The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 suddenly got hit with a recall notice. The reason given was “a screw inside the machine may come loose, pressing on the battery and causing it to explode.” Fine, loose screws inside a laptop aren’t exactly news. Even if it were loose I’d have opened it up and tightened it myself. The recall and the screw aren’t what matter to me. What matters is that I finally have an excuse to register IWS global warranty for the ThinkPad I bought from Japan. Delightful!

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.

Stumbled onto a sale at a ThinkPad shop on Taobao — both the ThinkPad TrackPoint Bluetooth Keyboard and the 6-cell battery (72Wh) for the X250 were going for good prices. I’d just returned a bunch of stuff I bought for Spring Festival and had some money sitting in Alipay, so I bought them. Both shipped from Beijing, and fast enough… First, the keyboard:

As a semi-loyal ThinkPad fan, my love for the TrackPoint is no less than my love for Ms. Atsumi Tanezaki. So whether on the X230 or the X250, the TrackPoint has become my go-to pointing device. Sometimes even with a Bluetooth mouse connected, I’ll find myself using it for a while and then tossing the mouse aside to go back to the TrackPoint. So here’s the thing: my X230 has been in use for almost two years now, and its TrackPoint is battered—gray and no longer bright, and it seems a bit shiny too. So I figured I’d find a new one to swap in. I knew Taobao had them… but I didn’t know there were actually three kinds of TrackPoint:

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.

Honestly, I never had a strong need for a laptop. Back in college I was like most students — I really wanted one, because it’s portable, it’s fashionable, it’s badass. But as I got deeper into using computers, I started to dislike laptops, because they’re just so un-upgradeable. Who doesn’t want to upgrade the GPU, RAM, or CPU every now and then? With a laptop, basically you can upgrade the RAM and that’s it. Still, right now I’ve got a renewed need for a laptop, and the reason is a bit silly: I often want to find a quiet, empty place and just use a computer in peace. I already have a cheap Dell laptop, but the eye-searing screen, the garbage keyboard feel, the pathetic i3 SNB performance, and the tragic battery life even with a 9-cell — none of that meets what I need. Especially the screen. Anything can be bad, but how can the screen be bad? So my requirements for a laptop were basically set: high performance + good screen + strong battery + good keyboard + portable.