Edit: I just popped over to System76 to look at their laptops and I must say I really prefer the way Thinkpads look when compared with System76. I realize that this a dumb reason to choose a laptop but I have encountered no better judge of build quality than how a laptop looks. Every stupid looking laptop I've ever bought has been a disaster (parts break off, camera dies, weird crashes), whereas laptops who had a physical design which I liked (macbooks, thinkpads) have held up much better.
>the enterprise support is still relatively solid
That's not the experience I've had with my own company's support requests with Lenovo, and the lousy support relative to Dell is a prime reason why most clients I work with are dropping Lenovo for Dell.
> it doesn't have a "click anywhere" touchpad (it's still a mechanical hinge-based design)
Looking at the pictures, I'm more interested in the physical mouse buttons and trackpoint. I miss the buttons I had on my last computer.
Сlose to what?
FYI https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-2017... Among other things pay attention to the weight - 1.144 kg and don't forget ThinkPad's still have the best keyboard ever.
A recent ultrabook selecting topic https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/66ad57/why_i_went...
If you're going to get into the laptop market with a focus on maintainability, your competition is the T470, not Ultrabooks in general or the Thinkpad X1 Carbon in particular, which, as your Reddit link pointed out, has a downside in that the memory is soldered to the motherboard.
Soldered memory is not a real downside if 16GB is enough to run all needed tasks, as it helps to make laptop more lightweight and portable (1.144 kg !! and in the same time Carbon has a decent set of ports). So Lenovo provides a good choice for the folks that need to maintain something - T470 and for the users that do not do any hardware upgrading - X1 Carbon (gen5).
Also looks like the X1 is capped at 8GB ram? 16 GB is a minimum, and you can easily get on an XPS 13.
It does
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/657ene/linux_work...
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/5vh2by/arch_linux...
My goal is to have a 16 GB ultrabook for when away from my desk, and a 64 GB workstation when at my desk.
I always try to find the beefy laptop to replace both, but I am never that happy in either place. Too heavy for the road, too slow for the desk. Been trying for like 10 years, and sad every time at the laptop I end up with.
* In theory the CPU in the XPS-13 supports 32 GB says Intel, but I have never seen a true Ultrabook with 32 GB. Which is a bit sad of course...
So XPS 13 has a similar problem where you need to buy the max CPU to get the 16 GB upgrade.
So comparing side by side..
XPS 13 with 512 GB SSD, 16 GB ram, i7-7560U CPU, 3200 x 1800 screen is about $1900.
X1 Carbon with 512 GB SSD, 16 GB ram, i5-7300U CPU (a touch slower), and 1920x1080 display, and force shipped with Windows (could not find ubuntu version) is about $2800
X1 does look nice, but not sure it is $1000 nicer than XPS 13.
I'm not sure if the link[1] will work, but there is a version of the XPS 13 Developer Edition with Ubuntu and 16 GB of memory for $1,949.99. I find the slightly largest display of the X1 Carbon appealing (seems like a good mid-point between 13" and 15") but it would be hard to justify the price difference, especially since it's lower resolution.
(The X1 Carbon 4th Gen had an option for a high-DPI display; seems weird that the 5th Gen apparently doesn't.)
[1]: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?3x_n...
Are mostly unhappily taken care of by the Thinkpads. The brand has gone downhill since IBM sold to Lenovo, which has steadily eroded the level of quality that can be expected from a Thinkpad-branded laptop. Modern Thinkpads aren't nearly as serviceable or as durable as the Thinkpads of IBM's era.
People who stick with Thinkpads today tend to do so because a) the enterprise support is still relatively solid, b) no real competitors for the Trackpoint, if you want one you need to get a Thinkpad, c) the keyboard, while not as high quality as it used to be, is still great relative to most of the market, d) Thinkpads are still basically reference laptops for Linux, and as a customer, it's reasonable to assume that there will be good hardware support.
If System76 wanted to go after Thinkpads, they probably could.