I’m talking abundant I/O, great repairability/easy to open, maintain. A laptop from back when laptop manufacturers didn’t hate us.
The closest I got was a dell latitude 5500 which has decent I/O and a pretty modern processor.
If Lenovo were to make a modern T42 or something like that, not sparing the ports.
Got a Thinkpad T460 for cheap, that I initially did not want. Quite surprised at the build quality and performance. Quality nearly up to my TP 440, but that, with the big dock, had quite a bit more I/O, even with a PCIe gpu slot. You should probably look at used Thinkpads, but not the s(lim) versions. These have whining fans and less I/O.
Thank you for all your advice! After digesting just about every Thinkpad T and X model I think I’m going to settle for a T440p as my main work machine and a X220/X230 (with keyboard swap) as an ultra portable. Just waiting for the right deals on used thinkpads in my country.
I have a framework laptop which is built around repairability, and for I/O they have swappable ports where you can choose whatever I/O you want (I have 2 usb-c ports, an HDMI, and 1 usb-a, which is all I ever use at once anyway). The 13 inch model I have only has 4 of these ports though, while the 16 inch has 6 I believe.
Framework, as someone else said: https://youtu.be/drxOpMsr6sM
It feels a little more on the closed source side to me. They have modular parts, but it is using their proprietary parts.
MNT reform is more open and modable https://youtu.be/_DA0Jr4WH-4
The MNT might be what you mean when you say old laptops. This thing is a huge slab.