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ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

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Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#111

Post by lenkite »

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…

The Macbook trackpad beats the Thinkpad trackpad hands down. The Thinkpad trackpad is extremely liquid/oil sensitive. Wipe your hands through your hair, put your fingers on the trackpad and it stops working. Very frustrating.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#112

Post by lproven »

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…

> I think optimising for thinness is a stupid goal.

«

I don't WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet

I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer

[...]

I will pay extra for it to be heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death.

»

https://www.tumblr.com/canadiangold/675666527469568000/i-don...

I understand that different people want different things. Lots of people like thin light laptops. Maybe they're happy with the wireless peripherals I despise.

But can't those with other choices be offered something too?

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#113

Post by MereInterest »

al_borland wrote: post #68
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that impression comes from the laptop feeling “hollow” more than it does from it being light. This could probably be engineered around by doing things like holding the battery up against the laptop’s palm rest with a rim of TPU or similar between the battery and the case to deaden vibrations and make it feel more “solid”.

Haven’t some products been found to have weights inside just to make them feel more premium?

Yup. The most prominent I can remember are the Beats By Dre headphones, where about a third of the weight is from metal parts that are either purely decorative, or whose functionality does not at all depend on being made of metal, based on a 2020 teardown [0,1].

[0]: https://beneinstein.medium.com/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by... [1]: https://beneinstein.com/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-beats-w...

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#114

Post by maratc »

lproven wrote: post #110
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…

> I am not a tablet user.

It's unclear why you chose the Air then. It's designed as a lightweight entry level portable for people with minimal requirements.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#115

Post by maratc »

normie3000 wrote: post #41
penguin_booze wrote: post #39

One gripe I have with Lenovo keyboards is that the Fn key is at the left-most edge of the bottom row. Per my muscle memory, it's the Control key that ought to be there, not Fn.

This can be switched in BIOS.

Not on my T42 from 2005 :(

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#116

Post by maratc »

dralley wrote: post #71
penguin_booze wrote: post #39

One gripe I have with Lenovo keyboards is that the Fn key is at the left-most edge of the bottom row. Per my muscle memory, it's the Control key that ought to be there, not Fn.

They're trying to ape the Apple layout. I agree, it's annoying.

They were trying to ape the Apple layout without even understanding the Apple layout.

Apple layout works because the most used modifier is "Command". There are two of them, on both sides of Space. You can quickly find them without looking at the keyboard: put a thumb on the (extra-wide) space and move to the side until you get to the next button. That's "Cmd".

Less-used button is Option, there are two of them, next to Command further away from Space, you can find them in a similar manner by moving over two buttons. (Option is mostly used together with Command.)

Even less used is Control, there's only one, and it's even farther away from left Option. Finally, the thing that's hardly ever used is Fn which is stuck in the most remote location -- down-left corner.

On PCs, Ctrl is the most used button, there are two of them, on extreme left and right, you can quickly find them without looking at the keyboard: put a pinky on the "no keys" space outside of keys and move it towards where the keys are. Once you hit the key, it's Ctrl.

What ThinkPad designers did was to break this in the most brutal manner: by putting the least used button in the most used position. If they wanted to ape the Apple layout, they would do great by understanding the Apple layout first.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#117

Post by Fluorescence »

nosrepa wrote: post #81
goosedragons wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPD has some. Particularly the GPD Pocket 4. 8.8" Notebook with a AMD HX 370 processor and up to 64GB RAM. Can even work as a KVM.

I have one and I love it, but damn do I hate the key layout on it. Which is a shame because they have saner layouts on some of their smaller offerings.

I hate that they deliberately obscure the keyboard in all their product pictures. I couldn't see what was wrong until looking at a review. Sounds great otherwise but that's disappointingly deceptive.

I wish such devices had hot-swappable plates and key caps to let us choose our own compromises. Key layout seems like such a trivial, almost cosmetic, aspect that can make a device a misery overshadowing much higher complexity/cost tech like the screen and internals.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#118

Post by FirmwareBurner »

philistine wrote: post #80
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We’re talking 13 to 15-inch screens in laptops. I do not believe for one second that there were economies of scale in those screens in the 2010s with those sizes. People were not buying 13-inch TVs more than they were buying laptops. What happened is that desktops switched to 16:9 for economies of scale and the manufacturers switched on laptops for marketing purposes. Look at how Apple never went 16:9 except for one…

>I do not believe for one second that there were economies of scale in those screens

It's irrelevant what you believe if you're wrong. Laptop LCD displays can be cut form the same master glass as TV LCD displays more economically if they share the same aspect ratio and also share the same COGs(chip-on-glass) that drive the exact same TV resolutions 1366x768 and 1920x1080.

>Look at how Apple never went 16:9 except for one model, the 11-inch MacBook Air.

Apple never competed on the price war. For them, $5 extra on the BOM didn't matter at their margins compare to the likes of Acer/Asus/etc.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#119

Post by FirmwareBurner »

hakfoo wrote: post #101
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'r…

>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?

Also they shared the same COGs(chip-on-glass) to drive the TFT panels. That's why laptops had the same HDTV 1366x768 resolutions.

Re: ThinkPad designer David Hill on unreleased models

#120

Post by _fat_santa »

maratc wrote: post #116
dralley wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying to ape the Apple layout. I agree, it's annoying.

They were trying to ape the Apple layout without even understanding the Apple layout. Apple layout works because the most used modifier is "Command". There are two of them, on both sides of Space. You can quickly find them without looking at the keyboard: put a thumb on the (extra-wide) space and move to the side until you get to the next button. That's "Cmd". Less-used button is Option, there are two of them, next t…

> by understanding the Apple layout first.

And it's honestly kinda mindblowing that they didn't get it. You don't have to use a Mac for that long to realize how their layout works and why it works. Likewise they could have used keyboards with the Fn key on the very bottom left and realized instantly it was subpar for Windows based laptops.

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