Lenovo splits the Think brand into a separate group
engadget.com
engadget.com
I went from my own homemade machines, to exclusively Apple hardware, to owning a t420 (wanted the old keyboard). I'm in the process of leaving the Apple ecosystem and going back to Linux (Arch to be specific) because I dislike the direction Apple is going (the Mac App Store was the inflection point that made me want to leave). The Thinkpad brand was the obvious choice because of upgradeability, quality, dependency, and the fact that they make some of the best laptops for Linux. Even better than Zareason and system 76 hardware IMO. Making the perfect business computing tools AND at the same time the perfect Linux portable hardware is a big plus in my book. Even more than unibody pieces of aluminum and the retina bs that while commendable to a point, I've found is more of a nuisance than anything else.
Anyways, Lenovo earned a customer by keeping the Thinkpad brand alive and maintaining it's quality standards. Any step to make the brand better is AOK with me.
Perhaps you should explain exactly how Arch is a "maintenance nightmare."
I've been using Ubuntu since Breezy and every upgrade I haven't had a problem. I use it on many of my machines (apart from my laptop due to Bumblebee) and have had no issues with the 6 month updates, but I usually stay on the LTS versions.
To be fair, at work I've used Debian a lot for servers, and it had worked pretty good all the time with very few exceptions. In comparison Ubuntu (which I know is Debian based) always breaks for me. It's amazing how I can always get stuff done in minutes in Debian but I always have a problem with Ubuntu. This is to the point that I would rather work with the botched in-house distro of Solaris I used on a mini mainframe I used to work with and maintain some 8 years ago than Ubuntu. Even with the weird customized vi/vim it had, that made life for me and the sys admin incredibly painful.
All that being said... Slackware was the distro that made me fall in love with Linux a decade and a half ago, and one of the reasons I'm jumping out of the Apple bandwagon is their recent tendency to make their machines more common-user friendly, but less of an "hackers" machine. Therefore, I'm tremendously biased regarding Os' and Distros.
The flipside is that Arch Linux has shown to be able to make sweeping and controversial changes rapidly for longer term benefit.
I've tried running Arch as my main OS in the last year. I needed a weekend to configure the OS and even wrote a little daemon to handle the conservative fan spin ups on my overheating Macbook Pro. After that it was great as long as it lasted.
But then the OS just died 3 times. What had I done? A simple
> pacman -Syu
was enough. Whenever there was a bigger change (a new kernel, new init system, etc.) a simple update would render my Arch installation unbootable. And to get everything to work I had to waste hours (in one case days because of re-install) to get it to work again.
That's not something I want from an OS I'm using productively.
The initial configuration is tiresome and complicated. While knowing the details is important, using them as a barrier to entry i.e. by removing the arch installer is just a hideous waste of time.
Occasionally, I've had a broken system, packages or dependency failure which has left me in the royal shit with a recovery disk and a text editor.
pacman has no transactional semantics around it so you can't stage a package or roll it back easily and no-destructively as you can in deb and RPM based distributions.
It relies on the default configuration of all pieces of software i.e. minimal changes to upstream. This is good and all, but most of the upstreams have retarded and dangerous by default configurations. You have to vet every damn package upgrade.
As for rolling upgrades, introducing major new package versions mid-cycle is a major risk, particularly when it comes to large critical packages such as DB engines and web servers. Minor version changes can literally shred you. MySQL are very good at that for example (I no longer use their product due to the awful bugs in early 5.0.x release).
I see people above are moaning about Ubuntu in comparison. In fact that is just as bad, but for a different reason: it's just hideously mismanaged.
They ignore the collective knowledge and mini frameworks that are included in other distributions (for example the /etc/apache2 structure in Debian derivatives). These are incredibly powerful at managing configuration through upgrades etc so hours with diff aren't required.
To be honest, I have a virtual machine floating around which was once a physical machine. It was deployed on a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 (nice dual Pentium Pro 200 with 128Mb of RAM, 4 Matrox heads and 18Gb of SCSI disks) with Debian 2.0.
This installation is now at Debian 6.0. This has been accomplished EASILY with ONLY dist-upgrades since day one and has survived about 5 bits of hardware.
That's how it should be. Rolling releases are dangerous. Planned staged releases.
And no I don't particularly care that my Ruby VM is X years out of date.
The only two points I could complain about is that:
1. There should be a better guide/support for dkms, or you have to recompile your driver by hand every kernel upgrade
2. You must look at the `pacman` output while upgrading the system, because sometimes (rarely) the migration step is printed out for manual application (for example "mkinitcpio hooks changed, replace all of pata, scsi, sata, usb with a single hook block").
I'd never recommend Arch to a beginner, but it's far from maintenance nightmare.
There is always a tradeoff between 'works as _I_ want' and 'how much time _I_ have to spend on maintenance'. It is always your choice, and if you want an OS that you can craft exactly to your needs Arch is currently the best (in most cases, of course).
The tradeoff is that you get new and shiny software continually.
New and shiny is considerably less important than working and tested the first time something breaks.
This will save the following thing happening again and again:
1. Someone asks me for a laptop recommendation.
2. I tell them "ThinkPad T-series" and state you can get them online for the price of a mid-range laptop in a retail outfit from http://www.lenovo.com/ with a direct link to the product page - they say thank you.
3. Some time passes
4. I get a call from the person saying they bought a "Lenovo" laptop at their local electrical supplier and it's rubbish and they'll never trust a recommendation from me again. They have inevitably bought a cheap Lenovo close-out machine which has died after 3 months (their cheap machines are crap).
5. Argument ensues and email is re-sent with "ThinkPad" highlighted. Much "aaaah" is to be had.
4 times so far. People just don't get the difference between good and crap, which is to be honest, where Apple are quite good.
Apple's secret is to only built good stuff and don't try to serve the cheap crap market. I hope the new ThinkPad brand will do the same.
They've already started down this road IMO, dropping their near-perfect keyboard for a trendy chiclet one in the x230. To be fair, it's a great chiclet keyboard, but it doesn't have the action of the old ones.
Most of us don't need to look at the keyboard when writing, chiclet keyboards are completely ok for that. You don't really need the peaked edges to find the keys.
The new chiclet is way better when you have gotten used to it. As usual you only feel the difference when you go back (in my case to my second-newest one, the T61, which I occasionally use for other stuff)...
Only because it looks nice doesn't mean it's useless. And only because it's functional doesn't mean it has to look like a plastic brick from an 80s sci-fi movie.
Right now I own a cheap Asus for instance and it has swallowed tea, coffee and water. Besides the keyboard getting a little sticky, nothing happened. I probably got lucky, since I am talking about a piece of shit low-end laptop.
But Thinkpads are designed for accidents. The T line has to pass military tests. Soldiers used Thinkpads in Irak. That plastic brick from the 80s can take abuse like no other laptop on the market.
And besides, I do not care about how shinny and good looking my laptop is. I do care about functionality. Macbooks are great for their touchpad and their high resolution screens. But thinkpads are great in this regard - great keyboard, awesome pointing stick, HD+ available on all models, not to mention things I wish Macbooks had, like the Ultrabay, which allows you to easily put something else in place of your DVD drive. Something like an SSD, or maybe an extra battery.
Something else I love about Thinkpads and HP EliteBooks, something which even low-end models have (ThinkPad L series, Thinkpad Edge, HP ProBook), is the easy access to the internals, without voiding the warranty. On Thinkpads, even the low-end ones, it's really easy to change the hard drive or to add an extra memory stick. On ProBook you don't even need a screwdriver. This is useful not just for upgrading it, but also for cleaning the internal fan and other maintenance stuff. This allows businesses to have in-house hardware support, without having issues with the provided warranty.
There's a lot of things I like about MacBooks. But IMHO, if I were operating a business, I would give MacBooks only to developers that know what they are doing and really want one.
Typeing on that keyboard was soo nice.
But more importantly, Lenovo has really raised the bar in terms of size and weight with the X1 Carbon. I don't think they are abandoning functionality at all.
I've not had a problem with the keyboard, and I also own a thinkpad with a "real" thinkpad keyboard. I wouldn't say I prefer one over the other, they're both solid keyboards.
It should be easier to pick a laptop then, as I don't think we will see any Lenovo with a non-glossy screen.
I see this as an issue now that they are two separate groups, likely with their own KPIs and numbers to meet. As we see so often with other organisations, they tend towards in-fighting rather than (good) cannibalisation because of the "silo" structure they've created.
SL and R series "Thinkpads" are rubbish, imo. Not to mention the cheap Ideapad's- the build quality is on par with pretty much every other cheap notebook manufacturers.
I only keep it because it has a real serial and parallel port but its still going strong!
I paid approx $150 for this T61.
An hour to get replacement earphones for my daughter's iPod due to the well known problem of the rocker switch which failing after a week! I asked "so what happens when these fail? Do I have to spend an hour a week down here?". The reply was simply "it's not my problem".
She owns a Cowon now.
(I would actually try out the chiclets, but I need all 7 rows and use the pgup, pgdown, del, insert,pos1 and end keys and have them so deep in my muscle memory that I will be miserable when I get a new Thinkpad)
Thinkpads are great otherwise, the W520 is almost perfect.