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I bought a brand new vprMatrix (Best Buy's Now-Defunct In-House Brand) 120-170B4, with a Pentium 4 1.7Ghz, 256MB of RAM, 14.1" LCD and 30GB hard drive in 2004. It was my first laptop and my only brand new laptop, and I remember taking it out of the box and smelling the fresh packing materials and booklets... It was worth all that money I saved over the years from allowances, small jobs, and birthdays. It was sleek and sexy, and had a two-tone paint job inspired by Porsche. I even bought a copy of Windows XP Professional to go with it. (Fooled by the marketing that the "Pro" version was better for laptops and portables... Ha!) Everything was just great!
That is, until the A/C adapter died, and due to parts (un)availability, I used a universal one (which, of course, didn't have the exact fitting for my obscure laptop) which fried and melted the power jack. I was too fresh to the hardware side of laptops to know that just the jack could've been replaced easily, and I ended up parting out the laptop...
After going without a laptop for a year or so, which was total agony to a geeky 15-year-old, I somehow found out about ThinkPads, mysteriously, as I've mentioned above. I have no recollection of why I started looking at ThinkPads, but I bought my first one in Jan. '06, a T21, with an 800Mhz PIII, 256MB of RAM, a 20GB HD and that's about it... I bought it for $260 on eBay and used it for just shy of 2 years. The only issues I've had with it was a bad LCD ribbon cable, which I replaced, and the inevitable cracked plastic keyboard bezel on the right side of the keyboard... I still have the laptop today, and it still works flawlessly.
In Dec. '07 I upgraded and bought a T41 (1.5Ghz Pentium M, 1GB RAM, 40GB, Radeon 7500, Atheros WiFi) for $375 on eBay. Finally, I had more power than my original laptop, and it was much thinner, lighter, sleeker and stronger than both the vprMatrix and T21. I liked having the airbag protection for the hard drive, although sometimes it was an annoying to get that click and delay if you made a strong enough movement. This laptop was definitely my workhorse. I had it the last two years of high school, and through 2 years of college. I'd bring the laptop in every day for note taking, and write all my papers at home with it. My 3 years of great use ended once it acquired the dreaded ATI GPU problem... I tried the cardboard under the keyboard trick, which slightly improved the problem, but it was still there. I tried re-flowing the solder in the oven, which didn't work either... The laptop is now sitting idle waiting for me to replace its motherboard with another that will eventually fail again.
In March '11, I bought a T61 (C2D 2Ghz, 2.5GB, 100GB, NVIDIA NVS 140M, WXGA+ LCD) for $250 to replace the T41 that had GPU issues. I used it during college, as well, and it was quite a bit more powerful than the T41, as well as being thinner, lighter and sleeker, too. It was my first computer with an NVIDIA chip (I'd been an ATI fan throughout my Flight Sim experience, but the bad GPU left me with a bad taste...) The widescreen seemed very small compared to my 14.1" screens that I had in the past, and I didn't like how the screen wasn't centered in the bezel, nor was the keyboard. It looked thrown together. Also, I didn't like how the laptop didn't have an S-Video port, it only had a VGA output on-board. I did love the crisp WXGA+ resolution, though, and watching widescreen movies was great! This laptop also allowed me to do my AutoCAD, Revit, and Chief Architect work wherever, rather than having to be tethered to a desktop. After only a year, this laptop gave me bad graphics card/LCD symptoms where only the backlight would come on the LCD, and I would only get a picture once every 50 power-ups or so. Once on, the LCD would display fine until I powered off the machine. Then I'd have to go through another ~50 cycles to get it back. The VGA output worked every time. I swapped in a known good LCD and got the same results. I sold the T61 on eBay, and bought my most current ThinkPad. This laptop also had very loose hinges. But the time I got rid of it, the very top of the LCD would have a full inch or so of free play forward and back.
So what does someone who's had their last two laptops die of GPU failure do? That's right, they buy a laptop with two GPUs, just in case!
I bought my fully-loaded W500 in March '12 to replace the T61. It was the most expensive Thinkpad I've bought, coming in at $400. It's got the C2D 2.8Ghz, 512MB FireGL/Intel GMA, WSXGA+ LCD, 4GB of RAM, 500GB 7200RPM HD, Fingerprint & Webcam. It plows through my AutoCAD and Revit work no problem, and breezes through HD video and DVD encodings. I was a bit shocked when I opened the package. This laptop is massive when compared to the others. It's quite a bit heavier, too, but I guess we have a way of getting used to larger laptops if they're more powerful. The keyboard on this W500 doesn't seem to be as nice as my T41. There are some keys (s in particular) which gives a bad feeling when typing, like there's room for flexing under the keyboard at the spot... I haven't taken this keyboard off, so I'm not sure what FRU # it is. Maybe there's a more desirable FRU out there... Overall I'm very happy with my Thinkpads, especially with this last W500, and even though I've had GPU issues with the T41 and T61, I can't see buying any other brand. When I'm repairing HP's, Compaq's, Dell's or Apple's they just don't have the same quality workmanship and engineering behind them. Internal component placement is haphazard and inconvenient at best. Service documentation (if you can find it/have access to it) isn't nearly as thorough as IBM/Lenovo's, which is free and accessible to anyone. No epoxied screen hinges here like... Remember those Titanium G4 Powerbooks!?! Ughh. What a job that was. Anyway, I've been proud to show my square black laptops (with interlocking lid & body) in places where silver paint and brushed metal dominates, college for one. I like being able to remove my optical drive for weight savings, or replace my hard drive, memory or optical drive with at most, one screw...
So, if my ThinkPad trend goes as intended, I'll be buying a newer ThinkPad in 2015. Are corporations still leasing these high-quality but expensive laptops, or are they tightening their belts and buying cheaper brands? (This has been one of the greatest reasons I've been able to get these well-made laptops, off lease ThinkPads are VERY plentiful!) What ThinkPads will be ~$400 then, and what will their quality be like? Will it be a constant evolution and improvement over the last, as it has been in my experience? I'll have to revisit this story then.
-Nick
