I will share some feedback, sorry for the poor english. I had a R500 and now a T540p.

The general reliability is a bit better on the 540, but to be fair, the old R500 had a dedicated GPU that caused higher temperatures and fan activity.

The 540 battery is way better, but it is the normal technology evolution. I assume that all brands and ranges have benefited from this improvement.  Same for the weight.

The input devices of the 540 was a terrible regression. No physical buttons for the trackpoint, no leds for capslock and num keys. The keyboard is weaker than the old R500 one. The old one can forgive you for some occasional brutality while typing, when I do that on the 540 the key is simply broken. I miss the old keyboard, sincerely.

Also the screen cover does'nt fit the body when closed. There is a large space and I have to remove dust on the keyboard more frequently.

The T540p still features a magnesium frame and the CPU is hard to overheat but the input devices side is like a shipwreck. Some of these shortcomings was fixed on the following models and I can't wait to have the funds for a P1 or even a T495. I don't think the ergonomcs weaknesses of the T540p was a mistake, all these change saved money for Lenovo.

I used to have T43 at previous job. It was build like a tank, although the screen was terrible. Now I have T570, it feels much more fragile, has nice matte touch screen and one huge problems that affects all TXXX series - the keyboard prints marks on the screen. It's ugly as hell, I haven't seen other laptop with that fail.

I have both a  T400 and a T450S. The T400 is a tank that you can drop and drop at will. The machine went through coffee spills, dead drops and screen scratches and still works today.

The T450S has been back to Lenovo 3 times already. Twice for screen damage and once for going completely dead after changing a battery. Please do not even try to tell me they haven't gone down in quality. I think they even meet a different milspec than the T400. This article is odd and fact free to say the least.

Quote from: Systems Decoy on December 19, 2019, 21:16:22
The title does not really represent the content of the article. I would expect notebookcheck to be more articulate here. As for the question posed in the title, worse for whom? These changes don't affect their target audience, large corporations who buy these machines on three year leases with an adequate support plan, and have enough spare units on standby to mitigate the odd system that's sent out for repairs. There has been no evidence to suggest that reliability has taken a hit. For some random employee out in the field, a failed DC jack is no different than a failed USB C port, the laptop is going back to IT regardless.

I'm mostly talking about small businesses, or businesses that don't have upgrade cycles frequent enough for 2-3 year upgrades, or businesses that don't buy extended warranty coverage. Failed ports are failed ports, and it'll overall cost the company more to get the port fixed if it's on the mainboard. Sure, warranty coverage is great, but I'm sure there are some companies that would prefer to do repairs in-house. This is especially true for organizations that have data security policies which don't allow shipping their devices out to the manufacturer for repair.

Regarding reliability, the reliability of the ThinkPads themselves haven't exactly gone down, no. However, the chance of a problem cropping up before a year or two goes up as you add more complex components to the board. RAM can fail, WIFI cards can fail, GPUs can fail, etc. Ram and WLAN are fairly easy to swap in a few minutes, which means a failure only results in a small amount of downtime as mentioned. Being able to hand an employee their laptop back in a matter of minutes is crucial for some companies.

I understand that large companies on a contract are their main market, but there's a chance of alienating a number of their customers by making it impossible to replace any components.

As the operations director for a small SaaS startup, I settled on lenovos after hearing great things from relatives and other small business owners (I personally have been a Dell guy) we have a few E series and I have a yoga 920.

Support has been great for the E series, even out of warranty. And they are easy to service , as I've done a few times (changing store bought e series with HDDs to SSD's, replacing wireless cards). My yoga- it's a great machine, but the support has been mediocre at best. My father has a 7 year old T series and he couldn't be happier after an SSD upgrade.

no evidence*

The title does not really represent the content of the article. I would expect notebookcheck to be more articulate here. As for the question posed in the title, worse for whom? These changes don't affect their target audience, large corporations who buy these machines on three year leases with an adequate support plan, and have enough spare units on standby to mitigate the odd system that's sent out for repairs. There has been evidence to suggest that reliability has taken a hit. For some random employee out in the field, a failed DC jack is no different than a failed USB C port, the laptop is going back to IT regardless.

WLAN card being soldiered is not good, I've seen them die. Heck I just got a T480 in that had a failed Intel WLAN card. WLAN cards are cheap, motherboards are not.

I wouldn't say they have gotten worse....

I currently use a T470 as my daily driver, having upgraded from a T440p. And it is much the same system. Solid and reliable. I have a X230, X201, T420, and have had a couple of others going back to the X600.

The redesigns don't make them any less capable, just less convenient.

Even the ideaPads, like the 720s make a decent daily driver.

Yeah they have changed over the years, but gotten worse?

To put something in perspective: since approx. the X230, battery life reached the point of being able to do a whole day's work without a charger. That hasn't changed too much since (assuming you aren't making heavy use of the CPU/GPU, in which case it may have got worse). For many, this is "good enough".

The real problem with the T4x0/T5x0 lines may be the marketing perspective: these are the cheapest models of their lines, with more expensive 's' models and the X1. What some of us are missing is 'robust & performance' models. What we did get are 'workstation' machines, good in some respects but generally with expensive workstation graphics cards that may be an unwanted extra.

Oh, and screens got stuck at 16:9 without limited availability of high-resolution models (and many of those including unwanted extras like HDR since they are seen purely as the 'top end' option).

Quote from: Wally Downey on December 19, 2019, 09:46:12And it's not just Lenovo, nobody makes a descent quality machine today.

That's true. I am back to self assembled PC because I can choose the exact components I want. No component lottery Lenovo exhibits for (terrible) displays or noisy fans.

Well, i'd rather carry a lighter and slimmer laptop that is more fragile, than a heavy durable tank that doubles as a dumbbell.

But i guess it sucks for people who have used to doing deadlifts with their laptops as office exercises.

Everything from Lenovo since the T430 is typical Chinese consumer junk.  I bought two laptops in the past few years, both overheated and performed badly.  I've since junked them and gone back to a T420 and T430, and will probably buy a couple more to set aside for future use.  And it's not just Lenovo, nobody makes a descent quality machine today.  I'll never buy another new computer or laptop.

For power bridge: Lenovo screwed it up, long before axing it. It randomly chooses the battery to drain, so the internal battery may be drained before the external. This is absolutely absurd and illogical in every possible way. If the internal battery is drained first, the "power bridge" becomes nearly 100% useless. No other device manufacturer - not even Sony, with their slice battery - ever implemented a bridge battery so poorly.

For the KB change on the _30 series. The KB change to chiclet was not the main issue, despite constant attempts to make the narrative about that. The keycaps are not the problem at all. The layout is the problem, and what was disliked the most. It's still among the better KB layouts, but not nearly as good as the old 7 row, IMO. I get why it's gone - that space taken by the keys "has to" go to the battery, trackpad, and now the speakers. Of course, this would be less of a problem with 16:10 or 3:2 displays, since they would have adequate vertical space... Instead we have these narrow 16:9 screens that are only good for some youtube and some TV content (since it's increasingly popular for digital media to be 18:9 or "wider," and movies were long, long, long [predating electronic computers altogether] in Cinemascope or wider, which was always more squished than 16:9).

Either way, poor attempts to copy the macbook have resulted in the current "ThinkBook" - hey, Lenovo even came right out and named a whole line of laptops "ThinkBook," just to further hammer the point home. Eventually, the ThinkPads will be downgraded to the ThinkBook specs, and by then, the only real difference will be an a choice of macOS or Windows - both with ever-worse aesthetics and HW engineering.

The question needs to specify: Worse for whom? For the shareholders or for the customers (sorry, I mean the brainless "consumers")

Thinkpads now are slimmer/sexier but less durable, less upgradable which means shorter "life" before you need to replace them. So, shareholders vs "consumers" score 1 - 0.

I think this was a well thought strategy and not a "mistake" or "quality issue"