[Hasknewbie]

I have a X260. Don't.

The keyboard is a smooth smudgefest with so-so tactile feedback (this particular point will depend on which manufacturer supplied the keyboard that ends up in your unit). The keys and trackpoint leave marks on the display when it is closed. The display bezel leaves marks on the palmrest. This is really poor engineering on basic stuff.

When I pick up the laptop by the lower left corner (hey, it's an ultraportable, why would I ever do that, right?), it immediately crashes with a garbled screen. After looking that up I found out that the HDD/SSD is under the left palmrest, and picking it up there may flex and alter the SATA connection, causing the crash. This seems to affect a random sample of users. So much for Thinkpad's vaunted "sturdy rollcage". But here's the real kicker: when I found this info on Lenovo's own forum, it was for the X230! This defect has been known for 3 generations of X-series Thinkpads, and yet they have never bothered fixing it.

Ever since they decided to move to 16:9 with horrible Low-Fi resolution (for a line of laptops meant to be for serious, professional users), I feel like Lenovo's Thinkpad group have be led with the vision and drive of a Roomba: mostly face-plants, and every actual improvement is to catch up to the competition (notable exception: hot-swapable battery). I only stick to Thinkpads because of the trackpoint and Linux compatibility, I suspect I'm not the only one.

[Havoc]

Weird - we've got an office full of x240s & x260s and they all seem fine from what I can tell.

Never had a hardware related issue in ~2 years of use. Well except that one bluescreen a couple months back - that could be hw I guess.

The screen res pisses me off though. :/

[Hasknewbie]

I am not saying that you cannot get a decent X260, but notice how now in every Thinkpad thread there is a significant number of "me / my team had a number of thinkpads, we've had to go through N replacements during the last year", whereas a few years ago they were the poster boy for reliability. Thinkpads now have the engineering/manufacturing tolerance of a low to mid range consumer laptop, even though they are supposed to be professional equipment. This is unconscionable.

This is why I don't recommend something like the X260. You can't buy a premium laptop and "just hope" it will have none of the reported defects. We pay a premium with an expectation for reliability, not for a QA lottery.

Conversely it seems most complaints are for the X2xx and T4xx series, which is why I believe it has to do with manufacturing tolerance: maybe on 15" it's just good enough to not have any significant defect, and they kept the same M.O. for the more compact models, and there problems did pop up.

(The screen resolution has in fact been getting better for the latest two generations, but here again it is only to catch up to the competition. Remember when you could get a 15in Thinkpad with an IPS 2048x1536 display, long before the "retina" buzzword came to life? That was before Lenovo took over.)

[Havoc]

>I am not saying that you cannot get a decent X260, but notice how now in every Thinkpad thread there is a significant number of "me

Well its subjective either way. We've got over 300 of the things in the office though, so more inclined to trust that than counting complaints in threads.

I'm sure there are better laptops out there but the x240/260s are far from duds. What they are though is old...office is replacing them with x1 carbons thankfully - with HD screens (finally).

[_cmmn]

What would you suggest then?

In my experience, only Thinkpads and Latitudes have provided me satisfying user experiences.

Except XPS 13 and Macbook Pros, which I tried and I don't like the feeling.