Comment by globnomulous
Comment by globnomulous 2 days ago
Sorry for my cluelessness, but why is this laptop so popular?
Comment by globnomulous 2 days ago
Sorry for my cluelessness, but why is this laptop so popular?
Mine x200 still my daily driver. Only had to replace the battery and the charger so far.
It's small, sturdy, maintainable, and aesthetically pleasing. And one can still get (original) parts. Throw in enthusiast projects like this and you can have your own "Laptop of Theseus".
And that’s about it, I’d say! I find that everything else is really, really bad. It creaks, it wobbles, it warps, and it did so from day 1. The fan is loud and kicks in quite early. Well maybe the X200 isn’t as bad, but the X220 certainly is. And even after 14 years, it still smells when it gets hot.
Sorry for the rant. I really want to love it, but I just can’t.
Yet after 14 years you still have it and use it?
Quality also went down while with later models - back in 2014 I was laptop shopping, based on the X2xx series reputation I tested an X240 and it was crap, even the keyboard was super bad, I ended up getting a Dell xps13 whose keyboard was miles better and it still works today.
Well "use it" is a bit of a stretch. I’m a bit of a device hoarder. It's one of my experimentation platforms for Linux stuff, currently running Fedora Kinoite (with Universal Blue).
My daily driver (of sorts, don’t really need a laptop anymore) is a MacBook Pro Late 2013, with NixOS. It’s so much better in every regard, it’s not even funny. It also still has its original battery.
Not really! It’s just good. I guarantee you it’s better than the keyboard 95% of people have on their desktop computers.
https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Old_ThinkPad_Niches
You can CTRL+F for the model and see that the x201 tics many of the boxes for desirable traits in older Thinkpads.
Mine still works as well as expected after 17 years, 5-6 of which it spent with heavy daily use, another 2-3 with light use, only occasionally afterwards, and overall a lot of travel and airports. I could disassemble and reassemble it to the last screw easily, no special tools besides a screwdriver, no glue, upgradeable RAM and storage. Actually my one major complaint is Lenovo's use of whitelisting for wireless cards.
But I wouldn't pay $1300+ to bring it up to speed. The batteries are done, the screen is small and the backlight is yellowed and dimming. That laptop would need a lot more love to make it fully usable as a daily driver so I'd rather keep it as it is, as a memory.