When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new.
That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.
That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.
While a very fine machine in it's day, the screen, battery life, processing power, disk speed, size, and lack of heat on a modern machine like the 13" Retina MacBook Pro are on another level. You're talking about 7 years of evolution.
Well, I have T61 guts and an SSD in mine. It isn't so far behind as you might expect.
I've used a 15" Retina Macbook Pro. The screen is not better. Sure, it's higher density and brighter, but the viewing angles are not better. Subjectively, I'd say the color reproduction is worse (I used them next to each other). Reflections, glare and fingerprints are significantly worse on the MBP.
Yea, I have a ten year old Toshiba P26-S2607 I still use on a daily basis.
I have a one year old MBP that I haven't used much; I'm
not sure why, but the screens seem the same?
I do know one thing about most old laptops; they were made
to last longer than 2 years.
That said--HP--as made crappy laptops for quite some time.
I bought one a few years ago and it was horrid on an
engineering basis, but it looked Slick.
I had an HP laptop that I bought around 2009. It lasted a year before the insane heat issues started; I agree with you completely regarding the engineering issues. In the end, I ended up buying a Lenovo about two years ago, and it's been perfect for me.
Getting back to the original story, I don't think I've bought a desktop since 2003. I prefer using them, but laptops are just so convenient.
Are you sure it was simple heat issues and not a defective Nvidia GPU? A bunch of them in that time period were prone to premature failure. Many HPs used them, as did a few Thinkpads.
I also enjoy quite old laptop (HP2530p, 2009, 12", Core2 Duo 1.9GHz, sturdy, lightweight). I upgraded to 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM. Plenty enough for the next couple of years, me thinks :) Perfectly runs W8.1/LinuxMint/Android-x86ICS
Completely irrelevant to the rest of the discussion at hand, but if you are going run Android as a Netbook OS on stock PC hardware with keyboard and mouse/trackpad, I've found that everything from Jellybean and up is incredibly much better to work with than Android 4.0.
They've done some deep level fixes which just makes everything flow and stick together as one "netbook" user-experience in a much better way.
My experience is mostly from Asus Tarnsformer type devices and not regular X86 laptop hardware, but I suspect the same improvements should be valid in X86 country. You certainly have nothing to lose by trying it [1].
Agree, and to wander further afield: how's your luck running apps? The Google apps work great, I use Opera and some hack to get Flash games to work, but the vast majority of apps just fail to load.
In spite of the problems, it's amazingly fast and usable, esp. compared to Windows/Ubuntu.
I've typed on a T530. It was pretty good, but the removal of several keys I actually use and the relocation of others bothers me. I don't think the feel is quite as good on the T530 as on the T60, but it's still one of the best laptop keyboards.
Yes! I have an X1C and they have messed the home, del, pgup, pgdn island, and placed print screen between the right alt and ctrl. I'm tripping over the keys all the time.
How hard can it be to design keyboards with all keys in the correct place? Thinkpads used to be the only ones which got this design issue right.
I think Lenovo wanted increasingly large trackpads with increasingly short screens. They've mentioned in their design blog that some of the changes are driven by "consumerization".
The problem with that is Thinkpads were never meant for mainstream consumers, Lenovo isn't going to out-Apple Apple, and if it wanted to try, it would do better using a model line that doesn't have a business-oriented reputation going back decades.
I'm hoping and waiting for some third party like infocomp to supply proper aftermarket thinkpad keypads for the new lenovo machines, with the buttons restored to proper order.
Otherwise I will not be "upgrading", ever.
Don't get me started on the single audio socket for both recording and playback.
I've upgraded it with a T61 motherboard, 8gb RAM, a tweaked BIOS and an SSD. It runs not-so-small VMs now. I try not to drop it or spill things in it, but the spill-resistant keyboard is good peace of mind.
That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.