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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

More configurability? Great. When can I order one with a screen that isn't some low-res 16:9 TN monstrosity?

The Lenovo ThinkPad x230 is available with a good quality IPS display (though still widescreen and low-resolution). I own an x220 with the same IPS display, and I'm very happy with it.

Likewise. I also own a X1 and the X220 screen is far better.

Yes, but 12" is too small for dev work and it's still not possible to order T430 or T530 with IPS display.

Why not have it drive one of these[1] on your desk and use the smaller size to its more portable advantages?

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/02/viewsonics-vx70smh-led-ip...

I have my X61t, with 1400x1050 res 12" display, hooked up to my HP IPS 24" 1920x1200 res display. It's a good combo for portable (yet usable res for real work) and then even better when it's docked at home.

12" too small...? There is a small amy of developers running off 11" MBAs out there. I guess usability depends on what IDE etc you are using though.

EDIT-- It probably helps that the MBA has a higher pixel density screen and resolution.

I'm not sure how many developers are using 11" MBAs. 13" yes, but the 11" one is small and low-res enough that it's awkward for development (particularly development involving an IDE).

I just recently got an x230 with the IPS option. The display is great and really comparable to my 11'' Air except for the coating. Overall, I love the machine. It lacks the size advantage of the Air (they are generally similar, but the x230 is several times thicker) but I was able to swap out the drive with a 256 SSD and upgrade the RAM to 16 GB which has left me with a machine that is way more capable than I anticipated. I also am really surprised by how much I like the keyboard.

That said, the ultrabook market is still in a weird state. I looked at all of the major vendors and no one really had the ideal combination of components yet. Once you can get the x230 with higher res display and a multi-core CPU, it'll be an ideal machine.

So you think one can like the new keyboard, right? I heard many long-time ThinkPad users were dissatisfied with the new keyboard. I'm on older X series and really contemplating whether I should get X220 or X230 in the future. Apart from the keybord type, why the hell do they dissolve the six-key Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn block ?!

I have had 3 other ThinkPad T models and I actually kind of prefer the keyboard. It's pretty subjective either way.

If you don't use WWAN on your x230 (or even have the card), you can put an mSATA SSD into the M-PCIE socket. Then you can have an ssd for your OS, and a hard drive for mass storage.

That's interesting, I didn't get the WWAN option so it's probably just dead space. Thanks!

You should have an unused M-PCIE slot then.

But those are still low res (1366x768), right?

The only ultrabooks I can find with high res screen at the moment are either made by Asus or Sony. I've heard good things about the Asus UX31/32, full HD IPS displays (1920x1080) in a 13.3 inch laptop. A 12 inch laptop with 1600x900 would probably be ideal for me.

Yeah, it's the 1366x768, same as the Air. I saw better options from a few different vendors but it always came at the price of low end components elsewhere.

When people stop buying cheap bric-a-brac with just-enough-for-youtube-480p integrated graphics from HP and Dell for 499.

Last time I bought the cheapest dell laptop with a discrete card it was maybe $600, now it appears to be $719. That's only on the 'small business' more brick-like ones, though. The 'consumer' ones don't even offer discrete, but hey you can get Skull Candy[TM] speakers for an up charge!

Even the cheapest comes with a dual core processor, though, so you can share your memory among 2 cores and an integrated graphics engine. Progress it ain't.

Joe Q Public had been subsidizing performance for quite some time. I think that era is ending because most of Joe's use cases can now be met with a ~1.5 Ghz arm tablet. I think the high end of the market is going to become more expensive unless a use case emerges where everyone wants that performance. Intels been hard at work trying to invent such a use case, but so far theres been little to show for it. Making games more realistic is one reasonable use case but those efforts have recently been stymied by content creation costs.

If people shopped smarter, they could find laptops with discrete graphics for significantly cheaper. After the deal I found, I'm paying about $420 for a system that comes with an i5 Ivy Bridge, 6gb RAM, NVidia 630M... And it came with a free bookbag to boot.

Integrated graphics aren't bad these days.

my previous (bought in 2005) laptop was a dell inspiron 1440 that had a 1400x900 screen. when i replaced it (in 2009) the best i could do for a similar price and cpu performance was an inspiron 15 that had a 1366x768 resolution. it's not a matter of people being cheap, screen resolutions really have retrogressed.

I think a lot of manufacturers took the shift to 16:9 as an excuse to sneakily reduce resolutions.

At the low-end, I think they've actually been going up on laptops:

    1024x768 -> 1280x768 -> 1366x768

but the trend reverses at the high-end:

    2048x1536 -> 1920x1200 -> 1920x1080

Apple's 2880x1800 display is an exception, but so far the rest of the industry doesn't seem to be trying to imitate it.

And what's so wrong about them? I bought those when I was a student and I was pretty happy with the result. They're very reasonable quality and they're definitely enough for any work that doesn't require 3d, or heavy virtualisation. They're also very likely to be supported by linux - a long time has passed since that hardware became available.

This plus their tried-and-true keyboards. I'm not sure if I like where the new keyboards are headed, I never thought I'd see the day where a T-series would have a chiclet keyboard!

Real keyboard + 16:10 hi-res, high quality display and real thinkpad (IBM era) build quality and I would be willing to pay north of $1500

Am I the only one who misses 4:3?

I pull out my old T42 from time to time and it's so relaxing to code on such a screen ratio.

Agreed ten times over.

I've been trying to grab a 4:3 (1400x1050) T61 for a while off ebay as they're cheap and upgradeable to a reasonable spec.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find one :(

They weren't hard to come by about half a year ago when I bought one. It came without a battery or AC adapter. I paid $256.

Edit - I just checked eBay and searched for "T61p". I found:

* A 4:3 T61p with an incorrect description for $500. That seems high.

* A 4:3 T61p missing its palmrest and other parts, auction only.

* A T61p in a T60 chassis with a QXGA panel, SSD and other upgrades for $1300. That sounds high unless you've tried to find a QXGA panel; they're over $400.

Did you guys miss this one? http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T61-8892-02U-14-1-14...

1400x1050 14.1" !

If you want the ultimate 4:3 Thinkpad, I think this is it: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Custom-IBM-Lenovo-ThinkPad-T60p-T61p...

I won't say most, but 1400x1050 14" was a fairly common config. Standard issue at work at the time.

It was rare on the T61. There was a waiting list.

I'm in the UK.

The ones here tend to be broken.

I'm typing this reply on a T61p/T60p hybrid I built myself because I wanted a UXGA Flexview screen and more than 3.2gb of memory. You are not alone.

16:9 is just perfect for two 80x25 Emacs windows side by side on my 13.3" MBP.

Your MBP is 16:10.

I personally have moved on to widescreen (16:10 1680x1050 being my favorite) due to the ability to split the screen in a editor|browser or editor|pdf configuration (or two-pane editing).

I miss 4:3 on X60s/X61s because it was so much smaller. I like how widescreen makes keyboard bigger though; I just wish for more portable laptop, more like Air but still user-configurable.

Better speakers wouldn't hurt either. I need them occasionally but when I do I am not content with them. It seems like they aren't willing to make a no compromise product. Maybe there's a too little market for it?

I don't mind the new keyboard. The crappy screens are really annoying. The new ones (T430) don't even have the correct ICC profile by default. I measure 2cm of bezel at the top and bottom (each - total 4cm) plus 1.5cm of bezel on the left and right sides (another 3cm of plastic). That would far better be used by actual screen.

(I actually wanted a 15" screen to replace my 15" T61 but the current 15" laptops are so frigging huge with so much wasted space that I had to downgrade.)

Right now? I'm using a Lenovo laptop that has a 1920x1200 15" screen. It's great.

T61p?

Yup, love it.

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