ThinkPad P50 and P70 Hands-On | Hacker News Reader

ThinkPad P50 and P70 Hands-On

forums.lenovo.com

11 pointswalterbell23 comments

Remember, however neat these are, Lenovo is a company that has been caught multiple times inserting spyware into their products. There are other enterprise-class solutions out there that are satisfactorily good. We need not keep giving money to a company that time and time again violates our trust.

My thoughts exactly, there is no way I'd buy or recommend any Lenovo product to anyone after how they've treated their customers.

> There are other enterprise-class solutions out there that are satisfactorily good.

If only. I want to migrate to Dell, but the hardware is just so bad compared to Thinkpads.

Asus hardware is vastly superior to Lenovo and I find has a better price point than many Lenovos.

Also, what lines are you looking at? My company recently got a new round of Dells and they seem pretty well put together.

> Asus hardware is vastly superior to Lenovo

Is it? From my understanding, Asus has two product lines: Good hardware… and business hardware. Lenovo (and to a slightly lesser degree Dell) manage to make good business hardware.

And if it doesn't have at least three years on-site service, it doesn't matter (to me) how good the hardware is.

> Also, what lines are you looking at?

Lenovo T/X series and Dell's Latitude 7xxx series.

Particularly the 7440, where Dell insisted it's not a problem if the touchpad firmware reboots every minute (freezing input for a second – supposedly it's now fixed, after a year and a half, but people still report bugs), and when a month later the mainboard suddenly died, I stopped bothering with them. Going by reddit et. al. it seems to be a common occurrence.

I have a pair of business laptops from Asus and they've been great for the last ten years or so. Also have an Asus laptop for home use and a friend just purchased one recently and the hardware still seems top notch.

What about HP? The EliteBook series are quite good.

A colleague has the newest 840 G2 and it gives my x250 a run for its money.

Between HP threatening to split up every year and the horror that is their support, I never got so far as to evaluate their actual hardware offerings.

Came here to say this. Lenovo shits on its customers.

I'm not sure I speak for the masses here but I really want a new high end ThinkPad that doesn't have a touchpad at all like my X201: http://i.imgur.com/oOiyl32.jpg

I only ever use the trackpoint when I'm out with it and the rest of the time it is docked and I have a cheap wireless Logitech mouse.

Second,

my laptop (x201s) has a trackpad but it's so tiny that I don't use it.. in fact, I have it disabled entirely.

Clit mouse and USB mouse is good enough for all possible use-cases for me, personally. There is no increased value in a tiny trackpad.

However, my mac+trackpad is an absolute delight and I wouldn't be able to work without it. (on my mac).

So, if you're going to include a trackpad, make sure it's a exceedingly good one, and additionally, make sure it's used effectively by the operating system.

I really didn't like my old Mac trackpad (2011 MBP). It made my fingers very sore.

I tried to love the Trackpoint for years but I just can not get the hang of it. For me a trackpad always feels more natural and way faster, so a missing trackpad would be a complete dealbreaker.

Ditto.

I love my new x250 but the first thing I had to do was turning the damn touch-pad off. It is so huge that you constantly run your fingers over it while using the track-point and now I have all this dead space that I would rather dedicate to things like, for example, the extra keyboard row that everyone seems to be asking for.

I recently bought a lenovo l450, I'm pretty disappointed with the responsiveness of the two finger scrolling. Is there a reason it's bad, or is there an apple patent preventing from being good enough ?

Companies are cheap when it comes to HID devices on laptops.

you can't put a 'number' to it, so it's not something they can add to a spec sheet, so, the kinds of people who hate on apple will not pay for an 'inferior' spec machine which has a higher build quality.

it's a hard sell to investors.

even for a thinkpad ?

thinkpad ain't what it used to be.

Does it run on Windows? If so, could you try to boot some kind of Linux distro from USB, to see if it's similarly bad? I'm very suspicious of the driver because my T530, which has by a huge margin the most atrociously (physically) uncomfortable touchpad I've ever seen, has that problem too. And any other Windows-running laptop I've used from any brand, too.

My T61 on the other hand, runs on Linux and the touchpad is super smooth. It's not only Apple. Could be just Windows drivers being poor. :)

I'm always shocked at how responsive and wonderful trackpads become when I boot up Linux on one of my Windows PCs.

Set Control Panel -> Mouse -> Wheel -> Vertical Scrolling to 3 lines. Restart the PC and don't use TrackPoint scrolling. Check whether touchpad scrolling is more responsive. If it is, please contact Lenovo and demand a fix.

On my T430, with Lenovo-branded Synaptics drivers installed (it's an even greater mess without them), using the TrackPoint for scrolling will reset above setting to 1 line and make touchpad scrolling ridiculously slow. Setting it back to 3 lines won't fix touchpad scrolling until restart.

Worst point: I can't even disable middle button scrolling, so I constantly hit it by accident.

It's ridiculous how PC vendors totally ignore bugs in the most basic functionality. I like where Windows is heading, I like many aspects of ThinkPad hardware (dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn buttons are a huge selling point), but these things are violently pushing me back to Apple.

Why can't they put the touchpad in the middle of the laptop and not the middle of the keyboard?

If you put it in the middle of the laptop, your right palm ends up on top of the touchpad while typing. Even with good palm rejection, it's unpleasant functionally even if it looks better aesthetically.

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