I have bought an used T470 for Uni and so far it has been the best laptop I have ever had, and when times comes I need an upgade i wonder how much upgradeable a laptop like this can be.
As far as I’m aware, you can change the battery, the ram and the storage. If you don’t have a 1080p display, that can be swapped as well. The wireless chipset can be changed, but note however that you need to get one that is whitelisted by the BIOS of the computer. The CPU is soldered to the logic board, so what you have is what you get.
I have the I5 version, If I managed to get an I7 board, could swap the whole board?
From what I can see on the spec sheet http://static.lenovo.com/shop/emea/content/pdf/ThinkPad/TSeries/Lenovo_T470_DS_EN_2.pdf
You can upgrade the RAM, have two drives (1x SATA, 1x M.2), and you should be able to swap out the Wi-Fi card with one that supports Wi-Fi 7. It’s also very likely you can replace the battery fairly easily.
If this is your first time opening a laptop, read as much as you can before buying or opening things up.
I upgraded to a t490 from a t480 just for USB-C.
I use this for the m14 portable monitor, and a battery. They’re both just awesome. Wouldn’t be without them.
The hard drive can go from 500gb to 2tb, and the RAM from 8 or 16 up to 32gb. You won’t be able to change much else, but you can replace the battery if it starts to go. It you have a thunderbolt port, you could possibly snag an eGPU, which would allow you to play most games on it as well.
You won’t be able to upgrade the CPU or display though.
ThinkPads handle Linux like a champ though, so you’ll get use out of it for 15 years if you take good care of it.