Since these forums were useful to my decision I wanted to drop back in and share my own impressions. Context:
- I've been a ThinkPad fan since 1998
- I've been a 560, T, and W series user
- I am a Trackpoint fan and disabler of touchpads
- I care a lot about display quality
- I care a lot about the keyboard remaining cool to the touch
- I run Ubuntu and do a lot of VM work
Impressions and experiences:
- Very attractive appearance and smooth display hinging. Tight/firm everywhere.
- I was concerned about the offset keyboard, but it doesn't bother me in the least. I got used to it in about two days.
- Chiclet keyboard has a very precise feel to the keypresses. I'm fine with the shift, as far as the fundamentals go.
- Keyboard layout is a step down from pre-chiclet. Tight spacing and lack of other differentiation hurts my ability to unconsciously locate specific keys (and the groups of four) in the Function row. Ditto for PgUp and PgDn. Additionally, I expected the new all-horizontal arrangement of Home - End - Insert - Delete to be a problem, and it is. I can find Delete. I have to look at the keyboard every time for the others. Really hoping that improves with use, but I mostly wish it hadn't changed.
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial) installed beautifully and has required very little troubleshooting or configuration.
- The IPS FHD (not 4k) is excellent and a nice surprise. The W510 had a technically impressive but subjectively lacking display. I found the W510's colors—especially its whites—garish and not susceptible to much improvement with color tweaking. The P50 looks far better out of the box and NVIDIA color tweak options have allowed me to improve it a bit from there.
- Backlight bleed is horrific. Fortunately, that matters very little to me. I don't notice it in most apps with most lighting, and even when watching a movie I unconsciously tune it out pretty quickly. But it's bad.
- I'm a fan of how they've moved most of the chassis buttons onto the keyboard, if only because I think we've seen very sketchy button design from ThinkPads in the past. Poor/confusing tactile feedback, etc. The keyboard versions work well for me and the keypress experience is much nicer.
- Ports are all extremely tight. USB, power, and HDMI all require paying close attention and exerting a noticeable amount of force.
- Keyboard temperature stays very low. Not room temperature, but not warm either.
- I have no fan problems. Fan runs seldom and is very quiet when it does.
- Performance is excellent. It never looks, feels, or acts like it is exerting itself unduly.
- I get about four and a half hours of battery, which is a huge step up from the W510. This is with the dedicated graphics card on at all times, and I believe some power-saving problems with the Skylake chipset that are resolved in newer kernels.
- I left the stock 256GB M2 SSD in place and added my own, a Samsung 960 EVO.
- Very solid webcam performance.
- Adding a hard drive password to take advantage of self-encryption on the SSD was very easy and effective. I had no booting problems in any OS.
- Sound is great for a laptop.