5 ms·
> The market of people who want something rugged/durable/functional are already taken care of by the Thinkpads. Are mostly unhappily taken care of by the Think
by solatic 10y ago
> The market of people who want something rugged/durable/functional are already taken care of by the Thinkpads.
Are mostly unhappily taken care of by the Thinkpads. The brand has gone downhill since IBM sold to Lenovo, which has steadily eroded the level of quality that can be expected from a Thinkpad-branded laptop. Modern Thinkpads aren't nearly as serviceable or as durable as the Thinkpads of IBM's era.
People who stick with Thinkpads today tend to do so because a) the enterprise support is still relatively solid, b) no real competitors for the Trackpoint, if you want one you need to get a Thinkpad, c) the keyboard, while not as high quality as it used to be, is still great relative to most of the market, d) Thinkpads are still basically reference laptops for Linux, and as a customer, it's reasonable to assume that there will be good hardware support.
If System76 wanted to go after Thinkpads, they probably could.
- sithadmin 10y ago>Thinkpads >the enterprise support is still relatively solid That's not the experience I've had with my own company's support requests with Lenovo, and the lousy support relative to Dell is a prime reason why most clients I work with are dropping Lenovo for Dell.
- solatic 10y agoRelative compared to, you know, companies like Acer or Samsung, which aren't really in the enterprise support market, and whose products enterprise IT shops would have to largely support themselves.
- ghostly_s 10y agoSeconded. We are a major enterprise customer of Lenovo's and have been deeply disappointed with the level of service particularly vs. what we used to get with Dell (~6 years ago).
- JudasGoat 10y agoMaybe some PC company will get the idea to hire retired IT people to do tech support remotely. I think it would be competitive to off shoring.
- vladimir-y 10y agoIt's funny that you wrote about Thinkpads, for example currently Thinkpad X1 Carbon (5 gen) is the best ultrabook on the market (including macbooks pro, yes nowadays macbooks pro are ultrabooks).
- solatic 10y agoI don't think System76 would be wise to get into the Ultrabook market from the get-go because of the much tighter thermal/power requirements. If you're going to get into the laptop market with a focus on maintainability, your competition is the T470, not Ultrabooks in general or the Thinkpad X1 Carbon in particular, which, as your Reddit link pointed out, has a downside in that the memory is soldered to the motherboard.
- vladimir-y 10y agoT470 is also an ultrabook as it comes only with ULV CPUs, but it provides a certain level of upgradeability. Soldered memory is not a real downside if 16GB is enough to run all needed tasks, as it helps to make laptop more lightweight and portable (1.144 kg !! and in the same time Carbon has a decent set of ports). So Lenovo provides a good choice for the folks that need to maintain something - T470 and for the users that do not do any hardware upgrading - X1 Carbon (gen5).
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago"best" is subjective - it doesn't have a "click anywhere" touchpad (it's still a mechanical hinge-based design), there's no 2x display option, battery life still doesn't come close, and so on...
- vladimir-y 10y ago> battery life still doesn't come close Сlose to what? FYI https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-2017-Core-i7-Full-HD-Laptop-Review.207160.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-2017... Among other things pay attention to the weight - 1.144 kg and don't forget ThinkPad's still have the best keyboard ever. A recent ultrabook selecting topic https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/66ad57/why_i_went_for_the_x1_carbon_2017_vs_mbp2016_t470/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/66ad57/why_i_went...
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoI'm still using a 10 year old Thinkpad X200 as my primary laptop because it's mostly been downhill from there.
- EthanHeilman 10y agoI use Thinkpads for Linux as they are well built and trusted brand that has yet to disappoint me and are well supported by Linux. Plenty of room for System76 to just do a Linux-thinkpad better by focusing on the Linux laptop segment of the market. Edit: I just popped over to System76 to look at their laptops and I must say I really prefer the way Thinkpads look when compared with System76. I realize that this a dumb reason to choose a laptop but I have encountered no better judge of build quality than how a laptop looks. Every stupid looking laptop I've ever bought has been a disaster (parts break off, camera dies, weird crashes), whereas laptops who had a physical design which I liked (macbooks, thinkpads) have held up much better.