T60 looks cheap - just like the Z60t

[jjfcpa]

I've seen 2 or 3 Z60t's at the local Office Depots and I have to say that the build is definitely cheaper than the current T43. This is not rocket science - it's just using the powers of observation. Keyboard is not as solid either.

I have to say, after seeing the pictures of the T60 on this website, it appears that they are going to be using the same trackpoint/trackpad assembly that is on the Z60t. Definitely cheapens what has been an excellent product up to this point.

Can't wait to see the new D620 from Dell after seeing what Lenovo is doing with the T43.

[christopher_wolf]

Doesn't seem cheaper to me and I have been around Thinkpads for a long time, it actually felt pretty sturdy. Also, the Touchpad buttons felt a tad firmer than the ones on my T43...But I don't use them anyway. Oh, and I am not holding my breath over anything from Dell. The three previous Dells laptops I have owned and a current Widescreen Dell laptop tell me to never expect much at all from Del; which is why I stuck with Thinkpads and Powerbooks.

[K. Eng]

Hmm... I went to my local Office Depot and I had the opposite experience. The T43's keyboard felt like mush, while the Z60t's was very solid and had superb feedback. The Titanium lid also felt much more substantial than the magnesium lid on the T43.

I wouldn't count on any Dell D6x0 series notebook being great. The D600's keyboard and buttons sucked, and the suckage continued with the D610. Poor feedback, shallow travel, flexing, etc.

I've seen 2 or 3 Z60t's at the local Office Depots and I have to say that the build is definitely cheaper than the current T43. This is not rocket science - it's just using the powers of observation. Keyboard is not as solid either.

I have to say, after seeing the pictures of the T60 on this website, it appears that they are going to be using the same trackpoint/trackpad assembly that is on the Z60t. Definitely cheapens what has been an excellent product up to this point.

Can't wait to see the new D620 from Dell after seeing what Lenovo is doing with the T43.

[christopher_wolf]

Not to start bashing Dell...But whoever designed the Trackpoint and the related buttons on most Dells needs to have their head examined; the one on my Widescreen is recessed in between the G, H, and B keys and is too tiny for the hole leaving a significant gap around it. The buttons for it are no better, they cannot be consistently depressed enough without hitting the space bar and there is no tactile feedback telling you a successful button press has occured, add to that they are loose. The touchpad fares no better as it is too small for such a large laptop and the buttons make a sharp "click" everytime they are pressed. That is whyI use it almost like a Desktop, maybe move it around alittle, and *always* use an external mouse with it.

[jongordo8]

I agree...my brother has a D600 and compared to my T40 it is night and day. His breaks about once a month.

The worst part of the dell (besides plastic case) is that the LCD hinges are so cheap and the monitor flaps all over the place.

Keyboard does suck as well.

[wolfman]

Yea, I can echo the comments above in regards to my work issued widescreen dell latitude d800. The screen kind of shakes while typing - maybe I'm a little heavy handed in typing while coding, but still that doesn't happen on my R40. I find that the keys on the Dell are so thin in depth that while typing I often catch the edge of my finger underneath a key (z in particular if I am stretching for the ctrl key with my left ring finger) - it's very annoying and luckily I haven't had a key cap pop yet. My trackpoint is totally unusable - it's buttons are way too easy to inadvertently hit and when you intend to use them they are flat with the palm rest and uncomfortable to strike. The trackpoint itself is too small to use comfortably. I always end up using an external mouse.

I've had the machine for approximately a year and the keyboard has been replaced once already (as I typed on the keys near the trackpoint the mouse would fly all over the screen). Out of 4 of these identical units issued to developers in my group, two have had this problem and 1 other is developing it - happens sporadically. One of the 4 has had a motherboard replaced and a second on has had a hard disk replaced. Mine now exhibits pressure rings on the right hand side of the display when the case is open in certain positions only. This really bugs me because I *always* pick the thing up with two hands - one in the middle front and one in the middle back. There are no visible marks on the outside of the case and slightly moving the screen makes them go away (for now).

None of this inspires confidence in this machine. I'm waiting anxiously for the next year to pass so my lease is up and I can get a replacement. Unfortunately it'll be another Dell unless corporate policy changes... If these are supposed to be business class machines (latitude line) I'd have to say I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.

[christopher_wolf]

One Dell I had with the floppy screen syndrome met a hilarious end; I was typing on it, nothing too hard mind you, and the screen teetered, spit out some plastic from the sides which delaminated, then fell over and locked with an Unceremonious "Whump;" I just sat there laughing for awhile.

[SpaRood]

The Thinkpad Z60t cannot be matched by any Dell laptop.

[jjfcpa]

Didn't know I was going to raise such a rukus.

I've used Thinkpads for over 15 years and for the most part, they've been very reliable. My current T43p is rock solid and fast. Perhaps the best part is that it runs cool as a cucumber and it's got 2.26 ghz processor and a 100 gig 7200 rpm hard drive. I really love the weight and size of the T43; and I really thought the Z60t would be the widescreen that I've been looking for.

I really want to get a widescreen laptop because I just like the 16:10 format. With that said, when I looked at the Z60t up close, it just plain doesn't look like the same kind of workmanship that goes into the T43.

On top of that, the screen looks washed out... I mean really bad. Heck, even the screen on the T43 looks pretty pale compared to the one I had on my D610. Please don't tell me about your bad experiences with Dell, heck I could tell you some horror stories about Thinkpads that my company has had... like the time we ordered 4 Thinkpads and 3 of them had to be sent in for repair within 2 weeks. Everybody will have some bad experiences from time-to-time... yes, some more than others. No doubt about it, Thinkpads are more reliable than most. But I've had at least a half dozen Dells and they have been extremely reliable; and if I did have to send them in for service, it was prompt and quickly fixed.

Understand, I don't buy anythings but the Lattitude line because I use my laptops strictly for business.

The D610 I bought about 8 months ago was vastly improved over the D800 that I bought just 18 months ago. Dell is constantly making small improvements within a products life cycle. The trackpoint and buttons were very usable and 2nd in quality only to those on the Thinkpads.

My observations of the Z60t is that it is not as well made as the T43 and not a suitable widescreen replacement for the T43. The Z60m is just too heavy and bulky; although it appears to be much better built.

[NeilB]

Just set up a D410 at work today, a week after getting my Z-60.

Keyboard is stiff but feedback sucks. Trackpoint device blows badly, and buttons are poorly designed. Otherwise it is very nice. Fast, light. Great price.

Use it with a docking station and you may not care. But unless Lenovo screws up, Thinkpad reliability should be the deciding factor. Dells can suck. I hope my Z60 is as good as my X and T series.

[christopher_wolf]

Ehhh, I tend to disagree on that because I have had several dells (D800 amongst them) and can say I wasn't impressed all that much; maybe I have my standards set a tad too high, but they had some serious issues that I would like to have seen addressed. As for Dell support, some of the tickets on my Dell have been sitting unresolved for around 1 month now and I don't think they ever will get resolved. I have worked on around 15 Dells over the years and have seen some pretty bizzare behavior; if they are taken care of though, i.e. leave them in one place and move them like a very small desktop, etc, they last for quite awhile. I am not, however, in the habit of buying a laptop to set down on a desk and have it act like a delicate mobile desktop; when I spend a significant amount, I expect at least some durability and service life as well as functional support in which 95% of the techs haven't been outsourced to the local vicinity of Pluto. They may make sense for a large scale business if each one lasts for 2-3 years; but I wouldn't get one for my personal use. IMO they would actually have to *try* to get the Keyboard and Mouse devices worse...Which is at least a relief to me. They have their good points, but they still don't come near Thinkpads when you consider quality and service life.

[NeilB]

I won't disagree at all. Just initial impressions. But note that I bought another ThinkPad for a reason. You get what you pay for.

I would like to have an Alienware too though...

[dr_st]

Z60t appears to be a hit-n-miss model...

[jjfcpa]

I think one of the most common problems with Thinkpads is the keyboard. It's great when it works, but generally, you will have to replace it for one reason or another within a year or so.

I've had to replace the one on my current T43p after just one month of use. The space bar worked most of the time, but sometimes, it just didn't register. Very annoying if your a touch typist.

Another girl in the office just had to have her CD-RW drive replaced and that T43 is only a couple of months old. Would not recognize CD's in the drive. We replaced it with one from another T43 and it worked perfectly so we know it's the CD drive.

The only saving grace with Lenovo is that they seem to get things repaired fairly quickly.

I have never had a keyboard or CD-RW failure on a Dell. I only say this for comparison purposes.

We did have to send in a D800 the other day for a dead LCD. It was repaired and back in our hands in less than a week. Still had 8 months left on the warranty (3 years).

I had tons of issues with Thinkpads, one of the most annoying was that until a year or so ago, they didn't support resolutions greater than 1280 X 1024 on an external LCD using DVI. I can't tell you how many times I called IBM and just screamed at them for calling this a business machine and NOT supporting higher external resolutions via DVI. I had a 21 inch Samsung display that I had to run at a non-standard resolution (fuzzy text) because they wouldn't change their drivers. Fortunately for me, there were modifications available on the web that allowed me to work around this problem.

I never had this problem with Dell or ACER for that matter.

My problem is that I really want a widescreen laptop and I don't think the Z60t is the ticket - poor specs - I'm a glutton for speed. The Z60m is just too big and even it's specs are not stellar.

I'd really like to see Lenovo come out with a widescreen with a form factor similar to the new Macbook Pro.

[christopher_wolf]

You must have gotten special attention then from whomever sold you your Dells; the ones here haven't had such grace as that. Dell never had, and never will have the kind of reputation IBM, Apple, or even Toshiba has. Getting a Thinkpad, I know I am getting a laptop line that was started with rules and goals that with set, and reached, year by year; you can see that R&D that is put behind Thinkpads as well as Powerbooks. I can't see any R&D behind a Dell and neither can anybody else I have asked. Dell takes a different approach, those laptops are designed by looking at what everybody *else* puts out, they see what features are the most popular, then come up with a laptop that melts all of the features together into a whole; and it seems as if they just *hope* that the engineering tradeoffs of all the features they put in aren't too bad. I doubt if the Dell I had before my Widescreen was tested past 1 hour in the Factory before it was shipped; if it was, I am sure the manifest issues on it would have been caught; there was no excuse for the parallel ports and firewire not working. Neither was there any excuse for the screen acting like a druken pendulum whenever it was moved and I got nowhere with support trying to fix the problems. I have had tons of keyboard problems with it; keyboard, mouse, keyboard again (the connector wasn't seated properly from the Factory)

My oldest Thinkpad, 701c Butterfly is now over a decade old, and it still has decent battery life, connection to the internet, and boots up just fine (keyboard is fine too, same tactile feeback, no decay). I cannot see that happening a decade down the line with my Dell laptop; not by a longshot. The widescreen manages to be the best dell I have had thus far where the previous one failed to project anything through the VGA port unless I disabled anything that used Video Card power on it. I half-expect the next Dell to be a customer assembled snap-tite model.

I buy Thinkpads because I want to make a long term investment in a Research-Grade Laptop that is actually engineered correctly and with known tolerances plus safety margins. When I call support, I expect to get a tech that knows exactly how to handle the system; not a comic-relief buddy that enlists with me in an Adventure worthy of a week long MMORPG Quest to find the solution to a problem (that happened to me no less than 20 times with Dell Support). I don't pay for a copy of the "General Concept" of a laptop; I pay for the Real Thing, a Thinkpad.

[ThinkPad R]

Yea, I can echo the comments above in regards to my work issued widescreen dell latitude d800. The screen kind of shakes while typing - maybe I'm a little heavy handed in typing while coding, but still that doesn't happen on my R40. I find that the keys on the Dell are so thin in depth that while typing I often catch the edge of my finger underneath a key (z in particular if I am stretching for the ctrl key with my left ring finger) - it's very annoying and luckily I haven't had a key cap pop yet. My trackpoint is totally unusable - it's buttons are way too easy to inadvertently hit and when you intend to use them they are flat with the palm rest and uncomfortable to strike. The trackpoint itself is too small to use comfortably. I always end up using an external mouse.

I've had the machine for approximately a year and the keyboard has been replaced once already (as I typed on the keys near the trackpoint the mouse would fly all over the screen). Out of 4 of these identical units issued to developers in my group, two have had this problem and 1 other is developing it - happens sporadically. One of the 4 has had a motherboard replaced and a second on has had a hard disk replaced. Mine now exhibits pressure rings on the right hand side of the display when the case is open in certain positions only. This really bugs me because I *always* pick the thing up with two hands - one in the middle front and one in the middle back. There are no visible marks on the outside of the case and slightly moving the screen makes them go away (for now).

None of this inspires confidence in this machine. I'm waiting anxiously for the next year to pass so my lease is up and I can get a replacement. Unfortunately it'll be another Dell unless corporate policy changes... If these are supposed to be business class machines (latitude line) I'd have to say I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.

This is an amazing & absolutely true description of a Dell!
I would like to say that I'm an R40 owner as well (Pentium M 1.4GHz 1400MHz 256MB 40GB 32MB Ati) & I've seen others' laptops & I think mine's billion times better.

But, I have much doubts about Lenovo. Have you guys looked at the E series ThinkCentre? It looks so ugly.

[jjfcpa]

Last Fall, before the Lenovo buyout, I had occasion to call tech support at IBM. The tech was a super nice guy, but unable to resolve my problem. This is one of those issues that I've run into on more than one Thinkpad and have NEVER gotten resolved.

The issue simply is that when trying to view computers attached to a network, the system hangs and I have to do a "end task" in order to back out of the search.

This particular tech tried everything to resolve the issue and finally resorted to the profound solution that every technician recommends when they can fix the problem - "try re-installing windows". As I told him, done it and it does fix it for a while, but the problem always comes back. I've had at least 3 Thinkpads with this problem.

Anyhow, the real point of this post is during my discussions with the tech he confided in me that IBM had no knowledgebase to refer to when trying to diagnose problems. They have to deal with every call as if it's the first time anyone ever had that problem. Although he could refer to my file and see that I had called about this issue previously, he still had to go through their normal procedures to attempt to fix the problem... without any luck.

When I have had to call Dell, I've had much better luck in dealing with specific issues. They at least seem to keep a knowledgebase of issues and suggested remedies.

My company buys 15 - 20 desktops from Dell for clients every year and we buy laptops for clients regularly. We've been very pleased with their support on the minor issues that we've had to fix.

[bert]

Actually, none of the mentioned companies do any R&D. Their computers are all designed and built by a few companies in Taiwan. Quanta and Compal are the largest ones. These two companies make more than half of the world's notebook computers. All that Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and the other so called "PC companies" do is to write specifications and send them out for bid. So there is very little quality difference. If there is any at all, it is because some product managers specifiy cheap material to get the cost down. This said, I love my T43p, and would not want to trade it for any other model.

[ThinkPad R]

... Dell never had, and never will have the kind of reputation IBM, Apple, or even Toshiba has. Getting a Thinkpad, I know I am getting a laptop line that was started with rules and goals that with set, and reached, year by year; you can see that R&D that is put behind Thinkpads as well as Powerbooks. I can't see any R&D behind a Dell and neither can anybody else I have asked. Dell takes a different approach, those laptops are designed by looking at what everybody *else* puts out, they see what features are the most popular, then come up with a laptop that melts all of the features together into a whole; and it seems as if they just *hope* that the engineering tradeoffs of all the features they put in aren't too bad. I doubt if the Dell I had before my Widescreen was tested past 1 hour in the Factory before it was shipped; if it was, I am sure the manifest issues on it would have been caught; there was no excuse for the parallel ports and firewire not working. Neither was there any excuse for the screen acting like a druken pendulum whenever it was moved and I got nowhere with support trying to fix the problems. I have had tons of keyboard problems with it; keyboard, mouse, keyboard again (the connector wasn't seated properly from the Factory)

My oldest Thinkpad, 701c Butterfly is now over a decade old, and it still has decent battery life, connection to the internet, and boots up just fine (keyboard is fine too, same tactile feeback, no decay). I cannot see that happening a decade down the line with my Dell laptop; not by a longshot. ...

I just want to say that this is a great post. Quiet moving.

[Duff]

I'm an R40 owner as well (Pentium M 1.4GHz 1400MHz 256MB 40GB 32MB Ati) & I've seen others' laptops & I think mine's billion times better..

Hey, we have the exact same notebook (except your 40 GB vs. my 30 GB).

But I agree - I see other brands of notebooks, and I can't help but think, but ThinkPad is much better .

[snife]

jjfcpa - i think you are in a very small minority (possibly of 1) who have used both ThinkPads and Dells, including the support and think that Dells are even comparible - and IBM does have a knowledgebase AND knowledge which from my experience, DELL support does not.

Again would go for faults - I would guarantee that Dells fail more than ThinkPads.

But how you can even question the pointing devices on any ThinkPad in the same post as the word Dell I just cannot comprehend. I have used a D610 and a D800 and, even although I think a touchpad is greatly inefficient compared with a trackpoint, the touchpad buttons on the Dells are so dire to the point where I could not bring myself to use the system for any length of time without an external mouse. The Ultranav pointing devices on the Z series are as good as previous ThinkPads without doubt, albeit they are a different shape (which has no effect on usability) and sadly are missing the colours (which I just like from an aesetics point of view).

And bert - most laptops are designed by the big OEMs but the T series ThinkPads are definately not - they are designed in house by Lenovo / IBM R&D and imho there is a big difference in quality.

[thePCxp]

I've seen 2 or 3 Z60t's at the local Office Depots and I have to say that the build is definitely cheaper than the current T43. This is not rocket science - it's just using the powers of observation. Keyboard is not as solid either.

I have to say, after seeing the pictures of the T60 on this website, it appears that they are going to be using the same trackpoint/trackpad assembly that is on the Z60t. Definitely cheapens what has been an excellent product up to this point.

Can't wait to see the new D620 from Dell after seeing what Lenovo is doing with the T43.

The T60 and Z60t are not cheap (no ThinkPad is cheap in my opinion). And have you even used the Z60t? Don't judge a ThinkPad by its looks.

I also have used a Dell laptop (my school has 3 Dell's, the rest of the laptop's that my school has are ThinkPad's and there are also some Apple's). They (the Dell's) were okay but they are not as good as ThinkPad's. One of the things that I didn't like about the Dell's was the touchpad, it wasn't as good as the one on my ThinkPad.

But, I have much doubts about Lenovo. Have you guys looked at the E series ThinkCentre? It looks so ugly.

I have looked at the ThinkCentre E series and its not ugly.

[dr_st]

jjfcpa - i think you are in a very small minority (possibly of 1) who have used both ThinkPads and Dells, including the support and think that Dells are even comparible

LMAO, that was good.

[jjfcpa]

Obviously, on a Thinkpad forum I don't expect to see a lot of support for Dell, HP, or Sony. But that doesn't change the fact that Thinkpads are undergoing a slow but methodical change to adopt a more mainstream appeal.

They are adopting some of the design features of the Z series in the T series with only one goal in mind... make it appeal to more people - most notably consumers, not professionals. Think about it, the Z series is now being sold in Office Depots right next to T43's. Their goal is to open up the Thinkpad to masses and to do this, they are going to have to make some compromises in design that will make it more acceptable to "less" business oriented consumers.

There are trade-offs in these decisions. Yes, they run the risk of pissing off the professional consumer who wants top notch components, ergonomic excellence, and support to match.

Well, guess what... they just made some very sublime design changes that are just the tip of the iceberg in my opinion.

What would you do...? "Consumerize" the T series so you could sell more, or keep it "Professional" to satisfy existing customers? Whichever way you go, someone gets upset.

Personally, I think these changes are significant in only one regard, they've chosen to "consumerize" the T series. They've never had a Windows key - so why add one now? It hasn't stopped me from buying a Thinkpad, but adding it might stop me from buying another! I'm not interested in investing in a line that is headed in that direction.

[K. Eng]

I think that it is impossible for individual users to say whether or not a particular brand of computer is reliable or not. Most people deal with too small a sample of machines to make a definitive judgment -- this is much like hard drives. People experience failure with brand X, Y, or Z and then claim that the brand is inherently unreliable.

PC World does a reliability survey. Here's the notebook chart: http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/ ... g,5,00.asp

IBM and Dell were about equal in hardware reliability, but IBM was far ahead in service & support. I'm not surprised that hardware reliability is the same, as both companies tend to rely on the same suppliers for CPUs, displays, chipsets, HDDs, and other components.

I think that ThinkPads are physically more durable than the stuff that Dell sells though.

[Rose]

Obviously, on a Thinkpad forum I don't expect to see a lot of support for Dell, HP, or Sony. But that doesn't change the fact that Thinkpads are undergoing a slow but methodical change to adopt a more mainstream appeal.

They are adopting some of the design features of the Z series in the T series with only one goal in mind... make it appeal to more people - most notably consumers, not professionals. Think about it, the Z series is now being sold in Office Depots right next to T43's. Their goal is to open up the Thinkpad to masses and to do this, they are going to have to make some compromises in design that will make it more acceptable to "less" business oriented consumers.

There are trade-offs in these decisions. Yes, they run the risk of pissing off the professional consumer who wants top notch components, ergonomic excellence, and support to match.

Well, guess what... they just made some very sublime design changes that are just the tip of the iceberg in my opinion.

What would you do...? "Consumerize" the T series so you could sell more, or keep it "Professional" to satisfy existing customers? Whichever way you go, someone gets upset.

Personally, I think these changes are significant in only one regard, they've chosen to "consumerize" the T series. They've never had a Windows key - so why add one now? It hasn't stopped me from buying a Thinkpad, but adding it might stop me from buying another! I'm not interested in investing in a line that is headed in that direction.

i agree with you on this.

[K. Eng]

Hmm... I don't think that adding a windows key is necessarily "consumerizing" the ThinkPad. Note that business class machines from Dell and HP have always had Windows keys. My old Latitude CPi (1998) had a Windows key.

Personally, I think these changes are significant in only one regard, they've chosen to "consumerize" the T series. They've never had a Windows key - so why add one now? It hasn't stopped me from buying a Thinkpad, but adding it might stop me from buying another! I'm not interested in investing in a line that is headed in that direction.

[JonathanGennick]

The issue simply is that when trying to view computers attached to a network, the system hangs and I have to do a "end task" in order to back out of the search.

Had similar problems once. While browsing my home network to find a shared folder, my system would take a loooong time, and then report back that nothing was found. I too never figured out the cause, though the problems have vanished since moving some of my shares to Linux and others to 64-bit Windows (they had all been on various 32-bit Windows boxen). My gut feeling, and I have no rock-solid proof to offer, is that my particular problem(s) came out of some subtle aspect of windows networking that I did not understand. I still use all the same Thinkpads that I used to use, and I now have no troubles at all in this area.

Anyhow, the real point of this post is during my discussions with the tech he confided in me that IBM had no knowledgebase to refer to when trying to diagnose problems. They have to deal with every call as if it's the first time anyone ever had that problem. Although he could refer to my file and see that I had called about this issue previously, he still had to go through their normal procedures to attempt to fix the problem... without any luck.

I find it hard to believe that each tech is simply "on his own" to solve a problem. What I can believe is that tech support has some well-defined procedures to follow in order to diagnose a problem. And sometimes you just have to go through the procedure, even though you may have gone through it on your own before calling in. This is fair. Eons ago I used to work in a position where I took tech support calls. No matter how much you trust the customer, you simply cannot take their word for anything. Trust but verify for yourself. Those are true words in troubleshooting.

Here's another viewpoint. Whenever I'm called in (even today) to help troubleshoot a problem, it is usually because the other person has reached a point of frustration. They've gone down some path to get to that point. If I begin from where they left off, I'll not end up anywhere different. When troubleshooting, if you call me in, it's back to first principles. I will reinvestigate the problem from scratch, and I will do my best not to assume anything about the cause.

BTW, I just went through a tech support call. And the tech did, in fact, have me test many things that I had already tested. And along the way he had me test a few things that I hadn't thought about (new ground!). Even so, I followed his lead and did my best to cooperate. In the end, he came to the same conclusion that I already had reached. That gives me confidence in the diagnosis. Had I tried too hard to influence his thinking, that would actually have worked against me. Having two independent investigations reach the same conclusion is a good thing.

[snife]

Yes I am a ThinkPad Fanboy but that does not mean that I don't appreciate that HP have some good machines and I do like the Vaios, however, I have never used a decent Dell. I also do not like their business model which in many ways has forced other vendors to reduce quality and innovation in the industry; they sell a computer like any other electrical appliance, and while this may be technological snobbery, I just think a computer should be more than that.

</rant>

I don't think they are consumerising the T series - the wireless switch would be very business orientated, as would EVDO and the windows key is not necessarily consumer either as most home users would not use it for anything other than launching the start menu but I think the windows key might become more important with the launch of Vista.

I don't think there is any reason to consumerise the T series and the consumer market is definitely on the list of targets for it. Lenovo will be launching non-ThinkPad notebooks in the US and EMEA - these will be the consumer systems.

[SpaRood]

I think jjfcpa is incoherent. He complains that the Thinkpads are getting too mainstream, whatever that means, but one of the most mainstream laptops are the Dells, which he is a fan of. I find it rather sad that some just goes to a Thinkpad forum to bash it by focussing on very small details of newly announced laptops that they even haven't seen yet, and the question is still whether they are accurate and right with their premature conclusions.