I mean, my company buys them, I know at least one other that does too. Both are too technical I think to bother with a hardware support contract. But others might!
Both my Thinkpad and I (thanks to my Thinkpad) were totally fine, and I continued to use it for 4 more years.
Uhh, millions of people "precisely and efficiently accomplish real work" on MacBooks every day. Moving back to a tiny trackpad or nubbin with fixed location buttons feels incredibly inefficient and gross now...
The other evil part about trackpads is drivers that don't let you turn off the pointer acceleration because to do so would reveal how jittery the sensors really are.
This is why even now and even on the highest end laptops you must still either slow down your fingers or put up with endless overshooting/undershooting of the cursor movement. I deeply despise how "heavy" and slow the cursor feels on all macbooks for at least the past decade. This is the real reason why the fucking clickpad has to be so massive!
* Laptop price
* Extended waranty and support with onsite fix 3 year
* Accidental damage insurance. 3 year
Get it all and consider that the ticket price. Then divide by 36 for the monthly SaaS-like price. Makes claude code seem cheap :)
I found it is worth it.
Especially as the home visit means no backup reinstall needed for many fixes, unless it is a full replacement. Such a time saver. And laptops are fragile. They need repair by default (think like a car not like a house double brick wall).
The iPhone is pretty awesome, my Nvidia cards work way better under proprietary drivers on Linux than my AMD cards worked under either OSS or proprietary drivers, and the Macbooks are fantastic hardware. I got scammed by these tech hipsters.
I've found it's usually a relation in sorts to the underdogs, in some way or another: a vengeance against the status quo, a sort of angsty reactance against it, or a desire to simply do the usual thing and signal yourself as "alternative". That's all the hipsterism is: a kind of counterculture. The author of this post is basically saying in the subtext "You're simply living off the scavenged technology of corporations and these computers aren't built for what you see in them. You are a stupid 20-something with false nostalgia," which I could argue is just a different sort of social signaling.
There is some truth in both sides of the Thinkpad culture argument. Thinkpads have excellent Linux support, ludicrously bad color gamut, questionable build quality generation-to-generation, but are always serviceable if not attractive. If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.
My personal preference is mouse > trackpoint / nub + 3 physical buttons > trackpad, but I know people who swear by an Apple "slab" trackpad even at their desktop computer.
For most of their history Macbooks were good looking, but overheating and throttling devices with some specifically unlucky generations being pure garbage due to design problems like butterfly keyboard and flexgate. Apple also have a long history of not admitting these design flaws.
Macbooks only became a really good option in last 5 years after switch to ARM and overall industry degradation towards not upgradable and not repairable hardware.
Also even though more than decade under Lenovo thinkapds became much more fragile, but they are still much better suited to survive water, dust and physical damage. This doesn't matter if you work in comfy home, cafe, office or co-working, but there are many people who have to use their laptops in moist or dusty environments.
PS: Written from M1 Air that I bought back in 2020.
Not... really? They're mega-companies because of deliberate choices like that. Those choices are not the only way to get there, but they've found choices that work. I get that it's trendy to shit on successful businesses and be toxic about the crumbs you enjoy, but it's plain ignorant to call these things "accidents" or "coincidences" and nobody is forcing you to eat crumbs.
The later comparison to Apple is just as strange. Consumers aren't so particular and will buy anything at any price for almost no reason but marketing. All those people hyping Thinkpads may not be the original manufacturer, but they are selling them on eBay and effectively the vendors. They hype old Macs just the same.
Too often cold hard business logic is subverted by psychopathic short term executive thinking that says “we’re spending money on something good for the customer? I don’t care that it’s also good for us but I like the idea of a quarterly earnings report that doesn’t include that expense!”
The executive then takes their bonus and gets headhunted by the next F500 company where they apply the same strategy.
Dell laptops must have one available.
The main argument is that thinkpads are high quality because it makes the service contract cheaper for Lenovo to fulfill.
But other non-repairable/poor quality brands thrives in the same market segment.
If I were getting a new laptop, I'd probably buy a Mac. But if I needed a Windows laptop, I'd buy a Thinkpad (one is currently my only Windows PC). It's not really upgradeable or modular (fixed RAM, SSD and battery not easy to change), but it is well-built and still pretty snappy despite being 6-7 years old.
It's the Third Way that is not a mouse or trackpad. Oh, fifth I guess, with trackball and touchscreen.
It is why was a bit horrified when I was watching the first spacex manned launch and saw their main interface was a touchscreen. I guess a mitigating factor in that case is the pilots probably don't have to fiddle with it during launch and it had one feature I would love if forced to use a touchscreen in a vehicle. A dedicated bar to stabilize your fingers on.
I have expectations about the screen not being silly DPI and 'reasonable', and that's usually met too.
Bluetooth etc. works just fine.
Finally I have expectations on the fans not being like a total joke on most windows laptops... and that's usually fine too.
For the rest I want compatibility; lack of 'FML quirks'.
If only they could fix the absolute turd of audio quality in thinkpads, I think we'd be on par with Apple from my perspective. Although I've loved ARM processors lately and would always prefer a portable ARM machine than Intel.
Choosing thinkpads is really mostly about choosing the boring option, with the least amount of surprises, the dad option of laptops in a sea of disappointments.
most wrong statement ever.
in fact with the entire 30th anniversary lineup was made to sell new units to fans, no one else cared.
>It’s rare for those teams of people to survive buyouts by foreign companies with their agency and independence intact.
ThinkPad enthusiasts were very vocal about how the Lenovo takeover impaired their later designs (200 and onwards).
I've always found it amusing to see the modern wave of people hyping ThinkPads as recent as the t480; which I've known greybeards to consider having no more in common with a "true" ThinkPad than name and colour scheme.
that's the entire reason.
no need to get into supply chains and culture and hoodoo.
>Lenovo does not care about you. >IBM did not care about you.
No shit.
>that IBM and Lenovo are the most kind, gracious corporations in the universe
I have never encountered this line of thought in the thinkpad enthusiast space. People like the design, not the company.
>when most of the laptops they worship were made less than ten years ago
The gold high standard in the Thinkpad enthusiast community was still the T60 last I checked. Released like 2006. I have a T61p at home for my own amusement. And you can still get bootleg parts like batteries.
>Simply put, because they have not thought for one second about a Thinkpad in any other context than their home, let alone about the general functioning of computers in a business setting…
No of course not. Because they like the design. If I could get myself a Cray 1 I would. I dont care about the business context.
>old laptops are disposed of, and treated basically as garbage.
No, what happens is that the finance/leasing company contracts someone to assess the current state of the hardware. Anything that's missing or severely damaged is billable to the lessor. Then what was turned over to the recyclers is sold on with a cut going back to the finance firm.
Some basic research here would have actually strengthened your core premise, because they get a small tasty bite of the secondary market.
>Thinkpads are Repairable because every minute of a field technician’s labor costs money for IBM/Lenovo, and cuts into the profit made on a service contract
Yes exactly. But this isnt the only business model available. Some businesses make laptops that are less repairable, or dont last as long. Nobody thinks the company wants to marry them. But in a marketplace you choose the product that closely aligns with your parameters. It doesnt matter why the company used those parameters.
>Notice, that nowhere in this explanation did I say “used to”, “once were” or “back then”. Because this cycle is continuous.
Oh no, you are telling me that they are continuing to make repairable laptops? Thats terrible. How will the thinkpad community ever recover.
>These are not magical virtues of a bygone age. These things aren’t even really “virtuous” at least in terms of motivation. Lenovo doesn’t care about “Right to Repair” any more than Apple, they just sell to a different market, and make their money in a different way.
I honestly see people clamoring for computers from specifically before Intel Management Engine\TPM\Secure Boot more than a vague mysterious bygone age.
>They’re typical companies, who just happen to have some good designers and engineers.
No shit. But this is true about every piece of hardware that has a fandom. Its no different in a Porsche group. Or people going on about old Cisco switches. Theres nothing new here. I dont think that JVC wanted to make beautiful love to me because I enjoy the design of the Videosphere.
>But Thinkpads didn’t materialize out of the virtuous ether
And no one claims they did.
>But don’t treat these things like they’re magic
No one does.
Apple could easily fix this. Macs are generally good value except for the absolute rip-off that is storage. $400 to go from 1TB to 2TB is a ridiculous markup.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...
The only time I had something bad was one model that it has issues when powering, which I never tracked down if the root cause was the hardware itself or a driver issue.
The only other brand I have been as lucky were Asus multimedia laptops, and netbooks.
They've had many security issues since then, including another backdoor in 2025, but Superfish was probably their worst disaster because after it became public that every machine they sold with it was vulnerable Lenovo continued to deny it until they were finally forced to admit it and release a removal tool. That should have been the end of it, but the removal tool just uninstalled the bloatware itself while leaving the system changes it had made which introduced the vulnerability. That just gave the customers who were even aware of what was going on and downloaded the removal tool a false sense of security. Only after the media started reporting that failure did they eventually release a second removal tool that actually corrected the problem Superfish introduced. No way would I ever trust that company
al_borland•1h ago
resonious•38m ago
Actually the Microsoft Surface book/laptop line is really good in my opinion... It's just the Linux support is often (understandably) quite bad. Sometimes I psych myself into thinking I can stomach Windows for the "official, supported" laptop experience but it never lasts more than a few months before I cave and go back to Linux.