TIL about the PS/55 Note, a precursor to the 700C for the japanese market. And 85 key XT keyboards. I'm on my 3rd Thinkpad, this one is a P14s, 3 years old now and still powerful enough for most things, esp now that I'm on linux. My previous was an X1 Carbon, which I love for the light weight and one-hand hinge, but quickly became too underpowered for Win10 + Visual Studio + SQL Server, because of its u - low powered CPU and only 16GB of RAM.

I was able to upgrade the RAM of the P14s, by buying one with 1 soldered DIMM and one empty slot.

I have a p50 or p51, it’s so heavy, just a tank. I think they called it the portable workstation. I have LOVED this thing. It ran any Linux distribution I needed, was speedy, keyboard never missed, it’s in a closet now in headless mode running proxmox.

I just had my 25th ThinkPad anniversary, which started with a ThinkPad that was 5(?) years old at the time, and which I carried all around town (parks, cafes, student centers, libraries), every day, wrapped in a towel in my bag: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/

ThinkPad was a very expensive taste. The key to being affordable to a poor student or open source developer was to acquire gently-used older models, keep them working, and run Linux. All useful skills, which I still apply.

At MIT, Ted Selker (TrackPoint inventor mentioned in the article) had some retail boxes of the IBM SpaceSaver II TrackPoint keyboard on a shelf in his office, and one time he casually offered to give me one. I had to decline, since I craved that exact keyboard, knew exactly how much they cost, and couldn't accept such an expensive gift. They still fetch a good price used, and their looks aged pretty well (the alternative at the time was almost certainly a beige or light gray 104-key): https://www.ebay.com/itm/227342514769

Would have been interesting if not very AI generated :(

For more on this, the book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/483933.ThinkPad

is highly recommended.

Also, Jerry Kaplan's wonderful:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup

touches a bit on the early history of it as a pen computer project.

Still have my ThinkPad 755c, and still a bit bummed that I was never able to get OpenSTEP to run on it. (It's worth noting that when David Pogue complained of Steve Jobs using a ThinkPad after the purchase of NeXT by Apple that it was running NeXTstep and not Windows 95 as he claimed.)

Really wish the Lenovo Yogabook 9i was a ThinkPad model (so that it would have a Trackpoint) and that it used Wacom EMR stylus technology --- wouldn't've been able to resist that.

I've been a TP user since 2004ish. Almost exclusively. I had to use a mac for 2 years for a job in between but other than that, T series, Two X series machines (Which were my favourite) and finally, now an X1 carbon.

The last one is the one I'm most disappointed with. The battery dropped to 75% of max charge in a month and it heats up quite quickly. I don't expect my next one to be a Thinkpad.

I would have bought one if they weren’t so pricey for the spec they ship. Similar specs on a IdeaPad goes I think something like 40% cheaper or more.

I understand people loving heavy duty ones. But the ones I have run into in the past had poorer screens and were just clunky to carry around. What’s the trade off here? Why do people still want a Thinkpad.

Edit: I just thought of one reason, some specs are not available in Ideapads due the power consumption and cooling needs I think. So Thinkpads on the lower end aren’t worth it?

Using them professionally since 2006, and don't plan on changing, other than having Asus privately as well.

All the Mac issued hardware that I touch are project assigned if it must be, and never managed to win my heart to switch.

> ThinkPad is not dominant in the 2026 AI-laptop conversation. The Apple Silicon competitor class leads on raw inference per watt.

Alone the facts that I can expand memory after acquisition, have native access to GL 4.6, Vulkan and DirectX 12 Ultimate, with a CUDA GPU trumps that.

I'm a fan of thinkpads but I didn't much like the "AI" branding as of late. I tried to look at what it means exactly and all I could find is that nobody actually knows. I still ended up purchasing one because it was a reasonable price and it could run Linux flawlessly. My experience with their pre-purchase sales team was not good and almost made me go somewhere else.

The build quality has improved over the past 5 generations or so. It was getting too plastic-y and felt brittle. Nothing like the original thinkpads though, those were built like bricks.

I've recently purchased my first ThinkPad with intel ultra series 2 chip. Especially the weight is impressive. It weighs less than 1 kg! It's a fabulous machine. I appreciate that it has linux kernel modules dedicated to thinkpad family, which, I believe, is a culmination of decades of users' love described in this article.

I lived through this timeline, and with ThinkPads from different eras. Throughout, they were always considered in my science and computer science circles as "premium" laptops with excellent build quality, keyboards, and performance. The performance of my latest one (a P-series) always surprised me given the hardware specs.

I repaired some of the early 700’s at IBM when they were still mostly in the hands of upper execs and no official repair manuals had been released. I’d get random unit showing up at our Madison Heights, MI repair depot addressed to me from names I only vaguely recognized.

Do people not realize what they do to their reputation when they publish bottom-of-the-barrel, unedited AI slop under their own name?

Can someone explain how he is running inference at decent speeds on a CPU or integrated mobile gpu? This seems to be the most important part that he just fails to mention anything about.

I loved my 760C, with a trackpoint so hot they had to make it red, 90 MhZ, 12" 800x600 16 bit color screen, Mwave DSP (audio, fax modem), tilt up keyboard with lego-like modular bento bays for battery, floppy, hd, cd, magnesium body, soft touch black coating that melted with age.

I still have my x61s, T460p, and currently running a T14 Gen 3. The x61s is just sitting there awaiting some future project. Hopefully it happens someday. The T460p has become a homelab server. I never should have sold my W500, that thing was awesome. I also have an 11e which is my burner Windows machine for doing sketchy stuff with cars.