[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