Maybe this is a hot take. However, a lot of the Chromebooks that were deployed by schools during covid are build like tanks while being super lightweight and having great battery life. Meanwhile the old thinkpads are 10 years old and are probably starting to wear down. Many Chromebooks support coreboot these days so theoretically they have the potential to be more private and secure. Some of them are also arm which means that they are more efficient from an architecture perspective.
Edit:
I like how incredibly controversial this is. I have successfully split the votes
Thinkpads were the enterprise standard. They were well documented and had full spec implementations of software. This was the reputation that built the icon.
I don’t trust anything from Google and especially anything with ARM. I’ll use Graphene, but only because of the TPM chip that can better prove what is happening in hardware when absolutely every mobile device made is a heap of shit hardware.
With a computer I have better options. When I was younger and dumber, I thought Android was great because it was Linux. Since then I learned that the entire scheme of Android is a way for google to enable and manipulate an industry while stealing ownership of all consumer devices using orphaned kernels to depreciate devices.
I learned my lesson. Everything google touches is a shitty scheme. Everything from the “free” stalkerware internet model that has completely undermined the third pillar of democracy (free press/freedom of information), the ownership over a part of me that is used to manipulate me, to the theft of my device itself; nothing google does is ever in your best interest. The only time it is worth buying google stuff is with an extremely well reasoned group like Graphene OS that have nothing to do with google and are not in any way funded by or associated with google.
ARM is dead in the water. The writing is on the wall. The same last hoorah of hardware happened when Power PC, and the 68k Motorola stuff was about to die. The most important thing to know is how Apple actually works and has always worked when it is successful. Apple leverages sinking ship silicon with buying power, and next level software development to squeeze all the untapped potential out of the device. All of the bugs and issues are fairly well known and documented. This low grade trailing edge hardware is placed in a pretty dress and marketed to people that are clueless about actual hardware. These people are paying a premium. Their stuff works great and performs quite well for what it is, but nothing about it is cutting edge. Apple profits from selling old tech as a premium product. The 6502 was a hackjob that started the trend and it only existed because it was a third as much money as all other processors. That was its only real selling point. Their fab quality was so bad, MOS couldn’t compete with the speeds of their competition. They came up with the first dual instruction loading pipeline to try and get anywhere near the speeds of Zilog, Intel, and Motorola. This is how Apple started; with the 6502. The only architecture that Apple has ever used that has not already failed is x86. When Apple chooses ARM, that is the death knell. The true tell about ARM is how it was sold by the original Acorn group ownership right after RISC-V won the legal case against UC Berkeley for full independence. The entire business model of ARM is to keep everything proprietary. This is a key player in theft of ownership and the dystopianism of the present neo feudal digital age. This is the polar opposite of the original legacy of the IBM Thinkpad. The present hardware with Thinkpad stickers doesn’t come close to that original legacy in any way. The world is more complicated now. But, we have tools like Linux hardware probe to find what works and what doesn’t, and distros like Fedora just work.
I am a big RISC-V fan and often write how it will eventually push ARM down but let me do the opposite here.
Apple Silicon uses the ARM ISA but Apple designs the chips themselves and TSMC makes them. This makes it a very different situation from PowerPC.
TSMC offers more advanced manufacturing than Intel does. This is not changing anytime soon. From that perspective, Intel looks to be more in the PowerPC seat this time around. Their recent troubles are going to hang a serious anchor on their R&D. It is not at all clear what their future looks like.
Add to this the timing of Intel stumbling just as the Qualcomm X Elite chips enter the market and we have a very interesting competitive moment. Power and battery life matter a lot these days. Will it matter enough to counter speed bumps in app compatibility? We will see.
Independent of Apple, ARM may become viable in the Windows space and that would be entirely new. If it does not happen, it does not really hurt Apple. However, if ARM does take a cut of the Windows market, it does hurt Intel and puts them more into the place PowerPC was historically. If X Elite ( ARM ) does not fail on Windows, it will probably become the preferred option on laptops. If that happens, maybe it reduces Apple market share as well but not enough to push Apple off their own silicon.
As long as Apple sells enough volume, they can continue to design their own chips. It does not even matter how well ARM themselves are doing. If Apple continues to be good at it, there is no reason to switch.
So, while it sounds like you and I may agree about RISC-V vs ARM, remember that Apple does not buy their chips off of ARM. Apple gets its chips from TSMC and, far from being “old tech”, they are buying manufacturing process superior to anything Intel has access to. Also, Apple’s market is not just laptops and desktops. They are using Apple Silicon in all those iPhones and iPads at volumes that dwarf the PC side.
The reason that Apple moved away from PowerPC ( and Motorola before that ), was because of the economics. With only 15% of the PC market, Apple was the primary driver of PowerPC and had to fund all its innovation ( including manufacturing ). Now, they have control of the design and use it to serve much higher volumes while TSMC ( biggest in the world ) drives the manufacturing at the forefront of the industry. Most importantly, Apple is not really impacted at all by the success of the rest of the ARM space. If ARM fails, it does not really hurt Apple. If ARM is very successful, maybe it helps Apple a bit with more software available, especially on alternative OS like Linux. But alternative OS options for Apple hardware are a mixed blessing for them anyway.
It is a very different world m.
I appreciate the perspective, and acknowledge that Apple is on an edge node. ARM sells the IP blocks required to create masks. Apple is designing chips as much an a toddler with wooden toy blocks is a master carpenter. They are paying a hefty royalty to ARM both for the design and for every single chip sold. RISC-V obsoletes this business model.
While it is true that Intel struggles, the Intel/AMD duality and transparency have a history that goes back to the government/enterprise requirement for second sourcing. Perhaps we live in a world where figureheads are completely ignorant of single source extortion and monopolies, but this is the direct inevitability of any move to ARM.
I believe, the push for ARM is limited to the consumer space, and is attempting to follow the footsteps of smartphones, and Apple, as a method of planned obsolescence through a proprietary POSIX kernel. This move is intended to undercut the market in hopes that people are ignorant enough to sell their right of ownership and get stuck with a worthless product in the long term.
One could argue that all hardware is a worthless product long term. That has been the case for quire a while, but not as recently, and won’t remain the case in the future. The odds are high that your present mobile device is not much more advanced than your last. If your present device was designed for reparability and durability, it could likely last 5-10 times longer than the orphaned kernel used to steal ownership and prevent you from doing so. That kernel leverages a proprietary binary that supports the hardware and obsoletes the device. Every device model, and even some carrier sub-models have a unique binary that makes no sense to reverse engineer to open source the support. It has been attempted before, such as the LG Hammerhead, but the challenge is too monumental and time consuming.
All that said, I don’t think anyone has seen where the market is headed right now. If you step back to the big picture abstraction, as I love to do, there is a very important shift that is happening right now. At the present, all processor designs have failed. They use a math coprocessor for matrix multiplication. Thia is an absolute disaster for the CPU architecture. Intel tried this in the early days of x86 with a math coprocessor as an accessory and it failed miserably in practice. Under the surface, this issue comes down to the bandwidth of the L2 to L1 cache memory.
I have been thinking about this for awhile, and while entirely speculative, I don’t think this is a solvable problem without a 10 year scale redesign from scratch. This area of the die is at the edge of the insanely fast clock speeds in the core. Increasing the bus width here will inevitably cause major issues. This is in the gigahertz regime where electrical properties turn magic with signals that can jump gaps all over the place because everything is a capacitor, a resistor, and an inductor. The power differential of signals in this region is miniscule, and a large amount of parallelism is a monumental hurtle for instances when the majority of that bus is in the high state. If that bus could be wider, I believe it already would be. The push for single threaded performance and the marketability of CPU speed is what drove the evolution of this CPU architecture for decades now.
The market is focused on the most viable alternative of the maths coprocessor using a GPU, but this is a hack and is long term untenable. In the long term, data centers are not going to bear the overhead of a dual compute solution. Anyone that designs a new scalable processor that can handle both traditional code and matrix multiplication flexibly will win the ensuing market across the board. Any business that can handle both types of execution and scale to accommodate demand utilizing their entire available infrastructure will inevitably be much more efficient and with more profitability.
What does this really mean, it means that as of a year and a half ago, the entire market changed at the foundational level. Hardware is very slow. It takes 10 years from initial idea to first consumer market availability. At best, that means that the current systems paradigm has ~8 years before total obsolescence. I am willing to bet the farm, no one will be using a CPU from the present, or a GPU as a math coprocessor for matrix math.
How does this change the market? - nobody asked - It takes away the advantage of incumbency and establishment. It also takes away the security of iterative conservativism. Now all the sudden it is a massive liability to be iteratively conservative. Simply having the capital to pursue this new shift is a viable path to a competitive market share. There is absolutely no reason to hire ARM to do anything from scratch like this. It is far smarter to poach their engineers and from academia and use RISC-V without paying the royalty to an unnecessary middle man. ARM’s only selling point is the initial cost savings of a prepackaged design, but all of their IP blocks are still focused on single threaded code execution. In fact, ARM is at a major disadvantage due to the nature of reduced instructions as it will require a redesign to accommodate an AVX like instruction capable of loading matrix math quickly.
The primary way Apple/ARM is handling AI workloads right now is through software optimisations. Sizing the tensors to the actual hardware massively improves the speed. This is simply software stuff. AI is moving too fast for this to work as a long term practice. Every model architecture needs to be tweaked, and the future will be very different. A flexible solution at the hardware level is required.
American businesses have become extremely slow and conservative. There is no telling who is doing the next generation of dominant hardware right now. Judging by the clown show of how the Americans handled tooling up for EV’s, I expect the industry will pivot to Asia entirely. They have the foresight and stability to compete in this situation. The only question is really if ASML wants to stay relevant and sell to China, or if China has already found a replacement solution for EUV. I don’t think anyone will reveal a single detail of what they are working on in the present, but when everyone shows their hand, it is a truly open statistical game unlike any time in the last 30 years. I see no reason why the establishment has a fortified entrenchment in the market.
I believe this will kill both ARM and x86 in a different future world, bond.
ARM is the biggest reason this is unlikely to happen imo. Software compatibility is key.
For a laptop style system, the vast majority of users expect x86_64 software to just work. There are ARM versions for some things, and some can be recompiled by a knowledgeable user, but most software simply won’t run.
Probably we don’t need new Thinkpads. And the old either. The main motivation behind the desire of people to by old Thinkpads is a desire to be a part of the club and culture, to look like a hacker, a geek. The same motivation had early apple fanboys. I hope smarter people will become less dependent from such crowdthinking phenomena not more.
Old thinkpads work well and (opposite of Apple) they are cheap. I buy them from familiarity but am open to other suggestions in that price range.
https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/
A lot of Chromebooks can have Linux natively put on them.
I see a lot of pooh-poohing of the idea in this thread, but I think there’s people who are willing to do so.
I just took an old Lenovo ThinkCentre Chromebox 10H5 and modified the UEFI firmware with the walkthru from MrChromebox to put Xubuntu on it. It’s actually pretty snappy despite its limited hardware.
Also, I upgraded the 16gb M.2 SSD into a far more sufficient 256gb size.
The shortage of RAM is rough, but it can still be a workhorse in a lot of ways. I plan on replacing Xubuntu with a server version to get a little boost out of running it headless to drop the RAM going to rendering a GUI.
