MacBook Pro 2012 - a better Thinkpad?

Hah! Whatever it takes.

 

Yes, lots of people want cheap laptops. Asus, Samsung, Dell and even Ideapads are for them.

But there are also people who want good laptops who don't mind paying more. Thinkpads used to be an option but not anymore. Now, only the Apple RMBP and the Sony Z are legit options

Seriously, I don't mind if Lenovo diversifies the thinkpad line (as if there aren't enough models now) to broaden their consumer base.

What I want is that they retain the original thinkpad in a separate line meant for enthusiasts - that's where the RMBP stands. And don't forget that Apple is making more money year by year as well...

 

Lenovo used to do that. I recall a number of Thinkpad models selling for well over $2,000 back in the day. Now, they don't exist anymore.

 

This is very sad. To me the thinkpad closest to perfection was the X301, but the processing power was too weak for my purposes or else i would've stocked on it..

 

Thats not so easy. They would have to redesign the complete chassis to offer this upgrade option. This is far to expensive and their main target (business) would not pay the premium price.

Lenovo has not the money and not the costumers that Apple has.

Yes, because you can´t money with notebooks that cost over 2000$...

 

I wouldn't say they aren't an Option anymore. I am also not happy about the way the have become, but if you compare them to other crap you find at Best Buy or whatever (Acer etc.), you'll be happy they still exist.

There are always people who are willing to pay more, but if it's only a minority, it wouldn't gain Lenovo any Profit. In the end, it's all just about money anyway.

The main Buyers of ThinkPads are companies, and they don't really care about 16:10 and stuff like that. If it's cheap, reliable, has some good backup Software and an Ethernet Port (ThinkPads fit into that category), then it's a buy. Otherwise they would just go for similar Dells or HP's.

Yes, I really love the X301 too, and if they had continued it up to the X303 (2011), Sandy-Bridge would have really made a huge difference in processing power, while still staing very cool, even under heavy load Situations. Just add an ExpressCard slot and my perfect ThinkPad awaits. I wouldn't even have minded the average Screen. Res is OK and its bright. That's all I need.

 

As an optimistic person, I propose that we should focus our discussion on what lenovo should do as opposed to explaining why lenovo has failed to do (yet again)...

 

What are you talking about? Complete chassis redesign? The T/W510/520 configs have been offering the FHD 1920x1080 upgrade for $250. And orders have been placed.

Enough drama already.

Right.

 

If thinkpads lose their uniqueness, they'll ultimately lose to their cheaper competitors like Dell or HP. I would say that the 2010/11 TPs are still better than the rest, but the 2012 ones are not.

 

Putting a 16:10 display in ThinkPads as an option would require a complete redesign of the chassis.

Ok: Lenovo should not follow Apple to a Retina display IMHO.

 

I'm not sure about that. Lenovo 15" laptops have a huge bezel, and a 15" 16:10 panel would probably fit there.

Perhaps the camera must go. But somehow it's possible now to offer X200 series with a choice 3x3 WiFi antenna no camera, and 2x2 with camera. Far more subtle and less useful option tbh.

 

No, they are not huge enough.

 

I don't think so. Maybe it is necessary for the L420/L520 due to the Speakers, but those HUUGE Bezels on the top and bottom of the X220/T420 etc. provide more than enough space for a 16:10 Display. But that Dream has died, fallen into crumbs and been buried forever anyway.

I advise anyone who can't bare 16:9 to get an X200/201 or T410 while they are still available in masses. Better get a huge stock of parts too.

 

They are only huge enough on the 14" T, nowhere else. There is some stuff under these bezels.

And if you would put a 16:10 Display in the existing chassis, you would get HUUGE bezels on the right and on the left, which would look just weird.

 

I guess it doesn't matter anyway. It is extremely unlikely that we'll ever see 16:10 in a ThinkPad again, so if you aren't satisfied with 16:9 I can only repeat myself: Get an X200 or T410!

 

RMBP is meant for enthusiasts of Apple design and technology in 15.4" form factor precisely. It's a nice laptop, the ultimate device to run OS X (especially as Apple decided to let their 17" and Mac Pros to die), but everything else in there is achieved by other notebooks, from Asus to Sony, just not as well marketed.

W/T5xx are still very decent laptops for business purposes. Because of the dock and multiple monitor support and connectivity and all the other features. Yes, they've cut an inch from height, and added it to the width compared to T60, and keyboard layout changes are undesirable for many, but otherwise not much is different. Just much more powerful and lives on battery longer. More pixels, compared to 1440x1050 too.

 

Great advice. Hanging on to my X201 and T410.

 

Kaso, I cannot agree any more. I always hope that people be truthful and clear when addressing their customers and tell them how they do business. This way, they will be able to avoid unhappy customers and just live in peace with fanboys or those who just do not care with anything in the world (I know many of them). But unfortunately, Lenovo does not care because people are buying and do not care....

 

uh, chassis design to accomodate 16:10 instead of 16:9

 

Why not just read what an employee of Lenovo itself wrote about the shift to 16:9?

Display Ratio Change (again) - Perspectives - Lenovo Blogs

Either way, it's kinda a moot point. Unless things change dramatically, I don't think we're gonna see the return of 4:3 or 16:10... whatever the reason.

 

FYI

The 15" 4:3 ratio T60p was 13 x 10
The 15.4" 16:10 ratio W500 was 14.1 x 10
The 15.4" 16:10 ratio Retina MBP is 14.13 x 9.73
The 15.6" 16:9 ratio W530 is 14.68 x 9.65

 

Thanks, saw that a while back. The drama still makes me sob:

The logic of vertical integration is kinda forced.

Okay, then, provide better screens at 16:9. Any more blog post?

 

Well, I'm sure employees of Apple could have written something too.

AFAIR, Lenovo sells in the ballpark of 50 millions PC a year. Apple sells less than 15 (and most of those are 13", 15" and 17" are not very popular).

So I find it really hard to believe that Lenovo does not have the power to demand what they want from supplier, and it's the panel suppliers, or weather, or whatever is to blame.

They didn't want to do it, w/o competition pushing them to higher-resolution quality panels. It did get them to insert 12.5" IPS panels into X230. Asus, and Sony, and Samsung, and now Apple, started to put some decent panel into notebooks. If HP or Dell decide to follow, things may change very rapidly.

 

Microsoft did listen to Matt. The start button is no longer in the top portion of the screen when the taskbar is in a vertical orientation. Oh wait...

 

Worse, now, 17! years after release of Windows 95, there are still plenty of apps that don't work correctly when the taskbar is not at the bottom. Why does the taskbar default to the bottom of the screen? - The Old New Thing - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

 

Honestly, the only thing that MBP has on ThinkPads is their 16:10 ratio.. i would love to have that on my t520...

 

The original Macintosh screen had the "menu bar" with the "drop-down menus" at the top of the screen. Microsoft copied that (and a lot of other things, like the event loop). In fact, Apple copied the "menu bar" design of UCSD Pascal.

Anyway...

 

I don't know about Apple's numbers, but I'm pretty certain that Lenovo doesn't sell 50 million ThinkPads per year.

 

Not just ThinkPads, their entire brand, Idea, Essential, desktops, etc.

 

I doubt it was copied (at least not from Macintosh), as the taskbar never was a menu replacement. Menus have always been the part of the application window in Windows, since 1.0.

Taskbar was a replacement of Windows 3.11 Program Manager, and early builds looked quite different too Why do some people call the taskbar the "tray"? - The Old New Thing - Site Home - MSDN Blogs .

 

The original (circa 1984) Macintosh's "menu bar" is not meant for "application menus" alone, but more like for context-dependent "system commands" together with access to "applets." Later came the application dock.

 

The whole dropdown menu thing may be from Mac (or borrowed from somewhere else), but taskbar is much later invention.

In the days of Windows 3 there were plenty of 3rd party launchers and switchers, as the "program manager" was inconvenient. I used something with little tabs and nice GUI, can't recall the name now. So Microsoft had plenty of inspiration sources for the taskbar.

 

I don't look at this thread for half a day and it doubles in size...

X220/X230 IPS?

If they think enough people will pay for something, it will be an option. It seems like Thinkpad buyers aren't willing to pay more than $50 more for IPS, or aren't willing to pay for IPS on non ultraportables where IPS is less useful.

It's the customers to blame. It costs money for both Lenovo and Apple to demand special stuff from suppliers, but the difference is that Apple has a loyal army that will buy the products at the increased cost. Lenovo doesn't have that kind of following. If its an option, and it's priced too expensive, Lenovo can't sell the upgrade, and loses money. If its forced, the price increase will be felt by everyone, pushing people to buy Latitudes or Elitebooks instead of Thinkpads, and Lenovo loses money.

I don't think it was competition. It's buyer demand. Enough people would pay $50 for an IPS panel that Lenovo felt it was worth the risk demanding IPS 12.5 inch panels from their suppliers.

Fixed

Thinkpads are still better quality and consumer crap, because businesses demand more out of notebooks than average joes do. But businesses aren't willing to pay more for what they don't need.

No corporation issues every employee a Sony Z. The Sony Z and RMBP are cost no object products for people willing to pay for low volume high price halo machines.

I would like to point out that:
1. Thinkpads have gained ground against Latitudes and EliteBooks, not lost it.
2. Neither HP, Dell, or Lenovo is doing a business notebook chassis refresh this year. Almost all the comparisons between E6220/X220/2560p, etc hold true for E6230/X230/2570p, etc since they are all pretty much the same laptop with SNB swapped out for IVB. If the 2011 Thinkpads were better, why aren't the 2012 ones when there really not much have changed. (except the keyboard, but that was due to popular demand from survey of customers and users, and apparently enthusiasts in Japan)
3. Thinkpads are cheaper than EliteBooks and Latitudes. Probably why point 1 is true.

You have a really weird taste in keyboards then. Most reviewers think the X1 keyboard was a huge improvement over the traditional. Most users like the X1 keyboard better according to a survey by Lenovo as well.

 

I am soo doing this Monday.

 

oh god this is awesome. useless, but so awesome.

 

Windows 8 sucks! I am gonna stick to Windows 7 as I see no difference or even worse confusing stuff. I have been working on the release preview version for a while and I do not like it. I now understand why they are offering the upgrade for $14.99 to push it forward. When I compare it to the Mountain Lion, I CRY!

 

The PC guys used to say exactly the same thing about the Macintosh in 1984. Proportional fonts? Awesome, but useless. Overlapping windows? Full-screen editing of composite documents? Useless, but so awesome.

 

Here we go again.

The Windows 8 Release Preview (RP) is faster than Windows 7 on every machine I have tried it on so far. I have created a quicklaunch bar with all of my legacy Windows 7 applications and have been using it full time for a week now.

I am not having any major issues with the RP and nearly everything I do is a major step forward. I/O and files copies are MUCH faster than Windows 7. Hyper-V is working well for me.

So I don't agree. It doesn't suck.

 

Well, customers are easy to blame.

While Lenovo has no such great vendor lock in as its own OS (they tried, with Android, not very successfully so far), they do have a loyal army too. Big accounts that standartize on Lenovo laptops, and have a fleet of 5000 of them, won't go and buy HP the next round, merely because they cost $10 less a piece.

Compared to the display options, it costs incomparably more to design and produce flagship devices like X1 or T430s, that are unlikely to end up in hands of Doris from accounting. Give it to some management, who'll be using it as a office/typewriter mainly, and he'll notice the screen and its difference from iPhone's screen in his very pocket, and from the iPad, and may actually start pushing things around, shake the system with BYOD etc. etc.

Lenovo offers 4 wireless cards as options that require different antennas etc. Quite a complexity. Yet screens are plain ugly in all millions of 14" Thinkpads sold every year, for many generations, with 12" and 15" at least having a partial way out (and a very expensive one, in 15" case, even though it's still TN at the end, and not the Dreamcolor HPs have).

Okay, may be 16:10 is not worth it. Why can't be another option of 14" premium screen with 1600:900? Why can't be an option of 12" with the same resolution, or even FHD, if Asus & Sony & Co, while not having access to these huge corporate accounts, manage to make it happen?

Citing numbers like "15000 orders" that are needed to make get an additional panel option, it's very hard to believe that Lenovo wouldn't manage to sell these, or if they wouldn't, there would be a huge loss.

 

Let's bow to the Lenovo god and blame either the ignorant customers or the incompetent suppliers.

Let's bow to the proliferating number of products and the overwhelming number of per-product options. Great focus! Great clarity! Great discipline! Great power in numbers!

 

I know this is subjective, but I do not think it is faster. Also, it has been restarting on its own multiple times a day and I do not know the reason for that. In addition, the display driver stopped responding a couple of times in a week. Finally, I do not like its layout and how things are organized and I do prefer the classic Windows 7 interface (not that I am not adaptive to change as i have been working on Windows since Windows 3.x). One more thing, Microsoft though for a moment that they are Apple and try to do 'apps' style and link it to your MSN account but I do not see it working for me. Actually, I try to find any Mac interface that can work on PC to make my life easier if I can such as iCloud and Mac Calender.

Kaso, I agree with you that ignorant and also 'careless' customers are to be blamed but Lenovo also is to be blamed because they get what they pay for. Apple would kick the a.. of the supplier if they do not provide exactly what they want in the time frame they want it. Suppliers especially from the Asian part of the world can provide you any quality you want.

 

That isn't my experience on the W510 or T420.

 

@pchome: I was being sarcastic.

 

Looks fantastic! I'd have to see it in person, but I would think it'd be more than usable at either 125% or 150%.

 

But Metro < Start Menu!

 

I went to the Apple store near my home this morning and spent 45 minutes on it looking at the scaling, color, brightness, zoom, power management, Office for Mac, and a number of other apps.

They have the Retina MBP's in the worst possible location of the store. They were all on the first table of the store in the front in nearly direct sunlight. Extremely bright conditions. So the glare on the screen was at nearly maximum terrible conditions and the sunlight was also washing out the screen some. Even under those conditions it still looked gorgeous.

I flipped it up to scaled 1920x1200 and moved the dock to the right side of the screen. Using apps with 1200 pixels of vertical resolution again was nice. 1680x1050 is really easy on the eyes. Zooming websites with Safari is easily done. Some of the other applications are going to need some tweaks to really take advantage of the actual real estate. I suppose that is why Apple hasn't exposed 2880x1800 through the UI yet. I think they should expose the higher resolutions.

My original plan was to run Fusion and a Windows VM. But after seeing Anand's test, I will definitely be testing native execution of Windows 8. You know, that sucky OS on this sucky notebook.

 

and I was being realistic

 

How exactly is running Windows at a resolution/scaling that is too small for you to see anything going to ever be useful?

Of course there are buy Thinkpad joints, that might be enough of a loyal army for a $10 increase in price, it isn't even enough of a loyal army for a forced $50 increase in price, else IPS X220/X230 would have been standard. Also, Lenovo wants to attract companies to switch to Thinkpad, and having the cheapest of the big three business notebooks helps with that a lot probably. A lot of their initiatives to attract more companies to Thinkpad also deal with reducing total cost like providing imaging services that are cheaper/more efficient/more reliable than the buyers can do in house.

It doesn't matter how much it costs, it matters that that cost is returned and then some. The T4x0s series makes money. Lenovo thinks that, other than for the X2x0 IPS panel, IPS display options will lose money. At least for now. If big IPS panels or 4:3 panels become more normal thus cheaper, I think it would pass through a critical point between red and black and Lenovo will offer them.

Their customers demand certain wireless cards in certain configurations, thus Lenovo follows their orders and gives them what they want. Said customers would prefer to save a hundred bucks per machine instead of getting nice screens, thus Lenovo doesn't provide nice screens. Of course there is hope, as at least a significant part of said customers are willing to pay for the $50 IPS X2x0 upgrade.

15k at what price? 15k is just the bare minimum for a custom panel order at whatever cost. Would you be willing to pay an extra $1000 for a IVB 4:3 T430? $5k? $10k?

When did I say that? More like Let's bow to the capitalism market god and blame the customers with a lot of money that don't want what we want and the suppliers and manufacturers that listen to them.

I'm not saying I like these decisions by Lenovo. I just acknowledge the fact that they are good decisions from a business standpoint. I would pay a good $250 for 1600x900 panel in my X220, there just aren't enough people like me to get the cost of such an option down to $250, thus it isn't reasonable to expect the option. Just quietly ask and hope there are enough people asking.

Full resolution can be utilized by Fullscreen apps I think.

As for whether Apple should expose things that might not function perfectly, like full resolution to normal apps. Their brand is built on putting look and feel first, if something doesn't work perfect, Apple is shy about letting it be seen at all unless they really have to. They held back copy paste on iOS until it worked just right and not being able to copy paste is much more important than not being able to use the laptop at a resolution that requires a magnifying glass.

 

user on macrumors claiming the new RMBP is laggy and the graphics cards cannot handle the high res. even forcing the discrete gfx

New Macbook Pro (Retina) Laggy - MacRumors Forums

 

Most reviewers favoured the 16:9 ratio when it came out. Most reviewers welcomed new products to fuel consumerism. Most reviewers received free laptops from lenovo. Most customers haven't tried a real thinkpad yet found the new chiclet to be better than HPs or Asus.

But you're right. Thinkpads are getting more 'consumerized' and that helps with sales. Don't forget that Dells are more popular than Lenovos and if that's the direction you'd want Thinkpads to go, fair enough. But for me I'll be moving away from the consumer grade thinkpads for something better. After all, not all corporations can afford their employees a Vaio Z, but I can

You're probably right. Lenovo's not gonna change... So I'm gonna change... to the RMBP this time

And the Lenovo blog, I think it's for puerile individuals who believe whatever big corps tell them who will then spend hours on forums justifying their cost-cutting policies. Great strategy for Lenovo.

Are you an engineer? Do you work in laptop designs? If no your assertion is unconvincing. From a common sense point of view, the plastic rim below and above my T420s is sufficient to fit a 16:10 or even a a 4:3 screen. Yes, if would require minor amendments, but it's not a complete revamp.