My Macbook Pro has a small dent in it. It happened when something small fell off my bed and landed on it. It doesn’t affect how the laptop works, but every once in a while I look at the small scar on the otherwise sleek, smooth matte aluminium surface and I feel sad.
Not long afterwards I knocked my ten-year-old Thinkpad off the kitchen work surface. It fell on the hard tiled floor. Nothing happened. Luckily the floor was ok.
My Thinkpads are like Land Rover Defenders. They’re not very fast, they’re not very exciting to look at and if used for the right job perform better than anything out there.
I have an X61s that is more than a decade old, a slightly newer T400 and a positively modern six-year-old X220. All have SSD drives and upgraded memory. The older machines run pretty lightweight installations of Arch Linux, while the X220 runs multiple virtual machines on Xen. I usually have four or five open.
All three machines run beautifully. Nearly all of my computer time that isn’t gaming or photo editing happens on an old Thinkpad. The 4:3 aspect ratio display on the X61s makes it a wonderful machine for browsing the web. I spend more time reading and less time scrolling. It’s also really light, sturdy and get’s about five hours on a battery charge.
The T400 is great for development. I have a couple of Vi buffers on screen at a time along with usually a terminal or two. My web browser is usually on the next virtual desktop, which I access by pressing the dedicated ’next page' button that sits above the cursor keys. When I want to go back I press the ‘previous page’ button. No three finger swiping necessary.
I use the X220 as a mobile lab with multiple VMs running. The early i5 processor and 16 Gb of RAM allow it to do this job perfectly.
All three Thinkpads have fantastic keyboards. Without hyperbole, I can say that they are better than many desktop keyboards. The keys are slightly concave and I can type for hours and it remains comfortable. I can’t say the same about the wobbly flat slabs on the Mac.
I never use an external mouse or even the track pad on these laptops (the X61s doesn’t even have a trackpad). The magic red Trackpoint that sits between the G, H and B keys allow me to move the mouse pointer without taking my hands away from the keyboard home row. I almost feel lazy.
The only problem with old Thinkpads is that they’re so affordable. You can get them for next to nothing on eBay. If they weren’t such wonderfully designed machines they’re practically disposable. I’m already considering a more modern T-series. I don’t think I’ve reached the upper limit of my girlfriend’s tolerance for Thinkpads, but I might be getting close.
