Who gives a shit. I'm so sick of this race to the bottom of the thinnest and the lightest and whatever the fuck appletard trendy bullshit. I want my six pound, two inch thick, 7-row keyboard chonker with a dozen status lights, 20 different ports, and more maintenence panels than the fucking space shuttle.
ThinkPads were once a utilitarian utopia. Lenovo stole that from us and I will never forgive them.
Gotta agree with this. I have a big workstation machine at home for work, and a thin & light laptop that does the bare minimum that I use for travel. It's 2 lbs but still has a dedicated graphics card and good enough to do light CAD work. Everything has a practical purpose, it just depends on your specific needs.
Doesn't mean they can't offer both, and there's no reason they can't have status lights, 7-row keyboards, and reasonable port offerings (even if it's mostly a bunch of USB C ports, which can service just about anything) in a smaller package, it's that they're cheap, lazy fucks selling trends instead of utility.
Are there supply issues? IDK, I haven't looked into getting one, but there's a number of people that have received theirs and have commented on them, good and bad.
Laptops are primarily designed with portability in mind. If I wanted a work station I would use one. When you are traveling regularly and carrying a laptop in your backpack, every gram counts.
Doesn’t mean they can’t offer both, and there’s no reason they can’t have status lights, 7-row keyboards, and reasonable port offerings (even if it’s mostly a bunch of USB C ports, which can service just about anything) in a smaller package, it’s that they’re cheap, lazy fucks selling trends instead of utility.
So now you get less and less utility and maintainability for the same or greater price. They spend less on engineering and charge you the same or more for it. Fuck them.
That's absolutely not true. It is very difficult to develop lighter and thinner laptops. And the main utility of a laptop is for it to meet my needs while being portable. The portability is the main utility. A laptop like this will meet the utility needs for 99% of the population while giving them what they are looking for from a laptop the most, portability.
Bullshit. Even the smallest 12" ThinkPads had all of these things. They were lightweight and compact, and still had 7-row keyboards, a status light for everything, and a plethora of ports.
I would rather have a bigger screen and thinner profile than all that bs. I don't need all these ports, a few usb-c's is enough. I don't need a 7 row keyboard, 6 is enough. And I am probably a more technical user than the vast majority of people so the vast majority of people need even less. What they want is something that is super light, big screen, looks sleek, and good enough to browse the web and maybe make a powerpoint presentation once in a while. You need to realize your use case is an extremely tiny market segment and in most cases, people with your use case realize they should be using a work station to begin with.
I don't care about the number of rows, specifically, it's the particular layout that 7-row keyboards have. The point of a 7-row keyboard is having the text nav keys arranged the same as a desktop keyboard, like so:
Versus this clusterfuck:
I use those nav keys constantly and completely by feel. The very specific placement they have on a 7-row is critical to productivity without having to constantly fuck around with the mouse/trackpoint/trackpad. 6-row keyboards are dogshit.
I am aware what a 7 row keyboard is. My point is the vast majority of consumers don't use or care for such a feature, especially if it means they get a slighter thinner, lighter, sleeker laptop.
To be fair, even Apple is done with this stuff. Now that Ive is gone, and they seem to be listening to customers, they’re actually putting reasonable I/O on laptops again.
Same here (W520). I have maxed out everything. 32GB RAM, two SSDs, two external monitors. I will continue using this thing and make it the ThinkPad of Theseus.