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> Let's say we're talking about ThinkPad T.. Which model?

> T440p, T450, T450s, T540p, or T550?

T450s.

When looking for a competitor to Apple, go for the T-series, but also take a look at the X-series.

T5XX has 15" screen and numpad in the keyboard, so unless you like numpad, forget those. 440 is the older series, before it there was 430 series, and presently 450 is the current line.

"p" stands for "performance", basically it's a laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, if you are heavily into gaming or video production. It makes the laptop thicker, heavier and consume more power. Usually you forget the "p" option. Also Apple makes do with just the integrated Intel graphics, so we don't need NDIVIA either.

"s" is maybe for "slim". T4XXs is the flagship, and the plain T4XX is an economy version. The T4XXs is, in my opinion, the best competitor for Apple laptops.

> When looking for a competitor to Apple, go for the T-series, but also take a look at the X-series.

Sure. Joe Average has no clue about that though. Most of the main vendors suffer from the same proliferation of models. Look at Dell:

Latitude - For Business

Vostro - for Small Business (WTF? Why is this a different model from Latitude?)

Inspiron - For Home and Home Office (Seriously? Why isn't this satisfied by either of the other two models?)

Precision Workstations - For professional creators (that seems like a reasonable distinction, but then looking at the specs it's not really, it's just a slightly higher spec than other models)

XPS - For the Ultimate experience (Okay.. but what about Precision Workstation then? Why on earth does something called the Ultimate have worse spec than some of the other not-ultimate models?)

Plus their sites are abysmal. It's like they were built with technology from the 90's and nobody told them about UX.

It's like they were built with technology from the 90's

HTTP, HTML and Javascript?

> Also Apple makes do with just the integrated Intel graphics, so we don't need NDIVIA either.

No they don't… the 15" MBP has a dedicated GPU, and a good one at that.

And costs 1000€ more than the Thinkpad W, a graphics workstation laptop.

A good one ? Nope, not for the price.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R9-M370X.142763.0.ht... The AMD Radeon R9 M370X is a mid-range graphics card for laptops that was announced mid 2015.

Mac are awesome for work (mine at least) but useless for anything that requires a good gpu

Compared to the Yoga 2 (or is it 3?) non-pro (proper HD rather than faux retina or faux HD), the 'proper' Thinkpad is a generation of CPU behind with half the RAM and double the price.

The backlit 'chicklet' keyboard on the Yoga Whatever(tm) is also subjectively better than the barrage of nipples and buttons that come with those 'legendary' Thinkpad keyboards. The screen is of a magnitude more vibrant and you can run two disks - mSATA SSD + normal SATA SSD/spinny-disk. Plus touch is just a feature, not something that is a special requirement. The hinge seems better engineered too, even if it never gets used in 360 tablet mode.

There is proof of pudding in that my colleagues with 14" Thinkpads have those stands and external monitors, with external keyboards and mice, rarely with the machines being 'un-docked' or taken home. Meanwhile, my off-brand Yoga Whatever(tm) gets carried around as intended, used on trains and used at home.

Sure some of the shiny has worn off the fibreglass in the palm-rest area but I actually do not care, I don't like the feel of Apple-style aluminium, plastic is more me when it comes to what I want to rest my palms on. The build quality is absolutely fine on Yoga Whatever(tm), same power connector as Thinkpad with same USB3 connector.

I downgraded from Windows Whatever to Ubuntu and admittedly the wifi does need 'make install' every time the kernel changes, but it runs a full set of dev tools fine (my colleagues desk-bound machines run 'Outlook', a web browser and nothing else, maybe 'Excel').

I prefer a standard linux distro as the Apple dev environments don't have the repository 'apt-get install' thing done very well. Horses for courses but there are surprises in the consumer range that are better for getting work done and a worthy contender for Apple competitor. Actually I would be annoyed if company policy forced me to have either a proper Thinkpad or a proper Apple computer, the Yoga Whatever(tm) with 14" deep-colour proper-HD screen hits the sweet spot for me.

I went through this when trying to help my younger sister choose a laptop for college. HP had a sale / coupon, and the number of laptop choices was overwhelming. Not only do they have 3 product groups, but they have ~10 products in each group, and you can customize each product even further.

I spent over an hour narrowing down the list of laptops (with names that told me nothing) to the few that met her price / performance budget. After that experience, I can totally understand how Apple does so well. Most consumers want LESS choice, not more.

The human biases related to paradox of choice type issues are real, but there are all sorts of ways to manage that for yourself. You end up with something objectively better if push through the psychological toll that a lot of choices takes on humans. Sometimes this is clearly worthwhile, sometimes not.

It's totally reasonable to make the choice that a lowest common denominator set of features is acceptable if it means you don't have to deal with the pain of choices, but you don't magically get something better as well. I do this for all kinds of things where the extra effort to get "the best" isn't worth the mental cost, but I make that choice mindfully. I only vaguely remember the annoyance of having to pick from the myriad of Thinkpad choices years ago.

For example, Apple makes great stuff but isn't designing things for my needs in a work laptop at all. I place no value on appearance since it's just a tool to me, I'm in a very keyboard-centric software environment so a trackpoint keyboard is the best mouse for me on this machine. I need various ports to plug things into more than I need clean lines. I need features and battery life more than I need portability. And while I try to discount status concerns here as much as I can, if I'm honest the people it's most useful for me to impress with my work laptop are more impressed by novelty/customization (arch linux + tiling wm + vim-keybindings everywhere setup) than with Apple product beauty anyway. When people refer to a laptop being "ugly" it strikes me as about as meaningful an opinion as if someone told me my cordless drill or vacuum was ugly.

Now that I mention it, that's the reason I find the current designer culture (intuitive design is the be-all and end-all of design) to be fairly anti-creator. The people who create things with technology, who craft code or video or sound or images in order to build valuable things do better with tools that allow for expertise. They benefit from the payoffs that investments in mastering expert interfaces bring with them. They want the option to climb a learning curve if it's the only way to reach the heights. I find calls for the systematic removal of this option to be troubling, especially when they are aimed at young people.

So, as a consumer, value being given limited choices when it makes sense for you but please don't lobby for it to be more universal!

What advantage do we have with this whole confusion of product lines with meaningless names? In many cases they could be replaced by a couple of lines with optionals for customization and that's it.

yeah. My Mac Air is a custom build - but getting to it was a conceptually simple process. Mac Pro/iMac/Mac Mini/Macbook Pro/Mac Air? Low-end Air or high-end Air? Want to customize that?

Apple's got about fourteen separate computers they'll sell you (plus tablets/phones), but that's folded away behind six distinct products that come in two or three stock configurations. If you had to choose between those fourteen things up front it'd be a lot more conceptually complicated.

IMHO there is a difference between choice and the chaos you have with most vendors. I appreciate that there are different variants of Thinkpads, but why are they so cryptically? A customization based system would be better IMHO. Pick a screen size + maybe for 15.6 bulky vs ultrabook style, then pick the upgrades you want. Ideally just a bunch of sliders.

Some options really are unnecessary. Like "Do you want to spend $15 to upgrade the network card to the 3x3 model? (no, we can't tell you if you need that or not or even what it means, you gotta know that yourself)".

Makes the design step more difficult (because you shouldn't have crazy intransparent dependencies between upgrades), but is more user friendly. Give 2 or 3 preset options for users that don't want to fiddle.

This is something a dealer might be able to implement on top of the existing offerings, but I haven't seen it yet. Screenfulls of base models, then another page of dropdowns. No way to tell what specific options each of the base models offers (or doesn't offer).

We use thinkpads at work. They're okay, but they're not Surface/MacBook level of quality. My T450s has bad backlight bleed at the bottom, the trackpad is a major regression from my T430, and it was chock-full of crapware before I nuked it and reinstalled windows. Apple isn't perfect, but the sort of annual model lottery that is notable when it happens in the Apple world is par-for-course in the PC world.

This is one of the reasons why I never bought a Lenovo because I am not sure which one to buy. Too many choices. They did the great job in confusing the heck out of me.

You make a very good point for the average Joe. With that many options, you better hope Joe has a tech savvy friend to make the recommendation, and that said tech savvy friend doesn't just say "get a macbook" because these days that's a perfectly good recommendation 99% of the time.

As a long-time Thinkpad owner, there are really only two answers for most tech-savvy users with typical needs (media, browsing, travel, and maybe programming): The X series and the T4XXs models.

After a very long deliberation (few years:) I went with T450 (non-retina) this summer and I am very happy. I chose it over T550 due to slightly lower dpi (I have a a 15 inch Dell at work with T550's resolution and everything is unpleasantly small, on T450 it's fine).

I took SSD, 16gb ram, no DVD, 2 cores (quad core was very expensive) and 2 batteries which makes it very light, yet with proper screen size; very fast and the battery lifetime is amazing (10-20h)

Only thing I don't like is touchpad, but I usually disable it and use track point. I preferred touchpad in my old asus laptop which was lower than keyboard level hence one would rarely click it by accident.

I chose T450 over T440 since in ..50 series Lenovo readded physical buttons over the touchpad (in ..30 and ..40 they were replaced with touch zones on the touchpad and long time Thinkpad users were really furious about that on forums)

The DPI is really a software problem. More DPI should only be better except for battery use.

IMO Touchpads/clickpads on those are a deal breaker. They are so bad that it is almost impossible to be nearly as productive as with a mouse.

On the other hand, Apple really got the clickpad right.

I am surprsied reading those comments. A touchpad on my x250 is fantastic and very customizable. I hate touchpads in general but after customizing it to be very sensitive and proper dead zones (to avoid clicking on accident in areas I often put a part of my hands) even started to like it.

I customized to very low sensitivity and I use only for clicking these days as trackpoint is just much better an interface.

Lenovo should simply stop shipping touchpads on their X series.

Anyone that doesn't like the trackpoint can buy a MacBook clone instead.

I cant agree. I really dislike the feel of the MacBook touch pads. Besides that they work good

T450 has 130dpi, T550 has 140dpi. It is small but noticeable difference.

It is a software problem that for pragmatic reasons I don't want to get into. Good luck setting non-integer scaling on current operating systems (like 1.25 or 1.50). It's either not supported, or the effect is blurry. It's a different story for retina screens, you set scaling to 2.00 and you're fine. But I was talking about non-retina.

That's the issue right there. You get swamped by options, some may be good, most are crappy. How can you tell? Sometimes they'll add a letter and an otherwise good product will be a crappy mess.

They can make it better than MS's offering because they are providing you with exactly what you need.

Take for example me, compsci student. I wanted to have a sub-600€ laptop with good hardware and good battery life, but did not care much about display. I ordered a thinkpad, replaced the HDD with an SSD, and am now happy with it.

The trick is called customization: Being better because they can deliver exactly what you need.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice

No, they really do have too many models. The yoga line is nice, but they clearly don't invest much individual resources on the design of each of the other models, which tends to make them generic. I have a work-supplied s540, and it's a decent workhorse laptop, but a macbook it is not. It's too generic for that. I was also pretty disappointed that the coating had blemishes. Even a cursory visual QA check would have detected those, so either they're shipping product sight unseen, or they're deliberately deciding to ship blemished goods.

There is nothing more generic than a macbook

No, there's nothing that espouses the "Modern" (capital M) design ethos as thoroughly as a macbook.

T and X are the ones you want.

I think that complaining about "too much choice" is disingenuous. One of the things I don't like about the Apple eco-system is that there is hardly any choice. Choosing between a tablet and a laptop is not really making a choice. It must be hell for you to by a car...

I'm a fan of Mazda. Your analogy would make more sense if instead of Mazda offering a choice of compact (Mazda 3), sedan (Mazda 6), or sports car (Mazda Miata), instead Mazda decided to build a lineup of:
* Mazda6L (Our most green Mazda 6) * Mazda6 Yoga (Our Mazda 6 that transforms into a Miata) * Mazda6W (Our power version) * Mazda6T (Our version which includes more gizmos) * Mazda6X (Our version which includes even more gizmos) * Mazda6 Helix (Our version that's like our Yoga but different) * Mazda611E (Our rugged version for teenagers who are careless)
.. and then within each type, have specific models like Mazda6T 554p, Mazda6T 440s, etc.
.. and then allowing you to further customize each Mazda6 model down to the finest detail.
...and then repeat for each type of car in their lineup (Mazda3, Miata, SUVs, etc).
Yes, if this were the case then I would have a very hard time buying a car! :)

Mazda in Australia is particularly straightforward as far as full-range car companies go. Three cars (2, 3, 6) three SUVs (CX3, CX5, CX9) a ute (BT-50) and a sports car (MX-5). Each of these has a few levels of trim. Some have choice of engine, boot style. Overall it's very easy for consumers to comprehend.
Whereas take BMW, which seems to have a really simple product line but has endless subtle variations in the same segment. 5 series Sedan vs 4 Gran Coupé vs 3 Grand Turismo, anyone? Then try to comprehend the endless options for each model. Then try to comprehend the relative cost of one model versus another (or one trim versus another) factoring in the inclusion or exclusion of particular features. It's insane.

Oh, you mean like having a
* Mazda 6 SE Saloon
* Mazda 6 SE-L Saloon
* Mazda 6 Sport Saloon
* Mazda 6 SE Tourer
* ...
... and then within each trim level, with or without nav
... and then within each, auto or manual transmission
... and then within each, petrol or diesel engines (sometimes several power levels)
... and then of course colours, paints and fabrics and alloy wheels and all that cosmetic stuff.
Admit it, there's more different option in a car configurator even at Mazda than in a laptop manufacturer's line-up.

I admit that other makes allow more customization and there's regional differences too (Mazda USA offers far less customization than Mazda Japan or Europe specifically because their research determined us Yanks like less choices).
But I think your example is way off. You're showing Trim Levels which are equivalent to prepackaged options list like CPU, memory, Red type cover vs Blue type cover, black stylus vs silver stylus. It's still the same model (Mazda6), still the same chassis, same body, same car! And cars are far more complicated than laptops! Buying a car in the USA for 99% of the general public basically comes down to choosing the Model (Mazda6), choosing the trim level (Grand Touring), choosing the color, and then settling for whatever your nearest dealers have on the lot :)
In comparison, the ThinkPad T models have different chassis, different physical sizes, different weight before you even start customizing things like CPU, memory, batteries, etc. And remember we're only talking about the T series.