ThinkPad x250 for science: recommended it to me?

[viktit88]

Dear professionals! Dear friends! Help me, please!

I am from Russia. And I decided to buy X250 device (I want to replace my 13 inch MacBook Pro) for daily work at home, on the road and in office.

For me the main things I need are portability, convenience in typing (I use MS Office a lot, about 10 hours a day), and also autonomy. I am working in the sphere of science, so I work with a lot of researches and databases. I need to use ms office (special business version with power pivot, power map and other special tools), latex, spss, mathtype, mathematica, stata, qlick view, adobe acrobat pro, indesign, finereader, 1c, ms visio, ms project and etc. And, of course, I like to watch movies in the evening. These are the main programs I need to use, other are less productive. I am also doing a lot of administrative work, that is why I always have hundreds emails every day and I should response on them very quickly, so I need to be always online and it is good that it has LTE!

So the question is, whether X250 will satisfy all my needs.
I like retina screens, will the matte display FHD in x250 will be rather competitive? Or the screen in t450s series will be better?
Is the keyboard really so good?
And what about competitors? For example Hp 820 g2 or Dell?

Thank You very much!

Best wishes, Viktor

[viktit88]

In Russia today we have these prices: for Lenovo t450s core i7 5600, 8gb, fhd non-touch ips - 1960$, for x250 core i7 5600, 8gb, fhd, non-touch ips - 1660$. So, the question is should I pay 300$ more for the same t450s?
Thanks!

[brchan]

T450s seems to be the best liked among lenovo's current offerings. Better build quality and stiffer chassis than the X250s, but I can't confirm since I haven't used either of them. I would personally go for the T450s because of the bigger screen and better overall rating, if I had to choose between the two.

If you can tolerate getting a used 15.6" unit, a W520 (if you like the classic keyboard) or W530 (new style keyboard) with quad core cpu and FHD panel will cost less and also suit you well. Much better upgradeability and the high end processors are faster than the processors in the T450s and X250s. Ram caps out at high 32GB, too.

A T420s/T430s with upper end cpu can also be just as fast as the T450s and X250s IIRC and cost significantly less, but battery performance and screen quality is worse (but still decent).