Thinkpad T14

The Problems

In mid 2025 I bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 6 with 1440p display for $350 [1].

It has been working reasonably well for me, but my vision is diminishing so my current setup with the Kitty terminal emulator allows 4 terminals of 153/154 columns and 40/41 rows or 9 terminals of about 101*27. To have this much text I use the minimum font size I can see which is unreadable when I first wake up – which is bad for the “woken by network management system alert” situations. Also 16G of RAM is a bit of a limit, the Thinkpad X1 Carbon has 4G of swap space and it’s all used most of the time. While there’s usually plenty of buffer/cache RAM it does sometimes get to an OOM situation.

Another issue is that the battery is approaching it’s end of life. The “upower -d” command reports the following which might imply that the battery should last more than 80% of the time when it was new, but testing shows that the time I can use it on battery is not much more than half what it was when I bought the laptop, maybe 1/3 of the battery life when new. I used to be able to consistently run the machine on battery for 7+ hours and still have plenty of charge left, now I can’t even get 5 hours.

energy-full:         50.35 Wh
energy-full-design:  57.02 Wh

I could buy a new battery for about $70, but there are plenty of things I can do with that laptop for which 1/3 the designed battery life is more than enough. Also I have a couple of USB-C batteries that are capable of supplying 30W+ to power a Thinkpad X1 Carbon but they are inconvenient and I’d rather have external batteries and an internal battery that will last most of a day.

My Thinkpad History

Below is a table summarising most of the Thinkpads I’ve owned. I really like the Trackpoint on Thinkpads and have not considered buying a laptop without one. I skipped two laptops I bought in the 2000-2002 time period, that was an expensive laptop time for me. Fortunately by 2000 ebay was getting useful so I only ever had to buy one brand new Thinkpad.

So I’ve spent $2675.70 on Thinkpads that I used from 2010 until now (not counting the one I just bought), so that’s $160 per annum for the past 16 years and 9 months.

When I convert that to 2025/2026 dollars that’s $3,221 for 16 years 9 months or $198 per annum. So I just need to make this T14 last for 2 years to be spending less than usual.

Some Generic Laptop Advice

A while ago I was asked for advice on buying a laptop for an architect to use. I can give good advice for laptops used by programmers and for home use and students but I really don’t know what an architect does and even a description wouldn’t do it justice.

The advice I gave was to buy or borrow a relatively low end laptop, something that costs $400 new or $300 second hand and give it a go. Using it will reveal that it doesn’t do what is desired in some ways, whether it’s screen resolution, RAM, CPU power, storage capacity, physical size/weight, or some combination of them is something you won’t know until you try it. Then after having used a cheap laptop they could buy a laptop for $1500+ (for serious work use by people outside the IT industry buying a new laptop is recommended) knowing what features they really need.

So I have gone through a similar process of buying different laptops and discovering the benefits which has arrived at the T14.

The New Thinkpad

Upsides

I saw a Thinkpad T14 with 4K display and 16G of RAM on Facebook Marketplace advertised for $400 and they ended up selling it to me for $300 without the SSD and without the PSU. The seller has a business of selling used enterprise gear so he was happy to keep the SSD and PSU for sale with other laptops. I don’t have a need for more laptop PSUs as I have most of the laptops in my fleet charged from 200W+ PSUs that charge multiple devices and I also have a collection of spare SSDs.

$300 for a laptop with 4K display is a good deal. The T14 is significantly better than the T14s because it has one SODIMM socket while the T14s has soldered RAM, so I could expand the RAM to 48G at some future time – but with current prices I bought an 8G SODIMM for $40 so 24G will have to do for now. That gives a total of $340 plus the value of a SSD.

My first tests with the 4K display I set the display scaling to 150% (previously I had 100% which was a little small for some parts of the display). For my current favourite terminal emulator Kitty I had the Terminus font set to 10.5 point and now have it set to 9.0 point. This set of changes took the amount of text displayed in terminals from about 300*80 to about 330*100 while also increasing readability. This is a very significant improvement. If I knew that 4K in a 14″ display would be so good I’d have got it years ago!

The T14 still fits in the pocked of my ScotteVest jacket [2]!

Neutral

The i7-10610U in my new Thinkpad scores only about 10% faster on Passmark than the i7-8550U in my previous one. That’s disappointing given that Intel had another 3 years of research to develop it and it’s running with faster RAM. The two CPUs have the same TDP so it’s just a 10% performance gain over 3 years and no change anywhere else. If the new CPU had a lower TDP then the small performance increase would be understandable.

When I first booted the system Chrome graphics were corrupted and system performance was bad, after installing the packages firmware-nvidia-graphics and firmware-sof-signed to deal with the kernel errors about not finding firmware the graphics display was correct and the system ran a lot faster. I had forgotten about the issues related to having NVidia and Intel GPUs on the same system that I had dealt with in previous T series Thinkpads.

In the systemd-boot loader.conf file I added “console-mode 0” to prevent the font being ridiculously small for the boot selection.

The battery life seems like it might be a bit less than my previous laptop was when I got it, but it’s definitely better than the previous laptop gives now.

Downsides

The screen is very shiny, I prefer the screens with matt finish to avoid seeing reflections. The “anti glare” screens for the T14 are for FullHD and worse while the “glossy” screen is the only option for 4K.. Maybe I should investigate one of those hoodie jackets with a hood that’s large enough to cover the screen, they are being sold as a privacy feature but can also be used to avoid reflection. As an aside if you are in an environment with hostile parties then you really shouldn’t block your vision of them.

A problem I previously had with T series Thinkpads which contributed to the replacement of two of them is the screen hinges breaking. This laptop is significantly heavier and more solidly built than the X1 series I’ve been using and opening and closing the screen takes a lot more force. I am now wondering if I’ll be looking for a “for parts” condition Thinkpad on ebay in the future. It seems that cracking the screen is a much more common failure case than breaking the hinges so hopefully there will be spares available. But as my previous T series thinkpads lasted 7, 3, and 4 years this one could be expected to last until 2030 and maybe by then giving it to someone in Vietnam and buying a replacement would be the easiest option.

Future Laptops

I thought that going from 2560*1440 to 3840*2160 I would be hitting the diminishing returns range but it seems that there are still further gains to be found in screen resolution for my use, maybe the Apple people with their “Retina” displays are on to something. There are Thinkpad X1 Carbon models with 3840*2400 displays, so maybe that’s something to move on to in a few years. The minimum model with 3840*2400 is the X1 Carbon Gen 9 and there’s the X1 Yoga Gen 6 with an OLED 3840*2400. There’s also the P series which has 16″ 3840*2400 displays which would allow more usable text with the caveat of being much less portable.

It sucks that no-one seems to be making a laptop with more than 3840*2400 resolution. 5120*2160 desktop monitors are common and affordable nowadays. I’m sure that even now I could use more than 3840*2400 in a 14″ laptop and when I was younger I could have benefited from more than 3840*2400 in an 11″ laptop if such hardware had been available.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2026/07/24/x1-carbon-gen6-again/
• [2] https://www.scottevest.com/