In case you had any doubts Lenovo was dead

[Mr Momentum & the Sidesteppers]

thenextweb.com/insider/2015/02/19/lenovo-caught-installing-adware-new-computers/

tfw classic Thinkpads are now timeless antiques of the age before Lenovo's corruption.

[solocityElectricCyan]

it's pretty sad. I can't buy a laptop ever again. features that were essential to me keep getting taken away from me.

[Mr Momentum & the Sidesteppers]

which features specifically?

[solocityElectricCyan]

For Lenovo, a small trackpad and separate buttons for right, middle, and left click. I'd also like to see a proper keyboard layout with the home/end/pgup etc. where it's supposed to be. None of this 6-row bullshit. A 4:3 display would be nice too.

For Dell, their latitude line had a version of a trackpoint that worked just as well as the Lenovo one, except, their newer models don't have it at all anymore. I hate track pads so much, they're literally the worst input method ever.

Every other manufacturer just makes garbage I never would never spend money on. So until these morons get their shit together I'm using my Latitude E6410. It's from 2010 and it's still a beast. It's a got a nub, a small trackpad, the perfect keyboard layout, 1440x900 screen, 2.68GHz i7 processor, a real graphics chip and an SSD. It should last until 2020 at least.

[Mr Momentum & the Sidesteppers]

the battery would be the one thing i'd worry about there, but yeah, it seems solid enough. i keep thinking i want to buy a new laptop, but it's hard for me to find one i even feel like spending money on because, as you say, a lot of the features that were selling points have just been going away.

[solocityElectricCyan]

I have another one of these laptops lying around. 81 Wh Batteries are $150 on dell's website, so I'll pick one up eventually.

[Hauskaz]

My X60 Tablet's held up pretty damn well for being a 9 year old laptop, but I've been bringing the IdeaPad Yoga 13 around with me as well lately for gaymen and general tablet-like usage when I'm doing boring shows or whatever. I'd like to amalgamate the ergonomics of the X60 Tablet with the performance of the Yoga 13 into a single Broadwell-based machine, but nothing in the current ThinkPad range really compares to their IBM lineage. I'm willing to accept some compromise, but everything they have has some dealbreaking flaw for me:

ThinkPad Yoga 12 Second Generation
No VGA or DisplayPort
RAM is soldered
Mini HDMI is fucking retarded

ThinkPad Yoga 14
No VGA or DisplayPort
Clickpad is shit compared to dedicated buttons
No Wacom digitizer makes this convertable pointless to me

ThinkPad T450s
4 GB soldered RAM + 1 DIMM is a weird combination, don't know how I feel about that
Might actually be a winner other than that

ThinkPad T450
Screen is shit

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Third Generation
No upgradeability

ThinkPad X250
Only 1 DIMM slot, single channel RAM will cripple the Intel HD Graphics

Anything of the x40 Haswell generation
Fucking retarded clickpad, holy shit what was Lenovo thinking?

Anything older with the good keyboard
The screens are all shit

The new keyboard caps and switches are honestly fantastic to type on, but I don't understand why they had to change the layout in the process. I can live with it since I don't really write much code or anything anymore, but it still absorbs that they did that. 16:9 also absorbs, 16:10 or 4:3 would be better. I also miss the ThinkLight. Dell's pointing sticks are okay, but I find them clumsy compared to IBM/Lenovo's, especially with high sensitivity.

[Mr Momentum & the Sidesteppers]

so this is what it's like when grandpa is dead and teens are pissing on his grave

www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/26/lenovo-website-hacked-and-defaced-by-lizard-squad-in-superfish-protest

[Hauskaz]

The sad part is that there was finally a little hope shining through for ThinkPad when they reversed their fucking retarded clickpad and X1 Carbon keyboard redesign. There were rumors of an announcement that would please old school ThinkPad fans and I was hoping to god it was a reversion to the 7 row keyboard, but instead they pull this Superfish shit. Granted, it was only on their IdeaPad line and only faggots don't immediately reformat a new computer, but it put that announcement on hold from the looks of it until the whole thing blows over, which won't be soon with how poorly Lenovo is handling it. I really want to update my X60 Tablet but everything that came after it is either too old to bother with, has a shit screen or the new 6 row keyboard. Life isn't worth living without the TrackPoint so other laptop lines are not even on my radar, but I just don't know how to feel about that keyboard. The new key switches and backplate with the old layout would be GOAT.

I guess it could be worse. I typed this out on the Yoga 13 just because it was already out on my hotel table, and holy shit does it remind me how bad other keyboards are. The only laptops that even come close are the Latitude's like Kuldeep's (it's almost perfect but their pointing stick feels sloppy to me) and MacBooks (but I hate the Mac concept of using command and the arrow keys to act as home/end/page up/down and there isn't even a fucking delete key).

[Mr Momentum & the Sidesteppers]

what kind of latitude does kulmainyards have?

[solocityElectricCyan]

[Hauskaz]

The sexy kind as you can see there. All metal chassis, good specs and a pretty damn good keyboard. It just absorbs that print screen doesn't have its own key and the pointing stick isn't as refined.

[Mr Momentum & the Sidesteppers]

10/10 chassis, would lick

[solocityElectricCyan]

yeah the whole thing is metal except for the top. It's plastic that looks like brushed aluminum. whatever rofl

so 7/10 chassis

[Hauskaz]

Lenovo had the perfect mouse input design. You will never find a pointing stick better than the UltraNav. It took IBM and Lenovo 19 years of research, testing and real-world usage to reach this point. Rather than showering and getting ready for work, I'll show you how they completely fucked up. It all starts with the basic TrackPoint II (the original was a shitty trackball):



The pointing stick design allowed more space for a better keyboard layout on a smaller chassis, while also allowing you to move the mouse without removing your fingers from the keyboard, which along with their ridiculous durability and easy upgrade-ability quickly established the IBM ThinkPad as the ultimate mobile productivity machine for corporate deployment, code monkeys, and any other field requiring no-nonsense durable workhorses. TrackPoint III came out later with more refined input sensitivity and easier mouse buttons on the fantastic 701C butterfly keyboard:



TrackPoint IV, which went through many cosmetic and ergonomic changes, perfected it's input sensors and became IBM and eventually Lenovo's bread-and-butter pointing stick. The T20 added a third mouse button which could be used for scrolling or as a middle click:



The T30 introduced UltraNav, IBM's name for the combination of the TrackPoint IV with a traditional touchpad seen on other laptops. Originally seen as IBM pandering to plebs who just wanted to browse MySpace on their $1,500 business machine, it was found to have its uses through the immense customizability the custom Synaptics drivers provided for them. I personally used the one on my T42 as a giant scroll pad:



The T60 brought about a controversial change to the UltraNav by removing the now iconic red and blue stripes and making the buttons smaller. Opinions on this are mixed with some people preferring the cleaner design while others missed the colour indicators. I personally didn't really care as the TrackPoint IV part of it was essentially unchanged:



It was not to last though, as Lenovo underwent an intense research and development period to determine what changes they could make that would genuinely improve the ThinkPad experience and proclaim themselves as the true heir to the ThinkPad throne. David Hill, Vice President of Lenovo Corporate Identity and Design, outlines the immense thought that went into their revisions on his blog, from heatmaps to ergonomic studies and trials, to draft and finalize what became the ultimate ThinkPad design:



This was a highly controversial change for purists, who cursed Lenovo for daring to touch the legendary ThinkPad keyboard layout and design. However, it soon came to be realized that Lenovo was not smoking crack when they made the changes they did. As David Hill explains:



What he didn't touch upon in that video however was the refinement of the UltraNav. As you can see in the previous photo, the TrackPoint buttons were given a gentle curve to them. While berated for being ugly as fuck, which it still is, this curve accommodated the fact that your thumb does not rest perfectly perpendicular to the keyboard but rather at an angle. It was comfy as fuck, which along with bringing back the red and blue stripes, was enough for ThinkPad purist fags to accept and embrace their new Lenovo overlords. Even the touchpad was best in class thanks to the subtle dotted surface inspired by the yellow bumped curbs used in Asian countries to mark places you should not overstep, giving tactility to what is normally a complete shitfest of an input device. Lenovo could have kept this design forever and be printing money for having the only line of laptops on the market that you can do actual work on, but then they went and did this:



What the actual fuck.