Dekks wrote:laowai wrote:Eh, I'm willing to wait to see the 450p come out, and then pull the trigger on something. Skylake seems to be a massive refresh on capability and the premium would make the ultrabay loss more bearable looking at it from a longterm usage perspective. If it's a flop, then the 440p will drop in price more and I can tolerate it at that price.
Intel has no serious competition atm, so it doesn't really need full fat Skylake CPU's. It's only released the Broadwell M core & U models that compete with AMD HSA APU's which still are not here and potentially some new ARM CPU's. Skylake was originally Q4 14, now its H2 15, wanna bet it's Q4 15?
Lenovo is rethinking it's Thinkpad strategy as can be seen bringing back the trackpoint keys, they have been surprised by the push back over the *40 series machines from their core customer base. They have lost some big orders over the last year and are fighting to stay on supplier lists as they are now seen as being pricey and are perceived as moving away from the core principles of what makes a Thinkpad.
Yep, still worth the wait for skylake though, oh well, maybe next year when this T60 is pushing 9 years old. The improvements are actually rather significant from what I can see.
As for Lenovo... they sure as hell better start rethinking what they are doing. They have been spending the past few iterations trying to copy apple while the rest of the business machine market has been copying what thinkpads once were like. The advantages of a thinkpad machine are still there, but they are dwindling quickly.
When it was under IBM, the line was famous for being holdouts. The rest of the market does a marketing thing, IBM ignores it to the delight of endusers. We saw it with matte vs. glossy, we saw it with aspect ratios, keeping it black, keeping it useful. Rather than creating a niche, they let the market create niches for them. We loved it, but it was a loss leader for them, which is why they dumped it on Lenovo.
Lenovo has, from a business perspective, done a great job. They made it profitable while keeping *most* of the essentials. When they gave up on high res screens, gave up on 4:3, then started fiddling with the keyboards however.... it's gone quickly downhill. Changing things for the sake of changing things. Basing those changes on tech reviews from idiot mac users.
The T-series has become, for lack of a better word, awkward. the "s" models seem decent, but they solder it all in, they are not really designed to be upgraded, they are essentially consumables. The non-p is little more than an L with a nicer case (and oddly enough a worse screen). The 450p specs have yet to be seen. It seems as if they ran their specs through a conjoint model and blasted it out at a panel of morons... resulting in models that really make no sense and force significant tradeoffs. This is NOT what Thinkpad should be. The whole point of them was: It's not the bleeding edge, but it's stable and pretty close. It's not trendy, but it's timeless. No stupid games, you get nice things. It's not a gaming machine, it's not an email-box, it's not a movieplayer. It's good for business use and it can generally do a good job at all the others. Easy to maintain, durable, and most of all... wear doesn't make it look grungy or falling apart, wear makes it look dignified.
The dropping of the thinklight was, to me at least, a kick in the nuts. All the PR they did to exclaim how "innovative" they were for copying apple. How much more expensive the keyboard is because of it, etc. etc. No one bothered to stop for a moment and consider what they were nuking. It's as if they have a list on the whiteboard of "things that gotta go", and it was drawn up by a 14 year old mac user. The F keys are another lowblow, first iteration was ignoring the spacing complete with a total remap of keys based on "research" that was "innovative". It's just been so painful to watch. Almost as painful as their screens when they claimed that "no one is willing to pay for non-horrible screens" or "no one likes high-res"... odd how they changed that tune once tablets and 4.7 inch CELL PHONES started having higher resolutions.
From what I can see, it's almost as if they want to nuke the T entirely, or turn it into their "ultrabook" line. Pushing business users into X for small format where they can get away with serious compromises, W for large format where they can milk you for crazy premiums... and anyone else can just get a crummy looking L and "deal with it", call it "green" so you can pretend you're not going there because you don't have a choice.
Here's hoping that the corporate buyers push back hard and take a baseball bat to this internal roadmap of theirs. They seriously need to just walk it back. The chiclet keyboards have this nifty little feature wherein when crud gets under the keys, you simply cannot easily clean it out. my T60 gets crud, and cleaning it out is a process, but it's not too bad, and having things like a thinklight, status LEDs, a 7-row keyboard, a layout that makes sense, function keys that are still function keys, hardware buttons for sound, etc... all makes it somewhat less annoying to clean.
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