Since the beginning of the lockdown, my brand-new-but-broken Mac has been stuck at the repair shop and I’ve been using an old hand-me-down T420 ThinkPad as my main computer.
I had to replace its slow hard disk with a faster SSD, I had lying around, and the laptop needed a good cleaning but it was in perfect working condition and, despite its age (2011), it runs incredibly well. Be it under Linux Ubuntu or Manjaro but also, mind you, under Windows 10 Pro. I don’t know what magic the devs at Microsoft have recently done to Windows, but it feels great to use it on this 2011 laptop (it even feels snappier than Ubuntu).
So, I used this ThinkPad for the whole lockdown and what I expected to be a temporary workaround turned out to be such a satisfying experience that, now that the lockdown is over here in Paris, I haven’t yet checked with the store to see if I could come to grab my Mac. I have not missed it once.
What I have done since the end of the lockdown, though, is to purchase the ThinkPad X220, the T420 little and lighter brother.
It was released the same year as the T420 was; it uses the same CPU (2nd Gen Core i5 2520M), the same ram (up to 16 DDR3, 8Gb officially) and, more important to me, the exact same keyboard as the T420, but in a smaller package. And it runs as great under Windows, or Linux.
Me liking the ThinkPad does not come as a total surprise. I owned an X220 back then, in 2011, when it was brand new. And the X200, prior to that. So, I knew I liked them, but I had forgotten how much.