Thinkpad t440 systems have been a great option to upgrade and breath new life into an old laptop, especially with having so many options. Now that my trusty elitebook 8470p is dying, is there a more modern t440 that I can buy used but have an upgrade pathway with?
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This kind of upgrade philosophy aligns well with Framework Laptops. IIRC they are ex-enterprise laptop engineers (was it HP or Dell? 
)
Anyway the whole thing is modularly upgradable, almost like a PC apart from the motherboard+CPU stack. Do have a look.
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They look very nice, but the price adds up quickly.
Thats the price of not being disposable, unfortunately.
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The next step newer in the ‘cheap, used, (somewhat) upgradable Thinkpad’ is either the T470/T470P or T480. After the T480 you get into the soldered RAM; even the T480S has it. But then you’re into the intel management engine era, though, if that matters to you. T480 is allegedly librebootable, but requires a flash programmer rather than being a simple update. But… in all of these cases, they’re really not that much faster than a t440 or 8470p. Just newer. This was the intel performance deadzone era (2nd gen to 12th gen) where they didn’t move the needle nor core counts much 'til Ryzen happened.
Other options for new and upgradable are NovaCustom, ThinkPenguin, or System76. Or Lenovo’s Legion line of gaming laptops, at least IME (IME is a Ryzen 5000-series laptop). But they’re all roughly the same ‘new laptop price’ or higher, rather than $100 beater with $400 of parts thrown in.
Edit to add: If you’re after them for coreboot/librebooting, old beater Chromebooks seem to have a relatively straightforward path. Keyword there is ‘chrultrabook’, if that’s your angle 
It does give up hardware upgrades, though, beyond maybe sometimes being able to upgrade the storage inside.
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And that Framework doesn’t have the economy of scale that the established players do. When Dell/HP/Lenovo are cranking systems out in the hundreds of thousands each year, they’re able to get the cost per unit down more than a new niche company that at best is selling them in the Tens of thousands right now.
Though, I would be curious if the Framework 13 line has cracked 100,000 units sold already or not.
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I think the thinkpad P series (the workstation series) still has upgradeable RAM and replaceable keyboards, for example:
This is a larger one but they have 14 inch models too.
Hmm, on second view most of the 14 inch models are less upgradeable. Some of them still have dimm slots but most have soldered memory…
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Upgrade path is basically slim at best but to answer your question, HP EliteBook 845 G11 is the closest “modern” replacement.
Yeah, if this was about the T440s both DIMMs have been soldered since the T490s. Non-s T4x0 and T14 tend to have one or two sockets but some models have zero.
At the moment, T14 gen 5 supports 2x32 DDR5 SO-DIMMs but discounted availability’s most likely to be open box. Gen 2, 3, and 4 usually have one soldered DIMM and one SO-DIMM socket but check the model specifics of anything you find to be sure.
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You make a good point. Since this primarily will be for tinkering I may just stay with my elitebook for now. Going to get a better AC adapter so that I can use the docking stations for more displays though.
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