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Comment by zubiaur | Hacker News Reader

Yes, higher oil prices are starting to affect profit margins, the cost of shipping a 40 foot container has tripled since the 2000s. Shipping finished products is getting more expensive.

Lead times are also very important, it takes about a month to get something from china to the US. This means that you need higher inventory levels in order to be able satisfy the demand without considerable shortages.

When you take into account the variety of configurations available its very hard not to get low rotation items on your inventory. Specially if you are expected to always have stock and when your inventory levels have to consider that it takes a month to get an item to the US.

Shifting assembly to the US reduces the number of SKUs imported and allows an easier control over inventory levels and supply chain costs.

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Lenovo just has too many choices (technical term for this condition is SKUs up the butt). A T430 can be configured with one of 7(!) CPUs, some Sandy Bridge and some Ivy Bridge. There are two pairs of CPUs that cost the same. There are four wifi choices, even though the most expensive is only $40 (and is actually available 3rd party for ~$17 on ebay). Lenovo should just always stick the good one in there, and either eat the cost or bump the base price. Whenever Apple offers an option with two choices, Lenovo offers it with six choices, and then there's twice as many options on top of that.

I honestly like having 7 choices for which CPU I want in a computer. It's the main reason I chose Lenovo over Dell for my most recent computer.

Just because Apple sells items with a few options doesn't mean every other company should.

> Lenovo should just always stick the good one in there

I'm sympathetic to this argument - there's always the oddball page in the configuration process that doesn't make sense, like the not-actually-selectable "Selectable SIM" on the current page for the T430. But the number of choices that actually don't make sense isn't that high, and the wifi adapter is not a good example. Which is "the good one"? The one with a working driver for someone's oddball OS, or the one with 802.11a support for someone's legacy network?

Do you think Lenovo should do away with one of the two palmrest combinations on the T430, and if so, which one, the one with the fingerprint reader or the one without?

Considering all the wifi adapters use the same driver and all of them support 802.11a, I'd say the best one is the one with 3 antennas, instead of 2 antennas or 1.

Can you point me to the information that specifies whether the 'ThinkPad 1x1 b/g/n' adapter supports 802.11a or the 5 GHz band, and uses the same chipset as the Intel Centrino adapters? I honestly tried looking and couldn't find any confirmation.

Ah. Sorry I was hasty, some don't support a. All the more reason to include the good one. :) I believe all the intel chips are essentially identical driver wise, but dunno about the unlabeled one. Then again, I would not be picking the unlabeled mystery chip if I were concerned about drivers.

> Then again, I would not be picking the unlabeled mystery chip if I were concerned about drivers.

You would if you knew what the chip was from sources other than the ordering page. Owning a model already is an obvious example but if I wasn't so lazy I could probably dig up the model spec book, grab the FRU of the card and google up the specs based on that.

BTW when you order a Thinkpad from their website and customize it then it is shipped from China using UPS and spends almost a day in Alaska going through customs. Shipping is "free" but of course you are paying for it.

Except when Lenovo forgets the paperwork and it spends a week in impound before somebody notices...

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