ThinkPad X280 Review
I got an used X280 recently, mostly for our institutes but I have it at home for a bit till we ready the courses at the institute. It has an i5 8530U and 8G of (soldered, sadly) RAM, which is still quite performant for daily usage even in 2025. Cost me around 125 EUR.
Originally I had been planning to get an X270 (which would have been the same specs, just with 7th Gen instead of 8th), but the dealer called me and said that the parts for the X270 wouldn't arrive until it was too late, so I opted for the X280 instead which only cost me 10 EUR more, and I thought it's a fair deal.
I got it (the amount of packaging was insane, it was bubbled wrapped then cling wrapped for whatever reason, took me about 15 minutes to open it), put Windows 11 IoT LTSC on one side, and Arch on another partition. I set up necessary BIOS locks for changing boot devices and accessing setup (you can never be too lax wen its an institute with kids smashing the keyboard). A nice touch was that when I enrolled my fingerprint on Arch (which required open-fprintd, the original version did not suffice), it was also picked up by the BIOS so I can just use fingerprints to bypass the locks, pretty cool.
What scared me was its battery efficiency.
Now I might be a bit of a weirdo for saying this, but this might be the most battery life I have ever seen in a laptop. This was refurbished and got a new battery, 1 cycle when I got the laptop.
Gave me more than 7 hours of screen on time, my Ryzen 3 5300U (the HP that famously died) gave me around 3-5 hours, tops, and lets not even talk about my actual daily driver which has an i5 12500H, that will just slurp up 100% of my battery sitting idle (I have tried everything, trust me) within 4 hours. My usage on all of the laptops usually consisted of Firefox with WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram open, some music going on with EasyEffects, and some package compiles here and there.
Although battery life is a bit of a shame on Windows, its quite good on Arch with tlp installed. No lags or anything whatsoever either, and I am also using GNOME! Did have to disable Panel Self-Refresh on i915 tho, it caused the panel to flicker a bit after waking up from sleep for whatever reason, would go away after a minute or two but I am honestly not taking chances.
The screen size is honestly, perfect!
I have always been a sucker for bigger screens because they give me a larger estate to work on things like coding or graphic designing. The X280, however, has a 13" screen, a whole 3" less than my daily driver, and it feels quite nice. The small size of the screen and the laptop makes for a really portable and nice environment. While I do agree sometimes you might need to zoom out a bit to get more space, it is really for once-in-a-while exception.
The keyboard is quite good as well!
As the chassis is small, so is the keyboard. It's... well I will not get into %s but its more like 60-70%? But it feels so comfortable to write on, and I could keep writing for days without getting my hands sore (although my bad posture is to be blamed more here).
Intel WiFi cards should honestly be included in every device
Realtek WiFi cards are criminally offensive, the speeds are slow as hell, sometimes they just don't want to work, and the lack of stability is horrible. You either get speed, or you get stability that's worse than a pole in the middle of a cyclone. From the same room, I get 140-150Mbit on the X280, and my main gets (if its lucky) 20Mbit. I would upgrade my main to an Intel card as well, but I am, at the end of the day, broke.
The only downside I found were that the SD card reader was micro SD only, and it had a SIM Card like tray, so its not as much accessible as I would like it to be, but I carry a USB C hub eitherway, so its not a big deal. The onboard DAC is also pretty nice but the amp might be a bit weak considering my main drives my headphones louder than this does, but I add some gain and its alright. The webcam is also surprisingly nice for whatever reason. The speakers are tiny and... mostly sound like tin cans, but I don't use them so its not a huge issue.
Overall, I think the X280 still has potential to be a really good travel laptop. Great battery backup, screen gets nice and bright (too bright even, I use it at 50% brightness or I feel my retinas burning), the WiFi reception is really good too. Since I travel a lot, I have set up tailscale between the X280 and my main laptop (which is an Asus Vivobook X1605ZAC btw, I just realised I didn't mention the name) so that when I go out, I can just take the X280 and not worry about carrying an almost 2kg 16" laptop, and still have access to all my files and even some extra compute power if I ever really need it.
Here's the fastfetch because the YABS won't really make sense here:
➜ ~ fastfetch
-` otus@x280
.o+` ---------
`ooo/ OS: Arch Linux x86_64
`+oooo: Host: 20KES0RH0U (ThinkPad X280)
`+oooooo: Kernel: Linux 6.15.7-arch1-1
-+oooooo+: Uptime: 9 hours, 5 mins
`/:-:++oooo+: Packages: 889 (pacman)
`/++++/+++++++: Shell: zsh 5.9
`/++++++++++++++: Display (IVO04E6): 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz in 13" [Built-in]
`/+++ooooooooooooo/` DE: GNOME 48.3
./ooosssso++osssssso+` WM: Mutter (Wayland)
.oossssso-````/ossssss+` WM Theme: Adwaita
-osssssso. :ssssssso. Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3/4]
:osssssss/ osssso+++. Icons: Adwaita [GTK2/3/4]
/ossssssss/ +ssssooo/- Font: Adwaita Sans (11pt) [GTK2/3/4]
`/ossssso+/:- -:/+osssso+- Cursor: Adwaita (24px)
`+sso+:-` `.-/+oso: Terminal: GNOME Console 48.0.1
`++:. `-/+/ Terminal Font: Adwaita Mono (11pt)
.` `/ CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8350U (8) @ 3.60 GHz
GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620 @ 1.10 GHz [Integrated]
Memory: 4.66 GiB / 7.50 GiB (62%)
Swap: 1.93 GiB / 3.75 GiB (51%)
Disk (/): 11.89 GiB / 70.78 GiB (17%) - btrfs
Local IP (wlp59s0): 192.168.29.26/24
Battery (470): 31% [Discharging]
Locale: en_US.UTF-8
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
Comments
Should mention for the Indian readers who want to buy refurbs, this time I did not use Amazon, but instead went with saudewala.in. They were nice enough to even call me when the delivery guys said they couldn't reach us (they, infact, did not call). There is also another website for mini PCs that one of my friend's got a ProDesk from called refurbco.in and they are equally reliable. After the mishap with Amazon, while their support is quite good, I did not really have the courage to buy from there again.
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
You're not a real thinkpad user given you didn't review the Thinkpad Clitty. also where pictures?
Fuck this 24/7 internet spew of trivia and celebrity bullshit.
Thx for the review!
I'm very curious how the durability of the x280 is. I tend to bang my computers around and kill them quite fast, and I'm scared that the thinkpads have been profit-maximized to be fragile.
Its their Magnesium thing, and the lid is apparently Carbon Fibre according to the psref, feels good and sturdy, no flexing or anything.
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
The clitty is what I use on the daily lol, my hands get too sweaty for the touchpad a lot of the time.
Too lazy to take pics, but here's one side by side with my Asus
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
@Otus9051 is now rich
Why?
Used to rock one of those in corporate gig. They were pretty sound...never had issues with this model. Screen res could have been better but hey there is always something that isn't perfect. Since said corp job required walking around with laptop a lot I appreciated the light weight
The one we had before (also thinkpad) had a fair bit of issues.
Not bad, for a 12.5" screen.
Prefer my slightly lighter 13.3" Tosh Z930 though. ;-)
It wisnae me! A big boy done it and ran away.
NVMe2G for life! until death (the end is nigh)
so... YABS?
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Just some nice turn of events, but this laptop ain't my personal laptop so there's that.
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
Fine...
Don't mind the internet speeds because my dad randomly started watching TV lol, Pings are probably due to 5GHz Wifi.
youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU