[Waterfall]

As an owner of a T420 and x230 thank you but these laptops are too old. The CPUs use like 25w, the screens are 99% really bad TN screens and a few touchscreen IPS on the x220t and x230t. The screens are the deal breaker. Lugging around a heavy laptop or a small laptop with a crappy screen sucks. The new generation starting wirh 40s are modern battery can have internal and external batteries and the screens aren't overpriced crap, you can easily find a cheap IPS in FHD for under $60 on eBay. These need adapters or expensive crappy screens that aren't produced anymore.

I wish they had better screens to make them worth using. Using an IPS and going back to these is hell, and the 720p on the T420 is also really saddening. It's the worst part of these computers.

[ohazi]

I had the larger T520 (with the expensive at the time 1080p IPS panel) for about a decade and it was and still is great. Heavy though, and with the original battery now lasting about five minutes, it's essentially a desktop.

I use a T480 now, which seems to be the new sweet spot, as it's the last model made that has the combo internal + hot swappable external battery, and has a really nice wqhd panel option. Models with this panel are super rare on eBay, but you can still find the panel and cable and perform the swap yourself (slightly terrifying, though).

With the big external battery, I get around 10-12 hours (idles at ~6 watts), and combined with the lighter weight I now have an actual laptop again.

One slightly annoying thing about battery management controller though... You have no control over which cell it's going to discharge first. It seems to try and preferentially discharge whichever cell it thinks is less degraded. This makes sense in principle to keep cell wear even, but it would be nice to have an override.

For example, If you have two external batteries but it chooses to discharge the internal battery first, then you may not be able to hot swap by the time the external battery is discharged. It switches batteries at 5%, but by the time the other one is dead, 5% may be closer to zero - another parameter that would be nice to be able to change... Why not switch over at 15%?

Anyway, maybe in a few years when cells for this model are no longer available, someone will figure out how to write custom firmware for the BMC to give us these features.

[regularfry]

The rest of the package makes up for it, for me. The keyboard is fantastic, the CPU is more than fast enough, enough ports, they're rugged as hell, and I can get at the parts to swap them out when they fail. It's always been a desktop replacement for me, so lugging it about was rare. I can forgive the screen. Mine spends most of its time plugged into a monitor anyway these days. I think the graphics chip might be on the way out, though, I'm starting to see rendering glitches...

[Waterfall]

The new keyboards are good too. Where are you getting the screen from? They're way overpriced when I find them (12.5in screens, 14in and 15in aren't much better either).

Wait until you get a T440P. About the same, but way more powerful and the screen and battery life are way better. Only like $120 usually and even less pretty often. The batteries are cheap and genuine too. I'm looking forward to more devices like the surface so Keyboards aren't attached to laptops anymore. The new Lenovo keyboard is pretty good but it's expensive!