a) Horrible design with linux installed.
b) Beautiful design with a BSD like os installed.
It really is a no brainer. Even Linus uses a MBA I wonder when hardware manufacturers will start to realise that people actually care about owning beautiful things.
That being said, your point still stands. Official support is a lot better than unofficial support.
They also switched from 4:3 to 16:10 and now to 16:9 displays. The only resolution you can get the X-series thinkpads in is 1366x768. At least you can get 1600x900 displays for the T-series. (Which Lenovo ironically calls HD+)
It's almost like Lenovo WANTS me to switch to Apple.
I am glad Lenovo switched all lines to chiclet keyboard in the latest refresh. I think it is a bold but calculated move.
Instead of the Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp/PgDown key block in the upper right corner, the keys are put into the function key row. This also means that the gaps between F4&F5 and F8&F9 are removed. They also removed the menu key and replaced it with Print for some reason.
With the old Thinkpads, you could just pick them up and start typing without having to learn too many idiosyncrasies of the laptop keymapping. This is not the case anymore. When you work both on a laptop and a regular keyboard, this gets really painful.
Anyway, I am getting a E530 with full keypads so hopefully this won't be a problem.
I like the 16:10, but the drop in screen real estate going to 16:9 is too much for me. I ended up getting a Thinkpad W500 from a Lenovo outlet.
I'm tempted to go buy another and store while there's till a chance new ones can be found.
Looking at the ZaReason offerings I couldn't quite see who they are meant for. Poor resolution, no option for track point, these are not developer machines.
> It's almost like Lenovo WANTS me to switch to Apple.
Huh? Their 15" is 16:10 too. Lenovo lets you do 1920x1080 on their 15" while the highest resolution from Apple is 1680x1050. (The "HD+" resolution is the lowest Lenovo do, not the highest. Yes their mnemonics are stupid, and thankfully they actually clearly state the resolution these days.)
And the Thinkpads use non-glossy screens. For me that rules out everyone else.
http://blog.lenovo.com/perspectives/display-ratio-change-aga...
At least they are 16:10. It's 16:9 all the way with the new Thinkpads. The 1920x1080 resolution is actually a step backwards. I currently own a 1920x1200 W500, sadly with a broken display backlight. Apple's highest resolution at the moment is 2880x1800, which is also 16:10.
I know that they have supply problems. It's just sad that the work-laptop line par-excellence can't even get enough supply for at least 16:10 displays.
A few years ago I also bought what were probably the last 1920x1200 desktop monitors.
> sadly with a broken display backlight
Check out the sticky post on notebookreview:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/638662-thinkpad-s...
You can enter you serial number and get the exact part numbers in order to get more, and then there are the hardware maintenance manuals which will tell you how to take everything apart. I've known people repair Lenovos very successfully this way. Your manual is here:
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/guides-and-manuals/detail.pa...
Or you could turn your laptop into a sunlight readable model like Tridge did:
Apparently there is a fuse next to the Bluetooth model on the mainboard itself that can blow. In that case the only option is to either solder in a new one or replace the mainboard as a whole. None of them are really options for me.
I currently keep on working on the laptop using the docking station and have an eye out for a possible replacement. I guess that's also part of my current frustration with the new Thinkpad lineup.
Thanks for speaking for _everyone_, but no. It's just most people are really superficial. The end.
Hardware manufacturers need to be as superficial in order to compete with Apple, however, part of me thinks that it will just turn consumer computing into a boring homogeneous set of devices across all manufacturers.
An Apple machine is really very utilitarian and simple. It's a box with rounded corners and tapered edges. Pop off the screws and the case itself provides the structure for the machine. No extra structural support. The bulk of the material is also recyclable.
If you look at other computers, especially before the brushed aluminium trend, it was everyone else that had fancy sculpting on their enclosures, the keyboards, fancy personalisations. Just look at the machines linked. And they all needed extra stuff on the inside to provide a skeleton.
Apple machines certainly look good (why do we think grey boxes with round corners and tapered edges look good?), but they have also thought about manufacturing, engineering, materials, disposal etc ...
Isn't that where the PC world is now?
- http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/aspire-timelinex
- http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-l702x/pd
- http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisp...
This isn't to say that all non-Apple products have horrible aesthetics. Samsung stands out to me as a PC manufacturer that makes cool PC laptops. That said, I haven't worked with one so I have no way to evaluate the keyboard and general functionality.
However, the aesthetic look of the notebooks offered here is enough to put me off a purchase entirely - which is unfortunate.
Or do you mean quality of engineering and thought put into making the machine? Those are two different things.
I think your choices are more 'Utilitarian/Functional design' vs. 'Beautiful design'. Admittedly, Utility/Function designs are often ugly.
Another side to the coin is that I enjoy the look and feel of Apple keyboards - but I can't stand working without home/end/delete keys.
1. Unsupported dual-mode graphics card.
2. Inability to use multiple monitors.
3. Some ports being unusuable.
4. Audio glitches.
5. Hand patching required to keep your laptop stable.
6. Poor support for X11 even with simple Intel integrated graphics.
And in all cases you will simply get atrocious battery life compared to the battery life available from the same system via windows.
People will tell you, "Oh I don't have a problem with my T61 or my T520," but their definition of "no trouble" is typically so riddled with the phrase, "Oh that doesn't work so I don't do it" that most laptops are reduced to underpowered desktops or doorstops.
Currently, there are no competitively priced linux laptops. This stems from a mix of vendor apathy and poor laptop support on Linux. If you would like to build a linux experience comparable to a mac osx or windows laptop with free software, it is currently either so expensive (Lenovo W520) or so difficult (T520) that it's almost certainly not worth your time.
You're better off using a competent VM solution to run Linux under Mac OS X and be able to enjoy a fully spectrum of modern hardware and battery life while still getting to use Linux (presumably for your development).
Note: And I sort of promised myself I wouldn't post here anymore, but on this one issue I hope this is the warning to someone that I personally never got. Don't try and make a linux laptop. It is a waste of your time and money.
> Currently, there are no competitively priced linux laptops.
I think ZaReason, System76, and ThinkPenguin all offer decent machines for prices that beat their Dell, HP, Sony, and Mac counterparts. It's just a question of whether or not their offerings meet your needs.
Using a Linux VM on a Mac (or Windows) is definitely a good solution.
Just to be crystal clear: I did not say it was a good solution. In fact, it's often wholly inadequate. However, it is better as a time investment than trying to get a workable Linux laptop solution.
Now, if you get the crappy Realtek wireless card instead of the Intel wireless, or you get Intel graphics that were released less than 6 months ago you can have serious problems, but if you know to avoid those two things you shouldn't have any trouble.
I had different expectations shaped by my use of macbooks and trying to recreate feature parity with any Linux laptop as a basis was difficult enough to render it impossible.
P.S., I think it's pretty ugly that we only get 5-6 hours from the extended-cell batteries. With the extended batteries they're comparable to macbook pros not running extended batteries.
P.S. for the record, these are 30$ fake chinese extended-cell batteries I'm talking about ;) In the extremely rare cases where I need more than 5-6 hours autonomy, I carry a spare. If you have enough, why should you bother that there's something else out there that performs better?
i agree with none of these points, actually, except #1, which i wouldn't know about because i'm not using dual-mode graphics card.
"2. inability to use multiple monitors" < incorrect. i use a docking station with a dell u2711 hooked up to it. pressing fn+f7 switches correctly between external, internal, and external+internal with no problems.
"3. some ports being unusable" < incorrect. every port on my thinkpad is usable, including the ports on the docking station.
"4. audio glitches" < incorrect. my audio works better with my u2711 (via display-port audio) than it does over my macbook air (via display-port audio). why? because i can control the volume via the volume control via linux+pulse whereas OSX artificially restricts me -- it tells me i can't control the audio levels via mini-display port unless i'm using an apple display.
"5. hand patching required to keep the laptop stable" < incorrect? by this, do you mean updates? don't all OSs benefit from updates? if you mean configuration, udev (now systemd-tools) found everything correctly on my thinkpad on the first go. this was the case when i recently ran ubuntu 12.04 off of a flash drive as well.
"6. poor support for X11 even with simple intel integrated graphics" < incorrect. i have the intel HD3000 on my thinkpad, which runs everything pretty much the same way that my macbook air (with the intel3000) runs them. flash video at fullscreen with no tearing, etc (in fact, flash runs better on linux than it does on my macbook).
regarding battery life, i did have to do a bit of tinkering there. but that's because i'm a bit power-consumption obsessed. i used powertop to show me what needed fine tuning, then wrote a power management script that changes my computer's parameters depending on whether it's plugged in. the result: an idle 7w power consumption (with wi-fi on). that's roughly the same power consumption i get from the macbook air, which is an ULV chipset. battery life for windows on my T420 is ~10 hrs. with linux,...~12hrs.
"no competitively priced linux laptops"? my T420 was $1000 with a 2520M processor, 1600x900 resolution display, 160GB intel SATA 3 SSD, and 8GB of RAM.
Lenovo took a big step down from IBM when they took over the brand, but for my money they are still the best non-mac laptops out there for a Linux user.
And you don't have a dual mode graphics card and probably only have VGA out, so you really don't have dual monitor support except in entirely unsatisfactory or projector contexts.
You also almost assuredly get battery life that is worse to a comparable windows 7 installation with Lenovo customizations.
You also almost assuredly get battery life that
is worse to a comparable windows 7 installation
with Lenovo customizations.
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/New-Linux-kernel-fixe...
That article is from Feb 2012 and mentions two big power-saving problems with the kernel, the first one patched, the second (RC6 power-saving feature in Sandy Bridge) unpatched as of the article's publish date. The second has since been patched as well, for huge power gain.
I'm not going to fisk your post otherwise. I have better things to do. I will point out that due to the way Lenovo updates models over time, it's entirely possible for mutiple people to buy "T420s" and end up with different-enough components that you'd need to tweak drivers to get things to work right. So "Your T420" may not be someone else's "T420."
This is provably the case for my T520, and supposedly the case for the T61.
I've had some of the worst customer service I can imagine from them, both at the policy and individual level.
But it is ABSOLUTELY the case that my T520 has a slightly different configuration than most of the T520s I come across. There is no argument allowed here: this is fact. It's also ABSOLUTELY the case that Lenovo couldn't replace my latpop with a new one because I ordered a very popular processor option that was repeatedly out of stock. Twice now I've been offered replacement downgrades without even so much as an offer of credit. Twice I've refused, and twice I've gotten back a laptop with the same exact problem.
So perhaps I am just not enterprisey enough.
That's pretty sweet. Any chance you could post that script on Github? I've been tweaking my linux laptop power settings too and would love to take a look at it.
It occurred to me I probably should have included this info in my original post only after the window for editing it had passed. I'd previously written a bit about how to optimize the Thinkpad power consumption on another HN post here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564400
FYI, I find that the kernel flags are necessary even with the latest kernel. I'm currently on 3.3.8-1-ARCH and experimented with turning them off because the power regression that started in kernels > 2.6 was supposed to have been fixed and merged back into the kernel code. But I found that passing the pcie_aspm=force flag at boot time still results in a significant savings. Indicating that the regression (for at least my configuration) might still be there.
If you have an Intel video card, then check out the other kernel args I'm passing as well for additional power savings (and there are more parameters you can play with outlined here http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel...)
I experimented with a few different combinations before settling on the ones I posted in my HN link, but they're what gives me optimal battery life on my T420.
Despite what the other poster had said, I'm getting battery life now that's significantly better than what I get booting into Windows on the same machine, which usually stays at around 9-10 watts idle. I'm getting 6.8-7.8W
Without any optimization, my battery life was much less than I'd expected to get from the 9-cell (~7 hours). But with the power management script and the kernel flags, I can get 13 hours with light use and 10-11 while doing development (i.e. apache, mysqld, eclipse, multiple browsers, etc... all running).
edit: FYI powertop2 was the beta release of powertop at the time. the source has been merged back into powertop so you can just use that.
As for item 1, this was dealt with in another thread a few days ago. Optimus can be made to work, but it isn't convenient (run a script then reboot to switch). But if you're planning to "build a Linux laptop", why would you buy one with Optimus? It actually causes problems on Windows too, speaking from personal experience.
Linux is not for everyone. Let me repeat that. Linux is not for everyone. But if you want to use Linux, which I do, there are excellent options for doing so at very reasonable prices and Thinkpads are an example of that.
2-6 on my list are not complete garbage, they're all problems I or other friends I've worked with have experienced with various Lenovo boxes over the last year or so. I actually got Bumblebee/Ironhide working on my T520 without issue, but I couldn't ever do what everyone else could do: get the DisplayPort out to drive an external display. So effectively I was limited to VGA-only for a second monitor (and running Ironhide in such a condition caused a system freeze).
Not acceptable. And the one game I do enjoy, Minecraft? Renders unreliably without Ironhide. So... yeah. I had display problems.
Not to mention despite the most assiduous reading of FAQs, consulting with powertop-savvy-friends, and appealing for help on twitter I never got more than four hours of light-use battery life from my T520 with the stock battery.
This, of course, ignores the nightmare ordering process, the late delivery, the snippy service, and the inability to FIX my machine despite having sent it back a few times now.
It's great you have managed to build a decent experience for your specific requirements. I'm glad, I don't wish my pain on anyone. And I really do wish it was better, I miss XMonad dearly. I miss a JVM with good performance dearly. I miss a sane linker dearly. But if your expectations are, "My laptop is fully supported and gets good battery life and does things a macbook would be good at doing" then you will be disappointed with Linux on the laptop, and Lenovo will not be an impressive vendor.
For reference, and perhaps for the use of others, Canonical maintains a list of hardware that works, along with information about what doesn't work. I have found it handy in the past. It can be found here: http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/
The most important things for me are
A matte screen
Excellent keyboard
Large resolution for large amount of screen real estate
SSD
Good CPU & RAM
And built solid/well