ipad 3.... 3x resolution of current thinkpads?

it seems that apple has made some bold moves these days that have really earned my respect. first they kept the 16:10 ratio in the macbook air and now they have a qxga screen in their 10 inch ipad! that's three times the pixels used in the thinkpad ultrabook!

people on this forum (including myself) have consistently complained about low resolution 16:9 screens, but it seems that lenovo really don't give a damn. thinkpads 5 years ago had 1900x1200/ QXGA screens, but the best you can get now is FHD - and in FHD you can't even open two A4 documents side by side on microsoft word

it's very strange that a lot of people here try to excuse lenovo by putting the blame on the screen industry... saying that they won't make 4:3 screens anymore etc etc. if they were right, how did apple get the 4:3 qxga screens? it just boils down to how much cost the manufacturer is willing to pay for the screens. and judging from the price of the new ipad getting a custom-sized screens really don't cost too much extra. so i hope that lenovo can listen to their customers and switch back to 4:3/ 16:10. that really improves the productivity a lot.

i've always called apple fanboys ifools but i'm seriously impressed now. if lenovo doesn't respond there's no doubt i'll make a switch soon.


what do you think?

 

It'll probably be just like the iPhone. It has the retina display, but the icons and such are the same size as the original iPhone. While the screen will be a bit sharper, but I think few can read at its native resolution. I like the resolution on my X220i. I don't want to have to magnify things to read them.

 

The retina display is nice and I would definitely get a Macbook if that type of display transitioned over to their laptops. I wouldn't miss a thing except maybe for the trackpoint. I agree that if Lenovo could get this type of display (especially if it's matte), I would definitely jump on that. Apple must have a very strong relationship with their display supplier otherwise we should be seeing more high res displays for non-Apple products.

 

not to mention the overall quality of the displays used by Lenovo...
the only word I can think to describe is: SHAMEFUL

 

I agree that Apple deserves a great deal of credit for expanding their retina display to the iPad. I hope they plan to do the same with their MBPs too. I can't really work on a Mac though, so my hope is really that Apple forces PC manufacturers to do the same. I've got at least 2 more years with my WUXGA screen, I hope I at least have the option to upgrade to something equal, if not better by then. And if Lenovo would bring back their W7xx, maybe it could even be a Thinkpad.

 

Lenovo hasn´t so big volumes. Apple is buying millioins of screens for the iPad, so the prices aren´t that high for them. Lenovo couln´d handle souch big volumes.

 

Except they might not keep 16:10 for their next generation and 4:3 screens are only available with tablet sizes. Lenovo won't switch back since there aren't any factories mass producing these screens at laptop sizes.

The screen on the W520 is pretty good and so is the IPS panel in the X series. There are currently no good 14" screens out there, so it's not just Lenovo.

 

You have two opposing forces at work here. There's a group of buyers who want good screens. There's another group of buyers who use any means at their disposal to get the cost of their notebook down to the bare minimum. The latter group is much bigger than the former. Until that changes, you probably won't see better screens. Outside of a couple $2k workstations and the X220, nobody's offering anything better anyway. This is why the X220 qualifies for true greatness - gorgeous screen, small price.

 

I don't think this is right. Lenovo is the only manufacturer who offers an IPS screen option for 40 bucks, probably because they anticipated lots of people who buy the IPS upgrade, so they bought tons of IPS panels up front. If only they would commit to their model line, but think how many people won't pay for an upgrade to 1600x900 for the T420, or 200 for FHD on T520/W520, hence you see Lenovo's dilemma.

 

You won't be able to open up 2 A4 pages side by side easily on the iPad either. There are enough pixels, but its for sharpness, not screen real estate. By the time you scale the fonts down that far, its too small to read. Just give me 1600x900 at 12.5 inches and I'll be happy. IPS is good too.

Apple has way more volume on iPads than Lenovo does with individual Thinkpad lines.

 

Apple is one of the only manufacturers out there that just does their thing, instead of participating in the race towards the bottom which all other vendors seem to be engaged in.

Ever since the original ipad came out, there has been a resurgence in IPS screens everywhere else, from premium panels on Elitebooks and Dells to low cost IPS desktop monitors (I remember paying $600 for an NEC 20WMGX2 display, now can get a good IPS screen for $200-300). Even mid-range consumer Sony and HP Envy now comes with IPS panels.

Similar thing happened to battery life. Ever since Apple started activity pushing their good battery life on the Macbook line, the other manufacturers focused on it as well.

Now i just hope this high res high quality display trend migrates from tablets and phones to laptops. I'd kill for a computer with such high resolution panel like one offered by Apple on new ipad.

 

you are correct

I guess I'm too focused on my dissatisfaction towards my T420s screen

 

In my experience ThinkPad screens are average. You want to see a sub par screen, go look at a Portege Z835. The 14" segment is particularly barren of good options. The question remains, where's the 14" four pound notebook with a good screen?

 

Thus far, (and unfortunately) the answer is there are no good current 14" panels.

 

On a related note, I just read in "The New York Times" that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. More valuable than Exxon/Mobil !

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/technology/apple-updates-ipad-with-some-refinements.html

 

Hp Envy 14 RADIANCE (screen only)!!!!!!!!!!! 1600x900 | eBay

The best 14" screen.

 

Who produces that screen? Will it fit a T4x0s?

 

I think Envy 14 is like 14.5", it's not a standard 14" LCD. Also I thought Lenovo was picky with EDID, where most other manufacturer's panels will not work.

 

Paging Mr. Occam, paging Mr. Occam...

Actually, what really changed things battery-life-wise was Intel's decision to make power consumption an area of intense focus from Banias onwards, spurred on in part by the problems with NetBurst.

Apple had virtually nothing to do with this, sorry to say. Battery life had already started improving rapidly by the time the MacBook was released, and Apple has played no part in the development of Intel's CPUs (with two minor exceptions.)

 

I seem to recall MacBooks having superior battery performance to PC laptops until Sandy Bridge. The reason given was their non-cell based batteries (which was their public justification for making the battery non-accessible). Once Sandy Bridge laptops landed, suddenly you saw a huge jump in battery life of PC laptops and you didn't hear the battery life argument so much from Apple fans. So while I agree that Intel had a role, it seems to me that Apple overcame the earlier battery problems by engineering their own solution.

Please correct me if I am wrong. This is based on my perception gained from being on NBR over the past few years.

 

Apple is in a realm of its own, it doesn't play second fiddle to anyone, while Lenovo may get to be no.1 company by the end of year (from the projected growth in the volume of machine shipped), but it relies heavily on its technology partner such as Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc.

In order to be like Apple you must function like Apple, listen to no one and do your own thing, which is bit hard for Lenovo when it owns very little of the IP in the major software or hardware it use in the machines.

For Lenovo, the cost of each machine and volume of shipment is the most important concern, also there is no internal real challenge to the status quo of keeping these priorities as it is.

Even though Apple is very successful in keeping ahead with the latest technology, the design evolution of the machine hardware has somewhat stagnated. The iPad 3 and iPhone 4S are two prime example, the exterior remains unchanged, while the internal hardware gets a good upgrade. In this light one could assume that the new macbook with the updated Retina display would still use the same chassis design. Maybe the death of Steve Jobs is really an end of era for Apple, very soon Apple products could be just be a stale exterior that never changes, it is just crammed with ever more powerful hardware.

 

This is a very interesting subject to me, and a frustrating one since I just upgraded from a Dell E6500 with a 1920x1200 screen to a W520 with a FHD. While the laptop kicks it's , the screen.. well- three years later I thought I would be working on a MUCH higher resolution laptop screen. Not lower.

Instead 3 years later, most new PHONES seem to have higher resolution screens than netbooks and portable laptops.

I found myself reading review after review of laptops with high res screens and it seems like I hear "I found the text too small" more often than "it has a wonderful high res screen. So I'm wondering, is this a fault of the OS (both OSX and Windows). Obviously you can increase the size of the text, which is something I tend to do the opposite of (but I realize one day I'll need to). I'm guessing this is something a lot of people don't realize.

So I'm just wondering if this is why monitors and laptop screens aren't increasing in resolution but phones and tablets are. It's just easier to pinch and zoom to make things bigger. While on Windows we don't have that.... While everything else seems to be getting smaller, faster, better in technology- laptop screens seem to be going backwards. At least in my point of view.

 

Not really. I remember the X200 having great battery life as well and its C2D.

Apple didn't invent the concept of great battery life. They just decided it was a good idea and acted like they invented it.

 

laptops are mostly a commodity product where sale is driven by the CPU/GPU rather screen, since many of the laptops are sold through online retailers and brick & mortar stores never been tested before they are taken home.

While, phone for all intents and purposes are mostly interacted through the LCD (it also doubles a touch screen keyboard), so the visual aspect of it are particularly important for driving sales.

Also, you are more likely to compare your phone with that of your friends' by comparing the screen size and colour accuracy rather than the spec of the CPU and GPU.

Lastly, there is no clear leader within the laptop market, so maintaining the status quo is much simpler than driving for dramatic change.

 

Lenovo probably is the only laptop maker that offer IPS in sub-1000 market?

 

Yes that is quite true.

 

In recent times they have kept the exterior of their devices constant and used tech advances to cram more powerful hardware inside. Look at MBP - the outside stayed the same since the unibody model came out in 2008. These long product cycles is probably why they can afford to make the outside bits of their hardware be as premium as they are - they can simply order huge volumes and that keeps their costs way down. So far no other manufacturer managed to make a laptop, tablet or a phone be as high quality from the outside bits perspective.

 

IMO aluminum shouldn't be considered a premium material as it sucks for electronics and notebooks. I'll take a nice lenovo plastic case any day.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

That really depends on how you treat your laptop. My MBP/MBA laptops haven't had any issues with the exterior, same as my previous ThinkPads (exception being the X220 and the top split piece design).

 

Rumors say that MBPs will all drop the ODD and go with an Air-like design.

But you are talking about a specialized small-screen laptop. Apple's mainstream 15" and 17" laptops were killing PC battery life for years prior to Sandy bridge.

I agree that aluminum is inferior in many ways. But aluminum unibody looks cool, and does a good enough job to satisfy the average user (which is what Apple builds for, since they offer limited choice).

 

You can upgrade the screen in your W520 to a 1080 95% gamut panel, one of the best 15.6" screens out there except for the IPS RGBLED.

 

Right. It's an AUO part, shown as AUO14ED or LEN40B2.

B156HW01 V4 (matte) - Lenovo ThinkPad T/W510 & T/W520
B156HW01 V7 (glossy) - Dell XPS 15 L501X/L502X

Certain Dell users "upgrade" their glossy screen with the Lenovo matte screen.

 

except that it's neither Dell nor Lenovo, it's AUO, like you said. I used to order both the glossy and matte versions from AUO directly through our company.

 

AUO is a merger of Acer, BenQ, and Quanta lcd unit. Just throwing random fact out in case someone is curious who is AUO.

 

Any chance the W530 will get a brigther screen? I love working outside in the sun, a bit more juice would be nice, or is it possible to get some sort of layer that will make it reflect less?

 

Sure, there's a chance, but we probably won't know the details until it's released or shortly before.

 

I don't remember the non-unibody MacBooks being anything special in terms of battery life (and I owned most of those revisions.)

The unibody MacBooks might have had better battery life than some similar PC laptops, no doubt, but when I've seen comparisons of them done on the basis of battery capacity/run time/load figures, Apple's laptops don't really stand out. It'd be an equally unfair comparison to compare a ThinkPad with a bay battery and a 9-cell to some other laptop with a lower-capacity 6-cell.

So I actually like Apple's laptops, I just don't think they're anything special in terms of internal hardware.

The case design... well I can see the appeal, but it's like kabuki theatre: I appreciate that it's really visually beautiful and enjoyable to some people, just not me.

 

Aesthetics in general are very subjective.

On the topic of screens. I would like to see a transflective screen on my next Thinkpad. The screen consumes more power as the ambient lighting increases since you need more backlight to compensate. Translfective displays get more effective as ambient lighting increases. Makes perfect sense. There are limitations, but more battery life is always better than less. Also, reflective displays are easier on the eyes than backlit ones.

 

Superb innovation, yet to be implemented.

 

maybe OLED screen is the next step in mobile computing in terms of thinness and lower power consumption.

 

I'm pretty sure OLED is still higher power consumption than transflective, and it isn't as easy to read continuously for long periods of time as transflective/reflective displays are.

 

But it doesn't have its own light source.

 

I wouldn't mind a togglable transflective screen.

 

Transflective has a backlight that can be turned off if there is sufficient ambient light. Think PixelQi.

 

True. A 12/13" with such high Pixels would ROCK! for me.

 

I'm not sure how much more efficient OLED screens will be if they ever enter devices like these, but I've done some comparisons the current drawn by an OLED screen and a backlit LCD screen on a phone that was released in 2 identical variants save for the screen. While the power draw is much lower with blacks making up the majority of the screen, if whites and other bright colors are displayed, the current draw will actually spike past the constant value drawn from the LCD.

They look great, but they still have work to do. Very curious to see the pros and cons of samsung's new OLED TV.

 

OLED is a relatively new technology when compared to LCDs. Currently, OLED has yet to exceed the best LCD panels in terms of color reproduction and power consumption, but it has a lot more potential to be better. IMO LCDs are nearing their peak in quality and output, making OLED is the future. We still have a few years before OLED really picks up. The mobile (phone) market is gaining traction, but it has yet to penetrate into the notebook market but Samsung is definitely pushing it forward.

 

Also, IIRC OLED yields suck, even in comparison to the high-end LCD processes. That's saying something...