Very true. Lenovo destroyed thinkpad legacy and it's on its way to destroying Motorola's legacy. The leaked renders of moto g4 and x4 look mighty awful.

The Lenovo keyboards aren't bad? I actually like them. Well aside from the bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is retarded.

The trackpads on them are beyond redemption though. How that made it past well any kind of user testing is beyond me.

FWIW, on my W530, you can swap Fn and Ctrl in the BIOS. YMMV.

> Well aside from the bottom left key being FN instead of Ctrl...that part is retarded.

There's a BIOS option to swap Fn and Ctrl, at least on the X250.

I believe the BIOS option to change them was introduced in the xy10 series, I actually loaded a hacked BIOS on a W500 I was given to "recycle" to do the same swap.

Interesting. I'll check. Not sure I can get into BIOS though...corporate laptop.

Did it work? If not, can you hit ESC and still save the option?

(None of my old TPs have this, so I can't check.)

the option is there on my L520 as well.

> I'd buy a retro Thinkpad, like you link, in a second.

I'm not sure if the Libreboot would fit your needs? https://minifree.org/

I'm desperately hanging on to my T500 daily work machine. It was the last generation with 16:10 screens and the second-to-last with the good keyboard layout.

With an SSD and maxed RAM it's still viable, but the C2D processor is a real bottleneck. Trouble is, any machine I could replace it with would be a processor upgrade and an everything else downgrade.

Edit: actually the Macbooks have great 16:10 screens, so there's at least that option. Unfortunately they come with a long list of downsides of their own.

I don't want to get your hopes up too high, but there are positive signs that Lenovo is listening to what ThinkPad users want. There were a number of surveys started last year (and that may still be open) for feedback on a retro ThinkPad.

http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-survey-4-misce...

It's too bad Lenovo ripped before I ever bought one, I often see nostalgious people. Have you tried system76 laptops? A bit expensive but no real flaw so far for me.

I believe System76 uses rebranded Clevos. I own a Sager which is also a rebranded Clevo and it has the worst build quality of any computer I have ever owned.

Whoa, I never tried any of the old Thinkpad. I think the keyboard in Lenovo's Thinkpad is already better than other cheap laptops, and the old one is even better?

It's a bit like the vi/emacs debate, it'll run and run :)

I prefer mechanical keyboards - my old IBM Model M that is wearing better than I am, or on new keyboards, Cherry MX Blues. I've no doubt that colours my laptop preferences. TP keyboards tried to duplicate that feel. Lenovo have slowly backed down the IBM "clicky" feel of the keyboard so a t22 or t43p feels quite a bit more clicky than a W520.

@masseyset says the new keyboard has better spacing. What he means is the key spacing is precisely identical (I saw many reviews claimed larger spacing, or that the keyboard was bigger, it's objectively untrue) but the key tops, being flat rather than sculpted, are larger so feel like a different spacing.

Being chicklet, the key travel is a fraction 1/2, 1/3? of the old TP keyboard. This is the bit I hate with chicklet keyboards along with their actuation point. 6 or 8 years of Macbook as main machine and I never got past that dislike. Devoid of feel and travel. I ended up with a Matias Tactile Pro for any time I wanted to do anything significant, so only needed to use the dead calculator keyboard when travelling.

The Thinkpad chicklet keyboard is way ahead of a Mac or anyone else's chicklet keyboard, and they brought back a fair bit of the clicky feel they'd slowly been losing (at least on my friend's W540). As chicklets go, it's very good. It'll never have the travel of the old 7 row TP keyboard, so I will never like it.

I could probably live with the new TP chicklet as the weighting is back to good. The lack of travel and scattering the pgup/home block randomly around the whole keyboard to save 50c and the extra 1/2 row is unforgivable.

I think that covers my biases. Oh, I lean towards vi. :)

Opinions differ on this. For a couple of years I had Thinkpads with both the old and new keyboards and I strongly preferred the new one. Each key is slightly larger, the spacing is better, and the keyboard springs are just right. However, if you use a lot of function keys, I can see why you'd like the old one better. The keyboard heavy things I do involve old school text editors (I use Vim awhile, get mad at it, switch to Emacs, then reverse) and these don't use function keys much.

I love my Lenovo Carbon X1 3rd Gen, and I know a few friends who have them too and love it.