Originally published at: How the beautiful bland ThinkPad reigns supreme in business
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Needs more beige.
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I’m told that hobbyist breeders have been seeking an albino morph of the thinkpad for several decades; but stable results remain elusive.
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It’s like a bra - when you find one that fits right- stick with it!
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I worked at IGS back when the first models of the ThinkPad came out, and had that huge size, we called em Thunkpads, because that was the noise when you put em down on the table, solid as a rock those were.
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One reason I’m drawn to ThinkPads is that the keyboards are consistent and have intelligent component placement. I would love for laptop manufacturers to stop “innovating” with keyboard layouts.
I had to talk my employer into letting me order a one-off laptop since none of the standard deployments had full-height arrow keys; they all did that horrible thing where up and down share the height of a single key. Intolerable.
We’ve already designed a good keyboard. You don’t need to keep changing it up. We don’t need special media keys. We don’t need a sleep key. We don’t need a touchbar. Jesus.
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Also, dear laptop manufacturers, please include photos of the keyboard in the product gallery. gaaaah.
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Heh. Remember the “butterfly keyboard”? I suppose we’ll never see the like again.
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This is an innovation I’m not entirely opposed to. As long as they don’t start moving the key positions around capriciously.
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I switched my organisation off of Lenovo for security reasons. I completely avoid Lenovo, Huawei, Xiaomi, and vehicles from BYD.
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What brand did you switch them to? Many of the other business laptop brands might as well make the cases out of cardboard, since the motherboards die in less than a year.
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C’mon, guys! It’s not that hard to find. They even made it red.
[Old workplace joke]
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I have two ThinkPads from my workplace. They are two of the worst machines I’ve ever used. Yeah, the industrial design is fine but usability is terrible.
The keyboards in particular are bar none the worst I’ve ever used in a mainstream device. Worst NKRO I’ve ever experienced that makes me want to throw it on the floor whenever I type too quickly and it beeps at me. I wish I could throttle whoever created the Fn key, and then throttle them again for putting it where they put it. ThinkPad keyboards have been terrible since before Lenovo took over the brand.
One of my ThinkPads has such poor cooling in its quest for unnecessary thinness that it’ll often dip down to sub-500MHz speeds making it essentially unusable.
So yeah, I’m pretty much on the “all my homies hate ThinkPad” bandwagon.
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I was such a fan of the old IBM Thinkpads that when the Lenovo Thinkpad X (?) came around I got one for my wife. What a mistake! Function key confusion, lots of odd designer-y choices. She was so continuously enraged by it we switched her to MacBook. Much quieter now.
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You can swap Ctrl and Fn in BIOS if you really want, but the default layout makes it easy to slide your left pinkie down from the A key.
We switched to a mix of devices (Macs, Dells, Juno, Chromebooks). We haven’t experienced any motherboards dying. The Juno I’m writing from now is nearly 5 years old and still going strong.
The other place where I work originally standardised on Surfaces and everyone complains about them to no end. (I haven’t tried one, personally.)
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There’s a ‘pile’ of five ThinkPads within sight of this old nerd right now. The lower older models furnishing parts for the upper ones. Frankenstein’s puter! And very pleased with their stability, hackability, and overall robustness. (running linux all, of course [smug]) …now where did i put that sack o’ nubs?
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I’ve been using Thinkpads for 9 years and 4 models, not a veteran by any means but my corporate experience with it made me buy a good one when I went freelance.
I’ve never uses the red dot thingy.
My only other real complaint is that the trackpad only intermittently works as a mouse clicker. A lot of the time you have to use the twin “mouse” keys. I don’t know what the trapezoidal key in the middle does and I don’t want to find out.
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I’ve been using a ThinkPad with Linux as my backup/travel computer for a few years now. I love it. It has a few Linux-based quirks, but it’s not enough to turn me off it completely. I’d probably upgrade my current workhorse laptop to a ThinkPad if I had the chance (but I’m also pretty happy with it).
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Not if it’s a work device where the BIOS is locked.
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