Because, after years of advertising made by designers and not by technical people, for most potential buyers more thin = more modern so to remain in the game they have to adapt to the most idiotic trend today: make devices thin as credit cards no matter how this would impact their usability, battery life, robustness, repairability etc.
person sits down at new thinkpad laptop
"It's so... thicc"
Narrator: we added an extra millimeter...
starts clacking on the keys and makes an O-face
*...for your pleasure."
the market is absolutely out there, zoomers love their mechanical keyboards.
I'd take a smart phone that's 3x as thick (thicc) if it had 3x the battery life, but I currently settle for a case that's also a battery.
When my T420 finally dies (if that's even possible), I'm hoping the Framework laptop is chunky enough to take its place
So no, striving for thinness is not idiotic. It follows the same principles of miniaturization of all components in PCs. It also changes the skillset required to work on the devices, but that's not really all that problematic.
> the most idiotic trend today: make devices thin as credit cards no matter how this would impact their usability, battery life, robustness, repairability etc.
They're not, though. Laptops are by definition a compromise product. You compromise on various things to afford yourself more portability. If you want a laptop that's easier to repair, they have those. You want something with more power? They have those too, but it's going to be less portable and have less battery life.
Your real complaint is that they don't make a Thinkpad that matches your own set of acceptable compromises and tradeoffs in a portable device. That's totally valid but has nothing to do with your asinine complaints about thinness.
The moment that all the brands started focusing only on who is the thinnest instead of who has more features that's the point that they just ran out of innovative ideas.
Batteries are like car tires, they are expected to need replacing. Why can't I replace them myself and instead have to send the laptop to the lab? Why can't I decide which brand of batteries I want just like in my car? Maybe I want more powerful batteries or maybe I want lighter batteries.
Another issue is that the unrepairabilty of these laptops harms the environment a lot. Lenovo sells now laptops with 8GB and maybe it's acceptable for some uses. But in a year or two, these laptops will have to be thrown to trash cause you can't upgrade the memory in any way. As many mentioned here they have fully working laptops for 5 or even 10 years and that's laptops that saved from the need to buy new ones.
So what? The market can bear having more than one kind of laptop and so exists many different kinds of laptops that come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.
> The moment that all the brands started focusing only on who is the thinnest instead of who has more features that's the point that they just ran out of innovative ideas.
Except even if one brand focused only on that, there'd still be many others that did not.
> Batteries are like car tires, they are expected to need replacing. Why can't I replace them myself and instead have to send the laptop to the lab?
No laptop requires you sending it to a lab to replace your battery.
> Why can't I decide which brand of batteries I want just like in my car?
You mostly can. There's a whole lot of cheap replacement batteries you can buy for most laptop models.
> Maybe I want more powerful batteries or maybe I want lighter batteries.
In most cases this isn't really possible because of either 1) low market demand or 2) it's literally impossible to do so without modifying the chassis. A few thinkpads used to have this feature with a hot-swappable external battery that you could choose the capacity, though. You can still buy a T480 on ebay and go this route if you want.
> Another issue is that the unrepairabilty of these laptops harms the environment a lot.
I see this argument made a lot but I find it to be mostly made in bad faith. Most people use their laptop until it's not useful to them anymore and then get rid of it in some manner — selling it to someone else, handing it down to relatives, recycling it, and sometimes throwing it away.
> Lenovo sells now laptops with 8GB and maybe it's acceptable for some uses. But in a year or two, these laptops will have to be thrown to trash cause you can't upgrade the memory in any way.
People have been making that argument for at least 8 years now that 8gb wasn't going to be enough in a year or two, and yet it's still serviceable to plenty of people today. It's about as likely as the CPU that is soldered onto every laptop now (even the framework laptop) will stop being useful. Raspberry pis are at max sold with 8gb of RAM, are you really going to try and suggest that they won't be useful two year from now?
> As many mentioned here they have fully working laptops for 5 or even 10 years and that's laptops that saved from the need to buy new ones.
My 2013 Macbook Pro was working when I traded it into Apple to get a new laptop. I got a new laptop because I wanted something with more power, not because it strictly needed to be replaced. People that are able to will replace their laptop when they feel they need to and that threshold is different depending on the person. Throwing an ssd into an old laptop will only go so far.
I can't speak for the X series though, those are made to go as thin as possible, at a cost to battery life, reliability and CPU power.
Absolutely correct. For context, typical Cherry MX mechanical keyboard switches have a total travel around 4mm. We’re very sensitive to switch height.
Why not laptops with mechanical keyboards again? It was basically 100% of laptops from the 1990s for a decade or two.
Is choice a bad thing? We can choose OS, we can choose editors and desktops and so on... but if you want a portable computer with 1cm of key travel and a click: well, it sucks to be you, so GTFO and STFU.
I detest chiclet keyboards. At some point soon all my decade-old Thinkpads will wear out and everything newer, including Thinkpads, is nasty thin-and-light plastic junk.
To quote my favourite Tumblr post ever:
https://canadiangold.tumblr.com/post/675666527469568000/i-do...
« I don’t WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet
I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer.
[...]
I will pay extra for it to be heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death. »
Even the optical drive is negotiable, TBH. But the drive bay would be handy. Give me both SATA and NVMe for a honking great spinning disk.
Look at this story:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/04/you_cannot_buy_softwa...
Rewritten 10 days ago on an intercity coach on a 2009 Thinkpad X220. On its original battery which lasted for the whole trip.
Look at this story:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/05/rust_kernel_pull_requ...
Written entirely on a Gemini PDA waiting in a visa biometric testing office.
Neither of those are viable places to use an external keyboard.
This is not some kind of fantasy hardware. Kit like this was the norm in the 1990s -- full height full travel mechanical keyboards in BUDGET model laptops from good brands -- and it was still doable in Core i7 kit sold in the first decade of this century.
Keyboards matter. They are important.
Look at any "gamer's keyboard" from the mass market. Full size, full travel, mechanical switches, even backlit.
Gamers won't put up with the crappy slimline things that Apple sold and the rest of the PC industry copied, badly.
It's only weirdo editor fans who popularise these ridiculously tiny things that don't even have cursor keys. To h3ll with that absurdist obsessive rubbish.
Full size, full travel, or GTFO. It's not some weird made up thing; we had this stuff just 10-12 years ago, but the marketing lizards foisted ultraslim junk on us and we swallowed the kool-aid and now everyone thinks laptops were always like this.
Even maintainable ones like the Framework.
I love the chiclets. They did a good job. The keys are perfectly shaped to reduce accidental presses.
> I don't understand why Lenovo doesn't add an extra 1 mm to the thickness of their laptops
Because they are already market leaders on key travel. Why aim for perfection when you are already ahead of everyone else.
I agree that I don't like the direction they are heading towards USB0-C and non removeable batteries, but at least for the mid-model years I think they did a good job balancing which components were replaceable.
USB-C for power is a huge improvement over their proprietary connector. I can carry one USB-C charger and it works for all of my devices.
Losing 2 discrete ram slots sucks, but honestly the lack of expandability is far more of a downside than the lack of reparability. I always save a few bucks by buying memory aftermarket where I can, so for me a computer with discrete ram slots is just a cheaper computer. The swap to USB-C was fantastic, it made chargers which previously cost more than a hundred dollars a commodity and lowered prices and improved reusability, I've saved LOTS of money off that standardisation.
I think the most infuriating modern trend to me is actually is soldering the SSD thus leaving a computers data hostage to a failure elsewhere in the computer. A computers data and the rest of the computer should be separable. Thankfully it doesn't seem Lenovo is soldering the SSD yet.
I don't mind the chiclet keycaps, but Lenovo really ruined the keyboard when they went from the 7 row layout [0] to the current 6 row layout [1].
Each new generation of ThinkPad reduces the travel distance of the keyboard - they've gone from 2.5 mm in the T420 (2011) to 1.5 mm in the T14 G3 (2022). 1 mm doesn't sound like on paper, but you immediately notice the difference if you switch between them. I don't understand why Lenovo doesn't add an extra 1 mm to the thickness of their laptops, at least it would restore the reputation for typing feel on ThinkPads.
For repairability: soldered WLAN cards, 1 SO-DIMM slot or soldered RAM on T/X series machines (HP offers 2x SO-DIMM slots on most EliteBooks) are a step backwards.
USB-C charging sounds good at first, but the ports start to wear out after 2 years and become loose. They are soldered to the motherboard, so good luck repairing them if you aren't good at micro soldering.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_migrated/pics/t420_...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/f/5/csm_...