I’m a Melbourne-based husband, father of three, and principal engineer / engineering director. I live amongst the trees out in Belgrave; you can find me online at:
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@electric_nan Yeah ours are all a bit long in the tooth. Given the kids’ proclivity for destroying equipment though they’re on the cheap stuff :)
Not Thinkpad related, but: my next laptop will almost certainly be an AMD Framework. They’re just so good. _Better_ design and construction than even older ThinkPads, fast, powerful, and with great matte 4:3 screens. My only gripe is the lack of a Trackpoint.
@electric_nan Following up on this: my favourite _ever_ ThinkPad was my old X220. Robust, easy to work on, fantastic non-island keyboard, ThinkLight (!), … just great. I used it as a daily driver for years while consulting.
However it just got too slow, and the 768p display became a liability for Web development, even by ~2018 when I retired it for the W540.
If you don’t need a fast system, and are willing to do some hardware-hacking to upgrade the display, an X220 might still be worth looking at.
@electric_nan I run a fleet of ThinkPads for the family (except my wife, who gets a Ryzen Framework 13).
Kids run X250s and a T470s. Great little systems if you make sure to get the 1080p displays. The 470s has a touch-screen which, weirdly, even works out of the box in FreeBSD. Recommend both models, especially if you want to run FreeBSD as well as Linux.
I run a W540 as my daily driver. Do *not* recommend purely because of the trackpad, which is awful; lack of separate buttons makes the Trackpoint useless too. By all accounts the W541 has a “proper” trackpad and is good. The battery life on the W-series is bad, because of their design (CAD desktop replacements). Otherwise fast for what they are.
@electric_nan Issue for me is the cost. Frameworks are actually cheap for what they are (compare with a MacBook!) but we could replace our entire family (second-hand, elderly) ThinkPad fleet for the price of one Framework.