Right now Lenovo’s product line is very convoluted, across the board. The ThinkPad T, X and W Series all fit in and make sense. Then we have the SL, originally purported to be SMB focused. One might guess that its traditional design wasn’t quite “mainstream” enough for SMB, or at least Lenovo’s perception of SMB.
Enter: ThinkPad Edge. Slim, sleek, multiple colors, but still sporting some ThinkPad heritage. With its 100% SMB focus, where does this leave the SL models? Furthermore, we also have the ThinkPad R Series quickly gathering dust as it didn’t get refreshed in January with everyone else. We’ve suspected for a while that R Series would be going away, and with rumors of the L Series popping up a couple months ago, it would make sense for L to replace R.
In today’s tough market, the R Series is a tough proposition for Lenovo to keep around. Historically, the R Series have been equivalent to the T Series except for the use of “plain” ABS plastic in the chassis. To maintain T Series durability, the R models got lots of ABS plastic which made them heavier. A heavily de-contented ‘e’ model of the R Series (i.e. R60e) was sold to reduce cost even more, lacking things like a hot swappable optical and TPM chip. Fast forward to 2009 and the 14-inch R Series is a replica of the T400, just slightly thicker due to the 12.7mm optical.
In a time when companies need to improve margin, the kissing-cousins R and T Series weren’t complementing each other. Lenovo needs a true low cost, higher margin way for customers to get into the ThinkPad lineup. The SL Series made a lot of sense for that purpose, sporting a respectable amount of traditional ThinkPad features and design. However, SL was intended for small businesses and judging by their decision to introduce Edge, it appears SL wasn’t impressing in the SMB space or wasn’t high margin enough.
What’s next
In the next six months, or by the end of the year at the latest, we should see the disappearance of the ThinkPad R and SL Series. The L Series is semi-announced and should fill the place of the R Series, while the already-shipping Edge models will hopefully please small business owners.
With this little shakeup, Lenovo’s ThinkPad line is finally back in alignment. While ThinkPad purists will still denounce the L Series and X100e as non-ThinkPads, in reality they aren’t all that different from the de-contented ‘e’ models previously found in the R Series. The old formula was to take the regular ThinkPad design and features, then sell it without some of the more expensive and less requisite features. The new formula is to take some of the fundamentals of ThinkPad and use design and technology content that makes them more appealing to their target audience.
If you were a small business owner looking for a reliable laptop under $800 with a robust support infrastructure and reputation for quality, would you be more excited about an R60e or an Edge 14?
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
I’d better get the Edge 14.
I just hope Lenovo makes it right this time with their ThinkPad offerings. If they’re gonna tweak it again in a major way, it risks losing customers to competing OEMs, which have already made significant headway into the once-impregnable ThinkPad customer base.
I wouldn’t worry about it. When I compare to Dell’s laptop offerings, Lenovo’s product line was significantly smaller. Since businesses buy laptop’s in bulk, if the laptop does not fit in their criteria, they will take their business elsewhere.
Why the X-series laptop has a red border ????
x100 series.
The Edge is clearly the future. It solves the squeaky-creaky-plastic problem of the current Thinkpad body design by adding the metal strip around the edge. It also refines the keyboard, simplifies the LED situation, and the combines earphone and microphone plugs. On top of that, the red top looks great.
If Lenovo were interested in customer input, I’d suggest dumping the R series, giving the T series the body design of the Edge, and drastically rethinking the W series.
But regarding the W700, I like the integrated Wacom tablet and color sensor, and call me radical, but I think the Wacom should be a slide-in option on all Thinkpads.
Lastly I think all Thinkpads should have matte display, which is a big deal for many people.
I’d be happy if their catalog would just stabilize for one day or more. Today the X201 Tablet has disappeared from the USA site yet again. The X200 Tablet is still on there, though.
The frustrating thing about this is that none of the models has a decent screen anymore. My users want lightweight machines with vertically-tall (4:3 aspect ratio) IPS displays, not cheap low-contrast widescreen displays. Issues like CPU speed, battery life, etc. are pretty much irrelevant if the screen is no good.
Yep, and Lenovo’s whining about the inability to source such displays has been shown by the Apple iPad to be nothing but lies.
Nobody said they couldn’t get the displays. The issue is several fold:
1) They would have difficulty obtaining a large supply of the LCDs reliably. The iPad is not something sold in large amounts, like a mainstream 14-15 inch laptop.
2) Demand. Regardless of what you and the other dozen people on this and other blogs say, most of Lenovo’s customers don’t care about display quality. Lenovo has always had a strong focus on their enterprise customers, whom do not want to pay extra money for a better display when it is merely an appliance for their workers.
3) Cost. Yes, the displays exist and they can be acquired. But considering the small market Lenovo would have for them, the cost per model would be quite high.
In fact, they addressed this very topic on their blog:
Link
That’s exactly the blog post I’m referring to, John. Lenovo says “the PC vendors have almost zero say in this” which is a demonstrably untrue statement at this point. Apple already sold more than half a million iPads, which I reckon is more than any single model of ThinkPad has ever sold. The iPad bucks both of these trends by shipping a 4:3 S-IPS display. To say that the iPad is not sold in quantity is a strange statement.
Fact is Lenovo has been unwilling to manage their vendors to the benefit of their customers. It’s not like the laptops are now radically cheaper than they were when FlexView laptops and FFS tablets were current. Apple is willing to dictate terms to the vendors because they care about the customer experience.
A true statement would have been “Lenovo is apathetic about display quality and we haven’t really ever tried to source IPS or 4:3 displays.” The fact that they had to address the topic on their blog just means that they are aware their customers notice display quality, but don’t care enough to improve it.
Anybody can get or do anything they want with enough money. PC manufacturers don’t have wiggle room with money due to razor thin margins. And the iPad *is* a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the PC industry.
Link
Try to keep some perspective that users like yourself, myself, and some of the Lenovo Blogs audience are relatively small. We are loud on the internet, but small in purchasing power. If “IT Buyer” had tens of thousands of users or there were tens of thousands of us with cohesive actions and strong proof of intent to purchase, I do believe Lenovo would do it.
But the decision would have to be championed from within and would come from the very Lenovo employees who interact with people like us on a regular basis. Those people would need not only solid evidence from “us,” but also they would need to be sure of such intent before making such a push to people inside the company. For them to even get other stuff fixed that isn’t effecting a large corporate account, it requires hard work and professional currency, to say nothing of such a drastic change as introducing an entirely new model.
I do agree that Apple dictates more to their ODM’s and that they do care quite a bit about their customer experience. Lenovo’s trying to do more to improve their customer experience, what with the Win7 EE and custom Skylight OS.
Displays have been, are, and will continue to be Lenovo’s weak point. And frankly, they are a weak point of other manufacturers too. The 95% RGB display on the W510 is pretty good, although the viewing angles still don’t reach IPS levels.
What a discussion. Apples and oranges, iPads and ThinkPads.
My point is that for the iPad, the screen is *everything*. That thing ain’t nothing but it’s screen. As far as I can tell, Apple hasn’t put much money elsewhere on that thing.
Of course I would want the X310 to have a 13 inch 3:2 IPS screen with multitouch, but I wouldn’t even be able to afford that.
Also, I’d like it to have 64GB RAM, a 1TB SSD, a 5 GHz quad core processor and a Nvidia CUDA solution with lots and lots and lots of processing power. But no one makes such things, and no one puts them in a notebook that doesn’t weigh more than 1 kg, so what shall I do?
Some random thoughts delivered by O8h7w, thankyou.
PS: I’ll be buying a X61s, that’s within my budget. I’ll be complaining about the screen, the processor, maybe the lack of graphics power, and – mostly – the lack of colored stripes on my ThinkPad buttons.
I believe the color stripes are still there. With all that power, you want the 12 hours of battery life too. Right?
12 hours? No, I want an internal fuel cell or something alike that will last a lifetime…
I’m looking into an X61s, it’s from that generation where they didn’t have the color stripes. As long as this page hasn’t got it wrong: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-67777
On the other hand, something is wrong. This one has the fingerprint reader to the right, not centered: http://www.blocket.se/sodermanland/Lenovo_X61s__7667__25713688.htm?ca=8&w=3
I probably should buy a X201 today but really, it’s too much money. I can get hold of a X61s and put Win7 in it for less than half the cost. A X61 without the s would fit me better, but somehow those are hard to find in Sweden…
Oh shit, I did it again. Off-topic is my middle name.
Jeffrey, IT Buyer, John,
Great debate here..
When considering the iPad, try to keep in mind that it is a holistically designed product – designed to be one thing without interchangability in terms of parts of the chasis. As O8h7w said, it is a screen and nothing but a screen – that is the sole point of the interaction with the user so it makes sense to make the investment in that particular component. A conventional clam shell laptop has multiple design points from which users demand quality – strength and flex resistance of a chasis that by it’s design is componentized and commoditized rather than being a single non-moving part. There are multiple config options – different system boards, CPU, communication options, plus removable HDD and optical drives, and of course, a real working keyboard. All those design points must be delivered in a quality manner and on budget. A budget that is increasing competitive. There was a comment that things haven’t changed much since the IPS days in terms of price. I disagree – the sub $1000 price band seems to be growing across all OEM’s lines – there are a lot of $500 and $600 systems out there. These did not exist during the IPS days of the T43p days. In fact, most sold around $2000. This seems to suggest to me that the masses care more about the overall value equation.
With regard to Lenovo introducing a 4:3 IPS panel – at this point, in addition to sourcing a panel, which would be at a premium, the cost to develop an entire system chasis would be required, and would have to be amortized across the build. The total cost is far greater than just the cost of the component that is often the focus of the discussion. I understand that another OEM has recently introduced an IPS display in a production system – it will be interesting to see how sales of that go, and whether or not it affects the industry direction.
I always said they needed to simplify the range when I worked for Lenovo but marketing always seemed to be convincing the management that more models were needed to fill gaps in the market.
I always thought that given the premium nature of ThinkPads in the past that they should have followed the apple model and simply had 3 different models for X series, X Tablet and T series (including currently what is classed as W500 as well); have a low spec, a mid range and a high spec choice, the reduction in inventory, development and customisation would really streamline the business and actually reduce the cost of the ThinkPads as a whole without specifically targeting the SMB and low end markets (which yield very little profit anyone).
I never understood the R series really but since the R50, it has been so similar to T series that the dual development, part tooling and inventory for the 2 different models was simply insane.
I am firmly in the camp that the Edge and SL (or now L) series ThinkPads are not proper ThinkPads, I like to have more options for systems with TrackPoints but they should not be ThinkPad branded; The e models of previous ThinkPads vere different because the industrial design was the same as the proper ThinkPads (the robustness imho is what mostly makes a ThinkPad, a ThinkPad), the Edge and the SL are clearly generic crap, you just have to look at the rubber buffers on the screen to know that they will not last like a ThinkPad should.
I also agree that there are too many thinkpad models. They need to standardize to fewer and more capable models. That way they can use their scale of economy to provide decent displays. Quality of components/technology employed in thinkpad is quite uneven.
I agree with Snife, though I would say to Lenovo be even more radical with the Thinkpad brand:
Just have a single Thinkpad series – no different series letters and models.
Make them all of the same high build quality and materials (don’t let the R series or SL taint the whole brand), and accentuate the traditional thinkpad design by simplifying it as much as possible (make it truly a black rectangle – no adornments), with the only variables being size and specs.
Pare it down to a portable, a tablet (12 inch), an all rounder (14 inch), and a desktop replacement (17 inch). Call them something bravely minimal – like Thinkpad 1, Thinkpad 2, Thinkpad 3, Thinkpad 4 – but don’t have another label on the laptop other than Thinkpad.
Add ons like a second screen or wacom pad can just be that, add ons – they don’t merit a new series name. Likewise, when the models are updated, you don’t need another number. It works for Apple after all.
This would be bold and catch peoples’ attention; it would bring a more definitive brand – one that consumers can flaunt and buy in to as they do apple (living in the UK, there’s nothing like the recognition that thinkpads have in the US. As far as I’m concerned, the edges and the x100e are laptops that should be lenovo branded – they detract from the Thinkpad and dilute its distinguishing features.
Starting with the R61 14.1″ actually shared the same ThinkPad Roll Cage AND Top Cover Roll Cage as the T-series models. The 14.1″ R61 and T61 shared almost identical dimensions and looked very much the same. The 15.4″ R61, followed by the R500, is the only model with a PC-ABS (plastic) exterior. The R500 is also the only R/T-series model lacking the Top Cover Roll Cage, although it does have the one-piece magnesium ThinkPad Roll Cage in the base. The R400, T400 and T500 all have the Top-Cover Roll Cage (also one-piece magnesium). They also have Carbon-Fiber Reinforced Plastic skin, which keeps their bulk and weight down….
My last ThinkPad was a 14″ R61 that I bought for $200 less than a T61 with identical specs. It even had discrete graphics, which the R400 didn’t offer. As a consumer, I was happy to save $200, but it didn’t make sense why they offered both. The T400 has often been cheaper than the R400 with coupons or sale pricing, which made the R400 seem even more redundant and illogical.
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