Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/08/laptop-has-fake-subwoofer.html
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#AltSubwoofer
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FYI: the video is three years old and has no provenance.
A Youtube commenter had a reasonable explanation:
On many lenovos the cd drive bay is what they term a “flexbay”… you can take the optical drive out an put in other things like a second hdd, expanded battery, and yes, a subwoofer (“sub” being in laptop terms, it’s still a laptop speaker after all).
What if the person who shot the video pulled the original speaker module and stuck the DVD drive in as a joke?
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Lenovo has fans?
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What exactly is “subwoofing”?
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when a dog talks about another dog behind its back on woofer (the dog version of twitter)?
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It means it’s “hilariously bad design” instead of “outright fraud.”
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Just bought a refurbished L430. Ugly as hell, solidly built, good keyboard, snappy perfomance (3rd gen i5 + 8GB), a smidgeon under £300.
So there’s me, for now at least.
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That is so weird and cunning, I don’t know if I should be mad or impressed. I mean who thought of that? I had no idea subwoofers were even a thing on laptop.
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I love Lenovo, but everything they make that isn’t in the Thinkpad line is utter trash. Thinkpads are pretty much indestrucible workhorses with the best keyboards ever.
That said, I’ve changed my work machine up to a Razer Blade (Late 2016). It is frigging boss.
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Some of the Thinkpad line is garbage as well. My kids’ school gave each kid a Thinkpad and they are simply terrible machines. Considering how almost everything they do is on Google, they would have been better off with Chromebooks. Chromebooks might still be shit machines, but at least they cost less.
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Brand dilution. The thinkpad line used to be 100% business grade laptops. Now with the “edge” line of thinkpads, they’re starting to slap the name on consumer grade craptops.
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Yeah, the last one I bought was a £1,400 i7 based developer machine; I don’t know what it’s like in the sub-£1k zone.
I’d also suggest that if it’s a school district they might be using a terrible OS build, covered in crappy tracking software and locked down so you can’t fix anything.
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Well there are the Thinkpad T series machines which are solid builds and I like them pretty much for the same reason I like the Dell Latitude series. Solid builds, other than replacing a screen or mother board component repair is dead easy so yes there is good hardware from them.
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I only ever buy them used, so I have no idea what the cost of a new business class thinkpad is vs an “edge” thinkpad vs whatever lenovo is calling their non-thinkpad laptops these days. For ordinary people (not developers or 3d artists who need the fastest system available), buying a business machine off lease is the smartest way to spend your dollars on a PC.
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I still own an ancient X40 that I use as a thin SSH terminal (No graphical UI) for all my headless machines. Still works well. It’s 13 years old so badged as IBM, but made by Lenovo before the laptop manufacturing had been fully divested.
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The T series ones are all sub $1000 on the website though the most expensive one would be just over if not ‘on sale’.
There is a P series now that is advertised as a bit sturdier build and those are all $1000 and up and they all look nice and thick (even the yoga) but all I have is the pics to judge with.
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Recently replaced my failing x121e with an ebay special x220.
Feels like the i won the ebay lottery because the listing was very vague, but i ended up with a top of the line ex-corporate unit (i7, IPS screen, upgraded wifi card, 3G modem - the latter three points not even mentioned in the ebay auction) for just £180. Swapped in the SSD and RAM from my old machine and it flies along now 
It’s been kind of interesting seeing the difference between the newer-design and the older-style thinkpads. (i’m pretty much stuck with them regardless now because i can’t stand touchpads and the IBM/Lenovo trackpoint mouse is awesome)
On one hand, i prefer some of the keyboard layout choices on the newer models (page up/down keys in the cursor key block is very handy for web-browsing)
But on the other hand: actual status LEDs on the x220! Forgot just how much i missed having them, especially the HDD activity LED, no idea why they phased those out…
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You can hear them on my W510 every time I do something more demanding than browsing the internet 
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