It’s been three years since I bid Lenovo adios and used my employee discount to buy my last ThinkPad, a T410s. I was a big ThinkPad booster in my day. I was paid to be. Cash incentives aside, the all black design, the red trackpoint pointer in the middle of the keyboard, the promise of a rugged, durable, non-nonsense computer was a classic alternative to the generic chromed plastic and blue indicator lights being pumped out by the competition in the PC industry’s ongoing race to the bottom of commodity computing. ThinkPads were the best laptops on the market and it was easy to market that fact.
No offense to the good designers and engineers I worked with back then, but the T410S was a lemon that took two annoying warranty trips back to the service center to solve a bad display problem and then an aggravating overheating problem that caused it to shut down and turn into a brick. I hadn’t done my homework when I bought that machine, and when I tried to breathe a second life into it with a 64 GB SDD harddrive I learned that the original disc’s form factor was utterly weird, expensive, and ultimately impossible to upgrade. So I said to hell with it, built a great desktop tower myself with parts ordered from Newegg and haven’t looked back.
The ThinkPad still works but I don’t use it anymore and have passed it along to my son. I expected to buy another one this summer, but ….
This post is being written on a $250 Google Nexus 7 tablet with a $70 Logitech wireless bluetooth keyboard. The battery life is great. I can use it in my lap, on the porch, in the morning with my morning coffee. While I don’t like having to take my fingers off of the little keys to touch the screen and move the cursor around, I can get past all that because for $320 I have a great set up for taking notes, editing documents from my Dropbox and Google Drive accounts, watching past episodes of Deadwood on HBO Go and controlling my Sonos speaker system playing WWOZ over TunedIn radio.
I won’t buy another clamshell classic laptop ever again. I may be given one if I take another job inside of a corporation, but even then I imagine the “bring-your-own-device” to work trend will give me the freedom to show up with a tablet/wireless keyboard combo. This isn’t a retromingent screed against PCs, just a statement of personal preference backed up by one of the more vicious disruptions in computing platforms since the PC was introduced to the world in the late 70s.
The old argument that serious creation and composition would always prefer a real notebook with a real keyboard is silly. I can see myself buying a Thinkpad tablet just to get to the ThinkPad’s legendary keyboard (the way the Thinkpad engineers deliver the best keyboard experience is a great, untold story but one that few serious typist/Tpad fans would dispute), even the Microsoft Surface is a nice piece of hardware. And as I see more and more iPads and Android tablets pulled out in meetings and turned into typing devices with bluetooth keyboards, I think I’m justified in saying the sun is setting on the world of Inspirons, Pavillions, Satellites and ThinkPads.
I’ve tried external keyboards in the past, most memorably a folding contraption back in the heyday of the Palm Pilot that got maybe a grand total of three hours usage before I gave up in expensive disgust. But this stripped down combo of Android and bluetooth typing is working for me when I am away from the desktop battlestation.