When I see this I do think there would be a market for a drop-in motherboard replacement for macbooks. Not necessarily to upgrade them to run macOS, but to take a (say) 2015 macbook which has an excellent keyboard, mouse and screen, and have an upgraded motherboard that is a drop-in replacement. It would mean a lot less equipment going in landfills, and from my experience of earlier (pre-2014) models, they tend to follow the same form factor for a few years, so there would be a reasonable market for it?
I'm writing this on a 2011 MBP which is running Monterey because of OpenCore Patcher, and it's a bit slow, but everything about it physically is better than most laptops I would get for under £500. This with a faster processor, graphics and RAM would do me for another 5 years for 'general' duties.
Sometimes I wonder why I keep a boxes full of a good dozen late IBM era Thinkpads, and I remember thinks like this exist and hopefully will continue into the future with modern tech like OLED, power efficient chips. Maybe if I even just use the chassis, I just love the feel of the T42 - T63, 4:3 aspect ratio is perfect, arguably the best laptop keyboard of all time, trackpoint, tracklight, dat Mg case, beautiful 90s business aesthetics.
>I'm writing this on a 2011 MBP which is running Monterey because of OpenCore Patcher, and it's a bit slow, but everything about it physically is better than most laptops I would get for under £500. This with a faster processor, graphics and RAM would do me for another 5 years for 'general' duties.
I just replaced a 2012 with a 2021 M1. Yes, it's faster. Not having to use a pad to shield my lap from the computer's heat is nice. But I would have continued to use the 2012 had the hinge not loosened to the point where the screen would not stay upright. My computer environment is almost unchanged; Monterey with OpenCore Legacy Patcher to Monterey, 16GB RAM to 16GB, 1TB SSD to 1TB, 15" to 14". The battery life is much better,^1 but I don't take the computer out of the home so it doesn't make a difference in practice.
^1 But not as good as I'd expected. I don't do anything heavy on the computer—browser, Excel, and ssh—and the M1's battery only lasts for about six hours. Can using Chrome as the browser and not Safari make that much of a difference?
> I don't do anything heavy on the computer—browser, Excel, and ssh—and the M1's battery only lasts for about six hours. Can using Chrome as the browser and not Safari make that much of a difference?
On an Intel Mac from 2020 I'll get nearly 8 hours of battery if I'm not running a VM. My browser is Firefox.
I would expect M1 macs to run substantially longer on battery even if using Chrome (is that even supposed to be a factor?).
Ha! This has been an on/off idea in the back of my mind. I realized that an opportunity to do this would attract customers but not enough to turn into a viable business. On one hand, I wish someone at Apple has the imperative to try this at scale. I don't think it'd be a profit generating scheme but I do think there would be some revenue. I have a couple of 2015 rMBP to maybe try this out one day
Think there is some sort of advantage they had by doing that rather than say, four screws at the ends of the PCB? Damage resistance? - Trying not to believe planned obsolescence was the priority.
They're cheaper to make this way. It's not 4 screws in the earlier models, it's more like 100. Fitting those, even with a special mechanism will be more time consuming and problematic than riveting.
They don't care about repair. They are optimising solely for manufacturing.
When I spilled a drink on my Framework and ordered a new keyboard, I discovered it had 3 mis-aligned screws in the keyboard from the factory. Like either a hole was punched wrong or a screw was rammed in off center. The holes and threads are all messed up and impossible to tighen those screws.
3 out of 60 or more.
Never knew there was anything wrong from the outside but I can't imagine wouldn't have worked loose over more time if I hadn't happened to have a reason to uncover them in the first year.
I love that I was able to replace a keyboard, but 3 out of 60 is a pretty bad rate.
The 2012 era ones are screwed in place (I didn't know this until this weekend when I took one apart to that level). I've never known one come loose, and a properly torqued screw will never be a problem in this situation.
I absolutely love my 51nb 10th-gen Intel transplant Thinkpad x200. It's incredible how, after 10 years, it still feels better as a piece of hardware than my modern Thinkpads do (not to say that they're at all badly built). Nothing comes close to that keyboard, not even my choc sunsets.
I lost my original Thinkpad 700c that I grew up with in a house move about 5 years ago. I don't think I'll ever forgive myself.
It's okay to be honest. Are modern TPs better built than Walmart laptops? Of course. But do they live up to the price tag and legendary Thinkpad name? No. Not at all. While modern TPs have dipped significantly in quality other manufacturers have been catching up.
Some of my issues with T14 Gen 1
1. Cheap daughter boards for USB c ports that hilariously die every few months, on a laptop that only offers USB c charging...
2. Keyboard is trash. I'd rather use the keyboard on my Acer Nitro. High actuation tires out my fingers.
3. Terrible trackpad. Absolutely terrible. Not just the texture but the firmware, it works fine for one second then all of a sudden, it's this laggy, unresponsive mess.
4. Cooling is terrible and laptop throttles constantly.
5. Build quality is terrible for a TP. Screen started peeling off when I dropped it once, the chassis screws are easily stripped, extremely thing plastic gets chipped, random components die and aren't easily replaceable like past TPs.
6. It's just buggy. Function key lights are incorrect randomly, when I plug in my mouse, the trackpad gets like 1-2 second input delay.
On the flip side I've been using business Latitudes and Elite books at work which aren't great but still work better than this TP.
FWIW I think the T14 is an exceptionally badly made thinkpad. It was one of their first AMD thinkpads, and it was positioned firmly as a 'budget' machine. I really think it was rushed to market to take advantage of those mobile ryzens.
I bought a couple of them for some of my team (for the better graphics in Linux). The controller firmware it came with scanned rows and columns of the keyboard matrix at completely different frequencies, which created this weird interference pattern where it would randomly swallow keypresses if you pressed them at just the right time. It sucked, it made the laptop keyboard unusable.
They did fix it eventually though, and I guess updating your controller firmware might help your trackpad issues. I'm a trackpoint fanboy so I don't know for sure. FWIW I'm a big fan of both the X1C line and the X1E/P1. My primary laptop for last 3-4 years had been a p1 gen
2, before I went all in on the x2100.
I have a P14s Gen 2 AMD. I think it's pretty much identical to a T14 Gen 2 AMD because Lenovo. I've had it about a year. No cooling problems, no USB C ports have died, keyboard is pretty good although not as good as my W520. I don't use the trackpad so I can't really comment in it. Only real issue is that disabling the trackpad under Linux doesn't fully disable it.
After some of my Carbon X1 keyboard keys stopped working (and trackpoint never seemed to work well (e.g., drift)), I resurrected my X220. The keyboard and working trackpoint are such a joy that it's worth the downgrade of display and sound. Also nice to have a real Ethernet port, memory card slot and Displayport built in.
Yea, I've got a 220 still going strong after a turbulent start, used to randomly reboot but they fixed the BIOS and it's been gtg since. New battery and new keyboard... all good.
Xue Yao has a really nice page [0] explaining how all that stuff works. I got mine from Jacky@lcdfans, and he's been really great to deal with (contrary to his reputation). I haven't used it with an external screen yet, but I believe the type C port supports DP.
> a ~10" compact laptop that IBM sold for a brief period in the mid-90s. It has a full sized keyboard that flares out as you open the lid
It always amazes me what guys in 1995 could fit a full sized keyboard with all keys in ~10", yet since 2010 the humanity lost this wondrous know-how and now even in a 15" notebook you would only get an abomination with merged keys and goddamn PrtScr instead of ContextMenu.
Oh Gawd don't get me started. I spent personal money on the ThinkPad t25 years ago so I could have aproper keyboard with proper home/end/pgup/pgdwn block. It's still my main daily driver. Now every laptop invents it's own abomination and layout, with key keys scattered and hidden, arrow keys combined, etc (and a track pad that's slowly eating up the entire surface area instead.... Can you tell I'm a track point person :-)
On the surface, not at all. It's a t470 with a massive marketing spiel.
On the other hand, if you spend 10hrs a day on a laptop, you'll keep it for many years, and keyboard layout is important to you, it may be a worthile choice priced per hour of usage. You can also think of it as pre-moded and warrantied thinkPad :-).
I have a couple of t480 and e595 around too but much prefer the t25. I also have a client mandated HP that, while it does have a track point, has an apple-style format and keyboard that drives me up the wall. Non-sensical unique layout, no feel in keys, plus dreaded combined up and down arrows (WHY?? There's so much room on that side! So clearly a choice of pretty over useful/functional. The t25 arrow keys extend down past space key, so they are full size, which neatly demonstrates their priority aligns with mine :)
You spend 10 hours each day out of office/house? Seems like problem easily solvable by external keyboard (you can keep same one at home and at office), that's what I do. I have T520 (specifically bought originally for keyboard instead newer models) and hooked up wireless full size keyboard, mouse and 32" external display since msot of the time I work from home, if I travel I just take wireless mouse with me.
Agreed; I do have the Microsoft Skulpt keyboards for both client HP and my T25 laptop (plus monitors on stands etc).
But... life! :). Two very young kids and wife who need support through the day, so I end up using laptop as a lap-top frequently enough :). I take my dad to a doctor appointment, or work from friend's home, etc etc. Overall, laptop's keyboard is still important for my personal use-cases.
Not sure. I've heard before there's a slight plastic piece you may need to dremel. It IS a bigger keyboard / differently shaped, just looking at my T25 sitting next to my T480. As well, sourcing T25 keyboard in the first place may not be trivial - it was a very limited run model.
Well, we tend to assume that the keyboard layout we know from the PCs in the 90s is the only correct one, but these things were always changing and adapting to the needs. Looking at the average modern computer user, I understand why a contemporary MacBook keyboard looks the way it does. That being said, it's disappointing that every other laptop keyboard looks just the same. Modern tech always converges to a single design, there is no market to create something, unless you can really sell millions of it.
Please show me the people who needs to make screenshots so often what there is a key under right thumb.
> keyboard layout we know from the PCs in the 90s is the only correct one
It's not the best but it's on the every goddamn desktop keyboard. The only reason it's get constantly re-arranged without any regard to usability or common sense[0] is what someone needs to justify own existence, just like "web-masters" which "plays with fonts" because otherwise they would be doing nothing.
[0] how many times you powered down/pressed without any result Backspace only to encounter what it is not Backspace anymore, but Power?
I agree with your point. 90s keyboard isn't necessarily "the right one", or perfect. BUT! I dislike every manufacturer making their own keyboard layout with no clear benefit or improvement. If it works don't break it. In particular, hiding key navigational keys (home / end / pgup / pgdwn), which are not exactly a nerdy requirement - anybody using ms office or browser or other tools proficiently will adopt them.
I think we can blame the mass emulation of Apple products by others for this phenomenon. Since Jobs/Ive would never make such a design, neither will the other major laptop firms.
I find this incredibly fitting. The ThinkPad 701 is a textbook example of amazing design/engineering principles (which is why there is one on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art), and the Framework laptop aspires to be another one.
The 701C's butterfly keyboard is surely out of patent protection by now, right?
I'd love to see that style of folding keyboard revived -- either as a standalone bluetooth keyboard for tablets/phones, or as part of on the the 7" to 10" mini-ultrabooks Chinese vendors like GPD and One Netbook sell. Or maybe a Framework mini-ultrabook with a 9" or 10" screen ...?
Umm, Planet Computer's Gemini anyone? Easily the most heavily used & abused phone I've ever had. Still waiting for my (long overdue) Astro Slide to ship ...
The Astro Slide is shipping (mine arrived in mid-January!) but it's a little small for touch-typing -- what I'm after is a 65% or larger full-scale keyboard that packs down into something a bit larger than the Gemini/Cosmo/Astro, or their design predecessor the Psion Series 5.
There’s little point in the era of cheap giant lcds… but man I loved that little machine. Kept mine for many years until enough plastic parts had degraded and it literally fell apart.
Besides that, Framework overall looks very promising to me.
I think they have a nice middle ground between DIY and "works out of the box". Yes, you can change parts if you want, but you don't need to fiddle for hours to get something going again. With enough money you have on-site repairs by big manufacturers, but if your IT guy can just swap the motherboard in 15 minutes with a spare one, that's even better I'd say.
I'd love to have a matte screen on their devices, though. That's something I really like on my ThinkPad. Besides that those devices look really good to me and my next device will probably be a Framework laptop.
Does anybody have negative experiences with those machines?
> I think they have a nice middle ground between DIY and "works out of the box". Yes, you can change parts if you want, but you don't need to fiddle for hours to get something going again. With enough money you have on-site repairs by big manufacturers, but if your IT guy can just swap the motherboard in 15 minutes with a spare one, that's even better I'd say.
Framework owner here. It really is super freaking easy to open up this computer and fix things or swap them around. Easy enough for your average software engineer (who doesn't have much hardware experience), but probably easy enough for your average not-super-technically adept person.
On the whole, very happy with my machine. The touchpad wasn't registering all clicks when I first got it, but customer service happily sent me a new one and no issues since then. I also had a driver issue or two when I first got it, but that was resolved when I updated my drivers. I'd happily recommend the computer to any engineer or anyone with decent "techie" skills. It's probably not ready for your less-than-tech-savvy average consumer just yet, but it's close. Also, bonus points for the machine really looking and feeling very premium. I especially love the cover having the nice cog-wheel logo, but no brand name on it. I've had a few people tell me, "wow, that looks nice, what kind of computer is that?".
I don't know. I regularly hook it up to two monitors (one 2560x1440 and one 1920-1200) at the same time (via a USB hub) with zero issues. Not sure how it would perform with two 4K. If you search around https://community.frame.work/, you'll most likely find your answer.
I have a friend who recently went through a very negative experidnmce with supprt team from Framework...
My friend is quite the hardware expert, and has built and fixed computers of all types for decades, and his hardware skills are second-to-none. He bought a framework laptop for his significant other several months ago - let's say somryhing like 5 or 6 months ago. The SO used the laptop, then had to use a diffeent machine for work...so left the Framework unplugged for about 1.5 ~ 2 months....so of course, the battery lost its charge. This is not the issue. Subsequently,. when my friend's SO retuned to start using the new machine again, it woulkd not start nor charge, etc. Hey, components fail for every hardware maker, so not a big deal. After many negative interactions between my friend and Framework support, it seems like there is a bug in hardware that Framework blamed on Intel compoenent which potentially can prevent from batteries charging....in addition, somehow it also inhibits computer from using it while connected to non-battery power...in other words, the computer is not able to be used at all. Here's the worser part, the Framework support team stated that even though the machine was well within warranty, because they blamed Intel, its not returnable nor refundable nor even somthing Framewokr was willing to swap out...So my friend and his SO are no stuck with no refund nor replacement, and an unsable computer. Their only recourse now is legal.
I'm sure there are other details that my friend did not inform me about. But if this is happening to others - the poor support from Framework team - then this is quite worrying indeed. I counted myself as a big fan of Framework, and i definitely was going to get myself one whenever i am due to get a new laptop...but after hearing this horrorible experience fro my friend, i will be hol;ding back from buying anything Framework related for quite some time.
@martin_a If you will be looking into Framework, please do whatever research you can into their returns/refunds policies. Also, I don;t know how to go about this, but: please research what other experieneces other folks have had with their support department. Good luck!
The issue of running down the CMOS battery is well documented, and I believe there are hardware-level alterations in their second revision that avoid it, both from Intel and from Framework altering their internals so the main battery can keep the CMOS battery charged.
My understanding of that problem is that it's not fatal or permanent: it's a "remove the battery and clear the CMOS" kind of situation that's required to get things working again. A case where it was really permanently unable to charge or operate and was within the warranty period, I don't know how a replacement/refund would be avoidable in that case.
Yep, clearing of cmos and other tasks were tried by my friend...As noted, he's got decades of experience on all sides of deep hardware support (including not only consumer but also very much on vendor side, etc.)...and yet Framework flatly refused any replacement, repair, or refund. Quite horribly disappointing.
I also bought a framework for my SO, I was amazed by how easy it was to open up and work on and how much effort they went through to make it all cleanly modular and simple to service.
My SO has been using it daily for months and loves it. I love how easy it is to maintain it. It's a perfect laptop for us!
I love this thing to the extent that I feel an emotional need to defend it. Great hardware.
>Here's the worser part, the Framework support team stated that even though the machine was well within warranty, because they blamed Intel, its not returnable nor refundable
It is precisely for this reason that every PC I have bought has been a Dell with a 3 yr warranty and next-business-day Onsite service.
I've talked about it plenty on HN before but generally speaking my maxed-out Intel 11th Gen Framework has been the most regrettable large technology purchase of my life. Bugs like the one you've described are just the beginning. BTW, they did acknowledge their culpability in this somewhat and finally released a BIOS update for this issue in August of last year. However, that doesn't do you any good as you're already in your situation.
The BIOS alone clearly has many outstanding bugs and with the release of the Intel 12th Gen Frameworks the 11th Gen has been all but forgotten by Framework. Just looking at the list of issues they addressed in a recently announced[0] BIOS update for 12th Gen (no mention of 11th Gen) gives you an idea of the issues present (and more) in the 11th Gen.
For many of us our laptops are our tools for our livelihoods. As painful as it was to write-off a $2500 purchase I finally gave up, went out and bought a MacBook Pro at less than half the price, and have been infinitely happier since.
The lesson here is - hardware is hard and fundamental. Buying hardware from a startup is generally a bad idea.
I just ordered a Framework. It has not arrived yet. I am sure it is a fine machine, I am here to give some advice against FedEx delivery in Europe.
I got no notification by email or phone that they were coming yesterday. I was at work so of course I missed their call. I went the to FedEx tracking website, it said it had been rescheduled today, before noon was the expected delivery time and the website it should be there before 18h, again I was not notified but I was able to stay home today. Then past noon I noticed something odd, the package was still marked to be at the same spot as it was in the morning. So while it said it was being delivered today it also said that it was not in delivery state. So I called them. I got in touch with them, or rather a call center subcontractor where they can pay people shit, and I realized they didn't know more that I did. They confirmed it was weird and reschedule it for tomorrow... Is it going to be there tomorrow? I would not be so sure. I asked for proximity relay delivery so I don't have to wait home for the package and can't just pick it up at some nearby convenience store : It was possible... It would be there in 4 days.
To get updates from them you have to submit your names and email/phone it but they already have my it! I suspect they do that so that I can click that I agree with them using my personal data.
Also the website is very heavy and no I don't want a shitty app on my phone to be able to track a package.
So Framework if you read me please to using FedEx shitty service and use a relay delivery system, it's better for the planet too. It is stupidly inefficient to have a truck running around people homes in working days.
My advice to Framework buyers : Call FedEx immediately and ask for relay delivery or whatever it's called
I love the idea of modernising old laptops with this approach. I have a ton of (working) old thinkpads and dells I can't bear to part with, would love to upgrade some this way.
I probably would have done the 51nb mod already if I could have just ordered the parts through a regular online store and not the cryptic forum puzzle that was required
It's a cool project, but it appears that it is more of a Thinkpad 701 keyboard ported to entirely new everything else. Hard to call it a laptop modernization, even though it is a very respectable talent to be able to pull that off.
What is most surprising about this to me is that the iPad screen uses just standard displayport lanes as the interface and doesn't need anything crazy to drive it other than a backlight voltage boost converter. That is useful to know.
PCMCIA was such a cool expansion slot, but not because of that mouse monstrosity. :)
From NICs and modems, to memory cards and hard drives—it was incredibly versatile. Hot swappable too, assuming your OS supported this well. It was the USB before USB, and for a short time there were PC cards with USB ports for machines that didn't have any. Even today, I miss having an internal slot of that size, instead of a dozen different USB devices and dongles.
But my favorite has got to be the Rex 3 PDA[1][2]. I've never used it, but back then it must've felt magical.
This makes me want a MacBook display wired as an external monitor.
My work laptop is an HP 1040 g8 with the privacy screen. It’s the worst screen I’ve ever used. I think an old TN panel from the early 2000s had more brightness and better viewing angles. I don’t understand how HP tested this and said “yep it’s good for a $2K laptop”.
Anytime I’m by a window I can’t see what’s on the screen. Working outside is only possible if you like squinting and you’re looking at a white background with black text. Not to mention the abysmal viewing angles keep you shifting on your chair as you read.
Anyway, having a regular 13in MacBook Air or pro Retina display to hdmi would be awesome. I don’t think I’d be the only one to use it. I wouldn’t even need a stand, I’d put it right on top of this screen and be done.
> My work laptop is an HP 1040 g8 with the privacy screen. It’s the worst screen I’ve ever used. I think an old TN panel from the early 2000s had more brightness and better viewing angles. I don’t understand how HP tested this and said “yep it’s good for a $2K laptop”.
Well, that's the price you gotta pay for a laptop with privacy protectors - these things are used for restricting viewing angles so that, say, passersby on a train can't read your highly confidential PowerPoint slides full of corporate double-speak and general bullshit... and usually bought and required by organizations who think their corporate double-speak PowerPoints are so uber secret that it is worth making the lifes of their employees measurably worse in exchange.
Not to this extent. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with these screens, but the filter can be turned on and off. The previous one I had was the 840 g5 and that one had a much much MUCH nicer screen that still had the privacy filter. That one looked almost normal with the filter off. This one, 3 generations later, looks like the proof of concept model.
I had a think pad from the early 90s (running on win. 3.1), that I bought in the middle if the 2010s to also do that.
It had a floppy disk drive and analog port
Anyway, i couldn't even have time to work on it, as materials from the 90s didn't age well.
Just by opening the screen to boot it up a few times, the plastic case broke.
After opening the service panels, the foams inside (because there needed foam on the hdd for some reason) went into mist
so the MB and the electronic part was the only that was recoverable, not the plastic shell
I wonder if OP is having the same issue, if he tries to actually use the laptop
I don't remember game ports on any of the Thinkpads (I worked for IBM at the time and serviced a lot of the very early 700's and 710's).
They had parallel ports, DB9 serial, DB15 VGA, and a couple of PCMCIA/PCCARD slots, IIRC.
Game ports were DB15, and as the Thinkpads were squarely targeted at business users, taking up the real estate for a "game" port would seem unlikely, and possibly even a turn off for buyers of that era.
At some point internal modem's and NICs came along, but I think we might have been out of the 90's by the time that happened. I remember juggling an analog modem, 10Mbps Ethernet and 4/16Mbps Token ring PCMCIA card, depending on what I was doing at the moment.
I wanted a 701C so badly back in the day but they were out of reach of my 14 year old self.
I have been debating what to do with my old T42 which I recently discovered has died, thinking I will remove the track pad and shorten the case to be just the keyboard which should make it fit a modern screen quite nicely. Will be a bit of a trick to cut the case down and keep it looking good but I am pretty sure I can manage it and this will take care of getting rid of the battery bay. Thinking of just sticking a beagle bone or two in it but I could put a dozen pi zeros in there without even trying but that would limit battery space.
I was in an SME in the 90s where we bought 701Cs for the execs.
I can confirm they were awesome, back then it was de rigueur to have a chunky docking station to mount your hugely expensive (and altogether hugely) CRT monitor.
The 701C had a particularly nice docking station too.
If it works out please blog about it. If it doesn’t, failure is hard to admit, but learning from other’s mistakes is still valuable, so please blog about it anyway.
I have absolutely no issues with sharing my failures. Only part of the project which would be iffy is the keyboard/trackpoint, kind of hoping I can just use the GPIO on what ever board I end up with and somehow make it work but I have yet to look into it at all, seems doable for at least the keyboard. The QMK route is always possibly but it feels like the lego theory of electronics and I have a completely pointless aversion to that.
Another and maybe more accessible target would be the IBM Thinkpad X41. It was incredibly slim for its time, it still kept the 4:3 screen ratio (not sure if compatible with the bigger ipads?). I wrote a bachelor thesis on it and a fanless version would still be the laptop of my dreams.
Converting that old iPad screen into a normal DisplayPort screen is really cool, could be handy on something like raspberry pi’s or nucs. In the thread linked to about that part, it’s not clear to me if that is an aftermarket part you can buy or something he designed, any ideas?
What is the point of these high resolution displays in 10" body? Actually I don't understand them even in bigger bodies, you still can't see anything without resizing whole display and they eat a lot of battery.
Its great to have a sharp IPS screen and frankly shouldnt be an issue for modern hardware to power. Macs and iPads have had it for a long time and most modern laptops now too.
I love the idea of breathing new life into old hardware like this. I bought an X220 for $297 in 2015 because I needed a laptop for college and it was all I could afford. It’s built like a tank and has survive a lot that I put it through. I went through grad school with it and retired it after I graduated. The biggest thing that held me back was the screen resolution, but everything else was awesome (especially the keyboard). An x220 with framework guts and a better screen would be sweet!
Not related, I am asking this because Lenovo is mentioned on HN very often. Can anyone please explain what is special about Lenovo laptops? As I know it is China based company.
Mostly due to the IBM legacy - the original thinkpad laptops where great mobile workstations. Some of that DNA remains (sadly not the original long-travel (by today's laptop standards) keyboards.
See eg:
"THINK: A brief history of ThinkPads, from IBM to Lenovo"
Good quality, good materials, matte screens, great keyboards, usually very linux compatible, durable, user raplacable parts (atleast in older models)... basically a very capable (although expensive) business laptop. You also have the dell xps series and the old HP probooks, but that's about it. (of course I'm talking about the business class laptops, so thnkpads, mostly T and somewhat X series, since lenovo also produces cheap crap).
Also, they used to be made by IBM "back in the day", until the chinese bought the brand and designs.
"matte" screens, not good screens! There are lots of x220 and similar with terrible, low viewing angle, 1366x768, low contrast displays. Transplants from XPS series displays are popular for obvious reasons.
I think a big part of the appeal is that the business workstations were popular for businesses, and those businesses would operate on a 2-, 3-, or 5-year upgrade cycle and unload used high-quality workstations on eBay for dirt cheap, which also made them popular with the hacker crowd.
Usually you have multiple options [1], with different resolutions and contrast/brightness levels with and without touch. The cheapest models usually suck, but once you go up a few levels, those displays are pretty good for a business laptop.
I mean, yes, the loyalty to Thinkpads was in part because they had great keyboards. The first I had new, an i12200 series model 1163, was a badge-engineered thing made by Acer, with nasty plastic screen hinges that failed, only USB 1, only 1 SO-DIMM slot, etc... but it still had the IBM keyboard.
But the thing is that since the ?30 series (X230, T430, W530) Lenovo has gone over to awful chiclet keyboards.
So the model you cite is a late one with a nasty flat almost-no-travel keyboard.
Which is why I only use ?20 series or older, which have the good, 7-row keyboards.
Lenovo, the company, bought the Thinkpad line from IBM. At the time the Thinkpad line had a near-religious following for quality and durability. Lenovo had done a decent job maintaining the Thinkpad reputation for enough of its models.
They also had unique innovations that few other laptops had: a finger joystick for a mouse, an overhead keyboard light (before we had glowing keys), expanding keyboards for small models, etc.
My first Thinkpad is a T490 from work randomly and if I would get to pick in the future I would pick Lenovo over HP or Dell.
They are great business laptops. Still amazing chassis quality and keyboard. Great driver support from Lenovo. I also get over 8h battery solid out of mine still, on low power plan in Win10.
But the business laptops of HP and Dell are also good, the HP Elitebooks and Dell Precisions/Latitudes.
It's just that when people buy Windows laptops, they buy cheap ass 300$ Acers from Walmart or a really expensive and loud gaming laptop. These business laptops are built to last for company use, and it does show. If a company buys 1000 laptops from HP, Dell, or Lenovo, and they are shit they won't buy from them again, so the quality has to be high. Yes, new they are expensive, but a lot of enterprise companies do 3 or 5 year hardware refreshes so used you can get them cheap. And company employees in general take care of their laptops or just use them docked 90% of the time. My keyboard looks new after 3 years because I most often have mine docked or hooked to an external screen/mouse/kb.
ThinkPad was originally an IBM line of laptops, which they later sold to Lenovo when they got out of the PC business.
ThinkPads had a reputation for being durable, but also somewhat repairable, so something of a DIY laptop community developed around hacking on ThinkPads more than any other laptop brand. This is clearly the market that Framework wants to appeal to.
I think most people are very fond of the ThinkPad Series which was bought by Lenovo from IBM in 2005. These laptops are very well built and have good Linux support. And in the past had outstanding repairability.
Incredible work, I love the ThinkPad 701C and wish for a resurgence of that type of industrial design. Very exciting to see that a transplant is possible albeit not simple
Reminds me of the “X62” mod I did a couple years ago. It was quite expensive all said and done but was so satisfying upgrading the X61 to a sharp screen and new motherboard
I picked up an x62 complete system and its been fantastic. I dont use it as much as I should, but I love the feeling I get booting it up. Its very unique in the collection of thinkpads I have amassed over the years.
The touch that I liked most on this was the internal USB-A port for a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse dongle, because who wants a little lump of plastic sticking out of the side of their laptop all the time?
The new model which I am looking forward to is the Lenovo Yogabook 9i which is two displays facing each other where one can have a keyboard on it, or one can connect an external keyboard and have a dual-screen setup:
I'm hoping this form-factor becomes popular enough that someone (Samsung?) makes a version which supports a Wacom EMR stylus (not wild about Wacom AES, though I may have to break down and accept it).
I'm writing this on a 2011 MBP which is running Monterey because of OpenCore Patcher, and it's a bit slow, but everything about it physically is better than most laptops I would get for under £500. This with a faster processor, graphics and RAM would do me for another 5 years for 'general' duties.