Site of a hobbyist who builds modified ThinkPads, including new mainboards that put modern Intel CPUs into older X200 and T60 cases.
HN commenters point to it when discussing modernized ThinkPads; one owner of an X2100 calls it a great laptop.
I've always found the "hey Twitter friends, I wrote a guide, buy it for $90 now!" stuff super unethical anyways. First of all, the information they sell that way is 100% available for free somewhere else or is useless. They're usually mediocre in their fields, but have chops for social media marketing.
Essentially that economy is all about being perceived as an expert and manipulating naive/unsuspecting people with marketing tactics without ever actually providing any value. The entire focus of that community seems to be on MRR rather than products or solutions.
They make posts on HN, Indiehackers, Reddit, etc. trying to sell themselves as sympathetic by using the guise of "sharing their story" but they're actually just finding more customers. Btw, I don't mean that sharing your project on HN is sleazy, of course not. But it's quite obvious when you're lying with a blog post for example, and actually using the mirage of a real discussion to point eyes at your money makers.
That said, I think there's a subset of those people who do provide real value and don't play the MRR game. Instead they treat it more like a hobby (or craft) and just build shit while being practical about income. IMO, that's something to try to emulate. Stop worrying about "how do I make $1000 per month in passive income?", and instead build something useful or fun without pressuring yourself (or others, for that matter). Be practical, not hopeful and needy.
Some examples I can think of right now,…
There was this famous guy, which sold custom old Thinkpads, but with newer mainboards and Intel 10th gen chips in it, with custom USB-C adapters and all.
At some point he kind of disappeared and rumors appeared that he is now in mandatory military service, but will come back afterwards. Well, that was pre-COVID.
He also knows a friend that backports coreboot to the new mainboards. No idea how they manage to do that in a 2 person project like this. So yeah, all of the laptops they sell run coreboot in it (including the Thunderbolt EC, which is insane amount of work to implement).
Nonetheless the build quality was insanely good, and lots of folks were amazed by what they essentially bet blindly on when they ordered it. The X2100 would be my dream laptop, but I didn't manage to get one in time.
[1] https://www.xyte.ch/shop/x2100-pricing/
The X201 mods are pretty comprehensive, the 51NB team and others like XY Tech have commissioned entire replacement motherboards that carry i7-8550u or i7-10710u processors. See [1].
And the old 35W processors in some of these laptops will still deliver solid performance. The new ones will turbo higher, but throttle quicker. You get higher default clock speed and better thermals with the older processors. Of course memory bandwidth and peripheral connectivity are better with newer processors, but they're perfectly usable. If what you want to do to be productive is edit text and maybe render HTML and browse files, and your OS/IDE/browser does not place unnecessary demands on your computer, then an X201, especially modded, cannot be the blame for your lack of productivity.
https://www.xyte.ch/
I run NixOS on a coreboot-ed T420 and I absolutely love everything on the outside, but it really shows its age when compared to the display on my Macbook or it comes to running heavier software ie. rust-analyzer, Chrome, or Nix builds.
If Lenovo were to release a modern T420-like, with identical chassis, battery system and similar IO port variety, but a modern display, modern internals (replaceable SSD! soldered RAM at least has a case for performance) and a modern camera, cash would evaporate out of my wallet.
I remember there was a person [1] modding T60/T61s into "T700"s with 11th gen Intel chips. Unfortunately it looks like the project's been quiet since 2022. Hopefully there'll be more who try.
[1] https://www.xyte.ch/t700-crowdfunding/
The work by the LCDFans community, specifically the X2100 mod motherboard [0], was one of those moments that made me do the nodding guy meme IRL the fist time I saw it. Both the level of enthusiast engineering, and electronics manufacturing services available to enthusiast communities, totally blew my mind.
I love mine - I have 64gb of ddr4, a 10th gen intel i7, NVMe SSD, an incredible keyboard, a nice screen, and three interchangeable 6 hour batteries. It was my daily driver for a long time, up until very recently. If they can make a Ryzen-based one I'll be all over it.
[0]: https://www.xyte.ch/shop/x2100-pricing/
From one of the blog posts[0]:
> There is also the threat of lawsuit. As I’ve later learnt, 51nb was sued by big L on the pretext that the images and website contained trademarked terms. However, the real reason was revealed that 51nb actually owned the tp.cn domain name and big L wanted it for themselves. Even though 51nb actually won the lawsuit, it hurt their financials badly and they were very reluctant on continuing these projects.
[0]: https://www.xyte.ch/2021/11/09/t700-part-1-preparation/