For many of my school and university years, I used and liked my ThinkPad X200 ultraportable laptop. But now that these years are long gone, I realized my use-case for laptops had changed: instead of carrying my laptop with me every day, I am now only bringing it on occasion, for example when I travel to conferences, visit friends, or do volunteer work.

After the ThinkPad X200, I used a few different laptops:

• MacBook Pro 13" Retina, bought for its screen
• ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which newly introduced a hi-dpi screen to ThinkPads
• Dell XPS 9360, for a change, to try a device that ships with Linux

With each of these devices, I have felt limited by the lack of connectors and slim compute power that comes with the Ultrabook brand, even after years of technical progress.

More compute power is nice to be able to work on projects with larger data sets, for example debiman (scanning and converting all manpages in Debian), or distri (building Linux packages).

More peripheral options such as USB ports are nice when connecting a keyboard, trackball, USB-to-serial adapter, etc., to work on a micro controller or Raspberry Pi project, for example.

So, I was ready to switch from the heaviest Ultrabooks to the lightest of the “mobile workstation” category, when I stumbled upon Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Extreme (Gen 2), and it piqued my curiosity.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.