Hacker News Reader

Lenovo destroyed the Thinkpad legacy.

I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7 row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use them. I still prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad.

I'd buy a retro Thinkpad, like you link, in a second. I'd Hackintosh or Linux it. Barring miracles, my next laptop will be a Mac.

A friend has a W540. It's horrible. Worst sound output of any machine I came across, horrible chicklet keyboard, and cracks in the keyboard surround that's design fault but Lenovo won't fix. All the once handy TP utilities are Adobe Air bloatware that take 5s+ to even open.

After 20 years he says it's his last TP.

Very true. Lenovo destroyed thinkpad legacy and it's on its way to destroying Motorola's legacy. The leaked renders of moto g4 and x4 look mighty awful.

I'm desperately hanging on to my T500 daily work machine. It was the last generation with 16:10 screens and the second-to-last with the good keyboard layout.

With an SSD and maxed RAM it's still viable, but the C2D processor is a real bottleneck. Trouble is, any machine I could replace it with would be a processor upgrade and an everything else downgrade.

Edit: actually the Macbooks have great 16:10 screens, so there's at least that option. Unfortunately they come with a long list of downsides of their own.

I don't want to get your hopes up too high, but there are positive signs that Lenovo is listening to what ThinkPad users want. There were a number of surveys started last year (and that may still be open) for feedback on a retro ThinkPad.

http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-survey-4-misce...

Whoa, I never tried any of the old Thinkpad. I think the keyboard in Lenovo's Thinkpad is already better than other cheap laptops, and the old one is even better?

Opinions differ on this. For a couple of years I had Thinkpads with both the old and new keyboards and I strongly preferred the new one. Each key is slightly larger, the spacing is better, and the keyboard springs are just right. However, if you use a lot of function keys, I can see why you'd like the old one better. The keyboard heavy things I do involve old school text editors (I use Vim awhile, get mad at it, switch to Emacs, then reverse) and these don't use function keys much.

It's a bit like the vi/emacs debate, it'll run and run :)

I prefer mechanical keyboards - my old IBM Model M that is wearing better than I am, or on new keyboards, Cherry MX Blues. I've no doubt that colours my laptop preferences. TP keyboards tried to duplicate that feel. Lenovo have slowly backed down the IBM "clicky" feel of the keyboard so a t22 or t43p feels quite a bit more clicky than a W520.

@masseyset says the new keyboard has better spacing. What he means is the key spacing is precisely identical (I saw many reviews claimed larger spacing, or that the keyboard was bigger, it's objectively untrue) but the key tops, being flat rather than sculpted, are larger so feel like a different spacing.

Being chicklet, the key travel is a fraction 1/2, 1/3? of the old TP keyboard. This is the bit I hate with chicklet keyboards along with their actuation point. 6 or 8 years of Macbook as main machine and I never got past that dislike. Devoid of feel and travel. I ended up with a Matias Tactile Pro for any time I wanted to do anything significant, so only needed to use the dead calculator keyboard when travelling.

The Thinkpad chicklet keyboard is way ahead of a Mac or anyone else's chicklet keyboard, and they brought back a fair bit of the clicky feel they'd slowly been losing (at least on my friend's W540). As chicklets go, it's very good. It'll never have the travel of the old 7 row TP keyboard, so I will never like it.

I could probably live with the new TP chicklet as the weighting is back to good. The lack of travel and scattering the pgup/home block randomly around the whole keyboard to save 50c and the extra 1/2 row is unforgivable.

I think that covers my biases. Oh, I lean towards vi. :)

The Lenovo keyboards aren't bad? I actually like them. Well aside from the bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is retarded.

The trackpads on them are beyond redemption though. How that made it past well any kind of user testing is beyond me.

> Well aside from the bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is retarded.

There's a BIOS option to swap Fn and Ctrl, at least on the X250.

Interesting. I'll check. Not sure I can get into BIOS though...corporate laptop.

Did it work? If not, can you hit ESC and still save the option?

(None of my old TPs have this, so I can't check.)

the option is there on my L520 as well.

I believe the BIOS option to change them was introduced in the xy10 series, I actually loaded a hacked BIOS on a W500 I was given to "recycle" to do the same swap.

FWIW, on my W530, you can swap Fn and Ctrl in the BIOS. YMMV.

It's too bad Lenovo ripped before I ever bought one, I often see nostalgious people. Have you tried system76 laptops? A bit expensive but no real flaw so far for me.

I believe System76 uses rebranded Clevos. I own a Sager which is also a rebranded Clevo and it has the worst build quality of any computer I have ever owned.

> I'd buy a retro Thinkpad, like you link, in a second.

I'm not sure if the Libreboot would fit your needs? https://minifree.org/

I love my Lenovo Carbon X1 3rd Gen, and I know a few friends who have them too and love it.

>> some devices aren't available in a quality we used to have available in mainstream

This unfortunate reality extends to pretty much all products. Manufacturing is nothing like it was 20 years ago; quality is down across the board. Products used to be well made, but are now mass produced using the cheapest materials possible.

Go buy a Scrabble board. The unfolded board won't lay perfectly flat on the table because the two halves are not heavy enough to fully bend down the crease in the middle. The tiles are made of flimsy particle board instead of real wood. The letters wear off too because they are printed on rather than etched. Compare it to a board made in the 70s or 80s. The difference between them isn't just large, it's disgustingly atrocious. Same for a Cribbage board (cheap wood, plastic sliding door that falls out instead of metal that grinds into the board), a Battleship set (the one I bought for my nephew, the panels that hold the pegs don't snap in properly and fall off). Things used to be quality made; now they're done at the lowest possible quality because people will buy it regardless.

>Compare it to a board made in the 70s or 80s.

I can buy Scrabble for $20, rather than $40 in 1985 money.

Please let me pay $40, or $100, for something that will last a lifetime. That 70s-80s board my mother has is still in near pristine condition, and it has been used a hell of lot over 30 years. My friend owns one that is a couple of years old, rarely gets used, and yet some of the letters are nearly illegible; more than a few of the point values have rubbed away. The board is cheap, the tiles are junk, and the racks move every time you touch them (rather than sitting firmly on the table from the weight of real wood).

Throwing quality out the window for the sake of racing to rock bottom pricing? No thanks.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B006VCSL0W/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...

With many games the copyright comes to an end and, when that happens, one company no longer has the entire market for that game. Consequently anyone else can make the game, to undercut the original price competitively. This happened about a decade ago with 'Connect 4', originally a premium product by MB games, nowadays anyone can make it but they have to call it 'Four in a Row' or something like that. Needless to say the clones and the updated 'Connect 4' are rubbish compared to the 1980's vintage version.

I don't know what the copyright situation is with Scrabble, however, there's bound to be some reasons like what has gone on with 'Connect 4' meaning the product is degraded.

Not only have they hosed the reputation of the brands they've bought, but they're diminishing their own as well. I know it's nowhere as popular as the ThinkPad, but I have been a ThinkStation fan for years. I bought my first one in 2005. I bought another in 2014 and the new one was an identical case with different components inside and a few different labels outside. I was blown away by this because it's exactly what I've always wanted -- I don't care at all about the gimmicky chassis updates -- and I told everyone about it, probably resulting in a couple other people getting one. Unfortunately, I won't have a chance to reproduce this experience as they discontinued the model and no longer seem to have a comparable machine.

I started out building my own machines because that was how you did it to save money and get good components, then vendors eventually became good enough where that wasn't necessary or desirable, and now we've come full circle and it seems likely I'll build my next machine, whenever this one finally gives up the ghost.

The Microsoft IntelliMouse was so good. This was something I realized at the time and hoarded them. I now have a wonderful stash of that mouse.

MS hardware was always good.

Their joystick offerings (Sidewinder) were top-notch, for example.

The Dual Strike was innovation ahead of its time: https://www.google.com/search?q=SideWinder+Dual+Strike&tbm=i...

Before MS gutted the PC gaming hardware division to focus on forcing the Xbox on us..

My bank got new computers and were selling their old intellimice for $3 each. I have a huge stash.

Any for sale?

I'm down to my last one, and can't source them anywhere now. Want to sell any?

€90 on amazon, holy shit!

Maybe there would be a demand for a website that lists where you can buy obsoleted programmer gear like the IntelliMouse and Thinkpads.

You can get refurb T60/T61 systems. Buy them now, stick them in a box, pull one out every 18 months when your old one dies. There are some on EBAY for < $100. In most cases you can clone your existing drive and put the new one in the "new" laptop.

> Microsoft IntelliMouse and Comfort Mouse 6000

You can easily find these and other discontinued mice from China (eBay/aliexpress/etc...). Quality may differ, but MS IME looks (and feels) like original.

I remember when the office "upgraded" our workstations with shiny new Dells (KB, mouse, monitor included). So there I was down at the street rummaging through the bin trying to get my favourite, well worn keyboard and mouse back. It was that serious.

I've had good luck finding old hardware in second stores in small towns. Like an entire Apple II (with drive, floppies, monitor) in Puerto Rico. I wished I had the space in my luggage. I have some programs on old floppies I wrote at my sons age that if live to show him.

Microsoft Comfort Mouse 1000 fan here. Simple, higher quality, well fitting. Hard to believe they were released so long ago (2003). Like someone else said, designers have went a bit nuts. I've got a Apple Magic Mouse and for all of its nifty features, it is not comfortable to use. I've went through a few of the Comforts but luckily I still have a couple functional and a spare in the box.

I haven't encountered a single laptop keyboard that isn't bad to type on but the old Lenovo keyboards were better than the usual stuff. But these days we can get laptops with full Cherry MX keys and that's a proper keyboard experience. It's not something you'd carry in your backpack, but for going on trips where you sit at a table, it's fine to bring with you.

I had 2 T41p laptops. They were great while they worked but they had a problem with the Nvidia chips which caused the chip to die at some point. You could reflow the board in the oven (did that twice) and it would give it a few more months of life but then would die again taking the laptop with it. Otherwise it was a great machine.

It's strange that Lenovo's laptop IPS panels are not as good as desktop IPS or VA panels, but they're okay to code on. Are there real IPS or VA panels that look great from any angle like a display on your desk?

I had a 600E and 600X. Everything after felt inferior to me. Since, I have bought MacBook Pro. I miss the old Thinkpads. The build quality, the keyboards, the mouse nub.