Category: Thoughts

I’ve been told that there is a nice Lenovo that I need to look at. T480 has some interesting things about it – OK it’s old-er but it is very upgradeable… swappable almost everything apart from the CPU, and has the very nice Lenovo keyboard – and I’m a bit of a keyboard snob if truth be told.

T480 has things like internal AND external battery – so you can swap the external battery without shutting down. IT comes with 24Wh internal, and a 24Wh external slim, or you can go all the way up to a 72Wh external… and take two if you like. Full bright screen, decent CPU for an 8 year old – and well over 15 hours battery life.

And cheap as chips as well. Theres a new in box on everyones favourite Tat Emporium for £249…. it has 1920×1080 screen, 16GB ram, 256GB ssd (thats a little small but hey) and a 4 core Intel i5-8350.

So I bought it.

So I live and work off laptops. Something that you can take with you, and compute, anywhere. Most people do these days – I’ve no idea for the numbers but you don’t see many tower PC’s these days in peoples houses. I mean, I have boxen, but thats stuff running Proxmox or TrueNAS, they don’t have monitors…

My current daily is a Alienware lump – I like it for gaming, and it’s a desktop replacement – it has a monster graphics card, lots of storage, lots of RAM (was I glad I bought that two years ago!) and an appalling battery life. OK, the three hours I can reliably get isn’t that bad historically, but then I look at a Macbook…

So Im looking for a lightweight laptop that I can walk around the house, chuck in a bag, and get a days use out of. And it needs to run Linux, I’ll suffer MacOS for work but no way am I subscribing to the Cult just for battery life.

Framework looks interesting, if a little pricey, I love the idea, and the interchangeability is nice. Battery life also looks good, shame about the lead time for it though. Also with the RAMpocalyspe ongoing, no guarantee that they wont hike the price before it appears, or just halve the RAM offered.

Do I really want to spend that much on an extra laptop, when I have a perfectly good one…. Or will the Cult finally suck me in.