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October 17
ThinkPads Are Over (Again)

A few days ago, I spent some time posting in a few different threads on YOCF about ThinkPads being over. The context is that it was ThinksGiving, and a thread about a Dell Latitude came up, and several people panned Dell laptops for, as far as I can tell, no reasons that have any grounding in reality. This made me think about a conversation I've been having one-on-one with a few people over the past few weeks: ThinkPads are Over (Again, or: For Real This Time.)

A friend of mine is a (technical) support agent who gets called upon to do a large variety of different tasks for a local government. They let departments buy their own machines, and so systems get replaced on a "whenever we feel like it" or "dire emergency" basis, depending on the particular department involved. As such, there's no big multi-year exclusive contract with a single PC OEM, and their environment is a mix of (at least) Dell and Lenovo equipment, plus whatever server gear happens to fit the bill at the moment. In discussions with him, it appears that over the past few years, it has once again become true that ThinkPads are over.

Every single year, for the past ten to fifteen of them, somebody somewhere has declared ThinkPads to be over for one reason or another. Whether it was wide-screens, the Lenovo acquisition of the IBM PC Division, the removal of the UltraBay, a change in materials, a particular product within the line, a change in docking connector, the removal of the TrackPoint buttons, or more recently, the apparent overall decline in system build quality spanning the past five or six years: ThinkPads are continuously over.

Relatedly, the memes, as I'm led to believe, on some ThinkPad communities are the following:

  1. A machine from the Sandy Bridge generation (X220/T420/T520/W520) is The Last True ThinkPad and everybody is going to settle in for the next ten to fifteen years using thesen machines (which are already about five years old). This dovetails nicely with the meme elsewhere that the i5-2500K is the Last Great CPU Of Our Generation.
  2. The One True ThinkPad you can buy today is a Dell Precision 4800

The impression I get from my own work, at an institution that runs tens of thousands of Dell computers from the past few years, and from anecdotes I've heard from others, is that Dell Latitudes are really taking up the position ThinkPads used to hold as the most reliable computer you could buy short of something explicitly ruggedized, such as a ToughBook or a Dell XFR. It's to the point where, in the environment of my friend mentioned above, departments are holding onto their oldest Dell Latitudes and surplussing off ThinkPads, sometimes models less than three years old. This phenomenon starts around Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge, as my understanding goes. Basically, six years from this writing. At least, as far as any of us can tell, because nobody I know directly owns any Broadwell or Skylake ThinkPad hardware.

Perhaps the hardest part about being an individual consumer customer trying to order and use a business computer for your personal use is knowing exactly what that computer will be like when you actually get it in hand. There's not exactly a showroom where you can go to look at Latitudes, ThinkPads, and EliteBooks, and any that are in random retail stores are usually not the high end models, and aren't customizable. (I hope you definitely wanted last year's version with the i5-5300U).

When you're a large institution of corporation, signing a long term exclusivity contract for buying hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of computers on a pretty regular replacement cycle, the PC vendor will send you one of everything and an in-person account team to help evaluate needs and preferences.

The only way to really "test" a business computer you want to buy at home is to either have a friend who has one, be given one at work, and like what you get enough to go buy one at home, or buy one, try it out, and if you don't like it or you want to try another, suffer the high restocking fee.

The other hard part is that you can't really judge a company now by the way they were, ten, five, or even two years ago. Perhaps the best example of this is Apple: Ten years ago, they simply didn't buy laptops I was willing to buy, in part due to my experience with the powerBook G4, and in part because it didn't really look like Apple had improved since then, with each successive generation of PowerBook and the earliest MacBook Pros having some kind of major manufacturing or design flaw or defect. When I was buying my ThinkPad in 2009, it was hard not to look at Apple and wonder if the GeFORCE 8-series problems (which, to be fair, manifested in desktop graphics cards and every other OEM's laptops) were going to happen again.

This comes up because I'm unsure about the Surface form factor, and because laptops in general have gotten way better over the past few years. As I've mentioned, the original reason I got the Surface RT was because it was a well-built computer, small, good battery life, and it had a reasonable keyboard. In this brief time, the Surface RT was the only good computer to get. Today, there are so many good laptops, it almost doesn't make me sad that ThinkPads are over.

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