Thanks for the detailed breakdown.

How well do those other models (T49x, T14 Gen 1) work with Linux? Is everything compatible out-of-the-box? And how does the CPU performance compare to the T480? It looks like the T490 has the i7-10710U and the T14 Gen 1 has the Core i7-10810U. Is the CPU performance ranking T14 Gen 1 > T490 > T480? (I’d think a bigger number means better performance.) Does the performance difference even really matter? It looks like these laptops were released 2018 - ~2020, so I imagine they’re all close in performance.

T480 specs

T490 specs

T14 Gen 1 specs

I also found out that there is a difference between the T480 and the T480s. Do you have any opinions on them? A Reddit user said this:

This sub loves the T480, but the T480s is a much nicer feeling machine in the hand due to the external frame materials.

Reasons for the T480: power bridge, 64G RAM dual channel. T480s can do 40G RAM which is plenty but it will sacrifice some real world performance due anything above 16G being single channel (visible on i.e. speedometer 2.1)

Reasons for the T480s: build quality/feeling, portability

Link to post

T480s specs

Overall, it looks like the T480s is less upgradable, but more comfortable. Is that analysis correct?

Thanks for your input. I appreciate it.

Which battery did you buy (if you bought one, of course)? Any recommendations or anti-recommendations? Official batteries usually go for extortionate prices, but aftermarket batteries are a little scary since you can’t tell what quality you’re going to get until it’s too late.

Thanks for the thorough response. It helps a lot.

How is the Wi-fi on your laptop? Did you have to do something hacky to get it to work, or did the Arch kernel just recognize everything nicely?