New 2013 Lenovo Serial-/Machine-Number Nomenclature for Think-Products

Another thread with news about the 2013 Think-lineup (after this one: http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo/700739-new-thinkpads-rogue-oasis-santana.html):

Lenovo will change the Serial-Number and Machine-Number Nomenclature for the new 2013 Think-lineup; the current 7 character part-number will be replaced with a 10 character part number . For more details see: http://www.partnerinfo.lenovo.com/p...olkit/New-Lenovo-Part-Number-Nomenclature.pdf

But there are more infos in this PDF: There is also noted that the new nomenclature will start on 14th January 2013. This change will be exclusive for the Think-lineup (Idea will change in 2014), so the announcment of the new ThinkPad lineup will be in January. As noted at the end of the document, the GA (General Availability) of the new classic ThinkPads will be in March ("ThinkPad T431s: March 2013").

 

So. T431s. Not T440s. Hmmm....
-No major chassis revamp for Thinkpads? Or Asias being uber scared of 4?
-All those weird new Thinkpads (Rogue, etc) are codenames, or non-main models. We should expect a direct continuation of the standard X2xx, T4xx, etc. model lines?

 

Maybe T431 will be only a new chassic revamp, and new CPUs (Haswell) will follow at the end of the year (as T440). But this is just my speculation.

Or, maybe is T431 just a "codename", and it will carry some new name like Rogue etc. (like the ThinkPad Twist, which had a different name in the development progress, its name was S230u).

 

Probably they are just making some minor upgrades while waiting for Intel's Haswell in Q2 or Q3 2013. Then we should see a whole range of really new models, possibly with new nonsense (sigh) names...