I have a P14s Gen 5 AMD, which afaik is just a T14 with some certifications, and it's flimsy. The whole chassis is plastic and quite flexible. It's also currently at a Lenovo service center because the battery lasted a whole month before failing and claiming to be "non-genuine."
ThinkPads ain't what they were. My x230 is still going.
I wasn't aware of their build quality degradation. I've been using T14s Gen 3 for a year now and I thoroughly enjoy it, the chassis is magnesium and really sturdy. Something must have happened around Gen 5 time.
The worst for me was also my first one, T570. Two motherboard changes because of a flex-y body that put too much pressure on the hard drive connector. I had to use it for a few months because my main computer had to be fixed. I thought I can get more time out of it - nope. That flex-y body probably put too much pressure on something else and after many attempts (for some reason) of resetting the CMOS battery and using it a little, the thing would go right into a boot loop. I bought a new T480 (can use the battery from the T570! :D ) and this is soo much sturdier. Also have a T470p -- besides my screen issue, that thing is a really sturdy.
I have a P14s Gen 3 (so basically a T14s with the power-hungry GPU :D ) from work. I don't think the fit and finish is great, but it properly feels sturdy at least.
Why would a second company freeloading kernel and services from Google change Google's OSdev roadmap? Google could just say to Meta 'fine, fork and maintain it yourself, you're a grown-up company' and continue on with whatever nefarious rug-pull closed source pivot to Fuschia gambit that they might be plotting.
1. IIRC the first Pebble was $99, and the one after it was $149. We're a decade on, inflation is rampant, and the new devices are evidently intended as lower volume products. $149 seems OK to me in 2025. $225 seems OK as well for the color unit, but I don't feel like waiting until December, and can't justify buying two watches. I put my money down for the $149 unit. We'll see how much it ends up being by the time it's on my wrist in Ireland. My current "smart" watch is a Mi Band 6. I'm on screen no.2, strap no.3, and shortly battery no.2: all told, I certainly have $100 invested in it by now, even though it cost me 42 Swiss Francs ($45?) to buy initially.
2. There are other hacking-friendly watches out there, but they do not have the depth of app ecosystem that Pebble did/does. I think those thousands of watchfaces and applications ready to fire on day1 are worth something. This is not a net-new smartwatch environment, it is an established if a bit aged standard that is being polished back up for the modern world.
3. I'm the target market, but I definitely don't have an Apple watch because it doesn't work with Android devices, and I absolutely detest iOS (and am increasingly frustrated with Apple's blatant cash grab-ism vis-a-vis RAM and flash prices on their computers to the point that I've pivoted back to Linux devices).
I managed to eke out a couple more years after Pebbles were discontinued by finding replacements on ebay. If this is a low volume run, I'm contemplating the opposite—whether I can justify not buying multiple while I still can.
I've bought one TV in my life (I'm pushing 43) and it's a Bravia. Ten years old, too, and I have no intention of replacing it while it works. Sony makes nice stuff. Expensive, but nice. I still remember the ad fondly.
DIY mesh networks (I'm speaking of Wi-Fi, not Meshtastic, but even that has its place), isolated pirateboxes, dead drops, and (horror of horrors) going to the pub and talking to people. It's trivial for a government to make the first one illegal and relatively trivial to enforce it, but difficult in increasing magnitude for them to actually control the remainder.
Have WiFi mesh networks ever been proven to work at scale? The few experiments that I've seen seemed to be slow and unreliable. And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.
Mesh networks like https://guifi.net have been reliably delivering internet longer than you have been a member of HN.
There are many mesh networks with Autonomous Systems Numbers, peering at internet exchanges, etc. You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully.
> You don't order 10Gbps ports at various IXPs if your community run network can't deliver that bandwidth usefully.
Well, to be fair....
- Membership of most IXPs is not that expensive and the smaller port sizes are not that expensive
- Many IXPs are moving to 10Gbps as the default port size (e.g. with a membership at LINX in London, you get your first default-size port for free, which is now 10Gbps at LINX).
- If you are running an eyeball network (i.e. xSP, WISP etc.) then you might as well just buy bare-minimum IP transit and save your money for your peering point memberships, since most of your traffic will be going to the CDNs etc. all of whom have open-peering policies at IXPs, so why pay more than you need to ?
- Moving to cynical-view territory, its a marketing expense ... become an IXP member, get a nice logo you can put on your website and give your salesdroids something to name-drop ....
> And in order to be of any real value, at least one of those mesh network nodes needs a connection to the real Internet.
I don't know what this means. If all of my family and friends are on a private network, and I'm serving my copy of Wikipedia, and all of us are sharing our books, movies, and music, we have a bulletin board, voice and video chat...
How did you get your copy of Wikipedia? How do you update your copy of Wikipedia?
How do you get your books, movies, and music? How do you get new ones?
Yes, it has real value as a fill-in-the-gap until you can reconnect to the real internet. Long term I guess it still has some value as a way to look at a static collection of things (plus content generated by people on the mesh), but the real internet is much more valuable.
Just bought a P14s gen5 AMD with a 16:10 OLED, reconditioned, for about a grand. Two SoDIMM slots and one m.2 NVMe slot. Now rocking 96GB RAM, for which I paid the princely sum of 200 pieces of silver. Loaded openSUSE on it - everything works.
It feels plasticky (magnesium chassis T/P-series belong to the ages) but it's a damn sight more computer than I could get from Apple for that money. Well, apart from the battery life, RAM bandwidth, OS-hardware integration, and build quality. It's more RAM than I could get from Apple for that money, for sure.
I'll have a Mac any day an employer offers to buy it for me. Lovely hardware, but it's just too glued-down for my current budget and growing frustration with lack of repairability.
I shall take a good lesson from your case and keep my ThinkPad in its Pelican case whenever I'm not using it. Can't afford to be laptopless for months!
I've built a large solar array on a repurposed mobile home chassis and have been digging a trench through rocky ground to lay the conduit for the cabling to backhaul the DC power to the shed where the inverter and battery bank will live. It's the rainy season in Ireland, and that field was marginal at best, so it's been swampy work and half of the digging is trenching additional drainage channels so the conduit doesn't flood and path water back into the shed.
There's a housing order due to a bird flu scare, so I'm not running poultry on pasture until it's lifted (or until I can get the government to agree that my pasturing system qualifies as housing).
Annoying, but that's farm life.
Oh, I'm doing some shit with AI also, but that's a secret :)
ThinkPads ain't what they were. My x230 is still going.
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