T420 build quality. Is it good after all?

[Vonfeffer]

Can´t seem to find any real review on this particular dislpay, but Sony uses it on their Sony Vaio E Series - SVE14111ELW (E14)...

[mikemex]

Let's discuss the issues:

1) Size.

Newer Thinkpads are ridiculously huge. They say the bezel around the screen is so big to route more antennas (WWAN, BT, WLAN). My opinion is that you don't need to route so many cables, they could perfectly make them flat but shielded and run them behind the screen.

I believe that the real reason is that they don't want to lose the touchpad. With 14" screens and lower, there is not enough vertical space to fit a keyboard, a trackpoint and a touchpad unless you add some artificial height.

Thickness increased to fit cheaper components such as 12.7mm optical drives. What annoys me is that they removed the battery connector from the Ultrabay. In my Dell days I used to have a D600 and the modular bay battery (12.7mm tall) had like 48 Wh or so. I'm pretty sure that with modern batteries they could easily allow you to double the run time without increasing the size at all.

2) Build construction

It's a tank. It's well built, no complaints. It's made of CFRP like someone said and that's the highest quality stuff readily available today (let's just hope nanotubes hit the market soon). The lid is plastic but it's a good thing (for wireless). It does have magnesium inside to reinforce it.

Overall, the T420 is a great machine. It's fast, it has long battery life, it is built very well and ports are plenty and useful. My only complain is size.

[wolfman]

Mikemex does a real nice job describing the T420 there, thanks for the feedback. I've been very pleased with my T420.

[dxps26]

It depends on your use case. For example, just last week I was prototyping a server build for work and had 3 VMs running on top of my host OS. 2 of the VM's required 3gb of RAM each and 1 of the VM's required 6gb. So that left 4gb left over for my host operating system. If you need the RAM, you need the RAM (I sold my T410 and bought the T420 specifically so I could use 16gb of RAM).

Agreed on specific scenarios such as this. I have no use for VM's and therefore have not required the use of 16gb of RAM.