151–160 of 321 posts
I've bought Thinkpads personally and professionally for 20 years. Idiotic cunning stunts such as this and Superfish have removed it from any future consideration.
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> The sad thing is that they're still better than everything else out there. They haven't ever been better than Apple laptop hardware, even in Intel-land. There seems to be this common bias in PC laptop evaluation that excludes Apple machines from consideration when doing comparisons. Apple makes the best x64 laptops, and has for years. Sadly, they will stop soon.
Can I run Linux on them? Can I get them with keyboards that aren't awful? Can I get them with next-business-day-on-site warranty? Not trying to be snarky here, I haven't owned an Apple product since the iMac, so I literally don't know. But I suspect the answer is "no".
Apple products (top case stickers notwithstanding) are fungible: just buy another one from any Apple store in the universe and restore your backup, and let AppleCare deal with the busted one on their own schedule.
There’s nothing special about your laptop except the data. The factory pumps out bazillions of them.
Does anyone actually buy Lenovos after what happened with SuperFish? [0] [0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/superfish-to...
ThinkPads are still the name of the game for enterprise laptop deployments. AFAIK, they don't contain any preloaded stuff beyond the OEM app (Lenovo Vantage). Some enterprises prefer the more stripped down Lenovo System Update instead, although I think users may need Vantage to change some hotkey, etc. settings. Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new…
This is what I've done with virtually every machine I've personally owned for oh... the last 20 years? Why is this not people's defacto way of setting up a new machine? It's obvious that preinstalls are full of bloatware and spyware. The only issue (primarily from the past) is that specialty hardware may not work without vendor-provided drivers. That's largely no longer true, especially for the big-name brands like Lenovo, Dell, Acer, ec.
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Finding a good Mac-layout mechanical keyboard that I liked was a total chore, I eventually got the Vinpok Taptek which I'm really pleased with but I can't find replacement keycaps for the life of me.
One good source of Mac mechanicals is Matias, e.g. https://matias.ca/quietpro/mac/ . In fact, it's the only company I've found that makes a true Mac layout: that is, a full symmetric set of command, option, and control keys on each side.
It was good for about a year. Then i started having connectivity problems. The Letter in the keys wrote off quickly. And a few of the keys started becoming less responsive. The quality just wasn't there.
Luckily, by then Apple came out with its version, and it's been flawless for a few years now. It's worth the extra money to go with Apple, if you're getting that kind of keyboard.
Can we please get a law that says that on my devices, I control ads. Fine if bigcorp wants to show me ads, but then they must pay for the device.
I'm sure the response would be something like "oh we gave you a discount on it when you purchased it for $399 instead of $1399. It's all in the EULA you agreed to when you first got your device."
(More seriously, this is why I looked at but passed by all of their other devices. Maybe their PCs get better treatment but I have no guarantee that the same management won’t make the same call again.)
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>I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the BIOS from an attached USB with specific format and layout Source for this? I've seen it available on various enthusiast desktop motherboards, but I haven't seen it on laptops. I haven't even seen it on the pricier thinkpad line.
It is key for desktop motherboards, at least AMD ones where they reuse the same socket over multiple CPU generations. I bought a motherboard and a new AMD Zen 3 CPU together recently. The motherboard wouldn't POST because the BIOS was too old to and didn't have Zen 3 support. The only way to get it to work was to flash a new BIOS using the out-of-band update tool that works with just the PSU and USB stick attached. W…
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I've never encountered any ads in printed books. Edit because I can't be bothered to reply to all the comments below: excerpts from other books (often by the same author, or in a similar genre) are not ads IMO. They're not intrusive. They're pretty much always relevant. They're fun to read. They don't contain tracking cookies. They're as benign as it gets.
I have a couple of German paperbacks which had one ad in the middle of a book, often for an instant soup or something like that. But at least it was easy to skip :).
[1] https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/2015/02/14/whats-rihan...
I wonder if the ad bombardment we are suffering for some years now will eventually reach a critical point to trigger mass exodus or protests. TV got annoying with ads and viewership greatly decreased but that was caused by the emergence of the internet I think, what new technology options we have to escape the current ads to? The only other hope is that the massive amount of money in ads and data collection is actual…
I wish there was a good legal way to punish people who make bad ads. Maybe we need some sort of consumer collective to organize boycotts?
(If you define "bad" as "in a context where ads should not be", I think I agree with you.)
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Can I run Linux on them? Can I get them with keyboards that aren't awful? Can I get them with next-business-day-on-site warranty? Not trying to be snarky here, I haven't owned an Apple product since the iMac, so I literally don't know. But I suspect the answer is "no".
I’ve never understood the next-business-day-on-site warranty thing people seem so keen on. Apple products (top case stickers notwithstanding) are fungible: just buy another one from any Apple store in the universe and restore your backup, and let AppleCare deal with the busted one on their own schedule. There’s nothing special about your laptop except the data. The factory pumps out bazillions of them.
> Apple products ... just buy another one
I think you answered your own question. Buying a new laptop every time something is broken is expensive. Lenovo offers quite cheap extended warranty plus the next-day repair is great. (EU: I paid less then 50E for another year of warranty after the original 2 years)