IBM/Lenovo was my first choice for the last 20 years when it comes to computers and laptops in particular. Unfortunately, the quality of these systems is slowly decreasing over time. Lenovo is doing nasty things with their recent models. Like Apple and other big manufacturers, plenty of their laptops are now sold with soldered RAM, hidden battery and many other displeasing “features”. Well, this is a bit sad, those laptops were great. Is it possible to find a professional alternative to them? A list of requirements before starting digging:
Multi-core with more than 32GB of RAM. Currently involved in Erlang development on projects consuming a huge amount of RAM and CPU, this is a must have. A system with at least 8 cores and 32GB RAM is the bare minimum in my case. An amd64 architecture is probably better, but any other should do the job as well.
Open-Source Friendly. This is one of the first important point, all my laptops must be compatible with at least OpenBSD and recent Linux distributions. It was fun to debug stuff 10 years ago, but my time is now too valuable to lose it by doing hardware/kernel hacking stuff.
Easy to repair. Fixing an hardware issue on Lenovo laptop was easy. Even too easy. In less than 5 minutes you can replace the RAM, remove a disk, change a fan… My first IBM/Lenovo laptop (a T42p) is still working today, and only few screws need to be removed to replace the most important port of the system.
