| 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. |