SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Just days after Lenovo Group Chief Yang Yuanqing hinted that Lenovo may be pulling out of the PC and Server markets in favor of focusing on datacenters and mobile devices, long-time Thinkpad designer and Retro Thinkpad Project Manager David Hill has announced his resignation from the company. Mr. Hill, who had been in charge of the original ThinkPad design in the early 90's and rose to the rank of Vice President of Design at Lenovo, states:
"I want to broaden my view and create the opportunity to do more in the field of design, not less."
The 25th Anniversary "Retro ThinkPad" project, which was in development for over two years and received over 13,000 responses from long-time ThinkPad fans, is still, for the time being, scheduled for an October 5th announcement. Could internal pressures to minimize costs have resulted in Mr. Hill deciding to take his name off the Retro ThinkPad project which he spearheaded for two and a half years?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Friday June 30 2017, @06:35PM
I don't think so. I think a lot of people just don't understand the appeal of a business laptop; they're not usually specced higher than high-end consumer laptops, and in fact can be quite a bit more conservative. For instance, you can still find VGA ports on many of them (the HP I have here with me has one, and it's less than 2 years old). If you want cutting-edge and high performance, you buy an Alienware or some other such laptop, not a business laptop. Business laptops are meant to be relatively rugged so they can be carried around everywhere, especially on airplanes, and to be reliable because you don't want your laptop crapping out in the middle of an important presentation. They can be a little behind on I/O technologies because conference room projectors frequently are many years old and still use VGA, and you need to be able to bring your laptop and plug into the conference room projector, even if it's old and crappy and doesn't have HDMI. It needs to survive rough handling by idiot TSA personnel, so it'll usually have some kind of metal chassis, like the magnesium used by Dell Latitudes and I think Thinkpads. And because the corporate environment can be rather conservative, you usually won't see any flashing styling on them, just blacks and grays. They'll also usually have docking ports, so you can easily plug it into your docking station at your desk and use a full keyboard/mouse/(dual)monitor.
Anyone who doesn't really care about durability, typing feel, etc. and cares more about thin and light and cutting-edge tech and maximum performance probably won't be well-served by a business laptop.