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from the they-might-have-listened-to-the-customers dept.
Lenovo connoisseur David Hill recently blogged about the upcoming release of the much anticipated retro Thinkpad (Retro ThinkPad: It's Alive). Details are scant, but he hints at a "keyboard to die for" which sounds promising, and notes that it definitely won't cost $5000 (whew!).
I'm sure many people have seen the recent leaks related to the Retro ThinkPad initiative I started nearly 2 years ago. There's talk about display aspect ratio, resolution, keyboard, pricing and much more. Adding fuel to the rumor fire, the Lenovo commercial segment executive leader, Christian Teismann, even gave it a brief mention at the recent Lenovo Transform event in New York City. (Read the original blog that got the ball rolling here.) The social media response to the concept was staggering.
[...] At this point, it seems like the cat's out of the bag. There are certain things I can now confirm. Yes, Lenovo will be making a special edition ThinkPad as part of the 25th anniversary celebration. It's aimed at enthusiasts and superfans that were kind enough to share their thoughts about what the laptop might be. As with any new product we develop, there are always technical and cost limitations but I think where we landed is quite impressive. The product will embody many of the things people asked for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 25 2017, @05:46PM (3 children)
It would also weigh 7 pounds with another 2 pound power brick and be limited to a 16:9 ratio display with an off-centered numpad keyboard and an off-centered trackpad.
Terrible, terrible ergonomics with very little upgradability.
An ATX mini tower plugged into a UPS will provide much cheaper system at 2-3 times the performance, with multiple displays and whatever keyboard you want, at the same cost or less. And you can upgrade it piecemeal.
Combined with a $500 laptop or even an iPad Pro with remote/vnc, you will get all the mobility and performance of a gaming / workstation laptop, without the burden of poor ergonomics and a single point of failure.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday June 25 2017, @07:12PM
I use a computer
* In the study
* In bed
* On sofa
* In Kitchen
* On the train
* At work in meeting rooms
* At work in 'touchdown points'
* At work on 'hot desks'
* In hotel rooms
* On the can
* On an airplane
When I'm in the study I plug in a largeish monitor, external keyboard, mouse, and network, and that's great. However most of the time I'm not in the study, and having everything I'm used to is great. With games, I do have a couple, however the only place I have time to play a game is on the airplane or train, If I have free time at home I'm not going to lock myself away in the study for the evening, even if I did want to play a computer game, it would be on the sofa or in the kitchen
Weight and battery life isn't that crucial to me -- pretty much all of those areas have sockets. If I've got an unproductive day ahead (lots of meetings and in the office) I'll take the air. If I'm going away for longer I'll take both. Right now I've been working on the t410 all day, but I'm now back at the hotel, so I just brought the air back to watch some youtube in bed.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Monday June 26 2017, @06:57AM
Weight of it has never bothered me. Not once have I cared about it, even when lugging it around on holiday. The power brick is actually slim and small. It all fits in a slim rucksack only slightly thicker than the laptop itself.
The numpad isn't off-centered, it's a full numpad. The trackpad isn't either, it's centred over the spacebar (not centered over the laptop because of the full-size numpad). P.S. I manage financial databases too, so a numpad is critical.
But these things are really petty considerations, in my eyes. Besides, most of the time I use a bluetooth mouse with it, if it's anywhere near practical (which is at least 80% of usage scenarios).
The ergonomics are at least equal, and usually far better than sitting up to a desk.
Though your system may have more performance, I really DON'T NEED that kind of performance to play every game I want, run every VM I want, etc. I hate multiple displays with a passion, it indicates that people don't know how to task-switch and also that they don't realise their eyes are only ever on ONE SCREEN at a time. And I can use whatever keyboard I want.
In terms of performance, as stated - I literally RAN A SCHOOL from it. I pushed the VM's from the servers onto that laptop en-route to server upgrades once and nobody even noticed (I wouldn't expect them to, it actually outperformed the server it was upgrading and was used as a staging past with intermediate power to the place they were heading too.
And I have everything I ever need installed on a single machine (P.S. two full-speed drive bays), for home, business, gaming, etc., so I don't need to switch machines to do tasks.
Remote/vnc is atrocious for anything of this sort, and I spend most of my working day in RDP / HyperV viewers. That works fine for BUSINESS apps only. My laptop isn't business apps only, it's every program I've ever needed to use, ever. Plus a 20 year email archive. How many people do you see doing video/photo/audio/gaming over RDP? No-one. Why the hell would I pay for a full desktop, pay for a laptop/ipad, and then suffer in a remote session? And OnLive died for a reason.
Your single point of failure is really dredging the bottom of the barrel. So is your PC. In fact, you just added a requirement for another laptop / remote to make it portable that's dependent on it. (P.S. remember those double-drive-bays? Guess how long it takes to remove an SSD and put it into ANY other machine? Especially with VM images on the laptop - the only thing that really runs on the main OS is games, hardly critical!).
It may not be to your taste, but a gaming-level portable machine has far more advantages for some people (whether or not you would use it like that) than a static desktop.
Hint: I specify only static desktops in work. I actively resist all laptops requests, and pretty much they represent less than 1% of the clients I manage. At home, the only desktop I have hasn't been plugged in in years. I think it's still got IDE drives in it, plus one early SATA drive. I've literally not needed or desired it in nearly 10 years. And I have any amount of desktops I could use, including server-grade hardware, and I'm in charge of the budget so I could easily put a desktop into my home for work purposes if I wanted.
My previous workplace? Entirely laptop. Every single machine that wasn't a server was a laptop, plugged into official docking stations in every room. I think it was a disaster. So I have tried both sides of the coin.
It's a choice. Much bigger than "Oh, but you might buy one with a rubbishy numpad". But as a general compromise on minor things to give you much greater flexibility on the larger things, it works wonderfully.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 26 2017, @04:19PM
I see you've never heard of a "docking station".