I love ThinkPads. Arguably, since I discovered them in 2007, the ThinkPad has been one of my favorite brands in computing. ThinkPad as a name is symbolic of a few things, and I think that many will agree when I say that it stands apart from a vendor, because it has changed hands at least once.
When Lenovo bought the IBM PC Division in 2005, everybody was worried that the Core* based ThinkPad T60-series that came out in 2006 would be reduced in quality, even though Lenovo didn't start building machines of their own design until slightly later on. In late 2008, Lenovo introduced the ThinkPad T400/500 series, making a partial break from the existing numbering scheme, and for the first time, building a set of machines that was entirely wide-screen. This was widely heralded as a terrible move by people who prefer 4:3 and 5:3 ratio displays, however I (and others) ended up being okay with it and the T400 is one of my favorite computers ever.
Although it'll ultimately be revealed that I'm shopping for a desktop, I'm also more than vaguely interested in the developments on the laptop front. I have a laptop that is newer than the ThinkPad, but I dislike it and use it only for a single task. In the year after I buy my desktop, I'm looking at replacing my now-aging ThinkPad T400. I have already tried to phase it out due to old age once, and aging/breaking parts. It works properly, but its age is showing, I've had to reapply the thermal paste at least once, and I now have machines that are technically better in several aspects.
Haswell is a big improvement on the mobile front and the most common theme of the reviews of the first Haswell laptop (the MacBook Air) say that it has battery life that is absolutely wild bonkers insane. There are screenshots and records of it achieving about eighteen hours of run-time doing average tasks like casually browsing the web and working on iWork/Office documents. On the PC side of things, there have been several exciting laptops, but until the past few days, most of the vendors have kept their Haswell business systems under wraps, probably at least in part because the appropriate new chips just hadn't been released/announced yet.
Haswell has of course made its way into the ThinkPad T and X series first (as well as the new S series, which is not going to be shipping in North America anyway.) These particular machines are the flagship ThinkPads, with the X series boasting the ultimate in portability, and have been capable of being slipped into an interoffice mail envelope for far longer than the MacBook Air has existed. The T series is slightly larger and had traditionally still been considered "thin and light" without compromising on expandability, flexibility, and computing horsepower. In 2009, Lenovo split the T series into the T series, which were business notebooks (very nice ExcelBoxes) and the W series, which housed the mobile workstation variants. Traditionally, the T and X series haven't fallen prey to too many trends in the consumer notebook space, however the X220/T420 changed the historic keyboard layout and the X230/T430 moved to a newer island-style keyboard.
The X240 and T440 (and s variants) have been very pretty severely nerfed compared to the X230 and T430 systems. My particular beef is with the T440, which also gets a bad time compared to the 0.55mm slimmer ThinkPad T440s. This system will only get Core i5 processors, up to twelve gigabytes of memory, two USB ports, a 1600x900 display, and no mention was given to whether the new ThinkPads will have UltraBay modules available. In addition, the T440 has a lower end discrete graphics chip available compared with the T440s, and North America may not receive these particular options at all. The T440 is really the new "i series" system, which sat at the bottom of the T series as an inexpensive option, often with a lower end chipset, possibly lacking some management functionality and having fewer configuration options available.
The X240 loses a whole memory slot and doesn't have any memory soldered on, so its new maximum memory is eight gigabytes. All of the announced systems so far have display lids that sink behind the main body of the laptop, similar to the MacBook Pro. No word yet on how this affects the previously legendary cooling ability of ThinkPads. My guess, however, is that it is "negatively."
Subsequently, Lenovo announced the T440p, T540p and W540, which addresses some of the issues with things like the lowered memory limits, but there is still no word on things like UltraBay.
Additionally, it bothers me that the keyboard is losing some of its functionality like dedicated keys for Scroll Lock, Pause, and Insert. I am a heavy user of the Shift+Insert key combination, in part because I use primarily Windows desktops, but am in PuTTY all of the time doing things on remote Linux/UNIX systems, and Shift+Ins is a good way to paste text into PuTTY without worrying about what commands like ^C (or Control+C) do on Linux. ^C is relatively innocuous, but ^X will end the process.
The large, prominent clickpad featured across the entire ThinkPad line is "interesting" but will likely prove to be problematic and need to be disabled. The question I have yet to see answered is if you will still be able to use the TrackPoint buttons with the trackpad disabled.
I'm sure there are other things, and to be perfectly honest, I have been frothing with rage for several days. My biggest problem has really been that the ThinkPad name has a very "classic" image. It has adapted as time has gone on, but how much adaptation should be done at any given time? Lenovo has been talking for years now about making changes for a reason, but with so many things happening to the flagship Thinkpad lines at once, I'm having a difficult time seeing it. Maybe I just need to lighten up, this generation brings so many changes and reduces the differentiation between ThinkPads and high end consumer laptops like the Dell XPS series, the MacBook Air/Pro, and various Sony Vaio systems.
It'll be interesting to see what the T440p/T540p and W540 look like. Those are the direction I'll be going in if my next laptop is a ThinkPad.