[busterarm]

you too!?

I used to at least be able to recommend ThinkPads but I can't even do that anymore. I pretty much only have Macs left as an option at this point, but not one that I'm super thrilled about. I mostly use VPS and a $600 _should_ be fine.

[nly]

I ordered a Thinkpad direct earlier this year and was really dissatisfied with the build quality and shipping. The new clicky touchpad in particular was just horrendous. It went back and I ended up going with a refurbed Dell Latitude. The keyboards is reasonable, and I have my nipple and sturdy build, but even at the reduced price I had to drop back to Intels integrated graphics (on reflection I don't miss dicking around with NVIDIAs proprietary Linux drivers one bit). It also came with a decent warranty.

[agumonkey]

I still like x61 a lot, not hard to find for less than 100$ on ebay. With the usual maximum ram + ssd upgrade you really have a neat little 4:3 rock solid machine. Most people buying ~600$ core i5 laptop will never reach the boot time and stability I get using *linux on this hardware. Next week I'll try x200/x201 family to see how better the cpu is (heat and battery life mostly).

[busterarm]

Yep. I've got Arch (soon to be OpenBSD) on my 2nd-gen x100e and I put in an SSD and upgrade to the A/G/N wifi card. There are some quirks but it's a decent system. I'm ready to move on though. These have heat problems though and everyone I know with an x2XX has worse problems than I do.

Even with the $600 core i5s, it'd be getting the same OS. Hopefully they've switched to the newer Intel wifi cards because the Linux driver on the 5400AGN they were using has problems.

[agumonkey]

Arch user here too. I see a lot of articles saying BSD is saner than linux, and you're tempting me even more to try it. If you ever write about it post the url here.

[selectodude]

I loved my X61 but I couldn't put up with how it sounded like it was going to take flight all the time.

[agumonkey]

True, that's the main reason I try newer ones. If I was a gifted engineer I'd build a better heatsink so the fan would never kick in.

[thrownaway2424]

I still have a x61 and a x220. I prefer the x220 obviously for being way faster and for having a giant Esc key (I use vim). Both totally solid. On the x61 I use tpfand and the fan almost never comes on.

[agumonkey]

Thanks, I stopped looking for fan control, since I was more interested in underclocking. I'll try it right away.

[spost]

I'm a bit out of the loop, what's gone wrong with ThinkPads?

[busterarm]

A growing trend of poor platform choices. The obvious stuff is that their once great keyboards are now terrible. Mouse buttons are the other one.

On the more hardware nitty-gritty side of things though, nearly all of their laptops the last 4 years have heat problems, including one line that you can never use more than 50% of the CPU before it throttles due to severe overheat. My second-gen x100e is the second laptop I've ever used to actually give me a burn - and from doing nothing more than streaming a youtube video. Their x series are basically unusable and were the only ones I would consider buying to begin with.

Sorely disappointed.

Edit: Also their software is shit, but I don't use Windows on it anyway. They're still better than ASUS laptops though.

[Too]

Apart from the things other people here already mentioned. The speakers are the worst i have ever heard. I don't have high demands on laptop speakers to start with but this is way below any standards. Music you can just forget about and even in voip calls it's hard to hear what people are saying. And even when they are off they are bad! They keep sending out a faint white static noise, i first thought it's the fan but it's actually the speakers. Lenovos "solution" to this problem was to update the driver and turn off the spekers completely if there's been no sound for the past 5 seconds. Really annoying, any time you open a folder in explorer and the click sound plays it sounds like the fan turns on and then off again, same with intermediate IM notifications, i have to keep my laptop on mute because of this. So the speakers are useless for music, voip and notifications, what usage scenario is left? why even put them in?

[busterarm]

I forgot about this! Oh yeah. Their headphone jack is pretty flimsy too, but it seems to be on most laptops. I'm pretty much resigned to using a USB sound card/headphone amp these days.

[TillE]

> Their headphone jack is pretty flimsy too

I really can't stand those. I've had the headphone jacks on two separate high-end Android phones go from crackly to completely unusable, while my ancient iPod nano is still rock solid after years of heavy use.

A decent 3.5mm jack is not an expensive part, but so many manufacturers seem to opt for the cheap garbage that doesn't actually work.

[serf]

and on top of that most thinkpads have switched to integrated mic/headphone combo jacks rather than separate ports.

it's old fashioned, but I prefer them to be separated.

[adamors]

Talking about the 440 series: no physical buttons on the trackpad, keyboard changes, a lot harder to take apart, 12GB max memory. It's basically not a Thinkpad anymore but a black MBP wannabe.

[w1ntermute]

The changes to the keyboard and trackpad are being reversed in the next version.

[philippotto]

Do you have a link for more information about the next ThinkPad versions?

[w1ntermute]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0BlRjcgcN8#t=24m15s

[throwawayaway]

that video does not say anything about the home/del/pgup/pgdn buttons...? does it?

[w1ntermute]

They're going back to the 6-row keyboard (top), not 7-row keyboard (bottom): http://i.imgur.com/NpmHQbL.jpg

[jdiez17]

They've started messing with the keyboards. I don't find this an issue personally (I'm typing this on a X1 Carbon 2014), but it bothers some people.

[bluedino]

The function keys missing is a pain. Moving home/end is a pain. People calling and asking how to shut the caps lock off when there isn't even a caps lock button is a pain (hint, double-tap the shift key)

[agumonkey]

The keyboard was, to me, a genuine attempt to improve things. But they did some very stupid things like removing LEDs, to be replaced by OS Notification. Nobody wants a corner of the screen saying 'CAPS LOCK PRESSED'.