I’m still on my 2012 W520 as daily driver. Runs Ubuntu 22.04. It’s a tank - it just won’t die. And if something does wear it, it’s easy to repair or replace.

I’m actually thinking of purchasing a X220 or X220T as a smaller, more portable model of the same era. To me, this era of thinkpad is the pinnacle of laptop design. Unsurpassed. Robust and practical.

I've stockpiled a few W520 units, in case I ever need that upgrade step. The huge 170W power brick is the reason not to just move to it now, since I have a fleet of 90W AC adapters I've been using for everything since the T60.

I've also wanted to get X220, for more portable, but still matching keyboard. (I currently have some X200 units, with better displays than X220 usually has, but different keyboard layouts. They'll be a bit of work to sell, for the upgrade, since I'll have to replace the custom Coreboot that's on them.)

> The huge 170W power brick is the reason not to just move to it now, since I have a fleet of 90W AC adapters I've been using for everything since the T60.

Can't you get a barrel connector on top of a modern GaN adapter? It should be much smaller!

Good question. The W520 wants 20V (at up to 170W). Looks like the newish USB PD standard can supply 20V in addition to 5V. So maybe it could be done with a current/forthcoming consumer USB PD wallwart, without needing to add additional power circuitry?

> So maybe it could be done with a current/forthcoming consumer USB PD wallwart, without needing to add additional power circuitry?

You may need a circuit to negotiate the USB-PD, then to ouput 20V from that, but it should be possible.

It could even be a very interesting project: expose an artificial resistance on the barrel plug to simulate the Lenovo AC wattage resistor by matching what the USB-PD can deliver.

If you end up using an X220 you will regret it. You’ll never be able to use a different laptop again. Absolute masterpiece for its time.

Yes. I used an x200 which was unfortunately damaged. I tried to repair it but it didn't recover. I bought an x230 off ebay. It was a factory demo piece which was refurbished. I did that in 2014 and did so because Ineeded one urgently. I replaced it about a month ago with an X1 carbon. The battery is shot and it overheats when I run too much on it. However, for day to day stuff, it's superb. Runs Debian and chugs away without many problems.

> It doesn’t seem “vintage”.

And a 7-year old machine isn’t necessarily obsolete either.

Apple uses those two words to mean specific things (vintage: >= 5y, < 7y; obsolete: >= 7y) as it relates to their support policies. Full support up to at least 5 years, some support up to 7, no support from then on.

Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing to be able to summarise 99% of a company’s product support lifecycle in such a small paragraph.

I'm still on a x230 I've bought 12 years ago (which was also manufactured in around 2012) as my personal daily driver. I replaced the keyboard once as I preferred the x220 one, replaced the battery every 4 years, and wouldn't even consider "upgrading" to something else. I mostly write C, Guile and Perl code in Emacs on this machine and spend another large chunk of my time in a terminal emulator, so I'd even argue that my hardware requirements haven't really changed during the last decade and probably won't for yet another.

The X230 is absolutely a classic, a local optimum of computer hardware. I have several of them at this point. It's just too bad that it doesn't have the X220's keyboard.

I've heard of people transplanting the X220 keyboard into X230, but don't knwo how polished that can turn out.

> And if you drop it on something, the something will probably get hurt more.

Make sure that you don't have another T520 lying around!