In an office full of Retina MacBooks, I love my ThinkPad X220 (and this is my fourth ThinkPad in a row, spanning both Lenovo and IBM eras). It's not a flashy machine, but it's got a bunch of non-mainstream features that are devoted to getting things done, at which they excel:
- Nub pointer? I love it. Full mouse control without moving my hands significantly away from where they were on the keyboard anyways. My X220 has a trackpad, but I only use it by accident.
- An LED that lives above the monitor and has a shield that points it down to light up the keyboard. This is a lifesaver on long flights.
- Docking stations. I've got two USB drives, a pair of headphones, a few USB-powered accessories, two monitors, a mouse, and a keyboard plugged into my computer when it's at the office. My MBP-toting coworkers have to connect and disconnect all that when they pick up their computer; I press the big undock button and it all stays where I left it, and reconnects when I put it back on the desk.
- Accessory comparability. I've still got the power adapters from the first ThinkPad I had. They work fine on my current one, and mean that I have more of these bricks than I could ever need - so I can keep one at work, in my go bag, at my home office, in my living room, in my kitchen, and still have a few backups around.
- Repair manuals. Want to know how to do any type of repair on your ThinkPad? The repair manual is freely available, and tells you exactly how to do anything you'd like to. To swap out the network adapter, for example, involves taking off the keyboard and going from the top.
Was ordering it in the first place a pleasant experience? No. The website sucked, I had to call in to do half the customization I wanted, and it still took two months to get here.
I have a ThinkPad (T420) too, I love it. I agree with everything that you said - nobody else comes close. Plus, their keyboards are by far the nicest laptop keyboards out there. The X220 is in my mind the perfect portable laptop... except, like every Lenovo laptop I've used, it has an absolutely terrible screen. It drives me nuts, because they come so close, and yet still miss by so much. I mean, I'm not expecting a Retina display here, but if Asus can put a 1920x1080 display on their $1000 Zenbooks, would it be too much to ask for Lenovo to put a 1600x900 panel on the X220?
My laptop - the T420 has a 1600x900 panel on it, but colors change at every angle, and I find myself constantly having to adjust it to get the angle just perfect. And even then, it's fuzzy.
The one place things have gone downhill is screens. Thankfully you can still get matte screens rather than ones that double as mirrors. But Lenovo has gone 16:9 losing lots of vertical pixels - note how workflow is vertical (coding, documents) so this is a serious productivity killer. They also use large bezels meaning the laptops are larger than they need to be. And they used to be IPS giving excellent visual quality - that is pretty much extinct too.
>I'm with you about being less than thrilled with the transition to 16:9 displays, though.
Interestingly enough, Lenovo is aware of the problem; I remember reading a blog post a while ago in which someone from Lenovo said the problem is with volume: since the vast majority of uses for displays are now 16:9, it's more expensive to get square-er displays. The person speculated that, if they had 10,000 paid pre-orders or something like that, then Lenovo could seriously consider offering a different size. But it's just not feasible right now given the market for displays.
(If anyone remembers the post and can find it, post it!)
I'm with you that the screen on a Retina MBP is a leap ahead, but I don't think I'd call it a game-changer.
For one, I do 80% of extended work sessions when I'm at one of two desks. At both those desks, I've got an aforementioned docking station sitting there, and plugged into each docking station is a pair of beautiful Dell 24" IPS panels. That's more screen real estate, and in a more organized and usable way, that I'll get on an MBP Retina. If I did most of my work without these external displays/setups I may feel differently, but for now, they come with my main use-cases.
When I'm not at one of those two desks, would a Retina display be nicer than what I've got? Sure. But I wouldn't trade it for the control nub, the user-fixability, the ability to send a hundred bucks to Crucial and get 16GB of RAM at a time of my choosing or order a second battery if I'm going to be off the grid for a weekend, the docking station, or the keyboard light.
Neither machine will be the ultimate machine for every person. For the way I work, the X200 is in a league above the MBP - the better screen doesn't make up for the machine's other failings. If you work differently, your mileage may vary.
I won't argue practicality or usability (a dual-monitor setup has distinct benefits, as does an increased physical area), but my computation says:
(2,880 x 1,800 = 5,184,000) > (2 x 1,1920 x 1,200 = 4,608,000)
Of course, you have to be crazy enough to run the MacBook at its native resolution without scaling to reap this benefit (I am crazy in this way).
That little machine has replaced everything for me, giving me the benefit of working in the same machine without interruptions when moving from place to place. I use it in 2 workplaces with docking stations. Love the long battery life too which can make it to 8-9 hours of use, but the screen is small and has some aftereffect issues.
I agree with all your points. The bricks are pretty
much universally interchangeable, except for W models (powerful workstation series, they have a large heavy brick with a higher current rating, which you cannot use with other series).
Repair manuals are fantastic. Two weeks ago the fan in my mother's T500 has become noisy. The laptop had been running non-stop for 3 years and the fan needed more lubrication. Using a repair manual that I downloaded from lenovo.com, I could do this in an afternoon, having had no prior experience of opening up (let alone fixing) a laptop of any kind (although I do have an experience of building my own desktops).
The knob and the thinklight are the best things since sliced bread.
BTW, you can turn off the trackpad completely in the BIOS setup utility. That's what I did on my X220 :)
I have an X200s without a trackpad. It invariably blows people's minds when they try to use my laptop and there's nothing where the trackpad would usually be.
- Nub pointer? I love it. Full mouse control without moving my hands significantly away from where they were on the keyboard anyways. My X220 has a trackpad, but I only use it by accident.
- An LED that lives above the monitor and has a shield that points it down to light up the keyboard. This is a lifesaver on long flights.
- Docking stations. I've got two USB drives, a pair of headphones, a few USB-powered accessories, two monitors, a mouse, and a keyboard plugged into my computer when it's at the office. My MBP-toting coworkers have to connect and disconnect all that when they pick up their computer; I press the big undock button and it all stays where I left it, and reconnects when I put it back on the desk.
- Accessory comparability. I've still got the power adapters from the first ThinkPad I had. They work fine on my current one, and mean that I have more of these bricks than I could ever need - so I can keep one at work, in my go bag, at my home office, in my living room, in my kitchen, and still have a few backups around.
- Repair manuals. Want to know how to do any type of repair on your ThinkPad? The repair manual is freely available, and tells you exactly how to do anything you'd like to. To swap out the network adapter, for example, involves taking off the keyboard and going from the top.
Was ordering it in the first place a pleasant experience? No. The website sucked, I had to call in to do half the customization I wanted, and it still took two months to get here.