Lenovo spits out retro ThinkPads for iconic laptop's 25th birthday After teasing techies for months, Lenovo has finally unveiled the ThinkPad 25: a laptop designed to mimic the look and feel of the legendary IBM ThinkPad but with all modern components. This 336.6 mm x 232.5 mm x 19.95 mm ThinkPad 25 has the seven-row keyboard beloved by ThinkPad devotees but which Lenovo dumped in 2011, the …
Although as noted they started screwing up the designs a few years ago, which happened to roughly coincide with Apple launching the MacBook Pro with Retina Display - a productivity beast if you valued the ability to have between 100 and 120 lines of cleanly legible text (assuming great vision or a great optometrist) on your screen. I miss the TrackPoint, but Apple does many other things well (including a UNIX-based operating system with generous third-party software support) and other than that I haven't looked back. This 25th anniversary edition is giving me a pretty strong nostalgia kick, though....
"I have alway, and always will, hate the nipple-mice."
Agree completely.
I thought they were just put there to make you concentrate your big fat fingers on typing accuracy. My big fat fingers seem drawn to the f_cker when I am absolutely not trying to type what I am typing into a completely different paragraph :-(
{Note: Loved everything else about the Thinkpad though}
"Your humble hack's old X220 is one of the last units with the old-style keyboard, which is why it's in service six years later despite being so slow to boot you can make a cup of tea and be back before it's ready to use."
X220 + SSD + no-name battery = boot in 45 sec (cos Slackware) seriously snappy and fully functional.
Time for a reinstall?
Comment on OA: 4:3 ratio and same form factor as X60 but with bright non-reflective screen and 12 hour battery life and I'll buy two.
"I have a very similar X220, except with Xubuntu, and I swear that it boots in well under 45 seconds"
Probably does. Slackware does an old school boot and for some reason the 'kernel test' takes 10 seconds. But I mostly suspend and reboot once a week or so or when kernel updates arrive.
Coat: mine's the one with the Slackware DVD in the pocket
Similar here on an x201 - bought 3 yrs ago 2nd hand v cheap then totally forgotten until rediscovered a few months ago. SSD, another battery and boost to 8Gb and it's fine. A HD screen would be nice but probably not worth losing the 4:3 aspect ratio.
Lenovo should've tried to source a similar panel to the one on the surface pro and this 25 would've been irresistible.
"Your humble hack's old X220 ... which is why it's in service six years latner despite being so slow to boot you can make a cup of tea and be back before it's ready to use."
Yes, time for a SSD.
Perhaps commentards (with X220s) can crowd-fund a SSD for Iain. Better still, Vulture Management could just pay him more.
my x220 is still going and its disc spins and it is the original battery and having seen x230s/x250s you can keep those overgrown calculators.
.. it boots in about 2 mins but that is all the $employers security crapware that expects you to login connected to their lan
> It's just that the battery had decided to only give 25 minutes of life
That's because Lenovo recommends that your battery be charged to only 50% to increase battery life. What a laugh! Lithium batteries must be kept at or as near as possible to 100% for as long as possible to maintain good battery life. I tell everyone who cares about battery life in modern appliances that a Lithium battery should never be allowed to dip down beyond 50% charge. (I have an HP iPaq 951a which had its battery replaced in 2004 and still works well, because it's kept charged to 100% all the time.) The only thing that Lenovo users get by following their recommendation of keeping the battery charged to 50% is the privilege of purchasing a new battery from Lenovo every few years.
"What a laugh! Lithium batteries must be kept at or as near as possible to 100% for as long as possible to maintain good battery life."
I don't know if thats true or not. But I do know that if you keep hitting a battery with charge when its 100% then it shortens its life. Or it did in the old days anyway.
My t61's have software that allows the battery to fall to about 95% before recharging each time. The family has four, and I have only bought two new batteries (I think they date from about 2008). Two are in constant use, and tow just get occasional use.
I also have a T21 which is still used as a dumb terminal for Sun servers, and a T43 with SSD which I use when travelling cos its smaller than a T61. Some have had CPU upgrades. All have max supported memory, and one runs windows - but has an SSD in where the DVD used to be and runs FreeBSD.
I will probably buy one of these new-fangled devices. It will probably run FreeBSD.
They missed the serial port - a real ThinkPad has a serial port.
I still have a T23 in regular use with the original battery that's good for about 2 hours.
I tried Panasonic Toughbooks for a while but could never get used to them.
The only laptop that comes close to the old ThinkPads is the General Dynamics GoBooks.
My T60 was in a house fire. The fire melted the bag around it, after which it was fire-hosed and then frozen. Two days later, I retrieved it. I thawed it, cut the remnants of the bag away, removed the HDD, the optical drive, the battery and the RAM, wiped everything down, and let it all dry in a warm room for three days. I reassembled it - and it booted. I then used it without incident for another two years before installing Linux to deal with the now-slow-and-antiquated hardware. I wanted a tank for my business - and I got one. This is one rugged laptop!
Cool story bro. How does it relate to Lenovo factory installing Superfish advertising, allowing MITM modification of SSL traffic?
That's easy to bypass. Just wipe the disk clean and install Linux. Both problems (junkware and junkOS) fixed in one simple step.
I first did this to an IBM 560Z (Redhat Linux 7.2), and a few years later to the new Lenovo R61i that replaced it (Vista immediately wiped and replaced with Fedora). This is still running though on its second screen, keyboard and fan though the DVD drive died and so did its HDD, which got replaced by a Sandisk 128GB SSD - the R61i hardware can't handle disks bigger than 200GB but you can't buy HDDs that small now, hence the SDD.
However, for everyday use I now have a Lenovo T440 that also got wiped immediately and Fedora 25 XFCE installed.
I had a T60 (given to a friend that needed a decent machine, or else I'd still have it) which was abused quite mercilessly. Knocked off the bed/stand many times, kicked, cord yanked out, held by any give point along the screen bezel. While it was likely a matter of chance, the LCD panel itself survived being struck quite hard on several occasions. Only thing that ever failed was the palmrest itself, which was easily replaceable. Replacement included a fingerprint scanner, as it was the cheapest available at the time. Also wore the texture off of the trackpoint nipple.
Went through a bunch of 600Xs back in the early-mid 2000s, giving/selling them to friends and acquaintances (my dad's company had heaps of broken 600Xs and 600Es which were being discarded). For their day, they were pretty stout as well. While not exceptionally durable, I did have one get yanked off a meter-high countertop by the charge cord, by someone who's velcro shoe strap interfaced with the cord's own velcro. The outer shell of the screen actually shattered, sending the front bezel flying off, and a missing arc of material equating 1/3 of the total shell was ejected as a few large plates of plastic.
If I remember correctly, the panel survived with a small bit of superficial impact damage at the very corner, though I might be confusing it with another more minor incident. At worst, a minor crack with a few vertical lines on the damaged side. On the other hand, if you put a few pounds of pressure on the back of the lid, a disheartening crunch and RIP panel... nothing's perfect, but older thinkpads were pretty close.
I actually destructively "tested" (totally not wanton destruction for lulz) a couple of 600-series machines cobbled together from the non-working remains of others, and found them to be able to withstand several arm-powered vertical excursions terminating on the asphalt without losing too much material before finally coming to bits, though it seemed dependent on whether the struck hinge-side first (more survivable) or not. I would do some more testing, for science, but they're becoming a relatively rare breed these days.
I think I've now made a long-winded Thinkpad-exalting spiel every day this week, albeit in disparate spots on the net... and it feels good :)
"My Thinkpad P50 I bought this year doesn't have it"
None of the Thinkpads had it. Only some consumer models were preloaded with Superfish. And yes, Lenovo handled their blunder surprisingly well. They owned up and cleaned up.
In this sense OP is missing the mark by a wide margin. This is an article about Thinkpads after all.
Righteous yells à la "we will remember" would be more justified if people actually did remember.
I got my first Thinkpad in March 1997, (and apart from a 12 month stint on a Dell when Corp IT demanded it) I have had one after another (X30, X31, X60, X61 X201, X220, T420p T440p(using it now)) but I've finally had enough.
The hardware has been magnificent over the years. Hardware manuals on line and driver support great. It's Lenovo here in Singapore that have forced me to take a look at other brands.
It used to be I could take a machine to the service center (and have a good coffee) and they would sort it while I waited.Now you have to jump through so many hoops for support it's a waste of time. Also the recent changes of docking connector every couple of generations It's time to change..
I'll be sad to see the TP go, but Lenovo does not seem to care about customers any more.
That stupid little keyboard light is a quintessential part of the ThinkPad experience. That and a really good keyboard feel. And you could pop out all the various important bits (batteries, RAM, HDD) for upgrades and replacements.
You could also beat a mugger to death with one then go right back to Lotus Notes and keep working.
Now on my third Thinkpad - a T420 I bought second-hand four years ago for £329. All three machines still work (the X30 runs XP and the X60 runs Linux). Solid, dependable workhorses and I love the nipple mouse. They have their flaws but I wish everything in my life was as reliable as my Thinkpads.
Friend of mine gave me his.
I wanted to love it I really did. A really good idea. But fundamentally a pig of a machine.
And a far-too-heavy one at that.
On the other hand I have a working T30 with XP loaded which I fire up occasionally to enjoy the keyboard. But only briefly - I have to blow hard into the air vent to clean out the cooling fans before they seize.
But only briefly - I have to blow hard into the air vent to clean out the cooling fans before they seize.
My X61 decided to get the CPU fan to seize while on holiday for a week. A trip to one of those local Pakistani-run WeSellEverythingIncludingKitchenSinks store somewhere in London for a set of jeweller's screwdrivers, a tin of lighter fluid and a flacon of universal oil solved that.
Remove keyboard, peel sticker off fan hub, mix a bit of lube with lighter fluid (otherwise it's too viscous for that bearing) and put that in the fan hub.
Done. Kept going for several weeks, long enough to get home, order a new fan and wait for it to arrive.
Finally they've brought back the proper keyboard and done away with that chiclet shite. I'm still using my T500 which I bought second hand to replace my R50e ThinkPad (which was my first). Still a capable development laptop with the proper keyboard.
It's just a shame that I don't have $1800 to spend on a new ThinkPad. Oh well, I'll just keep buying new batteries for my T500 until it dies of overuse. But what am I saying? It's a ThinkPad. They'll outlive me!
Chiclet KB is still better than the competition, I think.
I use a W500 at home, so first grumbled when work gave me a T550 with the chiclet KB. They replaced that with an HP Elitebook - upon which I found myself wanting to grumble about how the keyboard was inferior to the T550.
But I stopped myself when I realised how bad consumer laptops' keyboards are....
My old T410. With added ssd and 8 gb might be replaced by this. Don't get me wrong it still works and runs beautifully.
Just be nicer to have a model which might last me another 7 years of solid and reliable working no thrills laptop. Plus looks like it comes with a proper keyboard and not the clicklet one.
@CrazyOldCatMan
I wasn’t. Actually, I found my old OS/2 2 install CD last month - but not the boot floppy disks which are also a prerequisite for install. Besides, if I recall correctly, you can’t install OS/2 2 on a system with more that a certain amount of memory (8MB?) or speed (33MHz?) - although it’ll run correctly once installed. Something like that anyway. I can’t remember the specifics.
I used to run it on my 25MHz Opus 386 PC. Happy days.
The problem is that Lenovo were talking about this being a retro Thinkpad, yet what they've actually released is just a T470 with a classic keyboard and a few transfers stuck on it.
No buttons on the trackpad.
No status LEDs.
No ThinkLight.
Nasty 16:9 screen.
Basically the only thing in its favour is the keyboard.
I was eagerly looking forward to this when Lenovo first mooted it some time back as a possible replacement for my X201 (last one Lenovo made with a 16:10 screen), but the actual product is a real let down.
Bah. All I want is a laptop with a large screen (17" is currently adequate - bloody presbyopia) and dedicated mouse buttons. I don't need anything else. Ought to be possible to find one for a few hundred quid.
<old git rant>
Why is it laptops never seem to really come down in price? They get faster but somehow the lowest spec laptop always costs about £400. And large screens don't seem very popular. Odd that. Maybe as the rest of the population ages they'll become more popular. It wouldn't be so bad if web site designers didn't waste so much screen space these days. O! for the days when you could read most of what you needed to without having to scroll the screen.
</old git rant>
Happy Friday, everyone :)
"Bah. All I want is a laptop with a large screen (17" is currently adequate - bloody presbyopia) "
https://www.cnet.com/products/acer-predator-21x/review/
"hey get faster but somehow the lowest spec laptop always costs about £400. "
£133?
"https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/acer-aspire-es1-132-intel-celeron-n3350-4gb-32gb-ssd-11.6-inch-windows-10-l-nx.ghlek.001/version.asp"
If you could live with a 15.5"
https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/hp-15-ay078na-pentium-n3710-4gb-1tb-15.6-inch-windows-10-laptop-1bw60ea/version.asp
I'll direct you to this handy chart of laptops with matte screens (because glossy screens are the devil's creation): https://www.productchart.co.uk/laptops/sets/1
Basically the only 17-inch options are gaming laptops such as Asus ROG (Republic Of Gamers), Dell Alienware, Acer Predator, or MSDI Dominator. There's one decent-looking HP Pavillion laptop too.
Screen size seems to be inversely proportional to screen resolution: my pocket smartphone has something approaching 4K resolution, whereas hardly any of the 17" laptops have anything more than 1920x1080.
Guess I was really lucky to get my Acer Aspire ES 17 then. It was just under £500 and aside from the large screen is just a bog standard laptop. With a crappy touchpad :-/
And yeah I guess I should have said 'the lowest, reasonable spec laptop' but rants don't have to be accurate :)
Desktops I build with current generation parts once every few years... laptops, on the other hand... I buy second-hand business laptops that are 2-3 years old, and save gobs of cash on quality products. I briefly thought you were off mark on large laptop screens being uncommon, but I'm having trouble finding ANY > 17" that aren't overpriced gaming laptops... that being said, I'm writing this on a 23" 16:9 monitor, and I actually feel like a 21" machine wouldn't be all that insane for a desktop replacement machine, especially if they minimized the bezel.
edit: I see now that someone replied to you with an absolutely ridiculous 21" gaming laptop xD ... I purchased my current car (used Crown Victoria, with only 11K miles on it) for as much as that thing costs.
I've been running the T470 which this retro version is basically for about 6 months, I've nothing but good things to say about it, it replaced a Macbook Pro 2011. I did buy a XPS 15 and the new Macbook Pro before landing on this but both went back faulty.
The build quality on the T470 is excellent, best keyboard I've ever had on a laptop, beats the clacky thing on the new Macbooks, and above all it just works. I use it 8-10 hours a day, get 4-5 hours battery out of it running Visual Studio with Resharper, SQL Server and IIS on it.
I am converted, which given I was a hardened macbook fanboi prior was a bit of surprise.
Found a T410S in the trash; lid hanging by one hinge, screen hanging from lid, keyboard sticky from ciggy smoke.
After a little kitchen table engineering, W7 reinstall and shitload of drivers from Lenovo site, now my favourite laptop. Touchscreen, SSD, silly light over the nice keyboard. Wish they'd implemented the mobile broadband more sensibly !
Love the TP almost as much I loved my first laptop -- Dell Latitude CPi Pentium2 in blue, built from two flea market wrecks for under £20.
"Don't forget the IBM standard desktop keyboards.
I've kept several for when they wear out, so far I'm still using the first one as I type this and every key works."
As far as I can see, they don't wear out -- typing this on a model built in 1991 (in Scotland, from girders).
I'll wait on UK pricing, availability, and I presume it is the case that they're being lazy and not creating a UK keyboard with an inverted and mirrored L shaped return key.
I did have a Thinkpad 701CS, it was quite good, but the expanding keyboard was just not as durable as normal thinkpad ones, the hinge eventually started failing, and the screen resolution was rather low.
Currently still on an X61, but web browsing is a bit slow in OpenBSD (part of this will be BSD's fault). I was pondering an X230 with a 220 keyboard and a new screen transplanted into it (this is possible), but now the 25 is out it's a little tempting. A little disappointed by screen resolution and lack of a thinklight, but the discrete GPU and thunderbolt are decent additions.
I've used lots of Thinkpads in the past, the X40/X41 had a lovely form factor, but the dog slow custom hard drive was awkward.
Not sure why you need to upgrade the W520, which has the blue "ThinkVantage" key and the screen light, with an otherwise identical keyboard layout to the 25. With 24 or 32 GB RAM, it runs just fine. It won't drive a 4K display at 60 Hz is all.
While the 700C was the first Thinkpad, the most iconic was the 701C which came out not long after. OS/2 was sweet and, of course, the butterfly keyboard. The main weakness of the 701C was the hinges. That would have been a fitting machine to honour.
Put down the rose-tinted Friday afternoon beer goggles chaps - the Thinkslab was an absolute nightmare if you had to actually lug it around with you all day.
Got my first one upon joining Sema; it was basically an anvil with an HDD. Of course, backpacks weren't invented then, or if they were, no self respecting salesgit would ever use one - creases the suit and makes your back a sweaty mess. Shoulder bag it was, which would include paper stuff, charger, fags, bottle of water, etc.
Many, many, years later I'm having physio on a shoulder injury. Lying there, physio lady says "you carry weights on your right shoulder? Your spine is curved to the left where you're always compensating"
No wonder I went fully insane and bought a BlackBerry PlayBook... anything but carry that damn laptop around.
Had quite a few ThinkPads over the years, and loved most of them.
The T43 was a bit of a donkey, that went in favour of one of my favourites, the T61. My T510 was dropped by it's previous user hard enough to break the plastic fan vent and bend the heatsink fins, and was still working when I was made redundant.
My personal laptop is a T410, I have an X240 from work, and my mum has a T410 I set up for her. I've played with getting a X230 or T420 for myself, but I don't really like 16:9 screens.
I've used a few Thinkpads and the biggest attraction of them was the fact that if something broke you could order a replacement part. And aside from that they were quite rugged with nice lids that closed shut properly. The red nipple thing was and still is vastly easier to use for precision than a touchpad.
I wonder if this is true for the Thinkpad 25 or if it's going to break if you look at it sideways and the whole lot has to be junked.
It would need to be reprogrammed, of course, but an SSD might be a more sensible cure, methinks. I do not, however, know what ill effects SSDs might encounter with increased radiation exposure, as hard disk media seems less likely to be impacted.
I have a T450, I think - 15" sandybridge i7 with 8GB RAM its big... aesthetically and physically... yes its got the silly think light... but nothing to write home about...
then earlier this year I have a X260 to replace it with - 7th Gen i7, 16GB RAM and a 500GB SSD... considering how small it is, its big!
I do concede, the keyboard is good... but I just cant see how people get all wet over them!
Here's what I like about the business-class Thinkpads:
Keyboards are generally very good
Machines are usually easy to service, and upgrade
Good documentation available and easy to get parts for
Usually, Trackpoint and trackpad and decent buttons
Big user base means pretty likely to find a solution to any problem you encounter
Robust, reliable, well built and last a long time
Usually reasonable selection of ports
No one thing makes me think I must buy a Thinkpad but whenever I look at the alternatives, they always seem to be missing features I want, even if they have better screens, higher performance and less weight.
Blackberry is back again.
There are new Nokia phones coming out.
The Palm name is being revived for PDAs.
Even a new Psion Revo was recently announced.
I'm surprised there's no 25th anniversary Sony MiniDisc player yet.
I'm getting nostalgic for the good old days when I wasn't nostalgic all the time...
The Thinkpad is basically an industrial tool. It is designed to do a job of work, and to do it well. Not like some of the crappy computers you see out there; which seem to be designed to look as though they were designed to do a job, by someone whose actual experience of that job goes no further than "seen it being done, thought the tools were ugly".
My own Thinkpad -- an Edge 15; now running Xenial Xerus, having been upgraded a few times from Oneiric Ocelot -- has been flung around in a rucksack on buses and trains, sat on by cats and even opened too close to a candle (evidenced by just a slight smooth spot in the otherwise rough texture). And yes, I'm fully aware that by many standards it's hardly a "real" Thinkpad! But the HDD is being a bit slow, after one drop too many; and I'm now torn between buying myself a whole new Thinkpad that might not be as good as this one, or spending rather less on an SSD (more drop-proof, as well as faster) and a pair of 4GB SODIMMS (it has two 2GB ones in it) just to see if I can get another 5 years out of this one.
Icon: Another case of one drop too many .....
All other specs for computers advance over time. Why are we so locked into 1920x1080 for screen res? I understand it would cost more, but I for one would be willing to pay a premium. Everything else about the Thinkpad 25 is fine, but that screen res is a dealbreaker.
I have a strong preference to 16:10 screens, and a 1920x1200 screen is really all it takes to appease me. I'll even take two discolored, dim 1280x1024 monitors turned sideways and live with the bezels, if given the opportunity. I especially dislike working with 1080p content on 1080p screens... that extra 120 pixels of height for WUXGA make it seem absolutely massive by comparison, the benefits far exceeding the slightly over 10% gain in total pixels. There have been many times when I have taken work home with me just so I can use my own screen, as my company has been a bit slow in upgrading monitors to suit our current product.
I bought it second hand seven or eight years ago. Since then it's had two new SSDs (first a speed upgrade, second for capacity), more RAM, and three new power supplies when the cables give up. Surprisingly still the same battery though - I don't use it on batteries a lot.
Running Ubuntu MATE. Fan sounds a bit like a chainsaw these days but other than that the darn thing just won't die. And much as I'd like to I can't really justify buying a new one until it does.
Side note: I particularly like the T5xx-series as a compromise between full-size machines and portables. Nice big screens and keyboards. My work-supplied T440 is nowhere near as nice, though that may also be because the T440 is the worst ThinkPad ever made.
It is now over 5 years old (an i5) and is still ok, having been upgraded in 2016 to Windows 7. I have had to change the battery once.
In that time, I have had 3 Dells for personal use, they have all had problems, which effectively wrote the machines off, mainly to do with the power socket failing and requiring a solder or new motherboard and this includes an XPS model which died 1 month after the 3 year extended warranty expired. The other two were Inspirons.
Not going to buy a Dell ever. Would consider a ThinkPad for personal use, but as they are expensive, I might have to go for a re-conditioned one.
So that's one hit in 4 tries.
I want the trackpoint but I don't care about the logo or the design - and I learned to like the chiclet keyboard. What I want instead is a good screen (my ancient netbook outshines every Xnnn Thinkpad screen by miles). And make them robust again. The Lenovos look similar to the old Thinkpads, but they are much much easier to break. It took a good tumble with the bike to crack a corner of the old X40. The newer ones damage so easily that every year-old model seems to be missing a corner.
This:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxQGhqF60zE
His presenting style cracks me up (lots of swearing (but it's funny)), but he's accurate in his condemnation of this new Thinkpad.
As he says, check out the 1080p 16x9 screen :( and the crappy U CPU (check out the CPU Benchmark score, it's pretty shocking!)
And again, as people have said, no proper indicator lights, no hardware buttons etc.
Such a missed opportunity. I was waiting to see the specs, I've decided to buy an old (2011) W520 and upgrade that for relative peanuts in cost (and will run a modern linux pretty damn quick (don't need any games)). I really like the old keyboards, this is the newest old Thinkpad with a reasonable sized screen that you can buy, sadly... :(
(I bought a fairly recent E550 too, but it's crap compared to the "proper" Thinkpads... :( )
Probably going to have to spend some serious money next time to get a decent keyboard (via a "gaming" laptop).
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