Lenovo Announces New ThinkPad T, X, and S series Ultrabooks

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• noeldillabough - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

  Actually the new keyboard (on the x230) which I thought I woudl HATE is awesome. Really! I notice immediateyl when I'm on a crappy keyboard (any chiclet including macs lol) and this one is actually quite good. Plus while programming I often hit cursor/pgup/pgdn and its just convenient where they are.
  
  Definatley would miss the trackbutton buttons and the extra ram...
  
  WTB: 12-13" laptop with Iris graphics, tons of memory and user replaceable hard drives.

• defter - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link

  When we get small affordable laptops with decent screens?
  
  X240 costs over $1000 but comes with 1366x768 resolution by default, I wonder how much you need to pay to get 1920x1080? At the same time Nexus 7 with the same resolution is sold at $229, what's so difficult of putting this resolution to <$1000 laptops? Full HD should be the default resolution for cheap laptops while expensive laptops should move to 2560x1440 or better.
  
  Also the connectivity is silly, X240 lacks DP but has VGA!? How about ditching ancient VGA and putting both HDMI and DP so you can use two external screens at the same time digitally and need less adapters?
  
  What I want from the laptop is:
  - small (<=13")
  - decent screen (at least 1920x1080)
  - removable battery
  - two DIMM slots
  - at least 3xUSB and Ethernet
  - affordable (way less than $1000)
  
  Such laptops existed in the past, almost three years ago I bought Lenovo Edge 11 with these specs (except the display resolution) for less than $600. Now it's impossible to find similar, but with a better display even if you pay double. I would expect that the technology has advanced enough for full HD displays be affordable enough for this. Phone, tablet, and monitor (27" 2560x1440 monitors for $300) market point to this way, but laptops still have worse resolution than almost 10 years ago.

• JarredWalton - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link

  10 years is pushing it -- 10 years ago good laptops generally had 1400x1050 or 1280x1024 LCDs, and they had relatively poor contrast with maximum brightness levels of 150 nits or so. LEDs improved brightness but often resulted in worse colors, and the race to the bottom really hurt contrast, quality, and uptake of IPS and similar solutions. That's starting to change, but it hasn't happened 100% yet.
  
  For the rest: Windows still has lousy dpi scaling (8.1 is supposed to improve this, but only for Win8 Apps, not legacy stuff AFAICT), and if you have too small a dot pitch you end up with text that's hard to read and the older generation -- the people most likely to use a ThinkPad -- get angry. On a 12.5" screen, I can see some people wanting 1366x768, others wanting 1600x900, and still others pushing for 1920x1080, and the X240 at least offers two of those.
  
  Comparing a 12.5" screen to 7" displays is apples and oranges, and the OS makes 1080p on a 7" display usable with Android where it wouldn't be with Windows. Likewise, a 2560x1440 grade B panel sold for $350 is totally different from a laptop display. Realistically, I think the 1080p 13" IPS displays probably cost around $125-$150 right now, so it's not that bad, but manufacturers are still slow to put them into laptops. They hate increasing BoM and it comes back to bite them in the butt.
  
  VGA is still around because tons of businesses have projectors and other equipment that still "works fine" and only supports VGA input, so almost all business laptops continue to include VGA. When will VGA truly die and go away? Probably 10 years. :-\
  
  For your wish list:
  13" or smaller laptops are plentiful, so that's not a problem.
  Decent screens are available (X240, some Sony, various other Ultrabooks) as well.
  Removable batteries add to the size and girth of a laptop and so most Ultrabooks avoid them
  Two SO-DIMM slots makes a thicker laptop, so Ultrabooks rarely have more than one and many solder the RAM.
  3 x USB is possible, but on the cramped confines of 13" and smaller it is difficult to do while getting everything else in place (mostly just an engineering problem, so doing it would increase costs).
  Ethernet has a required thickness and again, a lot of Ultrabooks skip it just to be thinner.
  Affordable? Well, with all the above, you're basically going the opposite direction.
  
  Your Edge 11 has a lousy quality display, no SSD, and an old CULV processor that's less than half the performance of modern budget laptops. Prices on CPUs haven't really come down; the CPUs are just faster, so budget laptops are still $600 -- and don't have the various extras you're after. Finding a replacement for your Edge 11 that's a good upgrade will probably mean spending $600 again, and you'd end up with something that is similar in overall quality and doesn't have an SSD.
  
  Could someone do all of the above for $1000? Almost certainly. But then they'd have to either sell at a very tiny profit (like less than 5%) and risk losing money, and when most people still prefer $500 to $600 laptops it's a risk. So they make the prices higher to reduce the total risk, which in turn reduces the market interest. Heh. But an MBA11 has an estimated BoM of $700 and it still misses on the quality display, so add another $100, and then add another $100 for the engineering resources required to get the rest of your list. Apple is the most likely company to build what you're after, and I think they'd charge $1500+.

• noeldillabough - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

  Any news on the new dock system they were showing off (it was a proprietary port)

• Mackan - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link

  No Thunderbolt port on any of them. It seems no OEM want to support it. And ExpressPort gone as well. So no eGPU solutions for these laptops then...

• gobaers - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link

  ThinkPads have never been known to have consumer GPU options. Some have workstation graphics options, but they were mediocre at best for gaming. I don't think these are the laptops you are looking for.

• gobaers - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link

  I'm obligated to post my thoughts on any article on new ThinkPads. All I want are:
  
  * The old keyboard layout. I'm fine if you want to switch to chiclet keys, I just need to delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn keys in the corner, so I can hit them consistently without looking at my keyboard.
  * Please release a nice display (preferably IPS) with enough vertical space. 16:10 < 4:3 < 3:2. We use these to work, I can't fit a full page of text with a short display. I don't need to watch movies on this.
  * Thin bezels around screen, narrower laptops. The T420s I'm typing on has an extra inch of unneeded horizontal size.
  * Trackpoint buttons. I can't believe I'm having to spell this out now. Being able to use it without looking at it leads to efficiency. Though I haven't tried the new TrackPoint buttons, since they are not raised buttons, I'm pretty sure ergonomics will suffer.
  
  That's it. If you need to make changes to keep up with the times, so be it. These are what I think constitutes the strengths of the ThinkPad design. If these changes make the laptop more expensive, that's fine. This is supposed to be an enterprise product made for work.

• mammal - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link

  Does anyone know whether the Carbon X-1 will be refreshed with Haswell ? No mention of the Carbon X-1 with the new X line roll-out so wondering if it will be phased out. It has been a great machine for me except the battery life, which I had hoped would be resolved with Haswell.

• tuxRoller - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link

  So, what is HD and HD+?

• nicolaim - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link

  HD 1366x768
  HD+ 1600x900
  FHD 1920x1080