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ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

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Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#101

Post by hakfoo »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #20
ginko wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one asked for a 16:9 thinkpad though.

16:9 displays were inevitable due to the economies of scale form the TV industry. It's a shame they had to be 1366x768 for so long. I remember many eons ago in the last 2000s to early 2010s when I wanted a 16:10 monitor for my PC and the price difference between 1920x1080 and 1920x1200 or between 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 was massive, that it made no sense to get the few extra vertical pixels of the 16:10 unless you we…

There was a narrow window when TV and monitor products used the same panels.

TVs got bigger very quickly after LCD took over-- there were a few years where they had ~22-25" sets as the small "dorm room" size models, but you walk into Best Buy and there's barely anything smaller than 32" now.

Conversely, mainstream desktop screens didn't get much above 27" before you started going exotic, so the typical monitors you're putting on a million desktops are not using the same panels as TVs.

I suppose you could say that a "master glass" could be cut into 16:9 panels for both TVs and monitors, but wouldn't it require the two panel sizes to use the same pixel density?

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#102

Post by hakfoo »

Melatonic wrote: post #52
dehrmann wrote: post #25

A general takeaway from this is that there were a number of innovations that made sense at the time, but as the landscape changed, they lost their utility. The butterfly keyboard wasn't needed once screens got larger. The switch to widescreen mean the 7th row of keys competed with the trackpad for real estate. The lid latch was no longer needed as screens got lighter. Top-of-screen keyboard lighting got replaced by b…

I'd take a Thinkpad without a trackpad all together - I always disable mine in the bios anyways. Still also prefer thinklight to backlit keyboards but that's less of a necessary

Considering how big a thing custom keyboards are on desktops, I could see a very viable market for more keyboard options as an upsell. If they swapped out the entire case top (or at least a large panel including the trackpad and keyboard) as a single FRU, the options could be impressive.

Regular keyboard with stupid trackpad: included Backlit keyboard: +$30 7-row non-trackpad keyboard: +$60 7-row backlit: +$100 All glass programmable touchscreen monstrosity: +$400

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#103

Post by hakfoo »

rs186 wrote: post #26

Interesting that we have tons of interviews, podcasts and books about how Apple design their hardware and software, but barely anything when it comes to other PCs or OSes. I have read some books and they are disappointing.

I assumed much of the PC industry wasn't doing "design" so much as "what's available in stock and quantity."

Only the largest players-- the Dells and HPs and Acers-- really made much design decisions with custom cases and peripherals, but their teams might have some interesting stories to tell. It might be hard to turn it into a mainstream appeal story, rather than a industrial design tech-journal one.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#104

Post by hxorr »

ginko wrote: post #75
criddell wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did. I like having two documents side-by-side and I think it works out well on a 1920x1080 (or 3820x2160) display.

Guess I’ll blame you for ruining laptops then. 1080 pixels is too little vertical space to read documents.

Back in my day... We had 1024x768 and if you were rich enough for a 19", 1280x960

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#105

Post by Lio »

al_borland wrote: post #51
elric wrote: post #48

I think optimising for thinness is a stupid goal. I get wanting to reduce weight , but volume and mass are two different metrics. Thicker laptops can have better cooling, bigger batteries, easier maintenance, a bloody ethernet port, and probably better keyboards. For some reason Lenovo has made the ThinkPad keyboard worse with every new generation. They're still better than other laptop keyboards, but my goodness the…

When something is large and light, the consumer view is that it is cheaply made. That's a problem when trying to sell an expensive product.

That very much depends on the product type.

No one pedalling a heavy bicycle up hill ever thought it was better made than a lighter one, even if it was.

It’s almost first thing people do when looking at a bike is pick it up for weight.

Heavier aero bikes can be fast. Heavier 4-pot brakes can work better but still we notice the weight and want lighter.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#106

Post by microtonal »

brikym wrote: post #84

I have always found thinkpads to be the most overrated laptops ever. I far prefer Macbooks in all aspects beit ergonomics, aesthetics or performance. I don't get the love for Thinkpads. Maybe it's just nostelgia clouding people's judgement because I just see something which is clunky, ugly, plastic, noisy with a crap screen and crap battery life. The keyboard is the only thing I like more, but the macbook keyboards a…

I have both and would say that they just have different priorities. ThinkPad is an open platform, so you can run Linux. If you want to run Linux, modern MacBooks are no good. Yes, you could run Asahi on an M1/M2, but things like DP-Alt and Thunderbolt are still not supported. Whereas I could plug in my T14 Gen 5 AMD with Linux to a Thunderbolt display and it worked on day 1.

ThinkPads are also much more upgradable and serviceable than a MacBook. I popped in 64GiB RAM, 2 TB NVMe SSD, and a WWAN modem and it cost me almost nothing. However. doing so requires a less flat, less glued, etc. system, which requires other compromises. Getting a MacBook with similar memory and storage would cost 5300 Euro (compared to ~1400-1500 for the ThinkPad) and I still wouldn't have WWAN (far better CPU/GPU though, but I especially want the RAM/storage).

I fully agree though that for the price MacBooks have far better screens, cooling systems, and the unibody aluminium case is pretty much unbeatable. CPU-wise, AMD APUs have caught up a lot.

clunky, ugly, plastic, noisy with a crap screen and crap battery life

I think that's not really a fair characterization. There is are wide gap between a good ThinkPad and e.g. a cheap Acer (to which your description would apply). My T14 even gets 6-7 hours on Linux (which isn't exactly known for great battery life), so it would probably do 10 hours on Windows. I only head the fan when I load the system a lot and even then it's fairly quit. And the case, even though it's not aluminium is still pretty nice/robust.

I have M1 Pro and M3 Pro MacBooks to compare to. IMO MacBook and ThinkPads are great in different ways. Ideally I'd want to have a MacBook with the upgradeability/repairability of a ThinkPad that can run NixOS with all peripherals supported.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#107

Post by microtonal »

tonydav wrote: post #23

I can't have a laptop without the trackpoint. But why can't my fulloption P16 gen2 have a working suspend sleep S3? It's a furnace in my backpack. Also why lose the RJ45? Sadly there is no better laptop.. - ecc - trackpoint +3buttons, could be without touchpad - camera shutter privacy - smartcard reader - 2 nvme ( <3 NixOS

My T14 Gen 5 has RJ45, so they are not completely gone.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#108

Post by lproven »

hxorr wrote: post #104
ginko wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess I’ll blame you for ruining laptops then. 1080 pixels is too little vertical space to read documents.

Back in my day... We had 1024x768 and if you were rich enough for a 19", 1280x960

My first, second and even 3rd laptops had 640×480 in 16 greys, with passive matrix LCDs. They also didn't have pointing devices.

I still use 15+ year old Thinkpads with 1366×768 pixel screens (a bit cramped) and a W520 with a 1920×1080 screen. Twisted nematic screens.

For me, given the 20th century laptops I started on, I think they're great. Not perfect, but good enough to put in 2 weeks working 9-5 on one of them, no problem at all.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#109

Post by lproven »

whyenot wrote: post #85

Maybe I’m just sentimental, but My Thinkpad x300 was the toughest, most productive laptop that I have owned. I took that laptop deep into the Amazon where it was exposed to near 100% humidity for months. It’s plastic / polycarbonate shell stood up to a tremendous amount of abuse, and it’s keyboard was awesome. Times have changed and now I mostly use Apple products, but they are not nearly as tough, or have as nice of…

I run Fedora 42 on one, and it's surprisingly nippy even today.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#110

Post by lproven »

brikym wrote: post #84

I have always found thinkpads to be the most overrated laptops ever. I far prefer Macbooks in all aspects beit ergonomics, aesthetics or performance. I don't get the love for Thinkpads. Maybe it's just nostelgia clouding people's judgement because I just see something which is clunky, ugly, plastic, noisy with a crap screen and crap battery life. The keyboard is the only thing I like more, but the macbook keyboards a…

Sometimes, I travel with my nearly-15-year-old Thinkpad T420 in preference to my MacBook Air M1.

The Macbook has a horrible keyboard with no travel. The buttonless trackpad is a pain to use; it's very hard to right-click and even with a 3rd party FOSS app to give me 3-finger middle-click, it's almost impossible to do it precisely. I use middle-click hundreds of times a day, but I have no use for trackpad gestures. It has a wretched 2 USB-C ports, one for power. I can't connect a mouse, keyboard, screen and power without carrying a dock. I can't upgrade the RAM. I recently had to remove Asahi Linux because it no longer had enough space to install the latest macOS 15 update -- the SSD can't be upgraded either.

It feels like a laptop designed by and for a tablet user. I am not a tablet user. I don't like them much.

The Thinkpad is a pleasure to use, and I can work on it all day for weeks without feeling especially cramped or anything. It has 2x the RAM and about 10x the SSD space. I've upgraded RAM, keyboard, main SSD, secondary SSD and battery, and it cost me next to nothing.

The only virtues of the Macbook are that it's easy to carry and the battery lasts a long time. It's very unpleasant to actually work on.

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