> 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.
>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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ggreer|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mjg59|7 years ago|reply
The stock firmware is, uh, not good. I ported Coreboot to the second batch boards (https://github.com/mjg59/coreboot/tree/X210_good ) and things improved significantly - I wrote it up at https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/50924.html
[+] [-] Ndymium|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snazz|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tbrock|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cyberpunk|7 years ago|reply
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.
10/10 would recommend.
[+] [-] syntaxing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canuckintime|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archon810|7 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=x1+extreme+fans
[+] [-] shasheene|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eggy|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] veryworried|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepearl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evjim|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberpunk|7 years ago|reply
Do you use a non-root account?
[+] [-] linuxlizard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotancohen|7 years ago|reply
The next time somebody asks why everybody has a problem with Electron, I'm referring them to this page.
[+] [-] lucideer|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ggreer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shacklz|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cztomsik|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anderspitman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwhitney|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahstilde|7 years ago|reply
Why isn't Lenovo as much of a security risk as Huawei?
[+] [-] elagost|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] camgunz|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Barrin92|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eikenberry|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhd415|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] VvR-Ox|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FrankDixon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixelmonkey|7 years ago|reply
https://amontalenti.com/2017/09/01/lenovo-linux
Fan never turns on, matte display, awesome connectivity, great battery life, and everything on Linux just works.
[+] [-] lelf|7 years ago|reply
That’s intensive. And sad.
[+] [-] leiroigh|7 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] GordonS|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] xiphmont|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truth_seeker|7 years ago|reply
I am sold, totally :)
[+] [-] pascoej|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tbrock|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noir_lord|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kensai|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZUSFda_W7k
"Unbox Therapy
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."
[+] [-] systemBuilder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aquabeagle|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652584
[+] [-] Causality1|7 years ago|reply