T440s up on Lenovo website (IPS Screen, 1080p)

Hey guys, I had a question about invoice date. I spoke to a Lenovo rep and they said their price match policy is from the Invoice date not the order date. They said the Invoice date is the day it ships. Which I understand. Can anyone confirm. I ask because I was waiting until the weekend to order my T440s due to it being 21 days from Black Friday. However, the invoice/ship date price match policy is true, I will order today.

Anyone know?

 

kinda like paypal. i use it if i dont feel like entering my credit card info and making an account.

 

Oh, well I actually used a debit card so it's a little more confusing. I saw the same thing as you for a few days (my bank balance was lower) and now it's reverted and the transaction is gone. So I'm guessing it's something my bank did. Sadly none of my credit cards have a limit high enough for this :-(

And yeah, I just used it like PayPal because I didn't want to have to enter all my information again into Lenovo's site.

 

Thanks I figured it was this. I think there may also be a benefit in ordering through Amazon if your shipping address is different from your billing address. I think Lenovo said you have to call to make sure. I had that problem once. However, they are both addresses are the same. Good to know.

 

It is normal. Lenovo puts a temporary charge on your account and it will disappear but they will instantly charge you after it ships and before it reaches your house.

 

Oh OK, so they will charge it again when it ships? That's very reassuring, thanks!

Yeah, that does let you avoid that issue actually. In fact my billing and shipping address are different on Amazon but Lenovo only has my shipping address for both it seems (though I was kind or worried that this was maybe a problem).

Random thought: I thought that once this laptop came out and I had ordered it, I would have stopped checking this thread as much. Instead I think I started checking this thread twice as much! (yay for Tapatalk lol)

 

I got charged for my L440 a few days after it shipped. I will probably get charged for my T440s soon as it is in flight. I think the reason they do a temporary charge is to make sure you have enough funds before they actually build your laptop.

 

Yeah that does make sense, though I kind of wish they would just take my money at once lol. Can get confusing when budgeting and the like.

 

I wonder if any hardware hackery is possible to modify the way the clickpad responds?... sounds like a little less travel and a softer feel might make it more pleasant.

 

It's not as bad as I made it sound, but it does definitely have a lot of room for improvement/refinement IMO and is not in keeping with the generally solid build of the rest of the machine.

Not sure how it's attached, but I imagine some strategically-placed thin felt or tape might work wonders, even if only to damp the sound. I also worry that a single, large clickpad like that is not going to wear well and might get much sloppier as time goes by. Can any T431s owners comment on how the clickpad fairs with age?

 

Are you volunteering to be first? It's an excellent project.

 

Are we still talking ThinkPad build quality with the T440s? Still durable and rugged as the older models? I keep hearing that Lenovo is "downgrading ThinkPad build quality" to compete with the rMBP, but I can't help but think that this is fabricated?

 

People are saying build quality is better than before. As for ruggedness, there hasn't been enough time for owners to drop them, so we don't know yet...

 

All relative. Everyone has a different model or era of reference to what older is. And different definitions of ruggedness. And different judging criteria such as feelings of quality or durability what the laptop "survives."

And there so too many reasons why the T440s (and business laptops) is not "competing" with the rMBP. People say they hate Apple and Macbooks so much, but give them so much credit for everything. It's self defeating actually.

 

hi guys the T440s is now on the Australian website... ordering mine now!

 

Did you get the quad core L440? I am interested in your impressions on how loud it gets, how hot it gets, and of the screen. Thanks!

 

I think I can agree with this, mostly. I like the new TouchPad, but they could definitly still improve some thing. Outside of a better click sound, one nice idea for TrackPoint users would be to use a different paint for the red stripes for the left and right TrackPoint buttons. They maybe could invent a paint thats feelable, so that you know whne you are on the buttons. t would definitifly help some people to move to the new ThinkPads.

The ClickPad is designed similiar to the Spacebar. Thats why the sound of the Clicking sounds a bit like a Spacebar.

 

I've been following this thread from the beginning and was excited for the t440s but I was looking to order it from the Australian lenovo site yesterday but the base models price was a HUGE $1, 999AUD. I find cost very excessive for the specs, does the cost really justify the ends?

 

Unfortunately, now it's beeen bumped back to 11/11/13.

 

The T440s is now in my hands .

It is so thin and light... holy . It feels like it's so fragile because of the lack of weight.

In the mean time I'm in the process of installing Arch Linux.

 

not really, the prices for the new line up are kind of ridiculous, you should find a family or friend to that is going to the U.S. to pick you one up, 1900 USD is not worth it, lenovo has gone crazy thinking they are apple, they think since they can charge that much, so can they.

 

These prices in Australia are crazy. ThinkPads are even here more affordable, and they are more expensive here normally than in the USA.

 

I am confident it is from the ship date as well because I specifically asked multiple chat reps about it. I can also confirm that my warranty starts from the ship date not the order date based on their warranty portal. Further the order confirmation has the following small text.

"Lenovo accepts your order by 1) shipping the hardware product or making the software product available to you, or 2) providing the service. This email does not constitute Lenovo's acceptance of your order."

That said, I don't think Lenovo price matches coupons, others may know better but I was told the price match policy only compares your actual price (after coupons) to the new list price(not including coupons) which makes it kind of useless.

 

How did you get yours in Germany so early by the way? I am in Switzerland and can't seem to find it anywhere, but I need one ASAP since my X1 got stolen a few weeks back and I'm now on a crappy temporary machine. The ones on ok1.de don't have th i5 4300U so I'm a bit reluctant, but I know a bunch of people in Germany including students so if you know a site offering all lenovo options I'd be very glad to hear which. Otherwise I'll proceed to order on the US site as a fallback but it means a few more weeks waiting.

 

This makes alot of sense. However, I was thinking in stores if I were to come back in within 30 days with a coupon they would allow me to use it.
I think the trick is to talk with multiple people. I spoke with someone last night but will try again considering all you wrote.

Lenovo Rep: I will help you with the information.
Lenovo Rep: Yes, we have 21 days price protection and it starts from the day you placed the order.
ME: Okay. another agent told me it was the invoice date.
Lenovo Rep I apologize for that.
Lenovo Rep: The invoice date is for only the returns.
ME: okay. That makes sense.
Lenovo Rep: Returns must be initiated within 30 days of invoice date in order to be eligible.
Lenovo Rep: Thank you.

 

I ordered the following two items from Crucial: 8gb ram and a 240g ssd. The Samsung SSDs may have better performance, and Black Friday deals will probably discount these items, but I want to be done with this nonsense when my laptop arrives on Friday. (This also means I guess I won't be the guinea pig for using the m2 SDD along with the spinning HD.)

Amazon.com: Crucial Single 8GB DDR3 1600 MT/s (PC3-12800) Notebook Module, CT102464BF160B: Computers & Accessories
Amazon.com: Crucial M500 240GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal Solid State Drive CT240M500SSD1: Computers & Accessories

As an aside, what's the best way to go about getting windows onto the new drive? Can I torrent an ISO, put it on a flash drive and use the license key that (I assume) will come in the box or something?

 

Well, if there was truly a big price difference and they wouldn't price match, you could always order a 2nd laptop and return the first one.

 

I'm in the same boat as you. I even bought the same stick of RAM. I will be reusing my 256GB Samsung 840 though. The best way if you still want to maintain the original software would be to just make a recovery usb using Lenovo software. If you want a fresh install, you have to do some magic as the license key is built into the machine.

 

Nope. I just stuck with the i5. The i7-4700MQ sounded like a great upgrade for the performance/price but my brother didn't need that much performance. I can try to get the L440 to spin its fan at max and tell you how loud it gets.

 

I am pretty sure Australia has tariffs on it.

 

The reason I could think of for the large travel distance and noise is the same for mechanical keyboards. You get great feedback and they last a damn long time since they don't use rubber dome. I wonder if you have to fully depress the track pad to register a click.

 

Just wondering, would any of you here still considering getting an X230? The X240 really isn't an improvement (same res, ULV CPU, worse battery life, only 1 DIMM slot, etc.) but it could be competitive with the T440s. A completely maxed out X230 (besides RAM and HDD) is only about $1040 now compared to more like $1600 for a very well-specced T440s (also besides RAM and HDD). The i7-3520m (I believe) should still be faster than the i7-4600U, you have 2 DIMM slots on the X230, there are Trackpoint buttons, expresscard, and possibly better battery life. But you lose the Intel 4400, FHD screen and better touchpad. Do you think the new iGPU and mostly FHD screen is worth the jump?

 

Keep in mind these are Australian Dollars (AUD), not USD.

 

Naw. I would have payed $100 more to get the T440s a month ago But if I could order today instead of waiting until Friday (as it won't be processed until Monday) that would be nice. . If i return it on the 20th or 21st day to place a new order I would have to wait awhile to get it all to save $100 not worth it. But if I can save a $100 on Black Friday I will take it. (I am assuming 20% discount as opposed to the current 15% through Barnes & Noble,). I will just wait two days But. Friday at 12:01 am?.....lol I will be on that site ordering.

 

Just throwing this out there for all you people mentioning Black Friday - it's possible that Lenovo might wait until Cyber Monday to lower their prices.

 

Does anyone have an idea of how much Lenovo normally takes off for Black Frida/Cyber Monday? And would that discount be able to be combined with something like the B&N discount? I'm trying to find out how much it would be worth to wait until then. Someone on another forum basically said don't hold your breath for a discount on the new line, although they could've been speaking out of their azz.

 

If I recall correctly essentially what happened last year was that the Web discounts went up a bit, so eg. you would still use the Barnes and Noble discount, but instead of 15% it might be 20% or 25% if you're lucky. Though last year the highest discounts were for the W530 (I wanted one for a time but realized having a workstation laptop is somewhat pointless) and it was 28% with B&N but that was kind of old at the time and rather expensive without the discounts which were regularly pretty high compared to the other models.

My completely baseless guess is that the new series will probably see 18-22% discounts, probably not going as high as the older models but a bit higher than it is now. I'd be mildly surprised if it stayed at 15% for Black Friday, and very surprised if it went as high as 25%. That's just what I think anyway.

Oh, the other thing is that they had several topseller (pre-configured) models on a very steep sale each day (like close to 30% or above). I think I almost bought the W530 topseller configuration when it was a doorbuster but the thing with those is that you're stuck with whatever configuration they decide to sell, and it might just be a bunch of HD+ models for instance. And again with these B&N Gold would get you a slightly deeper discount.

Edit: OMG happy life, my ship date finally got bumped from 11/25 to 11/11, woot. Estimated delivery a week later . Almost makes up for the fact that I have an exam in 12 hours that I've been procrastinating studying for all day (and now it's 1am lol). Oh well, grades don't matter in grad school, right? I sure hope so anyway

 

just wondeing, when my t440s arrives - will the windows be 8.1? or 8?

 

my ship date has moved up from 11/28 to 11/11 with a delivery date of 11/18. i ordered 10/31.
my hope is that these dates are moved slightly forward too and i get this before next weekend.

and to the poster above me, it'll probably be 8.1 which is why they waited til after the release of 8.1 to announce these.

 

So I installed Arch Linux on my T440s. No problems with the installer. WiFi worked out of the box. Clickpad is broken as hell, but that may just be my distro. Trackpad is still enabled despite it being disabled in the BIOS. A workaround was made by setting MinSpeed/MaxSpeed to an absurd low speed such at 0.00000000001.

As there are not physical buttons, every click region has to be remapped, which I still have problems with.

And a big bummer for me is the battery. It can see both batteries but is only running off the internal battery.

Anyone who can fix this is very welcome to post it here .

 

Why don't you try* a "normal" distro (ubuntu, fedora, suse etc) and see if you have more luck... I can't imagine many people will be running Arch.

* I mean dual boot it for a day or so, for the benefit of the rest of us...

 

I was set on ordering a t440p as I thought that Thinkpads had good Linux support (the touchpad drivers for the HP that I am using now are terrible ) but seems like they are no different than other models...

Edit : Didnt see you mentioned Arch there

 

I don't feel like reformatting But I will keep trying. Trackpad issues must be the same as T431s, since it's same Clickpad.

EDIT: Battery may be working after all. let me fully charge it and check again.

 

I am having the exact same thought. The screen resolution on the X230 is of course pretty low, but other than that, it seems to me to compare very favorably to both the X240 and the T440s. It fits 16GB of RAM and has a substantially faster CPU. From what I can tell, Haswell does not really give that much longer battery life, and it also seems it'll be easier to install linux on the X230. It feels crazy to purchase last year's laptop, but it really looks very compelling to me.

 

The license key is as you say embedded into the BIOS. What that is supposed to mean is if you reinstall using any Win 8.1 Media it will automatically use your key (i.e it will not even show you the key entry screen). To be safe I would use the correct version 8.1\8.1Pro\8.1Enterprise etc.

 

You don't need to replace arch, just shrink your partition and make a small (say 8gb) root partition for Ubuntu and dual boot.

 

Most of the major Linux OS's have live CD's/DVD's, so it is not necessary to install anything on your system to try out a different distro.

 

Gave a quick look into elementary OS. It's using the old kernel from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Wifi did not work out of the box, but that is expected. Both battery were recognized but didn't show the total estimated time for both of them - only for the one it was discharging. There is no way I'm checking that . And it still ignored the Trackpad disable from the BIOS.

Either way... with Arch my discharge rate is around 4.22 W with wifi on, and about 6.5 W with some light usage. Max I have seen is 13 W.

 

Thanks for the updates on Linux battery life! I too am planning on putting Arch on this machine when I get it. It seems that with some light usage, this thing should get some pretty good battery life? I'm also curious as to what was running when it was draining at 13wh.

 

I'm curious, too. I had read in one of those sales Q&As that it'll still be windows 8.0 and we'll have to do the free upgrade to 8.1