New Business Laptops

This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant

Unlike most things I write about here, this is a business expense, paid for out of the business account. As we own a small technology business, we follow equipment life-cycles. In our case, we try to replace servers every five years and desktop/mobile PC equipment every three years. This falls in line with most enterprises. We purchased Dell E7440 laptops three years ago and while they are still good units, it’s time to upgrade. Among other reasons, we like to keep same day onsite repair contracts on our laptops as we use them for critical business, and buying them before the end of the year will help reduce our business tax burden for 2016.

Before buying the E7440s I owned several HP Elitebooks and Apple Macbooks. I’ve always been an armchair fan of Thinkpad laptops, but never owned one personally. I’ve come very close several times over the years to ordering them but price has always won out, with others, and most often the Dell Outlet Store, delivering (mostly) equivalent units for far cheaper.

A few months ago I was looking for my new laptop and was sold on 4K. I love screen real-estate and 1080P no longer cuts it for me. The idea of a 17.3″, 4K laptop sounded great. After lots of research, I almost bought a Thinkpad P70, but ended up buying a Dell E7710, because I found it far cheaper. It’s a great unit:

  • Intel i7-6920HQ
  • 32GB RAM
  • 512GB PCIe SSD
  • 1TB 7.2K disk
  • AMD FirePro W5170M
  • 4K IPS Display

I bought it from the Dell Outlet store as a new/return, so I didn’t get to choose the components. But they aligned pretty well with what I was wanting, so I bought it and added a 3yr service contract on top. Fast forward a few months, and I’m tired of having such a large, cumbersome laptop. It seemed like a great idea at first but just the sheer heft of the thing makes me avoid using it, and the battery life is terrible. I can get by with half the cores and half the ram, and onboard video for the majority of my workloads. I mostly use a terminal application (SecureCRT), a web browser, and a few other lightweight applications. Occasionally I’ll spin up some VMware Workstation VMs for some development work, but usually they’re powered off. I decided to find something else and sell it.

I was waiting on the Apple Macbook Pro refresh before making any decisions, and the keyboard (butterfly keys, no physical escape) and ports are deal breakers for me. I really should stick with Windows anyway, because I have a handful of legacy applications that require it and running Boot Camp or a VM is cumbersome. That’s the same reason I keep moving away from BSD and Linux when I run them on my workstations.

I began researching laptops again, and set my eyes on the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga. It’s a 14″ laptop that really stands out among its class for many reasons, including a 2560 x 1440 display. The Thinkpad line, like the HP Elite(book) and Dell Latitude lines, is designed for more consistent use than consumer laptops. The X series of Lenovo is supposedly one of their pinnacle offerings among that group. The X1 Yoga in-particular has a hinge design that allows for it to be folded back on itself and the keyboard locked out to form a tablet. I thought the design was gimmicky a few years ago when it came out, but with Windows 10 I can actually see it as pretty useful. Another huge selling point is the OLED screen that is available: there are only a few laptops on the market offering it right now, but it’s a much higher quality display and I’d rather stare at it all day than an IPS. And maybe not last, but the last I’ll point out is that the keyboard on the Thinkpads has one of the highest vertical travels and highest reputations for extended usability for frequent typists.

I built a custom laptop in their store a couple days ago and stopped short of buying it when it was over $3,000 with extended warranty, tax, and shipping. For a single unit. And I want to replace at least two aging dells. I went to Ebay, and found one that was used, close to the specs I wanted, for $1300, still under warranty. I bid $1800 on it, which was quickly met and exceeded. I raised it to $2300 after several more attempts, but gave up and watched it sell for $2325. I’ve been watching the Lenovo Outlet store for a few days for a return or refurb, without luck, so was about to give up on that idea and move elsewhere. I’ve never spent more than $2,000 on a laptop, and don’t want to start now.

Today I was browsing on Reddit’s r/thinkpad, and found a discussion about an employee/partner pricing site that is open to the public if you have the URL and code, which is freely available online. Apparently a lot of people on r/thinkpad have used it to order their laptops. I decided to try building that laptop again, and it came in under $2,000 with their top i7 offering, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB PCIe SSD. I spec’d out an i5 with 8GB RAM for the second unit. While still expensive, these units were inline with the prices I was willing to pay and I decided to place the order. I’ve never ordered a full custom build for a laptop before, and am excited to have a fully loaded Thinkpad on the way. Unfortunately the lead time is 4-5 weeks, so it’ll be a while before we have them in hand. In the mean time we’re going to figure out what to do with our old laptops. We usually either sell them on Ebay or give them to family members. In the case of the Dell 7710, I’d certainly like to have some of that money back. For the E7440s, we may not be so concerned where they go.

  • Intel i7-6660U (second is i5-6200U)
  • 16GB RAM (second is 8GB)
  • 512GB PCIe SSD (second is 256GB)
  • 2560 x 1440 OLED Display
  • Touchscreen and Wacom stylus
  • Laptop, stand, tent, and tablet modes

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.