What do you mean bland?
8 Likes
I used to be a Mac obsessive. I was even the Apple Campus Rep at my undergrad college. But I bought my last Mac in 2009. Now that so much stuff is cloud based (and my work is in a Citrix virtual Windows environment) I’ve found that a $200 used Thinkpad from eBay does everything I need to do just as well as a $1500 MacBook or $1000+ new Windows laptop.
Every member of my household now has a 5-10 year old Thinkpad T series that I bought off eBay for $180-250. They’re great. We’ve only had one T series die, and it was after we’d already owned it for 4+ years. Another one was getting really slow, but I replaced the hard drive with a $30 SSD and it’s now on year 5 of our ownership (and it was probably 5 years old when we first bought it).
Things might be different for folks who do a lot of serious video/photo/audio editing. But for the average user who wants to be able to browse the web, watch youtube, and do some word processing or spreadsheets, it’s very, very hard to justify a $1000+ brand new laptop.
Also, I LOVE the Thinkpad Trackpoint.
5 Likes
While that one is depressed mouse movement up or down is interpreted as scrolling instead.
Not quite as good as a scroll wheel; but when you don’t have space for one it’s pretty handy.
4 Likes
I’ve never had a work Dell last a year. Either you’re getting the top of the line and lucky, the folks you have using them don’t do much with them, or they just haven’t bothered to complain about how it takes an hour to boot up and two hours to make a calculation in Excel.
2 Likes
It looks I’m relatively safe with Thinkpads running Linux.
7 Likes
My wife has had a Thinkpad, HP Elitebook, and some fancy business Dell from her job, and not one of them has gone for more than two years without a hardware fault. I used to source off-lease Thinkpads for not-for-profits, but wouldn’t dare now in the Lenovo days. And I was astounded to see the new costs. Anything fancier than a Yoga is well over CDN$1000.
1 Like
I still have my IBM R51 ThinkPad for my no longer supported apps which I still go back to as needed, such as CAD for my occasional home projects. Still solid after all these years and blessed with what I call its no-fail (*back to that later) exposed “bank vault” hinges that Lenovo carried over into its latest, larger versions of the ThinkPad which I also have, although the keys of the latter are not as pleasant to the fingers and the ears as the former.
*Lenovo’s Ideapad 330 hinging is hidden when the pad is shut, so that design choice creates a very expensive $300-to-repair problem; open-close cycling forces the pad’s case to open up at the seam at the right-hand upper-corner with that gap growing wider and wider until one can actually see inside the case. Gee. How do I know this.
6 Likes
It’s not entirely safe to trust Lenovo when they call something a ‘thinkpad’(looking at you, some of the ‘yoga’ variants); but when even they won’t call it that; believe them.
3 Likes
I had to use a PC to complete a job so picked up a second hand Athlon-powered Thinkpad - and it was a delight. The keyboard was a revelation, unlike any of Apple’s woeful laptop keyboards, this one was actually usable for typing. I loved the design and the durability of the machine, it could be thrown in a bag and carried around without being treated like a Ming vase.
Every now and then I wonder whether I should get a new one - for reasons, but I can’t quite justify the expense of a regular Thinkpad - let alone the X series which is what I really want.
2 Likes
Ha. We bought one of those Thinkpad Yoga models thinking it would be like a regular Thinkpad. It was tougher than my mom’s non-Thinkpad Yoga, but still died after 4-5 years. Now I strictly buy used T-series Thinkpads, which are SO much more solid.
3 Likes
My work laptop is, indeed, a Dell. And yes, it shits the bed if you open two Excel files at the same time. My own laptop is a refurbed Lenovo P50 and it’s a beast.
2 Likes
1 Like
This is just my personal experience, but I like Lenovo so much that as well as my Thinkpad laptop, I have a Lenovo Chromebook (a ruggedized model for schools) and a Motorola phone. In fact my last three phones have been Motorola since I moved away from Sony.
OTOH all my experiences with Asus hardware have been dismal, so I never even think about buying them.
Obviously this is irrational pattern matching, but what can I do?
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
