How does a water spill render your Thinkpad unusable? Mine has drain holes to handle this situation, my work Mac can't handle crumbs. I don't want to think about how it would cope with liquid.

There are some models where the keyboard itself isn't fully water safe, so there is a chance your keyboard dies but the rest of your system is fine. This is especially true if we don't spill water but some other harder to handle liquids.

There are also some products published as ThinkPads which aren't really ThinkPads (like some(many?,all?) of the Yoga ThinkPads don't have any of the properties normally associated with ThinkPads, they are much less robust pretty much in every category and much harder to repair even if it's just the keyboard.

Wouldn't that be true of Macbooks as well?

Yes, but with a MacBook the keyboard is screwed directly into the chassis, which is not threaded for them. It's literally designed never to be taken apart.

To replace the keyboards, Apple internally used to replace the whole top case. You, the business user, are likely to just be handed a whole new unit. This happened a lot for years and years, as we all remember.

So, if I spill water on my Thinkpad, I can drain it and probably replace the keyboard. Either myself or using the Lenovo support who will bring me a keyboard.

If I do the same on my Macbook, Apple have to replace it as everything is fixed in place and its gone for a week. I only say that as I've never had Apple Care able to repair anything same or next day.

I still don't get the original point about Lenovo keyboards and spills because a spill would render a Mac unusable.

Me neither. I think everything after that (bogus) original point has just been others highlighting that some ThinkPads don't have spill trays as awesome as those that are demonstrated at 28:30 or so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig3xI8dUdm0

I was just agreeing with you that the situation with spilling water on a macOS keyboard still definitely seems worse.

Right, okay it sounded like you were defending the original point! Which really confused me.

> Thinkpad keyboards are indeed much better, but only if you don't care about small water spills rendering your keyboard unusable.

This kind of generalization is as far I can tell the source of a lot of pointless discussions around thinkpads.

The truth is the quality varies, a lot. Sure wrt. most aspects the quality is at least good, but weather it's better or worse then a mac especially wrt. the keyboard is quite device dependent.

For example the one I have has a better keyboard then any mac keyboard I tried and the keyboard is quite nice to type on and quite robust, much more then then any mac keyboard. There are some models where you can continuously pure water on it and they will be just fine. But then there are some thinkpads keyboards which aren't, but then apple had also keyboards for a while which died from a bit of dust.

So in the end general statements like ThinkPads have the best keyboards or the most reobust ones or apple products have that are all kinda pointless. From both companies you can pick modules to get whatever result you want especially if you include some "fake ThinkPads" (published under the ThinkPad brand but not really thinkpads wrt. robustness, repair-ability etc.).

My main point for favoring ThinkPads is that you can easily remove the keyboard and use an external keyboard until an replacement part arrives.

(Just to be clear: I'm not speaking about the very old thinkpads; Only mean thinkpadish thinkpads e.g. mainly the T and P series but not e.g. the Yoga Thinkpad; Mean water and not liquids with a higher acidity)