Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga is less than half an inch thick

On Windows moving the taskbar to side of screen gives few extra pixels.

>gamers are told to fuck off

I thought the 16:10 plague was because TV's were typically made in that aspect ratio and therefore it was cheaper to use the same panels in a laptop.

Gamers care more about refresh rate than the aspect ratio.

Anyway, hip, hip hurray for Dell and Lenovo going back to a good aspect ratio for coding.

For something so thin, that's probably unavoidable.

Personally, I don't think I want a thin laptop. Not for any kind of meaningful work, at least. Thin doesn't just mean less key travel, it also means less space for battery, and less space for cooling.

I mean, I don't want an excessively bulky laptop, but there's definitely a point where the returns from thinness diminish really hard.

After having gotten a Dell Alienware laptop with an OLED display (just turned four years old last month), I intend to get OLED displays on all future laptops.

Better get a Thinkpad x270 before all of the depreciated corporate hand-me-downs dry up!

Shame no Thunderbolt though.

I dunno, this seems like a sane thing to want AND think that this is what your users might want.

And yet repetitively we dont get those products.

Like this trend with protruding cameras out of phone's body. Just make the body that bit thicker and slap bigger battery on it.

And you can boast in ads that it last 2 days instead 5hrs.

Maybe we are wrong? Or there is some kind of nonobvious business logic behind it.

Yes please. Glued batteries make for difficult repairs, which ultimately reduces lifespan. Of course, that's the goal, that way you can be a thinner, crappier version in 3 years time, with a further reduced feature set, an even worse keyboard, and a dongle for your dongle.

No, the thin options are bad, and the people who like them should feel bad.

Any experience on how well do these kind of ports age? I never had one but i'd suspect it to be fragile.

I'd probably snap that off in two seconds flat.

Wow, that is beautiful and clever.

I have a such Fujitsu Lifebook. To be honest, I always use an USB-Ethernet adapter instead of the built in foldable. But it's great to have an Ethernet port for emergency use. It's a nice notebook anyway. Very light, mate touch and pen display (a pen can be stored inside of the notebook), a lot of ports. Battery and SSD can be replaced very easy (sadly RAM not).

My Thinkpad T480s has a collapsed ethernet port and it sucks. I tried it a couple of times with different cables and the clip got stuck in the port and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it out. I had to open up the case and unscrew the trap-door holding the cable just to get it out.

Yep, it's decent. I also have its successor, T490s, which is much worse (e.g., no full ethernet port).

That being said, my T480s had to go into warranty aleady, three times total if you count the TB3 docking station (which to me counts as one system I use together all the time): the motherboard was fried on the T480s. And since everything is one block of silicon, they had to switch out the entire thing, except for the hard drive.

The TB3 dock gen1 is the single worst bit of technology I ever had the displeasure of owning and using. Next to countless incompatibilities and instabilities, it just died a sudden death on me recently. Still a couple months within the 3-year warranty.

That's a serious engineering flaw on Lenovo's side. A better manufacturer would've made sure it died outside of warranty. They're really dropping the ball, you can tell by that.

I saved a fair bit of money buying the base RAM and SDD configuration and then upgrading myself the last couple of times I bought a T-series Thinkpad.

2.5” SATA drives are dead for laptops. Only the really cheap/slow ones still have them, and that’s not the market for this kind of device.

We’re lucky that we still have removable M.2 SSDs at all. It looks like devices will be moving to fully soldered storage in the next few years.

I want it to be thick enough to allow for proper cooling so the laptop doesn't immediately throttle as soon as it boosts. That requirement would pretty much allow for everything else anyways.

+1 on the full mechanical keyboard (if used laptop full time, for 5% of the time, the Thinkpad ones are acceptable).

I used older Thinkpad for 2 years on laptop keyboard exclusively, but then switched to external ones as they are just better.

I don’t think the ultra book is a meme. I’d consider the MacBook Air to be the single most successful laptop of all time, and for good reason. For many people it’s basically the perfect compromise of size, weight, power and battery life. (Also, while the Air is thin, it is certainly not fragile). The current M1 Air is a really great machine. And while it’s not powerful enough for my work (data scientist - waiting for a 16 inch MBP, or perhaps I’ll get a larger thinkpad and put Linux on it), I am not going to delude myself into thinking that my needs are in any way representative of the average consumer. A good ultra book is perfect for people browsing the web and using office apps who want good portability.

Horses for courses. If I had to lug it through airports everyday, I'd want the lightest laptop I could possibly live with.

Although I don't really care about how thin it is, per se. Weight is what matters.

Ultrabooks are fine, but we have to remember who they're aimed at. They're aimed at office users, casual home users, students, and a large subset of programmers who don't need to run 50 VMs. They're not aimed at gamers, engineers, (some subset of) programmers, and technicians.

For those 4 groups, most ultrabooks suffer from:

1. Being underpowered (for gamers and some engineers this means graphically, for programmers memory/cpu count/cpu speed)

2. Insufficient ports (particularly for engineers, technicians, and some programmers and gamers)

3. Insufficiently sturdy (technicians, some engineers and programmers)

But often they do have good battery life, but by virtue of being underpowered that doesn't really help in the balance.

Companies that do make laptops (IME) aimed at gamers, tend to not make laptops that have decent battery life (that is, most desktop replacement laptops get good performance, but terrible battery life). And laptops aimed at engineers and technicians tend to be 3" thick, have terrible battery life, and have grossly underpowered processors and graphics, but they have every port you could ever want.

> I really hope this ultrabook meme ends.

is that really necessary? my "work" is a complicated desktop c++ application. short of a 17" desktop replacement, there simply isn't enough thermal budget in any conceivable laptop design to compile this program in under an hour. thus, all I want out of a laptop is the thinnest lightest x86 machine that offers decent performance for web browsing, playing movies, and editing word documents.

I really hope for a future in which we can both get laptops that fit our needs.

I don't really know if all of that is necessarily true. I've had a ThinkPad X in daily use for 6-7 years now, and I've even fallen flat on top of it after slipping on ice going home one winter. It's still chugging along. It's not the thinnest device there is, but there's definitely some kind of an attempt in that direction compared to bulkier devices. (The associated compromises in general are also there.)

I have no experience with Apple hardware, but I don't think Airs have a reputation of being super fragile either.

The thinner and lighter form factor also does have its advantages; it's a bit more comfortable to handle when using it to watch video on the couch, for example.

Compromised performance is definitely true, though. (Or compromised thermals, or some kind of a compromise on that axis in any case.) Ditto for more or less compromised upgradability and replaceability, which is unfortunate.

I wouldn't necessarily want the thinness to end, although striving towards it at all costs is something I would also disagree with, and probably wouldn't go for the absolute thinnest stuff there is.

And after a year of intense use it's down to ten. Imagine what the battery life would be with twice the thickness.

I was on Ubuntu 20.04 with a 5.8 kernel. The moment I did an incremental compilation of a Rust project (5-10s) the fans kept at very noisy levels for at least a full minute.

It was awful. :(

I was at 40GB RAM (the stock soldered 8GB plus an extra 32GB stick). And for what it's worth, an external 2560x1080 display. Maybe that was it? But IMO no, it activated fans on CPU load only. Still, maybe the extra strain on the video stack kept it at a higher temperature internally so it was quick to turn on the fans at the smallest of loads? Could be.

Glad it works well for you though. What OS do you use?

Definitely, not arguing about that. Although my iMac Pro begs to differ -- I hear its fans only if it maxes out all cores for more than 20-30 seconds. Otherwise not at all. But it's an exception (and that machine is quite the marvel of engineering, too, minus the flimsy VESA mounting stuff where it's an absolute catastrophe).

I have no qualms with my Win10 gaming PC being slightly audible (I use FractalDesign case with Noctua fans to it's not easy to actually hear it). I have no trouble with a machine spinning its fans here and there.

But for my former work Lenovo T490 killed all my desire to work. Sometimes it even started making noise (again for a full minute) after I saved a file in Emacs (so the language server kicked in for 2-3 secs).

From here on I'll just be only on desktop machines and will soon buy a Linux desktop workstation plus a MacBook Pro M1 with which I'll only do work outside when I absolutely positively can't do it at home. And use it for remoting to my machines as well, of course.

Thanks! Will pass it on in my org.

Just say 16.1mm. The fact that the keyboard and top of the screen taper to a knife edge does not make the machine take up less space in a backpack.

Here's a side profile:

https://help.apple.com/assets/5F46CA8B094622AD463B4A64/5F46C...

It's plenty portable, too. Poor battery life, though.

> Never leaves my desk

Why don't you just use a PC then?

I bought a P51 off Ebay for ~$830 over the summer. It is really well built, and I definitely got a better laptop used than I could have new for the same money.

Great laptop for my needs, 64 GB RAM, came with M2 SSD and took for 2 more drives, and has dedicated graphics card. No complaints.

P50 series was horrible on Linux with the dual graphics setup (the intel + nVidia combo). Just a nightmare for more than 1 external monitor and a docking station setup.

I found myself hankering after a P-series Thinkpad, after watching Louis Rossmann, near enough destroying one of them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig3xI8dUdm0

i'd be curious to know more about the technical aspects of the material but its new so we're stuck with the marketing speak

Yeah, from what I saw, 4k takes like a 30% hit, it was alot and completely useless at the 14" size

When I hurt my back and returned to work unable to sit, having a convertible was a huge lifesaver. It took a while to adjust everything to a standing lifestyle and having a pen tablet like the Yoga (I had a Dell 2 in 1) was amazing. While I now have a portable standing desk for meetings and such, while I figured it out the convertible was awesome.

Now I want a high-spec traditional laptop again though. :)