I had the same with X230. A lovely laptop that still serves as a home server after 10 years or so from being bought, and it was already used, post-lease machine back when I bought it.

MacBook Air M2 is also great machine btw, if you don't mind the macOS

"I’ve opted for the largest after-market external battery I could find. When doing casual work the laptop will easily survive for north of 10 hours without a charge, stretching to 12 hours if I’m careful."

Does anyone have a good suggestion for an aftermarket battery? I have a few Thinkpads and I've tried so many batteries and they all last maybe 2 or 3 hours before needing a recharge. If someone is out there making high density batteries for these old laptops I'd love to pick one up.

don't buy it. I invested quite a bit into this rabbit hole, I ended up loving new macbook air much more. I've used this kind of a laptop for a few years

An old x220 (which I have), but a bit more modern and fully OpenBSD supported would be my dream.

I think my favorite still has to be the MacBook Air 11”. Wish they’d make that size again.

Looking on eBay, it looks like I'm spending quite a bit more than $100 to get an old thinkpad of this era.

Why is this the favorite when the years older x230 takes up to 16GB ram ?

Had Lenovo (X220), followed by two top XPS 13" (lighter), then the first M1 (8gb), M1 Max (64gb!), and M3. Battery, weight, Linux-like, and UX (in that order) made the M1 practical to carry and reconverted my M1 Max into a server for LLM and computation. The M3 sometimes also work as a computing server in tandem. I would love to carry again my XPS 13" with Linux but the battery duration and lifetime makes it unusable for mobility.

I will raise you with a Dell Chromebook, designed for eight year old kids, totally bulletproof and able to take anything thrown at it, with a seemingly super-long-range battery that outlasts anything.

It is practically a Panasonic 'toughbook' and it also has a homing ability, in that you can lend it out to people with a fair expectation that it will come back one day.

At home it might as well be a 'home data centre', with a full LAMP stack, serving web pages to the world, just fine.

I am not sure if it really has things like a CPU and RAM inside it, maybe there is just a team of four cockroaches hyper-threading away.

I am really not sure about the graphics, it can drive 4K external and its own somewhat indestructible screen just fine, albeit not for gaming.

The keyboard works great, albeit simplified Chromebook style, as does the trackpad. The keyboard is practically machine-washable, you can spill tea, coffee, water, ice cream, mild PVA glue solution in it with no long-term consequences.

Purchased refurbished, many aeons ago, I forget the price, but it certainly wasn't three digits, even allowing for inflation.

I am playing up the strengths of this lame Chromebook from yesteryear, however, such a device could be made today, to survive the Zombie Apocalypse just fine. As a ThinkPad I am sure that such a product exists, but you probably need £4000 for it rather than £400.