I was thinking about something like the P73.
My use case is a stationary and docked laptop connected to an external monitor. I would mostly be using it conjunction with my desktop PC for torrents, watching 1080p videos, and browsing the web.
Being able to have large amounts of storage is nice. The T440P with the disc drive to SSD upgrade was nice for dual SSDs.
I don’t think I really need to upgrade that much but it would be nice to be able to do some light (2010 era) gaming when I travel or have less lag when I fire up GIMP.
Easy reparability, eGPU support, USB C ports, and upgradeability/modability are things that I would consider bonuses but might not be needed depending on the system.
I wouldn’t bother with the upgrade unless your T440P is falling apart like my X220 is. You can put in a 4TB SSD pretty cheaply. If you want to do heavy transcoding or something like that, use a remote server rather than a high temperature, power hungry laptop.
The T14 gen 1 is pretty cheap (I got mine 2 years ago for $200), and gen 2 and maybe gen 3 should be getting cheap. I wouldn’t really call those successors to the T440p which is more of a workstation. But it should at least match the CPU performance while using a fraction of the power, and let you have stuff like thunderbolt for eGPU. I guess there’s the P14s which is basically the same thing but quadro GPU. The P73 looks like it’s finally depreciating though, but it’s kinda for a reason. Below 11th gen Intel kinda sucks. 11th gen still sucks, but it sucks a lot less.
Also take a look at the P1 gen 3. Gen 4 still holds onto it’s value decently well, but the gen 3 seems to be falling off the cliff. For about the same price as a P73 it looks like you can get a newer P1 with a 10th gen CPU.
@CorrodedCranium if you can afford a 600$ computer, maybe Framework will be a decent choice?
I took another look at it and it is a good suggestion I just feel like I would end up buying components that rival my desktop rather than something more mid-tier.
I also don’t think it supports 2.5 inch drives and with the limitations and costs of NVMe drives that is still relatively important to me.
