Thinkpad T410s soon?

Im just wondering does anyone here have a T410s yet? What is the big delay on these laptops? No reviews, no onwership...

This seems much more refined with better quality and finish than the T410. I really want to purchase one of these but in Canadian Thinkpad site..

1. No cpu better than i5-520

2. No discrete graphics

What is the hold up on these machines??

 

I remember reading one person who spoke with a Lenovo sales rep that claimed there's a "world wide CPU shortage", though I don't believe it. Lenovo seems to have wildly varying ship times, and others have said not to believe their shipping estimates. However looking at Lenovo's site right now, the estimated shipping dates on the T410s is "more than 4 weeks", whereas the T410 is "within 9 business days", so go figure.

 

There was a thread a page or two ago on this fourm about what the delay was. From what I gather it is the screen that's the big hold up. The only way people are getting the T410s quicker is if they order it with the touchscreen display, (which also adds quite a bit to the price as well).
So, that's probably why no-one has gotten thier machines yet.

 

Although it won't happen, I WISH that the screen delay would be that they are replacing it with a much better one

 

It looks like they don't have the screen on delay anymore. Hopefully they start shipping it out soon.

 

Any discounts for the t410s right now?

 

Try contacting a Lenovo rep directly. I received $250 off my order by doing so.

That said, I've seen my shipping date jump from March 1 to March 26 to March 16 all in the past 36 hours...

 

I just called again since my ship date said 4/15 and they said that it should ship sometime this week. No update to my ship date online but this is the information they told me after complaining a few times.

 

I had a problem with my order, because it took so long after I placed it to ship that the card I used to purchase it expired. The rep offered to put a note on the order noting the new expiration date, but the ship date never moved from 4/21. He said the billing change would move me to the back of the line, so I used the opportunity to make a few other changes to my order. He said he would email those to me, which I never received, and still my order status never changed, either with an updated ship date or with the changes I requested.

I canceled the order, and that was reflected in my order status instantly.

I placed a completely new order, and now have a ship date a whole month before the previous one. Their shipping delays are kind of sad on this model, but the order status being useless doesn't give one much confidence that a machine will ever be received

 

Normally it takes just a single part to delay entire production line.

As of the CPU, I have no idea about that.

T410s model is thinner than T410 and that makes it harder to dissipate heat. This model was designed to only have integrated graphics.

Also, since the casing of T410s is different than that of the T410, it may be very possible that the production of casing is being delayed. I worked in plastic injection moulding before and it is very likely that a small engineering change on a mould would take more than one week to just get done.

 

Doesn't it seem a little odd though that the new X201 models are getting the i7?

 

The X201 is a good deal thicker, .38". May not seem like a bunch but that's a good 1/3 larger than the T410s' form factor. Maybe the increased space inside allows for a beefier heatsink/fan combo?

 

Some i5 are getting comparable performance to i7's under overclock.. for desktop.

not sure about laptops cpus

 

Hadn't realized that, although the X201s is almost the same as the T410s yet offers the i7.

 

that i7 on x201s is 2.13Ghz while the i5 on T410s is 2.4Ghz. i7 just have 1MB larger L2 cache than i5.

 

The i7 offered on the X201s is the 620LM as opposed to the 620M. It has a lower base clock and lower turbo boost capabilities, and has a lower TDP of 25w compared to the 620M's 35w. Also I believe the Intel integrated is capped at 566MHz instead of 766MHz. The i5-520M actually outperforms the i7-620LM in a lot of the benchmarks, it just as less cache.

 

I'll just third what the previous posters said: As far as performance goes,

i7-620M > i5-520M > i7-620LM

Clear as mud! Thanks a bunch, Intel!

 

humm i just looked at configuring a t410s and now it doesnt show that "may delay order by 4 weeks under the 80gig ssd" anyone think that they may actually ship in "15 days" as they claim?

 

Another question... If they have i5-540m's in stock for the X201s, how come they don't have them for the T410s?

 

So basically the hold-up is that Lenovo cant find any screens that are low enough quality and low enough price to put in their "premium" laptop? Wow...no wonder Apple makes more profit on laptops than the entire PC industry....

 

We'll find out For my config I (re-)ordered on 3/1 and it estimates ship (worthless) on 3/21.

Edit: now my order status shows nothing at all in the estimated ship date column. Wonder what that means. If their order status was at all reliable, they would get so many fewer sales calls...

 

Well I believe I can shed some light on this.

I wanted to get a T410s when they first became available but couldn't pull the trigger fast enough and they disappeared from the lenovo site for several weeks (supply issues I presume).

Anyways when they became available again in Feb 2010 I was quick to place an order. Here is the list of estimated shipping dates

Order Date Shipping Est Notes
2/10 3/1 16 business day
2/11 3/2 canceled 1st order bad shipping address
3/01 3/16 customer service cited just estimate
3/05 3/16 customer service offered $100 off
3/15 3/27 customer service cited just esimtate
3/15 3/20 said website is wrong

So basically it seems every time the shipping date arrives I get a new shipping date. Even though customer service offered me $100 off my order for my trouble, whats the point if I never get the product. Plus the unit has probably depreciated that much in the last two months already.

I have called customer service 5 times and emailed them 7 times. Their response time is really good but they can never provide any useful input. It seems they have a very bad supply chain problem.

The reason I got the $100 discount was because I sent a screen shot of their webpage to a manager demanding how they can expect customers to believe a "9 day" time when existing orders are back ordered for a month.

The only reason I haven't canceled my order is cause I got a great deal.

$1548 (128GB SSD, 4GB, Express Card, 6250 wimax, 2 business day) - This does not include the $100 discount I was promised in writing.

I travel pretty soon so hopefully the computer will arrive. They did assign an American rep to my case and I have his direct email and phone line. He just sent me an email this morning tell me he is doing everything he can. I believe him but the process sucks.

So for those of you wanting a T410s... Unless you want to wait for a couple of months, I would steer clear.

 

After the initial troubles in January, it was clear that they wouldn't ship before the chinese new year. Since then, they have been shipping but in small quantities - a couple of people already reported getting one. Realistically, a ship date in March was pretty much predictable. We'll see if that works out...

I ordered 3/1 with an estimated shipping date 3/12, which is currently 4/29 but the customer service assured me that the web site is wrong and it'll ship in March.

Lenovo often needed a few months to ramp up production with new models, this is absolutely no surprise. Annoying, yes, but no surprise

 

I don't know... this model seems to have more problems "ramping up" than others. It took 2 months to get my T42, way back in the day... but at least they weren't on their web site promising 9 business days at the time. That's the biggest issue for me - not supply chain or repeated delays, but obvious and persistent misinformation about realistic delivery expectation.

 

i wish custom service would have bribed me, but my t510 with 8 weeks worth of backordered parts shipped in 9 days.

 

Lenovo really need to put their act together in term of supply-chain management. There seem to be alot of bug in their system and they need to integrate their systems.

 

I tried calling again to confirm this, which is a useless exercise and I don't know why anyone bothers, but the rep wasn't confident that my 3/23 ship date will stick. I noticed that new orders are estimated at 4+ weeks on the CPU part. So obnoxious that a model "released" in January still barely has left the ground a whole quarter of the year later. If it's delayed again I'll probably give up on it... this was my second attempt already.

I'm apparently not even enough of a pain to qualify for the discount

 

Clearly the CPU is not the reason for the hold-up as you can order a T410 non-s with i5-520m and the website lists no delay. They could be out of chipsets, though (the t410s uses the QS57, which is different from the t410). Or the webmaster just made up some excuse

 

Haha, both equally valid possibilities

 

in T400s, the cpu is directly soldered onto the motherboard, which i think is also the case for T410s? If that is indeed the case, then this adds another layer of complexity with orders, manufacturing and shipment.

 

As far as I know both T410 and T410s use BGA versions of cpu, that is, are directly soldered on the mainboard. Though it could very well be that the soldering step is outsourced, so I guess its possible that they are out of already-soldered-onto-mainboard CPUs.

 

For what its worth, a sales rep just told me that they plan to offer the T410s with switchable graphics by the end of the month. Insert obligatory "its just a rep" comment here.

 

The t410s I ordered that was supposed to ship tomorrow was just moved to a 4/21 estimated ship date. If (big IF at this point) it does ship then it will be 8 weeks from order and during that time their site has had anywhere from "ships in more than 4 weeks" to "ships in 9 days" for this model. When I ordered it said ships within 15 business days so who is running the website over there?

Has anyone else in the US received one of these other than the guy on youtube?

Crazy

 

My friend has had one for the last week

 

I want to buy a T410s but I refuse to until I see some reviews, it has switchable graphics, and I know the supply issue is GONE!

 

Basically nothing has changed in the laptop except it's speed. I doubt you'll get much information except, benchmarks that show an increased speed performance and a 10% decrease in battery life (i5).

 

I think many people are waiting for better news about better LCD the new model should use. Basically it is key to me, otherwise I will not care about Lenovo at all, since neither T410 nor T510 are good to me. The trend is many manufactures have started using very good LCD screens (Dell, Sony, HP), Lenovo still is living somewhere in the past. Let's leave Lenovo glory to the past

 

It has an entirely new CPU platform. New NB, new Integrated Processor that is at least 50% faster, new dedicated graphics that is who knows how fast, and a new processor that offers significant performance boosts because of turbo mode. I want to see a review before I jump in. Especially of how the hybrid graphics functions. I have a W500 and I use dedicated graphics only because of how buggy the hybrid solution is!

 

there are no hybrid graphics currently available on the t410s
there *might* be at some undetermined point in the future

performance reviews on the i5 platform can be had looking at a t410 review or any other notebook with the new cpu

 

Well I can't imagine Lenovo making a advertising fuss about hybrid graphics and then never delivering. I'm pretty sure the hold up for dedicated graphics is more of a software issue regarding the hybrid part then it is a hardware issue.

 

My ship date jumped from 3/27 to 5/03 (original order placed 2/10) - so if they do deliver on the said date, it would have been 3 months. What a scam.

GREAT!

I am going to call customer service today to cancel my order. I am sure it's going to take forever to do something as simple as that.

Very Very disappointed in lenovo!

 

I don't know; in my experience, canceling an order is the only thing they actually do promptly. They are very efficient in this one area. My date is still 3/23 but highly dubious. If it slips significantly again, I will cancel again. Enough is enough.

I think it's darkly humorous that every rep I've spoken to has referred to the "estimated ship date" as a "worst case scenario" and that in all likelihood I should expect shipment significantly sooner. Then the estimated date approaches and jumps even farther back. They are worse at delivering than their own defined "worst case scenario."

 

Yea we are suckers for this game aren't we?

 

This is why ncix canada is a god send. They have a huge selection of thinkpads sold retail. They even have the t410s in stock!

 

My estimated ship date has moved from 2/22 to 3/2 to 3/15 to 3/27 to 4/30 and to 5/3. I order on 2/11. Pretty standard config, no ssd drive or touch screen.

I called on Monday to complain and got another $100 taken off the price, so down to $1100, which is nice, if I ever get it.

Also, spoke with a supervisor, who called to place my order on the "critical" list, promised it would ship in a 2 day window before or after 3/20. It is does not, I am on the phone again, try to get some more discounts, or if it really takes to May, I would think that their t410s w/ switchable graphics would be out, and might try to deal into getting that model on the cheap.

 

What email address do you use for this? Whenever I've emailed Lenovo about anything, their reply takes a couple business days and says "call us."

My ship date slipped to 4/8. "Ships in 9 business days" from 3/1... we've gone from misinformation to pack of lies, in my book.

 

Whoa my T410s shipping date just jumped from 4/29 down to 3/19. Episode IV - A New Hope?

 

Well I have the email address for a supervisor not because she gave it to me but because i insisted that I am not getting off the line unless I receive an email from her while I wait that acknowledges what she just told me - I was complaining that I get a new story from every cs rep each time I call. So she wrote that email because she promised that she was telling the truth. This was supervisor at the call center in India.

The same supervisor put me through to their American Sales dept, where my case got assigned to rep named Chris. he has emailed me within 5 minutes each time I email or call him. He's been great except he has no more useful information than the call center in India.

What I recommend you do is throw a fit and ask to speak with a manager and not take NO for an answer till you get something in writing. BTW as previously mentioned I took a screen shot of the webpage when it said 9 days (at the time my order was a moth out) and I ed about how that was paramount to fraud even with the "estimated" disclaimer. that might have something to do with the fast cs response times.

BTW anyone got promised the 18th March date so far. Please note that the website continues to show 5/4 ship date for me. I am traveling on 26th regardless of what happens so I can only wait till Tuesday (to recieve the product).

 

> What I recommend you do is throw a fit and ask to speak with a manager and not take NO for an answer

Though, seriously, I don't think that trowing a hissy fit will make your laptop appear one minute earlier at your doorstep