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

My dad and I ordered a T440s on 12/8. His is an i5-4300u with FHD Touchscreen and mine is an i7-4600u with Non-Touch FHD. Otherwise they were identical. My dad got the 5% discount email, but I didn't even though we both have the same ship dates of 12/17 and arrival dates of 12/24. Odd why he got it and not me...

 

I ordered my T440p on October 30, it shipped on November 5th, and I received it on November 11th. I'm in Washington state, USA.

Timeframes like mine is how it should be... But they're so much busier now.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

Yes it is perfectly usable at 100% and it is very sharp. No issues reading small text, in fact it doesn't look much smaller than, let's say an ipad retina. The screen would be a joy to look at if it weren't affected by the terrible backlight bleeding.

 

Anybody in the U.S. try buying one of these from another country to get the GT 730M?

 

Hello guys. I have a T440s that I ordered with 3G/WWAN, 500GB Hard Drive and a 16GB mSata/M.2 SSD. If you are like me, wondering where the hell did Lenovo hide the mSata/M.2 Slot with the SDD, I'm happy to report that I found it: it's under the smart card reader. Just follow the instructions on the official Hardware Maintenance Manual to remove the Smart Card Bezel, and you'll find the SSD under there (my clue was the gray cable with "NGFF" indicating that there could be an M.2 slot somewhere in the area). I have just replaced it with a 128GB M.2 from MyDigitalSSD and I am going to use it as a boot drive.

 

Is it possible to keep the cache drive and put the m.2 SSD in the third slot and boot from there?

 

Unless I am mistaken, on my machine the slots are used by: Wifi, 3GModem, and the M.2 SSD. I guess if you don't have a 3G modem you might be able to use that slot with an SSD instead. My setup consists in a regular SSD (500GB with Linux on it) that replaces the 500GB Hard Drive that came with the laptop, plus the MyDigitalSSD 128GB M.2 which is definitely slower at 250MB/s over the M.2 slot, on which I chose to install Windows 8. At boot time I press Enter/F12 to select which drive to boot as needed. If you are looking for more storage, it's more price effective to get a 1TB SSD from Samsung, you'll get both speed and storage for a better price by gigabyte.

 

I went the 1tb SSD route and its working great. I'm really liking this machine. Only thing I would change is a less "clacky" touchpad. Otherwise its perfect.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 using Tapatalk Pro

 

Lenovo finally got in contact with. My order was delayed because of a shortage of the 8gb RAM module used in the 12gb configuration. They are going to follow up on that and have escalated my order at the factory and with the shipment. Hopfully this all actually means something, and I wont be waiting till January 10 for something I ordered at the end of November...

 

Unbelievable! That's the last thing I'd expect to be in short supply.

 

I ordered mine on 8 December, but nowhere is stated any expected delivery date. I'm using the European (The Netherlands) tracking/my orders from a third party country. Any other way to find out? or i just have to email customer support

 

Same here from Sweden.
Ordered 9th of December, no info about shipping dates. I mailed them via their website Friday the 13th in morning, no answer yet...

 

Mine is going back. The display issue has gotten even worse in just a few days, there really is something wrong with the glue they used (or lack of?). There are new reports of the same issue every day so it's definitely not an isolated case.

 

For those still waiting, do you know if Lenovo keeps one single hold in your credit card with the full price, or chunks?
I didn't get a full refund after cancelling, trying to contact them and my bank.
I wonder if, with the huge amount of laptops, their quality will decrease.

 

More and more folks are reporting unacceptable delays on their T440s shipment in this thread on the official Lenovo forums:

ThinkPad T series shipping thread - 2013 edition - Lenovo Community

I dont know whether Lenovo staff actually monitors the forums or whether it would make any difference, but I would suggest that people who have had their shipments delayed to post their timelines on the official thread. At worst it would be a waste of 30 seconds of your life that you would never get back. At best, they might act upon the customer outrage and do something about it.

 

IT SHIPPED! (And a day EARLY no less!)

Just an update, I received an email this morning that my laptop shipped at 7am PST this morning and my original ship date was 12/17. One day early AND I had no delays or set backs. 12/17 has been my ESD all along since ordering on Sunday evening of 12/8. Shows estimated delivery date of 12/19 (which was updated from 12/24)

My dad who ordered 10 minutes after me, still shows as shipping on 12/17 and he received the 5% off delay email... I didn't. The main differences between our machines are he got a FHD Touch screen (I got FHD Non) and he got the i5-4300u CPU, (I got the i7-4600u).

Here is my config:

Status

Shipped

20AQCTO1WW

ThinkPad T440s

Estimated Ship Date: 2013/12/17

Estimated Arrival Date: 2013/12/19

5PS0A14077
1YR Onsite + Accidental Damage Protection


Shipment Details

System Details

Total memory 4GB PC3-12800 4GBBS+0DIMM
Hard drive 500GB HDD 7200rpm
Battery 3cell LiPolymer 23.2Wh Front
WiFi wireless LAN adapters Intel 7260 BT ACBGN
Wireless WAN accessories MBL BB upgradable, future use
AC Adapter and Power Cord 45W AC Adpt2 US (2pin)
Accessible Optimized Preload NONE
Assistant Voice Recognition NONE
Battery 2 3cell LiPolymer 23.2Wh Rear
Camera 720p HD Camera
Display Panel T440s 14.0FHD WWAN
ITC - Drop in Box NONE
ITC - Enhanced Service NONE
ITC - Harddrive Encryption NONE
ITC - Solution using SmartImg NONE
ITC - Vpro Provisioning (VPRO) NONE
ITC - Who Created The Image NONE
Keyboard Language KYB (Backlit) US English
Keyboard Patch NONE
Language Interface Packs NONE
Microsoft Office NONE
Microsoft Windows 7 XP Mode NONE
Nok Nok Labs client software NONE
Pointing device T440s FPR,dock
Preload Language W8 64 English
Preload OS Windows 8 64
Preload Type Standard Image
Processor Intel Core i7-4600U on MB
Protection Services NONE
Publication Language Pub; US English
Recovery Media NONE
SIM Card for WWAN 2 NONE
Security Chip 2 Security Chip Enabled
Selectable Warranty 1 Year Depot or Carry-in
Shipping Country USA
Software Application NONE
Storage Adapter No M.2
System Unit T440s Intel i7 vPro1 4GB
System expansion slots: Smart Card Reader

 

Interesting. I ordered the exact same configuration as yours on 12/7. Mine's been delayed to 12/25 and I received the 5% email. Lenovo's ordering system just seems so random. Did you put in a rep ID for your order? I was told that it might speed up the processing.

 

In my case, they apologized for the delay and offered a 5% discount if it does not arrive
by Xmas. That seems OK to me.

 

Yeah, I have no clue what the deal is. Hope I don't get the shoddy left over parts that have been causing issues, haha. I didn't put any rep ID in on my order, I went straight through the Internet. I did order through the Barnes and Noble discount site though, and I ordered the 1 Year On-Site service along with the Ultra Dock. I wonder if any of those 3 things put my order higher in the que? Like maybe the higher cost orders went out first, or those that had accessories got their orders shipped first. I know it makes zero sense, but it seems so does Lenovo's shipping process. At this point anything theory is worth a shot.

 

Anyone get the 5% email but also waiting for the order to ship/invoice to be made to submit a price match?
If I get the 5% back I will save $78 (total $1490 instead of the current $1568.37).
If I get the price match I will save $50 (total $1518.15). I want both but not sure what in order it can done.
The 5% late shipping "discount" would put the laptop at less than the price match image that I have = $1490 vs $1515. So I wasn't sure if I should just be thankful if my laptop ships late I get the 5%. But I wanted the price matched price then 5% off of that for a total savings of $126. for a total $1442.24 not including tax.
What do you think realistically vs optimistically?

 

Yeah, I feel like one of the proverbial blind men in the elephant story. Mine was also bought through the B&N site, without a rep ID but with 3-yr depot warranty. No dock or any other accessories. I originally ordered on Black Friday. Then had to cancel once due to a configuration change the next day. Cancelled the second order when they had the 2-day sale and wouldn't price match BF prices. Then discovered the rep who supposedly cancelled my first order never did, despite sending me an email saying he had done so and me emailing back to confirm 2 days later. Only found out it was still active when I got a shipping delay notification. Overall it's been way too time consuming. If I had known it would be this much trouble, I would've gone with something else (13.3 MBPr) weeks ago. At this point I just hope it doesn't have any dealbreakers in terms of defects when it finally gets here. I'm really starting to understand why Apple is doing so well compared to the PC guys.

 

I guess I'll be moving to Apple as soon as I get the cancellation confirmation.
(WIll try to find a t440s in store, but highly doubt I'll with the specs I'd like).

 

Amen to that Slightly less configuration options with Macbooks but they all ship within 24 hours. Even Dell's M3800m, which is arguably *less* configurable than a 15" MBP, is having long shipping delays.

When I helped my GF buy a new Macbook Air the other week it was a revelation. Go online, configure options, click order, pick up in local store two days later. Simple.

Compare that to the process of buying a T440p last month: I first had to wait for Lenovo to fix its website so I didn't have to pay $30 extra for Norton (after spending 20 minutes on the phone to try and get around it), I then canceled one order when Lenovo offered a new temporary coupon, I then re-ordered and saw the estimated shipping date immediately jump 10 days, then a few weeks later I get the shipping date bumped again to Dec. 24. And still I wait, totally unsure when my computer might actually ship (the 24th? tomorrow? Who knows?!) and nervous about planning any holiday trips for fear of missing a delivery.

Every time I have to deal with WinPC companies I quickly realize why they're generally doing so badly. They're so busy inventing new machines and chasing their own tails that they can't get the basics right (build quality, performance, customer service).

 

I hear you guys. It seems so strange to me that no other PC manufacturer can announce and deliver products to market quite like Apple. You'd think after all these years someone would learn. Actually, if there is one company that's close, it's Sony (The Apple of the PC world). I've ordered and custom built items through their site before over the past several years and they are seamless and fast. Unfortunately, I need something with a great keyboard as I'm a writer, and the new Apple & Sony keyboards are horrid in my opinion.

While I feel for everyone in this thread, I guess my experience with Lenovo thus far has been pleasant. I ordered exactly 7 days ago, and in about 5 business days my custom item was shipped. My dad found out his is shipping tomorrow so his was done in 6 business days, plus we get free 2 days shipping.

Not sure what happened with many of your orders, but Id be just as frustrated, if not more so if I was in your shoes as well. I will let you know how the item arrives once I get it and let you all know of quality issues or defects.

 

Yeah, I would really appreciate hearing your impressions, since yours would presumably be built in the post BF batch. I wonder if they're tweaking QC as they hear about issues or if it's just "ship'em all and deal later." I understand where the PC makers are coming from. For a lot of them, their bread and butter are the large orders from businesses. Us individual consumers are just a small slice of the pie for them, so they're not really optimized to deal with us. Still, understanding this doesn't make it any less frustrating. Ironically, the PC is now a lot less "personal" than most other devices. And in the future, with most software becoming platform agnostic, it's going to be harder to compete if you don't cater to the individuals who use your devices, because they can choose almost any device and still do their jobs. I thought Lenovo knew this since they seem fairly determined to compete with Apple and Samsung on the consumer side, but my experience and those of a lot of people on this forum show that they still have a long way to go. I hope they get there, because I've always been a fan of their engineering and quality.

 

That is unbelievably fast. I also don't understand how there can be such a difference between your and others orders. I was happy when mine shipped after 20 days of waiting and being in Germany I didn't even have an estimated ship date. You just sit there watching the order status not knowing if it will ship in a second or a month. Anyway, I'll write about any issues as well (delivery is tomorrow).

 

I received shipping notice, UPS label created but nothing further yet. Ordered 12/16, original ship date was 12/17 which moved to 12/24 and then shipped today.

 

the QC has been horrific. as it is, there's numerous design flaws with it (even if you do get a 'good' one).

this has been a disastrous release by Lenovo thus far, they've lost a ton of customers.

 

For me it took over 2 days from the moment the label was created until UPS actually got the package (in Shanghai).

 

I'm hoping this is mainly the kind of teething problems that any new product can have. Some products may have tricky assembly issues that take a little while for the factory to figure out. After they figure it out though, they can produce them quite reliably. We won't know if these flaws are fundamental or not until a bit later. Obviously we expect better of Thinkpads, but it's also not unusual to have a handful or even a few dozen bad examples out of what must be at least many thousands sold so far. And no production process will be 100% flawless, you can even find horror stories with Apple hardware. Maybe I'm just unreasonably hopeful since I have one on order, but it's also more likely for dissatisfied users to post than those without problems, so there's likely a reporting bias on forums. I do think it's important to give them the feedback on all these issues, just to make sure they maintain their standards. I will definitely post my experience once I get mine, and will not hesitate to return it if it's not up to snuff. If I'm going to live with a machine for 3 to 5 years, I won't settle for something that's poorly made.

 

That order date is a typo, surely?

 

Thanks.

Oops. Order date was 12/6.

 

Perhaps others have mentioned this, but it's baffling that Lenovo doesn't have some pre-configured, ready-to-ship models for direct purchase on their website. I just don't know how small businesses make a commitment to this brand when they can't depend on timely (let alone fast) delivery of product. Inventory/availability of pre-configured units through third party vendors is dodgy at best and usually overpriced. Lenovo seemingly doesn't care about leaving money on the table and losing the need-it-now market to competitors.

 

After reading some of the posts here that talked about getting a deal from haggling on the phone, I tried it twice. I guess I don't know the magic words or something, but each time I asked about additional discounts or if they can do any better on price, I got a very firm "that's the best price we have right now." Got the same thing from a chat session as well. I also was told I couldn't stack any offers, unlike the report from some other posters here. So I don't know if you have to know exactly what to say or have to find a special rep that's willing to deal, but I'm certainly not optimistic. Good luck to you though, hope you get a great price. For me, even though the T440s ended up being around $700 less than the Macbook Pro I would have gotten instead (would need a maxed out one to dual boot), I think the time I've spent on it is worth several times the savings. If I wasn't such a computer geek to start with, I definitely would've hated the process.

 

I know, right? I have a 5-year old Macbook, the first unibody that Apple made. Still works great, just a bit slow now when compiling code. Although it's still fast enough for everything else after the 8Gb of RAM and SSD that I put in. They are still using essentially the same chassis and manufacturing process. How many different body styles has Lenovo gone through with the flagship ThinkPad in the same time frame I wonder? I like the variety and innovation to some extent, but there's also definitely less polish and optimization that can go into a model if it's life expectancy is only 12 to 18 months versus 3 to 5 years. I guess PC makers always have this need to "differentiate" themselves from each other, which drives them to make lots of superficial changes more frequently.

 

demand forecasting has become much tougher for all PC OEMs, as laptop sales have been declining rapidly across the industry for years now. because of that, OEMs have taken a far more conservative approach to their inventory levels.

yes, that makes it frustrating for the consumer, but OEMs actually save a ton of money by having smaller, infrequent production cycles.

the worst possible thing an electronics manufacturer can have is bloated inventory levels.

Apple is the gold standard of the supply chain, but they're a totally different animal due to their massive B&M retail presence, unique product line, and massive marketing budget.

 

It amazes me that no PC maker can mimic what Apple does so well -- design a good looking, robust machine, then just stick with the basic design and update the guts. Apparently no-one in Lenovo, Dell, HP et al bothered paying attention at business school when being taught the genius of Apple's branding.

The closest in the PC world is definitely Sony, but even they still fall into the trap of changing things too often and also still manage to come up with some real head-scratcher designs.

 

You need to learn that Lenovo is using a Just-In-Time inventory system and they make to order. They aren't going to be wasting money carrying inventory of finished products. Businesses usually don't need laptops asap as they most likely want their products to come with special software configurations. It is just consumers who want to have it asap. The cost of lost sales is far less than the cost of carrying inventory.

 

Even in a just-in-time system there has to be some demand projection and modeling. There's a lot of room for improvement in how Lenovo is doing it. Having too many products and too many configurations per product also makes it hard to optimize inventory and production. I guarantee they have excess inventory of some models right now while hot models like the T440s and Yoga 2 Pro are in short supply. Another problem is the apparent friction between their ordering system and manufacturing pipeline. Why can't configurations be changed once the order is placed, even if the shipping date is still more than a week away? There's no technical reason. They just can't be bothered because their business clients don't need it. But it's dangerous to only cater to businesses. Look at what happened to Dell once they decided they didn't care about the consumer market. Even when computers are bought in bulk by businesses, they are still used by individuals. In the end it's Joe and Jane Shmoe using your product. And whether they love it or hate it as an individual user is going to show up in your bottom line eventually.

 

Lenovo is going to continue doing what they're doing, which is their rapid rise to being the top PC manufacturer in the world.

They aren't going to take any tips from a few users in an online forum, you can be sure of that...

 

Lenovo does produce some versions you can just buy, but not from them. These are the "Topseller" versions that are carried by distributers. I actually expected to buy one of them (20AQ004KUS), but they just didn't get through the channels promptly, so I ordered CTO from Lenovo as well. You can start to see some "20AQ" models in stock in places like Provantage, but they aren't staying around too long.

 

Lenovo wants to give their customer all kinds of option for their business line of laptops. If consumers don't want that, they can get an ideapad. Lenovo also has many distributors that do carry inventory but Lenovo doesn't carry any themselves. I also manage to modify orders after placing them easily. All it took was a quick chat with a customer rep. There is a good reason why Lenovo is #1 in the pc market and climbing while others are falling.

 

Yes, and some of these should be available directly from the Lenovo website either ready-to-ship or with accelerated turnaround. They needn't carry excessive inventory to accomplish this.

 

Any amount of inventory is costly. There are 8 types of waste in manufacturing and inventory is one of them. When demand levels off, Lenovo usually takes two weeks to get a laptop in your hand. One week processing and making your order and another week for UPS to deliver.

 

We all know this. But a forum is for people to complain and blow off steam, among other things. Nobody here expects to be the next Lenovo COO.

Anyway, we can ask the previous top PC manufacturers Dell and HP how rosy life was at the top.

 

You can modify orders until they're released to manufacturing. My order was RTMed immediately, so I had to cancel it the very next day when l wanted to make a change. In any case, regardless of the technical reasons, my experience is that the reps like to tell you that cancel-and-reorder is the only thing you can do. I would think that when the customer has already given you their money, you'd want to hold on to it. But the impression I get is that Lenovo, or at least their reps, couldn't care less about a single order. Apple gets called arrogant a lot, but with them I never felt like they didn't care about getting my money.

 

My T440s arrived today. The display is awesome. I can see almost no backlight bleeding, was expecting it to be really bad after reading all these reports. Whites are good (non-touch). Bezel looks fine too.

Out of the box DPI is set to 100% and I will keep that. Fonts are small but sharp and readable.

Keyboard is great, as expected.

My only complaint is the TouchPad. When I press the upper part when using with the TrackPoint, it's harder to press and it's making a noise as if it was touching the edge. If I pull my finger in the direction of the front of the laptop while pressing down it's much better. If I push it towards the back, it's worse. When pulling and pressing, it's actually not loud at all and I would be perfectly fine with it if it was like that. I may attempt to fix it myself somehow.

The power brick is 65W because it has a dGPU but I'm glad that they ship the slim version which has a much more portable AC cable here in Germany (it has the small Euro-plug instead of the huge German plug with GND).

OK, on to installing EVO. I'll try to take some pictures while removing the base cover.

 

Give me reasons to choose this instead of the dell latitude e7440.

The t440s is more expensive here in sweden.

 

@about the delays on some orders,
what I have read in our German forum: It seems there was a fire in a chinese fab for PC and notebook parts, some of these parts are used for the ThinkPad T and X models. This could explain the problems with some orders lately.

 

Just got an email today that my order shipped, should arrive here in about 3 days. I ordered on the 8th of December for anyone interested in statistics