ThinkPad Anniversary Edition 25: Limited Edition ThinkPad Goes Retro | Hacker News Reader

ThinkPad Anniversary Edition 25: Limited Edition ThinkPad Goes Retro

anandtech.com

178 pointsartsandsci136 comments

So much negativity today! Now look: I have a T420s , yes, it's a Sandy Bridge CPU from 2011. It's older than my boots. It got a full HD screen hack last year.

Now look what I am getting:

* a decent upgrade in CPU speeds * three years warranty instead of hair raising hacks * Thunderbolt 3 * 32GB RAM support

I truly do not need anything else. Compared to what I was afraid of and budgeted for... at the end of the day I have six years worth of unspent laptop money. I already bought a second half tera SSD, two PackedPixels, a large battery and if more reports confirm it's single module 16GB then I'll buy a second 16GB stick now (I originally thought it's going to be a pair of 8GB and so I only planned going 32GB later but if it's already single stick then even better).

I am happy with what I will get when I return to Canada. The comparison to the T470p is total irrelevant -- why would I buy a machine without Thunderbolt 3 these days? The Microsoft keynote at IFA showcased a small Lenovo TB3 dock containing a GTX 1050, Sonnet and Mantiz both have talked about totally portable TB3 docks. It will happen. And then I have enough graphics power when I want and a perfect light ThinkPad when I don't want. If I were an avid FPS gamer then I could leave a powerful TB3 eGPU on my desk. Truly, eGPU is the bees knees and you dont want to miss out.

And if you compare to the T470 you will realize the premium is not that much.

There are a lot of "what if" scenarios but being mad over them not happening is stupid. We got something impossible: a laptop made for fans. No one else ever did anything even remotely similar. HP did a sticker for their calculator anniversary.

Well, 14" FHD antiglare (1920 x 1080) IPS multitouch. Well, it is a reflective screen how ever they want to put it.

Edit: I fortunately double checked this before ordering.

> I have six years worth of unspent laptop money.

I bought a used W520 a couple years ago because I couldn't find a system with a keyboard like this.

I think it's too early for people to be so negative. If a few months from now this edition flops because it didn't go all out, then okay, but we're not there yet.

While it doesn't have everything, I'm staring at a picture of a laptop made in 2017 with a keyboard that matches this 2011 machine.

Maybe if this sells out quickly we'll see more iterations in the direction that Thinkpad "retro" fans want.

Rumors are, there are only 5000 made worldwide. It'd be surprising if it would flop.

X201 owner here. Still use it, but not as a daily driver, and I'm in the market for one.

Lenovo screwed the pooch on this one.

1) Limited production run (5,000 units) and limited target audience (the multi-color logo and anniversary badging? Really?) drastically increased the price beyond what was reasonable (base entry cost being double the non-anniversary base cost, forced spec decision due to a sole SKU aside).

2) No status LEDs

3) No ThinkLight

4) No 4:3 or 3:2 display

5) Given that the display is 16:9, only 1080p is offered

6) No physical kill switches e.g. for WiFi let alone more modern ones like for the webcam and microphone

7) 940MX is aging, with poorer driver support in Linux compared to Intel offerings, not to mention the battery hit from a dGPU

8) What is up with the letter alignment on the B key? On a machine where the keyboard is THE selling point?

It's really sad to watch the unboxing video they "made for the community" where they claim that it's unfeasible to throw in a Thinklight into a modern Thinkpad because the bezel is too thin. Well - pray tell, why is the bezel that thin?? The entire Thinkpad brand was based on making, first and foremost, highly functional machines. Like I've said before in my comments, Thinkpads were the blue jeans and pickup trucks of laptops. I don't want my blue jeans to be thin, and I don't want my trucks to ride close to the ground. Maybe I don't want such thin bezels either, if they're going to force a compromise on functionality.

A T470 with a retro keyboard is not a modern successor to classic Thinkpads. They used to be so much more. Maybe $1900 would be worth it if they developed a true successor, but not this.

Agree on all points. Let's hope they get the message and do better next time. And I do in fact hope there is a next time.

> What is up with the letter alignment on the B key? On a machine where the keyboard is THE selling point?

The people who care the most about keyboards are touch typists who don't look at the key labels. Moving the B label is because of the low profile TrackPoint which requires a larger notch in the B key. Every recent ThinkPad has this; it's something you'd never notice in actual use, only in photos of keyboards. I had no idea my ThinkPad Yoga 460 and my friend's X1 Carbon had misaligned B labels until people started talking about it WRT the T25, and I certainly don't care about it now.

Definitely agree about the screen resolution; it would be a huge downgrade from the Yoga 460.

I've been using a Thinkpad for years and never noticed the placement of the B key until reading this.

I had multiple Thinkpads over the years and never noticed. I'm on an HP elitebook now, and just looked down for the first time. Yup - misaligned B key label.

Regarding physical kill switches for the microphone, even on older models with a mute button and visible indicator that no longer functions after Windows 10.

Good indicator that some of those buttons may not be as much of a physical kill as you think.

Yeah, mute buttons are really nothing more than just another key on the keyboard... They depend on software implement the function, and can just as easily be ignored or overridden by software. Nothing wrong with having mute buttons, as they very handy in conference calls and such, but they are NOT kill switches.

Thinkpads (including my current W510) used to have a slide switch to physically disable WiFi. I really wish the Retro had that, as well as switches to physically disconnect the webcam and microphones. The webcam can be fixed with a bit of black electrical tape, but the mic is not so easy. I've seriously considered going in with a soldering iron to add a switch there.

the 4:3 and 3:2 comment grabs me. Why aren't there more non-tablet form factors with one of these screen ratios? Even 1:1 might be useful to some.

I hate how we're stuck to 16:9 or 16:10 nearly everywhere. Those are not super useful ratios to me unless you're watching a lot of video.

Just a reminder that Lenovo is - unfortunately - not a company one can trust.

https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html

https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/lenovo-rootkit-malware.htm...

https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/lenovo-superfish-malware.h...

Agreed, I was a pretty die-hard lenovo fan until they started pulling this shit. When my t410 started showing its (very) old age last year, I went with a Razer Blade instead of a new thinkpad. I'm extremely happy with it. I know razer pumps out a good deal of lemons, but I won the lottery and have no problems at all.

EDIT: I do really miss the nub (or whatever it's called). It made programming in crammed areas (bus/plane/wife sleeping on me) much easier.

I've been following this for a couple years, lots of discussion on reddit /r/thinkpad. They basically produced a T470 with a classic style keyboard, and anniversary badging.

As far as what people hoped for, they couldn't do a 4:3 or 3:2 display, as that requires a larger bulk purchase than what they planned for this model (only 5000 units produced). The thinklight wasn't possible because the screen bezel is thinner. Hopefully they will use the classic keyboard on additional models in the future, but there is no indication of that at this time.

Yeah, the best we can hope for is that keyboard being an option on the T series moving forward.

I really don't want to switch to chiclets when my T420 finally stops being perfect.

what are the benefits of the thinklight over a backlit keyboard? my old thinkpad had the thinklight and i hated it.

i found that while using my laptop in an unlit room with the thinklight, the blue function icons were impossible to distinguish and the top-left and top-right corners of the keyboard required straining my eyes. i was 18-20 years old with 20/20 vision at the time.

i would actually be very tempted by this release if i hadn't just bought a dell XPS because i love the trackpoint (and lenovo's was always leagues ahead of dell's) and i love having dedicated volume controls and a hardware mute button (i can let my function keys be function keys without missing out on single-key volume control).

The benefit is that it can be used to illuminate objects other than the keys, such as a paper you're copying information from. A thinklight with higher color quality, and maybe adjustable brightness would solve the problems you had with it; white LEDs have come a long way in the past decade.

I use the thinklight for illuminating RSA keyfobs in the dark. Granted, I can tilt the screen and crank up its brightness to achieve the same thing, but it's cumbersome and maybe some people would prefer to read something illuminated while typing and seeing the screen simultaneously. At least my RSA codes are short enough to type from memory.

I used my X40 a lot in college where I did a lot of theatre sound and lighting, and the thinklight was really good at illuminating the script as well as the keyboard.

> (only 5000 units produced)

Jeez, that's as bad as Nintendo's latest retro gaming consoles.

I think if they produced a display at 1920x1440 they'd have no trouble selling as many as they could produce. The 16:9 aspect ratio is the worst thing ever forced on the industry.

A similarly equipped T470p is $600 cheaper on their website. I can't seem to add a 940MX on the regular T470.

I'm a big ThinkPad fan but I actually like their chiclet keyboards (blasphemy), so I guess this is a pass for me. I think it's cool they're even doing the anniversary edition though.

That's incorrect. A similarly equipped T470 is maybe ~$300 less but you miss out on the discrete gfx card and the keyboard. I think you're looking at the base price and forgetting the three year warranty that comes with this.

I've already bought one since the value is worth it.

Unless I'm bad at their webshop game, it seems bit curious that you can't get a T470(p) with both dGPU and low-power CPU. Dropping the GPU the equivalent model (with 3yr warranty) comes to basically $1500, compared to $1900 for the anniversary model. $400 (~25% increase) for the keyboard seems still bit steep, dGPU most likely being more of a burden than benefit for doing anything useful (ie running Linux).

>but you miss out on the discrete gfx card

Feature, not bug, at least on linux. For some kind or a commemorative device, it's very short sighted how they wrote its obsolescence in its design by forcing an nvidia card.

I have the T470P with 7700HQ and 2560x1440, it is brilliant.

I can't fault anything on it that.

How about a lack of thunderbolt 3? _The_ reason I can't buy one.

I don't need it so it has no impact on me, if you do them but a different one :).

I’m sorry, they had years to prepare this and couldn’t even align the ‘B’ properly.

51nb.com (chinese thinkpad forum) has been doing better work with less resources by putting updated motherboards into classic thinkpad chassis. (see X62 for example)

The x62 is super attractive, except even the sxga+ mod is still a dim CCFL, or if you mod for led slightly brighter but colors all wrong with all sorts of artifacts from the light strip, and aftermarket-only awful batteries.

-An sxga+ (w/led mod) x61s owner.

Typing this on an LED SXGA X61, you want: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/thinkpad/led-kit.shtml

No banding on the bottom, accurate colors, and great brightness.

My mod was less successful, and the colors are definitely off. Having done the mod myself and seen how cumbersome it is to get the LED strip perfectly oriented in the CCFL gutter, I'm not likely to try again.

How to grab attention for nothing. Could have reduced the trackpoint outer rim ..

> couldn’t even align the ‘B’ properly.

That's because of the low profile TrackPoint. The upper notch on the B key is larger than it was on older ThinkPads with the high profile TrackPoint.

This is nothing new; every recent ThinkPad with the low profile TrackPoint has the B label offset like this. It's not something you notice when actually using the machine: I've been using a ThinkPad Yoga 460 for most of this year, and never realized the B label was offset until I saw people talking about it when the T25 keyboard photos were leaked.

Unlike the high profile TrackPoints on all my previous ThinkPads, the low profile one never leaves a smudge on the screen. I'll take that over a perfectly aligned key label any day.

We're talking about the same people who refuse to fix the non-standard Ctrl and Fn key placement here.

What is non-standard about it? Every ThinkPad since they first added an Fn key has had it in the same place, and every MacBook has it there too. It would be dumb for them to arbitrarily change it now, but you can easily switch it in the BIOS if you prefer the other order.

I would _love_ to get me an x320/x330. But I can't for the life of me find a place that actually sells them. The one place that I found is a facebook group where it seems that they have been unresponsive for around half a year.

EDIT: For those who do not want to google it themselves: https://forum.51nb.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1699442&...

https://imgur.com/a/0m3a1#FpKEHYl

> I’m sorry, they had years to prepare this and couldn’t even align the ‘B’ properly.

Just so I make sure I understand you correctly: you're complaining about the positioning of the label on the key (since it has to be shifted due to the notch caused by the trackpoint)? That is, you're not complaining about the key itself, merely the label?

This should have been an x70; an oem x62 w/led backlit sxga+. Not some preexisting workstation replacement beast with a classic keyboard slapped on it.

Lenovo has been such a disappointment.

i wish it had the one of the T410/T420/T430 blue middle click buttons. It used to sit much higher at an angle, now it is flatter. All 3 of the trackpad buttons above the pad are inferior.

It'd be awesome if they offered that classic keyboard for sale to retrofit onto existing 470 and future models.

I just got a 470p, and I'd shell out for a real keyboard today.

Fn and Ctrl are the wrong way around.

My laptop also got pgup and pgdn in those position, but they have a slightly different shape than the up key. I flipped them with Home and End with seems to be a somewhat popular thing to do. Works much better for me.

The 1920x1080 resolution is a bit disappointing. Crispy text needs more DPI.

I share your disappointment with the resolution. 1920x1080 is at the low end of acceptability. I'm at 2560x1440 on the Carbon X1 and I won't go back.

I never understood your side of the Ctrl / Fn placement argument though. Why would you want the left side Ctrl key to be further from center than the right side Ctrl key? And why would you want a more rarely used key (Fn) to be closer to center?

Because I'm used to Ctrl being the outermost key on desktop keyboards

But that's really an incorrect position for it. The most commonly used keys should be easiest to hit (hence the Command key on Macs being right next to the spacebar). Since Control is used more often then Alt, Control should be immediately next to the spacebar, then Alt, then Function.

I always press Ctrl with the side of my palm. It's much easier than using my pinky.

Me too, and alt with my thumb. It drives me insane when Ctrl is not the outermost key.

Exactly!

Incorrect? It's a personal preference, I find it easy to hit with my pinky. Pressing Cmd+Z on Mac means pinching my thumb and ring finger together, Cmd+V means crossing my left index finger over my thumb; neither are more comfortable than using my pinky. I personally remap Command to the Control key on my OSX boxes for this very reason.

In my opinion, it's easy to hit cmd because it's the key right next to the spacebar and thus easy to find, not because it's close to the center.

It's easy to hit the bottom-leftmost key because it's also easy to find. And your pinky doesn't need to reach towards the center.

Meanwhile I can't consistently hit the keys between them because there's no real reference position. I'm often off by one, hit between them, and generally have to look at the keyboard.

For that reason I never use the ctrl button on the macbook and instead bind it to capslock. I find that ctrl is at just about the worst place on the keyboard where it currently is on the macbook.

My hands can span the entire keyboard, so "close to the center" isn't an optimization for the same reason that it would probably slow you down if the most commonly used english letters were clustered together in one spot.

Fn and Ctrl positioning seem to be like vi vs emacs, but every ThinkPad from the Tx10 series on seems to support swapping those as a BIOS option - and a hacked firmware and instructions were available for my old W500 to do the same.

Add it is not a matte screen. Antiglare what ever is not a matte screen. If anything then nobody asked for this.

They didn't change the Fn/Ctrl order for this model. Every ThinkPad since they first added the Fn key, including the older models with the classic keyboard, has had them in this order, so why would they switch them now? And as fencepost mentioned, you can swap them in the BIOS.

Definitely agree on the resolution. It's one of the two reasons I'm not ordering a T25, as it would be a massive downgrade from the high-DPI displays on my ThinkPad Yoga 460 and MacBook Pro Retina 15".

I used the MBPR as my main Windows machine for a couple of years even though I had a perfectly good ThinkPad W520 with twice the memory and twice the SSD storage. Even though I missed the ThinkPad key layout and especially the TrackPoint, the MBPR's high-DPI display made up for it. When I switched back to a ThinkPad this year, I made sure it was a high-DPI model.

The other reason I didn't order, surprisingly enough, is the keyboard layout. It's fairly obvious that the T25 is a one-off hobby machine and there is no intention to continue offering the classic keyboard. At this point I've made my peace with the 6-row keyboards, and even though I'd prefer the classic 7-row, what good would it do me to switch back to it for the next couple of years and then have to switch back to a 6-row on my next ThinkPad?

Rats! They didn't provide the old mouse pad with buttons above and below. The "click anywhere" mouse pads are a pain. And who wants to be stuck with only a iCore 7U processor?

If they're going to drop one set, why the bottom set? My thumb operates those buttons and my thing does the cursor position...maybe some people are the opposite.

Because most people who use a thinkpad use the trackpoint. I disable my trackpad.

Buttons at the bottom of the touchpad are not usable with the TrackPoint. Well, you could use them, but you'd have to move your hand down every time you wanted to click. One of the big attractions of the TrackPoint is that you can use it directly from the home row without moving your hands.

Hmm, the Lenovo configurator only offers one model: no indication whether RAM can be upgraded to 32GB afterwards (which is what my current T420 and T420s both have). The CPU can take it *1, but not certain what the memory config on the laptop is...

1: https://ark.intel.com/products/95451/Intel-Core-i7-7500U-Pro...

Someone please bring back 14" Laptops with 4:3 screens!

Apple sells 4:3 screens in the iPad Pro.

And the iPad Pro isn't a laptop. It's a tablet running a locked-down, irreplaceable mobile device OS.

It demonstrates panel availability, which has been argued in the past as why no modern 4:3 thinkpads will be produced.

It demonstrates panel availability up to 12.9 inches, but not necessarily up to 14.

That's perfect for an X series, a real one, like the X[346]0 line which ended with the wide screen takeover.

Right, but the originator of the thread was talking specifically about 14" laptops.

A small screen increases the risk of a small keyboard.

Apple can buy panels in any shape or size they want, that doesn't demonstrate general panel availability in any way. Do you think the notched display in iphone is an off-the shelf module?

Do you think the panel supplier wouldn't be happy to sell more of a panel Apple made very cheap for them to manufacture at scale?

You can bet that Apple makes those suppliers sign exclusivity contracts, less to keep the panels out of the hands of competitors like Lenovo and more to keep the panels out of the hands of counterfeiters/knockoff-artists.

And yet you can buy that exact LCD on ebay.

Can you buy 5000 of them on eBay?

For the 9.7” and 12.9 screens, you can buy 5000 4:3 LCD panels per week:

https://m.alibaba.com/product/60629586392/wholesale-9-7-Inch...

https://m.alibaba.com/product/60590281374/Original-Multi-Tou...

Yes!

my kingdom for anything better than 16:9 in a thinkpad

though it looks like other manufacturers besides lenovo and apple are starting to make good laptops now, so maybe i'll finally be able to ditch them in a few years

I'd be thrilled if someone put the 13" 4:3 (or should we call it 16:12 for marketing?) screen from the iPad Pro in a laptop.

Surface Book has 3:2 which is really nice, quite expensive machine though (I love mine, and have been lucky not to have any of the issues that seemed to plague them in their early days)

The Surface Book has a great screen but my god that machine was an absolute nightmare for the ~2 months I had it. Microsoft seriously screwed up on QC.

Not to mention it was just way over-engineered. All people were asking for was a Surface laptop. Microsoft's own MacBook Pro but they just had to do something "unique" and it was a mess. Now we have the Surface Laptop that comes with a gimped version of Windows[0]. Honestly I just don't understand Microsoft.

[0] Yes you can upgrade it to Windows 10 Pro for free until the end of the year but then it is an extra $50!

Isn't the Surface Book the one that iFixIt rated as "[unrepairable, made of glue]"?

Brings back memories - I was working in a SW startup in 1992 and we were subcontracting for IBM, developing OS/2 network SW. They gave us a bunch of PS/2 PCs but also tossed in an early ThinkPad.

Do you think it'll ship with BonzaiBuddy preinstalled?

Well, I'm done. I've been a Lenovo fanboy for _years_, currently running a maxxed-out X220 w/ FreeBSD 11.1.

But after _years_ of clamouring by the ThinkPad community, Lenovo has a released a decidedly half-assed machine. Yay for the keyboard, but no 4:3 / 3:2, ThinkLight? This is just a cynical exercise in branding.

And _then_, they are only making 5,000 of them, so that the price is high, and (unlike other older models, like the X220) they won't be thick on the ground in a few years for parts.

I bought the original S431 thinkpad with hybrid graphics for about $1500 when it came out. At the time I was a university student, and had saved for maybe 6 mos on my part time job to purchase it.

The original s431 had heat issues that came from the graphics card inside of it's slim body. The graphics card would actually heat up hot enough to melt the laptop. When people figured this out Lenovo pulled it off of the market (it was only sold for 1 month).

The bottom of my laptop melted when I was gaming one day, before I knew this was an issue. The keyboard also stopped working. I called about it to see if I could replace it but they said they where not servicing it unless I had a warranty.

So even though it was a manufacturer defect, they would not service my laptop. They said they would sell me a new keyboard for $200 and I could install it myself. So I did.

Turns out the keyboard cable that attaches to the motherboard was also melted. The new keyboard did nothing.

Fuck lenovo. I will never purchase from a company with that terrible of customer support again.

Edit: The laptop also shipped with a bunch of faulty drivers, and because the HDD was some custom lenovo hybrid drive instead of a standard drive you could not wipe the drive and reinstall windows.

I don't think the 940MX is worth the TDP - if they moved that to the CPU there'd be enough to put in a 35W quad-core CPU, which even in 8th gen would be a nice boost.

A lie7 with 940MX really isn't going to age well at all :(

edit: And the T470P looks like a much nicer base for this. The base (real quad-core i5) config pumped up to $1250 is a better machine! sigh

Anybody got a list of the countries where it's going to be available? (I'm tired of refreshing pages)

This is extremely interesting to me. So much about those machines make them perfect for dev.

If it's the keyboard you're attracted to, x230s can be picked up for ~200$, and the x220 classic keyboard+palmrest bolt right on. My x230 has an i7 w/16GiG and msata ssd for a whole lot less money than this retro thinkpad.

Can you put a decently bright 1920x1080 display in that, or buy one as configured?

Yes, though I haven't done it myself. Search Google for nitrocaster fhd. I think you lose docking port functionality, as the mod steals the external display lines.

Yes you can. https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=122640

The keyboard and the aspect ratio, although I now realise this new version doesn't feature the latter.

I do have plenty of old thinkpads, but I've never tried getting any modern components into one.

The keyboard is important, but so is the rest of the laptop.

The i7 in the x230 is much, much less power efficient than this one. The 16 GB of RAM is 1600 MHz DDR3, not DDR4. The msata SSD is decent, but it's designed to be just a cache drive by default and isn't a proper NVMe PCIe drive. It (remarkably) has USB 3 and Displayport, but no USB C or Thunderbolt. The battery in a used $200 laptop will likely be in need of replacement. And the display is the worst part: a disgusting 1366x768 with terrible colors and a weak CFL backlight, instead of a decent FHD or WQHD IPS LED.

The price is great, the keyboard is awesome, the display and various internals can be upgraded to be modern enough for now, but there are a lot of drawbacks to be aware of...says the guy with a T430 :)

I have a samsung evo msata ssd in my x230, it's the primary disk and the HDD bay is vacant. Not sure what your point is about it primarily being a cache - it's whatever you configure it for. And the display is LED IPS, but you're correct on the resolution.

I think for the money savings the x230 w/x220 kbd is attractive. People run egpu setups with them as well for gaming.

I use one of these, with a 2tb HDD in the 2.5" bay. It's plugged into a big screen most of the time. Makes a good, inexpensive portable desktop. A 12" 16:9 screen is pretty useless for doing anything apart from checking mail or watching videos, unfortunately. A 12 16:10, or 3:2, would be better.

I like that it comes with NVidia graphics -- that doesn't look like something you can get on a T470. The price point, while expensive, is still much better than I thought it'd be (I was thinking well over $2000).

Looks like it's an option in the T470P.

If you need the horsepower, you can get a T4XXp. 940MX is already somewhat outdated and will age quickly, for people who do need the horsepower.

nVidia graphics mean poorer libre graphics driver support on Linux, compared to Intel graphics drivers, not to mention the battery hit. If you're a developer looking to buy a programming workhorse, Intel graphics are a better choice.

And here I was hoping for a 3" thick laptop with a 1024x768 11" screen

That's an easy mod.

Grab a roll of tape, tape off most of the screen and use the rest of the tape to attach a brick to the bottom. Done.

The huge bezel under the screen looks ridiculous. It should be filled with more screen. I like the keyboard, but this doesn't bring back most of what I love about oldschool thinkpads.

I was really hoping for a 4:3 aspect ratio, the golden ratio for developers.....this is just very disappointing ...

Expensive and hard to get in Europe :(

Most of my actual 'work' I need a laptop for (remote stuff over SSH, testing web apps in a browser) is still handled just fine by my x41.

If only it had the butterfly keyboard ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_Butterfly_keyboar...

They can't "go retro", their laptops never stopped looking retro :)

So just some cutesy styling on a T470p, which seems underwhelming. Was hoping for 3:2 and something a bit more rugged which would also help with heat. The T470p and X270 have terrible reviews on heat.

Erm, nope. It's a T470 not a T470p.

Hmm if they manage to put in a GPU and keep it from overheating it'd be worth considering I suppose.

I have an x230t and it's amazing. Core i5, SSD and 16 GB RAM. Plus it has a touch screen with a pressure sensitive pen.

It was like $1200 less than all these computers people are talking about here.

Nice laptop, but unless I'm mistaken, based on google image search, it has exactly none of the features people are interested in T25 for - the keyboard is the modern design, with no separation between function keys, and no Insert/Home/Delete/End quadrant.

I have a T450 which work gave me sitting in the closet - it's also perfect, but I can't get used to its keyboard, and am using my personal T420 and T420s instead. Personal preference :)

you can swap x230/t430 to the x220/t420 keyboard, for what it's worth.

sticking point to me on the X220/230 is that 1366x768 screen, but I believe the X230 can be upgraded to 1080p.

I have an x240, which is okayish otherwise, but I'm quite annoyed that it is the model they decided to try dropping mouse buttons. x230 and x250 both have them, but of course x240 had to be the one I got.

does it work with linux?

ThinkPads almost always do... Typing this on a ThinkPad running Linux right now.

This is my first question too. Went to the shop, but it looks that it's only available with NVidia and maximum 16GB RAM. I need optimal Linux compatibility and more RAM (have 20GB now and reaching limits). I'm disappointed, because I have to replace my 450s and absolutely wanted the keyboard of Thinkpad 25. I hope there will be the option to buy it with an Intel graphics card and add RAM. Does anybody know more?

I do not understand why they're still putting GPUs in laptops under 17". Sell me an external thunderbolt 3 GPU for the rare occasion where I need a GPU, use the space you save for something else.

The difference between entry-level to mid-tier mobile GPUs and Intel's integrated graphics is too small to justify carrying it around with you 24/7.

GPUs are the new DVD drive.

My bet is Microsoft excel. Many users need slightly more power than an integrated gfx card offers.

Seriously? I didn't realize Excel put any sort of load on the GPU.

It doesn't, apart from some GPU acceleration for the UI. I have no idea what OP is thinking.

This almost certainly would have been more competitive with a i7-7560U instead of a i7-7500U (the former has 2x the graphics execution units and 64MB eDRAM). Same TDP.

The only reason I can think to put an NVIDIA dGPU is for people who need CUDA.

That makes a lot of sense actually. I haven't followed the evolution of Thunderbolt, but if such external GPUs are now fully supported and reliable then it's a bit of an inflection point for laptops.

I don't want something as large as 17 inches, and having purchased a machine without discrete graphics, I'm kind of regretting it.

> GPUs are the new DVD drive.

Coincidentally, I'm also missing the ethernet jack and internal blu-ray drive that my last laptop had. Dongles and external hardware suck. They make the whole experience of using the machine more awkward and less streamlined.

Optical drives are really a niche item these days, dropping it is understandable, especially considering the disproportionate space requirements of a drive. But ethernet, that is something I don't want to lose. Not because I can't get internet otherwise, but for getting access to restricted networks, or some quick troubleshooting etc.

Any guesses on Linux compatibility?

My guess would be very compatible, except perhaps for the fingerprint reader.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T470s

It has nvidia graphics though, that does not bode well

You could always just disable the discrete graphics card...

Does it mean that the Thinkpad 25 has two graphics cards?

The Intel GPU is in the CPU, so yeah, it has two GPUs.

Unfortunately, if it's like other ThinkPads I think the HDMI output requires the discrete GPU.

Thank you for the reply. So it would be possible to use it without the nvidia card, but then connecting to an external monitor will not work. that's sad, but I rarely work with external monitors.

Looked up on different forums and people had quite some trouble with Linux and nvidia cards, so I'm really not convinced.

I've read as well on reddit [1] that the key travel is actually less than on the classic and newer chicklet style keyboards. Will wait until people report how the typing experience is with this keyboard. I don't care about the looks, but the typing experience is really important, because I'm spending all the time on the keyboard and though I love my T450s, I have to say that it's far from the IBM Thinkpad keyboards (although it's seems one of the best for modern laptops).

I'm still not decided.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/74drfl/thinkpad_2...

Yeah, that's what troubles me. My current Thinkpad has NVidia and is working reasonably well using the proprietary drivers, but I know support has been hit or miss over the years with various chips. There was a time when I was unable to upgrade my OS for several years until I decided to get a new laptop, because the updated driver dropped support for my chip, and the old driver wouldn't work with the updated OS.

Just bought this to replace my aging mbp. Should I run windows 10 or go with Mint?

My suggestion is to stick with Windows 10 and turn on the Windows Subsystem for Linux. That gives you an Ubuntu command line userland running inside Windows. Then if you have any more specific Linux needs, use virtual machines to install any Linux distribution you want.

Friend of mine does this. All well and good, if you like working primarily in Windows. I prefer Linux as my primary OS, so this approach is rather less than ideal for me.

WTF the logo is upside down! How could they have fucked that up?

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