Shuold I buy a new ThinkPad E14 with soldered RAM or a used T480?

I have a t530 that I bought used in 2015 or so. With new RAM, an SSD, and Linux, it's an extremely capable machine. It's my daily driver.

I don't have any major complaints. The entire machine is pretty good from top to bottom. Easy to repair, good spill-resistant keyboard, decent screen, dedicated GPU, even a couple USB 3.0 ports. It's a thicc machine, but I like that. With the dock, it becomes an excellent portable workstation.

This little laptop has been around the planet with me and put up with a ton of abuse. I have never, ever thought "oh, I need to treat this thing gently in case it breaks" like I do with modern laptops. No, this bad boy gets thrown into bags and back seats with no fucks given. I've even sat on it once or twice.

Unless you need high performance for gaming or cpu intensive applications, you will not find better value for your money than a t-series. Mine has been my programming workhorse for nearly a decade, and I'd be surprised if it doesn't last at least another decade.

Get a t-series, then upgrade the bejeezus out of it. Max the RAM, get the best CPU it can support from eBay, get a new battery and a 90W+ power supply. Drop in a pci-e or sata SSD, and you'll be good for years.

Also of note: if you want to upgrade the wifi card, you need to hack the bios. It's very easy to do, just check the thinkpad wiki. If you don't upgrade the cpu, make sure you pull and clean the heatsinks and refresh the thermal paste.

This is a completely unacceptable question to ask because even you must know that what you've described doesn't touch at all on what your specific requirements would be in the device.

Without knowing what your specific requirements and expectations are its impossible to provide targeted information to help you make an objective decision. Everyone else is selling something that may not even be applicable to you.

As for the soldered RAM, I've heard good arguments for and good arguments against it, dealing with security, or usability which are often trade-offs. An older model allows you to flash the BIOS with an open source alternative and to remove any backdoor functionality that may remain in Intel ME, AMT, or any of its related subsystems.

You also do not mention how old the T480 is, we can surmise based off its original manufacturer date that its older but components have limited life and part of the cost of buying something new is the guarantee it will continue working, and that its usable life has not been expended.

I've seen T480s that are running just as fast today as they were when they were brand new. The owners of these took extra steps to make that happen. Controlling heat play's a crucial factor, removing design defects are another. The pristine ones I've seen have fixed the fan failure by rewiring the fan power cables so they don't get routed over a heatsink (i.e. where IBM itself used kapton tape right on top of the heatsink), or replaced the low-grade CPU thermal paste with a more heat conducive binder.

So I haven't had an e14, but I've had two P14's in the past year. One ryzen one intel. My only gripe is getting the power usage down while running linux took a few hours of fiddling.

I used to have a T480 that idled around 5 watts, I could get the newer laptops down to there but I had to make sure all the various devices didn't have power saving disabled. The thunderbolt pci devices were the big culprit which is unsurprising as I drive two 27" monitors via thunderbolt. The power usage is still a little "spiky". When the laptop comes online or out of hibernation it takes a few minutes for the fan to spin down but overall it's alright.

I guess personally I'd go for the newer laptop. But that's mostly because TB4 is a hard requirement for me at this point. It might take a little more fiddling with the power settings (linux or windows) to get it where you want it but lenovo is pretty good a polishing it's business laptops.

As for your original worry of soldered on RAM. I don't like it either and I try to avoid it, but it doesn't weigh heavy on my mind when choosing a laptop.

Edit; I don't know how to use commas I guess.

What is wrong with the AMD L14 gen3?

It has socketed ram, 3 m.2 slots (although none are 2280, so your stuck with the 2242 NVMe drives, which limit the section a bit but there are still some solid choices), and the top end machine has a ryzen 7 pro (8 cores, 16 threads) wifi 6E and up to 64G ram.

Its a pretty decent range, has good reviews, the base model is fairly inexpensive, and the line scales up well, although it seems not all the options are actually available at any given time.

There seems to be various reports of it working well with linux, which is supported on lenovo's business range, of which the L14 is part.

Here is the tech doc:

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_L...

"Memory Slots Two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, dual-channel capable"

There are a few options in the pdf, that aren't visible on the lenovo buy page where i'm at, including the 400 nits screen and 63Wh battery, but you can probably special order them if your willing to wait.

According to [1], you need to resolder only 1 resistor to tell BIOS that the soldered RAM is 16GB upgraded (in this case of upgrading the 8GB of soldered RAM to 16 on a Dell XPS13). Can it be assumed in a similar vein, that if E14 soldered RAM fails sometime, and you may only want to block it from usage and leave in the system board, so you may only need to fiddle with resoldering some resistors? Thou it currently seems like no, as I suppose the system board won't work at all without any working soldered RAM. So there need to be a way to inform the system board to not use soldered RAM and use inserted RAM.

[1] https://hackaday.com/2021/11/24/you-cant-upgrade-soldered-on...

This is a E series versus T series question.

If your care about quality at all, you should choose the T series.

Edit: for future reference

X > T > S/P > A > E > L

:)

These are just my opinions fwiw:

My strategy is to budget for more RAM than I need (16GB should be a minimum honestly for an x86 environment). For laptops I personally don't update the memory, so I feel that soldered memory is fine.

I would suspect the cracked solder joints would be due to people dropping their laptop (indeed there have been issues with manufacturing as well). If you have bad solder joints on memory due to poor manufacturing, how could you trust anything else on the main board?

I would avoid soldered SSDs though.

RAM pretty much never dies. It's either faulty on arrival or lasts the lifetime of the device. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/916373-pc/71723683

I don't know if I should care a lot about soldered RAM, there is 2 y guarantee from local suppliers on both new E14 and used T480. But it seems for a price under 600 euros I won't find +backlit keyboard, IPS FHD display, 4 cores, 16 GB RAM and 512GB/1Tb SSD.

You could also look at the 15+" devices there appear to be a couple lines that aren't soldered. The notebook selector page seems to be fairly accurately describing the memory type and how many channels are soldered.

If I had to have a machine with soldered RAM, I would insist on at least 32G, for a longer useful life and greater capability (more and bigger VMs, larger projects).

Is a Framework or HP Dev One (or other Linux laptop) not an option?