alt Hacker NewsI still primarily use Thinkpads for all these reasons. One incident with fluids and a $3k Apple machine is e-waste. I had young kids, it was inevitable.
Instead, refurbished Thinkpads are still coming off leases. Available for a 250-700 refurbished. Bench repairable. I keep good backups. If something incredible happens and I can’t fix it I can get a new one same day and be back on my feet.
And I like the aesthetic. They’re built to be durable. The chassis has fluid channels. The parts are replaceable. They’re black, unassuming, and utilitarian.
It is getting harder to keep the latest versions of some distros running on them. Software continues to expand like a gas and developers don’t seem to run their stuff on anything but the latest spec hardware. But there are distros out there where folks take care to keep things minimal and fast.
These are still powerful machines. Not editing 4K video on them. But they’re dang useful for coding, writing, and day to day things I do.
I would say even newer Thinkpads are a great deal. I recently bought a P15 Gen 1 from 2020 for ~$700 and it's been an absolute monster. Core i9, RTX 5000, and 128GB or ram. Through research I learned that brand new this machine would have cost around ~$5,800 but even five years later it's better than most new laptops around the ~$700 price point.
The "hard" thing about thinkpads is you have to find them. I must have searched eBay listing for close to a month before the right thinkpad popped up. Especially with the workstation grade laptops, they were so configurable brand new that there are something like 48 possible variants you can find, and finding one with the exact specs you want can be incredibly difficult.