The $50 ThinkPad T480S

11th January 2025

For the last 8 months I have been daily driving a ThinkPad T480s that I got on EBay for $50.

Why did I get this?

I needed a laptop I could comfortably bring around anywhere to do school work. I do own a gaming laptop (Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3) which is not too bad to bring around to places but it can be pretty annoying with battery life, noise, and space as its a pretty decently sized laptop.

I was also getting into ThinkPad's after browsing Reddit on r/thinkpads and some YouTube video's. I thought they were very cool and I wanted to see how hard it would be to snag one for cheap. It's also nice to have a laptop to tinker with.

The Buying Process

For the next 2-3 weeks I was browsing EBay every morning before I got on the bus to see what I could buy.

I then found this $15 dollar ThinkPad 11e that seemed pretty alright and I decided to get it.

But as you can tell from the screenshot the order was somehow cancelled due to being out of stock or damaged.

After that disappointment I continued looking for a few more days. Whilst I was on the toilet I ended up finding the gem that I am writing this on right now.

The seller originally wanted around 70-80 dollars. I put in a request for $50 and they accepted! With shipping included this did bring this to $71 so technically I did lie but uh shut up you didn't see this.

The Experience

The Specs

CPU: Intel Core i5-8350U

The seller noted that there was an issue with fan, the dock cable/USB-C cable has water damage and that the LCD was messed up.

The fan problem was solved by screwing it back in and the LCD ended up being fine. I tried using the dock cable and it just didn't work. The only real issue that sucked was that the battery health was pretty low. The KDE battery indicator reports that it is at 55% health.

The battery life still isn't bad though and I am still able to get around 2-3 hours of battery life on high performance mode. I do plan to replace it at some point but I have not bothered yet.

After cleaning the laptop, which wasn't very dirty, I decided to install Linux onto it. The first distro that I installed on this laptop was Fedora 40.

And of course I had to make a Reddit post. What is funny was I made the post after only owning the laptop for barely 2 days of owning the laptop.

as you can tell I really like Kirby :D

The Linux experience on the ThinkPad felt great. The only issue I had was that the finger print reader didn't work out of the box. I never bothered to actually set it up but I heard all you have to do is download 1 package and it should work, but I have no clue myself and I have no intention of setting up the finger print reader.

Even when I decided to swap to EndeavorOS (Arch Linux but with an easy installer + purple) and everything just worked fine. I had no issues with Fedora but I wanted to give an Arch-based distro a shot and I wanted to try the KDE desktop environment out as well. It really is true that ThinkPad's do have great Linux support.

Everything that I usually do runs great on this laptop. Even Electron apps like VSCodium, Obsidian and Discord have ran great.

My crippling tab problem doesn't slow down anything either but I imagine a lot of that is due to the Auto Tab Discard extension.

I am not a professional editor and I have not made any big projects but doing small edits and clips via Kdenlive has also worked pretty well. Rendering doesn't take too long either and I do not feel and lag whilst editing.

bUt cAn iT GaMe!@?!@!

Yes it can play games but don't expect anything too high end.

I won't go too in depth here since there are many videos that go over the performance of this laptop on games like the one made by Haiste Computer Repair.

The only gaming I have done on this is Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Bloons TD6, osu!, and Counter strike source and all of which ran very well at 60+ FPS at decent settings. I have seen people attach EGPU's to these laptops and they seem to work pretty decently.

Conclusion

Was this worth it? Yes absolutely. If you are attempting to seak out a ThinkPad like this one the odds you find it for this price are a bit low but sometimes you can maybe find one if you wait long enough. You can usually find the T480S for around 100-200 USD on Ebay.