Anyone else ditching the Thinkpad?!

[ZaZ]

Ditching ThinkPads seems a bit harsh, I'd really like to have a trackpoint on my 17" ProBook, but the last two times I bought a notebook, ThinkPads weren't offering what I wanted. I would have bought a T440s in 2014, but the whole buttonless trackpoint scared me off a bit, so I bought the Dell equivalent. Had I known in a month I could buy a touch pad with trackpoint buttons on eBay and swap it, I probably would have bought the T440s, even though it was more money.

My Dell served me faithfully for three years, though I was not charmed by it, but I can probably count on one hand the number of times I took it out of the house in those three years, so I decided a larger notebook would suit me better. Unfortunately, the only 17" ThinkPad is the P71, which starts at about 3x what I paid for my ProBook and is significantly heavier. If Lenovo made a more reasonably priced 17" under six pound notebook with a trackpoint and FHD IPS screen, I would have bought it.

[dr_st]

I'd really like to have a trackpoint on my 17" ProBook

Isn't there a 17" EliteBook, with a trackpoint? OH GOD NO MIDDLE TRACKPOINT BUTTON ON THEIR NEW MODELS. Heh. People here say Lenovo is braindead; as long as competitors stay even worse, why would Lenovo care to improve?

[edik]

Even pictures of the Russian legacy Thinkpad keyboard are not easy to find!

Never seen an IBM era ThinkPad with a Russian keyboard ever.. suspect if they did exist it would be early 2000's before they were introduced, however have purchased officially imported IBM ThinkPads around that time in Moscow and all had US keyboards. If anybody has a photo love to see!

[kfzhu1229]

If I don't have a desktop computer right now, I might consider a 15" Surface Book with GTX 1060 for some power hungry applications. Now that I have a desktop with a GTX 1050 Ti, I guess I will stick with my current ThinkPad T43p for now and T530 for intense stuff on the go.

[fatpolomanjr]

I've kind of ditched Lenovo by going with T70 and X62, but not ThinkPad since only the motherboard and some display components are truly made by others. If either of those laptops were to die then I'd still look into a P51 and X1 Carbon before committing to a Surface Book or Macbook Pro 15". No other company does trackpoints right.

[oeuvre]

I've used a slew of ThinkPads from the 600E, 770, T2x, T4x, T6x, *00-*50 lines. As much as I liked the pre-*40 lines, the new ones don't do it for me. I got my mother a T450 a couple years ago. It's a nice machine, don't get me wrong... but I don't like the clickpad still. Even though it does have 3 buttons north of the touchpad, the machine doesn't feel as well built as ThinkPads of yore. The display flexes and the screen isn't good (1600x900 one). I've ditched ThinkPads for EliteBooks and Latitudes... I do all my intensive work (video editing, PS work, game design) on my desktop anyways so I don't need some high end Precision or P series mobile workstation.

I've had a bunch of EliteBooks since the 8440p series... I should note only the 14" and 15" ones I've had. Also a couple of ZBook 14s. These machines are built well and have nice touchpads, 4-6 PHYSICAL mouse buttons, good port selection and easy maintenance. I've stuck with them too cause they come with 3 year warranties and they're generally cheap to find on ebay.

My EliteBook 840 G3 isn't perfect but I'm used to the keyboard layout. Even if it has 4 buttons instead of 5, I can program the top right one to middle click. The touchpad gestures work well. Touchpad is glass, even. Easy maintenance, better port selection than most ultrabooks, has ETHERNET (!!!) and FPR.