Thinkpads Forum

Many of you probably already know this, but I got the opportunity to find out what an Edge was "made of" this last weekend! Up till last week, I had never even seen a "ThinkPad Edge" in person, much less touched one. Well.... I bought one a couple of weeks ago and it showed up at the house last week. About a month earlier, I also got my hands on my very first Lenovo IdeaPad......

You guys can probably see where this is going now. After having had both apart, it's pretty apparent to me that the Edge machines are IdeaPadswith some ThinkPad parts grafted on (like the TrackPoint, and ThinkPad badge). The part that really got my attention was how similar the design and layout of the motherboards were. Although one was Arrandale and the other Sandy Bridge generation, the similarities are remarkable. Both very similar to consumer grade machines from other manufacturers like HP, Dell, Toshiba and the like.

I'm not saying that I hate it or anything. In fact I liked it enough to invest $38 into it to replace the MB, screen, screen cable, and i3 processor with an i5. I probably wouldn't have done it if I didn't have screens and any number of HDDs for it. Apparently, somebody decided to take machines out of service by drilling a hole through the whole thing versus just taking out the drive and destroying it!

I'm just saying that (at least during this generation), these aren't really ThinkPads. They are pretty much just like any other consumer machine you see at the Best Buys/Walmarts of the world.

If anyone else has had some experience taking apart the newer Edge machines and would like to weigh-in, please feel free to do so!

I have a E550. I agree it's a consumer machine. The screen and everything else just feels cheap compared to my T420.

thinkpadgeek91 wrote:I have a E550. I agree it's a consumer machine. The screen and everything else just feels cheap compared to my T420.

I must say though, that I like the look of the E550 quite a bit more than my Edge 15!

To be fair the Edge 15 it was a $500 laptop when it was new and I remember the spec was decent ie. 4gb ram 2.5ghz i5 and a 500gb hdd...

The T420 was over 3x the price.

TonyJZX wrote:To be fair the Edge 15 it was a $500 laptop when it was new and I remember the spec was decent ie. 4gb ram 2.5ghz i5 and a 500gb hdd...

The T420 was over 3x the price.

Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the "as new" price differential. I guess, I just struggle with them slapping a ThinkPad sticker or two on it along with a TrackPoint and calling it anything but an IdeaPad. I'm old enough to remember IBM going down this road before with the Acer contracted "i Series" as well as a few others from second tier manufacturers like Quanta, just so they can use the ThinkPad branding to get their foot in the consumer market. It's failed every single time to-date and I don't really see this effort coming out any better.

I don't really have an issue with the machine "per se", I'd just prefer a little more honesty in it simply being what it really is.... an IdeaPad.

On the subject of "consumer Thinkpads" are there any Thinkpad features maintained in the Edge 15's Chiclet keyboard? I know the SL series keyboard while pointlessly a 6 row still looked like it had the integrated numberpad and browser keys activated with the Fn key.

TPFanatic wrote:On the subject of "consumer Thinkpads" are there any Thinkpad features maintained in the Edge 15's Chiclet keyboard? I know the SL series keyboard while pointlessly a 6 row still looked like it had the integrated numberpad and browser keys activated with the Fn key.

No. Unfortunately, it's pretty much the same as my T430s and X1 and have lost the browser functions that I actually used. I work fine with the new style keyboards; as a matter of fact, I'm using a desktop version one right now, but I really hate to have lost the browser key functionality!

I must say that I haven't use that Edge 15 much yet, so can't comment on the "feel" on it.

That's a shame. I think backspace should work about the same as reverse but it's four whole rows away. Actually if you're using Firefox, try pressing Alt+Left Arrow and Alt+Right Arrow, it seems to work the same when I try it now.


If you do the classic keyboard and bios mod on your T430s I think you can get the browser key and integrated numpad functionality back, at least that's what I was told in the current thread about it.

Further to this, I remember many SMEs couldnt afford the T series so got by with this "Thinkpad" and you'll find these were available with Win7 Pro. They work absolutely fine in low intensity business situations... even today, I do think you can find the T series for less than $1,000 today but there's heaps of Edge E460s etc. WITH Win10 Pro for like $600.

That makes it much easier for businesses who arent in the Fortune 500 class.