Just in time for RAM, SSD, and HDD prices to skyrocket and make personal computers unaffordable.
I guess if you can afford one now, at least you’ll be able to repair it.
When buying a laptop in 2026, you really need to consider how easy it’s going to be to keep it running with parts you’ve scavenged from other road-warriors.
Old off-lease ThinkPads from corporate fleets as always.
You could buy an anemic one now, and then upgrade the RAM & storage once prices come down.
prices come down.
Schools are a huge customer for these types of Thinkpads. Kids are rough on laptops. They’ll be bought in large quantities regardless.
Oh stop it. Plenty of used computers are perfectly fine. There isn’t a single thing you need done that can’t be done with a 15 year old PC. You don’t need “agentic AI” to generate horse slop in your home, you don’t need terabytes of pirated content you can’t watch anyway, you don’t need video games.
We live in the golden era of thrifting PCs and disconnecting from the slop and nonsense of modern computing.
My apologies! I didn’t realize you were the arbiter of what I do and don’t need. I feel so relieved now that I can just ignore all of the demands on my life and just hand over such authority to some opinionated jackass I met on lemmy.
hell ya for being able to buy these used as office surplus in 5 or so years
First time I’ve seen CAMM memory in a real product. Pretty cool, but not sure if I prefer it to traditional DIMM slots though.
But the removable ports are a fucking godsend. So sick of a broken port making an entire motherboard unusable.
Honestly the only thing more I can ask for is for the battery to be on the outside of the case (like old school laptops) so you can replace it without opening it which not everyone is comfortable with doing. Otherwise this is really good. The only thing stopping me from buying this laptop is the fact that my current 6 year old Lenovo still works perfectly after I replaced the battery (honestly Thinkpads have always been pretty repairable, this is going above and beyond).
I mean I never had any issues with ThinkPad repairs ever, I think you still get parts for like real dinosaurs.
really wish they’d bring this kind of repairability back to their yogas; the upcoming T14s 2-in-1 gen 2 is still as locked down as ever.
the X41T to X230T was peak creative workstation and i’d kill to have something like that with modern internals. or hell, even the P40.
still using many non-standard and proprietary parts though, like most laptops. far from ideal still.
I have the previous gen T14, and I had to replace the entire motherboard because the Wi-Fi chip is soldered. It’s still soldered on this one I see.
Huh, I feel better about my recent Latitude 5450 purchase then, damn. I didn’t realize we were soldering on WiFi chips now too. (In addition to ram soldering thats been going on for a while now)
I once bought a HP Elitebook on the basis of a very good repairability score from iFixit. It was a shit laptop but the big problem was that as it started breaking I found it impossible to find parts for it. It doesn’t matter if it’s held together by torx screws with no glue if you can’t actually get any parts.
I had an HP laptop at work where the keyboard went haywire. I saw a replacement keyboard online and thought “hey, why not, I’ll just replace it”. I didn’t even look up any videos or anything because I’d never think there would be a problem. So after needing to disassemble everything to get to the front plate, I was very happy to find out that the keyboard is riveted to it (about 20 or so rivets). I looked up a video and they suggested drilling out every rivet and then replacing them. I had never been so frustrated with a piece of technology before. Luckily, a can of contact cleaner solved the problem
