OK so first of all this video was far more than I expected it to be you did a phenomenal job. Secondly I typically despise music in videos but your choice and volume of music complemented the video perfectly. I’m really impressed overall with this presentation!
@@byte.raccoon wait 2-3 years and see of framework is still upgradable to current gen. If that answer is no, then it have very little benefits over sleeker+cheaper "non upgradable" machines
i have an e470 i got as a gift back in 2018, took me about an hour to completely strip it down and change the thermal paste and it was shocking how easy it was. not to mention it outlasted my legion gaming laptop made in 2022 lmao. new lenovo products suck imo. the display died while i had it plugged into an external monitor and when i rebooted it wouldn't post
I've owned numerous Thinkpads and now own several Chromebooks, as well as a Thinkpad T460S. I have to admit that every time I switch from any Chromebook to the T460S, the keyboard is good that I feel a physical relief, like donning an old pair of shoes.
The thing to remember is that the old T and X class were bolted down to a $$$,$$$ server as the licensing and management co-processor. So they could afford to make a run of magnesium frames or shells because it was basically a line item for a much more expensive product. And the X was for reaally high up jet setters. If you ever have the chance run one on a flight (I used a T430), it fits and is comfortably usable on a seat back tray. That trackpoint is AMAZE ing. Also the X230/T430/T530 were the very last in the design philosophy (or technically the X220,T420,T520, because they still had the 7 row keyboard). Source: I've fixed up a dozen of xx30 class and xx40 xx50 xx60, xx80, even P50, P70,P71. The E and L class are completely different beasts, much closer to low end Dell and HP/Acer/ASUS.
I am not really sure what you mean. Yes, the older T models especially from IBM were expensive, but not "bolted down" to anything. I still use T-Modells (T40p, T41p, T42p, T43p, T60p) and even older ones like the A30p, or really vintage models like the 600 and 755C. T400 to T430 are also very long lasting models from Lenovo. All run fine on Windows XP and sometimes up to Windows 7, Windows 10 or your choice of Linux. I mainly repaired IBM Thinkpads and today they are fine for retro gaming and collecting or doing some specific tech tasks involving parallel/serial ports or software that depends hard on Win 9x or DOS. At the moment I mainly use several W541 and P51. I like that they are still very old fashioned in terms of service and upgrading possibilities.
i use a x220 with i5 proccesor as a heavy duty diagnostic service, handle oil, grass, dirt without a blink and battery fully charge can play for 2 hours straight... panasonics heavy duty laptops are slower and clunky to use. long live to my beloved x220
Wrong. E series aside, the R and L series work and last just like the T series, but they use cheaper plastics for the chassis. I can't tell any other differences, can you ?
@@rochester212Yes, I can. The T-Series are busines models and serviced by Lenovo Technicians. Non-business series are serviced by Medion, have different spare parts and driver support. Same with HP. There is a huge difference between business and consumer notebooks and that is not just about reliable hardware but reliable and long lasting support.
Hello Retro Reverie. My name is Christopher, from Los Angeles. Just came across your channel. It appeared on my home screen through RUclips, since I like watching a lot of retro computer history stuff. Thank you so much for sharing this video, love to learn about older technology, and what things and tech were like back in the day. I would like to share, I am someone with a visual impairment to a certain degree. I’m sure there are many questions popping through your head about how I use my computer and smart phone without being able to see, which I am more than willing to answer and share. Before the 1980s, blind and low vision individuals could not use computers like we can today. Anyway, I don’t wanna make this comment, too too long, if there’s an email address on your channel, I’m sure we can collaborate through emails, and wouldn’t mind sharing more through there. Anyways, just wanted to say keep up the good work, looking forward to listening to more historic and retro tech videos. Take care of yourself.
ever since im 16 i heard from the thinkpad culture on internet forums but never had the opportunity to buy one, now that i work in an industry that requieres strong computer power everywhere i got an used p series workstation but i still want a classic one, they look so cool :(
Yes. I enjoyed the history segment. I have several models dating back to 1995. Love these machines!
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I enjoyed the history, I wasn't all that familiar with the IBM versions. I had a Lenovo Thinkpad t460 at work. I didn't think I'd like it but I did and it proved to be a real work horse. I later bought a refurbished t470 because I loved the keyboard. I now run Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon, 16 gigs of ram, 256 GB SSD drive, and have a docking station with external drives, webcam, and sound system. I love it and use it everyday to write, online meetings, surf the web, and watch videos etc. If I head out the door, I just pop it off the dock and go. I love this laptop and it still serves me well.
I worked with a vendor of industrial equipment in the EU. ThinkPad won my heart when IBM picked up a Laptop in a Hotel in one EU country, repaired it, and delivered it to another Hotel in the country in the opposite part of the EU. They did it in a span of a few days with removed HDD, and missing part of the bottom cover, no questions asked. The best customer support EVER.
What I love about ThinkPad is not about the performance, but the user experience. I downgraded from an Asus machine with a Ryzen 5 3500U to a more modest T470s on a 6th gen i7 but, but it felt like I'm using an overall more polished device p/s get the t470s over t460s if you can, thunderbolt and the windows precision touchpad is worth it.
I've been using a T480 for a year already, spent 250usd on it at the time. The only issues I got was the battery which is normal for a 3-5 year old device and the keyboard which was very easy to replace, otherwise it's been a solid laptop, very happy with it. When buying one you should watch out for Windows Autopilot, also for BIOS passwords and making sure it doesn't have Computrace or similar services set up.
@@MrMosoani Much faster transfer speed and can use an external GPU. I used to use my T480s as a gaming PC with an external GPU hooked up the the thunderbolt port.
Great upload, really enjoyed this video and how you went into the history of Lenovo’s acquisition of ThinkPad. You’re right, a lot of enthusiasts are still upset about the keyboard changes, especially since they reduced the key travel yet again with their last couple generations.
Hi, subbed for your presentation style, and thanks for this video. Having run primarily Acer laptops for many years, I've always wanted a Thinkpad. I recently bought a lot of 3 T430's (not T430S's) from Ebay, and even though they are older units than my newest Acer, I have fallen in love. Much higher quality and serviceability. The only real quality-of-life upgrade I will need to do is a display upgrade to full HD. I LOVE THESE LAPTOPS.
A Samaritan donated me a T61 with Docking Station - the original Battery has 40 % Wear - lasts for 1 hour - the Engineering is superbe and I instantly loved the machine. Works like new - with 8Gb RAM ok. I bought a T410 with Docking for 80 Euros. Amazing wonderful machine Thank YOU!
The first time I've ever touched a Thinkpad was on university, they had some X thinkpads for borrow and use on classes, I really loved the construction, keyboard, and how it looked amazing and since then I wanted to get a Thinkpad, and then months ago I got a used Thinkpad T420 only issues it had were the DVD drive randomly opening and the broken DisplayPort, corebooted it (EFI payload, no Legacy payload since I really like EFI), saved some money, got a i7-3612QM, new thermal grease, an SSD, managed to get 2x4Gb DDR3 sticks and gutted the DVD drive and by using some solder and glue, managed to put a 500 Gb HDD in it, it's one of the best laptops I've ever touched, now I just need to save money for a 9 cell battery and a mSATA SSD to put Linux in it, it is one of the best used things I've bought till today
During my time at the office I had 4 different Dell laptops in the span of 11 years, and while fine, each model had a different issue which (wifi twice, keyboard, mouse pad twice, overheating, noise, etc). Now I am in a different point of my carreer and just got a new basic Thinkpad, and love the clean classic design, the long battery life, low heat, the keyboard and multiple options for the mouse. Hope it lasts for years.
Really enjoyable video! Glad you didn't fell onto the "A is better than B because of reasons" and simply love your machines :). Extra props for the Celeste ingame footage!!! I personally use mainly various Thinkpads (r60, x220, x230, t430, t460 and x270) running mainly Linux and some sporadic Windows. I also have some IBM classic ones just used for media forensics, due to still having internal floppy drives and the like. I also use two Macbook Pro (2012) and a Macbook Air (2014). I do love all my machines. I work on several locations so I can have "the luxury" of leaving a complete setup ready in every place, considering some of those laptops costed me 100-150 euros at most. I'm sure it would be a really different story just running brand new X1 Carbons and Mac M2's :). The Macbook Pro 2012 and the x270 (and maybe the x230) are my daily drivers, jumping from one to the other almost in the same day (I make most of my job on the Linux terminal, be it local or remote). I do "feel" for the nostalgia of writing on an offline machine (though I sadly don't do much creative writing nowdays). Enjoy what you have. Laptops could be a cheap and fun hobby, indeed, if you don't constantly chase the cutting edge Greetings from Spain !!!
Thanks for writing! Cool to see this video reaching across the pond :) I am also a big fan of the 2012 MacBook Pro, it was the subject of my first video on this channel. Currently I need to fix the solder joints on the ram headers, after that I might turn it into a PFSense router.
Another Thinkpad fan here! Got these in perfect working condition: 755ACX, R51, x201, X220, X230T, S230U, X1 Yoga G1 and my prized possession: a mint-condition X300 😁 Appreciate these machines while we have them, while they're running. Laptops as we know them will be a thing in the past; almost everything will run thru the cloud or w/ a lot less hware bc of AI. Whic is your fav of yours btw? @lagunagfx
12:44 The T60 did have a widescreen version, and as for the T61, not only that but also widescreen was indeed the most common form factor. A simple eBay search shows that.
@@GhostRider5555555 That's right, but 16:10 is still widescreen, as opposed to 4:3. The first laptops that left 4:3 behind typically had 1280*800, which is an aspect ratio of 16:10, as you mention, and they were of course called widescreen.
13:50 "The X1 hit the market in 2011 as a response to the MacBook Air." It's more accurate to say that the MacBook Air was an Apple version of the ThinkPad X Series, which was itself a continuation of the earlier lightweight thinkpads going back to the 560 from 1996.
How does a laptop with a 720p screen even come close to competing with the X series? Did you make a typo or something? The MacBook Air was a low end device, and it was sold as such! The difference was the SSD, and at the time, it made the Air feel faster. I'm amazed that the uploader favorited such easily debunkable misinformation (there's no way they actually agree with your comment). Edit: maybe I figured it out. I was thinking of X1 Carbon, but you didn't say Carbon. My bad, potentially.
The T400 was not the first widescreen ThinkPad, bith the T60 and T61 were also available with 16:10 widescreen displays. Some of the workstation ThinkPad Laptops have physical touchpad buttons, like the P53 for example. With the new T14 Gen 5, Lenovo partnered with iFixit to make their laptops more upgradable and repairable again. So they brought the second RAM slot back and made the battery easier to replace
@@milescarter7803 To be fair, the design language was absolutely not gone for the first 5 years or so, to the point that the T60, T61, T400...looked almost identical to the T4x lineup that came right before the brand change. Nobody would have noticed any difference if the aforementioned models had sported an IBM icon on them!
@ethanosterhout8204: don’t you *DARE* sell that thing! it’s the very-LAST Thinkpad that was manufactured with-a-socketed-processor (not soldered onto the motherboard), which means it can be upgraded (let-alone replaced. (if for whatever-reason the processor stops working)). *AND* the laptop-itself has TONS of modular-components: • *ONLY* a EXTERNALLY-ACCESSIBLE battery (no difficult-to-access/not-that-quick-to-access/when-the-battery_heats-up_all-that-heat-goes-to-the-components-next-to-it internal rechargeable-battery), • 2 RAM-modules that are in 2 RAM-module slots and are *NOT* soldered-onto-the-motherboard, • 2.5-inch-platter-internal-storage-drive bay, • etc etc.
same for my T420, bought used, did modding on it and now it is faster and better than it already was when I bought, now I just need to slap more RAM in it, change the DP socket, buy a battery, and for last get an mSATA SSD to have both Windows and Linux on an SSD
My first laptop was a Thinkpad. I went on to own 3 of them. A good friend of mine works for IBM and I was able to access the discount pages in IBM's store. I miss the old Thinkpads.
just bought a used P52 from 2018, and it's a full ThinkPad, in name as in Ideology. The Mouse buttons below the Trackpad are there, the status LEDs below the screen on the hinge are there, it's great for upgradeability (4x DDR4 SO-DIMM (up to 128GB), 2x M.2 SSD, 1x 2.5' SSD Slot, all of them easily accessible either through the bottom case lid or through the Keyboard, but thats only 2 of the 4 DDR4 SO-DIMM slots). It came with the i7-8850H (6c/12t 2.6/4.3GHz and the Quadro P2000 (4gb GDDR5), so it can get shit done. All in all a really nice, albeit hefty Notebook (thing's got some Girth to it) and definitely a true ThinkPad in my Book.
Thanks for a great presentation. I love my T60p. I've got Ubuntu on it now. I've been thinking about switching to another distro, but had a bit of a challenge getting the graphics card driver installed, so I'm worried about going through that again. There was a lot of screen artifacting, and it would often be blank on boot up before I got that sorted out. I'm planning to get a larger drive so I can partition it for a bare-metal linux distro and Windows for retro-gaming. I'd like to get a newer Lenovo model that can handle more modern Windows, but is still in the spirit of the earlier IBM models. I need to do a bit more research to decide which fits my needs.
Great video! I enjoyed watching. Between what IBM & the PC market were going thru, and what Lenovo did for the ThinkPad & themselves, you bring up a lot of great points. That, and also about the upgradability towards the end - indeed, as long as you're buying a good laptop to begin with, you shouldn't be looking into doing big upgrades so soon. And even when that time comes in a few years, is taking off the bottom cover really that big a deal? A recent realization I had when when working on some older computers is that, to do a teardown, it actually tends to be a lot simpler on newer laptops. On oldies, to get to the motherboard, it tends to be a lot of parts that must be removed! While on newer laptops, although it's annoying, in comparison it's generally a lot more straightforward. I don't miss taking apart mid-2000s laptops all the time! Heavens, can those be complicated!
I will agree with this. Just serviced up a lot of old Latitude e6250's. About the third one in i was thinking, they sure don't build em "like this" anymore. Having to take the entire case apart to just get to the mouse buttons.
I am definitely interested in seeing how a full tear down fares on my 560z when I get around to making the upgrade video. The initial stuff is obviously simple but I have not yet tried to take it all apart yet.
Do take care when disassembling - many vintage laptops suffer from brittle plastic! I'm dealing with a huge pain in the ass HP Pavilion about the same age as your unit. Hopefully your unit was stored well, it looks nice but without having it in hand I have no idea. Get yourself a good quality spudger set, and a magnetic screwdriver if you don't already have one. And most importantly, be very gentle with the parts - don't let them bend as much as you can help it. I wish you the best of luck!
Well having to remove the bottom cover isn't annoying, but when it uses plastic or metal clips that will bend or break, instead of only 10 or so screws, that's when it becomes annoying to upgrade. My T480 is not painful to upgrade, but fearing parts of the laptop casing breaking is not pleasant, when it's only for RAM or storage upgrades, not even a heatsink or motherboard replacement.
I never got into the Thinkpads but I feel a strong call to start buying them. I use an awesome ThinkStation P520 as my home server which hosts my 16TB NAS, media server, and VM’s. I love the modularity of the ThinkStation and it has a monster 900w power supply. I got the P520 for under $200 delivered and it came with a Xeon W2135 and 32Gb emmc RAM. I upgraded to NVME SSD, 96Gb RAM, Xeon W2145 and replaced the front bays with a 3 bay hot swappable HDD insert for the NAS. Running Unraid for OS.
thinkpads are great, haven't had too much experience with them though, i'd like to see the dell latitudes and precisions covered, especially the precision series is interesting as a competitor to the thinkpad as a business laptop
I had an X230 and swapped to the X220 classic-style non-chiclet keyboard. I may be blaspheming but I didn't find the X220 keyboard typing feel to be notably better. I think the newer thinkpad chiclet-style keyboard is still best-in-class among laptop brands. If I had to choose again I don't think I would bother doing it. I think the main benefit of the old style is the 7th row or the pure aesthetic vibe. Really the main IBM-era thinkpad feature I miss most is the downward-sloping front edge of the palmrest.
My main home PC is a Dell Precision M4600, an elder and quite powerful thing, but I needed something smaller and much lighter to carry around or even work on my bed, so I got a very cheap ThinkPad L14 gen 1 from Amazon Renewed. I'm very much in love.
i really enjoyed my thinkpad collection, i am currently working on getting a fully upgraded t430. Currently i have a t480, t480s, x1 carbon 6th gen, x1 carbon 7th gen, x260, x270 and t14 gen 1 ryzen cpu. i really enjoyed having the collection, it quite fun great laptops. the x260 and x270 i will just use as it is, 256gb ssd 8gb ram i7 and i5 cpu. i dont know if i want to get a thinkpad older than t430 atm.
Awesome video my friend. It's hard to beat a Genuine IBM Thinkpad. Lenovo is good but I prefer the classic construction and quality of IBM. Keep up the good work. 😎
An oldschool IBM Thinkpad was the first computer I ever used. My father used to work for IBM and I learned how to type in my first webpages, learned what email was, and more in 2002. I'd never even used a mouse besides that eraser mouse for several years and I got good at using it for Starcraft and other games, nowadays I can't use that mouse to save my life haha
As a long time software developer that often travels to customer sites, when I started developing for PCs in the 90s, I bought my first PC laptop. The amazing, at the time, 701c. One time it developed an intermittent problem. I sent it to IBM on Friday, and it was fixed and returned to me the following Tuesday. Since then, other than a brief foray with a Toshiba, it has been all ThinkPads: A21p, T42p, T61p, W550s, P51. There was a gap when Lenovo dropped the buttons in favor of the "ClackPad". When they came to their senses and brought the buttons back, I upgraded again. The software that I develop deals with computer vision using multiple cameras and realtime processing. So as cameras have increased in resolution and machines have got faster, memory requirements have kept increasing. The P51 has the resources needed for what I do, with a Xeon, 64 GB memory, 1 TB M.2, 2 TB M.2, and room for a SATA 2.5" SSD.
I was working as an expat in the Asia-Pacific region for 19 months from 1977 to 1999. I bought an IBM ThinkPad with my own money because the company issued Dell was crap. Compared to my MacBook Pro bought just a couple of years ago that ThinkPad was merely okay. But at the time no other laptop came close to the ThinkPad.
Yes, I write notes in my THINK pad every day. Though due to being over 70 years old, some pages are a little bit yellowish and don't take ink that well.
I got a T14 Gen 3 i7 Thinkpad last year for $400. The only "problem" with it is I don't know the BIOS password and can only install WINDOWS on it. Sadly replacing the motherboard is the only way to get a new BIOS password on the Gen3's...
I loved my 560e which I bought used in about '99/'00. I sold it (at a slight profit!) but never found another laptop that i felt as comfortable with. Recently my HP Probook died and after a few days of frustrated googling and fiddling I decided to replace it with a reconditioned T470. VERY pleased with it. Yes, the keyboard isn't the same as the 560's but it's still vastly better than other keyboards I've encountered recently. Logically laid out and solid feeling. Decent screen and ports. What's not to love?
Eh, you win some, you lose some. I switched from a very tired T420 to a T14s recently. Keyboard has a much worse layout, it's not upgradeable at all (save for SSD) and I really wish it had an ethernet jack, but also display is much better, battery lasts way longer (even though it's not easily replaceable) and it still feels solid and sturdy compared to most other modern laptops. Tbh my biggest gripe with it is that thinklight is gone.
This is the first video of yours I've watched as it got recommended to me and the stuff you've said lines up with the things I've read online. I agree with the ThinkPad following some of the modern design of laptops now like getting thinner, but they're still mote servicable than a lot of laptops now. I got a T450 myself and I find it servicable (apart from the times I need a beefier cpu) and I like typing on it. I've tried some older ThinkPad models like the R61, T400, and X220 and interestingly I found their keyboard mushy compared to the one on my T450 and ThinkPad USB Compact Keyboard. The modern ThinkPad keyboard is still far better from the terrible thing that is the HP x360 of someone I knew and the keyboard on that thing felt like tapping on chromed plastic and nothing else. It was so shallow that I felt nothing when I typed and had to look down on that keyboard to be sure I'm typing something. The T450 is my first ThinkPad and I hope to get something more modern like the T480 in the future when I have some cash for that as the i5 5300U is lacking in processing power for my needs. Though with the T480 I'll have to deal with a screen upgrade as I can't find any 1080p screen units in my country so I might aim for a newer model with a better screen if they are financially feasible in the future.
I’m glad you enjoyed the video. Hopefully you can find something that works for you. I made some sacrifices with my own P14s which has an 11th gen i5 and a 1080p screen (I would have preferred higher resolution and a slightly better chip), but for the price I that I snagged it it definitely fills my needs as a writer and a student perfectly. It seems to me that the best thing is to aim at a higher chip with lower memory and storage, make sure those things are upgradable and then upgrade them when you’re ready. My model also only had 16gb RAM and 256 pcie3 m.2 which I upgraded to 24gb and 2tb respectively. Good luck on your search!
I really like ThinkPad laptops, even though my current daily driver is a Dell XPS 9520. I'd love to have T430 with T420 keyboard in my collection... a T61 would also be great for - as you said - distraction free typing experience.
I had an X230 and did the keyboard swap - I may be a blasphemer here but if I had to go back and do it again I don't think I'd do it again. I didn't find the typing experience to be notably better (that is to say, the newer style of keyboard is still among the best in class in the laptop industry in my opinion). So I think it's only worth doing if you really need that 7th row or just want the pure aesthetic vibe of it (understandable).
Got a free Lenovo T420s. 4gb, core i7, windows 10. Thinking about some ram and maybe an ultrabay battery? Any suggestions for other internals that can be swapped out for more internal battery? Ive heard tell of a smartcard battery, never seen one though.
I can’t say I know much about these batteries, but I’d say the best place to start is upgrading to 16gb ddr3 and swapping the hdd for a sata SSD, the performance boost from that alone will be worth while. I also like to do hard caddies in place of optical drives if you have one, then you can recycle the old hdd for extra storage
@@Junktown-James Got 16 Gigs of ram, off amazon. Mine already has an ssd, so it's down to an ultrabay battery. I don't have any big storage to do, battery life means a lot to me. 😀
I used to daily drive a T420s. The best mod that I've done was probably the IPS screen upgrade. It was night and day and you will never be able to go back to the default garbage TN panels. Ultrabay battery is fun as you can hot swap it if you got multiple units of them but keep in mind these batteries doesn't have that much capacity and don't actually last that long. They are also kinda expensive these days since they're harder to come by.
I used a Thinkpad T510 or 520 in school. That thing even had a coffee gutter in case I spilled coffee on my device during class! I still regret getting another laptop
By the way, 560Z was from 1998 and not 1996. Original 560 was from 1996 is the model I have, which I have kept since bough new in Japan back in 1996. Made in Japan, simply the best.
In the early to mid 90''s I had a 350 MHz pc,very good for it's time but with the rhen current rate of advancement it quickly became very low end. I opted for a laptop and stumped up more money than I care to remember for a 1.4 Ghz titanium think pad pro and dock (which I used exactly zero times😂)and what a machine it was, the trackball I personally loved,but its overall quality was evident.I still have it,it still works but I haven't used it for years. If I remember correctly the think pad was the first device to turn off it's HDD if it detected it was being dropped. One thing I can tell you is that it's far more robust and sturdier than the current idea pads my wife and I currently use,both have required new lid assemblies and hinges before they are even two years old.
ThinkPads served me well in my younger years, but the USB ports always seemed to be framed in cardboard. They still worked... so long as I went back in and straightened pins. These were the tail end of IBM-branded machines, too, as IBM supplied the primary breadwinner in our house, a long-time employee, with oddball work machines.
Honestly my major gripe with old thinkpads is the old hardaware. its not just an issue of performance its also an issue of maintenance and support, even if you use linux with a lightweight window manager. Reality is newer hardware is simply more efficient too and you can make good use of the big battery banks (or dual batteries in the case of my T440s)
I used to work in a company where once, they tossed away a bunch of Lenovo's T430. They got into my hands... memory upgrades, new keyboard for one, SSD with bigger capacity and Fedora Linux running in one of them... I love the easiness to open, change, disconnect, reconnect, plug and make it work. The concept of "planned obsolescence" vanished in front of me with high Usability. They are like 3rd generation Intel I7 upgradable up to 16GB Ram. (old but still very functional)
I've got a T60, 2 T61a, an X200 (precursor to the Yoga machines), and a T510 (which has a full complement of mouse buttons). I also have an Ideapad, which isn't quite as rugged as the Thinkpads were - but since it's a lot newer, it's what I use.
The "response" to the MBA may not have been that given the timeline of when they each were introduced. In any case, the ThinkPad competitor was the X300/301 which was some years before the X1 series.
My first laptop was a 755CE with OS/2. The 755CE didn't need any tools to upgrade or swap components. Just pull the screen latch releases further, and the keyboard pulled up. The floppy was modular, the battery was modular, and the hard drive was modular, all of them pulled straight up from under the keyboard. I had a TV card that would slot in where the floppy was, and I know you could get CD drives for it as well. I'm currently using a Panasonic instead of a Thinkpad now. I still miss the trackpoint a little, but the Panasonic has a decent amount of repair-ability and swappable parts. It was like your 90's thinkpad, one screw to swap the memory, one screw to swap the wifi card, the hard drive, battery, and cd drive needed no screws at all. It's getting old now, being almost 12 years outdated. If I were buying a laptop now, I'd go with a Framework. I've seen how they continue to release new motherboards for their original first model, so I'm confident that they'll keep doing that as long as they exist. The old motherboards that get swapped out have been going around as components for all kinds of new devices.
I personally decided to go for a dual thinkpad approach. A Thin and light and an upgradable one, best of both worlds and lets be honest, since the upgradable older ones cost so little I invested on a ehin and light used relatively new one (3 year old x1 carbon) and then Ill easiky save uo for an older upgradable one (might have made a mistake taking a t450s since theres more upgradable ones but it was 100 bucks, Im happy, thats all that matters)
I'm a ThinkPad fanboy. My wife and I each have a T520 in addition to our desktops. I'm even using a T420 with a large HDD in the CD-ROM bay as a poor man's server on our home network. My first Thinkpad was a T61, the first one with a wide screen display. I've had good luck buying off lease units on eBay.
I love current ThinkPads. My current model is the X1 Yoga Gen 6, and it is an excellent machine. I am a Linux user, and ThinkPad has always been great with their Linux support.
When I was in high school I bought a commodore calculator that could be programmed with a formula. I thought that was so cool until they came up with the PET computer. The PET used a cassette tape as a drive mechanism. Yes they were slow but they were awesome to a wide eyed student. My father had an IBM computer in his business to do spreadsheets for his inventory. That IBM was ten feet long and four feet high. It is amazing to me how rapidly all of the modern solutions have become. I believe that future computers will be a very small form factor with virtual solutions to enter information and will be commonly available to the public. Where will we go from there? We have to be very careful because future solutions can have serious consequences.
God I love the TrackPoint - my first and only ThinkPad (T40) used for college, and I was not sure about that little red nub, but once using it, I learned fast to love it and despise touch pads.
I have been using ThinkPad since 1996. IBM made ThinkPads were not immune to poor quality materials and designs. They did break but most of the time the repair process was not hard and parts were easily obtainable. Demand for bulky upgradable machines are not there any more. People want lightweight and longer battery. Good to see repairability make a come back on the gen 5 T14 and patterning with ifixit. I’m sure framework and people like Louise Rossman helped push for more sustainable modern computing.
I used to have an old 1997 model ThinkPad (I don't recall the exact model, sorry), which I absolutely adored, and I've *yearned* for one of the newer ones for years specifically because of that experience. This year I got lucky enough to be able to upgrade my very worn out HP laptop to a T495 (2018, so not super new) and I gotta say that for all the griping I've read online about how the 480 was the "last true Thinkpad," this thing truly lives up to everything I loved about that old '97 model I used well into the 2010s from the late aughts. The keyboard just feels RIGHT, the track pad is very above average for a laptop, and it is, of course, extremely serviceable. I do regret some of the changes Lenovo made with that generation (M.2 storage only? Come on.) but overall it is a wonderful machine, and it's definitely cemented for me that I'd rather go without a laptop entirely than get something other than another Thinkpad.
To me the most important features thinkpads did away with was modularity. I have 2 old thinkpads that have modular IOs that i do like using. On one thinkpad it has 3 mini PCIe slots, hot swap bay, PCMCIA, expresscard and a dock with a PCIe slot. I used all those expansions and being able to use an extra battery was nice. On another thinkpad it has expresscard and thunderbolt. This is typically my complaint about modern laptops is the lack of modular IO and while the framework does offer this it does not offer thunderbolt as i do like PCIe connectivity for things like running GPUs externally as this saves power so i only plug in the component when i need it. One example of using the IO on an old thinkpad was, PCMCIA card for modern IO, expresscard for eGPU, miniPCIe slots for wireless, soundcard on the 2503 dock, extra battery and CD for the hot swap. The only thing that stops a similar HP laptop with its modularity from being popular is price. If you are going for the eGPU/PCIe card route, dont bother with dell AGA, it is terrible. stick to PCIe options instead like thunderbolt or expresscard. You cant run a 10Gb/s NIC on dell AGA but you can on thunderbolt while dell will disable your GPU with a card plugged in yet not let you use it.
While I agree that having greater modularity in modern laptops would be fantastic (for greater port variety, swappable batteries, and eGPUs), the framework laptops do offer thunderbolt natively on their expansion cards, and can connect to eGPUs.
I will receive and excited to unbox my T480s 1TB 20gb RAM this week. I accidentally bought it coz I meant to buy the t480. Coming from Macbook Pro user of 10yrs. Switching to Windows especially on Thinkpads it's like coming home. I grew up using windows and thinkpads was my first choice but because of wanting to showoff I ended up buying Macbook Pro.
There was a laptop from a Chinese Clevo that lets you change not only RAM, but a CPU too as they just have put B350 motherboard with a whole ass AM4 socket. That's what I call an upgradability
up till the 4th gen iseries laptops you could upgrade the CPU. I did on mine to the extreme edition recently for its very cheap price to get more cache and performance but it can pull more power than the laptop was designed for. (it can use 100W instead of 65W)
They can do some stuff that the new ones can't. I know the older ones you are able to connect an external gpu with the help of some other connectors. not sure if you can do that on the newer ones
The P14s featured in this video has thunderbolt 3 which should run an EGPU on a compatible thunderbolt dock. Models with a Ryzen chip might have a harder time with that
Personally, I think that Lenovo did try out to make the best thinkpads they could while the overall chinese culture was at its modern peak (pre-2018). Nowadays however, the current climate in both the USA and PRC is quite dreadful, which in turn makes some of these sino-american ventures to suffer the most. I mean, just look at the other few successful ventures such as SAIC-GM. They used to make good or at least decent cars using the branding image and tech from GM, but as time has gone, both have started to go their own ways, sometimes for the best, but a lot of times it just become a crowd pleasing experience. And that is not even mentioning the worst effects of the Sino-US split, as ARM pretty much got fvcked hard by the Chinese as they blatantly stole their division in the biggest ARM producing region in the world.
the old keyboard layout is just fantastic (especially the xx20 iteration), the new one is just like in typical toy laptops 20:40 lol, I have 32 GB in my W520
I bought a second hand X21 for £250 many years ago. It came with a detachable ~docking unit that sat under the laptop with a DVD and FDD plus a pair of decent speakers. fantastic machine 192mb of ram Win98se that's had a few nice extras added. I used it yesterday for about two hours the first time since the battery finally died at Christmas time. If I still went out with a laptop it would be worth getting a new battery but as I tend to use it sitting in an armchair, having the lead is no problem. I am also lucky enough to have a T60, both superb machines. - I would not tolerate your modern laptop, not just because I loath M$ 8-10-11 but without a detachable battery it's usefulness is highly compromised. - I have moved from Win7 to Q4os Trinity(Linux) for my internet connected box and remain a loyal user of (highly enhanced)XP for all my other desktops.
My p14s was a big disappointment for 2 years before the recent firmware update. Thermo trottling, high power consumption at idle, fan noise and missing keyboard back light. Fortunately I updated the firmware and switched to Linux, immediately it becomes a cool collected swift workstation. And the keyboard is easily swapable so I got one with back light.
I love my old X230 and T430 but the reality of the matter is if I am actually taking a laptop with me anywhere these days I go straight for my X270. Being able to charge by USB and not carry a bulky charger or a bunch of spare batteries with me is more useful in general than a slightly better keyboard. Whenever someone needs a cheap laptop I always point them to the t450 which I think gives the best value out of all of the modern thinkpads and make great web browsing/streaming/office PCs. I do want to pick up a T480 as well if I see a cheap one. Going back to quad core processors but with modern features like thunderbolt while still retaining socketed RAM is the perfect combination for me
I see T480's for sub $200 where I live, I think it's currently the best in value right now. I don't think I'd go for anything older than an _80 series at this point just due to the sheer peformance increase.
Unless you are doing video editing, 8GB RAM is plenty for everyday use so there is much less need to upgrade memory these days, but it is nice to upgradable hard drives as new bigger, faster, and cheaper drives are coming out all the time.
I’ve been an Apple fan since the early 90s, but I’ve always liked Thinkpads. I’ve had several of those laptops, and even the older ones w the i5 do fine nowadays.
When I was 10 years old, my parents bought me and old ibm thinkpad. To this day I love that thinkpad, especially the keyboard. I hate that Lenovo changed the keyboard.
I bought a refurbed T410 in 2018 as a beater mobile PPT machine. It ran perfectly for 6 years. It was just retired in 2024. There's something to be said for being built like a tank.
The one thing I ran across with the Thinkpad line is that there's a lot more Thinkpads that are easy to service than what most people will say. I've heard people say that the T430, or the T480 was the last "good" Thinkpad with solid repairability, but I've found that the most recent Thinkpad that has a replaceable battery, replaceable RAM, and easy to access Hard-drive was 2018's P52. (or at least, the most recent one I found) Just goes to show how long Lenovo has been at this this whole repairability thing.
Thanks for that video! I was buying mobile workstation in 2020 and seriously considering Thinkpads, but finally turned to HP z-book G6 17. Similar price, but I think it's more upgradable. Still with me working like an ox :D
OK so first of all this video was far more than I expected it to be you did a phenomenal job. Secondly I typically despise music in videos but your choice and volume of music complemented the video perfectly. I’m really impressed overall with this presentation!
I prefer the design philosophy of older ThinkPads but for all my gripes my L570 is vastly better in servicability to other modern laptops
Actually the best is Framework laptop now
As for Thinkpads, they are much worse than they used to be
@@byte.raccoon wait 2-3 years and see of framework is still upgradable to current gen. If that answer is no, then it have very little benefits over sleeker+cheaper "non upgradable" machines
My wife has XPS15, and I have W541, i have to admit the XPS is quite good at serviceability.
@@ssu7653 I mean, framework whole selling point is it's easy to take apart. without it the company doesn't have any competitive advantage
i have an e470 i got as a gift back in 2018, took me about an hour to completely strip it down and change the thermal paste and it was shocking how easy it was. not to mention it outlasted my legion gaming laptop made in 2022 lmao. new lenovo products suck imo. the display died while i had it plugged into an external monitor and when i rebooted it wouldn't post
I've owned numerous Thinkpads and now own several Chromebooks, as well as a Thinkpad T460S. I have to admit that every time I switch from any Chromebook to the T460S, the keyboard is good that I feel a physical relief, like donning an old pair of shoes.
Why is it so hard for other laptop manufactures to replicate such a nice keyboard?
@@UNK_0 they dont care, because thats not what people want. people want super slim, lightweight and fast laptops.
@@shaun_snow the people are morons. Typing matters.
The thing to remember is that the old T and X class were bolted down to a $$$,$$$ server as the licensing and management co-processor. So they could afford to make a run of magnesium frames or shells because it was basically a line item for a much more expensive product. And the X was for reaally high up jet setters. If you ever have the chance run one on a flight (I used a T430), it fits and is comfortably usable on a seat back tray. That trackpoint is AMAZE ing.
Also the X230/T430/T530 were the very last in the design philosophy (or technically the X220,T420,T520, because they still had the 7 row keyboard). Source: I've fixed up a dozen of xx30 class and xx40 xx50 xx60, xx80, even P50, P70,P71.
The E and L class are completely different beasts, much closer to low end Dell and HP/Acer/ASUS.
I am not really sure what you mean. Yes, the older T models especially from IBM were expensive, but not "bolted down" to anything. I still use T-Modells (T40p, T41p, T42p, T43p, T60p) and even older ones like the A30p, or really vintage models like the 600 and 755C. T400 to T430 are also very long lasting models from Lenovo. All run fine on Windows XP and sometimes up to Windows 7, Windows 10 or your choice of Linux. I mainly repaired IBM Thinkpads and today they are fine for retro gaming and collecting or doing some specific tech tasks involving parallel/serial ports or software that depends hard on Win 9x or DOS. At the moment I mainly use several W541 and P51. I like that they are still very old fashioned in terms of service and upgrading possibilities.
@@Grimhood They used those laptops as a "dongles" in mainframes.
i use a x220 with i5 proccesor as a heavy duty diagnostic service, handle oil, grass, dirt without a blink and battery fully charge can play for 2 hours straight... panasonics heavy duty laptops are slower and clunky to use. long live to my beloved x220
Wrong. E series aside, the R and L series work and last just like the T series, but they use cheaper plastics for the chassis. I can't tell any other differences, can you ?
@@rochester212Yes, I can. The T-Series are busines models and serviced by Lenovo Technicians. Non-business series are serviced by Medion, have different spare parts and driver support. Same with HP. There is a huge difference between business and consumer notebooks and that is not just about reliable hardware but reliable and long lasting support.
Hello Retro Reverie. My name is Christopher, from Los Angeles.
Just came across your channel. It appeared on my home screen through RUclips, since I like watching a lot of retro computer history stuff.
Thank you so much for sharing this video, love to learn about older technology, and what things and tech were like back in the day. I would like to share, I am someone with a visual impairment to a certain degree. I’m sure there are many questions popping through your head about how I use my computer and smart phone without being able to see, which I am more than willing to answer and share.
Before the 1980s, blind and low vision individuals could not use computers like we can today.
Anyway, I don’t wanna make this comment, too too long, if there’s an email address on your channel, I’m sure we can collaborate through emails, and wouldn’t mind sharing more through there.
Anyways, just wanted to say keep up the good work, looking forward to listening to more historic and retro tech videos.
Take care of yourself.
as a bystander i liked reading your story. glad that you were able to enjoy his video! technology is more accessible nowadays for sure...
My name is Walter wartwell white
ever since im 16 i heard from the thinkpad culture on internet forums but never had the opportunity to buy one, now that i work in an industry that requieres strong computer power everywhere i got an used p series workstation but i still want a classic one, they look so cool :(
Yes. I enjoyed the history segment. I have several models dating back to 1995. Love these machines!
I enjoyed the history, I wasn't all that familiar with the IBM versions. I had a Lenovo Thinkpad t460 at work. I didn't think I'd like it but I did and it proved to be a real work horse. I later bought a refurbished t470 because I loved the keyboard. I now run Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon, 16 gigs of ram, 256 GB SSD drive, and have a docking station with external drives, webcam, and sound system. I love it and use it everyday to write, online meetings, surf the web, and watch videos etc. If I head out the door, I just pop it off the dock and go. I love this laptop and it still serves me well.
Great channel and content, glad to be one of the first 100 subs 👍
Welcome aboard! Glad you’re here.
I worked with a vendor of industrial equipment in the EU. ThinkPad won my heart when IBM picked up a Laptop in a Hotel in one EU country, repaired it, and delivered it to another Hotel in the country in the opposite part of the EU. They did it in a span of a few days with removed HDD, and missing part of the bottom cover, no questions asked. The best customer support EVER.
You deserve more subscribers! Keep it up you will be at 300k subs in no time. Quality content man
Thanks for the kind words :) more is on the way.
What I love about ThinkPad is not about the performance, but the user experience. I downgraded from an Asus machine with a Ryzen 5 3500U to a more modest T470s on a 6th gen i7 but, but it felt like I'm using an overall more polished device
p/s get the t470s over t460s if you can, thunderbolt and the windows precision touchpad is worth it.
I've been using a T480 for a year already, spent 250usd on it at the time. The only issues I got was the battery which is normal for a 3-5 year old device and the keyboard which was very easy to replace, otherwise it's been a solid laptop, very happy with it.
When buying one you should watch out for Windows Autopilot, also for BIOS passwords and making sure it doesn't have Computrace or similar services set up.
T480 and t480s are the best laptops I’ve ever used.
running my t480 i5-8350u with the 72wh battery+internal 24 and fedora linux with i3wm gets me 12+ hours of battery life, its great
@@nathmorris1your comment makes me excited to unbox my T480s arriving this week.
I know nothing about the thunderbolt though. what's great about it?
@@MrMosoani Much faster transfer speed and can use an external GPU. I used to use my T480s as a gaming PC with an external GPU hooked up the the thunderbolt port.
Great upload, really enjoyed this video and how you went into the history of Lenovo’s acquisition of ThinkPad. You’re right, a lot of enthusiasts are still upset about the keyboard changes, especially since they reduced the key travel yet again with their last couple generations.
Hi, subbed for your presentation style, and thanks for this video.
Having run primarily Acer laptops for many years, I've always wanted a Thinkpad. I recently bought a lot of 3 T430's (not T430S's) from Ebay, and even though they are older units than my newest Acer, I have fallen in love. Much higher quality and serviceability. The only real quality-of-life upgrade I will need to do is a display upgrade to full HD.
I LOVE THESE LAPTOPS.
A Samaritan donated me a T61 with Docking Station - the original Battery has 40 % Wear - lasts for 1 hour - the Engineering is superbe and I instantly loved the machine.
Works like new - with 8Gb RAM ok.
I bought a T410 with Docking for 80 Euros.
Amazing wonderful machine
Thank YOU!
The first time I've ever touched a Thinkpad was on university, they had some X thinkpads for borrow and use on classes, I really loved the construction, keyboard, and how it looked amazing and since then I wanted to get a Thinkpad, and then months ago I got a used Thinkpad T420 only issues it had were the DVD drive randomly opening and the broken DisplayPort, corebooted it (EFI payload, no Legacy payload since I really like EFI), saved some money, got a i7-3612QM, new thermal grease, an SSD, managed to get 2x4Gb DDR3 sticks and gutted the DVD drive and by using some solder and glue, managed to put a 500 Gb HDD in it, it's one of the best laptops I've ever touched, now I just need to save money for a 9 cell battery and a mSATA SSD to put Linux in it, it is one of the best used things I've bought till today
During my time at the office I had 4 different Dell laptops in the span of 11 years, and while fine, each model had a different issue which (wifi twice, keyboard, mouse pad twice, overheating, noise, etc). Now I am in a different point of my carreer and just got a new basic Thinkpad, and love the clean classic design, the long battery life, low heat, the keyboard and multiple options for the mouse. Hope it lasts for years.
Great job for the video man, continue the good work.
Wow ! That was a great informative rundown on these machines.
Very well done indeed !
Really enjoyable video! Glad you didn't fell onto the "A is better than B because of reasons" and simply love your machines :). Extra props for the Celeste ingame footage!!!
I personally use mainly various Thinkpads (r60, x220, x230, t430, t460 and x270) running mainly Linux and some sporadic Windows. I also have some IBM classic ones just used for media forensics, due to still having internal floppy drives and the like. I also use two Macbook Pro (2012) and a Macbook Air (2014). I do love all my machines.
I work on several locations so I can have "the luxury" of leaving a complete setup ready in every place, considering some of those laptops costed me 100-150 euros at most. I'm sure it would be a really different story just running brand new X1 Carbons and Mac M2's :).
The Macbook Pro 2012 and the x270 (and maybe the x230) are my daily drivers, jumping from one to the other almost in the same day (I make most of my job on the Linux terminal, be it local or remote). I do "feel" for the nostalgia of writing on an offline machine (though I sadly don't do much creative writing nowdays).
Enjoy what you have. Laptops could be a cheap and fun hobby, indeed, if you don't constantly chase the cutting edge
Greetings from Spain !!!
Thanks for writing! Cool to see this video reaching across the pond :) I am also a big fan of the 2012 MacBook Pro, it was the subject of my first video on this channel. Currently I need to fix the solder joints on the ram headers, after that I might turn it into a PFSense router.
Another Thinkpad fan here! Got these in perfect working condition: 755ACX, R51, x201, X220, X230T, S230U, X1 Yoga G1 and my prized possession: a mint-condition X300 😁 Appreciate these machines while we have them, while they're running. Laptops as we know them will be a thing in the past; almost everything will run thru the cloud or w/ a lot less hware bc of AI. Whic is your fav of yours btw? @lagunagfx
12:44 The T60 did have a widescreen version, and as for the T61, not only that but also widescreen was indeed the most common form factor. A simple eBay search shows that.
It was 16:10, not 16:9.
@@GhostRider5555555 That's right, but 16:10 is still widescreen, as opposed to 4:3. The first laptops that left 4:3 behind typically had 1280*800, which is an aspect ratio of 16:10, as you mention, and they were of course called widescreen.
13:50 "The X1 hit the market in 2011 as a response to the MacBook Air."
It's more accurate to say that the MacBook Air was an Apple version of the ThinkPad X Series, which was itself a continuation of the earlier lightweight thinkpads going back to the 560 from 1996.
I had a 560 and loved it. It was do convenient and fit in my briefcase.
Actually, the X300 was the response to the MBA - ruclips.net/video/_hnOCUkbix0/видео.html
How does a laptop with a 720p screen even come close to competing with the X series? Did you make a typo or something? The MacBook Air was a low end device, and it was sold as such! The difference was the SSD, and at the time, it made the Air feel faster. I'm amazed that the uploader favorited such easily debunkable misinformation (there's no way they actually agree with your comment).
Edit: maybe I figured it out. I was thinking of X1 Carbon, but you didn't say Carbon. My bad, potentially.
Almost 500 subscribers, I've subscribed now too. Nice info
The T400 was not the first widescreen ThinkPad, bith the T60 and T61 were also available with 16:10 widescreen displays.
Some of the workstation ThinkPad Laptops have physical touchpad buttons, like the P53 for example.
With the new T14 Gen 5, Lenovo partnered with iFixit to make their laptops more upgradable and repairable again. So they brought the second RAM slot back and made the battery easier to replace
I know my Thinkpad isn't the oldest, but I absolutely love my T440P. I'm hoping I'll be able to make it work all through college!
It's not about being the oldest, it's about not being IBM anymore, it was spun off to Lenovo by that point, all the old design philosophy was gone.
@@milescarter7803 To be fair, the design language was absolutely not gone for the first 5 years or so, to the point that the T60, T61, T400...looked almost identical to the T4x lineup that came right before the brand change. Nobody would have noticed any difference if the aforementioned models had sported an IBM icon on them!
@@milescarter7803 Simply, No.
You are the one kept spaced in this video, who is nonproductive and irrational.
@ethanosterhout8204:
don’t you *DARE* sell that thing! it’s the very-LAST Thinkpad that was manufactured with-a-socketed-processor (not soldered onto the motherboard), which means it can be upgraded (let-alone replaced. (if for whatever-reason the processor stops working)).
*AND* the laptop-itself has TONS of modular-components:
• *ONLY* a EXTERNALLY-ACCESSIBLE battery (no difficult-to-access/not-that-quick-to-access/when-the-battery_heats-up_all-that-heat-goes-to-the-components-next-to-it internal rechargeable-battery),
• 2 RAM-modules that are in 2 RAM-module slots and are *NOT* soldered-onto-the-motherboard,
• 2.5-inch-platter-internal-storage-drive bay,
• etc etc.
same for my T420, bought used, did modding on it and now it is faster and better than it already was when I bought, now I just need to slap more RAM in it, change the DP socket, buy a battery, and for last get an mSATA SSD to have both Windows and Linux on an SSD
Great breakdown of an amazing laptop. New sub :)
the gen 5 p14s and t14 have 2 upgradeable so dimm slots with a limit of 96gb. i think that's great
My first laptop was a Thinkpad. I went on to own 3 of them. A good friend of mine works for IBM and I was able to access the discount pages in IBM's store. I miss the old Thinkpads.
just bought a used P52 from 2018, and it's a full ThinkPad, in name as in Ideology. The Mouse buttons below the Trackpad are there, the status LEDs below the screen on the hinge are there, it's great for upgradeability (4x DDR4 SO-DIMM (up to 128GB), 2x M.2 SSD, 1x 2.5' SSD Slot, all of them easily accessible either through the bottom case lid or through the Keyboard, but thats only 2 of the 4 DDR4 SO-DIMM slots). It came with the i7-8850H (6c/12t 2.6/4.3GHz and the Quadro P2000 (4gb GDDR5), so it can get shit done. All in all a really nice, albeit hefty Notebook (thing's got some Girth to it) and definitely a true ThinkPad in my Book.
My eyebrows are raised and now I might be grabbing one of these
Thanks for a great presentation. I love my T60p. I've got Ubuntu on it now. I've been thinking about switching to another distro, but had a bit of a challenge getting the graphics card driver installed, so I'm worried about going through that again. There was a lot of screen artifacting, and it would often be blank on boot up before I got that sorted out. I'm planning to get a larger drive so I can partition it for a bare-metal linux distro and Windows for retro-gaming. I'd like to get a newer Lenovo model that can handle more modern Windows, but is still in the spirit of the earlier IBM models. I need to do a bit more research to decide which fits my needs.
Great video! I enjoyed watching. Between what IBM & the PC market were going thru, and what Lenovo did for the ThinkPad & themselves, you bring up a lot of great points. That, and also about the upgradability towards the end - indeed, as long as you're buying a good laptop to begin with, you shouldn't be looking into doing big upgrades so soon. And even when that time comes in a few years, is taking off the bottom cover really that big a deal?
A recent realization I had when when working on some older computers is that, to do a teardown, it actually tends to be a lot simpler on newer laptops. On oldies, to get to the motherboard, it tends to be a lot of parts that must be removed! While on newer laptops, although it's annoying, in comparison it's generally a lot more straightforward. I don't miss taking apart mid-2000s laptops all the time! Heavens, can those be complicated!
I will agree with this. Just serviced up a lot of old Latitude e6250's. About the third one in i was thinking, they sure don't build em "like this" anymore. Having to take the entire case apart to just get to the mouse buttons.
I am definitely interested in seeing how a full tear down fares on my 560z when I get around to making the upgrade video. The initial stuff is obviously simple but I have not yet tried to take it all apart yet.
Do take care when disassembling - many vintage laptops suffer from brittle plastic! I'm dealing with a huge pain in the ass HP Pavilion about the same age as your unit. Hopefully your unit was stored well, it looks nice but without having it in hand I have no idea. Get yourself a good quality spudger set, and a magnetic screwdriver if you don't already have one. And most importantly, be very gentle with the parts - don't let them bend as much as you can help it. I wish you the best of luck!
Well having to remove the bottom cover isn't annoying, but when it uses plastic or metal clips that will bend or break, instead of only 10 or so screws, that's when it becomes annoying to upgrade. My T480 is not painful to upgrade, but fearing parts of the laptop casing breaking is not pleasant, when it's only for RAM or storage upgrades, not even a heatsink or motherboard replacement.
I never got into the Thinkpads but I feel a strong call to start buying them. I use an awesome ThinkStation P520 as my home server which hosts my 16TB NAS, media server, and VM’s. I love the modularity of the ThinkStation and it has a monster 900w power supply. I got the P520 for under $200 delivered and it came with a Xeon W2135 and 32Gb emmc RAM. I upgraded to NVME SSD, 96Gb RAM, Xeon W2145 and replaced the front bays with a 3 bay hot swappable HDD insert for the NAS. Running Unraid for OS.
thinkpads are great, haven't had too much experience with them though, i'd like to see the dell latitudes and precisions covered, especially the precision series is interesting as a competitor to the thinkpad as a business laptop
I had an X230 and swapped to the X220 classic-style non-chiclet keyboard. I may be blaspheming but I didn't find the X220 keyboard typing feel to be notably better. I think the newer thinkpad chiclet-style keyboard is still best-in-class among laptop brands. If I had to choose again I don't think I would bother doing it. I think the main benefit of the old style is the 7th row or the pure aesthetic vibe.
Really the main IBM-era thinkpad feature I miss most is the downward-sloping front edge of the palmrest.
I currently have the T500, T520, T430, X201, all in good condition, all running various Linux distros and yes, i use Arch BTW!!! Good video!!
install 9front
My main home PC is a Dell Precision M4600, an elder and quite powerful thing, but I needed something smaller and much lighter to carry around or even work on my bed, so I got a very cheap ThinkPad L14 gen 1 from Amazon Renewed. I'm very much in love.
Been dailying a T430 for seven years, and I absolutely love it. Everything's serviceable.
Guitar pick works great for removing backplates on newer thinkpads
i really enjoyed my thinkpad collection, i am currently working on getting a fully upgraded t430. Currently i have a t480, t480s, x1 carbon 6th gen, x1 carbon 7th gen, x260, x270 and t14 gen 1 ryzen cpu. i really enjoyed having the collection, it quite fun great laptops. the x260 and x270 i will just use as it is, 256gb ssd 8gb ram i7 and i5 cpu. i dont know if i want to get a thinkpad older than t430 atm.
A lot of older Dell laptops are like that too. I have a Latitude D630 running Debian that is lovely for writing my personal notes in.
Switched from a mac to a Lenovo t16 which I've installed Linux on. So far it's the best laptop I've ever owned.
Awesome video my friend. It's hard to beat a Genuine IBM Thinkpad. Lenovo is good but I prefer the classic construction and quality of IBM. Keep up the good work. 😎
I would certainly not complain if they made an exact copy of the classic IBM with modern specs. It’ll never happen but a man can dream
An oldschool IBM Thinkpad was the first computer I ever used. My father used to work for IBM and I learned how to type in my first webpages, learned what email was, and more in 2002. I'd never even used a mouse besides that eraser mouse for several years and I got good at using it for Starcraft and other games, nowadays I can't use that mouse to save my life haha
As a long time software developer that often travels to customer sites, when I started developing for PCs in the 90s, I bought my first PC laptop. The amazing, at the time, 701c. One time it developed an intermittent problem. I sent it to IBM on Friday, and it was fixed and returned to me the following Tuesday.
Since then, other than a brief foray with a Toshiba, it has been all ThinkPads: A21p, T42p, T61p, W550s, P51. There was a gap when Lenovo dropped the buttons in favor of the "ClackPad". When they came to their senses and brought the buttons back, I upgraded again.
The software that I develop deals with computer vision using multiple cameras and realtime processing. So as cameras have increased in resolution and machines have got faster, memory requirements have kept increasing. The P51 has the resources needed for what I do, with a Xeon, 64 GB memory, 1 TB M.2, 2 TB M.2, and room for a SATA 2.5" SSD.
I was working as an expat in the Asia-Pacific region for 19 months from 1977 to 1999. I bought an IBM ThinkPad with my own money because the company issued Dell was crap. Compared to my MacBook Pro bought just a couple of years ago that ThinkPad was merely okay. But at the time no other laptop came close to the ThinkPad.
Yes, I write notes in my THINK pad every day. Though due to being over 70 years old, some pages are a little bit yellowish and don't take ink that well.
I got a T14 Gen 3 i7 Thinkpad last year for $400. The only "problem" with it is I don't know the BIOS password and can only install WINDOWS on it. Sadly replacing the motherboard is the only way to get a new BIOS password on the Gen3's...
Great Video 👍
I loved my 560e which I bought used in about '99/'00. I sold it (at a slight profit!) but never found another laptop that i felt as comfortable with. Recently my HP Probook died and after a few days of frustrated googling and fiddling I decided to replace it with a reconditioned T470. VERY pleased with it. Yes, the keyboard isn't the same as the 560's but it's still vastly better than other keyboards I've encountered recently. Logically laid out and solid feeling. Decent screen and ports. What's not to love?
Eh, you win some, you lose some.
I switched from a very tired T420 to a T14s recently. Keyboard has a much worse layout, it's not upgradeable at all (save for SSD) and I really wish it had an ethernet jack, but also display is much better, battery lasts way longer (even though it's not easily replaceable) and it still feels solid and sturdy compared to most other modern laptops.
Tbh my biggest gripe with it is that thinklight is gone.
P14s has the ethernet port.
Every writer I know has an old Thinkpad they write on just for the keyboard, absolutely best keyboard ever.
This is the first video of yours I've watched as it got recommended to me and the stuff you've said lines up with the things I've read online. I agree with the ThinkPad following some of the modern design of laptops now like getting thinner, but they're still mote servicable than a lot of laptops now.
I got a T450 myself and I find it servicable (apart from the times I need a beefier cpu) and I like typing on it. I've tried some older ThinkPad models like the R61, T400, and X220 and interestingly I found their keyboard mushy compared to the one on my T450 and ThinkPad USB Compact Keyboard.
The modern ThinkPad keyboard is still far better from the terrible thing that is the HP x360 of someone I knew and the keyboard on that thing felt like tapping on chromed plastic and nothing else. It was so shallow that I felt nothing when I typed and had to look down on that keyboard to be sure I'm typing something.
The T450 is my first ThinkPad and I hope to get something more modern like the T480 in the future when I have some cash for that as the i5 5300U is lacking in processing power for my needs. Though with the T480 I'll have to deal with a screen upgrade as I can't find any 1080p screen units in my country so I might aim for a newer model with a better screen if they are financially feasible in the future.
I’m glad you enjoyed the video. Hopefully you can find something that works for you. I made some sacrifices with my own P14s which has an 11th gen i5 and a 1080p screen (I would have preferred higher resolution and a slightly better chip), but for the price I that I snagged it it definitely fills my needs as a writer and a student perfectly. It seems to me that the best thing is to aim at a higher chip with lower memory and storage, make sure those things are upgradable and then upgrade them when you’re ready. My model also only had 16gb RAM and 256 pcie3 m.2 which I upgraded to 24gb and 2tb respectively. Good luck on your search!
I really like ThinkPad laptops, even though my current daily driver is a Dell XPS 9520.
I'd love to have T430 with T420 keyboard in my collection... a T61 would also be great for - as you said - distraction free typing experience.
I had an X230 and did the keyboard swap - I may be a blasphemer here but if I had to go back and do it again I don't think I'd do it again. I didn't find the typing experience to be notably better (that is to say, the newer style of keyboard is still among the best in class in the laptop industry in my opinion). So I think it's only worth doing if you really need that 7th row or just want the pure aesthetic vibe of it (understandable).
Got a free Lenovo T420s. 4gb, core i7, windows 10.
Thinking about some ram and maybe an ultrabay battery?
Any suggestions for other internals that can be swapped out for more internal battery? Ive heard tell of a smartcard battery, never seen one though.
I can’t say I know much about these batteries, but I’d say the best place to start is upgrading to 16gb ddr3 and swapping the hdd for a sata SSD, the performance boost from that alone will be worth while. I also like to do hard caddies in place of optical drives if you have one, then you can recycle the old hdd for extra storage
@@Junktown-James Got 16 Gigs of ram, off amazon. Mine already has an ssd, so it's down to an ultrabay battery. I don't have any big storage to do, battery life means a lot to me. 😀
I used to daily drive a T420s. The best mod that I've done was probably the IPS screen upgrade. It was night and day and you will never be able to go back to the default garbage TN panels. Ultrabay battery is fun as you can hot swap it if you got multiple units of them but keep in mind these batteries doesn't have that much capacity and don't actually last that long. They are also kinda expensive these days since they're harder to come by.
I used a Thinkpad T510 or 520 in school.
That thing even had a coffee gutter in case I spilled coffee on my device during class!
I still regret getting another laptop
By the way, 560Z was from 1998 and not 1996. Original 560 was from 1996 is the model I have, which I have kept since bough new in Japan back in 1996. Made in Japan, simply the best.
In the early to mid 90''s I had a 350 MHz pc,very good for it's time but with the rhen current rate of advancement it quickly became very low end. I opted for a laptop and stumped up more money than I care to remember for a 1.4 Ghz titanium think pad pro and dock (which I used exactly zero times😂)and what a machine it was, the trackball I personally loved,but its overall quality was evident.I still have it,it still works but I haven't used it for years. If I remember correctly the think pad was the first device to turn off it's HDD if it detected it was being dropped. One thing I can tell you is that it's far more robust and sturdier than the current idea pads my wife and I currently use,both have required new lid assemblies and hinges before they are even two years old.
Edit: Oh, you fixed the "ThinkPad's" in the title, nice!
Thanks for the pointer! I just changed a bunch of thumbnails and titles this week so it seems a couple typos made their way in lol
ThinkPads served me well in my younger years, but the USB ports always seemed to be framed in cardboard. They still worked... so long as I went back in and straightened pins. These were the tail end of IBM-branded machines, too, as IBM supplied the primary breadwinner in our house, a long-time employee, with oddball work machines.
I enjoy my overclocked 380z because i have it precisely where I want it, and it isn't going to change.
Honestly my major gripe with old thinkpads is the old hardaware.
its not just an issue of performance its also an issue of maintenance and support, even if you use linux with a lightweight window manager.
Reality is newer hardware is simply more efficient too and you can make good use of the big battery banks (or dual batteries in the case of my T440s)
I used to work in a company where once, they tossed away a bunch of Lenovo's T430. They got into my hands... memory upgrades, new keyboard for one, SSD with bigger capacity and Fedora Linux running in one of them... I love the easiness to open, change, disconnect, reconnect, plug and make it work. The concept of "planned obsolescence" vanished in front of me with high Usability. They are like 3rd generation Intel I7 upgradable up to 16GB Ram. (old but still very functional)
Watching this excellent video on a docked T420, upgraded to i7 - 16GB - 3 x SSD - USB3.
Does all I need, cost peanuts.
Same setup
I've got a T60, 2 T61a, an X200 (precursor to the Yoga machines), and a T510 (which has a full complement of mouse buttons). I also have an Ideapad, which isn't quite as rugged as the Thinkpads were - but since it's a lot newer, it's what I use.
The "response" to the MBA may not have been that given the timeline of when they each were introduced. In any case, the ThinkPad competitor was the X300/301 which was some years before the X1 series.
My first laptop was a 755CE with OS/2. The 755CE didn't need any tools to upgrade or swap components. Just pull the screen latch releases further, and the keyboard pulled up. The floppy was modular, the battery was modular, and the hard drive was modular, all of them pulled straight up from under the keyboard. I had a TV card that would slot in where the floppy was, and I know you could get CD drives for it as well.
I'm currently using a Panasonic instead of a Thinkpad now. I still miss the trackpoint a little, but the Panasonic has a decent amount of repair-ability and swappable parts. It was like your 90's thinkpad, one screw to swap the memory, one screw to swap the wifi card, the hard drive, battery, and cd drive needed no screws at all. It's getting old now, being almost 12 years outdated.
If I were buying a laptop now, I'd go with a Framework. I've seen how they continue to release new motherboards for their original first model, so I'm confident that they'll keep doing that as long as they exist. The old motherboards that get swapped out have been going around as components for all kinds of new devices.
I use the E470 got it for 106$ i will use it till it dies, is perfect💪👑💰✈️
at 1:27 your charger plug is PERFECT
I bought a refurbished T40 (1.5ghz P4, 2GB mem) back in 2007 with XP Pro. Best laptop I ever had.
I personally decided to go for a dual thinkpad approach. A Thin and light and an upgradable one, best of both worlds and lets be honest, since the upgradable older ones cost so little I invested on a ehin and light used relatively new one (3 year old x1 carbon) and then Ill easiky save uo for an older upgradable one (might have made a mistake taking a t450s since theres more upgradable ones but it was 100 bucks, Im happy, thats all that matters)
Watching this video on a 2006 Thinkpad (R60) with upgraded CPU, RAM and SSD.
That’s the best, knowing definitely makes the effort worthwhile.
Hi, can I ask what is the game you play at first 40 seconds? Thank you!
It’s called Celeste! I got my copy from itch.io, but I think it’s on Gog and Steam
Also wanted to know and wow, it took a lot of scrolling to get to this question and answer.
I'm a ThinkPad fanboy. My wife and I each have a T520 in addition to our desktops. I'm even using a T420 with a large HDD in the CD-ROM bay as a poor man's server on our home network. My first Thinkpad was a T61, the first one with a wide screen display. I've had good luck buying off lease units on eBay.
I love current ThinkPads. My current model is the X1 Yoga Gen 6, and it is an excellent machine. I am a Linux user, and ThinkPad has always been great with their Linux support.
When I was in high school I bought a commodore calculator that could be programmed with a formula. I thought that was so cool until they came up with the PET computer. The PET used a cassette tape as a drive mechanism. Yes they were slow but they were awesome to a wide eyed student. My father had an IBM computer in his business to do spreadsheets for his inventory. That IBM was ten feet long and four feet high. It is amazing to me how rapidly all of the modern solutions have become. I believe that future computers will be a very small form factor with virtual solutions to enter information and will be commonly available to the public. Where will we go from there? We have to be very careful because future solutions can have serious consequences.
God I love the TrackPoint - my first and only ThinkPad (T40) used for college, and I was not sure about that little red nub, but once using it, I learned fast to love it and despise touch pads.
People should be happy enough that newer ThinkPad's didn't do that 16:9 garbage, but yes, always desire more!
I have been using ThinkPad since 1996. IBM made ThinkPads were not immune to poor quality materials and designs. They did break but most of the time the repair process was not hard and parts were easily obtainable.
Demand for bulky upgradable machines are not there any more. People want lightweight and longer battery.
Good to see repairability make a come back on the gen 5 T14 and patterning with ifixit.
I’m sure framework and people like Louise Rossman helped push for more sustainable modern computing.
I used to have an old 1997 model ThinkPad (I don't recall the exact model, sorry), which I absolutely adored, and I've *yearned* for one of the newer ones for years specifically because of that experience. This year I got lucky enough to be able to upgrade my very worn out HP laptop to a T495 (2018, so not super new) and I gotta say that for all the griping I've read online about how the 480 was the "last true Thinkpad," this thing truly lives up to everything I loved about that old '97 model I used well into the 2010s from the late aughts. The keyboard just feels RIGHT, the track pad is very above average for a laptop, and it is, of course, extremely serviceable. I do regret some of the changes Lenovo made with that generation (M.2 storage only? Come on.) but overall it is a wonderful machine, and it's definitely cemented for me that I'd rather go without a laptop entirely than get something other than another Thinkpad.
To me the most important features thinkpads did away with was modularity. I have 2 old thinkpads that have modular IOs that i do like using. On one thinkpad it has 3 mini PCIe slots, hot swap bay, PCMCIA, expresscard and a dock with a PCIe slot. I used all those expansions and being able to use an extra battery was nice. On another thinkpad it has expresscard and thunderbolt. This is typically my complaint about modern laptops is the lack of modular IO and while the framework does offer this it does not offer thunderbolt as i do like PCIe connectivity for things like running GPUs externally as this saves power so i only plug in the component when i need it.
One example of using the IO on an old thinkpad was, PCMCIA card for modern IO, expresscard for eGPU, miniPCIe slots for wireless, soundcard on the 2503 dock, extra battery and CD for the hot swap. The only thing that stops a similar HP laptop with its modularity from being popular is price.
If you are going for the eGPU/PCIe card route, dont bother with dell AGA, it is terrible. stick to PCIe options instead like thunderbolt or expresscard. You cant run a 10Gb/s NIC on dell AGA but you can on thunderbolt while dell will disable your GPU with a card plugged in yet not let you use it.
While I agree that having greater modularity in modern laptops would be fantastic (for greater port variety, swappable batteries, and eGPUs), the framework laptops do offer thunderbolt natively on their expansion cards, and can connect to eGPUs.
I will receive and excited to unbox my T480s 1TB 20gb RAM this week.
I accidentally bought it coz I meant to buy the t480.
Coming from Macbook Pro user of 10yrs. Switching to Windows especially on Thinkpads it's like coming home. I grew up using windows and thinkpads was my first choice but because of wanting to showoff I ended up buying Macbook Pro.
There was a laptop from a Chinese Clevo that lets you change not only RAM, but a CPU too as they just have put B350 motherboard with a whole ass AM4 socket. That's what I call an upgradability
up till the 4th gen iseries laptops you could upgrade the CPU. I did on mine to the extreme edition recently for its very cheap price to get more cache and performance but it can pull more power than the laptop was designed for. (it can use 100W instead of 65W)
Your production quality is *amazing*... where did you pop up from?!?! 😂
Thank you!! I feel like I’m getting a lot done with meager equipment 😁
They can do some stuff that the new ones can't. I know the older ones you are able to connect an external gpu with the help of some other connectors. not sure if you can do that on the newer ones
The P14s featured in this video has thunderbolt 3 which should run an EGPU on a compatible thunderbolt dock. Models with a Ryzen chip might have a harder time with that
My first laptop was a ThinkPad and I have been in love ever since
Personally, I think that Lenovo did try out to make the best thinkpads they could while the overall chinese culture was at its modern peak (pre-2018). Nowadays however, the current climate in both the USA and PRC is quite dreadful, which in turn makes some of these sino-american ventures to suffer the most. I mean, just look at the other few successful ventures such as SAIC-GM. They used to make good or at least decent cars using the branding image and tech from GM, but as time has gone, both have started to go their own ways, sometimes for the best, but a lot of times it just become a crowd pleasing experience. And that is not even mentioning the worst effects of the Sino-US split, as ARM pretty much got fvcked hard by the Chinese as they blatantly stole their division in the biggest ARM producing region in the world.
lenovo has been absolute garbage since at least 2020
Think I’d love that old IBM logo, I have the 2011 Lenovo thinkpad x220, I think it’s flipping amazing, especially as a Linux laptop.
the old keyboard layout is just fantastic (especially the xx20 iteration), the new one is just like in typical toy laptops
20:40 lol, I have 32 GB in my W520
I still have 2, a T430s and a L480, both great. I tried a x280.. ok-ish.. hopefully they gonna chip in the RISC-V or ARM
I just dug out my old IBM thinkpad 2722, can’t find the charger but it worked the last time I used it years ago.
I bought a second hand X21 for £250 many years ago. It came with a detachable ~docking unit that sat under the laptop with a DVD and FDD plus a pair of decent speakers. fantastic machine 192mb of ram Win98se that's had a few nice extras added. I used it yesterday for about two hours the first time since the battery finally died at Christmas time. If I still went out with a laptop it would be worth getting a new battery but as I tend to use it sitting in an armchair, having the lead is no problem. I am also lucky enough to have a T60, both superb machines. - I would not tolerate your modern laptop, not just because I loath M$ 8-10-11 but without a detachable battery it's usefulness is highly compromised.
- I have moved from Win7 to Q4os Trinity(Linux) for my internet connected box and remain a loyal user of (highly enhanced)XP for all my other desktops.
My p14s was a big disappointment for 2 years before the recent firmware update. Thermo trottling, high power consumption at idle, fan noise and missing keyboard back light. Fortunately I updated the firmware and switched to Linux, immediately it becomes a cool collected swift workstation. And the keyboard is easily swapable so I got one with back light.
I love my old X230 and T430 but the reality of the matter is if I am actually taking a laptop with me anywhere these days I go straight for my X270. Being able to charge by USB and not carry a bulky charger or a bunch of spare batteries with me is more useful in general than a slightly better keyboard. Whenever someone needs a cheap laptop I always point them to the t450 which I think gives the best value out of all of the modern thinkpads and make great web browsing/streaming/office PCs. I do want to pick up a T480 as well if I see a cheap one. Going back to quad core processors but with modern features like thunderbolt while still retaining socketed RAM is the perfect combination for me
I see T480's for sub $200 where I live, I think it's currently the best in value right now. I don't think I'd go for anything older than an _80 series at this point just due to the sheer peformance increase.
Unless you are doing video editing, 8GB RAM is plenty for everyday use so there is much less need to upgrade memory these days, but it is nice to upgradable hard drives as new bigger, faster, and cheaper drives are coming out all the time.
I’ve been an Apple fan since the early 90s, but I’ve always liked Thinkpads. I’ve had several of those laptops, and even the older ones w the i5 do fine nowadays.
When I was 10 years old, my parents bought me and old ibm thinkpad. To this day I love that thinkpad, especially the keyboard. I hate that Lenovo changed the keyboard.
I bought a refurbed T410 in 2018 as a beater mobile PPT machine. It ran perfectly for 6 years. It was just retired in 2024. There's something to be said for being built like a tank.
Might be heavy but at least you know it’ll turn on. I’ve had ROG laptops that just sputter and die after riding in the car.
That was super interesting. Just bought a refurbished X390; the fullHD-resolution (compared to X220's) was worth it. _Thanks_
The one thing I ran across with the Thinkpad line is that there's a lot more Thinkpads that are easy to service than what most people will say. I've heard people say that the T430, or the T480 was the last "good" Thinkpad with solid repairability, but I've found that the most recent Thinkpad that has a replaceable battery, replaceable RAM, and easy to access Hard-drive was 2018's P52. (or at least, the most recent one I found)
Just goes to show how long Lenovo has been at this this whole repairability thing.
but the P series generally are more expensive; big and heavy than the more common T and X series
Thanks for that video! I was buying mobile workstation in 2020 and seriously considering Thinkpads, but finally turned to HP z-book G6 17. Similar price, but I think it's more upgradable. Still with me working like an ox :D
You actually bought something on facebook marketplace and didn't get scammed, congrats! xD