Lenovo W540 Announced today

From
Lenovo Introduces New User-Inspired Design to the High Performance, Full Function Line of ThinkPad Notebooks

ThinkPad W540: Lenovo’s Most Powerful and Mobile Workstation Ever

Featuring the best ThinkPad display ever, the 15.5 inch 3K IPS panel, the W540 answers the demand for a portable, independent software vendor (ISV) certified mobile workstation. With an eye catching 2880x1620 resolution and the wide viewing angles of IPS Technology, the new W540 delivers the ultimate display for business professionals. At just 27mm and 5.45 pounds, the W540 is the thinnest and lightest mobile workstation in its class.

Powered by the latest Intel Quad Core i7 processors, up to 32GB of memory and using the ThinkPad Precision backlit keyboard with number pad provides faster processing for complex and detailed spreadsheets and large data sets. In addition, the W540 delivers the ultimate mobile graphics power with NVIDIA Quadro graphics with Optimus 2D and 3D content creation. Storage options up to two terabytes ensure plenty of local space and RAID options guarantee full data backup and protection.

Customers can take advantage of high speed data transfer with the on board Thunderbolt port, and can calibrate their display with the integrated X-Rite color calibrator. A full array of ports and connectivity options are available including 4G/LTE WWAN.

 

So probably the gt60 3k screen.

Dell have a cheaper fire pro option. Lack tb.
Hp have dream color.
Thinkpad should have better trackpoint + lighter.

Why can't someone make a machine with high res dream color, real dock, old thinkpad keyboard + tb.

It is like the oem are just trying to not compete and force people to buy w.e they offer.

 

Looks like the lenovov accessoreis website is up and running; Lenovo Quick Pick

According to leaked product timelines, we can also expect some more notebooks details this Friday...not sure on the W540 though.

According to this article, many of the new ThinkPad aren't available until NOVEMBER.

"ThinkPad T440p available starting November.

ThinkPad T540p available starting November.

ThinkPad W540 available starting November."

 

The announcement of a product usually comes well before the product ships.

I have a W530 I bought 3 weeks ago and still can return. Trying to find out how much more money the W540 will cost.

 

Looking good on the W540. Lets hope the thinnest doesn't come at built quality.

 

4 DIMM slots apparently have stayed. Good. Although they could solder some of the DIMMs to the motherboard: want 32GB, buy at least 16GB from Lenovo for $$$$.

As to the 3K screens, Lenovo seems to be well into "pointless megapixels" race, seen in cellphones and consumer cameras for the last decade. I wonder when can we get external monitors, where such resolution actually can be used, for reasonable amount of money, say sub-$1500. E.g. on 27" 2800x1600 it would be about 120ppi, awesome.

 

Hmmm... the battery life in the W540 seems to have taken quite a hit. Lenovo is advertising the W530 as "up to 7.4 hours" with a 6-cell, while the W540 with the same 6-cell is "up to 6 hours." This is a shame with the whole point and focus of Haswell having been to improve mobility. Maybe the new screen is more power-hungry?

 

6 months behind schedule, good one Lenovo.

 

My guess is its the 3GB+ onboard Quadro graphics card that accounts for the differ, along with the retina equivalent IPS display.

 

GPU is likely to be off in this calculation. With GPU on, W530/W520 would struggle to get past 4 hours with 9 cell, and the advertised figure was a lot higher. High res screen is likely to do something with it. Perhaps the battery is smaller W/h, despite being the same number of cells, to flush-fit into the shrunk body ( the old 70++ is at least 20mm high ).

It's all guessing at this point. After all, all these numbers matter little for W540, as they don't indicate how long will it last when actually used, with CPU throttling off, GPU on etc. Why to buy a workstation, especially with an off-center keyboard, to use as a typewriter on minimal brightness with everything off? HP and Dell didn't even bother with Optimus in such machines.

 

Most likely.

Power-consumption profiles typically show screen at the top. In the W540 case, the screen is arguably the most pronounced change from last year. (I did not say "good.") And please don't mention that off-center keyboard -- it's not a change; it's a deformity.

Touché.

 

Is a battery slice still available?

 

Does this W540 include hdd activity led? or are they just expensive "business" toys?

 

Some food for thought:

- The Y510p, another High Performance Machine by Lenovo, runs hot and has similar specs. Will the thinner W540 run just as hot?
- The speakers seem to have diminished in size
- The numpad/off-center trackpad REALLY tick me off.
- Not a fan of the more rounded look, leave it to the Y510p please
- Lenovo trying to compete with Apple on Retina display workstations?

 

Unfortunately, Lenovo seems to be trying to compete with Apple on fashionably-flat, quite powerful, but increasingly consumer-oriented machines. The idea to glue the battery into the case is yet to strike Lenovo, but the huge touchpad, the power-hungry display of useless resolution, Thunderbolt and all-but-removed TrackPoint have been delivered. It would be awesome, if there were other options too.

Meanwhile Dell, while playing similar games with their M3800 (only weighting 4.5 pounds with 15.5" screen), announced M4800 with same off-center keyboard, but still existing physical mouse and trackpoint buttons (Ok, it's Dell's parody on trackpoint, but with the lack of the real thing...), 3 storage bays and eSATA.

 

Post of the day.

 

People want better screen here it is...

Can't really see any complain other than no physical buttons and introducing numpad.

 

I personally never asked for a Retina Screen. They kill battery life, stress the GPU just for some pixels i can't see without straining myself.

 

W540 should have a much better sooling system, it also has large dual-air-outlets for the fan:


Compare that with the Y510p:

Well, that doesn´t have to mean much. The T430 also has bigger speakers than the T440s, but the T440s still has much better speakers.

There is always the option to choose the T440p instead, which has a nice centered TouchPad/TrackPoint/Keyboard. But yeah, ThinkPads maybe were the last full-features Notebook line with 15"-models without a numpad. But many people wanted one.

Roundes look? Compared with what? The W540 is less-rounded than the W530. Take a look at the rounded front-edge of the W530:
View attachment 101805

No, but with HP and Dell. They just also introduced Workstations with Retina Display (ZBook 15 and Dell M4800 will come with 3200x1800).

Nobody has to buy this option. There is still the 1920x1080 option. MANY people cried for IPS screens with a bigger resolution.

Whats bad about Thunderbolt? HPs ZBooks also come with one, and I don´t see where the disadvantage of Thunderbolt vs. mDP is...

 

Dat multi-quoting.


And by rounded, i meant Minimalistic. I guess it's just me, i prefer the looks of the W530 better.

 

The ultra-high resolution screen is an option. Why complaint about an option that you don't need to buy?

 

I'm happy to see a better display, although the 1080p IPS panel on the W520 is quite nice (and already two years old!) and should still be an option for those wanting better battery life. So please quit blabbering about a higher "useless" resolution. It's a quality display that provides crisp text so I love it. As for the numpad, I'm not a fan but I know many people who require one on a daily basis and understand such a feature in a workstation. The offset keyboard/trackpad also isn't much of an issue, as I quickly adapt to the slight difference and never care about it in actual use. Thunderbolt could have potential if more high-end mobile systems adopt it. It's a good design with future potential so I like the offering - though I'm surprised its standard (not jsut an option).

 

The w series never had a ips except if someone manage to mod one it.

 

Right, the W520 FHD was TN. Nonetheless it was a very good and high-quality panel with a wide range of colours.

 

Are you sure that FHD panel on your W520 is IPS?

In any event, there have been 3 display options on T/W510/520/530: HD, HD+ and FHD. None is IPS.

You're confused "speakers" with cosmetic "speaker grills" of arbitrary sizes and shapes.

 

Well they fooled me. (I do own two Dell Ultrasharps for comparison). The color-calibrated W520 FHD display is still one of the best displays I've used on a laptop, and would happily buy more TN panels if they were all that good (from personal experience, W520's panel is much better than the T61, T430s, x120e, X220 IPS?, X1C).

 

Yep. I'd be surprised if the W540's actual speakers are any larger or smaller. It'll probably remain about the same (aka use a pair of headphones).

My main gripe with the W540 is the numpad... I absolutely hate the off-centered layout that many 15" computers have adopted for those extra keys. The high-resolution screen is a must in this new generation; I'd have been very disappointed if Lenovo had left it out.

As for cooling and noise levels, I think it's too early to speculate. It's nice that the double-fan-grilles are still there, we'll see how effective they are in the reviews.

 

That makes the two of us.

How about 3D-print our own palmrest without space for the stupid numpad?

 

I third this notion.

Buy a T440p and show Lenovo

 

Similar thoughts here. Is it just me, or does the T440p look rather thick? Lenovo has new ThinkPad notebooks for business clients - NotebookCheck.net News

Anyway, it does have the ultrabay which means expand-ability and seems like the most ThinkPadish ThinkPad out of the current lineup.

 

i motion this motion that has been motioned 4 times already. I hate those off centred kb

 

Adding my own hate to the horrible off centered touchpad.

I had a Dell M6500. Excellent machine but the touchpad was waaaaay too much to the left. A few more inches it would have fallen off the chasis. Even though it was a 17inch with 16:10 , basically stopped using it.and switched to a Lenovo W530.
Just when I thought Lenovo got the ergonomics right - out they come with a off centered touchpad on a 15 inch.
This and the 16:9 screen.are two of the most annoying design traits in all current laptops (except Apple)...

 

it's interesting many external keyboards (at least those that I have used at work) are off-center and have num pads.

 

Would you PLEASE stop spreading your idea of the ideal resolution in a laptop and what is or what is not useful?

Yes? Please? Because in my opinion, it's blind and not-entirely-well-informed people like you, who are co-responsible for not having decent resolution displays in notebooks for now... what? 7 years?

Imagine what 7 years in the IT industry are. My W500 (2008?) has a better resolution than anything from Lenovo TO DATE.
And I can see the difference and I WANT higher vertical resolution. I absolutely could not understand why this was not available.

Of course, if there is a numerous bunch of blind people claiming that "everything above 640x480" is useless, that's a problem.

And for the "needs more power" card: Please inform yourself about e.g. IGZO resolution and power requirements compared to
standard LCD/IPS panels.

Thank you.

Had to rant that loud, because I'm not sure you'd see it. ;-)


R.

 

It is interesting that those keyboard dont bundle with a monitor hard fixed together.

 

Idea #1: Imagine what 7 years of human evolution are. Yes, we, as humanity, still have the same hands and the same eyes as 7 years ago. Or may be a bit worse, with more shortsighted people, on average. And a person with normal vision still can't see individual pixels on 15" and smaller with resolution larger than FHD, assuming a normal laptop/desktop user position, not touching screen with a tip of a nose.

Idea #2: Your W500 has about the same pixel pitch as FHD panel available from Lenovo all these years. Just larger, physically, screen.

Idea #3: Windows Vista/7/8 desktop mode, while improved somewhat in scaling department, is roughly the same thing. 150%-200% scaling causes real, practical issues in many applications. Particularly small, in-house, applications developed by either not very competent developers, or many years ago, or with different priorities than having all looking perfect on high-dpi screens, or all of the above.

Idea #4: Compact cameras, and now cellphones, for the last decade were pushing the idea that "more megapixels is better". Because "more is better", right, easy to understand? But with given physical dimensions of the sensor inside, adding pixels is just not noticeable after a certain point, and worse: other things start to suffer.

Idea #5: 3K-4K-5K resolution in a laptop are awesome, but where are the external screens of similar resolutions, that don't cost like a car? Nowhere in sight. MOST you can have nowadays in a inexpensive mass-produced desktop monitor is sub-120ppi (30" monitors have 2500x1600 resolution).

With all of the above, I see the demands "I need retina' display in a 14-15" laptop" no differently than "I need 60mp camera in a cellphone with sensor of regular size" or "I need 2400 dpi laser printer, 1200 isn't good enough". Purely marketing-inspired speak, "more is better". Except it's not. We need better screens, and larger screens, yes. But resolution just does not help in laptops (which are used differently than cellphones) after about 150ppi (and with subpixel smoothing it's more like 200+ ppi already).

So yeah, PLEASE, stop

 

Smart remark? Hmm.

Such keyboards are moveable, can be shifted left and right. You can always align the keyboard proper with the monitor and, at the same time, push the numpad to the extreme right, out of the way.

It's a matter of getting the right perspective. It's the off-centeredness of most 15" notebook keyboards that people are talking about.

Yeah.

I concur. It's the quality of the screens we're after. (But with the buffet mentality of the present time, I doubt that many people want to understand that.)

In general, though, there's no point to reasoning with Lenovo the bazaar about design: they basically just throw components together.

 

Yeah. It's not even buffet mentality, just amusing to see this marketing-inspired confusion between "more is better" / "changed for the sake of change" and "improved". Is keyboard with 500 tiny keys better than one with 80 normal sized ones? For some people the answer is apparently yes, especially if Apple ads say so

All I need is a decent mobile workstation, with 32GB RAM, capable of running W2008/W2012, drive 3 monitors when docked, and have a reasonable size, enough bays to put SSD drives into, few hours of battery life and the screen resolution/size so some work can be done while away from the office and monitors. In the office, I want to have Trackpoint and exactly the same keyboard layout as on the desk. It may be a crazy layout, I can adjust, but it has to be the same on external keyboard and on the laptop, as I need to be able to press keyboard shortcuts w/o looking. Not much to ask it seems, but with Lenovo it's a roller coaster:

- W520 + FHD + Thinkpad USB keyboard. Great screen, great price, great everything except can only drive 2 external screens, have to use the USB adapter for the 3rd. Thinkpad USB Keyboard with Trackpoint matches the laptop layout exactly. Powered eSATA, so can drive mSATA + 3 drives when mobile and 4 when in the office, at 300MB/sec.

- W530 released. Woohoo, all is further improved, Optimus got fixed, can drive 4 monitors even. Oh, no way to attach a fast external drive, and the keyboard layout is totally destroyed! Worse, there is no matching USB keyboard anymore.

- Half year later, Lenovo finally produces an updated keyboard, and USB, without Bluetooth (which is a no-go for running Windows Server). Woohoo! Batteries are chipped now, but I'm buying originals anyway. There is hope, I'm upgrading to W540, with Haswell, hopefully a brighter outdoor-usable display, perhaps touchscreen, DisplayPort 1.2 etc. Shut up and take my money, Lenovo!

- Half year later. This W540. Again, a unique keyboard with numpad, screen unusable at 100% (unless this 3K screen is an option) and without touch (because 'retina'!), weight is the same but drop in battery life!, no physical individual buttons for trackpoint/trackpad anymore, no screen latches, but for some reason Thunderbolt ( with about 3 peripheral devices available for it, at obscene prices ).

So it looks like W520 is going to manage another year

 

While you are correct about the lack of quality scaling in Windows, that doesn't mean that a "retina" class display is worthless. The default mode on a Mac is to pixel double the usual resolution, say 1440x900, so you end up with 2880x1800 pixels. Think of using four smaller pixels to display the single larger pixel you had on your non-retina monitor. It is far more legible and easier on the eyes.

If Windows 8.1 does even this pixel doubling, it will be a tremendous benefit to many people. If Windows 8.1 adds some of the other scaling modes similar to Mac, then it will be possible to have more "base" pixels scaled to the retina resolution, giving the users who need more screen real estate higher resolution, but at the cost of some amount of pixel quality, i.e. pixel doubling is quick, easy, and looks great. Using a non-integral scaling factor still looks good, but it takes some GPU resources and doesn't look as super clear as an integral scaling factor.

In general, as you mentioned, simply adding more pixels is not going to by itself make a display better. However, use those extra pixels intelligently and many good things are now possible that weren't possible before. Personally, I am never going to buy a laptop unless it has a pixel doubled retina type display. The improvement in quality is simply too large to ignore. This is why Dell, Lenovo and others are now supporting retina class displays. Not because they are simply keeping up with Apple in the megapixel wars. But because a retina display, when used in a non-native mode, is simply far clearer.

 

It does and does not. I have W8.1 RTM running at 200% scaling, and while there is "DPI virtualization" its not free of problems. The number of desktop apps that look worse, to the point of being unusable, at high dpi is comparable to the number of apps that look better. And the new feature with different DPIs on different screens (i.e. plug the laptop to external monitor and use both) is full of gotchas too.

"Simply far cleaner" is only when you look at screen from 20 cm distance. In normal position, with at least 70cm between the eyes and the laptop screen, very few adults will see ANY difference between 150ppi and 200+ ppi. Yes, it looks gadget-cool, but in day-to-day operation this is about as important as the looks of laptop bottom or orientation of "Thinkpad" logo on the screen. We are yet to see 4K screens on 4" smartphones too, equipped with 60mp cameras while keeping the same sensor size, because "more is better".

That said, I would absolutely love to have a pair of 27-30" with 4K resolution (same ~140ppi as FHD in 15.6"), but that is $20K++. Or to have a physically taller screen in the laptop (15.6", but with bezels reduced and extra physical height used). But 3K screen today in a Windows laptop is a degradation, not an improvement. It fixes nothing but breaks many things.

 

It's profoundly disappointing to hear that the enormous team Microsoft has working on Windows cannot implement high quality scaling. I'm sure they have a legacy problem in that older apps do not contain high resolution icons and other UI pieces. But Microsoft has severely fumbled the ball in getting developers ready for HiDPI Windows, focusing on all sorts of meaningless stuff instead.

Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever see taller screens on notebooks. Perhaps the only way this will happen is if 4:3 tablet computers become so omnipresent that notebook manufacturers are forced to go back to 4:3 panels, so tablet users won't feel the screen is squished. Maybe if tablet docking ends up being commonplace, we'd also see some larger 4:3 tablets that dock to keyboards/base units.

On the desktop, I agree -- it'd be great to see a 4K 27" monitor. Ideally, I'd like a 5K 27" monitor, basically a pixel-doubled version of the 27" 2560x1440 monitor that I use today. It will likely be Apple that puts this out first. Windows evolution seems to lag 2-3 years behind Apple.

At least on the research side, there are many positive values for HiDPI screens, no matter what the size. While most people cannot resolve very small differences, overall people find HiDPI screens more relaxing and peaceful compared to lower DPI screens. This likely means that the entire visual system isn't straining as much to read the screen. From a physics standpoint, there are limits on current screen designs/technologies which force some interesting tradeoffs. Samsung for example, to save battery life, added a clear sub-pixel to their LCD screens used for their new Galaxy Note 10.1 displays. You gain some brightness and power efficiency, but give up some clarity and color fidelity.

Technology is very iterative and true breakthroughs don't come very often. With today's CMOS sensors, used in many digital cameras, we cannot arbitrarily scale up the number of pixels without making some other changes as to how the data from the smaller pixels is handled. There is a trade-off between light capture per pixel and total signal. Yet we know that the human eye has far more "megapixels" than any camera today, somewhere around 576 megapixels. Keep in mind that they eye doesn't work the same way as a digital camera. But the problem with megapixels in cameras, screens, and such, today is that the current pixel technology is primitive, not that megapixels are inherently bad.

 

Ha, 4K 27" monitor would be perfect, anything beyond is just icing. As for pushing the pixels on such a display, nVidia and AMD should get their $hat together or Intel will take the whole cake. Haswell's iGPU performance/watt is impressive but not quite there...desktops should be leading the way on this front but there hasn't been much innovation in the merging of mobile and desktop.

Besides Sony's expensive VAIO Z with GPU side-dock from 2011 ( Sony VAIO Z Series (VPCZ216GX/L) review | The Verge), the lack of expansion is rather disappointing...even Apple has no solutions with Thunderbolt (and now the new Mac Pro desktop ). Why can't they coordinate a dock that works with at least one laptop from the X/T/W series? Especially now with higher resolutions on both internal displays and external monitors, plus advancing optics and HD video (the Galazy note 3 apparently records 4K video)... sell the dock separate from the laptop, include external storage/networking and, voila, goodbye desktop PC.

 

Its not Microsofts fault, it really are the developers who doesn´t improve their apps for scaling right. Blame them. Since Windows Vista, Windows is scaling-ready, and Windows 8.1 is a big step in the right direction.

 

I second this.

 

I second this as well. Most pro apps don't have the support or are even thinking about adding it within the next year. Apart from adobe, who probably was pressured from apple. As a pro user, a lot of the software we use are quite niche and dont simply have the resources to recode.

Retina displays only make sense for Apple computers right now since they have their own softwares that support it. Like aperture. If you are a pro photog and use aperture. You probably bought a macbook pro already.

 

This is just a big excuse for the incompetent morons at Microsoft. Instead of doing things that matter, like making it possible to use high quality displays, we get idiotic stuff like forcing the Metro start screen on desktop users. There are basically no competent executives who work at Microsoft other than Bill Gates.

Note that Microsoft has had about a *decade* to get their act together for high quality HiDPI displays, but hasn't. There is no excuse for this. Just recently Microsoft admitted that they had to throw away their existing half-baked lame HiDPI support and redo things the way Apple did it when they added "retina" support to OS X. So Microsoft basically had to fix a fundamental flaw in Windows. Obviously, external developers have nothing to do with this.

It is also useful to remember that there are far more professionals who use Windows than use Mac and a huge pent-up demand for HiDPI display support in the Windows community. Microsoft would rather waste ~$1B on a badly designed tablet than support their existing customers. If I didn't have to use Windows for work, I'd flush it down the drain.

 

The human eye has a resolution of ~576 megapixels. While the eye obviously doesn't work the same way as a camera sensor or a LCD screen, there is nothing inherently wrong with pushing up the resolution of sensors and screens. Sure there are compromises to be made along the way, but mostly because our technology is primitive compared to what nature can do.

So while the heat, power usage, and GPU requirements associated with HiDPI screens can be an issue, the megapixels themselves are not the issue. Same goes with camera sensors. There are limitations with CMOS-based designs, but that is due to the primitive technology. Being able to capture better pictures through using higher resolution sensors is a good thing.

In simple terms, these statements about more megapixels being bad are no different than someone saying decades ago that 640K memory would always be enough.

 

Same "competent" guy. (Gates is still clueless today.)

Regarding pixel density? It depends.

 

The real advantage of greater pixel density beyond a certain point is going to be the ability to double/triple/quadruple, etc. pixels showing the same image, thus making the image appear sharper. This is the same reason that a 6 megapixel image looks sharper than a 4 megapixel image, etc. However, you mentioned compromises, and those compromises are the reason that I personally do not see the value today in buying a 15" screen at anything higher than 1900x1080/1900x1200 or so. With digital cameras, the most important feature is the lens, so you can have a camera with higher megapixel count that still takes worse pictures because while you're getting a more detailed output, it's a more detailed output of an inferior image. With LCD screens, they only look their best when at exact ratios corresponding to the physical pixels displayed.

For most existing resolutions on notebooks, the pixel count on displays has dictated the workspace area, since most people are using their systems at 1:1 ratio (i.e. no scaling). When pixel count gets beyond a certain point that subjectively varies with each person, usability decreases with no scaling. People have to squint at their monitors to read anything. Comments such as "I don't see the benefit in any resolution over ____" are referencing this: the system usability would decrease with a higher resolution screen.

For screens that have more than this arbitrary number of pixels that is comfortable, software scaling techniques need to be used in order to reduce the apparent resolution down to something more manageable. While there has been progress made on this with OSX & Windows 8.1, there are still a number of problems users have with software that is not "optimized" for this type of use scenario. In other words, currently programs must be specifically built with pixel scaling in mind to be useful on highest-resolution screens, and most programs are not. While this situation is much improved in mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS, this is not the case with most desktop software. And I do not personally want to use a screen with a scaled resolution unless everything I use works well with it.

So people who comment that certain resolutions are too high are not saying there will never be a use for anything higher. They are actually stating that in the current state of technology, higher resolutions are not usable for them. Your last sentence makes it sound like anyone who doesn't want the highest resolution display possible is standing in the way of progress, when that's not true at all. They're waiting for better usability. The reason Apple's iPad did so well when it launched was not because it was the first tablet or was better than any of the other existing tablets in a technical capacity. It's because it offered a superior user interface for that type of device than what had been developed earlier. I'm all for super high resolutions when they scale consistently well. Until then, I'll stick with what I've got.

 

Well, the human eye (even ignoring its optical properties) does not have resolution anywhere comparable to that, whatever is the calculation method. Application of the logic used to come up with this number to electronics will produce any number of strange statements like "600dpi color printer is 60000dpi" or "640x480 display has a resolution of ~100 megapixels". Because such image can be scrolled through it, because at 120Hz refresh rate 640x480x3x120Hz > 100000, or the number of atoms in the screen is a huge number, or any other reason. Seriously though, the human eye is not a particularly good or precise optical instrument by todays standards, and even 150 years ago Hermann von Helmholtz was quoted saying that God was a poor optician, and a human eye could have been designed a lot better

But yes, theoretically there isn't anything wrong with high resolution of sensors and screens. But in practice, today, adding these beyond certain number does not anymore bring any noticeable improvement, yet does require far more serious compromises of other, more important, characteristics. Same with cameras, or printers, or anything really. There is nothing wrong with equipping laptops with 16TB of storage, for example, and these will come standard one day. Except that in todays mass-market implementation, 16TB in 4x4TB HDDs drives will produce a rather unwieldy laptop, defeating the purpose, and 99% of users have no use for this amount of storage anyway.

Microsoft has always supported scaling in the OS, starting from Windows 95 no less, and it works quite well, provided the application developers follow the guidelines and actually test their software in different dpi settings. Which they rather rarely did before Metro, because most desktop screens, for decades, have been hanging around 100ppi with very few exceptions (like IBM T221). And up to this day, maintaining a 4K resolution on external monitor at 60Hz really pushes the equipment (and modern 4K monitors either require multiple connections, or daisy-chain DisplayPort 1.2 etc).

As to "640K memory will be enough for everybody", some things are just attached to human properties. Keyboards have not changed all that much over the last 100+ years since typewriter invention, and IBM M keyboards from many decades ago are still regarded by many as best computer keyboards. Screen/print resolution can go up only so much either, our eyes have very real limits. There are many fundamental problems with current screens, starting from not being big enough in a given laptop bulk and ending with not being touchable, or having poor color reproduction, viewing angles, dynamic range, on-factory calibration and inadequate brightness (making their outdoor use problematic).

But too little resolution isn't simply a problem that needs solving: FHD at sub-15" screen positioned at 70cm from the eyes already goes beyond most human resolution abilities. Sure, Apple invented the problem, solved it somewhat, and used its marketing might to convince some people that it was the problem worth solving and over-solving (today we have 1080p screens in smartphones, even though Apple themselves stopped at sub-720p!). If boosting up resolution is free, or cheaper - sure thing. But if it has ANY ill effects, from an older apps not being usable, or power consumption growing by 10%, it's just not worth it.

Anyway, I wish Lenovo used more sensible approach, particularly in a mobile workstation. And rather than shaving the laptop height, or adding useless pixels, fixed something that needed fixing instead. For example, came up with innovative ideas how to put a more powerful GPU into 15" body. Or more storage. Or a 170W power supply that is compact. Or at least left alone things that were fine, like the keyboard or trackpoint or eSATA port.