so easy to open up, that I open it twice or more a year to clean out the fans, which are usually clean anyway; I like seeing the internals like a car mechanic who likes to check under the hood ;)
I considered the Lenovo Carbon X1, but it is pricey, doesn't have a number pad, and is at the ultra-slim form factor of a MBP or other similar notebook form factor.
The Lenovo T580 has the num pad, but the graphics card is the NVIDIA MX150, a mobile but faster version of the GeForce 1030. Not really an issue for me, but my son's Lenovo Yoga came with a 1050 two years ago.
Anyway, I've owned all sorts of notebooks, including MBPs, and have found the Lenovos to be my workhorses, and getting out of my way to get things done. Yes, the battery is only 4 to 6 hours, but for me, even traveling and living all over the world, it has never bit me work wise, only when playing.
Why in God’s name are you using Kali as a daily driver? Anyone who does this has no idea what they’re doing. Kali is made exclusively for pentesting, with a modified and insecure kernel specifically for running certain pentesting apps better.
Your username matches your reactive, hyperbolic and concerned response. I never said daily driver. The T430u is only one of my many laptops, and I have been coding and hacking, since the 70s. I was running MkLinux on Apple PowerPCs in the mid-90s, early Linux distros thereafter. I did some binary analysis and disassembly work back then, and still dabble, as well as other activities that make Kali a great system for this laptop and for what I use it. I also run Windows 10, Ubuntu, Minix, and MenuetOS on other systems, so don't worry.
Definitely going to binge watch soon. I have thought of using Redox and writing my own tools. An obsucre OS, but still running across interent/ethernet...oh, wait, spawn a drone node on a Windows machine using MOSREF/Wasp Lisp in Rust or Shen (shout out to doublec/sdunlop!) [1,2]
I think it's great, but the show changes a lot from how it starts off in the beginning, which understandably puts off a lot of people who were in love with the early bits.
AFAIK the Kali kernel is Debian unstable modified to allow wireless tools like aircrack-ng suite to do injection and other fun things. So it's just as insecure as any bleeding edge nix, the risk factor really depends on what packages you install and services you run. I wouldn't really recommend it as a daily driver either, but I also wouldn't frown on someone who does.
I've as well always been happy with Lenovos. I'm currently using an X1 Carbon (4th gen, FHD screen, ~6-7hrs battery) and a P71 (4k screen, in-built nVidia disabled, ~4-6hrs battery) and their fans run only when I'm stressing the CPU (e.g. compiling) and even then I only hear the flow of the air.
I would like to try an X1, but I think the P71 is more my speed. I wish they offered an X1 with the same rubbery feel as the T430u I am using now. I am not a fan of low-frictive surfaces, since my nerves are shot in my left hand, and my right is very insenstive, which has lead to me dropping things lately.
the P71 is very bulky (somehow more than how it looks in the pictures) and its case feels a bit cheap (the case is "real" plastic and if you tap on it below the keyboard it really makes the sound of an empty plastic case) => personally I expected a bit more as it's not cheap (the components I chose are basically the cheapest ones with the exception of the 4k panel and the backlit keyboard).
Additionally some weeks ago, while I was typing, the backspace and "t" keys stopped working out of the blue => I switched the laptop off but 1 day later the keys were still not working => I then opened the laptop and extracted the keyboard (veeery easy - compliments Lenovo) to read the model number to order later a spare part, touched a bit the connector cable of the keyboard and after putting all back together they keys magically started working again.
Saying all this just because I have the feeling that overall it could be that in the case of the P71 the quality might be a bit lower than what's otherwise the case for other models. Cheers.
How did you learn freecad? I really want to switch to it from auto desk inventor but have spent hours messing around and can't even make a cube. The YouTube videos I was watching assumed I knew too much.
I use Autodesk Fusion 360, which if you are a startup or business making less than a certain amount of money is free to use, and it now includes what were once extras: analysis (FEA), machining, and other features. It really is amazing.
I use FreeCAD, since I have been familiar with it for years. It was once clunkier and had less features, but now it can be used for a lot of the things I need to do.
For a quick start in making a cube, make sure you are in the correct workbench Part or Part Design in the tutorial. The only two issues I have are that it is difficult to interface with clients that use Autodesk, Solidworks, or Rhino products. I have done FEA with the Calculix backend in FreeCAD, and used Paraview to create my FEA pictures for reports. If you know Python, you can even create a cube in the console below. Check out the scripting tutorials. I am not a fan of Python, but I use it in FreeCAD and Blender3D.
Lenovo/Thinkpad + Kali sounds like a match made in heaven. May I ask what wifi chipset is on board? 'lspci | grep Network' should show it. The product page just says a/b/g/n which isn't terribly useful.
It's a 2013 T430u with an Intel Centrino Wireless-N 2230 chip. It only supports 2.4 GHz, and not 5 GHz. I use a second, external USB WiFi dongle for Wireshark and other uses. It's six years old and great to use for more than I thought it would be.
If you’re looking for something bigger for aircrack etc I use al alfa networks “AWUS036NHA” which is 5dB and you can pick up off amazon for about 30 euro.
For normal dongles a search for “Anadol Gold Line Wifi AWL150 Micro 150Mbit/s USB WLAN S” shows the one I use in various bsds/linuxes with no problems.
It depends on your needs and budget. I picked up a Netgear dongle years ago for $25 that still works fine. Just Google for your linux distro, netgear, and wireshark to find any gotchas.
Electron is far from ideal, and it may be argued it's incredibly difficult to make a relatively efficient Electron app (vscode is often cited as one, but Microsoft has plenty of resources).
However, for all the efficiency challenges Electron brings, Slack is universally cited in types of comments such as the above. This makes me highly suspect that—beyond being just written in Electron—Slack is actually an extremely poorly written app, and just the canonical example of overengineered inefficiency in general.
Slack Web, for example, also does similarly draconian things to my CPU.
Similarly, Riot.im—probably the most comparable app to Slack functionality-wise—is also built in Electron. It has some of the performance problems one would expect from any Electron app, but it is nowhere near as bad as Slack (and has a much much smaller development team with much tighter resources).
In short: Electron may not be ideal, but it seems to get an unfairly bad name from Slack; we should be laying the criticism with the Slack dev team rather than with the Electron one.
I think the disproportionate noise about Slack is just due to it being (often without choice) used by so many people, and hence to cite that people only complain about Slack as evidence that Slack is worse than other Electron apps isn't very convincing.
> people only complain about Slack as evidence that Slack is worse than other Electron apps isn't very convincing.
Spotify is almost certainly used by many more people than Slack, and vscode's usage is probably at least within an order of magnitude. The general feedback in comments is that Spotify is bad but not exceptionally so, and that vscode is actually very performant (not when compared to Vim, but it seems to do fine in the context of GUI IDEs).
The other app that there has been a lot of complaints about in the past has been Atom. These have declined recently due to improvements by the Atom team, but also: Atom being the very first ever Electron app probably didn't help here either.
Slack is a massive company with a singular product. Can they really not afford to write their product natively? Their backend should be reusable, and they could write a core of the application in C++ that should give them a core functionality in all operating systems. Then have a native team take over for iOS, mac android, and windows, Linux. There are cross platform libraries that gets you a ui pretty far, or they could use pure graphics library and roll their own.
A billion dollar company has few excuses in my opinion.
I feel like I might be falling into some kind of fallacy, but it seems at first glance like your argument supports GP's.
If Electron is such a horrible platform that you literally can't write performant software with it, and Slack's performance problems are really a huge problem for regular users, and yet as a massive company with a singular product they still rely on it, then I would guess at least one of two things should be true:
A) Native app development is actually way more horrible than most people say, and Electron's experience is so much better that even a company as big as Slack finds it preferable to building a dedicated Mac team.
OR, B) Slack's dev team just may not actually care all that much about performance in the first place, and they might just be writing a poorly optimized app on top of a poorly optimized platform which exasperates all of its problems.
Or, maybe a combination of the two. I dunno.
Anecdotally using Slack within a web browser (which should get rid of some of Electron's downsides since it's no longer a separate browser instance) I still occasionally see slowdown and issues with the App. Not nearly as bad as, say, Twitter, but not great. Certainly not as performant as I would expect an interface this simple to be.
So while it's silly to claim that Electron doesn't have an impact on performance, I suspect that even if the Slack team was writing native apps, they still might end up with a piece of software that has problems. Maybe fewer of them, or maybe even more, since you can get away with a lot of bad architecture in a C++ program before you hit the same bottlenecks like loading time or typing lag.
Are we sure that the Slack team wouldn't just view a native codebase as license to cut even more corners with performance?
While I can understand to some extent that Electron receives a lot of heat, people really should stop arguing that "Slack bad -> Electron bad".
I can run Discord and vscode on my machine just fine, with plenty of editor tabs/server tabs open. While Electron surely has its issues, Slack being terrible really shouldn't be blamed solely on Electron.
My 2011 X220 refuses to die. It's been tossed in bags, scuffed, cracked, and burned with a candle. The keyboard is perfect. Touchpad is fine. Wifi is excellent. Upgradeability unmatched. I'm running Linux with a tiling window manager, and performance is fine for pretty much everything I want to do, including compilation. It runs super hot (80C+ sometimes), but is always way quieter than my XPS15 from work. Only complaint is the low resolution of the screen (1366x768). 1080p would be perfect for the 12.5in screen.
My sister put a candle on the table and the rising heat was barely under the lip of my open laptop lid. It melted a bit of the plastic, but the damage was only cosmetic. Sorry; pretty anticlimactic I know haha.
There's more or less a cult around using Linux on older Thinkpads. They're so widely available for so cheap, and since so many people use and test software with them, pretty much every Linux distro works out of the box. The older models are coreboot and libreboot-friendly, the keyboards are amazing, and almost every single part is replacable (the older 14" models have socketed processors even).
Many still enjoy the old IBM models. I'm typing this on an X220 model, and I do understand the risks associated, which is why it's running coreboot, a stripped-down Intel ME, and GNU/Linux (as opposed to original firmware and Windows).
The X220 that I'm using has run every Linux distro I can think of with zero modifications, and I even had macOS on it as a hackintosh for a time. I've replaced the wifi card, I have two hard drives in it and two batteries for it, and it still does everything I need a computer to do with zero fuss.
Even without Coreboot and Linux, many still find the risks don't outweigh the rewards. Same reason people buy newer Macbooks that lack magsafe, sd card slots, USB-A, Ethernet, a decent keyboard, an escape key, replaceable disks/RAM, etc. For Macs, it's form over function. For Thinkpads, specifically the older ones, it's the exact reverse.
You don't buy the new ones. You buy at latest an X230 and put Linux or BSD on it. All the excitement around 51nb is that you can upgrade to modern hardware if you think the X220 is the last good notebook ever commercially produced. A lot of people (disclaimer: including me) think that, which is why you see them as targets for things like OpenBSD and Libreboot.
But you're right, I would never buy a "modern" Lenovo though. But in fairness, I don't know that I'd buy a modern notebook at all.
Still using the x220 as my every day personal notebook.
At work I have the x230 with the new keyboard - it's not as good as the old one still in the x220 but it's way better than let's say the new macbook keyboards.
The sad thing is that the x220 doesn't compete doing stuff with many VM's or consumer things like videos with high-res.
But I can totally live with that and use it for everything else with the following specs & setup:
- 16GB RAM
- 256GB SSD
- i5-2540M CPU @ 2.60GHz
- extended battery (good for holding it while carrying around)
- i3wm (it's awesome how much you can do with few resources)
- programming/writing etc. with VIM (also saves a lot compared to an eclipse/intellij)
It's definitely not the PC you want a full fledged desktop environment on and you shouldn't bother doing video stuff etc. but for everything else it's just perfect and I wouldn't want to give it away as long as I can.
The x230 is ok but I don't have so much love for it, can't explain what exactly I miss most but it's not the TP experience I was searching for all the years.
My next project is an old x200 that will be refurbished and put to test with some BSD OS (I heard it's also quite interesting and easy on old hardware).
P.S.: The trackpads suck hell and I only use the red nub on TPs. The only trackpad I ever found useful was on a MBP (some time around 2016 I think) but they managed to destroy that experience like they did with their crappy keyboards :-P
Honestly, because it has no relevance to me. I own a Huawei phone and a Lenovo laptop. I don't work any kind of government security related job and I run linux on my laptop so I don't see what I'm risking from the standpoint of a personal consumer and developer.
Those are both issues with running Windows on Thinkpads. The article's author is running Linux. Besides, there are very few options for decently built laptops with good keyboards.
I agree and I wish they had some competition, but they really don't. I'm currently holding out hope that System76 will put out a nice Linux laptop as part of the Thelio line. I'm not holding my breath though and will probably have to get another Thinkpad once my current one dies.
Only a partial explanation, but Superfish was not installed on the business-grade laptops, i.e., the T, P, and X-series, and those are really the only ones that the HN crowd would use. LSE was definitely a major mistake though they at least relented and offered a removal tool for it.
Huawei has been the target of a pretty unprecedented effort by the US to eliminate their hardware from both US and US-allied countries. I doubt many of us have the knowledge of the necessary facts to evaluate the appropriateness of that action against Huawai, but either way, Lenovo hasn't been singled out like that.
Because Huawei is a Chinese company and still media tells people they are "the bad communists" though they are no communists at all since Mao is gone.
Same goes for spying:
- The US spied on countries in EU by hijacking (network) hardware deliveries and installing intelligence offices near DE-CIX and many other actions we just don't know officially
- China is suspected to do the same once in a while (I think there was some rumor about 500GB HDD's with pre-installed malware) and I'd wonder if any country with the necessary resources would do otherwise
These arguments are made to distract us from the fact that there is no real hiding place. It is made to try to convince us that one of those parties is "the good" and the other "the evil" because they want power.
If you can still find one on then used market, I'll put in a plug for the Lenovo X1C 4th Gen (2016 model) as an ideal Linux laptop. It's what I switched to after the x220, and I describe it here:
I recently switched to a X1C6, and I wholly agree. It's an amazing laptop in terms of hardware and build quality, but it does have a bunch of Linux compatibility problems.
The trackpad didn't work out of the box, I had to change some settings; annoying, but no big deal. What's a bigger problem is that the trackpad buttons don't work after suspending/hibernating, and I still haven't been able to fix that. Also, the fingerprint reader and NFC do not have any drivers on Linux.
The Arch wiki page[1] has been tremendously helpful in getting set up. However, I think the length of the article goes some way toward showing that compatibility is far from perfect.
The trackpad / NFC issues seem to only be present on laptops with NFC behind the trackpad, so my recommendation would be to avoid that one if it's possible to get a similar model without.
Seconded. I had an X1C2 and am currently on an X1C5. Everything works out of the box on linux and the performance is crazy for something so thin & light (2.8lbs).
I run Slack in a Chrome tab but have started experiencing issues where that tab grinds to a halt doing simple Slack things (like switching channels) and the tab eventually crashes.
Electron is built with Chromium. It's usually behind by a few versions (though the team is really focusing now on getting things up to date), and there are differences and additions.
I am a happy owner of an x62. This article almost convinced me to buy an x210 next.
Minor gripes: (1) The dispayport-hdmi thing, (2) the mainboard is split (sound + rhs usb are on a separate board) and the small part has pretty flimsy attachement inside the case, (3) the CPU (i5 broadwell engineering sample) is pretty lackluster but perfect for development (no turbo, no throttling, no surprises), (4) finding an ok screen is hard, (5) nobody told me that I have to buy a separate wifi card. There is a free mini-pci slot, but 51nb could have been clearer on their online description, (5) the old x60 speakers suck.
Overall, it is an awesome machine (trackpoint, ibm keyboard, beautiful rubberized metal case). And shockingly cheap: An x62 mainboard, plus an old x60 chassis from ebay and battery from amazon, plus screen from alibaba, plus SSD, wifi-card and ram comes at ~$600 (I think?), cheap enough to buy as an experiment. I can definitely recommend to anyone who is ok with a little tinkering and the small adventure of ordering this from China (best approach: have Chinese colleague).
edit: Linux drivers work perfectly. Really, the ram was the most expensive component of this build. To expand on the no-surprises advantage of the CPU: To me it is more important to effortlessly benchmark small code changes than to quickly compile large codebases. And the weird engineering sample CPU that the 51nb guys sourced somewhere is absolutely perfect for that: Timings reliably match up with Agner Fog's instruction tables / iaca, without anything getting into the way (after the kernel cpufreq manager adjusted).
I'm not sure what screen you got off Alibaba but if you want something better, you might want to try the daylight LED mod.[1] You won't get better color gamut, but you will get insane brightness and better battery life.
I did that mod to my X62 and it made the screen actually usable.
Damn, 15 minutes after getting pointed to your mods the disappointment :)
Also, thanks for all your guides on the thinkpad forums.
Would you mind writing a small idiosyncratic guide about "51nb procurement for dummies"?
Like: Buy one of these models of chassis. These aftermarket batteries. These screens (possibly with aliexpress links). Use this preferred method of ordering. Remember that you also need to procure (ram, wifi, ssd).
I was lucky enough to have a chinese collegue who dealt with everything for me (I sent him the taobao link and gave him cash, next time he visited family he brought me my board). Without that I would have been lost.
(seriously, taobao? no way to enter a non-chinese address? Take my money already! There must be somebody in China who wants to make a quick $50 per item for just reshipping 51nb boards to the West, e.g. via aliexpress or ebay, instead of imposing on the time of hackers / hardware engineers who have better things to do than reshipping packages)
The problem with any specific process or link recommendations is they become obsolete instantly. Putting one of these together requires some searching and active exception handling.
There are Chinese services that do forwarding (I use FSC), as well as enthusiast engineers, like Jacky (or me), but enthusiasts get overwhelmed quickly... it becomes a full time job for little or no profit. I have to consciously dial way back to keep this only a hobby so it stays fun.
I know, and I am super grateful for all the cool things you and the other people in the scene develop, and for the effort you go to to actually ship out modkits. You do what's fun and I won't ask for more.
Don't get me wrong, putting together my x62 from your and other's guides was fun. I am just wishing that some of the Shenzen hardware hackers had an entrepreneurial cousin or friend who made a business out of this. I wish I could just send an aliexpress link to all my friends who rightfully complain about lenovo design quality nosediving.
> the mainboard is split (sound + rhs usb are on a separate board) and the small part has pretty flimsy attachement inside the case
That's however the same with the stock design and I've never had an issue with that. IIRC there are a couple pins from the lower casting holding it in place and then it's sandwiched using IIRC two or three screws between the lower casting and the palmrest. That's pretty solid.
The old x60 mainboard was a single part. I don't know about the x61.
It's not a big issue, but makes assembly pretty annoying because everything sticks out: There is no screw-hole from the lower casing in the extra attachement, and the flat connector cable has enough tension that the entire contraption bulges out and flaps around, until everything is fitted together. Or maybe I am just bad at this kind of stuff.
Just praising with faint damnation, really.
It would be so awesome if someone in the 51nb circles made an attempt to make money by properly marketing their stuff: make ordering easy in the west, possibly sell pre-assembled modded barebones (screen mod + 51nb mobo + new battery in place, chassis bought in bulk in china), put some modest markup on top and try to sell in the 10k units instead of the 100s. There really are a lot of people who think t60/x60/x220 are the pinnacle of laptop design and would love to get a machine with similar quality but modern hardware. The set of people who are motivated to spend their time modding is much smaller.
I am under no illusions that you could sell enough modkits to recoup engineering costs, if this was a truly commercial product. But you don't really need to: The development is a labour of love.
Is anyone happy coding on such a small screen, even if it is high-res?
I have a 2016 13" MBP, and find the screen too small for coding. It's high-res, but that means everything is super-small unless you increase the scaling, which of course reduces the available screen real estate. The screen is annoyingly reflective too, but that's another problem entirely.
My daily driver is a 15" HP Zbook G3 with a 1080p display, which I also find too small. I'm thinking a 15", high-res display would probably be ideal for portable coding?
The weight issue I certainly agree with - my G3 is big and heavy, whereas my MBP is small and light. I also mostly dock my laptop, but I still spend a lot of time undocked (probably 15-20 hours a week).
I also use external monitors during the day (27" QHD in landscape as the main one, 24" FHD in portrait as secondary), but when travelling, and in the evenings where I try to be more sociable that shutting myself away, I find the lack of screen real estate a real PITA.
I do 99+% of my programming on my MacBook Pro's 13" screen. It's certainly possible to do, and I generally seem to prefer it to connecting to an external display.
I moved to a 10.1" display as a winter (low power) necessity. There's more sun now so I have enough power for my larger laptop but am not using it, I prefer the ergonomics of my current setup.
My tablet is on an arm suspended at eye height about 15-20cm away from my face. At the same time I can have my ThinkPad BlueTooth keyboard+trackpoint in an ergonomically sound position (not possible to do both of these things solely with a laptop due to the keyboard and display being tied together).
I had a 15.6" laptop display and a ruler within reach so I just measured... at 35-40cm away from my face the visible area of the 15.6" screen is occluded by the visible area of the tablet screen at 15-20 cm away. The aspect ratios are different (my preferred 16:10/1920x1200 on the tablet vs 16:9/1920x1080 on the laptop lcd) but this is roughly correct. Admittedly 35-40cm is probably a little further away than most people have their laptop screen but it's in the ballpark.
I've had setups with multiple/larger monitors in the past. It's hard to compare properly as so much has changed for me. I move towards spending more and more of my time in the terminal and have learned to make good use of tmux for workspace management (and i3 workspaces when I'm using a WM). I don't miss the multiple/larger monitors (but am not suggesting anybody should be the same as me).
I can say that this is my favourite of my personally-owned setups ever, for its lightness, silence, low power usage and minimal space requirements. These requirements of mine are very specific of course but you asked for a subjective measure. I am very happy (and on a 10.1" screen)!
Next time I upgrade I'll be looking for a nice rootable tablet... possibly something x86 which can run linux so I can get VMs to work. I think I'm done with laptops.
[
To repeat stuff I've mentioned here before but which might help make sense of the above:
+ the 'display' is an Android tablet running termux (as it's the fastest and nicest terminal I could find)
+ I just use termux for its terminal and work in Debian Stretch via Linux Deploy
+ Termux is very good on its own but in my experience the best armhf packages are on Debian. I'm comparing to termux and Arch which are all I have experience with - they are both great but I've found some packages to be either missing or had problems due to termux's clang vs gcc... or that Arch uses Armv7 binaries whereas my tablet seems happier with Debian's Armhf in some cases. I specifically had trouble getting a working binary for Chromium which is essential for me as I need the developer tools but achieved it on Debian.
+ I run Debian GUI apps via local XSDL server and/or VNC
+ So far the only thing I've been unable to achieve is VMWare emulation of X86 OSes but as I don't have an X86 CPU in here I can't be surprised about that
]
So many things about this comment raise so many questions.
1. "winter (low power) necessity" Do you live in some remote cabin where you exist solely off of solar power or something? Sounds fascinating.
2. "I don't have an x86 CPU in here" Do you do all of your development solely off of a Android tablet running Debian in some kind of bizarre franken-ARM-Linux setup?
Echoing Geoff's article, I'm a big fan of the 51nb mobos from the X62 on. The X62 was very very good, and the T70 and X210 are even better. Can't wait for the X63.
One reason I'm taking time off from making X62 backlight kits is to make some new mods for the latest machines-- a 13" 3k screen and internal battery. I've gotten both running, but it takes time to work kinks out of production.
It's also why I've been working on my microscope. :-)
>> If the SSD fails, you can replace it. If the RAM fails, you can replace it. If the wifi card fails, you can replace it. If the screen fails, you can replace it. You can even replace the Trackpoint and the little rubber feet without much trouble. The laptop can be entirely disassembled with two Philips screwheads (#0 and #1). At no point do you encounter tape, glue, or pentalobe screws.
I went and visited their office in SZ last summer to buy one of these motherboards.
I was amazed that it seemed like a 5-7 person operation and they designed a modern laptop motherboard. Maybe they contracted out some work and the office was mostly just operational people, but it was really cool to talk to a bunch of retro thinkpad enthusiasts making what they love.
These are awesome. For a long time I’ve thought a 13.3 X thinkpad like the 2X0 series (a proper successor to the x300/x301) would be the best thing ever. You take the x2X0 chassis, renowned for portabiltiy, battery life, and repair ability and shove a 13.3 inch screen in. Just like how the 13 inch class chassis on the x1 has a 14 inch screen.
Well it’s happened: the x390 now exists. Maybe ever better would be a thick X1. Not larger or wider but thicker so the battery life was insane and you could upgrade the ram to 32/64gb.
X390 looks very interesting indeed. Did not at first realize that they have actually put the larger screen to the small chassis.
Lack of swappable battery is annoying. Maybe I belong to the minority, but battery life is still one of my main problems with laptops. Just so annoying to have to constantly look for an outlet in meeting rooms or conference places. I guess external USB-C batteries are the way to go.
I was interested in the hassle for making a payment and buying something from China. Counter to my view of how the world is supposed to work. Payment hassles probably due to buying from a small group of enthusiasts, not a large company.
I haven’t done business directly with anyone in China for a number of years (I helped a student on a project about 10 years ago and a media company had me write a simple machine learning model for them) but them paying me was easy, just used PayPal.
Buying not rebranded Chinese electronics interests me, because of potential lower cost, as long as it is westernized in things like keyboard, etc. and has a year warranty. I have specifically been looking at products like GPD Pocket 2.
I bought a NAS off Amazon a few years ago... one of their 3rd party sellers had the same product for $50 cheaper so I went with that.
Anyway, what happened next was really amusing to me.
I get the product about 8 weeks later... I had tried to cancel because it was so slow, and Amazon wouldn't let me -- they said I had to receive the product and then send it back as a return once I got it in order to get a refund.
I was planning on just sending the box back the same day... but something caught my eye. The box had come from Shenzhen, China. Curious I cut open the outside box.
Immediately I saw that the NAS they sent inside had been opened, and had been re-tapped shut -- and poorly, there was a clear bulge on top of the box. My heart sank a bit... but I figured, "Well, let's see -- maybe it was a return or something... can't hurt to open it again since it's already been opened."
Inside the NAS box, all the manuals are in Chinese... and seem like they are just photocopies of the originals. The NAS was not in the original packaging, but rather elaborate bubble wrap. And there's a China to US power adapter to the cord.
I'm curious if it would even turn on, so I plug in the NAS... It boots! But not in English. I'm thinking, "What did I just buy?!" But I can sort of read some of the messages and it seems like instead of 4x2GB drives, it came with 4x4GB drives. Interesting.
It's late so I leave it initializing the drives (I think that's what it was doing anyway) and go to bed. Next morning I wake up, and it's still initializing the drives. Fuck it... time to call tech support and get my money back. The little light kept blinking yellow, but I couldn't read anything.
I email Amazon to initiate the return process, then go to work. I leave the NAS running -- honestly just sort of forgot about it. Got pulled into a business trip that day, so it was about 4 days until I got back to focus on the project again. When I got home the little yellow light on the NAS was still blinking, and I thought it was weird that I hadn't gotten an email from the seller with return instructions.
I email Amazon to tell them I hadn't heard anything back from the seller, and since I had to wait anyway, decided to call tech support. Cringe.
The thing was, the NAS was still doing something. The drives were still spinning... but after 4 days... I figured it wasn't doing anything good. But I didn't unplug it. I read the serial number to the guy in tech support. Pause... "Can you read me the serial number again?" I do... longer pause. "Can you read me the serial number one more time?" I do... Pause... "Please hold, Sir."
"Sir, where did you get this NAS?" I'd been transferred to someone up the food chain who told me that the device I had wasn't a valid serial number -- that the number I gave was for a model that hadn't been released yet. Super weird conversation, they took all my details, Amazon order number, and told me they would call me back.
Really late, like 2 AM that night, I got an email from the seller. It just said, "What wrong?"
So I write back, and my phone signature had my cell phone number on it. I get a call. At like 3 AM. The guy is polite, but his English isn't great. He tells me to just unplug the NAS, and plug it back in again -- then walks me through how to install the English interface. We're chatting for like 2 hours. He's crazy knowledgeable. We get everything set up, but I have no idea what all I just put on the device... most of the links he had been emailing me throughout the process were just IP addresses and paths. But they seem legit... and there wasn't anything on the NAS yet so I didn't mind running strange updates on it.
He says the yellow light will blink for 4 hours 24 minutes. (I don't remember the exact number, but the point was it was an exact number.) He says to email him, not Amazon -- he's very clear about that -- if I need help after. He's a friendly guy, I liked how helpful he was.
I go back to sleep for a few hours, do some yard work when I wake up, forget about the NAS, but when I checked later... some point after 4 hours 24 minutes... it's all green and working fine. And it's got twice the space than I paid for. And it's all in English. Only thing was... when I hit the "check for updates" option it just spun and nothing happened. But everything else seemed perfect.
So I'm on the fence... I have this clearly not authentic NAS from some random guy in China... that the manufacturer says it's not supposed to exist... but it's 100% bigger than what I thought I paid for...
That night I got an email from the seller, and you can tell he's sad. "I tried to help you, why did you tell Amazon it was a fake? It not a fake." I wrote back that I think that was from before he and I spoke, I had called the manufacturer's tech support to get the issue fixed and they told me the serial number wasn't real, but that it's working fine for me now.
He was writing back instantly, "It not a fake, you want a refund? I give you refund, but please don't complain to Amazon about me, I sell good stuff." Right away I see an email from Amazon telling me that the seller had given me a 100% refund. He even refunded shipping costs.
I felt awful. Here's this guy who spent 2 hours on the phone with me, probably spent a lot on an international call, and the manufacturer contacted Amazon about the order and came down on him for selling counterfeits. Probably scared him or told him he wouldn't be able to sell on Amazon any more if it was a fake... who knows.
I write back, "Thanks for the refund, where do I send the NAS? I will pay for shipping. I didn't mean to get you in trouble."
He writes back, "I'm sorry. It's not a fake. Please don't be mad at me."
The case was marked as resolved at Amazon, the guy told me I didn't have to return the NAS, and I never heard back from the manufacturer. Free NAS! But a little guilt because I didn't pay this guy for it, or for his time... and he stopped responding to my emails after that. I offered to send it back to him two more times.
About a year later I logged in to the interface, realized the auto-update feature was working fine. Updated the bios and firmware. I think that was 5-6 years ago now -- it's been running great.
I had raved about the quality of the NAS to a friend, who bought the same model about 6 months after I did... but his died a few months ago... when we took it apart to switch out the drives we realized it had totally different drives and cables, and even the logic board seemed different from the one that mine had. Sure hardware changes, but... his seemed more legit and polished inside than mine. Mine has a few spots inside that just look glue-gunned in place. (=
Anyway yeah, probably 7 years on... my little free (and probably semi-counterfeit) NAS is still running great.
That call at 3 AM was by far the most knowledgeable of any seller or tech support person I've ever spoken with.
He might be knowledgeable but you got shipped what is colloquially known as a “shed” here in the UK. They’re ok when they work but when they don’t they can burn your house to the ground or empty your entire NAS to a random IP in China.
>They’re ok when they work but when they don’t they can burn your house to the ground or empty your entire NAS to a random IP in China.
I have never come across the term 'shed' in this context, either in urban slang or formal speak, please can you provide a valid source and/or clarify the origin of this term?
Yes AFAIK it started in Essex where someone would buy a “shed” car typified by the Vauxhall Nova with various attachments to it and drive it around town all night being a “Barry Boy”. As we all got older, grew up and went to work in the city (London) it seems to have been adopted as a definition for anything that looks ok from the outside but is made of sewn together corpses and bits of tape and straw inside.
I’ve heard it used in London and Nottingham regularly.
I always thought shed came from them being the sort of rust bucket normally found abandoned in a shed. Barely running, owned by someone who can barely fix or fuel it. So it would be somewhere to sit parked - and listen to the crappy stereo at max distortion - with bits falling or rusting off it in time to the bass. Least that's how we used it oop north in the 80s. The car equivalent of a rat bike. Both sewn together corpses, and animal corpses hiding in dark corners...
Pistonhead's Shed of the Week[1] is far too upmarket to be a proper shed - they all work. :)
Not wealthy - they just stole the fuel or put £5 a time in the tank after asking everyone in the vicinity to "gizz uz a fiver mate".
I think that's where shed started. A lot of people got lucky / rich and actually finished their car project. I had a proper shed which was a series III land rover with an engine in pieces in the back rather than the front. When I lived in Nottingham there were a lot of proper sheds!
Those "sheds" on pistonheads are ridiculously too good to be called a shed.
FYI, international calls are essentially free thank to VoIP. If you can download a DVD iso, you can make a phone call for the same price , plus the cost of accessing a local phone line at the terminating end. You pay for monthly access for your local internet and the remote phone network, but it's not 1990s 10c/minute
Clearly there is a market for people wanting this kind of machine to the extent they are jumping through hoops for it.
I have a maxed out T470P (stock) and it's a cracking little machine and while the keyboard is by modern standards excellent that's because the bar shifted, it's still not as nice as the one on my old R50 was.
Hell if I know. On various forums we have raised the idea but I guess it just doesn't get through they should run a Kickstarter for the classic keyboard in the, say, successor of the T490 (because the 10nm is going to be a huge change so ppl want to buy that more). If successful, Lenovo adds this option while people front the cost of creating it -- new plastic mould for the palmrest etc -- and get a discount code they can put in when ordering the new machine with the classic keyboard. All this takes very little effort from Lenovo -- all their backend system needs is a batch entry of discount codes. They don't need to ship anything separately and if the Kickstarter fails, they spent very little money.
A friend of mine who loves thinkpads bought two of those T25 anniversary models (2017). Sadly the only thing that was ThinkPad about that model is the keyboard. The CPU was a meh i5-7200. The motherboard was stupidly designed and the power switch had to come up through a hole in the keyboard. That's not how T4x/T6x series thinkpads work. Also there was no thinklight. Overall what they did was bring back the keyboard and then quit.
I am happy to read this review a couple of days after I saw a video of this Unboxing guy evangelizing the use of other Thinkpads. Lenovo is definitely making nice machines.
After many years using MacBook variants I've made the switch to Windows. I've used every version of MacBook Pro and MacBook Air that have been released. My current laptop of choice is the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon / Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme.Turns out switching from Mac to Windows isn't as painful as I expected."
when I watched this video a few days ago all I couldn’t get over how disingenuous he seemed, like he was just getting paid to make the video and didn’t believe anything he was saying
You guys thinking ATX is a standard has me laughing my head off. On those motherboards we had 6 bus 'standards', 6 video card 'standards' (AGP, AGP 2X, AGP 4X, ...), 6+ disk 'standards' (IDE, EIDE, PATA, SATA-1,2,3, M.2, PCI, and the list goes on). the biggest joke is that CPUs are not even 50% faster in the last 10 years and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Intel-Microsoft-Dell-Motherboard Cabal.
Single-thread performance has doubled. And the i9 has double the number of threads. And uses less energy.
> and yet we are still fooled into buying entirely new systems every two or three years by the Intel-Microsoft-Dell-Motherboard Cabal.
The point is that you do not need to buy an entirely new systems every two or three years (and I personally know few people that do), but can comfortably upgrade parts. CPU upgrade compatibility has sometimes been annoyingly short, but most of time you can easily extend the lifetime of a system by buying a former high-end CPU for cheap, and for other pieces compatibility is way longer. SATA drives from 10 years ago still work with modern PCs if they survived (or your PC from 10 years ago you still use because "CPUs haven't become faster" can be upgraded with a SATA or PCIe SSD, which it can't fully utilize, but it'll work and make a difference. PCIe cards always have been compatible between versions, you had the choice between AGP and PCIe for quite a while (when that switch happened, like 15 years ago?), and technically can still buy boards with PCI ports today (although that's a market niche).
Video card interface electrical standards may have changed, but GPU form factors have not.
Electrical interface changes just need to be paired with compatible motherboards.
Same with hard drives: the interface changed but the form factor has not. They are even compatible with their larger versions: a laptop 2.5" platter drive or SSD can fit in a 3.5" drive bay with a cheap bracket. The SATA versions were backwards compatible speed bumps. Performance was always the maximum supported on the motherboard.
M.2 is just PCIe in a different form factor, so on desktops a $5 passive adapter allows NVMe SSDs to be used on any PCIe slot on even on relatively ancient PCs (though use as a boot drive dependent on BIOS support).
Same with display interfaces. VGA is still supported on many systems, with DVI-I being backwards compatible with cheap passive adapters. DVI and HDMI are electrically identically (minus audio) so cheap passive adapters work.
The broader point is that large incompatible electrical changes are possible because they only mean the new motherboard just needs to be paired with a compatible component. There's still market pressure for backwards compatibility unless the leap is large enough.
Probably the same person who came up with the idea of using widescreens on laptops. At least with keyboards, if you have enough money, you can buy a brand new laptop with mechanical keyboard.
Nobody is even making 4:3 monitors anymore, laptops or not.
Didn't the Timex Sinclair and IBM PC Jr have that way in the dawn of the PC era? The PC Jr was especially egregious because normal IBM keyboards were pretty great in my memory.
Yes, though the PCjr had a version of the keyboard without the chiclet keys. Also either version was a minimal keyboard without separate function keys or num pad.
I had the non-chiclet keyboard. I now don't want to get a newer MacBook Pro because the lack of function keys and escape key, even though my first computer's keyboard didn't have function keys (though it did have escape).
"The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack."
Things like scrolling down a recent issue Web site are the main reason I'm not still using a vintage unmodified X200. I realise that the OA quote was probably tongue in cheek but I do find that surfing the Web has become a processor intensive activity!
Why don't Lenevo build these types of laptops any more? There's clearly a demand for a laptop with a good keyboard and screen, but "wiring $1200 to someone’s personal bank account in China, then e-mailing a qq.com address." is something I'm not particularly happy with.
I wanted a ThinkPad but while they were overall good laptops none of them offered a decent GPU except for the very expensive and massive "workstation" models with Quadros on the level of a mid range GTX.
I get that these aren't gaming laptops but why not give us the option of doing at least some gaming. And GPUs aren't just for gaming we did some projects at work that involved 3D rendering, plus there is all that GPGPU thing.
In the end I got a light gaming laptop, and at work, they also got gaming laptops for these projects that involve 3D. With RGB and all that, something I find kind of fun in a "serious business" environment.
I can't comprehend why not a single company could do a notebook like this! Classical keyboard, hi-dpi 3:2 screen, centered trackpad (well, in this case not 100%), latest CPU/memory/SSD. Is it that difficult?
They can bump the price and it would sell like hot cakes among developers. There are simply no similar products on the market. If NUC is profitable, which is a niche product, I can't see how such a notebook couldn't be (given at least minimal marketing and not putting a product notice into a locked cellar).
It seems really counter-intuitive to me that you'd pay $1200 for a Thinkpad. Isn't their popularity largely because old models are widely-available, reliable, and most importantly, dirt cheap? I don't do anything on my T420 but use the terminal and the web browser and the hardware has been sufficient, though I guess if you're gonna be rolling with multiple electron apps, upgraded hardware might make all the difference.
I have a MacBook Pro (2017, 15" top model). I came from a Thinkpad running Red Hat and FreeBSD later.
I have been for the last couple years putting a Thinkpad (P52 or X1 Carbon/Extreme or P1) I'm lusting over in my cart, but not hitting the buy button.
After owning this MacBook Pro, my first question is how replaceable are the keyboards? I want to have a spare in the case of spills, crumbs, dirt, etc and so forth. It's piece of mind at this point.
From my quick and dirty research, they aren't as replaceable as they used to be, but still able to be done by the user. The P52/72 seem to be the only easy option like the, "good old days." While the X1/P1/X series require the entire top palm rest replaced, which is costlier, but it's an option none the less.
I'm eyeing either an X1 Extreme, P52, or maybe getting something slightly more portable like the X390. I feel this is the year I'm finally going to hit that buy button and at least test the waters if I can get myself out of the Apple Ecosystem and survive without regrets using Linux, even so, it will be a fun experiment.
I stocked up thin silicon membrane keyboard covers, put one over the keyboard, and replace it every 6 months. It prevent spills and scratch. Keyboard can get really dirty. Replacing it once a while is like getting a new keyboard.
This is what I have on my MacBook Pro now, since the millisecond I took it out of the box. It's just not as pleasurable to type on, especially comparing to say, a Thinkpad keyboard. I was thinking how much peace of mind I would have using a bare Thinkpad P52 keyboard with a spare in the closet and knowing I can just go to Lenovo's parts site and order up a new one for a reasonable cost.
MacBook Pro keyboard replacement is a nightmare it's a 3-hour process search up the videos on YouTube you have to undo about 50 screws. The sooner you realize that Apple only makes throw away shit the better off you'll be in life!
I'm sold on 3:2 aspect ratio, and wish there was a wider variety of modern laptops available possessing that screen ratio. I hate looking for laptops and finding the only ones with reasonable specs to have widescreen aspect ratios. I feel noticeably constrained using them for anything other than playing games and watching videos.
It's a shame the Thinkpad Retro / 25 Anniversary Edition was released as a one time thing. I think it likely hurt the excitement behind buying one as you could end up with a machine that would be hard to find spare parts for in the future.
I never got a chance to buy one because they sold out and didn't release more.
My friend bought TWO and it was totally meh. Yes they did put a nice retro keyboard on that thing. It had the same horrible scratchpad as other thinkpads. No thinklight. Basically it was just a t440 with a nicer keyboard. The CPU (I5-7200) was crap. NO GRAPHICS ACCELERATION AT ALL.
Not an X210 but you can get refurbished X201s for just about nothing. They suck for games but I don't really know how to improve them as a homework/development computer (maybe EFI would be nice but that actually exists as part of the open source replacement firmware.)
Might it be possible for them to ship models with castrated Management Engine and Mic/Radio killswitches?
Do they have as Shenzhen manufacturing company/aquaintance any more leverage to take re-liberating measures on their boards?
I find it hard to believe they put a 2TB m.2 ssd and 32GB of ram in it for $1200. Surely that was added on top of the $1200 base price, which makes this much less attractive than it sounds.
Curious about the weight of X210--couldn't find it mentioned anywhere. I'm guessing such a feature-packed device must greatly compromise on the portability factor.
Probably works out a tad lighter than the X200 with whichever battery the user decides to use. The unmodified X220 I'm writing this on weighs 1.6 kg with the 'stick out' battery and I recollect that my old X200 was about the same.
I keep seeing these and going ooh and ahh and then I realise I’m happy enough with my hack job T440/450 hybrid frankenpad which cost pocket money in comparison.
That is beautiful... I loved those old 4:3 high-res laptops with big arrow keys. Now standard laptops are small-screen low-res tiny-keys... pain in the ass.
>Linux worked out of the box. I had to install non-free drivers for the Broadcom wireless card, then tweak a few module options to get better power saving.
This is not, for the record, "working out of the box".
Meh, if the non-free blobs are included as part of the distro (as they are with the Debian 'non-free' channel, similar to Ubuntu) it's as good as we've ever going to get. Even Intel wifi cards rely on a non-free firmware blob, and will only work with "non-free" Debian.
I seriously think this is the main problem of "Linux on Desktop". Just stop the cooler spinning all the time that's it - Desktop War is won, Win and Mac are packing their stuff and go home.
I haven't been using a Linux laptop for about 3 years now (Ended up with a Mac at my current job, which 3 years in I still don't really like all that much). Back when I did, I found the package laptop-mode-tools to be quite effective. It tunes a bunch of things when you're off A/C, and can be adjusted to control a number of other things. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/bionic/+package/laptop-mode-too...
On my mac, I've got HammerSpoon configured to change a bunch of things depending on power levels, sleep state etc, including killing off Slack.
I am yet to see a distribution that works out-of-the-box on a wide variety of hardware like Windows does. Sure, there are some distributions that generally work on most hardware, or some laptops that are “optimized for Linux”, but none of these come close to general hardware compatibility.
I think you still always need to install graphics drivers from AMD/nVidias site, because the stub-drivers included with Windows don't have proper OpenGL support.
I'm a heavy gamer, and I have been using video drivers from Windows Update for the past 8 years or so with no issues (other than Far Cry 5 complaining that they're old - but it still runs fine).
For printers and external accessories, maybe? My experience with laptops has always been that every built-in component works with no configuration, which isn’t true for Linux. However, I haven’t bought a Windows laptop for quite a while, so maybe this situation is no longer true?
> However, I haven’t bought a Windows laptop for quite a while
Are you talking about buying a laptop with windows pre-installed, or installing windows on a barebones laptop?
I doubt that a laptop with linux preinstalled from e.g. dell requires you to install drivers. It's been a while since I did a barebones windows install, but I would be surprised if no drivers were required.
This isn't a valid comparison, since macOS doesn't have to goal that Linux and Windows do of running on a large variety of hardware. And this shows: it's a lot easier to install Linux on any old laptop (or even Windows, to some extent) than it is macOS.
Point is that you don't need to, you can make any distro work. "Working out of the box" for Linux doesn't have the same meaning as for Windows. If you're a buying a custom motherboard for an old notebook that's nothing.
I love linux but damn, way to shift the goalposts.
edit:
Does any one else feel that redefining "working out of the box" to mean the opposite "just for linux", hurts linux's reputation more than just saying something non-hyperbolic, like it "works with a surprisingly minimal amount of driver treasure-hunt"?
As a tangent, I wonder if this applies to other things. if BMW users tell you "when talking about BMWs the term low-maintenance refers to not having your engine explode every 10k miles. With that in mind, BMWs are very low-maintenance", are you less likely to buy one than if they say "well there's a little more required maintenance than some other manufacturers, but as long as you do it the car is very reliable."?
Linux isn't just one thing. In a parallel universe he used a different distro and didn't have any issues. That says nothing about whether or not this piece of hardware is a good purchase or how good it is supported in general.
Yeah but after that, he never had any problem with it, except sleep mode cutting wifi sometimes. Or bluetooth not pairing. Or the battery lasting half as expected.
Nothing that a few commands can't fix. Zero maintenance.
This reminds me of a flash cartoon that circulated around 2001 or 2002 with a guy flying through air talking about all he had to do is mod probe or patch his kernel and was like a wizard in the classic kind of flash style animation... I wish I still had the flash file or someone could recreate it in a viewable format for today...
Is not officially Thinkpad model. Is "Frankenpad", made by combining parts from many Thinkpad model, in a creative way. This is what "group of enthusiast" in Shenzen do.
Just buy a Carbon X1 that's a couple of generations behind "current" - they're still being sold. Amazing battery life, trackpoint, high res screen (if you want it), super light, tough, good keyboard. And it's cheaper, too. What's not to like? Mine is 3.5 years old now, still going strong. Running Ubuntu since day one.
I have a L450, it might not the top-notch quality thinkpad, but it's still pretty good. I have a chiclet keyboard, seems preferable. I had to manually remove the FN, INS, PGDN and PGUP keys though, for more comfortable typing.
Also choosing a graphic chipset instead of a laptop GPU seems like the best option.
I'm still using a 2015 MBP and can't bring myself to upgrade. I'd love to see a service like 51NB for Macbook Pro's, does something similar exist? 2018 logic board internals in a 2015 logic board form factor maybe?
Can they do upgrades of my old T410? Love the keyboard on that, I blame Apple for ruining the keyboard experience since the loss of separate pg up and pg down keys, and Intel for standardising that layout in the ultrabook spec.
I don't get it. How is it Thinkpad X-something, and yet "made by a group of enthusiasts, not a big company"? Is it an illegal rip-off? Is it Lenovo lending their name to someone else? What is this 51NB exactly?
I hadn't realised about the (lack of) HDMI over DisplayPort - now I don't feel so bad that I can't afford one - this would render it much less useful to me.
I noticed the author names his computers after elements (iron). I do that too! I was taken aback because I have a box named "iron" also (as well as cobalt, oxygen, and helium)
I name all of my computers after elements. I set up DHCP leases so that the last octet of each host's IP is their atomic number. eg: hydrogen is 192.168.1.1, lithium is 192.168.1.3, carbon is 192.168.1.6, iron is 192.168.1.26, etc.
I also tend to categorize machines by elemental classification. Servers are alkalai metals, laptops are nonmetals, consoles are halogens, etc. I didn't have any neat nonmetals left, so I just called my new laptop "iron".
> I set up DHCP leases so that the last octet of each host's IP is their atomic number. eg: hydrogen is 192.168.1.1, lithium is 192.168.1.3, carbon is 192.168.1.6, iron is 192.168.1.26, etc.
Ok, that's definitely a step farther than I've ever taken it. Ingenious though, I'm stealing that idea!
For what it's worth, I still use a circa 2011 T420 for my work PC (decent spec for the time with i7 and 8GB RAM) which will probably be around or under your price. Great ThinkPad keyboard (non-chiclet), and instead of following the company upgrade cycle I opted for an SSD and new battery.
A lot of corporates off-load perfectly good laptops (as 'company property' they've often been taken care of reasonably well, or just left on a desk, or kept in a cupboard as backups) as part of their procurement cycle. Find such a reseller and you'll likely not only have a cheap laptop, but one with years more life in it too.
Love my T420. Bought it new, used it for work for a long time. Now it's my field laptop I take with me when flying my quadcopters. It's been dropped, rained on, sat in the sun all day when it's 100 degrees outside and it still boots up happily. Have been thinking about putting a SSD in it but I really don't need the speed and the original drive works fine.
We had a T420 for a while, they are nice machines and I think the last of that series where you can wipe the BIOS password without replacing the motherboard.
Just don't get the ?40 series, it's the series without physical trackpad buttons. You can put the ?50 trackpad in it, but that's more hassle and doesn't work in Windows well without extra reflashing.
Thankfully, they reverted to physical buttons in ?50 series and later.
I've had great luck with Thinkpad T420. I bought 2 over the last 2 years for about $225 (USD) from amazon. One of them i run linux mint without issue - my daily driver. The other one i kept with win7 (for kid as their school machine). I did replace the battery on one of them for a smaller physical size, and it apparently boosted the duration/power...so the original battery must have been aged. I can't complain because the replacement battery - again off of amazon - was around $50 (USD). Overall quite happy with T420 and would purchase theme again. (I have no experience with any other thinkpad models.) I hope this helps!
Unfortunately that generation of CPU (T420, i5-2520?) is just about the time when hardware video decoding was getting off the ground. You can play back 1080p video just barely and not always glitch-free with that CPU.
I'm not sure what the price differences are in Europe but I snagged a X230 for ~that amount in the US and am fairly happy. My only regret is the TN panel screen; this can be avoided by getting an X230T or going out of your way to find one with an IPS panel (a lot of resellers won't state what kind of panel it has, though). I got mine from a company that only refurbishes Thinkpads and was pretty happy about it, so I'd suggest looking off eBay as well and seeing if there's any companies like that where you are.
As the article suggests, you can also upgrade it along the way if your budget increases.
You could most likely get an X220 for that amount. It has nice old non-chiclet keyboard (I like it even more than the X201 keyboard because it has big escape and delete keys) and is still plenty powerful.
I’ve got a T410 and a T430s. Keyboard on the 410 is way better, but I upgraded because I needed more memory and a stouter processor to do webpack compiles.
They’re kind of a pain to disassemble, but it’s doable.
T430s is a horrible design mess. there is a middle layer of magnesium and all the wires go through random holes drilled in this magnesium and if you go through the wrong hole you will never get it back together again. the fan is on the bottom of the motherboard on the bottom of the computer and it takes 12 disassembly steps and 12 reassembly steps to fix the most commonly broken part which is the fan. Die T430s, die!!!
Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.
> Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack.
lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it. If this happens to me, you can bet I’m digging through Activity Monitor and killing the culprit before the fans can get fully ramped up.