[hakfoo]

What's interesting is that even aside from build quality, that little red eraser wad basically pushes Thinkpads outside the normal comparison shopping market.

If you don't like touchpads, your choices are basically "buy a Thinkpad direct from Lenovo" or "try to find the weird corners of the world where they actually mention, let alone sell HP Elitebooks and certain Dell Latitudes, and then find they're mind-blowingly expensive because they basically only compete with the high-end ThinkPad series."

I ordered a new laptop recently, and the ThinkPad option (an E585 plus adding my own RAM and SSD upgrades) clocked in about 40% cheaper than buying the comparable Elitebook. Even if the bottom were epoxied on, and you had to pay heir absurd prices for RAM and storage, I'd probably have ended up there.