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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> If this pans out it could spell the end of Thinkpads as high quality laptops that deliver premium performance while being very robust and sturdy.

I think that boat sailed a while ago. I'm writing this on one and it's the worst machine I've owned to date quality wise. Keys that spontaneously dis-integrate, wwan card that bricks itself (and replacements are not accepted by the BIOS because they're not 'authorized') and so on. Last laptop of this brand for me.

Maybe Asus or Acer has something half decent?

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I went from an x61 to a Tablet 2, and it's been lovely (the bluetooth keyboard with trackpoint makes it usable as a laptop for me).

Every generation of thinkpad in the past decade plus seems to've been decried as terrible by at least some people whose opinion I respect, and then I've bought another one and it's worked fine.

I have a feeling that while there may also be some degree of decline, a lot of this is that when a thinkpad's good, it's sufficiently good that when we have trouble with one we judge it far more harshly than normal.

Typing this from a cheap Acer Aspire V5-471G (the cheapest make and model for given specs). Remember you get what you pay for.

The laptop looks sleek, but build quality is very flimsy with issues like paint-peeling, scratches, and malfunctioning hinges causing display to flicker/black-out. Also Acer support sucks and traveller's warranty is not international warranty.

Beware of cheap thinner laptops. They may look nice in the store but poor construction and cheap materials will come to bite you later. IMO Budget laptops have regressed in this matter compared to older bulkier models (including Dell Inspirons and XPSes in my experience).

Can't speak for more expensive models though.

Which model do you have? I'm thinking about buying a laptop, and, obviously, one of the first things that come to my head is a Thinkpad, but I'm worried about the quality.

I'm on a carbon x1 and I'm not having any issues.

It's super light, but the feel and build quality is still there.

T 540 P.

I've heard that there are big differences in quality based on the manufacturers they use. For example, I think for the keyboards they have four or five different manufacturers. The T models use two different ones (while the lower budget models use the other three), one of them being LiteOn (which is the best one), and that depending on which manufacturer you get, you might get a higher quality or a lower one, especially with keyboards.

Have you taken a look at other laptops? If so, which one will you go with next time? I'm a Linux user, so if Thinkpads are as bad as some people say they are nowadays, I might even get a MBP and install Linux on it.

The last decent non-Apple laptops were the ones with 16:10 screen; since switching to 16:9 the whole industry refocused itself on making consumer grade products.

Have you considered switching to OS X? It’s a very good desktop OS.

Not a chance, linux and nothing else for me.

I still have an elderly iMac here that hasn't been powered up for a long time (the graphic card overheats easily so I have to run the fans at full power, design error on that particular model) so I know OS/X but it just does not compare for me to linux in terms of how easy it is to run it on anything and everything. What also helped deciding this is that I'm running a very close copy of what is on my production machines on my development machine so I can transfer stuff from the one to the other and expect it to work right away.

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