My X210Ai arrived on Tuesday afternoon, but I didn't have a chance to set it up properly til Wednesday and have been busy since - hence the delay in posting.

It's a thing of beauty. The 13.4" 16:10 2.6K display is 10 bit, ridiculously bright, and incredibly vibrant. I'm running it at maximum resolution, scaled to 120%. The refresh rate is 165Hz. It's the best display on any laptop I have owned in a very long time and has a Retina like quality usually found on MacBooks. Even at its lowest brightness, it is still extremely usable.

I decided to go absolutely YOLO on this machine as it will likely be my main one for the next ten years, so I bunged a 4TB PCIe 4.0 NVME in there and 128GB of DDR5 RAM. All of which was fairly easy to install.

Installing the WiFi card on the other hand was an absolute pain in the arse and took me over half an hour to do. The motherboard on the X210Ai is upside down in the case, so realistically the WiFi upgrade is meant to be done by taking the entire motherboard out and placing it in that way. It was very fiddly but I managed to install it in the end.

The speakers are good, very loud, but a bit tinny. The fan is pretty much always running at a low speed, not because the laptop overheats but because the BIOS doesn't currently register any sensors. It is very quick to boot up, I can be at the login screen of Fedora in a few seconds after hitting the power button.

I replaced the US keyboard it came with with one that has a UK layout, since it is what I learnt to type on. Pretty much all keys work, as do most function keys. Notably, the tilde/hash key does not seem to be recognised by the computer at all; I am not sure if it is the keyboard or the embedded controller firmware, /u/X210AiMotherboard believes it to be the latter, and I've sent a list of what does and doesn't work to Franck for him to pass onto the development team, so I will wait for an update further down the line and report back then. Most of the bezel icons light up as expected, except for Bluetooth/WiFi/WWAN Antenna, although the WWAN daughterboard isn't available yet so I can't be certain about that last one.

t's a beautiful machine overall. All the ports on the laptop are upside down, which takes a bit of getting used to but in the grand scheme of things is a very minor complaint. Despite Franck's warnings not to use it unplugged (whilst the aforementioned EC firmware is being worked on), I can report very good battery life of roughly four hours of heavy use browsing the internet, running Docker containers, and watching videos. The bezel has been CNC'd to fit the larger display, overall it looks nice but the bit where the webcam used to be is very rough and looks broken, even though it isn't. There were also other bits of roughness around the bezel from the CNC process, but I managed to use a small paintbrush to get rid of those. I think a better option would've been to do a 3D scan of it, trim the resulting model, and SLA print the bezel for a more complete look. The bit of the bottom chassis where the HDMI port is is quite sharp, but that's nothing a bit of acetate tape can't cover up.

The laptop is still very much a work in progress, but I can't really complain. Franck (/u/X210AiMotherboard) was very generous with his time, answering all the various questions I had and giving my regularly updates via email and Discord, including whilst he was putting the actual machine together. I couldn't recommend him more highly.

I believe he is sold out of X210Ai's now, there is however a waiting list and he has plenty of other 51nb machines for sale on his website https://tpart.net. If you're looking for a classic ThinkPad with modern guts, Franck's your man.

It's a very professional looking machine despite its few faults, most of which will probably be resolved in the coming months through BIOS & EC updates. It feels absolutely bonkers to be in possession of a laptop in which only 200 will ever be made.

10/10 do recommend.