[eliasmacpherson]

Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, is quoted as saying "change is the only constant in life."

Cutting my teeth with computers from the 80s through to the 00s, it's bemusing to see people resorting to hotrodding ancient shells of computers that in times previous would have been replaced every two years.

Maybe this slower rate of change is more sustainable, or maybe it is a temporary blip. At least the new Apple chips were good, but I'd rather wait for everybody else to catch up, however long it takes.

I am increasingly uncomfortable with how slowly things are moving. I don't remember generations past complaining about decceleration, rather the opposite.

[kuschku]

It'd be awesome if new computers weren't missing so many desirable features.

With a modded old thinkpad I can get 95Wh of battery, I can get another 75Wh in 10 seconds by swapping the external battery.

I can get a 1440p 400nits matte display, even a version with HDR support or in 4K exists.

I can get as much RAM as I desire, thunderbolt 3 support, USB ports, ethernet port, hdmi, smartcard reader, sd card reader, LTE support, charging via usb c and via the old style connector.

I can use old docks and thunderbolt docks.

All that's missing is upgrading the CPU and the thunderbolt port to more lanes.

Which modern PC offers in 1.1kg-1.3kg 95Wh of battery, such a good display, such great reliability and connectivity, with 16 or 32GB of ddr4-3200mhz ram, 2TB NVMe storage, for less than 500€?

Which modern PC can even compete at all with that offer?

If you could replace the motherboard with these chinese mods, and add the ThinkPad 25 keyboard (with minor mods it fits into the T470) you could turn a T470 into the ultimate ThinkPad.

[Joeri]

Which modern PC can even compete at all with that offer?

Excepting the price the m1 macbook air is a strong contender. It is roughly the width and depth of an x220 but half the height, 1.3 kg, P3 400 nits high dpi IPS display, insane battery life (to the point of not needing a spare), P series performance, trackpad so good I don’t miss a trackpoint. It is missing the great keyboard and the ports though, although in practice the only thing I really miss going to the mba from a thinkpad is usb-a.

[kuschku]

Even if you ignore the keyboard and the ports, the M1 has significantly worse battery.

The M1 13" has 58Wh, the M1 14" has 70Wh. And while the M1 does use less power in idle, under load it's just as power hungry as all the other processors, so for serious usage the battery would become a bottleneck.

The aforementioned thinkpad can get 95Wh, and you can swap batteries if you carry a spare. That's 170Wh of power in just 1.6kg. You can get a LOT of mileage out of that.

Now imagine an updated T470 with a more power efficient processor, e.g. a recent ryzen or an M1. Such a hypothetical device would last you forever, even if your system is at full load.

[turtlebits]

You can't compare battery capacities with the M1.

Under load the M1 uses significantly less power than any current AMD or Intel CPU.

I'm pretty sure the M1 would last longer than your T470 on both batteries (95Wh + 75Wh).

[kuschku]

The M1 Max draws in Cinebench single thread 11W, in multi thread 34W.

That's not much, but it's not the 2x-4x more efficient it'd need to compensate for the smaller battery.

Only for idle, browsing, video en/decoding, etc will you see significant improvements. For developers, the M1 is close, but not perfect.

[eliasmacpherson]

Well thanks for that info about the keyboard, since you saying that, I've found this insane t25/t480 story: https://kitsunyan.github.io/blog/frankenpad-story.html

[sennight]

"There's a sucker born every minute." -- Somebody in the 1800s marketing Ye olde Apple® Pro Stand™.

I expect the trend to continue, as individuals find it more and more difficult to keep up with the marketing induced conspicuous consumption cycles - they'll accidentally rationalize an already reasonable position: treating durable goods like consumables is stupid and should be scorned instead of aped.

[eliasmacpherson]

It was not always conspicious consumption, but certainly yes consumer buying power has gone down and so has the price performance ratio, particularly over the last ten years.

There were legitimate improvements between every generation of thinkpad I am aware of up to the Tm30 series, the Tm40 series was a a sidegrade and so was each that followed up until the arrival of the Ryzen chips.

key: Xm30/Tm30 with m for model - m = 2/4/5

[sennight]

I was speaking about the broader electronics market. I don't really view anything post Lenovo sale to be a thinkpad - there is practically zero design continuity. I think the [T|W]520 was the last IBM design, the product of a left seat right seat transition, where Lenovo's contribution was restricted to basically slapping their badge on it. After that the consistent method of segmenting by travel/performance design consideration was replaced by an explosion of confusing product offerings that seem to be a lot of distinction without difference. Oh, and they immediately (no joke, the first order of business) got rid of the most iconic thing about the brand: the nice keyboard. It really makes you wonder why they even bother pretending.