Lenovo unfolds time frame for bendy ThinkPad: Pricey Windows PC out in summer '20 Life for ThinkPad fanatics looks to be getting a lot more flexible in the near future with a premium Windows-based foldable PC set to start shipping from next summer. A brief sight of the as yet unnamed machine, the latest in the ThinkPad X1 line, was given at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona yesterday. The strange …
The Keyboard is a $500 optional extra that connects via MBT (Magic Blue Tooth) that only they have the keys too.
Back in the day(when IBM owned them)... Thinkpads were rugged, reliable and repairable. The last one I had to use was worse than the PCW Dell cheapo when it came to the amount of flex in the keyboard. I only had it for a month before some [redacted] nice person broke into my Hotel Room and walked off with it.
Thinkpads were rugged, reliable and repairable.
Now, now, wait a sec here. Durable designs mean that people won't be replacing them as often as the Lenovo beancounters like.
They've taken the ThinkPad name and milked it dry. All that remains is the logo, especially with the E series. Hide the logo and it would be another landfill IdeaPad.
From your experience with the keyboard, it seems he's done you a favor ;-)
If you don't have to have the latest and greatest, allow me to recommend an older, used ThinkPad. Costs much less, so less to lose if it is stolen again, and at least slightly better (they seem to get worse with every year that passes).
X220 was the last known good X series Thinkpad. Still very decent keyboard, built like a tank, fully repairable and upgradeable, i7. Bought it refurbished for $160, spent another $150-160 on upgrades (added SSD, upgraded HDD, added RAM), and voila - best machine for my purposes for under $500. Use it extensively for five years already and expect to use it at least another 10.
Multiply it by 2, as I got two of them - for my wife and for myself.
X230 and after - don't even bother. Keyboard (famous Thinkpad keyboard!) devolved to total crap, to begin with. Also unreliable. Bought new X230 for my wife, and she had a year of pain running to the repair shop now and then, until I ran into those refurbished X220s.
"The last one I had to use was worse than the PCW Dell cheapo when it came to the amount of flex in the keyboard."
Depends on the model. They still make durable kit, but they also sell cheap light kit. The cheap light kit seems to be what people want. The durable stuff costs more so organisations generally only shell out for those models where they are most needed. Most of what I see are P, T, L and X models, but the P models seem to be the more rugged, the L and X the least rugged. Then there's the even less rugged consumer models.
"Well apparently they're willing to trade sales figures for style so I guess we'll see how that pans out.
No great surprise if they manage to sell scant few and end up scrapping the line within 18 months."
Nah, that's not how sales works. In case they sell some, they'll proclaim that it as an ingenious idea, but since the market is shrinking it wouldn't sell as well as previous models. In case they sell very few they will also blame it on the market.
>for a display which will be obscured by your hands most of the time.
Touch is so yesterday...
The future is AI enahnced voice control. The AI will know exactly what you mean when you say things such as "the KPI needs to show better than 95% availability" or "move that wiggly thing a bit to the left".
The future is AI enahnced voice control. The AI will know exactly what you mean when you say things such as "the KPI needs to show better than 95% availability" or "move that wiggly thing a bit to the left".
Voice-control is SUCH a bad idea. speaking out loud system commands, passwords, or anything else you're doing? Even worse to be yelling at your computer "Hilary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher nude kissing" for a web search...
other than the fact that "because we can", I see absolutely no benefit (and lots of drawbacks, when you want to swap that battery for a generic clone, oh wait, it's 2019, no more swappable bendy battery,, ok, when you want to add more ram, oh, wait, it's 2019, no more ram upgrades, or when you want to replace the screen, the power supply, the keyboard, oh, wait...)
I mean, sure, it would help if you could bend it 40 degrees, because that's what regularly happens to laptops by mistake, literally EVERY. DAY! - but other than that... ah, I get it, the use is so that you can roll it and put it in your purse. Or flat briefcase.
IMHO this and others are just a first generation of flexible display technology (which itself is not new). In a few years some people will not imagine life without folding credit cards showing credit amount left and purchases in real time on its surface (those traditionalists who did not switch to paying with Brainwave® by touching the forehead with a wrist phone and thinking "confirmed").
A foldable desktop all-in-one makes more sense to me. Make the thing a tri fold with a stand and add a folding full sized keyboard. Ok it needs a desk to work on but it could be any table and it'd be far more useful for actual work than a pishy little screen half taken up with a virtual keyboard.
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