Long story short I bought this, did all sorts of upgrades (enumerated below) to it, and then rarely used it because I'm always at my desktop anyways. It's in very good cosmetic condition, and it runs perfectly.
The T480 is often considered the last great Thinkpad, largely because it's the last model to have a hot-swappable external "power bridge" battery. It came out in 2018 and the base machine under this is a fairly mid-range SKU as far as T480s go - It's got an Intel 8th-gen i5-8350U processor (4 core, 8 thread, 1.7GHz base 3.6GHz turbo) with integrated Intel UHD 620 graphics. If you need a laptop to do actual work on, and it's not GPU-heavy*, this is an excellent choice. You can open so many chrome tabs in this bad boy.
Upgrades:
- Replaced the stock display with an Innolux N140HCA-EA3 matte panel, which is brighter (300 nits) and more color accurate (100% SRGB). If you're a nerd you can find its specific specs on Panelook.
- Replaced the stock plastic trackpad with a more premium-feeling "glass" one from some other Thinkpad model, I think an X1 carbon?
- Installed 32GB of DDR4-2400 SODIMM RAM
- Installed a 256GB Intel 760P NVME SSD
- Replaced the internal 24Wh battery and bought a 72Wh hot-swap battery (both read 100% health in KDE)
- Repasted the CPU while doing all these upgrades
If you buy this listing, you will get:
- The laptop itself, with 72Wh battery and noted upgrades installed
- The laptop's official 65W type-C charger
- The original touchscreen panel that came with this laptop - it works fine, I just wanted a better panel.
- The correct eDP cable for that touchscreen panel
- The original trackpad that came with this laptop - it works fine, shows some wear though.
- A spare trackpad flat flex cable
- The original 24Wh external hot-swap battery that came with this laptop - KDE reports about 70% health.
What's the wear like?
Not bad at all. The soft-touch coating is in very good condition, very uniform, but with a couple knicks here and there, mostly on the edges. The original slim external 24Wh battery is at about 70% of its starting health, the internal 24Wh and external 72Wh are both at 100% health. The keyboard shows signs of light wear (the teeny tiniest bit of key shine) - I was going to replace it, but by the time I got done with all the other upgrades I realized I never use this thing anyways. Trackpad is brand new. Panel is brand new. It's not missing any rubber feet.
NOTE:
A couple photos show the machine powered into Kubuntu 21.10, I did this to show battery health, no operating system will be included.