Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, I do think it's better. I've got a ThinkPad T400, a white MacBook right here (and my wife has a Pro).

The T400 has five buttons around the trackpad... and Apple accomplishes the same functionality with one trackpad and one button (and no button on the new models).

The T400 has a lit keyboard toggled by a key. The light is actually just an LED pointing down from the lid. I can see the PCB it's attached to. Compare that to Apple's ambient light sensing backlit keys.

There is a key on the T400 to zoom the screen, but it just changes the resolution! Compare that to control+two-finger-drag on the MacBook, which smoothly zooms in on any region of the screen.

The T400 has a physical switch on a corner of the case to turn off the wireless hardware. The MacBook provides it through a menu.

The T400 for some reason still has a plain old full-sized VGA connector with screw posts, compared to mini-DVI.

It's a holistic thing, I guess. A design is either "together" or not. Lenovo doesn't have it.

Some of these points have pros and cons, actually.

The T400 appears to have five buttons around the trackpad because it has an exta "trackpoint" red nub in the keyboard, so you can handle cursor, scrolling, and typing without moving either hand from the keyboard--indispensable to all the people who have learned to use it.

The T400 has an LED to illuminate keyboard and slightly more so you can turn it on or off when you need to, rather than when an ambient light sensor thinks best, and you can hold anything under the light to see it. (Think airplanes.) Very useful.

The T400 has a physical switch to turn off wireless hardware so you can do it when the machine is off, quickly, without booting up and using a menu, and so you can physically verify its status.

The T400 has connectors for devices most often found in its environment. ThinkPad evolves its connectors, but a little more conservatively than Apple. Which plan is best depends on what particular users need to connect. You also get some complaints that a new Mac can't connect to existing peripherals.

Design is vital, Apple has some great design points, but ThinkPad has some different but equally great design points. Read David Hill's blog (http://lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/) for insight into the meticulous design thinking behind ThinkPad.

You can override the ambient light sensor easily. It's just a handy default.

"The T400 for some reason still has a plain old full-sized VGA connector with screw posts, compared to mini-DVI."

Why would you want mini-DVI? Mini-DVI is a proprietary Apple-only connector that forces you to buy an adapter so that you can connect all other hardware to it. By the way, the T400s has DisplayPort, which, OTOH, is an open standard.

The thinkpad has a trackpoint/nipple mouse. The macbook is limited with just a touchpad.

The macbook keys light up at inconvenient times, the thinkpads only lights up when I want it to -- and it lets me read dead-tree notes easily

I've never used screen zooming so I wont speak to it - the mac solution sounds nice though.

The T400 has an obvious, provable way of quickly disconnecting from a network. It's like pulling out the netword cord. And it has an option to turn that off in software.

The T400 connects directly to my projector, my monitor at home, my cheap plasma tv. For the mac I've got to drag around an extra converter thing.

There are plenty of designs you can knock as not being "together". The thinkpad design is pretty well tested though.

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