Editorials

Dell likes ThinkPads so much, they even use them to promote spillproof keyboards! Photo taken at the Comex conference in Singapore.

While this was likely just a sparky little go-getter from a PR agency who needed an image for a piece of signage and hit up Google with no knowledge of laptop makes & models, it’s still good for a few chuckles.

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ThinkPad is indeed becoming a commodity like so many other laptop lines. I fight back my urge to rebuke those who claim “We pay more for a ThinkPad and we should get more” – the reality is that you don’t pay more, not these days. For the U.S., this can be at least partially blamed on aggressive eCommerce discounts and sales to sustain business in slow times.

Constant discounts condition customers to wait for the next deal and the increasingly lower price. This is understandable when business is slow and you have to keep moving units; especially when your bread & butter corporate clients clam up because IT spending budgets disintegrate. That still creates a bit of a problem if you attempt to raise prices on existing models once spending picks up again: some may perceive “regular” prices or less discounts as paying “too much” for XYZ model, because it was 15% cheaper a few months prior.

But Lenovo gets an easy out for all the long term effects of constant “sale” prices: new models. With new models launched at the beginning of a new year, with new tech inside them and longer lead times as supply and production ramp up, they practically have a get-out-of-jail-free card to set reasonable MSRP’s and stop the constant sales. But as we’ve seen over the past 6 months, that didn’t last long. We’re still seeing aggressive sales on a monthly basis for all but the most constrained models (ala X201 Tablet).

Commoditization, sadly, is also just part of the “times.”

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I did it, and I wasn’t even trying. My fiancée likes the TrackPoint.

Let me back up. She has an older Dell Inspiron laptop, which serves her purposes just fine. Now, she treats her laptop a bit like she treats her car. After years of usage, the battery is 100% toast and her AC adapter plug bit the dust as well, meaning she couldn’t even use it attached to the wall.

Between review units and my own ThinkPad collection, there was no shortage of laptops for her to use. It took me a couple weeks to get around to ordering a new AC adapter AND battery (let’s face it, a laptop is only so convenient when you’re strapped to a wall). In that time, she was generally using a ThinkPad.

Fast forward to a couple days ago. The new genuine battery and genuine AC adapter arrive (thank you eBay) and I quietly swapped her hard drive so I could put a fresh coat of Win7 on her pink Dell. Years of software build-up had left Vista feeling like a Yugo.

With everything squared away and Win7 flying along with the Pentium dual-core & 2GB RAM, what were the first words out of her mouth upon receiving her much refurbished machine?

Wow….I miss the little thing on the keyboard.

Or something to that effect. Yes, she got used to and now prefers a TrackPoint. She still likes her Dell keyboard better, but to her credit it’s not a bad keyboard. The Fn key is just in the wrong place.

I win!

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I know this isn’t the usual Lenovo-fodder, but this article from Gizmodo caught my eye. Best Buy opened its first UK store last Friday, which ended up with the company’s best-ever opening weekend sales record.

Perhaps most interesting to me about this is the author’s commentary on the state of tech shopping in the UK. I know we have a lot of UK readers and accordingly, ThinkPad has a lot of UK users/fans. It seems that UK tech shops are dominated by a couple major brands and the quality of service is rather lacking.

To tie this in with ThinkPads, it was my understanding that a lot of ThinkPads sold in the UK are through Lenovo’s channel partners, aka resellers. I believe at least some of these partners are smaller businesses, but I don’t have a picture of the overall breakout.

Also, not long ago Lenovo added configure-to-order capability to their UK website, which one would hope is a more cost effective route of purchase.

Chime in

So, dear UK readers, please chime in on how you shop for ThinkPads. I’m interested to hear where you buy from and how this has changed over the years, as I imagine at least a few of you have been long-time ThinkPad users.

Are the resellers offering ThinkPads primarily smaller businesses, or are they in the chains too? Where do you find the best prices? How does Lenovo’s UK site compete in price?

Also, for those who have visited the new Best Buy location, are there any Lenovo PCs on display?

Cheers!

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A few weeks back I posted a discussion on the new Ultrabay design featured in Lenovo’s ThinkPad T400s and newer models. One T410 user felt strongly enough that the design change wasn’t a flaw that he made a video showing how easy it was to remove a drive with the new design.

I posted the pro’s and con’s of the old and new designs, with his video and my own pictures of the old design, and opened the post for discussion of the differing designs. I also posted a poll, the results of which you can see above, and we got some good input.

Nearly half of everyone who voted in the poll didn’t care about the change, and funnily enough this likely reflects the real world ThinkPad user base. Most people who come by a ThinkPad at work, through school or other passive means probably don’t even know about the Ultrabay, much less how to swap it.

The remaining respondents were nearly tied for the two more moderate poll responses, which in retrospect were a bit close to each other in meaning. In the end, 48% of you felt it wasn’t the end of the world, even if it was a bit dumb.

Finally, only a scant 8 people are in love with their Ultrabay enough to declare the new design a deal breaker. The biggest turning point in the situation comes down to swapping while docked, so if we had known that fact perhaps the split would have been larger.

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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.

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Left: Dell Precision M4500 | Right: Lenovo ThinkPad W510 (not to scale)

It’s okay Dell, we’ll pretend you have an original design. Although I guess to be fair, the top cover certainly is…original.

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