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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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