ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
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ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
1–10 of 81 posts
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#2The font on that page is making my head hurt. I can't even read it.
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#3The font on that page is making my head hurt. I can't even read it.
Given the content is not dynamic, they could have posted a webpage or a pdf and made it easier on everyone. There is some irony here.
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#4Very interesting, but the Flash-based player of this is not very readable. Is it available as a PDF?
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#5Well, that was a horrible experience. Sure, my connection is unforgivably slow, but a long player download (in my case, about four minutes) followed by a long per-page content download (with no apparent prefetch) means that I didn't get very far before bailing. Oh, and none of the usual keyboard navigation (arrows) work. There are a lot of ways to present something like this that work; this doesn't, particularly.
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#6I can't believe I'm reading an article touting the design smarts of the Thinkpad designers... honestly I've always thought that the standard black Thinkpads were unspeakably ugly. And I'm not even a design snob. Usable yes, but aesthetic? No way.
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#7I have privately been using ThinkPads exclusively for many years now.
These are the best laptops I ever used (and I am being supplied with work laptops that ranged from MacBook to Dells).
The part I relate the most with in the presentation is that ThinkPads are not trendy or flashy. No they are not, they are not gadgets or things you show off, they are functional tools that just work.
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#8I can't believe I'm reading an article touting the design smarts of the Thinkpad designers... honestly I've always thought that the standard black Thinkpads were unspeakably ugly. And I'm not even a design snob. Usable yes, but aesthetic? No way.
Maybe I am broken, but I think they are the best looking laptops. Ironically, their "function-over-form" design yields a form I find beautiful.
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#9I can't believe I'm reading an article touting the design smarts of the Thinkpad designers... honestly I've always thought that the standard black Thinkpads were unspeakably ugly. And I'm not even a design snob. Usable yes, but aesthetic? No way.
I use ThinkPads and their timeless design is one of my favorite things about them. For a lot of people, shiny aluminum is great, but some appreciate the ThinkPad color scheme.
Re: ThinkPad Design: Spirit and Essence
#10I've been using a Macbook for years now and love it, but reading this makes me nostalgic for my ThinkPad from a few years back. It truly stood apart from all other PC laptops. I happen to think (just my opinion) that the black body was a stroke of genius. The cobalt blue 'enter' key contrasted beautifully with the black keyboard. I miss the magnesium alloy hinges. Look back to the IBM 370 mainframe console from the 1970s and you'll see the origins of the ThinkPad aesthetic: http://www.answers.com/topic/system-370. The look and feel of the keyboard was sublime, nothing else matched it. The trackpoint was wonderfully quick and accurate. I didn't fully appreciate it until I tried the same mechanism on a Dell and found it to be clumsy and badly calibrated. A ThinkPad running Gentoo Linux was a beautiful thing. In recent years Lenovo seems to be cutting costs and compromising the look and feel of this legendary machine. And Macbooks are slowly but steadily being turned into appliances for the masses and becoming closed machines. I wonder if ten years from now there will be a handheld or personal computing device capable of generating the same kind of cult following.