9 ms·

Ahh yes the unibody which is basically a fucking big short circuit, hence why mine caught fire. It's engineering, but it's not SOUND ENGINEERING. I stand by m

by meaty 14y ago

Ahh yes the unibody which is basically a fucking big short circuit, hence why mine caught fire. It's engineering, but it's not SOUND ENGINEERING. I stand by my expensive trinket comment. Buy a Lenovo T-series and you'll understand.

astrodust 14y ago
You're essentially saying that any computer with a metal case, or extensive metal shielding inside could suffer the same problem. HP makes a number of metal laptops, for instance, in an effort to make them more recyclable, the same reasoning behind Apple's materials decision. Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. I hope they've improved the trackpad because those were nearly unusable before. I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing.
- Breakthrough 14y ago
  "The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing." Maybe you should get your head out of the gutter and realize a laptop isn't deemed "good" because it's an alternative to "what Apple's doing". Edit: And to whoever downvoted this, thank you for proving my point.
  - meaty 14y ago
    You nailed it. The pretty factor is not at all important, neither is blindly copying a vendor.
    - astrodust 14y ago
      I guess I should be wearing shoes made from truck tires and old seatbelts, shirts made from recycled canvas bags, and underpants made from old rags because who cares about appearances.
      - meaty 14y ago
        No you should buy shirts made of cotton, not tinfoil is what I'm suggesting.
      - indiecore 14y ago
        Realize that aesthetics are largely subjective. I personally think the Thinkpad line looks a hell of a lot BETTER than the rounded corner/aluminum macbooks.
        astrodust 14y ago
        So then appearances are important to you, but you have a different sense of what looks better. That's a lot more reasonable than insisting appearance doesn't matter.
        indiecore 14y ago
        I think people who say "appearance doesn't matter" really just mean "appearance is ranked much lower than whatever specs I am looking for", obviously at some level the look of the thing will come into play.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    Until there are other vendors on the same page as Apple, there's no way to put it otherwise. If you want to buy power tools, a watch, a car, you have many choices of first-rate products. When it comes to computers it's such a broken marketplace. It'd be a world where there's BMW and a whole bunch of Hyundai-type companies. I have my head in the gutter because I have standards? Expectations? That appearances do matter? Sorry if I don't come from the school of function trumping form, and that I care about attention to details.
    - Tipzntrix 14y ago
      For laptops, there's Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, Sony, and more...a lot of them don't cost as much as Apple, but their benchmarks match up at a cheaper cost.
      - astrodust 14y ago
        You're missing the point. It's not about benchmarks. That's like buying a car based on horsepower or quarter mile times. It doesn't matter as much as you'd think. It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value.
        Breakthrough 14y ago
        "It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value." That's fine, and that's perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, I think you are missing the point, since Apple products don't have any of those qualities (especially vendor support, given the text of the linked article...). I might bend a bit on build quality (especially since a majority of the parts aren't manufactured by Apple to begin with, and the parts that are do generally have good durability), but I see absolutely no advantage by Apple in the other departments. And really, how good of a metric metric is build quality when the entire computer ends up super-glued together?
        Tipzntrix 14y ago
- meaty 14y ago
  No I'm not. I'm saying that there is no acceptable insulation in the device. The chassis for example uses air gap between the board and the base for insulation. Even condensation can bridge it, which is the theory why mine exploded. Regarding appearance, and? Does that really matter? Why you pick a ThinkPad: http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg That and you can throw the damn thing across the room and it'll still work. Mine is 5 years old, has been thrown, dropped, spilled on, yanked off the table, stood on and it's as good as new. I'm not a fanboy - the thing is just built to last which when you're spending n-thousand dollars is a shit load more important than the shiny factor which you are obviously obsessed with.
  - manmal 14y ago
    Boards usually have a transparent coating, I doubt that it's only air separating the board from the chassis. For this very reason - laptops are thrown into the water as a test, they must not explode after that. I have never had a problem with a unibody Macbook. Please don't be ridiculous.
    - meaty 14y ago
      It's called solder mask and it doesn't cover the entire board... Compressing the bottom of the case will short. It's badly designed.
      - iyulaev 14y ago
        I think he's talking about conformal coating, not solder mask. Conformal coating can help but it's mostly there to prevent shorting across component leads from condensation. If you smash the Al casing against the board there's a good chance you can chip the coating and short things out.
        manmal 14y ago
        Exactly, that's what I meant. Good point about the chipping off!
- wesleyd 14y ago
  > Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s That's the point! Thinkpad T series laptops are what apple laptops can only dream of being.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Yes - a good side effect. I reckon my T61 wouldn't get nicked and can quite happily use it on a train out of London even at night without being fussed. The same could not be said for a MacBook which just has "mug me" written on it.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    Oh, so it's like wearing an ironic t-shirt?
- Torgo 14y ago
  I own a new W530, and I can confirm the trackpad still stinks. After my Macbook Pro died, I switched to Lenovo because how much work and fraught with difficulty keeping Linux running on the MBP was. Installs have been easier, but now I've found I've made a whole host of different sacrifices, mainly the crappy feeling you mentioned. They are not as solid as my good old pre-unibody MBP.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there. In fact, I don't even use a mouse with my desktop - I have a USB version of the ThinkPad keyboard[0]. With the TrackPoint, you can use the mouse without ever moving your hand from the home position on the keyboard. It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad. And instead of the stupid "two-finger scrolling" you see on Macs these days, you can hold the middle mouse button and push up or down with the TrackPoint to scroll infinitely. And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important. Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality. > I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. You really need to stop drinking the Apple Kool-aid and realize that there are far superior laptops to the MacBooks. 0: http://i.imgur.com/oVKgB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oVKgB.jpg
  - comex 14y ago
    The parent comment was wrong to brand its opponents fanatics, but yours is also excessively opinionated. TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste, not of Kool-Aid.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      > TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste I don't see how it is. It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row. When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable? In fact, I have completely disabled the trackpad on my ThinkPad in the BIOS. I have no need for it when there's the TrackPoint.
- robotresearcher 14y ago
  "The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing." Not with 768 vertical pixels it isn't.
LaGrange 14y ago
Last time I've disassembled a Lenovo laptop it still had the entire thin aluminum shield thingie inside, y'know. And desktops are made of metal instead of wood and rich corinthian leather for (a bunch of) reason(s). On the other hand, my experiences with Lenovo T-series were mostly of the "flimsy pieces of crap that only look solid" category (but maybe I was just less than lucky). Aggregated studies of customer satisfaction seem to still be so much better for Apple than for other manufacturers, that it's a bit hard to blame it all on confirmation bias.
- meaty 14y ago
  I think your eyes must have crap in them if you think a T-series is flimsy. The big chunk of titanium in the middle makes it rock solid: http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg Lenovo's relatively low score is because they shift out lots of low quality consumer grade laptops (g-series) which are to be honest, just junk but earn them a lot of money. They don't even assemble them themselves. If you took just ThinkPad series machines, there would be a very different result.
  - danilocampos 14y ago
    > I think your eyes must have crap in them Stop acting like a child.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - LaGrange 14y ago
    I said it looks solid, I had a T-series laptop, and I replaced it with an MBP, so I know a bit about their respective constructions. The cage and everything didn't help the T being in worse shape (loose hinges, cracks in plastic, failed display close sensor) in half the time I've used the MBP (which is still going strong). So yeah, my personal case was very different. And as for the flex test mentioned just above, it's not really an interesting test. It doesn't matter if anything flexes, it matters whether and when it breaks, and that's a test I'm not going to make. This is what I mean by making a product look solid, not be solid. FWIW, I tend to carry two different MBPs from different ages holding them by the display regularly, and they're still alive and well after, respectively, years and months of abuse. And the first thing I did after buying the first one was dropping it off the table, which is twice the height that killed the T completely (after it wasting its battery completely after a year, that is, another feat that MBP didn't replicate). Also, what the sibling said: stop acting like a child. Thank you.
bugsbunnyak 14y ago
Sadly, Lenovo cannot be relied on as they once were (even for the first few years post-IBM). My W520 has been to warranty depot three times - still not fixed - for this problem that has been known for 1.5 years: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-shuts-off-intermittently-no-BSOD-or-shut-down/td-p/459785/page/135 http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-s... I'm still using, and loving, my T61P. If only there was a way to get an i5 or i7 in that lovely reliable chassis :(
- debacle 14y ago
  My wife had a Lenovo that basically disintegrated in ~11 months, but my mom has had hers for years and has survived several drops and grandkids.
- chaud 14y ago
  Just as it has always been, the T series will be the best built laptops. You were free to purchase a T530 with any of the i5 or i7 CPUs and 1920 x 1080 screen. The only downside to them is the lack of higher end GPUs. They are just about as solidly built as the older T series.
  - bugsbunnyak 14y ago
    I bought it specifically for the quadro 2000, for volume-rendering and cuda. Thanks for the heads-up, I didn't realize the W series was created post-IBM.
mike_ivanov 14y ago
Ironically, I had to send my brand new Lenovo T420s back because of display issues.

by meaty 14y ago

astrodust 14y ago

You're essentially saying that any computer with a metal case, or extensive metal shielding inside could suffer the same problem. HP makes a number of metal laptops, for instance, in an effort to make them more recyclable, the same reasoning behind Apple's materials decision. Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. I hope they've improved the trackpad because those were nearly unusable before. I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing.

Breakthrough 14y ago
"The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing." Maybe you should get your head out of the gutter and realize a laptop isn't deemed "good" because it's an alternative to "what Apple's doing". Edit: And to whoever downvoted this, thank you for proving my point.
- meaty 14y ago
  You nailed it. The pretty factor is not at all important, neither is blindly copying a vendor.
  - astrodust 14y ago
    I guess I should be wearing shoes made from truck tires and old seatbelts, shirts made from recycled canvas bags, and underpants made from old rags because who cares about appearances.
    - meaty 14y ago
      No you should buy shirts made of cotton, not tinfoil is what I'm suggesting.
    - indiecore 14y ago
      Realize that aesthetics are largely subjective. I personally think the Thinkpad line looks a hell of a lot BETTER than the rounded corner/aluminum macbooks.
      - astrodust 14y ago
        So then appearances are important to you, but you have a different sense of what looks better. That's a lot more reasonable than insisting appearance doesn't matter.
        indiecore 14y ago
        I think people who say "appearance doesn't matter" really just mean "appearance is ranked much lower than whatever specs I am looking for", obviously at some level the look of the thing will come into play.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Until there are other vendors on the same page as Apple, there's no way to put it otherwise. If you want to buy power tools, a watch, a car, you have many choices of first-rate products. When it comes to computers it's such a broken marketplace. It'd be a world where there's BMW and a whole bunch of Hyundai-type companies. I have my head in the gutter because I have standards? Expectations? That appearances do matter? Sorry if I don't come from the school of function trumping form, and that I care about attention to details.
  - Tipzntrix 14y ago
    For laptops, there's Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, Sony, and more...a lot of them don't cost as much as Apple, but their benchmarks match up at a cheaper cost.
    - astrodust 14y ago
      You're missing the point. It's not about benchmarks. That's like buying a car based on horsepower or quarter mile times. It doesn't matter as much as you'd think. It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value.
      - Breakthrough 14y ago
        "It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value." That's fine, and that's perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, I think you are missing the point, since Apple products don't have any of those qualities (especially vendor support, given the text of the linked article...). I might bend a bit on build quality (especially since a majority of the parts aren't manufactured by Apple to begin with, and the parts that are do generally have good durability), but I see absolutely no advantage by Apple in the other departments. And really, how good of a metric metric is build quality when the entire computer ends up super-glued together?
      - Tipzntrix 14y ago
meaty 14y ago
No I'm not. I'm saying that there is no acceptable insulation in the device. The chassis for example uses air gap between the board and the base for insulation. Even condensation can bridge it, which is the theory why mine exploded. Regarding appearance, and? Does that really matter? Why you pick a ThinkPad: http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg That and you can throw the damn thing across the room and it'll still work. Mine is 5 years old, has been thrown, dropped, spilled on, yanked off the table, stood on and it's as good as new. I'm not a fanboy - the thing is just built to last which when you're spending n-thousand dollars is a shit load more important than the shiny factor which you are obviously obsessed with.
- manmal 14y ago
  Boards usually have a transparent coating, I doubt that it's only air separating the board from the chassis. For this very reason - laptops are thrown into the water as a test, they must not explode after that. I have never had a problem with a unibody Macbook. Please don't be ridiculous.
  - meaty 14y ago
    It's called solder mask and it doesn't cover the entire board... Compressing the bottom of the case will short. It's badly designed.
    - iyulaev 14y ago
      I think he's talking about conformal coating, not solder mask. Conformal coating can help but it's mostly there to prevent shorting across component leads from condensation. If you smash the Al casing against the board there's a good chance you can chip the coating and short things out.
      - manmal 14y ago
        Exactly, that's what I meant. Good point about the chipping off!
wesleyd 14y ago
> Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s That's the point! Thinkpad T series laptops are what apple laptops can only dream of being.
- meaty 14y ago
  Yes - a good side effect. I reckon my T61 wouldn't get nicked and can quite happily use it on a train out of London even at night without being fussed. The same could not be said for a MacBook which just has "mug me" written on it.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Oh, so it's like wearing an ironic t-shirt?
Torgo 14y ago
I own a new W530, and I can confirm the trackpad still stinks. After my Macbook Pro died, I switched to Lenovo because how much work and fraught with difficulty keeping Linux running on the MBP was. Installs have been easier, but now I've found I've made a whole host of different sacrifices, mainly the crappy feeling you mentioned. They are not as solid as my good old pre-unibody MBP.
w1ntermute 14y ago
> Why would I buy a Lenovo T-series? It looks virtually indistinguishable from any laptop made in the late 1990s and still has that absurd red joystick. And with that statement you just exposed how ignorant you really are. The TrackPoint is far superior to any trackpad out there. In fact, I don't even use a mouse with my desktop - I have a USB version of the ThinkPad keyboard[0]. With the TrackPoint, you can use the mouse without ever moving your hand from the home position on the keyboard. It's more efficient than a mouse, and much, much more efficient than a trackpad. And instead of the stupid "two-finger scrolling" you see on Macs these days, you can hold the middle mouse button and push up or down with the TrackPoint to scroll infinitely. And the reason why the ThinkPad design has stayed the same since the 90s is because ThinkPad users aren't chasing after the latest shiny bauble - they want a device on which they can get their work done. The ThinkPad design is timeless in that it gets out of your way so that you can focus on what is important. Apple has to make sure they regularly have shiny new product designs to keep their customer base happy because their customers are more interested in looks than functionality. > I know there's Lenovo fans, ThinkPad fanatics, but they look like junk and feel even crappier. You really need to stop drinking the Apple Kool-aid and realize that there are far superior laptops to the MacBooks. 0: http://i.imgur.com/oVKgB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oVKgB.jpg
- comex 14y ago
  The parent comment was wrong to brand its opponents fanatics, but yours is also excessively opinionated. TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste, not of Kool-Aid.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    > TrackPoint versus (Apple) trackpad is, fairly obviously, a matter of taste I don't see how it is. It's a simple matter of efficiency. When using a trackpad, you have to move your hand off of the keyboard and down several inches. When using the TrackPoint, you do not - the TrackPoint is accessible with your index finger from the keyboard's home row. All 3 mouse buttons are accessible with your thumbs while your fingers rest on the home row. When using a trackpad to scroll, you have to keep lifting your hand off the trackpad and moving it back to the other side of the trackpad to continue scrolling. With the TrackPoint, you just hold down the middle mouse button and push the TrackPoint in the direction you want to go, for as long as you want. How is this even comparable? In fact, I have completely disabled the trackpad on my ThinkPad in the BIOS. I have no need for it when there's the TrackPoint.
robotresearcher 14y ago
"The new Dell Ubuntu laptop is the only thing I can think of as a reasonable alternative to what Apple's doing." Not with 768 vertical pixels it isn't.

LaGrange 14y ago

Last time I've disassembled a Lenovo laptop it still had the entire thin aluminum shield thingie inside, y'know. And desktops are made of metal instead of wood and rich corinthian leather for (a bunch of) reason(s). On the other hand, my experiences with Lenovo T-series were mostly of the "flimsy pieces of crap that only look solid" category (but maybe I was just less than lucky). Aggregated studies of customer satisfaction seem to still be so much better for Apple than for other manufacturers, that it's a bit hard to blame it all on confirmation bias.

meaty 14y ago
I think your eyes must have crap in them if you think a T-series is flimsy. The big chunk of titanium in the middle makes it rock solid: http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg http://appel.hu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/rollcage.jpg Lenovo's relatively low score is because they shift out lots of low quality consumer grade laptops (g-series) which are to be honest, just junk but earn them a lot of money. They don't even assemble them themselves. If you took just ThinkPad series machines, there would be a very different result.
- danilocampos 14y ago
  > I think your eyes must have crap in them Stop acting like a child.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- LaGrange 14y ago
  I said it looks solid, I had a T-series laptop, and I replaced it with an MBP, so I know a bit about their respective constructions. The cage and everything didn't help the T being in worse shape (loose hinges, cracks in plastic, failed display close sensor) in half the time I've used the MBP (which is still going strong). So yeah, my personal case was very different. And as for the flex test mentioned just above, it's not really an interesting test. It doesn't matter if anything flexes, it matters whether and when it breaks, and that's a test I'm not going to make. This is what I mean by making a product look solid, not be solid. FWIW, I tend to carry two different MBPs from different ages holding them by the display regularly, and they're still alive and well after, respectively, years and months of abuse. And the first thing I did after buying the first one was dropping it off the table, which is twice the height that killed the T completely (after it wasting its battery completely after a year, that is, another feat that MBP didn't replicate). Also, what the sibling said: stop acting like a child. Thank you.

bugsbunnyak 14y ago

Sadly, Lenovo cannot be relied on as they once were (even for the first few years post-IBM). My W520 has been to warranty depot three times - still not fixed - for this problem that has been known for 1.5 years: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-shuts-off-intermittently-no-BSOD-or-shut-down/td-p/459785/page/135 http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-s... I'm still using, and loving, my T61P. If only there was a way to get an i5 or i7 in that lovely reliable chassis :(

debacle 14y ago
My wife had a Lenovo that basically disintegrated in ~11 months, but my mom has had hers for years and has survived several drops and grandkids.
chaud 14y ago
Just as it has always been, the T series will be the best built laptops. You were free to purchase a T530 with any of the i5 or i7 CPUs and 1920 x 1080 screen. The only downside to them is the lack of higher end GPUs. They are just about as solidly built as the older T series.
- bugsbunnyak 14y ago
  I bought it specifically for the quadro 2000, for volume-rendering and cuda. Thanks for the heads-up, I didn't realize the W series was created post-IBM.

mike_ivanov 14y ago

Ironically, I had to send my brand new Lenovo T420s back because of display issues.