Are Lenovo's ThinkPads Getting Worse? 271
writertype writes "Over the weekend, Lenovo launched the ThinkPad T431s, a ~$950 notebook with chiclet keys, no trackpad buttons, an integrated battery, and Windows 8 but no touchscreen. The T431s is also thinner and lighter than the bulletproof bento boxes we all know and love. The argument ReadWrite makes is that ThinkPads are becoming slowly, but significantly, worse. Do you agree?"
Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
They just don't hold up like they used to. We've got at work several 2009-2010 aged Thinkpads that are about done, while older ones (2007 era) are still showing no trouble aside from user error (dropped, etc). I've even got really old Thinkpad 600e (Pentium II, 96MB RAM) that won't die. I'd rather work off of the 600e then deal with the chicklet keyboards on the new ones (purchased a few T and W series laptops at the beginning of the year, they all suffer from it).
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally, I'd agree with you about Betteridge... but as a life-long Thinkpad owner, yeah... compared to 5-10 years ago, their quality has gone down the toilet, and they're slowly turning their laptops into cheap shadows of their former glory.
Being a "Thinkpad" used to mean something... it meant you were buying a laptop built to survive Armageddon (well, at least one that's neither wet nor sandy) that you'd feel compelled to hang on to forever as a future family heirloom, because it just seemed morally wrong to ever throw one away. Compaq's high-end laptops used to be the same way, until HP destroyed them & turned them into the same throw-away crap they sell at Walmart (but with enterprise management features added to their BIOS, a TPM module, and drive encryption enabled by default).
It used to be, if your Thinkpad died, it was almost guaranteed to be your fault (or the fault of somebody in your general vicinity, or to whom you made the mistake of temporarily delegating possession or stewardship of it). If you were on board a hijacked jet, you could remove the battery, put it in a pillocase, and go after the boxcutter-wielding hijackers using your battery as a hybrid club-mace, and your beloved Thinkpad as a shield.
I just pray to ${deity} that the Trackpoint IV patents all expire before the dark day that they decide to start eliminating them from even their expensive models in a misguided attempt to shave another $1.17 from the manufacturing cost, and take away my last remaining reason to stick with them instead of trying to hack my own guerrilla lunchbox PC with a microATX mobo, a body-transplanted Model M (with Trackpoint), a suitable 2560x1440 display, and the fruit of a Makerbot & a week or two of printing & gluing-together a new case, one 4x4 inch piece at a time.
There is no decent non-Apple laptop (Score:3, Interesting)
I have written about this on /. before but it's more relevant than ever to me now
A few years ago (late 2009), I bought a ThinkPad and a MacBook Pro around the same time. I used the two machines side by side for awhile, and I really, really wanted to like the ThinkPad. However, the MacBook Pro's screen was brighter, clearer, speakers were better, battery lasted longer, and, of course, the profile was a lot smaller. Power cord was nicer. Touchpad was miles beyond the ThinkPad. Also, power management didn't work perfectly on the ThinkPad (Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, all of them wouldn't suspend to memory on closing the thing and resume properly when opening it. Sometimes it would, sometimes not). ThinkPad fan was noisy.
I'd once again like to buy a laptop, and run Linux/BSD on it. While OSX was giving me a decent dev environment and not pissing me off too much on a daily basis at the time, lately the lack of configurability, Finder being slow as fuck, development environment issues, generally using OSX being not as badass as running something made by the community, Apple's legal positions, etc... I'd really like to get off the Apple stuff.
However, it's obvious that there's no laptop made by anyone else that isn't an ugly piece of shit. ThinkPads used to have that nice weight to them, the look and feeling like you just stepped off the space station with one. Something reasonably classy about them. But if you look at them directly next to the latest Macbook Pro, it is obvious which one is better hardware (OS political issues aside).
Honestly I'm thinking about just not using laptops anymore. The ergonomics of the screen/keyboard placement is obviously terrible, and there just doesn't seem to be any option I'd want to use every day other than handing Apple a huge check for their hardware and running another OS on it.
If anyone has any suggestions about other brands, products, or experiences I'd be happy to hear them. Because I certainly can't seem to find a reasonable alternative