Hacker News Reader

Comment by djur | Hacker News Reader

I've had great experiences with the ThinkPad T420, but after this news I'll likely never be buying a Lenovo product again. A damn shame.

View on HN

The T420 is, in my opinion, the last known good computer that Lenovo put out. I bought one in 2011 and still use it (sparingly) today. That is a rock solid laptop with a fantastic touchpad/keyboard.

We bought T440s a year or two later and both were just abysmal. The trackpad, the keyboard, everything is crappy and fails to work properly. No one at our company would use them and they sit in a closet now. I've been monitoring Lenovo's laptops recently and they all seem to be getting worse and worse.

You will find a lot of people who say things like: The [insert laptop model here] is, in my opinion, the last known good computer that [insert laptop brand here] put out. In the end it's just that, a personal opinion.

I have read similar things about basically every laptop(heck even cars, TVs, Fridges) brand in existence.

What was the point of this comment? I said in the first line it was my opinion.

I'm tempted to believe that's the last great Thinkpad. Until this morning I was being tempted by the new X1 Carbon, even with its non-traditional keyboard. Not so much now.

Not sure what you mean with "non-traditional keyboard", but Lenovo did change the keyboard in the 3rd generation Thinkpad X1 Carbons, reverting the layout of the 2nd generation to a more conventional one: with six rows instead of five. Glad they did.

Ars Technica just reviewed the 3rd generation version: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/thinkpad-x1-carbon-re....

As far as I am concerned this one has the non-traditional keyboard (CTRL is NOT in the lower left corner).

Mess with my muscle-memory and you're sure I will never buy your laptop. Same reason I'll never consider MacBooks: Non-standard keyboard.

Oh man I hate keyboards like that. If the keyboard is causing me to hit wrong keys, it's the keyboard that's wrong.

I used to feel the same until I remapped CapsLock to Insert on a MacBook running Linux so I could regain the ability to paste with Shift-Insert. After that I realized that none of my other keyboards had Insert in the same location, so having a non-standard keyboard wasn't unique to Apple. Now I try to remap certain keys on all my machines to the smallest set they share in common, so I can take my muscle memory with me.

In the BIOS for most Thinkpads I've used recently there is a setting to swap the Fn and Ctrl keys.

> As far as I am concerned this one has the non-traditional keyboard (CTRL is NOT in the lower left corner).

OK, that's one part of non-traditionalism :-) Luckily, the Ctrl and Fn keys' functions can be swapped in the BIOS (but obviously, the key labels will stay put).

I referred to the strange setup of the Caps Lock key, and the missing 6th row with function keys. (Although the functioning of the function keys is different in the 3rd generation model than in the 1st generation model).

My current T440s is pretty much all I ever wanted in a laptop. But yeah, this will make me think twice when the time comes to replace it. (hopefully not any time soon. Sweet sweet battery time!)

Then again, the first thing I did when I bought it was install an extra SSD and install Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com