Good to know, thanks! Do both lines have completely different engineering and management leadership? That might put me at some ease.

The ThinkPad team is still Tokyo based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Yamato_Facility the IdePad is from China.

The Ideapads are built like the cheap piece of crap x86 Windows laptops you can buy from anyone. They are fine for grandma checking her email but they are not meant to be on the move or do anything hard. I'm assuming the engineering teams are totally different. Thinkpads aren't cheap and the build quality generally shows that.

Thinkpad quality is nowhere near what it was when IBM was building them however :(

I think the perceived quality of older TPs is higher, but the objective quality is not so.

They do. Thinkpads are made out of magnesium and are super durable. Build quality is pretty great. Should be more reliable than a mac.

Mac build quality really isn't all that great. Lots of glue and plastic hinges. Motherboard design is also atrocious. Check out Louis rossman on YouTube. I remember seeing a video where the webcam died because a thermal sensor stopped working and for some reason the webcam was wired into the same bus.

They also solder in ram and ssds now. They removed the data recovery port so if your ssd kicks the bucket there's no way to recover anything. That's what the T2 chip is for- they market it as some magical coprocessor but it's just an ARM chip that acts as a drive and ram controller so they can use soldered parts on the cheap.