I have a mid-range used ThinkPad and I love it. It's not the fastest machine but it's built like a tank and it feels nice to carry my dev environment along with me when I'm traveling.
I had one for 10 years, through high school and uni. After that I tried the new-ish models and my god, Lenovo does not know how to make laptops anymore.
I still daily an X280. RAM is soldered so it's days are numbered (though that number is still high) and this one does not have the bridge battery setup, just an internal one. The size is great though, and the keyboard is top notch. This also charges over USB-C which is a nice creature comfort.
~zesterer I'm curious how well does it handle developing in Rust. I know rust-analyzer quickly starts to feel a bit painful on my significantly more modern laptop (Ryzen 7730U)
I'm not a user of rust-analyzer so I can't really speak to that. I do spend a lot of time invoking the compiler though, and even on fairly heavyweight projects like Veloren incremental builds are still snappy enough to not annoy me too much. It depends on your own personal thresholds I'm sure. It's certainly not a machine I'd prefer to do deep-dive development on a large project with, but it can handle it if needs be.
The battery life means that USB-C isn't an issue (it only needs a charge when I get to where I'm going, at which point I don't care about transformer. It's pretty tiny anyway). The screen feels like a matter of perspective: I'm used to 96 dpi screens, and I'd rather see the pixels than suffer the performance implications of not seeing them.
For traveling, I don't just mean the daily commute but also longer trips. I prefer carrying just one USB-C charger and cable. Also, replacement is ubiquitous if the cable or charger breaks.
I'm not talking about pixel density, I'm talking about the atrocious TN panels. Terrible colors, terrible viewing angles. Black-on-white documents display as washed out dark grey on washed out light grey. Though perhaps this model is IPS. It used to be quite the lottery what panel your ThinkPad arrived with.
For those of us who used greyscale passive-matrix LCDs in the 1990s, they are more than good enough, they are fine.
Features like mouse pointer trails, pointers that get bigger when wiggled, circular ripple-circles when you press Ctrl, and other ways to find your mouse pointer are because on '90s flatscreens, move the mouse and the pointer vanished until it stopped moving again. Those displays had a refresh interval for rapidly-changing image details in whole seconds.
When you lived with that, an TN panel is a joy to use. It's still a miracle of tech. I don't need retina displays, HDR, any of that: a 15Y old full colour flat panel LCD is still amazingly good.
i used my old x220 for many years beyond anyone else would have used it, even still reached for it from time to time after i got my 2020 MBP... but w/ my current M3 Air, it's too much of a leap forward... battery life is important to me and the power you get w/ this battery is unmatched
Like the author I also have a X250, and I bought a cable that connects on the Thinkpad power jack and has USB-C on the other end. This way I don't need to travel with the Thinkpad brick, just the special cable and a USB-C that I use for everything else (phone, earbuds, e-reader, etc).
That's just subjective. I don't personally I feel I'm gaining much on my 16" M3 MBP over my 10y old Lenovo or my 13y old Lenovo, except the size... And yes, I'd need to check if I have the IPS panels but if most of the Thinkpads I ever owned or used had the IPS panel, then your argument "but the TN panel exists" doesn't really have much merit.
In the UK, I use Morgan Computers, and regularly check Tier1 Online and Bargain Hardware, just in case. These are enterprise boxes -- you want depreciated ex-corpie-fleet machines.
I know of Gigacomputer in Czechia. I am sure there must be other such places. I have never lived or worked in North America and don't plan to, so I can't talk about there.
I have fond memories of older Thinkpads. I recently acquired a friend's cast off Thinkpad P1 Gen-3 for free when they upgraded. I intended to use it with Windows 11 for $WORK but had the satisfaction of wiping that to install Linux when they laid me off. It's surprisingly light with its 4k screen, Nvidia gpu, and i7 and I popped in a 256GB nvme and 32GB of sodimms pulled from another laptop. Despite being fast it's somehow not as nice to use as the older ones. The keyboard, which I had replaced for him with an OEM unit, just doesn't feel as good as old ones and the touchpad is just okay[1]. I doubt I'd buy one in the future.
There's also some weird interaction on both Windows and Linux between, I believe, the trackpoint and the touchpad where I can move the cursor but can't click for a few seconds. Trying the other pointer works. It also happens with an external mouse. It's inconsistent and just long enough to be frustrating. I'm going to try disabling one or both of them.
Author here. I also owned a Thinkpad E595. Honestly? It's difficult to believe that it was built by the same company when compared to the X250. The battery life is terrible, it's huge and bulky, performance is inconsistent at best for its size, it's got thermal problems, the outer shell feels flimsy, all of the edges and angles feel awkward and uncomfortable, and the keyboard makes me fingers ache. So, I certainly echo your sentiment.
I think the sweet spot in that family is the x270. Same form-factor but obviously more recent hardware, up to a i7-7600u with 32GB of RAM, Full HD touchscreen, 2 nvme slots and very conveniently it can be charged by Usb-C when their 2 batteries are low at the end of a long day!
I have an X270 (no touch-screen though). Had no idea it could be charged with USB-C, I've just been using that square cable, I'll have to try this out :-D
I was a huge fan of my x230 (and I still have it), but the battery was never great (and I'm on the 2nd replacement iirc) and these days I much prefer the T460p, if I don't have to lug it around. But if I ever needed another portable laptop I've had my eyes set on an x2_0 for a while, although I'd probably go x290/x280.
Yup, I still have my X250 as well, though I don't use it daily anymore. It has places in the top cover where I've rubbed through the black coating to reveal the shiny magnesium underneath because I've always had it in my bike panniers without any extra bag ... the hinges are a bit loose but it still works perfectly. To be fair though, compared to my new laptop it feels painfully slow nowadays.
Lenovo has been steadily enshittifying its keyboards even since the Thinkpad hundred series.
I own an X200 and W500. They are good. I never got to try a 400.
I own several X220s and 420s. They are still good but not quite as good: less travel. Still fine to use, and I frequently use these elderly machines for their good keyboards.
I have used X230, 240, 250, etc. All are much, much worse. I've never owned any, because I won't pay for those keyboards.
That's really subjective though. I don't really remember my W500 or W510, but I have an x230 and a T460p and both keyboards are just fine for me. I'm not some "omg I don't care about keyboards" person, looking at my opinions and choice of mechanical keyboards. But in the end they are laptops and I personally try to not use them for hours at a time, unless I have to. And so far I've had no problems.
Lenovo has been steadily enshittifying its keyboards even since the Thinkpad hundred series
They are still good but not quite as good: less travel
Why is "less travel = bad"? What else is so bad about them to deserve that label? Enshittification implies universal, objective worsening in service of profit margins, which can't really be said for the kind of change you are talking about.
For a taste of an opposite perspective, I personally can't stand the classic Thinkpads — bought one on a lark some years ago and resold it in disgust after a few months of misery.
Conversely, I owned the T540p, X1C 6th (*80 series equivalent), and now a P1 7th, and I enjoyed all of them equally (so much, in fact, that I'm still buying Thinkpads just for the keyboards and putting up with their subpar energy efficiency and distinctly second-class citizen Linux support, even though I would've rather bought a Framework or at least an XPS). What does that make me?
Only thing that surprised me is it said "old" but then talked about a 2015 model! My desktop is older than that :)
But I've used a few Thinkpads over the years now, and my favorite one in many ways is actually the oldest one, made circa 1996, I acquired it in 2005. OK, the screen is pretty junk, it is one of those where the mouse cursor disappears in motion, but its ok, I put linux on it and didn't even bother installing X. It also doesn't have usb or ethernet or any of that newfangled stuff, but that's OK, I have a null modem cable for the serial port and pppd.
What I like a lot about it though is the keyboard. It is a 13" thing and a bit thick.... and it uses that thickness to put on a very pleasant keyboard. It feel like a mid-range desktop keyboard instead of a laptop. I keep this around with the hopes of someday wiring its keyboard into a usb controller to turn it into a little portable unit for other laptops, but still haven't gotten around to it lol.
I also have a 2005ish era thinkpad (which I got in 2011ish) and its keyboard is also pretty good, though not as nice as the 1990's one, part of that is that this one is much bigger, like 16", and the screen works a lot better, and it comes with some of the newer ports! I replaced this one from regular use because if you flex it, the screen goes fuzzy, so not very good portable (and of course the battery is long dead anyway but I keep this computer around for testing programs on Windows XP hardware and really it isn't bad to use at all.
But then the newer ones... I have two new ones too, one is the company work computer which is very new and you know, I don't hate it, but there's nothing really special about it anymore. I can't complain too much about it (except that it has this "smart human presence" feature that was messing everything up and i had to beg IT to disable it, which they did yay, but like it was infuriating), but like I'd call the work computer slightly better than my personal laptop now, a HP that cost like a quarter of what these Lenovos do, and "slightly better" isn't worth that kind of price premium.
I love my X230 for similar reasons. I recently moved from it to a T14 gen1 for daily driver, but I love the footprint of the X230. I need to open it up to repaste the heat sink and replace the, though, and that's not a very simple operation on this model. Not hard, but involved.
I've had a few thinkpads over the years, the X1 carbon 3rd gen was my favorite, can't believe I ever sold that.
The t430 is my longest running pad, it's a tank, sata drive bay in the dvd slot, multiple teardowns and chassis cracks/breaks, the teardowns were just cleaning and new thermal paste, never had to replace anything that I can remember. This thing has been buried under sand, rained on, covered in coolant and motor oil, spilled coffee, chunked in the back of a truck, skipped on concrete, and still chugging along. Years and years.
Also had a t420, t60, and a x60. Librebooted and resold those probably 8 or 9 years ago, they were good machines but rarely used them.
whjms | 18 hours ago
I have a mid-range used ThinkPad and I love it. It's not the fastest machine but it's built like a tank and it feels nice to carry my dev environment along with me when I'm traveling.
linhns | 17 hours ago
I had one for 10 years, through high school and uni. After that I tried the new-ish models and my god, Lenovo does not know how to make laptops anymore.
theblacklounge | 9 hours ago
For now there's still old good ones on refurbishing stores. Cheaper and better than there current mid range.
BenjaminRi | 3 hours ago
What shortcomings do you refer to, specifically? Keyboard key quality and arrangement? I feel like even the modern ones are pretty solid generally.
mro | 10 hours ago
how nice to see a sibling of my x250, well respected and thriving. Got mine for 160 € refurbished in 2023. Now with FreeBSD.
nehal3m | 10 hours ago
I still daily an X280. RAM is soldered so it's days are numbered (though that number is still high) and this one does not have the bridge battery setup, just an internal one. The size is great though, and the keyboard is top notch. This also charges over USB-C which is a nice creature comfort.
schmudde | 26 minutes ago
I'm thinking about a Thinkpad but don't want soldered RAM. Is there a certain year when Lenovo started doing that?
lobo | 17 hours ago
I have the same laptop next to me in my desk, though I don't use it as much as I wish I could (and it's missing a couple keys too, oops)
hjvt | 14 hours ago
~zesterer I'm curious how well does it handle developing in Rust. I know rust-analyzer quickly starts to feel a bit painful on my significantly more modern laptop (Ryzen 7730U)
zesterer | 8 hours ago
I'm not a user of rust-analyzer so I can't really speak to that. I do spend a lot of time invoking the compiler though, and even on fairly heavyweight projects like Veloren incremental builds are still snappy enough to not annoy me too much. It depends on your own personal thresholds I'm sure. It's certainly not a machine I'd prefer to do deep-dive development on a large project with, but it can handle it if needs be.
BenjaminRi | 9 hours ago
I don't know how you put up with it:
Don't get me wrong, I have a bunch of ThinkPads myself, but I find myself not using the older ones for such reasons.
zesterer | 8 hours ago
The battery life means that USB-C isn't an issue (it only needs a charge when I get to where I'm going, at which point I don't care about transformer. It's pretty tiny anyway). The screen feels like a matter of perspective: I'm used to 96 dpi screens, and I'd rather see the pixels than suffer the performance implications of not seeing them.
BenjaminRi | 8 hours ago
For traveling, I don't just mean the daily commute but also longer trips. I prefer carrying just one USB-C charger and cable. Also, replacement is ubiquitous if the cable or charger breaks.
I'm not talking about pixel density, I'm talking about the atrocious TN panels. Terrible colors, terrible viewing angles. Black-on-white documents display as washed out dark grey on washed out light grey. Though perhaps this model is IPS. It used to be quite the lottery what panel your ThinkPad arrived with.
lproven | 7 hours ago
For those of us who used greyscale passive-matrix LCDs in the 1990s, they are more than good enough, they are fine.
Features like mouse pointer trails, pointers that get bigger when wiggled, circular ripple-circles when you press Ctrl, and other ways to find your mouse pointer are because on '90s flatscreens, move the mouse and the pointer vanished until it stopped moving again. Those displays had a refresh interval for rapidly-changing image details in whole seconds.
When you lived with that, an TN panel is a joy to use. It's still a miracle of tech. I don't need retina displays, HDR, any of that: a 15Y old full colour flat panel LCD is still amazingly good.
aae | 5 hours ago
i used my old x220 for many years beyond anyone else would have used it, even still reached for it from time to time after i got my 2020 MBP... but w/ my current M3 Air, it's too much of a leap forward... battery life is important to me and the power you get w/ this battery is unmatched
beto | 3 hours ago
Like the author I also have a X250, and I bought a cable that connects on the Thinkpad power jack and has USB-C on the other end. This way I don't need to travel with the Thinkpad brick, just the special cable and a USB-C that I use for everything else (phone, earbuds, e-reader, etc).
wink | 2 hours ago
That's just subjective. I don't personally I feel I'm gaining much on my 16" M3 MBP over my 10y old Lenovo or my 13y old Lenovo, except the size... And yes, I'd need to check if I have the IPS panels but if most of the Thinkpads I ever owned or used had the IPS panel, then your argument "but the TN panel exists" doesn't really have much merit.
dsschnau | 15 hours ago
Looking on eBay, it looks like I'm spending quite a bit more than $100 to get an old thinkpad of this era.
lproven | 8 hours ago
eBay is not a good source.
In the UK, I use Morgan Computers, and regularly check Tier1 Online and Bargain Hardware, just in case. These are enterprise boxes -- you want depreciated ex-corpie-fleet machines.
I know of Gigacomputer in Czechia. I am sure there must be other such places. I have never lived or worked in North America and don't plan to, so I can't talk about there.
ThatsInteresting | 15 hours ago
I have fond memories of older Thinkpads. I recently acquired a friend's cast off Thinkpad P1 Gen-3 for free when they upgraded. I intended to use it with Windows 11 for $WORK but had the satisfaction of wiping that to install Linux when they laid me off. It's surprisingly light with its 4k screen, Nvidia gpu, and i7 and I popped in a 256GB nvme and 32GB of sodimms pulled from another laptop. Despite being fast it's somehow not as nice to use as the older ones. The keyboard, which I had replaced for him with an OEM unit, just doesn't feel as good as old ones and the touchpad is just okay[1]. I doubt I'd buy one in the future.
zesterer | 8 hours ago
Author here. I also owned a Thinkpad E595. Honestly? It's difficult to believe that it was built by the same company when compared to the X250. The battery life is terrible, it's huge and bulky, performance is inconsistent at best for its size, it's got thermal problems, the outer shell feels flimsy, all of the edges and angles feel awkward and uncomfortable, and the keyboard makes me fingers ache. So, I certainly echo your sentiment.
hwj | 9 hours ago
Hello from the younger brother X280.
(I don't use it anymore since switching to an M1 running macOS 15, though).
gwenhael | 3 hours ago
I think the sweet spot in that family is the x270. Same form-factor but obviously more recent hardware, up to a i7-7600u with 32GB of RAM, Full HD touchscreen, 2 nvme slots and very conveniently it can be charged by Usb-C when their 2 batteries are low at the end of a long day!
They're so great I have accumulated way too many.
Sanity | 3 hours ago
I have an X270 (no touch-screen though). Had no idea it could be charged with USB-C, I've just been using that square cable, I'll have to try this out :-D
wink | 2 hours ago
I was a huge fan of my x230 (and I still have it), but the battery was never great (and I'm on the 2nd replacement iirc) and these days I much prefer the T460p, if I don't have to lug it around. But if I ever needed another portable laptop I've had my eyes set on an x2_0 for a while, although I'd probably go x290/x280.
ansemjo | 10 hours ago
Yup, I still have my X250 as well, though I don't use it daily anymore. It has places in the top cover where I've rubbed through the black coating to reveal the shiny magnesium underneath because I've always had it in my bike panniers without any extra bag ... the hinges are a bit loose but it still works perfectly. To be fair though, compared to my new laptop it feels painfully slow nowadays.
lproven | 7 hours ago
Lenovo has been steadily enshittifying its keyboards even since the Thinkpad hundred series.
I own an X200 and W500. They are good. I never got to try a 400.
I own several X220s and 420s. They are still good but not quite as good: less travel. Still fine to use, and I frequently use these elderly machines for their good keyboards.
I have used X230, 240, 250, etc. All are much, much worse. I've never owned any, because I won't pay for those keyboards.
wink | 2 hours ago
That's really subjective though. I don't really remember my W500 or W510, but I have an x230 and a T460p and both keyboards are just fine for me. I'm not some "omg I don't care about keyboards" person, looking at my opinions and choice of mechanical keyboards. But in the end they are laptops and I personally try to not use them for hours at a time, unless I have to. And so far I've had no problems.
intelfx | an hour ago
Why is "less travel = bad"? What else is so bad about them to deserve that label? Enshittification implies universal, objective worsening in service of profit margins, which can't really be said for the kind of change you are talking about.
For a taste of an opposite perspective, I personally can't stand the classic Thinkpads — bought one on a lark some years ago and resold it in disgust after a few months of misery.
Conversely, I owned the T540p, X1C 6th (*80 series equivalent), and now a P1 7th, and I enjoyed all of them equally (so much, in fact, that I'm still buying Thinkpads just for the keyboards and putting up with their subpar energy efficiency and distinctly second-class citizen Linux support, even though I would've rather bought a Framework or at least an XPS). What does that make me?
adam_d_ruppe | 5 hours ago
Only thing that surprised me is it said "old" but then talked about a 2015 model! My desktop is older than that :)
But I've used a few Thinkpads over the years now, and my favorite one in many ways is actually the oldest one, made circa 1996, I acquired it in 2005. OK, the screen is pretty junk, it is one of those where the mouse cursor disappears in motion, but its ok, I put linux on it and didn't even bother installing X. It also doesn't have usb or ethernet or any of that newfangled stuff, but that's OK, I have a null modem cable for the serial port and pppd.
What I like a lot about it though is the keyboard. It is a 13" thing and a bit thick.... and it uses that thickness to put on a very pleasant keyboard. It feel like a mid-range desktop keyboard instead of a laptop. I keep this around with the hopes of someday wiring its keyboard into a usb controller to turn it into a little portable unit for other laptops, but still haven't gotten around to it lol.
I also have a 2005ish era thinkpad (which I got in 2011ish) and its keyboard is also pretty good, though not as nice as the 1990's one, part of that is that this one is much bigger, like 16", and the screen works a lot better, and it comes with some of the newer ports! I replaced this one from regular use because if you flex it, the screen goes fuzzy, so not very good portable (and of course the battery is long dead anyway but I keep this computer around for testing programs on Windows XP hardware and really it isn't bad to use at all.
But then the newer ones... I have two new ones too, one is the company work computer which is very new and you know, I don't hate it, but there's nothing really special about it anymore. I can't complain too much about it (except that it has this "smart human presence" feature that was messing everything up and i had to beg IT to disable it, which they did yay, but like it was infuriating), but like I'd call the work computer slightly better than my personal laptop now, a HP that cost like a quarter of what these Lenovos do, and "slightly better" isn't worth that kind of price premium.
gcupc | 4 hours ago
I love my X230 for similar reasons. I recently moved from it to a T14 gen1 for daily driver, but I love the footprint of the X230. I need to open it up to repaste the heat sink and replace the, though, and that's not a very simple operation on this model. Not hard, but involved.
regedit | 3 hours ago
I've had a few thinkpads over the years, the X1 carbon 3rd gen was my favorite, can't believe I ever sold that.
The t430 is my longest running pad, it's a tank, sata drive bay in the dvd slot, multiple teardowns and chassis cracks/breaks, the teardowns were just cleaning and new thermal paste, never had to replace anything that I can remember. This thing has been buried under sand, rained on, covered in coolant and motor oil, spilled coffee, chunked in the back of a truck, skipped on concrete, and still chugging along. Years and years.
Also had a t420, t60, and a x60. Librebooted and resold those probably 8 or 9 years ago, they were good machines but rarely used them.