You can absolutely get 'buy it for life' backpacks and luggage for a few $000
https://www.briggs-riley.com/collections/carry-on-luggage still have a great repair and warranty deal for example.
I never used a mobile/power-efficient CPU myself, but I do use old CPUs. For example, this I5-4210M on my T440p, it's obviously not fast compare to newer ones, but when writing code on it (Go and a bit of Rust), I don't really feel a day-or-night level difference. Sure, it's slower, but not unbearably, in fact for most cases I barely notice it.
I daily a T480 at home and an X280 on the road. Swapped the batteries for fresh ones last week, they do around 6 hours on a charge for my use case and they run Linux so personally I don't see any reason to upgrade any time soon.
But I also saw people (usually X series users) complaining on YouTube saying something like their "mobile" CPU is trash etc. My thinking is, if the slowdown is actually insignificant for real-life use cases, then I rather have longer battery life than better performance.
Lenovo no longer sells T480 batteries afaict, and 3rd party vendors are a (dangerous) crapshoot.
The X1 looks nice but colleagues had thermal issues with theirs and the CPU is a bit limp so I skipped that particular problem.
My current one is a Thinkpad 14s AMD. As somebody who had most smaller Thinkpads and Dells in the last 15 years, this is my favourite machine so far: great battery, a decent GPU, still a Thinkpad, perfect Linux support.
I used a Macbook for about 2.5 years in between. Didn't like it (hardware was decent. Software was terrible). I also bought a Dell latitude (which was okay and is being used now as headless machine at my workplace for tinkering).
But my primary machine is a Thinkpad and I don't expect to see that changing in the near future.
I'd be interested to hear which software was terrible on mac and what was the better alternative on your side of the fence?
Only downside was the cooling: the fan was constantly spinning and producing noise akin to a plane taking off.
Lenovo, on the other hand, has been a hit or miss for awhile. I had a T570, which was horrible; one problem after the next. It's just a source of parts now. There are some design issues with the T480 (no center screw in the front/bottom). Also with the T480 is, what it seems to be, the slightly flaky USB-C connectors. The external keyboard (non-bluetooth), while very useful for 2 years, has always been a struggle with the flimsy micro-usb, leaving me to hack that. But now, I somehow now lost an important key on it, I just gave up and bought a nice Tex Shinobi. The only stable-ish one is the one I am on now, a T470p. It's not been perfect, but it's the best designed TP I had (my T430s is overall good, except for battery power, but the internals for those old machines are a chore to get through.) I have a P14s at work. It's OK, but nothing to write home about.
If all these TPs die, and Framework has a trackpoint version + delivers to my country, I would like to get that instead.
When I finally replaced it with a Framework a few years back I've regretted every second of it.
The ThinkPad still lives. I refurbished the batteries and slapped ChromeOS Flex on it and donated it to a Ukrainian refugee who needed a Chromebook for school. It'll probably live another 10 years.
I loved that thing to death. And I'm just happy it is still being used.
I've taken to just buying multiple 2-3 year old "tested" units again (plenty of NOS ones out there) and keeping them alive via ebay which is what I was doing around the X201 era. Same with the desktops - mine is a 2019 M720T ThinkCentre that cost me $150 equiv a couple of months back (before the RAM pricing went mental)
I had a brief affair with Apple, culminating in a fairly nice M4 MacBook Pro, but quite frankly it scares me carrying that around and I really do not like Tahoe (Sequoia was fine). Back to Debian stable on the T14 gen 3 it is...
The outside is a very durable rubber material. Certainly more durable than my Macbook Pro
Not sure if it still exists
They were all very inexpensive due to their age (when RAM was still cheap) and I'm really happy about them, I work from a console and a browser, they are perfect for my usage. I wouldn't use any other kind of laptop.
img { max-height: 100vh !important; width: auto !important; object-fit: contain !important; }
I had no idea David did the swooping mid-1990s AS/400s, I have a couple of those in my system collection and they definitely have an aesthetic.
I've seen a few 'consumer' laptops - HP DV6000, several Acers - go bad this way with parts on the board loosening. What these models had in common was that none of them had a stiff inside frame but consisted of a plastic bottom on which the guts were screwed down and onto the back of which the screen hinges were mounted with 2-3 screws each. This was capped with a plastic top into which the keyboard was mounted. With all parts removed the top and bottom shell are quite flimsy so any stiffness in the finished product depends on all parts being screwed down tightly. Now add those screwed-down hinges on the back which make the thing flex every time the screen is opened and closed, lift the thing using one hand every now and then which causes it to flex as well and you have a recipe for loosening parts - especially BGA components - on the mainboard.
It's t14 that are 14", it's in the name.
I really like my T14.. Gen2? Some Intel 11th Gen cpu from a few years back. Still getting driver and firmware updates through regular windows updates, which is neat.
Well, you can't have a t4xx or t14 with 16" display. It's like saying you want a apple pie, but you really don't like apple, and want banana.
I never owned another mouse as laggy and imprecise. Its design is good, but its basic mouse functionality is just very bad.
A quick Web search shows examples from more recent models with any OS.
I reported this issue to Lenovo and was stuck in the typical service desk loop of hell. Once I escalated the issue with our Lenovo representative the issue got some traction, but there wasn't any real progress for months and the troubleshooting remained nothing but superficial. Not a single expert got in touch with us to get some real and in-depth hardware debugging logs or whatever you need to truly analyse the hardware faults.
Ultimately, my employer decided to stop follow up on that with Lenovo and to just deal with it. We continue to buy these crappy laptops and monitors despite all the issues they cause us and shove the money down Lenovo throats, like any real company would. /s