Hi,
Sorry, I'm usually just a lurker, but thought that I should pass on my views on having a recent gen lenovo thinkpad.
My husband has been a lifelong thinkpad user and has had many over the years, but buys himself refurbished older ones and loves them.
I however needed something a bit better and more modern for a new job/freelance work, so I bought a P53s around a year ago. I don't think you're looking for anything like this from your description, but experiences might be similar to lower spec machines of the same age. (With upgrades it Core i7 (8 core), 40GB ram, 1 TB SSD and NVIDIA Quadro graphics, so yea, I'm not saying get this for web browsing, it's alright for video editing, although I'm already thinking I should have a better machine, I can't edit 4K video smoothly, which is annoying as I just upgraded to a 4K camera!
However, experiences that might be transferable; The build quality is awesome, as you expect from a thinkpad, I'm using this on my knees at the mo, and there's not a hint of flex in the base of the laptop, it's rock solid. It's not something that your going to be worried about throwing into a bag or tbh even loose in the boot of the car, I wouldn't be concerned at it holding its own. This is essential for me, I'm embarrassingly clumsy, I've dropped most things I own at some point.
My last Samsung laptop would flex and creak if you lifted it from a corner, but this is like picking up a solid block.
The other great thing is upgrading the SSD (NVMe) and ram is unbelievably easy due to the service guide that walks you through exactly how to do everything to the machine. The last machine that was this easy was a dell laptop, which also had a service manual.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04LTS on the machine.
What I want to say however are the downsides of the machine:
There is an odd bit where sometimes when it suspends it won't come back, the computer comes back on, indicators on the keys (capslock etc) functions, so the computer is responding, but the screen is blank. I suspect it's just not turning the screen back on. It doesn't always do it, but when it does the only way out is to force power down the machine, and can be exceptionally annoying and risky depending on what I was doing when I left it, so I now never let it suspend, only turn off the screen, which is fine and come back on.
I've got the Ultra dock, and very very annoying is that when the screen turns off (see above comment), when you wake it back up, the laptop display comes back on, and everything else connected to the dock is working, wireless mouse, keyboard, ethernet, etc, but the external display connected to the dock via hdmi doesn't wake back up, the screen can't see any signal, until you disconnect the dock and reconnect and then it'll switch back to both screens. So I've got into the habit of sitting down, sliding the dock connector out, back in again and then typing in the password. It's annoying that it's had to become a habit though.
Thirdly, something to bear in mind is that some (at least this one, I don't know how many more) have the ram soldered into slot 1. So this one came with 8GB, but that was soldered, so slot 2 is the only one upgradable. I got a 32GB stick to put in slot 2, so up to 40, but I could never upgrade the 8GB. If I'd bought a 16GB version then I'd have 48GB. I bought it knowing this, but I only realised as was looking at upgrades before buying, else I wouldn't have realised until I went to upgrade.
If you're going from an older machine (pre all the secure boot UEFI stuff) then it's a bit annoying, my last PC was a 6 year old machine which booted from SSD in under 6 seconds, this one is about double that.
I haven't worked out why, pretty sure it's my setup, but virtual box windows 10 is terribly slow. However it may be because I only use virtualbox for terribly niche weird software and I'm usually also running a screen capture at the time, because I'm trying to record what I'm doing (else I wouldn't be doing it!)
Another minor, if you regularly go between a thinkpad and another machine/keyboard, is that the Fn and Ctrl keys are the wrong way around on a thinkpad. I use a logitech keyboard 95% of the time, so it doesn't bother me often, but if I was 50% a normal keyboard and 50% the thinkpad one it might bother me as I'm rubbish at adapting to things being different.
I can't think of anything else major, but will update if I remember anything. But basically a great machine, but with ubuntu power management issues!
Hope there's something in there which is useful to know.
Katie
