ThinkPad T480
The last T-series ThinkPad you can open, fill with ordinary memory and carry a spare battery for. Librebooted, with Boot Guard undone.
Why this machine
The T480 is the last T-series ThinkPad with two ordinary SO-DIMM slots — the laptop memory format — and a removable external battery. The T490 that replaced it solders half the memory down and seals one 50 Wh cell inside. If you want memory and running time you can change with a screwdriver, the line stops here.
It also comes apart. The keyboard, palm rest, fan, screen and both drives are all serviceable, and Lenovo publishes the procedure. That matters more than any specification here: it decides whether the machine is still useful in five years.
How fast it actually is
Honestly: around 55 to 70 per cent of a current mid-range laptop chip on multi-core work. Geekbench 7 puts a 2022 i5-1235U at 5238 multi-core; Linux uploads for the i5-8250U on a T480-family board land between roughly 2975 and 3345. For text, builds, mail and a browser with too many tabs, the gap is not where you notice it.
You notice it on sustained parallel work: video encoding, large compiles, anything that wants every core for minutes. 4K playback is fine and the integrated graphics drive a 4K display at 60 Hz. 4K editing and encoding is work for another machine.
Intel graphics only
We sell Intel-graphics units. Upstream marks the display as non-working on boards fitted with the discrete MX150, except under SeaBIOS, and we will not ship a laptop whose screen depends on which payload you picked. If you have an MX150 board of your own, read the upstream page before you flash it.
Thunderbolt, precisely
The port is Thunderbolt 3, and it works for USB devices, DisplayPort output and charging. Thunderbolt device support was added during 26.01 RC1, then removed before the final 26.01 because it broke resume from S3. So: hubs, monitors and power, yes; Thunderbolt storage and eGPUs, no.
Flashing it, and flashing it again
The first install is the awkward one. The factory firmware will not overwrite itself, so the chip is read and written with an external programmer and a clip — which is why the Libreboot project rates this machine Complex. We do that step before it ships.
After that the restrictions are gone. Updates run internally, with no clip and no disassembly, so tracking the project’s twice-yearly releases is a software job.
What is still not free
The boot firmware is replaced with code you can read. A small amount of vendor code remains — hardware initialisation, processor microcode, a neutralised Intel ME, and the embedded controller. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
What you should know before you buy
- HyperThreading is disabled by default. Run lscpu on the machine you receive and you will see half the threads you may have expected.
- The TPM is disabled, because SeaBIOS hangs on buggy TPM drivers. If your workflow depends on a TPM, this is not the machine for it.
- Vendor code remains in flash: hardware initialisation, processor microcode, a neutralised Intel ME, and the embedded controller.
- The first flash needs an external SPI programmer. We do it, but if you ever want to start from a factory board yourself, that is the tooling you need.
- We sell Intel-graphics units only. Upstream marks the display as non-working on MX150 boards except under SeaBIOS.
- Thunderbolt device support was removed before the final 26.01 because it broke S3 resume. USB, DisplayPort and charging over the port are unaffected.
- Storage is one 2.5" SATA drive or one M.2 2280, not both. The M.2 2242 in the WWAN slot is the only route to a second drive, and it costs you WWAN.
- Lenovo and Intel document 32 GB of memory. 64 GB is reported working by the Libreboot project, which is not the same as supported, and we do not sell it configured that way.
- Roughly 55 to 70 per cent of a current mid-range laptop chip on multi-core work. 4K playback is fine; 4K editing and encoding is not this machine’s job.
- Windows is not officially supported, and the Libreboot project recommends you avoid it.