The ThinkPad Takes On The MacBook Air

An anonymous reader writes "Walt Mossberg has an early look at the ThinkPad X300, Lenovo's answer to the MacBook Air. He says the ThinkPad is almost as skinny and light as the Air, but has many of the ports and features lacking on Apple's machine. The biggest downside: it costs much more and will be limited to a paltry 64 gigabytes of storage. 'Unlike the Apple, which can be ordered with a higher-capacity, lower-priced hard disk, the new ThinkPad will only be available with the expensive, limited capacity solid-state drive. So it will start at between $2,500 and $2,800-up to $1,000 more than the Apple's base price.'"

Comments

I disagree, the Thinkpad is beautiful.

[FatSean]

In a few years, when we look back at the Apple designs which have become tacky and dated, the Thinkpad still looks elegant and clean.

Re:I disagree, the Thinkpad is beautiful.

[Kickersny.com]

Case in point.

The thinkpad pretty much spanks the Air

[Clockwurk]

The price for an Air with SSD is $3100. The thinkpad also has a nicer display (1440x900 vs 1280x800), removable battery, a faster processor (2.0ghz vs 1.8ghz), and weighs less (2.5lbs vs 3lbs), more ports (ethernet, usb), better speakers (LOL Airbook has mono), a microphone, and a built in DVD burner.

Re:The thinkpad pretty much spanks the Air

[pebs]

Apple's notebooks are also lacking a trackpoint-like mouse. I personally can't stand touchpads, even the ones on Apple's notebooks. The trackpoint is a much better input device when done right, and the ones on the Thinkpads work quite well.

My current notebook is an old Thinkpad T23 that only has a trackpoint and no touchpad. Although I really like OS X (own both a Mac Pro and Mac Mini) and really want a mobility for some of the apps I use on it, this seemingly small issue is enough to make me unsure about whether my next notebook will be a MacBook or a Thinkpad. It's a big issue to me, an analogy would be the touch screen keyboard on the iPhone being a reason people don't want it over a phone with a real QWERTY keyboard.

A used Thinkpad X-series is likely to be next laptop purchase (I bought the T23 used). And I would be running Linux on it of course, which I enjoy more than OS X anyway, but the few video and audio apps I use on OS X make a Mac possibly more useful to me. So I haven't really made a decision.

But There's No Illusion of Thin

[dsginter]

The problem with the Thinkpad is that it doesn't taper at the edges (not that this helps anything except for aesthetics). Apple really created an illusion of thin when they adopted this design (the Air is only like an eighth of an inch thinner that the MacBook but it looks *much* thinner because of the taper).

Apple really pulled off a magic trick with the Air. Marketing genius.

Critics!

[iknownuttin]

But, unlike the Apple, Lenovo's new skinny ThinkPad comes with a hefty complement of ports and features, some of the very things critics complained Apple left out.

Maybe, Apple knows what its customers want and builds their machines for what most of their customers and not for the critics? And, well looky there, you can configure the machine to include those features. Why does everything have to be built in? And the Thnkpad is making compromises to have those things built in. God!

Not that I'm a fanboy or anything, it's just that these tech "journalists" piss me off sometimes.

Re:apple fanbois

[Genevish]

DISCLAIMER: This Slashdot comments page will also be filled with Apple haters who can't spell and who will blindly reject any argument that appears to be in favor of Apple products. Please remember to contribute to your local home for the mentally disabled. Thank you.