Should You Buy a ThinkPad?

The main counterpoint in the article seems to be screen quality, which might hold for older thinkpads. There are however a lot of models almost a decade old such as 480s or 490s with IPS screens that are very affordable second-hand. Alternatively, thinkpads are known to have a high repairability so it's relatively easy to change the screen yourself if you're not happy with it (which I understand is not something everyone would want to do).

You can get ThinkPad L14 Gen 3 AMD Ryzen 7 5875U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD refurbished on eBay.co.uk for roughly £320

Their touchpads absolutely suck, with exception of some recent models. Trackpoints maybe made sense 15 years ago with lower-density screens, but I find them unusable with current HiDPI UI, they're just too imprecise.

Regarding price - pre-owned ex-corporate ThinkPads are sold for very little, usually about 20 percent of the price of a new one. Plugged into an external monitor it might just work for you.

I think tech enthusiasts like thinkpads for the same reason they dislike macbooks: out of the box linux support, good ergonomics and repairability.

Do thinkpad owners care about battery life? Yes, but once you are past a full work day battery and can charge it with same USB C charger that came with your phone it becomes a non issue.

It's all about personal perspective, so just find something matches with your price/performance requirement. With my personal experience, I can always recommend my friend to by ThinkPad, new or secondhand are fine.

in my experience, the elitebooks have made a substantial jump in quality in the recent years and they became a worthy alternative at a similar price, the base screens are decent (16:10 in the last models) with nice touchpads

Yeah i can vouch for the macbook neo as well.

My macbook neo outperforms my thinkpad x13g1 (ryzen 7, 8c16t, 32gb memory, amd gpu) on all metrics.

It’s snappier, battery lasts more, i have the same disk storage (500gb)

how's the battery life?