Have ThinkPads gotten worse over the last decade? – A ThinkPad retrospective

[Herbert Plaxe]

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.

[Szymon]

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.

[D.T]

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.