On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 06:57:13PM +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
P50's are about half that but most of them seem to be in Germany. That would mean a keyboard change (but I can't imagine that's too hard, I've replaced keyboards before). So is a P50 worth ~£500 by comparison to what can be bought new for £500 today?
I can't really vouch for it being worth it, I'm unlikely to have any other laptop than a Thinkpad simply because I use the Trackpoint exclusively which really limits my choice, to me a laptop with just a trackpad is worthless.
I would still say that Thinkpads are fairly straight forward to upgrade and repair though, they provide hardware maintenance manuals and they work well with Linux. My W530 is now 5 years old and given no problems (apart from it now does a random reboot once every 2 weeks or so) and is still very capable, a P50 would be 3 generations newer than a W530 so certainly a good choice.
Also, I've never found a Thinkpad with a keyboard that wasn't trivial to upgrade.
Adam