ThinkPad T490s

This unfortunately is normal for these. T490s was not a good design. Lenovo thinned the chassis and choose a smaller cooling system compared with the predecessor T480s that's not up to the task of adequately cooling the 25W sustained thermal power your CPU is allowed to produce under load. T490s sto

Absolutely not. This machine is 7+ years old, on a 9-year-old platform. $210 should get you a T14/L14 Gen2 and will get you a very nice Latitude 5420 or 7420 and $250 will get you a Latitude 5440 with an intel 13th gen chip and many of these are still under the tail end of their factory 3-year warra

Lenovo thinks im buying it so they can make the most pointless change every generation to say its different. OPs picture is a perfect example, I have a t490s and a t14s in front of me with opposite placements of Fn/ctrl so clearly consistency is not what we buy lenovo for.