x301 officially no more

I noticed the x301 was no longer on the Lenovo website. I chatted with a customer service rep. He told me it had reached the "end of life".

 

It's probably just as well. It was pretty darned expensive, and it was probably difficult to sell considering there's already 12 and 14 inch thinkpads, and for a lot cheaper.

 

Having never touched an X301 it seems like the 301 is the most extreme of them all, in (alleged) build quality, weight and general compactness for the screen size.

Lets now all hope for a new even lighter, thinner and even more extreme model with some real (i5/i7) power under the hood.

 

I for one think Lenovo should at least get an X302/X310, etc. to replace it.

My X301 is hands down the BEST Thinkpad I have used. It has MUCH superior build quality of that if my T61, but at a price. When I bought it, it was over $2,000+. To me it still is well worth the purchase, more so now that Lenovo is no longer making it.

 

I only saw a X300. It was an amazing piece of engineering. I just don't see where the X30x machines fits. Lenovo already has a three pound X series notebook and a four pound T series. Both to some degree overlap the space where the X301 lies. With the pricing it wouldn't seem they'd sell many of them nor make much of a profit.

 

Yes, this was announced about a month and a half ago, and was posted about in this thread. As both the X201s and the T410 have 1440x900 screens, and fall right below and above the X301 size-wise, the X301 niche is a small one, and as Lenovo ultimately judged, an unprofitable one.

 

Shame, but it has been coming for some time. The x30x was always built as a halo product. It also sort of got squeezed out by the most recent Intel CPU/chipset revisions. On the plus side, it served as a great learning ground for the T400s/T410s.

Personally, I've always preferred the x200 series. But I have little to no need for an optical drive.

 

What is this optical drive you speak of? I'd have to agree. Who burns discs anymore? I prefer the lighter price tag of the X20x machines. Even at home everything's in the cloud. Media, data and software are all accessed via the network. Sure I burn an occasional CD for the car or a OS disc to do an install, but that's about it these days. I got an external if need be.

 

Well I do. Only because there is a lack of viable alternatives to permanent, read only data archiving. But even then, external ODDs are pretty cheap these days.

 

Optical disks are not a dependable method of archiving for a long time though. Should build a raid6 file server .

 

Well, I said permanent, not long term. I simply meant that it's write once, read-only. That's the only way I trust to store my important data. I've never dabbled in RAID before, I know next to nothing about it.

 

I just wanted the DVD drive, since I always like to watch movies while on the go (airplanes, in the hotel, etc.).

 

time to use some DVD ripping softwares, or compress them into a manageable file size.