61–70 of 74 posts
I just got the T530 about a month ago. It was a rough order process as it was delayed numerous times. (This will be fixed by moving onshore now). It has been a great machine. The only complaint I have about it is the slow wake time. For whatever reason (even after following some optimization tips), when it wakes from closed cover or timeout it takes forever.
Only a few more years now before the patents run out on the trackpoint, at which point it will be "reimagined" by Apple.
Seems unlikely. There is a huge paradigm shift to touch, it doesn't really make sense go back to non touch input devices.
Widescreen? More like shortscreen.
Business machines should not be optimized for consuming entertainment.
One thing the Thinkpads do right, by me, is the keyboard, which I'm surprised no one here has mentioned. They have just the right depth of stroke, and the backing tends to be very solid to minimize flex. One thing that I wish most manufacturers would understand is that specs matter much less than the user interface. And for geeks, the UI is typically the keyboard, the display, and to a lesser extent the mouse (since…
T21 -> T41p -> T61p -> x220. I think it's safe to say I'm brand loyal. I've always felt that Thinkpads look cooler with a beat up the case. I'll never own a sleeve or protector. They don't require one. I have a hard time saying that about any of my other electronics. As a side, I've just flown from LAX -> Sydney -> Perth on a single charge using the Slice battery and standard 6 cell. Took out season 5 of Mad Men in 7…
Happy Birthday ThinkPad! Not a fan of their customer service, but my little X121e is the best laptop I've ever used.
This is probably the only forum where this rant will, be relevant, but as someone who has used ThinkPads for a long time (and has a business that sells them), I have to say the "back" and "forward" buttons on the newer keyboards are a terrible design. I can't even count the amount of things I lost by accidentally bumping the "back" key before I disabled them with third-party software, and people we sell the laptops t…
I've been using IBM (and now Lenovo) Thinkpads for quite some time, and despite being a fan of their X series (currently using an X220) I REALLY wish Lenovo would consolidate lineups and focus on higher quality offerings. Even small stuff like offering a TN panel on an X series instead of an IPS panel seems foolish. Having just upgraded my display from TN to IPS, it's such a stark difference that I think Lenovo shoul…
> I haven't heard "that Thinkpad looks awesome" or "that machine looks well built" in quite some time (X1 carbon aside). That's because a large sector of the tech industry (and a lot of non-techies as well) has been drinking the Apple Kool-Aid non-stop for the last ~5 years. That said, I think the X1 Carbon is the flagship model we've been waiting for. It ticks all the right checkboxes, and if you can handle the new…
There was a time after that when they just kept getting better and better: the A30p with a beautiful 1600x1200 IPS display, and then that same display in the slimmed-down and faster T60p.
I also bought a bunch of old beaters to use as test machines and what not: 750's, 755's, a 360, and I was so happy when I tracked down a 701c with the butterfly keyboard.
Then for a while you could get used working A30p's in good condition for $300 or so. Did I mention the 1600x1200 IPS display? :-)
I love the TrackPoint [1] and those great displays, and even better, all the machines had the same great keyboard! When other laptop manufacturers were fiddling with this layout and that, every ThinkPad had the same exact keyboard, and it was a good one too. I could move from one ThinkPad to another without thinking about it.
Then, they hired a keyboard designer.
You could see the trouble coming in this poll:
http://blog.lenovo.com/design/keyboard-layout-survey-details...
The poll itself is gone, but the comments on the blog post are still there. The poll had all sorts of layout tweaks - moving various keys around in an A-B-C-D test - just the kind of thing a keyboard designer would want to do.
Then the new keyboards started coming along. Commonly used keys were moved around, and the F1-F2 keys were jammed into a solid tight row with no gaps between the groups of four keys. These gaps (between F4-F5 and F8-F9) are what afforded easy touch typing on these keys that are so far away from the home row.
Trust me, if you're reaching for Fn+F5 (wireless settings), you don't want to hit Fn+F4 (standby) by mistake. With the old keyboards, that's never a problem. There's a nice gap between F4 and F5 and you don't have to look at the keys to hit the right one. With the new one, good luck. (Oddly enough, the ThinkPad X1 and X1 Carbon do have little gaps here even though they follow the new layout otherwise. But the other newer models, no such luck. And the X1 keyboards are not compatible with other models.)
Many die-hard ThinkPad fans hated the new keyboards, not because of the "island" design but because of these frivolous layout changes.
Lenovo's response:
http://blog.lenovo.com/products/why-you-should-give-in-to-th...
Entrepreneurs, read the comments on that post for a lesson in how to discourage your most avid supporters. :-(
Edit: this comment on that post was insightful:
> I bet the recent supposed user tests also didn't include a significant number of dedicated, old-timer ThinkPad programmers, otherwise you'd made more of an effort mentioning this in the article, and the outcome would most likely have been different. Rather, it must have consisted mainly of random people off the street who're used to cheap laptops with keyboard layouts changing with every model. So surely they can't be bothered with yet another weird layout and thus mark it as "fine".
Hands down the best laptop for linux in my opinion. I would be interested to hear if there are any other laptop lines with such a great history of linux support.
Almost literally everything worked out of the box on Fedora 17 (the sole exception being the card reader, which is supported by a staging driver Fedora doesn't put in its default kernels; rpmfusion has a kmod-staging package, or just build your own kernel).
I love it. The days of tricky Linux support in laptops are, thankfully, mostly behind us.