Plus I can't readily get my hands on a Thinkpad (even an SL) to try it out. I want to upgrade my laptops at the moment and would dearly love to walk into the equivalent of the Apple store, sit down, and try out each of the models that I'm interested in - but in London there are only a handful of retailers that stock Thinkpads, fewer that are up-to-date with the models that they sell, and none that I know of that have demo machines in store for any significant fraction of the range.

So if I want to buy one I essentially have to be willing to accept delivery (a pain when I can't predict where I'll be on any given day), and willing to risk buying a machine that I've never touched. If I decide to accept a Mac I can check out all of the options at the store over on Regent St any time until the late-ish evening.

Lenovo are just not geared up to retail customers - that might not be an issue at the moment, but I can't help but think that today's retail customers are tomorrows corporate buyers.

But the T, W, and X are easy to understand (mainstream, heavy duty, small size) and are damn good quality.

I did, too! Only I didn't realize that the SL models are basically plain black ideapads. It is a good laptop, but it is not a thinkpad. :/

While Apple's practice of not publicizing their model names in their advertising might superficially make things simpler, it means you have to explicitly list the model year w/ specs to do a meaningful comparison between current and older models.

This will be the last Windows PC I help somebody buy.

We're all friends here -- I think you mean the clit mouse: http://xkcd.com/243/ .

(Bad joke warning: no wonder you really like the "stick" mouse.)

10.04, wireless worked out of the box, but crashed when you adjusted the brightness, or did anything with ACPI. Installing the proprietary drivers let me adjust brightness, but it still doesn't like sleeping. And now the headphone jack doesn't work.

Which makes sense since when I'm looking for a new laptop (as I am now) I don't care about old models. And when I do care to discuss the relative merits of old vs. new models, the year is the natural way to differentiate them, rather than some opaque arbitrary naming convention.