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Change the ThinkPad and It Will Die
ErichTheRed writes "Here's an interesting editorial piece about the ThinkPad over at CNN. It mirrors what many ThinkPad devotees have been saying since Lenovo started tweaking the classic IBM design to make the ThinkPad more like a MacBook, Sony or other high-end consumer device. I'm a big fan of these bulletproof, decidedly unsexy business notebooks, and would be unhappy if Lenovo decided to sacrifice build quality for coolness. Quoting: 'Before doing anything drastic, Lenovo would be wise to review the spectacular rise and fall of Blackberry-maker Research in Motion. The mobile handset manufacturer tried to take on Apple by launching a number of products aimed at the retail consumer after the launch of the iPhone. It released the devastatingly bad Blackberry Storm as a response to the iPhone and later the Playbook to take on the iPad. The Storm failed because it was hastily put together in a mad dash and lacked the signature Blackberry QWERTY keyboard ... The Playbook failed because the Blackberry ecosystem had at the point of its launched more or less collapsed, making the Playbook just another iPad clone no one wanted. Meanwhile, the original Blackberry was left to wither away as the company focused on chasing Apple and wasn't updated in a meaningful way, making it look just old and tired.'"
Not the stand up meetings, or scrumaster training, but just the part where your development is an iterative process with constant feedback from end users.
I work in wireless and have many friends who were fans of the original Blackberry's. I could easily have told themt the Storm was a failure out of the gate, and they could have gone back and added their signature keyboard to it and tried again.
If Lenovo wants to "improve" the thinkpad, they should make a few hundred, and give them out as a loaners for peoples' systems that are in for repair, under the condition that they fill out a form at the end that asks whether they'd like to keep the loaner instead of their repaired system. If you don't break 50% on that form, you go back to the drawing board. The Storm wouldn't have broken 10%.
I love technology.
You pick up a blackberry. It feels like a cheap plastic piece of shit.
You pick up a acer. It feels like a cheap plastic piece of shit.
You pick up a HP. It feels like a cheap plastic piece of shit.
You pick up a (insert anything electronic and mass produced that the bean counters got at). It feels like a cheap plastic piece of shit.
This is because.. they are cheap pieces of shit.
Pick up a nice Thinkpad. It does not feel like a cheap piece of shit. Especially the old ones.
Pick up ANYTHING APPLE. It does not feel like a cheap piece of shit.
If you are in charge of decisions at a large company publicly traded and cannot figure out what you do to your product image.. those little cents you save here and there, all turn your products in to cheap feeling plastic pieces of shit. Your brand also turns into a piece of shit. I feel sad for HP. At least SGI died.
Rant off.
..don't panic
I've had couple of generations, and our current model for my wife's use is an X301. We love its industrial ruggedness (for a non-ruggedized machine) and its very light weight for its size.
But, I've owned Toshibas, Dells, and a Gateway, so I'm not opposed to other brands. When we bought the X301 it came with a free Ideapad S10-2, which is what I have on-hand as a quick-availability machine in the living room. Build Thinkpads like the Ideapads and you'll lose us as a customer. Even though the X301 was very expensive ($1700 if memory serves) I'd still rather buy quality an reliability in a package that looks businesslike and doesn't scream, "steal me!" over most of the stuff out there. If that paradigm changes, I don't need to keep buying.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
People like nice stuff. And Apple is convincing more and more companies that people are willing to pay for nice stuff. Though Apple is exceptionally good at balancing nice and cost.
I think lenovo has already hurt the Thinkpad, it does not look, feel or act like the robust 'tank' of old...
My macbook pro feels more solid than the lenovo which is only about 1 year old now. And I put 16GB into the macbook, so, not that big a deal to load up other laptops with more RAM (I do video work which can get pretty RAM intensive)...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
since ThinkPad hasn't been an IBM product nor brand since 2005
They already have a line of non-Thinkpad notebooks and ultrabooks under the name "Ideapad" and THAT is the line they like to mess with.
I specifically just bought a *THINKPAD* Twist because I wanted the removable "hard drive" (actually SSD, but whatever), a real ethernet port, and other ports, pop-out keyboard for easy service, etc. I was willing to pay more for a Thinkpad over something like their IdeaPad "Yoga" because I wanted those features and the (supposed) better quality and performance options.
I see no reason why Lenovo would need to muck around with the Thinkpad line when they have the Ideapad line. It would be disastrous to tamper with the Thinkpad line too much- I buy them at work for the same reason I wanted one for home.
I have a T60 and a T420s (and I've owned a T23, T40 and another T60p). The T420s has an abysmal screen, extraordinarily weak speakers, a lesser keyboard, poor battery life from day 1, terrible bluetooth range (noticeably worse than the T60), and the keyboard damages the screen like so many low quality laptops (I keep a sheet of A4 paper in mine to prevent this). Who cares about the Thinkpad brand? It's effectively dead. They're terrible now.
I think I can honestly say that I have had Thinkpads for 20 years and I have never had a bad experience on them (other than having a six year old system at one point that could run Cygwin but basically nothing else - the story about how I got the replacement made me a legend at work) - they have travelled literally around the world at least twice and have almost as many frequent flyer miles as I do.
They're great road warrior machines, well built, well thought out (their docking ports are worth every penny) and, amazingly enough, they're probably the only brand that didn't loose their quality when they were bought out/sold (I'm still pissed at what happened to Alienware).
Hopefully they'll keep a few of the old ones around so I can stock up before they try to emulate Apple.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
You can keep your Apple products if you like getting something twice as good for only 4 times the price. For a device I may only use 1-2 years, I don't need it to be rugged, beautiful, sexy, or magical. I need it to be functional and inexpensive.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Lenovo was one of the few vendors to retain the standard 2x3 key configuration for the Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys. This made it very easy to feel your way to these keys rather than a very unhelpful linear layout. It seems the newer models no longer retain this intuitive and most basic configuration. That was enough to hold my attention in the past even if it meant less CPU or other features that, in the end, don't matter that much to 95% of users (please don't yell at me, I know there are plenty who want the fastest, biggest, etc) But now, I can get any old laptop. They're all the same.
Pick up ANYTHING APPLE. It does not feel like a cheap piece of shit.
You're right, it feels like an incredibly overpriced piece of shit.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Rant off.
I'll take you up on that offer. Why are people so concerned with how things "feel"? It's a phone. It doesn't "feel" like anything. You feel. The device is.
Which leads to the second part: it doesn't "feel plasticky", nor does it "feel cheap". It is plasticky and you think it's cheap because you have equated plastic to inferiority. Which isn't necessarily true. If you have a mobile device that tends to get dropped (or even flung) quite often, guess what sort of body will be better at absorbing shocks: plastic or aluminum.
Plastic can be a wise decision, and because of fashion or just plain wrong generalizations (plastic is - historically, even - often used as a cheaper alternative to better materials) it's apparently now acceptable to "feel" something as "cheap", and that's it. Review sites do it all the time. No further investigation needed; it "feels", therefore it is, in a bizarre twist of Descartes. Give me data, not worthless subjective assumptions. They feel stupid.
A few months back I bought a Lenovo with a wireless card with a glitch so I did the first thing I have done with every other laptop I've ever owned when presented with this problem: I ordered a new wireless card. What happens? I get a post error about an unauthorized wireless card and the Laptop refused to boot until I removed it. Until Lenovo gets it through its head that if I pay for it than it is MY laptop and only I have the right to determine what cards are "authorized" I will not buy another Lenovo product.
But then you put it down anything less than extremely softly, and the screen breaks. For Apple prices, they should come with Gorilla Glass.
Though Apple is exceptionally good at balancing nice and cost.
No, Foxconn is. Sweatshops tend to do that.
I've had a T60 for 7 years, including all through college. The things are tanks. It spent class after class being thrown around in my backpack and on the ground and kept trucking. After 4 years of abuse, the plastic over the vent cracked a little. And it's missing an arrow key, but that was due to a milkshake incident (which is survived without flinching) and me misplacing the key. I upped the RAM to 2.5GB in 2007, swapped in a 7200rpm HDD in 2008 and put Windows 7 on it in 2009, which runs quite beautifully. The only issue I've had is the battery went from providing nearly 7 hours on a charge (with tweaked settings) when I first got it to less than 30 minutes on a charge two years later. I bought a replacement battery for ~$45 and that's provided a steady 4 hours over the last three years. I eventually had to replace the ac adapter too, which had taken more abuse than the laptop.
This past year, I got my parents a refurbished IdeaPad... not quite as sturdy as the Thinkpads but still leagues ahead of other laptops in the same price range. As long as they keep their basic design, my next laptop will definitely be a Thinkpad.
Ding ding ding! Typing this from a ThinkPad right now. I picked it from all its competitors because it has a standard IBM layout, with a keypad and all. No chiclet keys here. The mouse trackpad is a solid piece integrated with the case. This laptop has survived dropping once, accidental thumps more times than I can count, frequent airplane trips, and it's never done anything to make me angry - which is more than I can say for any other piece of electronics I've ever owned.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The number of Apple phones I see on my daily commute with a cracked screen is crazy.
RIM's major mistake was thinking that their "best security" offering would keep business customers locked in. Guess what? Smaller businesses don't give a crap about security, especially the clients I support - medical offices. The doctors just want the latest and greatest shiny thing, security be damned. We finally decommissioned the Blackberry server last year because only one person was still using a Blackberry. His office told him to get an iPhone.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I sincerely hope you're kidding... the whole reason we have gorilla glass now is because Steve Jobs talked Corning into making it again for the first iPhone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_Glass
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I dunno about that, although I suppose 'feels' is fairly subjective. We use Thinkpads at work...probably newer models, I don't know, mine's a T400...but it definitely feels like a cheap piece of shit to me. I know from the travel I've done with it already that it's fairly sturdy...but it _feels_ far inferior to my newer personal laptop, which is an HP dv6t (though about on par with my old Dell -- which was from their business line, a Vostro 1000.) If I squeeze my HP, it's fairly solid; if I squeeze the Thinkpad, it bends visibly and feels like it's going to crack. I'm actually somewhat astonished the plastic hasn't cracked already (and I've only had the thing a couple months.)
Not just toddler resistant. They're college student resistant, too. My daughter's Thinkpad lasted through five years of college. She claims her T60P lasted longer than any of her friends' laptops at college. What did she want for a graduation present? Another Thinkpad. She wanted something that would get her through grad school without a problem.
They are still well build and well designed, and that's why they have a loyal following. I bought my thinkpad (I also own a think station) because it was well designed, which allows me to:
1. Service and upgrade it effortlessly. How many laptops do you know where you need to remove just one screw to change the hard drive? They even have the service and repair manuals on their website!
2. Have a good keyboard with that wonderful red cl... mousey thing.
3. Have 16GB of RAM.
The rest of the features are also top quality, without being flashy (back-light keyboard, IPS screens, extra large wifi antennas)
Apple products are well designed, but with a completely different goal in mind. They are trying to prevent you from accessing the hardware (hell you are not allowed even to change the battery). Trying to byte into apple's user base is the stupidest thing they can do. Apple fan's are not going to buy lenovo just because it looks as cool as apple product. On the other hand the people that buy thinkpads for what they are will drop them as a ton of bricks.
I can't imagine cushier job than a thinkpad brand manager: Just sit back and don't do anything, besides making sure that the quality stays the same, the corners are sharp and the color is black. Every year you spend not doing anything only strengthens the brand. So why change a ting?
Though Apple is exceptionally good at balancing nice and cost.
No, Foxconn is. Sweatshops tend to do that.
Sweatshops are a tool. At Apple's direction, Foxconn builds nice products at manageable prices. For most other vendors, Foxconn builds cheap pieces of shit. I first heard about Foxconn (long before they became well know as Apple's factory) because they were the ones producing really awful motherboards for Dell.
You HP elite book is a chinsy toy compared to my laptop....
Try a panasonic Toughbook. I can beat someone to death with it and then continue working after I hose off the blood.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Lenovo has already started to mess with the ThinkPads. It used to be that the keyboard layout was a seven-row deal with the keys sensibly placed and spaced. What they have now is a six-row deal with the function keys squashed together and the keys from the seventh row scattered about seemingly at random. Howls of protest went up about it and the result was this condescending blog post from Lenovo telling people to just deal with it. Here's a selection of commentary.
mostly from morons that keep it in their back pocket. What complete idiots think that is the right place for a phone? I was told by one chick that the NExus 4 was junk because she cracked 4 of them. She kept sitting on the freaking phone because she puts it in her back pocket.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not true, I want a cheap piece of plastic that computes fast. Provided a reasonable keyboard and display. These pieces of plastic are used to be changed every 24 months anyway. I was a Thinkpad customer for a long time, it ended up abruptly two years ago when Lenovo managed very bad an important problem with the nVidia chip on its T61p line of products. I did buy these because they were the top end product at that time. I did buy Thinkpad instead of another brand because of the high quality I got in the past and the service. Lenovo just managed to replace the laptops likely to fail before the end of the warranty and made a recall for these serial numbers only. Many of us did have our lovely T61p just die not long after our warranty expired and we were told by Lenovo to go to hell (not in these terms of course) our warranty is expired and they won't do anything for us. Then I started to see if I could buy a replacement board and in Canada they charged over 1500$ for a replacement board while you can buy yourself a new machine for that price. I then decided to drop Lenovo once and forever. Since that time, I am committed to buy cheap pieces of plastic that computes fast instead.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Nothing terribly revolutionary about a gun that uses ABS plastics for the lower portions - magazine well, trigger assembly, pistol grip, etc. This lightens the weapon and makes it easier to carry, draw, and aim - though it does increases the effect of recoil when the weapon is discharged (due to the lack of stabilizing mass). The REAL parts of the gun are still forged steel though, despite quibbling internet memes and crazy anti-gunners screaming the 'ceramic' lie - Glock achieves the 'ceramic' feel through a process called 'Parkerizing'
Gorilla Glass' primary feature is scratch-resistance, not shatter-proofing. Apple already uses Gorilla Glass. To me, it seems like their devices shatter so easily for three reasons:
- The "glass sandwich" design (double the chance of shattering)
- Flat flush face (my Nexus S has a slight curve to the face, which means when I drop it, none of the screen actually impacts the ground)
- Aluminium instead of plastic (it increases the phone's weight unnecessarily, meaning more damage when it drops)
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Though Apple is exceptionally good at balancing nice and cost.
No, Foxconn is. Sweatshops tend to do that.
Foxconn just assembles things that Apple designs and ships the parts to them. They are close to the last step (maybe *the* last step) in a long supply chain. Apple is exceptionally good at designing products that people want and maximizing their profit on those items. Sometimes that means leaving off a few features but it always means very effective management of their supply chain. I don't think there are many companies in the world with Apple's skills in acquiring and locking up its component supplies. It helps having 10's of billions+ of dollars to throw around. Samsung is also pretty good and getting better.
It's planned obsolesence vs. company planning.
Business customers with a large PC/Laptop fleet don't really want things to change, because it breaks compatibility and spare parts availability, and change costs money -- especially change that they didn't really need, and hadn't planned on paying for.
This isn't what the manufacturers want, however; they want to sell kit, and a good way to do that is to have a customer base they believe is loyal, and render their products obsolete on a regular basis. The change doesn't have to be better, just different. Different enough to be incompatible with the current generation. Oh, and wrap up support of the old gear as soon as you can, so the customers have to change over their fleet.
I've noticed this happening during a gig certifying store systems for a major retailer. Really pisses off the retailers, too (beware the irony).
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
In good hands, the "cheap piece of plastic" can be made to last. My mother just retired her Dell laptop... it was an Inspiron 1525 that she bought in 2008, and the main reason for replacing it was that the hard drive was failing. The system itself is fine, and with a replacement hard drive it could be convinced to last another few years, but she saw my ultraportable and decided she wanted a new one while she could still get Windows 7 on it.
$500 once every 5 years is good economy, IMO. It puts the laptop in the category where I don't really cry if I have to replace it every year, and everything beyond that is gravy.
Got one recently, and it is truly awful. Screen, buttons, optical drive, cooling fan, drivers, usb ports, brightness controls, wifi, battery, you name it, it has a problem. Resume from sleep and brightness controls are broken. Reboot and wifi is missing. Totally power off and restart, usb port rejects the mouse. Fan pulses up and down every 2 seconds. Suddenly can't read the battery, and it will soon emergency shut down, unless rebooting to fix that asap. Optical drive randomly pops open occasionally. Rejects discs 1/3 of the time. Pops open after closing with no disc 1/3 of the time. Screen is bright gray instead of black (I knew it was a cheap screen, but dear goodness I was not expecting that bright of a gray.) Left trackpad button has to be smashed to work. There is no Win7 graphics driver on the official website for the exact model (but you can find one with web search.) I do like the feel of the keyboard though. Check the official Lenovo forums to see more carnage.
I used my Thinkpad T40 as my main computing device for a solid 9 years prior to dropping it shearing off the hinge last month (although it still actually works!). Part of the reason for its longevity is the modular design - everything is easily swappable - allowing me to replace the fan at 5 years for about 30GBP with just a small screwdriver. Upgrading the RAM, hard-drive, optical drive etc was even easier often not requiring any tools.
I paid 1500GBP back when I bought it, and at the time many colleagues paid around 850GBP for the cheapest piece of plastic on the laptop market, which would inevitably overheat and break after 1 year, just after warranty. People thought I was wasting money at the time, but since then I've had 9 uninterrupted years of computing pleasure, typed on a unrivaled laptop keyboard, in a nice thin and light design, which still doesn't show it's age. My friends have been through 3 even 4 cheap laptops in this time, spending at least double in total, and having the inconsistency and annoyance of having to replace it 3 or 4 times.
I've replaced my T40 with a 14inch T60p that doesn't seem to have been used, but it's concerning that the more recent models are showing trends towards less modularity (i.e the X carbon) and possibly also to less quality. I'm not against change - and the Thinkpad series has gone through a lot of experiment and change since it's inception - the cheaper i-series and G-series, the butterfly keyboard, various tablet type forms. When they started out they were sleek, black and boxy - I think that modern finishing techniques can bring those design features into this decade. But they can't compromise on the quality or modularity to achieve that, or else they will quickly lose their cachet.
I think Lenovo beats Dell on the high end too (wouldn't know about HP). I bought a fully loaded Precision M65... It was great on paper and out of the box. It was also bloody expensive and I found out later very keen to cut corners where things do not show too much at first, like flimsy hinges, a magnesium casing that at first looks awesome but was prone to cracks from stress fatigue ( never tried dropping it).
I bought a fully loaded W520 for about a thousand bucks less when it came out. It may not have a metal casing, but it's built like a tank, every little detail that made the M65 reveal its cheapness was carefully engineered in the W520, solid hinges, everything is built to last. The M65 was a nice laptop but it just doesn't compare. Now I haven't tried whatever was a replacement for the Dell when I got the Lenovo but I'd be surprized to find a major design improvement.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Exactly so. I think my favorite keyboard was on my T23. The T30 was weak, but the right layout at least. T40/T42/T43 were better. I still use my T60 daily. I've replaced the keyboard a few times, but that's just because of the quanitity of use I've put it through.
I could probably get over the chicklet (so-called island) style keys, but the crippled six-row layout is too much.
Of course, I'm still pining for 4:3 displays...
This space for rent.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think my Thinkpads look better than Macbooks. It's a matter of taste.
That they are also built like tanks is also nice.
Well, one difference is that Apple products tend to look like they were designed by someone at Fisher-Price.
A nice Thinkpad (especially a T or X series model), on the other hand, never looks like something that came from Toys R Us.
I don't know who the hell decided that the only acceptable expression of "sexy" is 'round corners and shiny surfaces', but I hate that guy. Has made shopping for electronics a lot harder, unless you're super into stuff that looks like Apple made it, obviously.
That and motherfucking glossy, reflective as fuck screens - I can't imagine how anyone thought that abomination was a good idea. Seriously, what the fuck?
sic transit gloria mundi
I work somewhere where I'm paid enough to be able to afford $2000/mo in rent, in addition to payments on a new car and still live comfortably. I still think that Apple's products are overpriced for what you get. They certainly are good quality, but I don't abuse my laptop and have had nothing but good luck with Dell's build quality on their recent stuff. It says something that you can get a $400 laptop from their business line and it includes 1 year of NBD onsite support. I'm typing this on the 13" ultraportable I paid $430 for from Dell more than a year and a half ago, and it's still working as well as the day I bought it. I don't see any point in replacing it until the battery kicks the bucket but it's still good for about the same time as it was when I bought it.
Same story with my cell phone, btw. While I could buy an iPhone, or a One X, or a GS3 if I wanted to, I went with a One V instead. It was $150 without a contract, and is plenty for what I actually use it for. I don't need a quad core processor with 2GB of RAM in my cell phone when all I do with it is listen to FM radio, check e-mail, check wikipedia from time to time, watch Netflix, and maybe play the occasional tower defense game, so why would I spend 4x as much on the phone or let myself get tied into a long-term contract where I'm paying more than I need to for service?
As a general rule, the only times I spend money on the higher end product is in food, clothing and shoes. Food because it's better for my health, and clothing/shoes because it's a false economy buying the cheaper product: higher quality clothes last a *lot* longer than the cheap stuff and end up costing less in the long run (and no, by "high end clothing" I do not mean brands that treat their customers as billboards). When it comes to consumer electronics, it almost never pays off to buy the expensive product, especially not with the pace that the technology is advancing.
Essentially, what I'm saying is that there's 3 classes of consumers. There's the people who genuinely can't afford a higher end product, there's the people for whom the more expensive product is a status symbol, and there's the people who search the best economy which may or may not mean the more expensive option. You are assuming the person you're replying to fits into the first category when they could easily fit into the third.
I dropped my Samsung Galaxy S2 at least 5 times from holding height onto a hard surface such as tile, concrete or asphalt. Twice, it even exploded into component parts in spectacular fashion. All three times, not a scratch on it. I really don't know how they do it (they copied Apple?).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Is English not your primary language, or are you being difficult on purpose?
When people use 'feels' in this context they mean 'produces a tactile sensation'. We are concerned with this because that's the best way to determine the build quality of a product.
The devices mentioned feel (again, words can be tricky, try to follow along here) like cheap pieces of shit, because they are cheap pieces of shit - purposefully built to fall apart withing 1-2 years.
Physically examining something is pretty much the exact opposite of "subjective assumptions". I don't really understand what kind of "data" you're looking for, do you not trust your senses to tell you what materials something is made of?
sic transit gloria mundi
Foxconn just assembles things that Apple designs and ships the parts to them.
I don't think you understand why everyone manufactures in China.
When Foxconn needs parts, they put in an order to a company down the street
Foxconn's factories are company towns, inside a city made of companies.
Literally, the entire supply chain is there.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I always bought the tablet series of the X thinkpad. I own a x60t an x61t and now a x220t.
I recently compared the x201t to the x220t. Its a serious backstep.
It lacks quite a few leds on the bottom screen. It has a huge think frame around the screen. The frame is also very thick around the keyboard. The keyboard layout was changed. The Touchpad now was to be curbesmly pressed to generate a keypress, no longer dedicated buttons. The keyboard also has been changed to something less klicky.
The cablelayout outside is a mess. Especially that the power cable has moved to the back, and the ethernet to the right, where formerly everything was on the left.
I also miss the screen locking mechanism of the old series, a solid latch. Instead i now have rubber pads that constantly go missing.
The plus side is an ips panel and multitouch screen, decent speakers.
I will see if lenovo is buyable in the future....
I'll take you up on that offer. Why are people so concerned with how things "feel"?
Since we began by talking about Thinkpads, let me bring up a case in point -- the Thinkpad keyboard found on their older models. As a tactile input device, the "feel" of a keyboard is tantamount to its quality.
Which leads to the second part: it doesn't "feel plasticky", nor does it "feel cheap". It is plasticky and you think it's cheap because you have equated plastic to inferiority. Which isn't necessarily true
My Thinkpad x201t has a plastic keyboard. So does the HP Touchsmart it replaced.
Despite the similarity in materials, I have no qualms about describing the HP keyboard as a cheap plastic piece of shit -- nor do I have any worries that the wording of this phrase might automatically casts aspersions on the excellent plastic Thinkpad keyboard. Most readers are not so obtuse.
Actually Lenovo is doing that to comply with FCC regulations. While authentication methods differ between suppliers the FCC still requires that OEMs control which wireless card will work in their system as the FCC grant is specific to a host/wireless card/antenna combination.
The Retina MacBook Pro handles 16GB of RAM and has a video resolution that makes the ThinkPads cry. Lenovo has slowly been trimming back from having the best displays you can get in a laptop over the last few years. If you want a touch screen, the ThinkPad is your system. In just about every other case they're hard pressed to compete with Apple's best stuff in anything but price.
The new Thinkpad T530 comes with a crummy keyboard and the top resolution is 1900 x 1080. It's a step backward in many ways from the 1600x1200 T60 with great keyboard I bought in 2006. And the build quality...Lenovo is not even close nowadays. Sad, really, that I find myself giving up on the brand after a solid 10 year run where they were the only reasonable choice.
Except that Thinkpads have a chiclet keyboard now. That's kind of the point here; they've changed to where they're homogenous and unrecognizable as classic Thinkpads from a quality perspective. There is no reason left to pay extra for a Thinkpad over $GENERIC_CRAP now. (They're still better than, say, HP, but I can assemble a computer out of cardboard that is more rugged than a HP laptop)
You do realize that F=MA? So no, elephants don't bounce when you drop them like beetles do.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
In my 30 years of buying computers, a HP Pavillion laptop is the only thing I've ever happily paid a restocking fee to return, rather than lose all the money by keeping it. It's easy to do better when the comparison point are the worst laptops you can get. It's not really a fair comparison though; HP's EliteBook models are the ones they claim are reasonable quality.
My just over 3 year old Thinkpad T500 just died recently. Meanwhile the entire fleet of 6 year old T60s at my last startup are still chugging along. I hope you have better luck with the newer models than I did, I've been surprised at how fast the quality has been declining on them the last few years.
"When it comes to consumer electronics, it almost never pays off to buy the expensive product, especially not with the pace that the technology is advancing."
Depends on what you're looking for. If we consider high-end computers like Thinkpads and owners who know what they're doing, it almost certainly pays off to buy the more expensive X/T/W series Thinkpad instead of a low-end Dell Vostro or Latitude... have you ever tried to replace parts (from sourcing to actually replacement) on a low-end machine?
For the high-end Thinkpad, you simply type the part number (listed in the hardware maintenance manual) into eBay and order it for (usually) a peasly amount (I paid 120€ for the top-end FullHD screen with an official Lenovo FRU sticker, now compare that with the prices for a low-end laptop's "Screen assembly"... and in the US it's probably much cheaper), then grab a screwdriver and follow the instructions in the hardware maintenance manual for repair. Anything short of a dead mainboard and you should be up and running in three days or less...
With the Dell, on the other hand, once that 1 year of NBD runs out, you're completely screwed, because on the low end, replacement parts are 1. way too expensive and 2. difficult to replace.
And even if your device doesn't break (and high-end Thinkpads rarely require more than a new battery and keyboard, maybe palmrest, after two years of daily use - and replacing these things takes about 60 seconds), you're still better off with the high-end model because the resale value is better. My Thinkpad is still worth twice as much as a new Vostro, even after an entire year of use... if I sell it and buy the next gen model as a demo unit, pump it full of upgrades (SSD + big spinning drive, top-end LCD, max out the RAM), I'll still be spending less than I would on a low-end Vostro, and have the performance (both in terms of grunt as well as battery and thermal/noise) to back up the high price.
It's got nothing to do with a status symbol - I'm just cheap enough to recognize that buying cheap crap is not very efficient economically.
Sure, sure. I suppose a hideous, yet incredibly well-made tablet would fly off the shelves. Apple's products are made to be beautiful, and their boxes, packaging, ads, and stores all highlight that. The vast majority of their customers know nothing about quality, nor anything about the specs of the devices they buy. They're drawn into the stores for the asthetics, not because they've researched build quality of multiple manufacturers. Apple's success has everything to do with being shiny.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Lenovo has ZERO to do with IBM now and that's the way it's been for YEARS. IBM doesn't make Lenovo or own any remaining Lenovo stock. IBM no longer owns the Thinkpad name or brand.