Sure, they can take a plain, painfully boring Intel chipset, slap it in the same magnesium and plastic chassis, with the same half-assed LCD panel, with zero hardware innovation, and make a mostly reliable “business” laptop. Ask Lenovo to try and innovate, and you get the total hot-garbage of my Yoga. Lenovo’s stuff ranges from mediocre at best, to absolutely awful.
just bought a used P52 from 2018, and it's a full ThinkPad, in name as in Ideology. The Mouse buttons below the Trackpad are there, the status LEDs below the screen on the hinge are there, it's great for upgradeability (4x DDR4 SO-DIMM (up to 128GB), 2x M.2 SSD, 1x 2.5' SSD Slot, all of them easily accessible either through the bottom case lid or through the Keyboard, but thats only 2 of the 4 DDR4 SO-DIMM slots). It came with the i7-8850H (6c/12t 2.6/4.3GHz and the Quadro P2000 (4gb GDDR5), so it can get shit done. All in all a really nice, albeit hefty Notebook (thing's got some Girth to it) and definitely a true ThinkPad in my Book.
Thanks for that video! I was buying mobile workstation in 2020 and seriously considering Thinkpads, but finally turned to HP z-book G6 17. Similar price, but I think it's more upgradable. Still with me working like an ox :D
I haven't touched a classic Thinkpad in years but I could touch type on them if I were handed one. They were tough but airy, so there was almost a sense that they were like a little Parthenon of magnesium for your motherboard and components to elegantly enjoy the breeze, complete a literal gutter system channeled spilled keyboard coffee out through dedicated channels. The amber lamp built into the lit illuminated the keyboard as well as an extra area of your desk. Perfect for keeping track of your drink in a darkened lecture hall. The new ones are just another laptop. I can't attest to durability because I use my stuff carefully, but I've seen an Indian or Bangladeshi looking guy in a CSUN shirt successfully defend himself against a crackhead outside a King Taco with some kind of workstation Thinkpad.
My main home PC is a Dell Precision M4600, an elder and quite powerful thing, but I needed something smaller and much lighter to carry around or even work on my bed, so I got a very cheap ThinkPad L14 gen 1 from Amazon Renewed. I'm very much in love.
In the early to mid 90''s I had a 350 MHz pc,very good for it's time but with the rhen current rate of advancement it quickly became very low end. I opted for a laptop and stumped up more money than I care to remember for a 1.4 Ghz titanium think pad pro and dock (which I used exactly zero times😂)and what a machine it was, the trackball I personally loved,but its overall quality was evident.I still have it,it still works but I haven't used it for years. If I remember correctly the think pad was the first device to turn off it's HDD if it detected it was being dropped. One thing I can tell you is that it's far more robust and sturdier than the current idea pads my wife and I currently use,both have required new lid assemblies and hinges before they are even two years old.
I'd like to bring attention to what I see as a hidden gem in the modern age of thinkpads that nobody speaks of The P70. A workhorse designed with professionals in mind before investors Lenovo after the w541 was put between a rock and a hard place with the workstation market, and the engineers wanted to introduce an 18" workstation Four ddr4 memory slots The first machine on the market with xenon chips MXM graphics without a whitelist Four hard drive bays A brick of a battery that gave you 2 hours of heavy lifting And a cooling solution that could choke a horse to handle the whole thing It cannot be understated how high the bar was set with the p50 and p70, practically reshaping how lenovo handled it's gaming machines going forward in terms of design and features And now you can grab one for just $100
Recently got a E14 and I'm pretty dissapointed to what Thinkpads became, less than a year and it already got a small crack in the frame, the screen is horrible and overall it doesn't feel as robust as thinkpads used to be back in 2000's 10's. Not buying Thinkpads gain.
You forgot about the keyboard. Old notebooks all had an easily replaceable modular keyboard, the new ones are held by 100 plastic rivets and can only be accessed from the back, after removing the motherboard.
One thing i've noticed about thinkpads, particularly the older IBM ones is that you seem to get alot of bang for your buck - perfomance and compatability wise. EG A thinkpad with the same paper specs as a dell or HP (same cpu, memory, etc) would always outperform them and have less compatability issues. Clearly alot of thought was put into thier design. Always found the driver support was excellent as well. On top of that - they are rugged, built to last. To this day I wont entertain anything else. I was concerned when lenovo bought it out but they have kept up IBMs ethos when it comes to the range. Good show.
Yes, I write notes in my THINK pad every day. Though due to being over 70 years old, some pages are a little bit yellowish and don't take ink that well.
Thanks for the kind words! Almost through my capstone for my Bachelors! Unfortunately none of it written on this beauty-I need to find the right project for it.
ThinkPads served me well in my younger years, but the USB ports always seemed to be framed in cardboard. They still worked... so long as I went back in and straightened pins. These were the tail end of IBM-branded machines, too, as IBM supplied the primary breadwinner in our house, a long-time employee, with oddball work machines.
I got a new thinkpad. I could bend the entire thing with the screen closed and click the trackpad. It broke in a year when it fell off a desk, onto a carpet, and the screen separated and cracked even though it was closed. Then I got an old ThinkPad, and it doesn't flex unless it falls. The ThinkPad will be okay, and the only thing flexing would be me and the floor.
In my experience, this was true for the tail end of IBM-branded ThinkPads EXCEPT for the USB ports, where the plastic tab seemed to have the integrity of a stick of chewing gum. I suppose it says something that the ports still worked when I inevitably had to get something flat and safe and unbend the pins inside.
The X lineup had a HUGE downfall from the old X220 (and probably the X230 wich is the same thing with a different keyboard) to the x250 (and probably the x240, x260 as well). The X250 i have doesn´t feel remotly well built, doesn´t even compare to a cheapo lenovo ideapad 310 i have, and can´t even be compared to the X220 i have. I Honestly regret ALOT buying the X250, i wish i had gone with the t440p for the same price :/
When it comes to retro OS gaming PC's, my view is keep them as compact as possible or so they don't get in the way to much, and so don't get put away in a cupboard where its less effort to use a virtual machine than lug the thing out and plug it all in. It also helps if its useful outside the retro OS as well. I went ITX and used the Cooler Master Elite 130 case for that 5.25" bay. I got a bay converter that gave me a slim optical slot and 3.23" slot which I ended up filling with a dual 2.5" hot swap bay. I got an ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe itx board with a 3770K and 16GB DDR3 2400. For colling I used a Corsair H55 with 2x 120mm Noctua fans in push pull. I used my old 980ti as the GPU with the modified drivers and for sound to get the full up to EAXHD support I use a USB Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 that is the original version that works with XP (newer versions dropped XP support in the drives to get the full feature set, though they do work as generic UB audio). I use a 500GB 2.5" hybrid Seagate drive for XP as it means I can get near SSD performance without having to mess around with SSD maintenance. I also have Windows 11 installed on my old Samsung 850 Pro SSD So that it can double as a HTPC as well (hence why I went with Noctua fans to keep the noise to a minimum) I use my old Ideazon Merc keyboard along with my old OG MS Sidewinder Mouse. Also shared with my 98SE PC, I have my Sidewinder force feedback 2 joystick. I was lucky as the only things I went out of my way to get was the case, the noctua fans, the bay converter and the v1 Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 (I had the v3 already, but I found out it doesn't fully support XP). All the rest were my old PC parts.
A lot better. New Thinkpad is god awful they are just like any other laptop now even their mobile workstation don’t have modularity as the old Thinkpad
They had the perfect 7 row keyboard and they just killed it to copy apple. The beautiful indicator leds... gone. The most useful dedicated sound adjust/mute buttons... gone. Those are the main points by me.
I loved my 560e which I bought used in about '99/'00. I sold it (at a slight profit!) but never found another laptop that i felt as comfortable with. Recently my HP Probook died and after a few days of frustrated googling and fiddling I decided to replace it with a reconditioned T470. VERY pleased with it. Yes, the keyboard isn't the same as the 560's but it's still vastly better than other keyboards I've encountered recently. Logically laid out and solid feeling. Decent screen and ports. What's not to love?
The "response" to the MBA may not have been that given the timeline of when they each were introduced. In any case, the ThinkPad competitor was the X300/301 which was some years before the X1 series.
I still remember having such good days with an Creative Sound Blaster 16.. then I upgraded to a Sound Blaster AWE32.. It was so nice.. not to mention those CDROM kits they were selling back then loaded with a lot of fun games. I miss this. RIP Sim Wong Hoo. those were very good old days..
I worked with a vendor of industrial equipment in the EU. ThinkPad won my heart when IBM picked up a Laptop in a Hotel in one EU country, repaired it, and delivered it to another Hotel in the country in the opposite part of the EU. They did it in a span of a few days with removed HDD, and missing part of the bottom cover, no questions asked. The best customer support EVER.
@@PARADOXzss When fast startup is turned on, when you shut down the computer it doesn't actually shut the computer down but merely in a state of hybrid sleep. That's why it starts up faster.
By the way, 560Z was from 1998 and not 1996. Original 560 was from 1996 is the model I have, which I have kept since bough new in Japan back in 1996. Made in Japan, simply the best.
I have been using ThinkPad since 1996. IBM made ThinkPads were not immune to poor quality materials and designs. They did break but most of the time the repair process was not hard and parts were easily obtainable. Demand for bulky upgradable machines are not there any more. People want lightweight and longer battery. Good to see repairability make a come back on the gen 5 T14 and patterning with ifixit. I’m sure framework and people like Louise Rossman helped push for more sustainable modern computing.
I am still using my (Lenovo) ThinkPad X270 (released in 2017) with i7 (7th Gen) 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD. I think it is the last ThinkPad that is true to its origins and heritage. All the models came after the X270 are just too flimsy to deserve the ThinkPad logo on them. Now I see they are trying to get back to their roots with the new ThinkPad X13 Gen 4, which is a small step in the right direction.
My 3770k was $12 on eBay, where the heck were you shopping? Also, I recently found that the Asus B85M-G has full XP driver support from their website. You'll want to check the CPU BIOS compatibility and grab one that works with BIOS 0306 first just in case, if you plan to put a different CPU in it. The seller I bought mine from said they used a 4770k to check it, which showed as compatible with 0306, but I personally used a 4570s and upgraded to the 4790s after I updated the BIOS. I attribute my lack of the rest of the issues to using XP "Integral Edition." My Linux part is NTFS cuz I figured XP would play more nicely, so I can't speak to those EXT4 issues, either. And, I've literally never had an EVGA PSU explode on me.
I also had an idea similar to yours, I bought an AM2+ board with 4GB DDR2, I put a phenom 6x II 1055T and an HD 6770 on it, but I have not installed Windows XP, but I have installed Windows 8.1, when I have time and I got another hard drive and a CD drive, I totally turned it into a Windows XP(with linux distro) era PC
EVGA PSUs blow up?? Bro since when? 🤨EVGA is one of the most reputable brands out there. I have a Supernova G2 from 10 years ago that still works like new!
There’s a specific model that was having trouble when I uploaded the video, they had to do a massive recall that went poorly. I think Gamers Nexus covered it
Yeah, I used thinkpads in the mid-late 90s for work, Pentium and PII models and you should just use the built in ethernet port and connect to your network and copy the files. If your laptop is so old you don't have ethernet, just use a null modem serial cable and copy from another pc(although I'm guessing your new pc doesn't have serial). We also used pcmcia wifi cards in these. I had some of the first 802.11a and b cards that should work fine in those laptops.
I'm a technician and notebook collector. Yes, the old ones are infinitely better than the current ones. The current ones are just crap for young guys, with a single board, soldered processor, thin, soft plastic, not upgradeable, and will probably die under warranty.
@@santhypaezyeah Simple: Try to investigate the model before purchasing. Don't buy junk with a soldered processor, avoid anything that calls itself "gamer" without having a GPU connected to the motherboard via a connector.
Fun fact, Lenovo is still #1: "The number one PC maker globally is Lenovo. As of 2023, Lenovo held the largest market share in the global personal computer market with 24.8%. This includes desktop computers, laptop computers, and netbooks, but excludes mobile devices that do not fall under the category of 2-in-1 PCs. Lenovo has been the global market leader every year since 2013. The second and third largest PC makers are HP and Dell, with market shares of 21.9% and 16.6% respectively." HP not THAT far behind, interestingly enough.
God I love the TrackPoint - my first and only ThinkPad (T40) used for college, and I was not sure about that little red nub, but once using it, I learned fast to love it and despise touch pads.