Someone with the stomach for that is going to already know they've got other options. Plus, you're never bringing that one up to 32GB of RAM.

i'm waiting for 64GB DDR4 (2x32GB sodimm) to be available... might upgrade if price is right, can never have too much ram

Not clear if the present generation of processors will support that. I'm surprised that individual 16GB sticks have gotten cheap as fast as they have, so I suppose there's a chance when 32GB SO-DIMMs come out they might be actually affordable.

Meanwhile, the 4-stick workstation machines are getting somewhat lighter; you can get 64gb today into a Lenovo P50 or a Dell M7510 (and I think there's an HP, there are 17" models from Lenovo and Dell, and some gaming models.)

Other options? Like... what? The last usable keyboards were in the 20 series and that series had pretty bad screens so this new hack of putting a good screen in a T420s creates the best notebook possible.

I retired my T420 (not quite the same as a T420s, but close) for a T460p and I don't see what all of the keyboard whinging is about. Sure, it changes how you do some things, but (at least in my case) not to the detriment of productivity. Working from my home office, the laptop is in a docking station with an external keyboard attached. And when I'm traveling, the built-in keyboard is comfortable, has good tactile feedback (although less travel than the T420) and I can still do everything I did before ... that includes the usual business-oriented office tasks, coding in a variety of languages, running multiple development and testing environments/VMs, and interacting with remote systems/applications at customer sites. On a good day I can type pretty close to 120 words per minute, but I rarely do as my most common role is "thinker" rather than "transcriptionist."

And I'm now rocking 32GB of RAM, which is something I could have used years ago

i7-6820hq supports 64GB, but don't know if there's issues with chip density/rank

http://ark.intel.com/products/88970/...up-to-3_60-GHz
Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type) 64 GB

the 4-stick workstations are typically heavier.. i'm heaving with my ~4 pounds
E5470 i7-6820hq+IGP+32GB+2 storage devices (other than wishing i had iris pro IGP)

Your bar for "usable" is unusually high; the only other person I'm acquainted with who's equally picky has just given up and brings his own separate keyboard everywhere (and I can't point too many fingers at him, as I actually travel with a mechanical keyboard and trackball when I have to do heavy coding work on the road.)

And putting IPS screens into older models is hardly a "new hack" -- I don't remember anyone doing it when the Sandy Bridge machines were new, but I remember discussions of those upgrades as far back as probably 2012 when the Ivy Bridge machines were coming out.

(For example: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thre...th-ips.649191/ although that's of an X rather than a T)

Sure, via 4 sticks; you can get a P50 or M7510 that way today.

Whether it will work with 32gb sticks is probably known to someone at the RAM manufacturers and to Intel, but I haven't seen any discussion of them one way or the other. So far as I know, to get 32GB sticks it's still RDIMMs only even on desktops; I haven't seen any sign of 32GB unbuffered (or "unregistered") DDR4.

I can't believe 32GB RDIMMs have gotten as cheap as they are. I am seriously considering rebuilding my home server, and I am tempted to just put one 32GB RDIMM in there for now if I go with the processor I'm leaning towards t.

That's what I'm carrying now, and I certainly wish they'd had an Iris Pro option. I find it amazingly light, but would give that up for an adequately compact more powerful systems -- I got used to 6-6.5 pound systems, and wouldn't mind going back to that.

Oh hai I carry a mechanical vertical keyboard and vertical mouse as well but still, the laptop needs to be usable.

De gustibus and all that, but we have very different bars of "usable."

Oh, and another plug for the cheap 75% keyboard I found -- smallest one I've seen with full function and cursor keys even if the layout is a bit odd in return. Wish there were a brown switch version, but this is very light, very cheap, and it's held up to 5 months of use on the road so far.

I bought myself a Surface 3 on Amazon for a pretty good price (probably because it's about to be discontinued). I couldn't justify having two laptops just so that I can run the couple of Windows-only apps that I use. In any case, the Surface 3 seems to run pretty well. I had to force downgrade the Wi-Fi driver to get anywhere near reasonable network performance, however, and even after that it took quite a long time to apply the latest Windows updates. The good news is that the slow Wi-Fi issue didn't come back after doing all that. ^

We'll see what Apple announces for the next MacBook Pro; who knows, I might be pleasantly surprised.

Good find!

Just pulled the trigger on a new T460 to replace my T440s. I wanted the extra/second battery, and the T460 is just a smidgen heaver than the T460s, so it made sense for me.

Will separately upgrade to a 1TB SSD and 16 GB RAM. It's hilarious how Lenovo only charges $15 for the 72wH second battery, but $140 for an upgrade to 16 GB RAM.

...and my new T460 is sweet! Much as I like my T440s's 7-hour battery life, I was quite amazed to see that my just-unplugged T460 claims sixteen hours and ten minutes!

It's slightly heavier than my T440s but I'll take 9 more hours of battery life for that few ounces anytime. And it works in my current dock, so no extra cost there.

I could have held out for the upcoming T470 products, but it sure appears that their updates will be incremental. This will likely last me 3 years until I pick up a T480.

Guess 2016 wasn't the best year for Intel processors.

Maybe they change their fortunes next year with Kaby Lake and beyond.

I'm not sure they will change as much as we'd like. a) AMD isn't as big of a competitor as they used to be and b) we're bumping into the laws of physics.