A few weeks ago I bought an x260, and it just arrived this week. My x220 was actually still running strong, but it was time to upgrade. I thought I’d put together some thoughts for anyone else considering buying the x260.

Overall thoughts: I’m very happy with the purchase. There are some minor things that are slightly annoying, but the good definitely outweighs the bad.

Likes:

  • The screen - 1920x1080 is plenty good for me and what I do (predominantly programming and looking at plain text files). Though there are several laptops on the market now with better resolutions, namely the Dell XPS 13” and the Razer Blade Stealth.
  • Battery life is mindblowing.
  • Ubuntu Linux (16.04) works perfectly on it. No issues so far aside from some weirdness when docking and undocking whilst the computer is asleep.
  • The touchpad is great. I still prefer the trackpoint whilst doing ‘keyboard-intensive’ tasks, but I find I’m actually using the touchpad quite a bit, now that it’s no longer terrible.
  • Simple, minimalist aesthetics. It’s really nothing that fancy to look at. Some might consider this a “dislike”, but personally I like it.
  • Display device ports of the modern age - HDMI and DP.
  • No MS/Windows stickers on the machine (though there’s an Intel one.)
  • Build quality - solid, I expect nothing less from a ThinkPad.

Things I miss (from the x220, t61p and older) and/or dislike:

  • Whilst the keyboard is good, and has much better tactile feel versus other keyboards on the market, it’s just not as good as the older ThinkPads. Perhaps it’s just a case of familiarity. But there’s a few things I’m not a big fan of here:
    • The ‘insert’ key is a meta-key. I copy and paste using ctrl+insert and shift+insert. This is a little awkward on this keyboard.
    • Dedicated hardware buttons for volume up/down and muting the mic are no longer available.
    • Page up/down are now near the up/down/left/right arrow
    • No more numpad! Prior models allowed you to hold down fn and have the right portion of the keyboard operate as a numpad.
    • No more dedicated function button to enable/disable touchpad. Note: I’ve worked around this using the ubuntu ‘touchpad-indicator’ application and defining a shortcut.
    • Hidden fn-keys that were a little hard to discover - e.g. fn+s for print-screen.
  • LED indicators for bluetooth, wifi, sleep.
    • The trade-off is the simplicity of the design as mentioned above. But really there’s plenty of blank space on that bezel!
  • Hardware kill-switch for wireless communication. This was quite useful when travelling.