* The corporate market often prioritizes speed and ease of doing business over the absolute rock-bottom cost. Local manufacturing offers advantages due to a much shortened supply chain.
* The gap between an hourly worker's wages in the US versus China is shrinking, due to Chinese labor inflation and US collar wage stagnation.
* The hours of labor per assembled unit is declining due to advances in automation, rendering regional labor variances less important.
Labor is becoming less of an issue while local manufacturing continues to have major supply chain cost benefits, so Lenovo considers that the scales have tipped enough to justify a US presence for the market segment that values that responsiveness the most.
Yes, higher oil prices are starting to affect profit margins, the cost of shipping a 40 foot container has tripled since the 2000s. Shipping finished products is getting more expensive.
Lead times are also very important, it takes about a month to get something from china to the US. This means that you need higher inventory levels in order to be able satisfy the demand without considerable shortages.
When you take into account the variety of configurations available its very hard not to get low rotation items on your inventory. Specially if you are expected to always have stock and when your inventory levels have to consider that it takes a month to get an item to the US.
Shifting assembly to the US reduces the number of SKUs imported and allows an easier control over inventory levels and supply chain costs.
Lenovo just has too many choices (technical term for this condition is SKUs up the butt). A T430 can be configured with one of 7(!) CPUs, some Sandy Bridge and some Ivy Bridge. There are two pairs of CPUs that cost the same. There are four wifi choices, even though the most expensive is only $40 (and is actually available 3rd party for ~$17 on ebay). Lenovo should just always stick the good one in there, and either eat the cost or bump the base price. Whenever Apple offers an option with two choices, Lenovo offers it with six choices, and then there's twice as many options on top of that.
> Lenovo should just always stick the good one in there
I'm sympathetic to this argument - there's always the oddball page in the configuration process that doesn't make sense, like the not-actually-selectable "Selectable SIM" on the current page for the T430. But the number of choices that actually don't make sense isn't that high, and the wifi adapter is not a good example. Which is "the good one"? The one with a working driver for someone's oddball OS, or the one with 802.11a support for someone's legacy network?
Do you think Lenovo should do away with one of the two palmrest combinations on the T430, and if so, which one, the one with the fingerprint reader or the one without?
Considering all the wifi adapters use the same driver and all of them support 802.11a, I'd say the best one is the one with 3 antennas, instead of 2 antennas or 1.
Can you point me to the information that specifies whether the 'ThinkPad 1x1 b/g/n' adapter supports 802.11a or the 5 GHz band, and uses the same chipset as the Intel Centrino adapters? I honestly tried looking and couldn't find any confirmation.
Ah. Sorry I was hasty, some don't support a. All the more reason to include the good one. :) I believe all the intel chips are essentially identical driver wise, but dunno about the unlabeled one. Then again, I would not be picking the unlabeled mystery chip if I were concerned about drivers.
> Then again, I would not be picking the unlabeled mystery chip if I were concerned about drivers.
You would if you knew what the chip was from sources other than the ordering page. Owning a model already is an obvious example but if I wasn't so lazy I could probably dig up the model spec book, grab the FRU of the card and google up the specs based on that.
BTW when you order a Thinkpad from their website and customize it then it is shipped from China using UPS and spends almost a day in Alaska going through customs. Shipping is "free" but of course you are paying for it.
Given that most components the computer will be made from are going to be made in China, wouldn't the supply chain cost benefits favor final assembly in China?
I'd be more worried about the "Custom" PC aspect on your supply chain.
Because of the variability in demand, you are either going to expend resources on keeping a large inventory, or you are going to be ordering in smaller batches from suppliers who are a week to two weeks away.
Unionization is the wrong response to increasing manufacturing efficiency. The correct response is finding something else to do, with the help of subsidized retraining and education, if you prefer.
How does increasing manufacturing efficiency lead to low hourly pay for the workers? That doesn't make sense. I'd expect fewer workers, but higher hourly pay.
>Unionization is the wrong response to increasing manufacturing efficiency. The correct response is finding something else to do, with the help of subsidized retraining and education, if you prefer.
Only it's not "increasing manufacturing efficiency", it's taking advantage of worldwide labour supply (including child labor and labor under extreme exploitative conditions) _in addition_ to all-too liberal outsourcing and import laws to make wages enter a race for the bottom.
Before outsourcing and offshoring everyone was afraid robots would take their jobs (they did). Personally, I care about a Chinese or Indian family's quality of life equally as much as I care about a local family. Manufacturing jobs allow them to rise above subsistence farming. I'd rather make it so they can skip the whole ugliness the western world went through during its industrialization, but that seems unlikely.
Since there are safety nets in most first world countries, I'll take globalization over unionization as the best way to improve global standards of living over time.
>Before outsourcing and offshoring everyone was afraid robots would take their jobs (they did). Personally, I care about a Chinese or Indian family's quality of life equally as much as I care about a local family.
If we really cared about those people, why allow their wages to be lower and their working conditions be far worse than ours? Just because we can, or because it's better than the alternative (substinence farming)? Well, and slavery is better than famine, should we take advantage of African countries with food/water supply problems to have them work for next to nothing?
The truth is, we "care" about them as long as they keep producing cheap stuff. We care about the cheap stuff. If they wanted equal pay, we could not care less about their fate.
As will happen, eventually, the industry people will jump to the next country that happens to offer them lower wages in a comfortable business environment, e.g Latin America or Africa. Like they moved from the US to China in the first place, crushing US working/middle class in the process.
The Lenovo ThinkPad x230 is available with a good quality IPS display (though still widescreen and low-resolution). I own an x220 with the same IPS display, and I'm very happy with it.
I just recently got an x230 with the IPS option. The display is great and really comparable to my 11'' Air except for the coating. Overall, I love the machine. It lacks the size advantage of the Air (they are generally similar, but the x230 is several times thicker) but I was able to swap out the drive with a 256 SSD and upgrade the RAM to 16 GB which has left me with a machine that is way more capable than I anticipated. I also am really surprised by how much I like the keyboard.
That said, the ultrabook market is still in a weird state. I looked at all of the major vendors and no one really had the ideal combination of components yet. Once you can get the x230 with higher res display and a multi-core CPU, it'll be an ideal machine.
The only ultrabooks I can find with high res screen at the moment are either made by Asus or Sony. I've heard good things about the Asus UX31/32, full HD IPS displays (1920x1080) in a 13.3 inch laptop. A 12 inch laptop with 1600x900 would probably be ideal for me.
Yeah, it's the 1366x768, same as the Air. I saw better options from a few different vendors but it always came at the price of low end components elsewhere.
So you think one can like the new keyboard, right? I heard many long-time ThinkPad users were dissatisfied with the new keyboard. I'm on older X series and really contemplating whether I should get X220 or X230 in the future. Apart from the keybord type, why the hell do they dissolve the six-key Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn block ?!
If you don't use WWAN on your x230 (or even have the card), you can put an mSATA SSD into the M-PCIE socket. Then you can have an ssd for your OS, and a hard drive for mass storage.
I'm not sure how many developers are using 11" MBAs. 13" yes, but the 11" one is small and low-res enough that it's awkward for development (particularly development involving an IDE).
I have my X61t, with 1400x1050 res 12" display, hooked up to my HP IPS 24" 1920x1200 res display. It's a good combo for portable (yet usable res for real work) and then even better when it's docked at home.
my previous (bought in 2005) laptop was a dell inspiron 1440 that had a 1400x900 screen. when i replaced it (in 2009) the best i could do for a similar price and cpu performance was an inspiron 15 that had a 1366x768 resolution. it's not a matter of people being cheap, screen resolutions really have retrogressed.
Last time I bought the cheapest dell laptop with a discrete card it was maybe $600, now it appears to be $719. That's only on the 'small business' more brick-like ones, though. The 'consumer' ones don't even offer discrete, but hey you can get Skull Candy[TM] speakers for an up charge!
Even the cheapest comes with a dual core processor, though, so you can share your memory among 2 cores and an integrated graphics engine. Progress it ain't.
Joe Q Public had been subsidizing performance for quite some time. I think that era is ending because most of Joe's use cases can now be met with a ~1.5 Ghz arm tablet. I think the high end of the market is going to become more expensive unless a use case emerges where everyone wants that performance. Intels been hard at work trying to invent such a use case, but so far theres been little to show for it. Making games more realistic is one reasonable use case but those efforts have recently been stymied by content creation costs.
If people shopped smarter, they could find laptops with discrete graphics for significantly cheaper. After the deal I found, I'm paying about $420 for a system that comes with an i5 Ivy Bridge, 6gb RAM, NVidia 630M... And it came with a free bookbag to boot.
And what's so wrong about them? I bought those when I was a student and I was pretty happy with the result. They're very reasonable quality and they're definitely enough for any work that doesn't require 3d, or heavy virtualisation. They're also very likely to be supported by linux - a long time has passed since that hardware became available.
This plus their tried-and-true keyboards. I'm not sure if I like where the new keyboards are headed, I never thought I'd see the day where a T-series would have a chiclet keyboard!
Real keyboard + 16:10 hi-res, high quality display and real thinkpad (IBM era) build quality and I would be willing to pay north of $1500
I personally have moved on to widescreen (16:10 1680x1050 being my favorite) due to the ability to split the screen in a editor|browser or editor|pdf configuration (or two-pane editing).
They weren't hard to come by about half a year ago when I bought one. It came without a battery or AC adapter. I paid $256.
Edit - I just checked eBay and searched for "T61p". I found:
* A 4:3 T61p with an incorrect description for $500. That seems high.
* A 4:3 T61p missing its palmrest and other parts, auction only.
* A T61p in a T60 chassis with a QXGA panel, SSD and other upgrades for $1300. That sounds high unless you've tried to find a QXGA panel; they're over $400.
I miss 4:3 on X60s/X61s because it was so much smaller. I like how widescreen makes keyboard bigger though; I just wish for more portable laptop, more like Air but still user-configurable.
I don't mind the new keyboard. The crappy screens are really annoying. The new ones (T430) don't even have the correct ICC profile by default. I measure 2cm of bezel at the top and bottom (each - total 4cm) plus 1.5cm of bezel on the left and right sides (another 3cm of plastic). That would far better be used by actual screen.
(I actually wanted a 15" screen to replace my 15" T61 but the current 15" laptops are so frigging huge with so much wasted space that I had to downgrade.)
Better speakers wouldn't hurt either. I need them occasionally but when I do I am not content with them.
It seems like they aren't willing to make a no compromise product. Maybe there's a too little market for it?
Though not an absolute requirement, the "Buy American Act" [1] gives preference to equipment that is made in this country and intended for government/military use. This could be a legal/marketing maneuver on Lenovo's part to get a larger share of government technology contracts.
Currently, if you want a custom configured Lenovo PC, you have to wait for it to be shipped from China. This increases the average time it takes to get the computer and introduces the risk of a customs problem holding up your shipment indefinitely.
I didn't think that larger exporting companies had problems with customs in China. Even so, wouldn't it be better to take advantage of your infrastructure and distribution already existing in Mexico?
In all fairness, the US corporations probably owe more than a little to Mexico. On purely ethical grounds, I'd rather buy an IBM machine built in Mexico than in the US. It's that little personal satisfaction.... But it DOES make a difference if you're going to use it for the next year or two...
I hardly think this is a big deal. The cost for assembly is low anyway. Even though the laptop might be assembled in the US, the major parts of a laptop (chip, case, screen) are still made in Asia.
Are you saying people would have problems with any "Made in USA" sticker, or that one in particular (which is obviously a fanciful clipart made in MS Paint)
* The corporate market often prioritizes speed and ease of doing business over the absolute rock-bottom cost. Local manufacturing offers advantages due to a much shortened supply chain.
* The gap between an hourly worker's wages in the US versus China is shrinking, due to Chinese labor inflation and US collar wage stagnation.
* The hours of labor per assembled unit is declining due to advances in automation, rendering regional labor variances less important.
Labor is becoming less of an issue while local manufacturing continues to have major supply chain cost benefits, so Lenovo considers that the scales have tipped enough to justify a US presence for the market segment that values that responsiveness the most.