[danet]

That is why I'm holding to my 2011 ThinkPad T420 for dear life. I replaced keyboard 3 times ($30-$40 off ebay), changed HDD to SSD, and replaced CD-ROM with another SATA drive bay.

Not having USB3 is annoying, the CPU is a little slow and the batteries aren't what they used to be, but the things still works and gives me no problems.

I would like to get something smaller and lighter but all the affordable light laptops come with at most 8GB of not upgradable memory, whereas mine has 12GB and upgradable to 16.

What I ended up doing is getting a desktop computer for anything that needs performance and every time I look at anything apple, it just looks like I'm about to get on a treadmill of shelling out a couple of thousand dollars every year without the ability to own, upgrade or repair any of my devices.

[enobrev]

I've been building my desktop (and now servers) for 25 years. The idea of taking my computer in to a store to fix a drive or ram or worse, buying a new one because of a hardware issue is absolutely foreign to me.

I had hoped laptops would be just as easy to tweak and build by now but it seems the world favors the apple way.

I'm going to keep building. It's _far_ less expensive. I can tweak my system to fit my needs and adjust as my needs change. And I have a solid understanding of the most used tool in my life.

Also things like PC part picker make it so much simpler than it used to be that I barely even need to think about it any more.

[errantspark]

I don't think this really holds water. I bought a Thinkpad L380 recently, it was a great computer with upgradable ram and ssd. I ended up returning it because of the lack of a ThunderBolt 3 port, but if it had one of those I think it would have been near perfect.

[mindslight]

T430 has USB3, and I would think everything should basically be swappable. I'd lurk eBay for an i7 T430 with a broken screen and go to town.

I'm speaking based on experience with the X230 though.

[jbverschoor]

I dunno.. My current mpb is from 2013 and I don't see any point upgrading this anytime soon. Except for the 1 model newer version for higher 4k fps

[cogburnd02]

> Not having USB3 is annoying

You could get an expresscard to USB3 card?