I'm a ThinkPad fanboy. I have been for years.
For me, a ThinkPad brings together several essential elements. I'm sure y'all are bored with me banging on about the TrackPoint—the red nipple situated between the G, H, and B keys that serves as a kind of joystick for moving the mouse cursor—but I continue to believe that they're better for cursor input than any touchpad ever made. Yes, I've used Apple's touchpads. No, I won't change my mind. Touchpads are nice for gestures, and so I'm glad that modern ThinkPads come with both, but for core mousing, the TrackPoint is unbeatable.
A 25-year legacy
The black, somewhat-angular, carbon-fibre ThinkPad aesthetic speaks to me. ThinkPads have a timeless elegance to them. While the look has evolved—corners are a little more rounded, overhangs and lips on lids have been eliminated, the latches are gone, and so on—there's a clear, hereditary link between today's ThinkPads and those of the IBM era. They look like serious working machines.
That seriousness has traditionally extended to the internals, too; ThinkPads had detailed service manuals, with almost every part field-replaceable. I've swapped out keyboards, batteries, RAM, Wi-Fi, and hard disks on ThinkPads, needing nothing more than the manual, a screwdriver, and a little time.
| Specs at a glance: Lenovo ThinkPad 25 | |
|---|---|
| OS | Windows 10 Pro |
| CPU | Intel 7th generation Core i7-7500U |
| RAM | 16GB 2,133MHz DDR4 |
| Screen | 1920×1080 14-inch (157 PPI), 10-point capacitive, matt finish |
| GPU | Intel UHD Graphics 620 + NVIDIA GeForce 940MX 2GB DDR5 |
| SSD | 512GB PCIe |
| Networking | 802.11ac/a/b/g/n with 2×2 MIMO antennas, Bluetooth 4.1, Gigabit wired |
| Ports | 3 USB 3.1 generation 1 Type-A, 1 USB 3.1 generation 2 Type-C with Thunderbolt 3, SD, 3.5mm headset, HDMI, RJ-45 |
| Cameras | 720p with infrared facial recognition |
| Size | 13.25×9.5×0.79 inches (337×233×20mm) |
| Weight | 3.5lb (1.6kg) |
| Battery | 2×24Wh (one fixed, one removable) |
| Warranty | 3 year |
| Price | $1,899 |
ThinkPads of yore were even quite modular, with various internal drive bays and interchangeable parts, so you could opt between, say, a DVD drive and another internal hard disk. And they rarely suffered a shortage of ports and connectivity options.
They were also thoughtful. Today's high-end systems all have backlit keyboards, but that wasn't a thing in the '90s or early 2000s. ThinkPads instead came with a ThinkLight: a little downward facing light in the lid of the machine that illuminated the keyboard.
And in the past—though much less so today—ThinkPads had very good keyboard layouts. They used to have a seven-row layout: five rows for your main keyboard block (space and meta keys, alphabetical keys, and number keys), a sixth row for the function keys. The page navigation block—that cluster of insert/delete, home/end, page up/page down—was positioned to the top right of the keyboard, spanning both a sixth and (partial) seventh row. That partial seventh row also included the print screen/scroll lock/pause triad alongside special buttons for power, volume controls, and a mute button.
Given the space constraints imposed on laptop design, this old-fashioned ThinkPad layout is the best I have ever used. It retains the full power and capability of a full-size desktop keyboard—only the number pad is missing, and if you go back in time long enough, even that can be recreated with the Num Lock button—and does so with a layout that, to as great an extent as possible, retains the correct relative positioning of the individual keys. That page-navigation cluster, for example—something I use all the time both when writing and when programming—isn't in quite the same spot as it is on a desktop keyboard, but it's close, and home/end and page up/page down all have the right position relative to each other, which is enough for comfortable navigation.
Laptop design is, of course, an exercise in trade-offs. The desire for smaller, thinner systems has put pressure on the selection of ports available. RJ45 ports for integrated Ethernet, for example, simply don't fit on the very thin, very light systems that many of us use and want today. Similarly, things like soldered-down memory (and sometimes even storage) and Wi-Fi that's integrated onto the motherboard rather than using a mini-PCIe card have greatly reduced the level of field replacement and servicing that's possible.
Keyboards in particular have suffered from this shrinkage, with the page-navigation block often being discarded entirely as manufacturers drop to six-row and sometimes even five-row keyboards.
For the most part, I think the pressure to build laptops that are more pleasant to carry around and that last longer between charges has been a good thing for the industry. I'm not the biggest road warrior around, but I use laptops in planes, hotels, on my lap at conferences, and so on and so forth; the increase in portability and time away from the power socket has been useful, and today's laptops are much more useful working systems than the kinds of two hours-between-charges devices I used in the early 2000s.
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