As everyone knows, one of the ThinkPad’s biggest draws is the TrackPoint, and newer ThinkPads have been caring less and less about it — not only has the height been cut way down, but it keeps getting shorter and harder to use, again and again. Maybe the TrackPoint just doesn’t fit with the mainstream Windows laptop push toward touchpads these days, but it’s still the last stubborn holdout for ThinkPad fans. The obvious fix is to swap the stock cap for a third-party one. I swapped mine out before — a 3D-printed piece by Mr. Saoto in Japan. My impression back then was that it felt great: it fit the finger nicely and was easy to use. The only downsides were that the color was a bit ugly and the material seemed pretty ordinary — not very durable. A while back I saw on Etsy that Mr. Saoto had released a new version of the 3D-printed TrackPoint, made with a composite material and with better colors, so I decided to grab one. Getting it, though, was a real ordeal.

This laptop isn’t mine — I bought it for someone else. Their budget wasn’t high, and the requirements were just these: A bigger screen, since they deal with Excel spreadsheets all day Decent performance — besides spreadsheets, the occasional game, roughly LOL and Overwatch level Looks nice, nothing too flashy Reliable after-sales service Honestly though, I think these days every laptop looks fine except those weirdly shaped gaming machines.

As a ThinkPad X1C 5th user, there’s actually one problem that’s been bugging me. The laptop is so thin that the screen hits the keyboard when the lid is closed, leaving keyboard marks. That’s also why I recommend a screen protector. But a screen protector isn’t a real fix, and putting one on a laptop is honestly pretty dumb. So I thought of another solution.

Generally speaking, putting a tempered glass protector on a laptop is a dumb idea, unless your laptop is a tablet 2-in-1 or has a touchscreen. After all, the laptop screen doesn’t really come into contact with anything, and closing the lid protects it too, so why would you ever need a protector? Even if it gets dirty, just wipe it off, right? Well, lately I’ve come to feel that was naive of me. After more than a year of using mine, I personally strongly recommend putting a tempered glass protector on your laptop, especially if it’s a ThinkPad X1C series. Don’t laugh, I’m serious.

I decided to buy a Pinebook at least a year ago, back when all the Linux news sites started covering it. Most of them called it “the $99 Linux laptop,” and sure enough it really does cost $99. But there’s nothing especially novel about it, because the so-called Pinebook is just the Pine64 dev board that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, shoved into a laptop shell. There are already plenty of similar products out there, mostly “Raspberry Pi laptops”—a Pi stuffed into a laptop case, or a 3D-printed shell with a battery and so on. Let’s look at the main specs of the Pinebook first. 11-inch or 14-inch 1366x768 screen (11-inch is IPS, 14-inch is TN) 2 GB RAM 16GB eMMC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MicroSD card reader USB port, headphone jack, HDMI output Nothing impressive there, and none of it is what got me interested in the Pinebook. The biggest selling point of the Pinebook—and its biggest appeal—isn’t performance. It’s that it looks good. Yes, compared to the whole flood of similar “Raspberry Pi laptops” on the market, the Pinebook is drop-dead gorgeous. Combined with the fact that it’s not expensive at all, I decided to buy one to play with. It’s cheap, and Pine64 claims to be a more advanced 64-bit ARM processor than the original Raspberry Pi (back when Pine64 was crowdfunding, the Pi was still on gen 1, if I remember right). At the very least it should make a decent toy. But I never expected that from deciding to buy it to actually holding it in my hands, it would take me a full year and more. Once the machine arrived I played with it for almost two weeks. There were pleasant surprises and disappointments. Picking up shells on the beach, sorting out my thoughts, let me sum up the sweet and the bitter for you.

Starting with the ThinkPad X240, the TrackPoint got thinner, and the feel got worse too. It lost that “point where you want, go where you point” convenience of the original ThinkPad X230. Honestly there’s not much to be done about it — laptops have to get thin, and this is hard to balance. By the time the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th came along, the TrackPoint’s size got even more awkward. Still, the TrackPoint’s advantages are irreplaceable, so I just put up with it. Naturally, a Japanese guy named さおと (saoto) wasn’t having it, and decided to solve the problem with 3D printing. I found out about saoto from a Taiwanese friend’s blog. He made his own little TrackPoint cap to replace the stock one, and it’s said to greatly improve the feel, so I decided to give it a try. saoto has released the 3D-print files for his cap design, but you can also buy one from him, and the price isn’t especially steep. What arrives is a plain envelope from Japan. When you open the envelope, be careful not to just tear it apart — there’s an instruction sheet inside… The sheet explains the design concept behind the cap in detail, plus the various versions included, covering both the old-style and new-style TrackPoints.

I was using a ThinkPad X250 before this, and I upgraded it bit by bit over time, but I had a few complaints about that laptop: Cooling was terrible. Hook it up to a dock and it hits 90°C in no time, and breaking 100°C was routine. I tried modding it, but it was basically useless. Performance was lacking. With the dock running dual 1080p displays, it just couldn’t handle it—open YouTube and performance explodes. Build quality was so-so. The ThinkPad X250 was a step back from the X230 in terms of build. It’s all fiberglass, even though every media outlet hypes it as carbon fiber. It’s not, and there’s no metal either. Fiberglass, plainly put… is plastic. Overall, the laptop was okay at first, but later it started to annoy me, so I planned to upgrade after two years. This time I looked at the X270, but found nothing new, and it seems the ThinkPad series has given up on the X200 line. So my targets were the ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Yoga.

I picked up another Chromebook recently, bought on Taobao. Probably leaked out of some factory somewhere. It’s an Asus Chromebook Flip, the ARM CPU version. The upsides are obvious: IPS screen, 1280x800, it flips around, it’s touchscreen, and the battery lasts forever. The Chromebook I bought before got sold off. Reason being I never actually used Chrome OS — the moment it arrived I wiped it and installed Ubuntu. Using it felt no different from a ThinkPad, and honestly worse than a ThinkPad, so what was even the point. This time I decided to actually give Chrome OS a proper try. But I’m in mainland China, and for certain reasons using this thing here definitely isn’t as smooth as in the US — bound to be a lot of pain. Though that’s more of a 2014-era take. How is it now? The answer: not bad.

I use my own laptop for work. It’s not that the desktop machines at the office are bad, they’re just a hassle to use. Over a year ago I bought a ThinkPad X230, and using it since then I’ve really come to appreciate how good ThinkPads are. If something goes wrong you can just find the parts yourself and fix it. Honestly, even if you smashed it, I could buy some bits on eBay and put it back together for you… Over the past year or so I’ve replaced the screen, messed with the cooling, and the machine runs fine. But there were still a couple of things that bugged me. One, the screen was the cursed 1366 x 768. Two, the battery life was bad. Even with a 9-cell I could only push power draw down to 11W at best, and it would randomly spike to 20W… So when I heard the ThinkPad X250 was announced and that it brought back the original trackpad, I just bought it. Why not a Mac? Because I don’t use OSX, and I think putting Ubuntu on an RMBP is too much hassle.

Part One: Replacing the Screen Last Friday, I suddenly noticed a very small white spot in the bottom-right corner of my ThinkPad X230’s screen. I have no idea when it appeared. All I know is that from the moment I spotted it, it became absurdly conspicuous. I could barely stop myself from fixating on it. Sure, it only shows up against white, and my desktop is black—but it still looked wrong, plain and simple. First thing I thought of was checking whether there was any after-sales service, even though mine’s a gray-market unit. Asked the seller I bought from. Answer: after-sales is possible, but the process takes a month if everything goes smoothly, and it’s not even certain this situation would qualify for repair. Fine, fine. So I bought another screen off Taobao. Supposedly it’s an upgraded STB1, thinner and lighter than my old one, and more power-efficient too. As for the old screen, the Taobao seller said they’d take it for 100 yuan.