The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of “design”. Functionality is no longer important to manufacturers. Repairability is purposefully removed to prevent users from truly “owing” their hardware.
It’s a mess out there. But thank goodness I still have my older, second-hand X220.
I don’t agree with the author, but he’s also not wrong. Luckily, things do seem to be improving somewhat, thanks to Framework being a decent success. Other OEMs are starting to make some noise about repairability, as are lawmakers around the world. We might be getting a new X220.
Users tend to either love or hate the Thinkpad joysticks, I suspect hand size and dexterity impact the utility of some designs, so there can never be one that is best for all users.
It’s not a joystick, and it doesn’t work like a joystick. Joysticks _move_.
The big win for me is 3 mouse buttons. I use the middle button literally hundreds of times a day, and without one, a laptop is crippled for me.
The absolute race-to-the-bottom in terms of build quality and functionality of laptops has driven me to Mini-ITX.
Everyone always talks about ThinkPads, but I often find HP EliteBooks/ZBooks (e.g. ZBook G2 is still very usable today) simply better/having more ports/better build/better specs. I never had a ThinkPad though, so I would be interested in some comparison from a person that had both of them.
I have two zbook g2 with maxed out cpu and ram as well as the fastest mxm card that fits and is supported by the bios, the nvidia quadro maxwell 2200 performs about the ame as a gtx 960 in games and a little better in other tasks.
1 deal breaker question. Do they have 3 physical mouse buttons? If not, game over. I will take a Thinkpad.
If by `mouse` you mean `touchpad`, then yes, G2 has 6 buttons, 3 buttons on top row, 3 buttons on bottom row, depending on which ones are easier to click. G2 also has a pointing stick.
Traveling around the world I have only 4 requirements to Laptops:
1) linux compatibility
2) as light/slim as possible (because I have to carry that stuff)
3) high screen resolution
4) long lasting battery
I always wonder why people need “ports”. 2 USB-C ports and a USB-Hub should cater all you need.
Toshiba Porteges and Samsung Ativ were really nice and lovely laptops. Huewai is not bad those days. But Thinkpads? No way, unless you were born a brick layer.
What you’re describing, is an “ultrathin” laptop, a la the Macbook Air. For lightness and portability, you need to sacrifice a lot, which includes reparability (sockets take up space, add weight) and performance (thin laptops are harder to cool). If all you need to do is web browsing, email and office work, an ultrathin is great. A Thinkpad, however, isn’t (and should never be) an ultrathin laptop.
In the same way that a Smart Car is useless if you’re hauling furniture, a panel van is overkill if all you’re moving is a few bits of paperwork. If all you do is move the occasional bit of paperwork around, get a Smart Car. If you move a lot of furniture around, get a panel van. If you do a lot of both, get both. Don’t complain that an Ultrathin can’t run elaborate data simulations, because that’s not what it’s designed for. On the other hand, don’t complain that a Thinkpad is heavy and has poor battery life, because again, it wasn’t designed for extreme portability
I think your answers contradict yourself.
#1: Linux. I worked for Red Hat, I visited an Ubuntu corporate site. Thinkpads everywhere. Enough said.
#2: Slim and light: this is the opposite of what I want, because of your comment:
> a USB-Hub should cater all you need.
I routinely use about 5 ports on my work laptops:
1. mouse
2. keyboard
3. network
4. second screen (and the option for another, please)
5. power
6. Then after all them I want *at least* 1 free for a hub or a USB key.
I do not want a laptop that forces me to carry supplemental devices such as hubs. I need that many ports most times I use a laptop so I want them built in. If that makes it less thin and less light then GOOD because it means I need to carry less stuff, so I carry less weight in total. I also don’t have to carry things with fragile connectors that are easily broken in use.
I don’t want a very hi-res screen because I am 55, dammit. My eyes are not that sharp.
lproven,
Agreed, those ports are very useful and I don’t want to carry around a dock/dongle/hub to replicate them.
So many laptop displays only go to 768, which isn’t an adequate minimum IMHO. So many graphical interfaces are hard to use and may even get chopped off because there’s not enough resolution. Even the the windows resolution dialog box didn’t display in full on these laptops. I prefer 1024P to be the absolute minimum. somewhat higher resolutions can be nicer but 4K is well past the point of diminishing returns for me. Personally I have no need for such high resolution.
I’d have to ‘register’ that this also shows how old these x220 are now, but, for the x220’s PC card slot, there are adapters – that can* turn that into 3 additional USB ports. (meaning, 6 USB, plus displayport, VGA, ethernet and SD; seems like that much is almost a meme)
It’s an interesting observation (if not wildly surprising) that makes me feel more strongly the thinkpad inertia is really down, more to the developers themselves; as lenovo seem to help out with this less than I’d like to see done (and they sure pick some parts that still have serious linux shortcomings), and as mentioned elsewhere, it’s been a while since the x220, I just can’t think we’re about to get another ticking all these boxes from lenovo. but i’ll settle for repairable.
* (I didn’t get on with the startech one, ymmv)
Andreas Reichel,
For my needs I require the ability to plug in usb thumb drives, phones, ethernet, projector,s. I hate having to carry around dongles, USB-C to USB-A adaptors, hubs…ethernet never became obsolete in my line of work. Here’s an idea: just give me ports directly on the laptop! While I get that not everyone needs those ports, it shouldn’t be a mystery why those of us who require them prefer having them without having to remember dongles.
Some people only need them occasionally, but when you need them it’s better to have them built into the computer so you don’t forget some dongle IMHO. My brother is a mac user, and has needed to borrow my computer on a few times because he forgot a dongle to connect a thumb drive or TV. Likewise on a business trip a coworker brought his mac, no judgement there, it was better than windows for the dev work we needed to do, but there was no wifi network for the equipment we were programming and his inability to physically connect to the LAN was a problem. He had to use my computer as an access point.
You all describe “work station” scenarios. If I want to run a Monte Carlo Simulation, I can do that on my laptop (16 cores and 64 GBRam can be pretty slim those days), but I would refuse to do that unless I am seated. When seated I have (access to a) work station, not a mobile device.
I really would not want to carry extra for ports I never use.
Mouse and keyboard are Bluetooth, charging is USB-C and that leaves 1 USB-C for the USB Hub (in case the client insists in wired network and does not allow me Wireless, which is a common requirement).
I also agree that sometimes, you need a pick-up truck for carrying the load. Have one myself.
But never ever it came to my mind to call this work horse “the best car ever built” — and that was the sentiment of the article.
If you like to carry heavy bulky stuff or drive 700km in a pickup, please be my guest. I am happy to have lighter and more efficient options though.
Andreas Reichel,
You are mistaken. I have and prefer a desktop at home, but every case I described was on the road with a proper mobile device.
The sentiment of the article was “Best laptop in the world” and I am arguing this claim.
On the USB-HUB: You carry a Charger-Transformer as well as the Charge Wire, right? And you won’t forget those, right? You also won’t forget your credit card or your passport, right? So how is the one USB-C-Hub anyhow different? It recharges, has HDMI + VGA, all kind of USB and Fire-wire and stuff. And don’t get me started with electric sockets.
For me the chance to separate the 5% use case stuff is relevant because I can check it in or have it spare at the places where i work. I don’t need to carry that stuff around.
.
Andreas Reichel,
Obviously the author’s view is subjective. I was specifically responding to “I always wonder why people need ‘ports’. 2 USB-C ports and a USB-Hub should cater all you need.”
Just because I have to bring a charging cord doesn’t mean I also want to carry around more peripheral dongles. Laptops with built in ports isn’t an unreasonable ask. You telling me what ports my mobile device should have…is that not pretentious? You’ve been pushing your own preferences onto other people as though their opinions and use cases don’t matter. That’s not reasonable.
Can’t edit, but emphasis was supposed to be on my mobile device.
As chonky as it is, I personally prefer my T420 to the X220. It’s even more of a battle-scarred tank than the X220; mine has survived several drops from desk height, a corner stepped on, and being used in a car mechanic environment. And that’s all before I bought it!
When I got it I swapped the HDD for an SSD, installed OpenBSD, and took it to 16GB RAM, as the author did with his. Future plans are a second SSD via the empty mini-PCIe port so I can boot into Windows 10 to use the OBD-II scanner I got with it (the software only runs on Windows and unfortunately doesn’t work under emulation in any other OS), adding USB 3 via the ExpressCard slot, a fresh battery, and possibly upgrading the LCD to a 1600×900 which was an option from Lenovo at the time.
I agree with the author that the six row Lenovo keyboard is absolutely fantastic to type on, and the only laptop keyboard that ever felt better to me was the Apple Powerbook G3 “Pismo” board.
I just realized I put “six row” when I meant “seven row”. Why did comment editing go away, anyway? (Not that it would have helped me here, just wondering)
Morgan,
Thom said it was broken by a wordpress update. From personal experience it’s not uncommon for wordpress updates to break plugins and custom code. Every time it was broken in the past Adam seemed to be on top of fixing it after a day or two, I assume by updating the plugins. I’m not sure why it’s taking so long, maybe no updates are available for the plugins this time?
Yeah, I deal with WordPress headaches at work when our “design team” i.e. the boss’s college age daughter inevitably screws up something by trying to put a square peg in a round hole. She means well and she’s a fantastic graphical designer, but I know more about PHP than she does and she took web development classes for several years.
From what I can tell, modern web dev consists of doing a visual layout in Figma and/or Canva and digging up code from randos on Stack Overflow to shoehorn it into a WordPress site. I asked her if she wanted the login info for our cPanel, and she just gave me a blank stare before saying “I don’t think I need that, whatever it is”. She’s a smart woman but I don’t think they are teaching web dev the way they did when I was in college 25 years ago.
>The classic ThinkPad keyboards are simply that: classic. I don’t think anyone could argue against these keyboards being the golden standard for laptops.
No, they have Ctrl and Fn swapped for some reason. 0/10, wouldn’t buy.
Every Thinkpad I’ve used has a BIOS setting to swap the Fn and Ctrl keys. Personally I just adjust to it when I’m on my T420 since the keyboard has a different feel from my desktop and other laptops, but the setting exists for those who want it the “normal” way. I do agree it’s a weird placement though.
I thought the X200/X201 was better. It still had a 16:10 display and could be fitted with an AFFS screen on par with the IPS in the X220.
X230 can be modded with the classic keyboard and has a slightly better architecture.
At this point, the only complaint about anything this old is eyestrain from pwm dimming.
I have an X220. I originally bought to make a Hackintosh. Didn’t do that. Kept it and use it as my mobile laptop. I saw that a guy in China has a motherboard CPU upgrade for X220 to a modern CPU. But the cost is something like $2000.
Who remembers this ad?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hnOCUkbix0
smashIt,
Hilarious!
I’ve had horrible horrible experience with Lenovo Thinkpads, maybe I’m just really unlucky, but I’ve had several die just after the one year warrantee expired. I’ve had much better luck with Dell. I just won’t trust Lenovo again Burn me three times, shame on me, burned four times can’t get burned again.
On one hand, Thinkpads (at least the T, X, and P-series) work beautifully with with Linux, have great build quality, are easy to repair and upgrade, and have durability features (like spill proof keyboards) that are rare even in other well-built machines. And — along with Apple products — Thinkpads are one of very few lines of laptops that have consistently good keyboards. Hence their popularity with writers and developers.
But I get tired of the “retreat to the past” vision of computing that sometimes comes with praise of Thinkpads. The x220’s 1366×768 IPS was bad even ten years ago and the noisy, side-venting fans on that and similar-generation Thinkpads are preposterous. And while there are good things to say about the old seven-row Thinkpad keyboard, a 90-key layout on a 12″ laptop forces ridiculous design compromises: a trackpad the size of a postage stamp, Fn keys like pencil erasers, etc.
Framework? seriously… you think a laptop that can have 4 only ports is even remotely “good”????
The X220 by comparison has a plethora of IO BUILT IN STANDARD and I’d argue it isn’t even the absolute best about IO out there its just what I’d call average.
Number of USB Ports 3
HDMI Port Standard
Multi Card Slot SD Card Reader
VGA Port Yes
Mic In Yes
RJ45 (LAN) Yes
RJ11 Yes
AND you can even use a port replicator… the framework laptop is a JOKE.
Just to get pedantic: the x220 isn’t specced as having an HDMI port standard — just VGA and DisplayPort. That’s still good connectivity but might make a difference for someone who’s considering buying a an X220 for whatever reason. If you mean to connect to an external projector you’re gonna be living’ the dongle life.
I really kind of wonder who uses RJ11, besides my old co-workers. I’m certain there must be other uses than custom networks made with RJ11 connectors.