Digging through some old boxes in our lab, I came across something I didn't know we still had: a Lenovo ThinkPad T570 from 2017, adorned with an IT inventory sticker from Tom's Hardware's prior corporate owner (well, before it rebranded), and a broken screen.
It has an Intel Core i5-7300U, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and, perhaps most importantly, a hot-swappable 24 WHr lithium-ion battery. We used to use this system for display testing.
Posting my find in our Slack chat led to a ton of nostalgia (did you know you can have nostalgia for something less than a decade old? Ends up you can!).
"Removable battery?" asked monitor editor Brandon Hill. "What year is this??? "
"Dual batteries in a Thinkpad [sic], those were the days!" Linux guru Les Pounder opined.
"I miss them," Editor-in-Chief Paul Alcorn wrote. " I had a ThinkPad and carried three batteries with me to events. For like 5 years!"
They are right—— these hot-swappable batteries were awesome. But they don't need to come back.
