2012 Thinkpads Poll

Just curious to see what people are planning to get on this forum.

 

Bought an X230, I'm very excited

 

Replace my 220s with 230s? Hopefully.

 

I don't see Ivy Bridge offering me much, especially since the most GPU intensive game I run is World of Goo. I noted none.

 

Probably none, as my T500 and X120e are still going strong. Also, depending on what Windows 8 brings to the table, I'd rather wait until it is released and intermeshed with hardware design before I upgrade.

 

None. We can probably expect significantly higher resolution screens for the next generation (c.f. Apple/ASUS) which will actually be a nice upgrade. As for a "gratuitous upgrade", the new keyboard keeps me from doing that right now.

 

No s430 there?

 

Forgot about that one. Keep interchanging it with the E430 in my head.

 

Just got my T420 last September and it's got everything I want in a laptop so I voted none as well. I do wish for an X1 Carbon though.

 

Holding out for X1C before making a decision.

 

None.

Bought a X220T (actually my better half did) and that will be our last ThinkPad as long as Lenovo keeps the newly introduced 6-row keyboard design.

 

None. I don't need 3d often (probably don't *need* at all), so W520 is about as good as the W530.

The next generation, when Windows 8 is out, and Apple MacBook Pro convinces many people that hi-res IPS screen AND 16:10 screen AND 2x Thunderbolt/DisplayPort is essential, will be interesting. The new keyboard layout is annoying, but considering that ALL other manufactures use something even worse than the new Lenovo's keyboard, and pretty much all fail to deliver a decent TrackPoint equivalent, there is no escape in sight.

 

Not this year. Likely not for a long while.

Recently bought a new Sandy Bridge ThinkPad for the collection, and for a very good price I might add, just for the sake of the "classic" keyboard.

Today, I found my 2012 chiclet-keyboard notebook (funds already reserved):

 

mark me down for all the tablety goodness packed into the x230t

 

I'll wait until Lenovo looks at that and improves.

Except the 16:10 screen, everything else is so much anti-Thinkpad... 2 DIMM slots, limited to just 16GB?! Non-replaceable SSD, and without any extensibility in the future (next year 1TB SSD will be $400 probably)? No Trackpoint?! No eSATA? Glossy screen?! Keyboard without Trackpoint and PgUp/PgDn/Home/End at all? No Ethernet? Non-replaceable 9 cell battery? Throttling issues (85W power supply cannot possibly feed both quad CPU and GPU)? Metal corners?

Lenovo, please take W530 guts, get some decent panels from Samsung, return 1920x1200 back to 15" devices, and it will be a perfect W540. If the old keyboard layout, without backlight, is an option, even better (come on, it's just a BIOS update). W/o the DVD/Ultrabay (but with mSATA and 9mm HDD bay) is probably fine too. Oh, and while on it, can you apply a piece of black electrical tape on the batteries right on the factories, so they don't wobble. Pretty please

 

None, but my new X220 i7 with IPS is shipping as we speak! Keyboard is the big turn off for me... In reference to that Apple, it blows my mind that on many of their laptops the SSD drives and RAM are all soldered into the motherboard, no upgrades!!! Why on earth do people find this acceptable on a $2k+ machine?!?

It would be nice to see a _40 lineup next year with keyboard options and some better screens though! ... And the option to continue shipping with Windows 7, too much change between this disaster Metro Interface and the new ThinkPad keyboards in the same year...

 

So you're saying there's a chance?

I'm typing this on the X230. It's quite good from a typing viewpoint unless one's miffed about the keyboard shortcut Chinese fire drill.

 

yup... i dont mind the chicklet keys... I just want all of the keys

 

I'm not going to pick up one of these new ones, that's for sure. However, since prices inevitably will drop I see this as my chance to perhaps snag a nice, loaded W520 in the not too distant future.

 

Thanks for reminding (oh so politely, with a smile). I refuse to spend over $1000 on a laptop and then have to put pieces of tape on the battery bay and under the keyboard.

That has been going on for years. The wobbling always reminds me of the $1 stores.

 

x230 most likely! The best business on the go out there from what I've seen.

 

I voted for "None".

My T61 is still running perfactly fine like the day I took delivery ( knock on wood lol ). If I WERE to get a new laptop right NOW, it would be the new Apple Mac Pro with the retina display.

 

Sincerely even with the terrible experience that I had with apple customer support, Im willing to go for the new retina mbp.

And I was thinking of getting either the t430s, s430 or the x1c. For the support and build quality. Suddenly the appeal of those models are gone.

 

I've read a lot of rhetorics here about manufacturer-driven inevitability of 16:9 screens and customer-driven demand of mediocre screens. Untrue.

 

I just cannot get excited about the retina display on a laptop--seems like overkill. When they finally get them in stores locally, I will take a look and perhaps change my mind, but I just don't see it being appreciably more USEFUL than a typical IPS screen.

 

I vote 'none.'

Regarding the fervor over the Retina display I feel that for some of the struggling students, such as myself, the >$2000 may not work into a budget. I know that I could spend $2000 somewhere else and carry on just fine with my X200. YMMV

 

It's a different price point. For the amount of money Apple wants for the retina MacBook Pro, one can buy a decently configured W530 with FHD, AND U2711 or even U3011.

16:10 and IPS is nice, but after using Sony P, with glossy 200+ppi screen, it feels a bit excessive. People even complain that 1920x1080 is too high for 15". Of course, unless it's Apple

 

Try to carry all those things around in your bag.

Uninformed complaint. "Too high" when the OS is too dumb to know how to scale properly. Higher resolution does not have to mean tiny fonts and icons!

(My "iPad 2" and "new iPad" look identical, with the latter showing much more beautifully: no need to "zoom in" when using the new iPad.)

 

Need a big bag But there is no going away from it: a good physically big matte screen, where you can put a lot of stuff side by side, is going to weight 10+ kg and consume 80W+ in the foreseeable future. It's also inconvenient to have it firmly attached to the keyboard at the bottom.

Anyway, Thinkpads are unfair comparison to Apple. Sony, aka the closest Apple's match in the PC laptop world, will probably show up with something soon. They already sell 13" with 1920x1080, SSD-only, quad Ivy Bridge, no upgrades, 3 pounds $1.5k+ laptop for a while, but not as well marketed.

The OS part is mostly fixed nowadays. It's the apps, that were not specially coded to handle dramatically different screen ppis.

 

I'm going to have to call "BS" on Apple's claim of 7 hour battery life on a 15" retina screen, with a quad core desktop processor and discrete graphics card.

 

Why? T/W 520/530 with quad CPU etc, and about the same 90+ Wh battery, does survive 7 hours. If screen brightness is low enough, and, of course, with discrete GPU off, and very light use. So will Apple.

It would be more interesting how 85W power supply manages to power CPU and GPU at simultaneous load, while charging battery at the same time.

 

Yeah. For me, at least, there are powerful desktop machines with big IPS panels, and there are portable laptop machines that I do want to look at and to touch.

Philosophically, sure. Practically, who is taking care of all that, moving forward? Ah, finger pointing! (I can, and do, built computers from parts. I need a vendor that offers an exceptional experience to me.)

 

When people called "BS" on the ThinkPad chiclet keyboard and new layout, they were "wisely" advised to try it out first, or at least wait for published reviews.

 

Well, Sony Z is much lighter than the new retina MBP too, and looks great btw. But it's expensive and it's not marketed well enough.

I, for example, need a powerful desktop machine, connected to big IPS panels, that can still be usable when portable too. And when portable, it has to have a nice screen, but even more importantly I want to be able to control for how long it's going to live on the battery with full desktop-level performance too. Apple does not produce devices like that yet. Lenovo/HP/Dell do.

Practically too. Microsoft does. Google does. But pixel doubling, like Lenovo's Magnifier, or DPI scaling does not quite solve the problem. 3rd party vendors need to start doing more work. Big ones do already.

 

Piecemeal.

(Thanks for the nice discussion. I propose we end it here, before some wise mod asks us to start a new thread elsewhere. )

 

I'm not planning on buying anything since I got my X220T last year. Need to save $$$.

But if I was to buy anything, it would be the X1 Carbon.

 

Driving the extra scaling algorithm will incur a not-insignificant overhead, which will decrease battery life. However, the gains in Ivy Bridge should make up for that.

Simple. It doesn't. It's been an issue since... forever. Which is also a reason they have an integrated battery, so no one complains about what happens like when people pull the battery on ThinkPads.

 

Agreed. Thanks, it was fun and Apple laptops shouldn't have been mentioned at all.

The whole comparison of Thinkpads with MacBook Pros does not make sense tbh. To me, they are about as comparable as pickup trucks and 2 seater convertibles (with RHD too).

 

i've been looking at the X230t, the only things i really dislike are the screen resolution and the touchpad (X201 touchpad looks fine to me, i like my buttons).

 

From Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display review (mid 2012) -- Engadget:

Despite all that performance, we were still impressed by the battery life. In our standard rundown test, which involves looping a video with WiFi on and the display set at a fixed brightness, we netted an impressive seven hours and 49 minutes on the 2.6GHz model. We're still testing the 2.3GHz model, and plan to update this review with final results once we have them.

 

from the same page

"Right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible.The primary Apple apps -- Safari, Mail, the address book, etc. -- have all been tweaked to make use of all these wonderful pixels. Sadly, little else has. While we got assurances that third-party apps like Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD are in the process of being refined, right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible."