A couple years ago, Lenovo announced its plans to build a “retro” ThinkPad that would resurrect design elements of ThinkPads past as an homage to the brand’s long history.
That ThinkPad is now real. Check out the ThinkPad 25, sold to commemorate 25 years of ThinkPads.
I’m just going to leave this here for you lovely ThinkPad people. This isn’t for me, but I’m not here to ruin your party.
Do clean up after yourselves.
Save space. Remove touchpad.
Agree, a retro thinkpad should not have the touchpad.
Myself though I would love a thinkpad with only the touchpad. It would be ideal if you could order one with one or the other, not both at the same time.
I also concur, this 25th anniversary edition should not have a touchpad. The touchpad often gets in the way of resting ones’ thumb on the palm rest when using the trackpoint.
A 4:3 screen would have been more “retro”. However, web content is increasingly optimized for a widescreen format so probably better this way.
Yeah, we have the ‘clit’ so why would we want the touchpad! Frankly, I hate touchpads. Every single one. “Try the Apple one” They say. Nope, still sucks.
Now I do use a Logitech T650 on my Atari Falcon, which is brilliant, mainly because 1) Ball mice suck. 2) Atari mouse has always been.. uniquely clicky. 3) no space for another mouse on my desktop, so makes it easy to use my Falcon.
Fun fact: research suggests that touchpads are faster than Trackpoint ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick#Ergonomics )
So why so many Trackpoint users swear by it? Personally, I suspect it’s an effect similar to https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/mouse_vs._keyboard/index.html – Trackpoint feels faster because it’s more cognitivelly loading / obscures the passage of time.
Yep, I never use the touch pad on my Lenovo x131e…. basically if you ever want anything more than the nub you just need to get a mouse.
4:3 and hires please.
Meh. It’s not what anybody wanted, but it’s not _that_ bad. People are knocking the display but they forget the dark ages of low-resolution TN panels just a few years ago. It will be sold out by this time next week because it’s manufactured in the same quantity as a 1993 Cobra. Resale value will be low because there will be no spare keyboards or palmrests available.
Fortunately, there are plenty of options for people who want a true retro machine. Final generation 4:3 ThinkPads are still usable for casual browsing. Later *20’s can be retrofitted with a FHD IPS display. For more horsepower a drop-in replacement Broadwell++ motherboard (for the T60/X61) can be purchased from 51nb.
Typed on my P70, a great machine in its own right. Lenovo is a follower, but I’m over it.
The keyboard looks identical to the one on my T410s & T420s (IIRC, the same keyboard part was across at least the T400-20 series, as well as the standalone “Ultranav” keyboards they sold at the time) – so hopefully one of those keyboards could be used, assuming the connector hasn’t changed. Not sure about the palm rest, though.
The keyboard only looks like the most recent traditional keyboard (the final iteration with the larger ESC and Delete keys), but it is is backlit, the power button doesn’t seem to be part of the keyboard, and it has entirely different connectors since the T440 series. In short, it is not swappable with the pre-*30 keyboards.
It also cannot be retrofitted into current ThinkPads since there was a redesign of the C cover for this anniversary edition.
In hindsight, I was probably wrong about the T25 keyboard showing wear. Since it is backlit with no spacing between the keys, it implies that the lettering on the keys is transparent, which means the letters will likely *not* wear off as has been the case on all of the Lenovo chiclet keyboards. A strong bit of craftsmanship if that’s what Lenovo really did.
Regarding the screen, the only knock is that it was 1080p instead of 1440p. Starting with the T510 (and T420 for the 14″ models), all traditional ThinkPad laptops have been 16:9. That’s going on eight years now, which makes it the second longest span of a single screen ratio in ThinkPad history.
I don’t really agree with the reasoning there – that span also encompasses what are generally considered to be some of the worst ThinkPad models, so I wouldn’t expect many ThinkPad traditionalists to have much fondness for 16:9 screens, even in just the “honour by association” sense. I always saw that change as merely a lazy cost-cutting measure on Lenovo’s part – a perception that wasn’t helped by the way they handled the transition: the lid on my T420s (16:9) is the same size as on my T410s (16:10), but Lenovo just increased the height the bottom bezel on the T420s to make up for the reduced height of the new display. It’s still noticeable in photos of the T25 as well, it’s obvious from the height of the bottom bezel that the lid could have easily accommodated a taller screen.
And for what it’s worth, I preferred the 16:10 screens for reasons of functionality/practicality, not traditionalism. I found 16:10 to be a nice compromise between 4:3 and 16:9 – the benefits of a modern widescreen aspect ratio, without losing as much screen real estate/height (relative to the screen width) as with 16:9. While I don’t know for certain, I suspect that the switch to 16:9 is part of the reason why ThinkPads lost the 7 row keyboard to begin with: when they redesigned the case to fit a less-tall screen, they would have had to reduce the size of the body to match the shorter lid – and reducing the keyboard’s height by one row probably seemed like the easiest way to do it.
Edited 2017-10-07 16:42 UTC
I mean, 16:9 is an entire third of the ThinkPad’s history. Those of us who have stuck around through the bad years are pretty numb about it at this point. Yes, I would have preferred 16:10 (actually I would have preferred 3:2 as the most realistic option) but that wasn’t going to happen without a ground-up redesign, which was at odds with what Lenovo Management wanted to do here. Anything other than 16:9 would have required Lenovo abandon their 14″ target.
Regarding the 6-row keyboard: an interesting comment from lead_org (Lenovo guy who pitched the T25 project to David Hill) on one of the ThinkPad forums (I can’t remember where) claims that Microsoft started requiring 6-row keyboards at the release of Windows 8 for whatever reason. I can’t find any independent verification that backs up that claim, except the fact that every single laptop manufacturer migrated in that direction around the same time.
I do not believe Lenovo is capable of building a computer that would be worthy to hold a candle to IBM ThinkPads of the past.
And from the looks of it, this “retro” ThinkPad seems like recent “Nokia 3310 reborn”, which is a complete and utter crap, plus horribly overpriced.
Username KKK.. Lenovo psyop? Nonetheless you are right. Thinkpad is over. These are plastic dell/macbooks.
Another moment that makes me think: Considering what I could do with a ThinkPad 25 years ago and how little more we do with a machine that packs probably a fifty times or more the hardware resources today, something went seriously wrong with the software part of it. While I admire the early creators of Windows for what they managed to eke out of the hardware of those days, the people working on Windows and the applications on it in the last two decades did a miserable job, to me.
A Raspberry Pi Zero already has a number of times the hardware specs of an early ThinkPad and should be enough to run a modern desktop.
You can do quite a bunch more stuff now..
Technology and software is there.
The fact that it has no reason of investment for the casual user is another discussion.
No, the main problem is, today regular consumer computer systems are no more responsive, does not feel any faster than the ones from 20 years ago. In many cases they feel even more sluggish due to insane amount of layering, abstraction and bloat. Because “javascript generation”. And apparently we now need applications that pretend to be (for example) a simple dd tool, or a simple messaging app, but are actually a full-blown browser under the hood.
Yep, something went terribly wrong. And it is not just in the Windows world.
Despite huge leaps in processing power and communication speeds, the overall web browser experience does not feel that much faster than it was with a dial-up modem. Media streaming sites appear to be notable exception. Maybe there are too many video adds going around?
Same for simple text editing and spreadsheet data entry and manipulation. There are still many “wait” times for response to keyboard keys or mouse clicks.
We now have 20 tabs of Full-HD content open that contain lots of images, fonts and video and we keep that open 24/7.
We used to have 1 or 2 browser windows open and waited for the text on the page to load before we slowly saw tables/frames and later images progressively load.
We now watch 4K youtube content without any buffering for an hour on average per day while we used to watch no video or at the very most a 30 seconds postage-stamp
We now download the latest Linux distribution in a Full-DVD-ISO in minutes while we used to not even try at home but instead went to the university and let a machine run all day long, hoping that no admin would notice that you were hogging all the bandwidth (sorry RedHat 5.2)
We used to run all our software locally and cache networked data for performance, now we run most software in the cloud and sync our entire image and video-collection to Cloud-Services
We used to preannounce to others that we would go online between 7:15 and 7:30 and then use some BBS to chat, now we send group-video instantly over WhatsApp and others
We used to buy cassettes and cd’s, now we stream music on our phones
We used to have physical maps, now we have online phones with navigation and traphic info
I don’t know what kind of dial-up you remember, but the world is a vastly different place now
It’s always the same; some of old farts who don’t really understand/grasp how exponential computing power growth works, bitching how “something went wrong.”
They just don’t remember. Software used to be terrible.
I would so much appreciate if this clever young gun could enlighten me how exponential computing power works. And while you are at it, maybe also explain what kind of point you are making with this comment.
Here’s a quick overview with some pictures:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/04/14/10-ima…
The point is that you can do a hell of a lot more with a modern thinkpad, than with an old one. And the software has to do a hell of a lot more things than during windows 3 times. There’s a lot of stuff going behind the scenes in the SW/HW combinations of modern systems to enable use cases that were a pipe dream 25 years ago.
Edited 2017-10-06 19:11 UTC
I used to use Windows 98 on a daily basis, and I still fail to see your point. In essence, there’s nothing fundamentally different between Windows 98 and Windows 10 if you compare the end result. Those “many things behind the scenes” are (very) bad things. They are there because of laziness (and stupidity) of modern developers. Layers, upon layers, upon layers of abstraction, higher and higher level programming languages, so that “developers” can tell computer what they want in simple words and/or put a “program” together from LEGO-like pieces instead of doing the real work and understanding how hardware works and how to utilise it properly.
It’s the irony of things: it takes a tremendous amount of resources to simplify the operation of a complex system, like a modern computer, to the point that a luddite like you can manage it.
You know what? Please go ahead and explain me why does a simple chat client needs more than 200MB of RAM and a full-blown, almost OS-like browser engine behind it? If in the end, it does no more than an IRC client who works perfectly fine with just few MB of RAM. I would really like to know, enlighten me…
Simple chat clients still only require a few MB of RAM or even less. Just take “net send” as an example which makes IRC look bloated
But most people aren’t using those. They are using chat clients that can do video-calling, share desktop programs, transfer files, send animated emoticons, etc.
I also remember Windows 98 and IRC-Clients crashing or losing connections several times in 1 evening and needing constant restarts for “simple things” like a resolution change
I miss Google Talk win32 client…
It has a great, simple to use UI, has great VoIP and flawless transfer of files, even animated emoticons!
Unfortunatelly no video-calling or sharing of desktop programs, but I’m sure they couldbe added without bloating the client too much… (IIRC it used a dozen or so MiB of RAM)
I guess that would be the main reason my comment ended up with a score of 0 (as of this writing).
Well – I was merely putting an emphasis on the responsiveness of the application/system to user inputs.
Man, those were the days! I spent way too much time on dial-up BBS and CompuServe chat rooms back in the mid 90s. My favorite places to go were a BBS for custom DOOM maps (barely playable on my first “real” computer), and the Star Trek Voyager RPG in the CompuServe chat rooms (I played as the holographic doctor, the only character I liked from that show).
And if I do not have all that open, the browser experience is still sluggish.
Firefox 57 actually is a lot better… its noticeably faster on my x130e which only has 2 1.6Ghz old AMD cores… so its pretty wimpy. And the UI has been modestly improved.
Edited 2017-10-06 17:31 UTC
“Old times were better” is one of more popular cognitive biases…
Well, if you really do that, you probably have small image and video collections and are fine with pretty low quality software. We’re not there yet, and I’m not convinced I’d want to go there in any case, for a lot of reasons.
Not every complain is about old people yelling to clouds. There are a lot of valid points about good things we are losing in the name of convenience.
When I was travelling for 1.5 year I used a small netbook with a local audio/video collection. I still install Windows/Office/SQL/VS from local ISO’s and we run WSUS and similar tools at our company. Of course have local copies is sometimes just more convenient and faster but it is also more problematic to keep things updated and backup-ed that way. That is why I use services like ninite.com to install the majority of my software now. We also stopped hosting most of our services ourselves because other companies do it better and cheaper so I can spend my time on other things.
I haven’t noticed any good things we have lost in the name of convenience, but I do see some things that we are losing indeed. However I have always found that in those cases there is another company that continued to offer “the good thing” so I can switch over to them if that good thing is worth more than the convenience that the other company offers.
I remember Netscape Navigator in the mid-90s; most websites then were simple text files with a bit of HTML mark-up; these days, the opening HTML at the beginning that you don’t even see is bigger than some web pages were back in the 90s. The old websites had small images (if any) because the owners probably only had a few megabytes to host their sites with; these days, sites are designed for browser windows that are bigger than screens were then. Even then, they were often slow to load, pictures doubly so, and those Java applets took interminably long.
I was never as much into the ThinkPad as I was the Dell Latitude series (I’m not saying the Latitude is better, just that it’s what I always had available). I’m still waiting for Dell to release the true successor to my Latitude CPx.
And I still use that CPx to this day, running OpenBSD and Slackware. I can’t watch high-definition video, sure, but 99% of what I want out of a full size laptop can be done on that machine. The keyboard is nearly as good as my desktop mechanical board, and the screen has held up over the years, still as bright and clear as it was in 2000. It’s a heavy, bulky brick of a machine, but at least it doesn’t bend when I pick it up like most ultrabooks I’ve played with. It feels just as fast as the Raspberry Pi 3 despite half the clock speed and with three less cores.
I think a Raspberry Pi based laptop with a good keyboard and screen would be a wonderful thing, a modern but extremely low powered device that never had Microsoft’s nor Apple’s fingers in the pie.
Oh yeah, Lattitudes were the only true rivals to ThinkPads in terms of quality, reliability, ruggedness and keyboards.
The Toughbook series by Panasonic was great for ruggedness and versatility too, though there was a rash of flaky hardware in the mid 2000s. They had a couple of “thin and light” models that were durable without being too bulky or ugly. I had one in 2003 that was well ahead of its time, the Toughbook T1.
Oh, that’s another category already… Panasonic Thoughbooks are military-grade machines, built to survive extreme conditions (not just regular businessman’s daily routine).
Something like the Pinebook (https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=3707)?
I was interested in that until I read reviews of it, particularly the one on Hackaday. The price is phenomenal for what you get (it’s clearly a loss leader) but performance seems to be not so good. Also, I feel the RPi ecosystem is much more mature and community supported than Pine.
I’m thinking more along the lines of something netbook-sized, 7 to 10 inch screen but with a non-chiclet keyboard, and perhaps a nub/stick instead of a tiny touchpad. I’ve a good mind to trawl eBay for a netbook with a bad motherboard but good screen/keyboard and build my own. Even a three cell laptop battery can power a Pi for 10 or more hours. Total cost including a LVDS to HDMI converter for the display would likely be under $100.
I’m also eagerly awaiting the Pyra palmtop, it’s a Linux hacker’s dream portable, though a bit small to call a laptop.
I had a Compaq Contura Aero 4/33c in 1994. That’s less than 25 years ago. It ran Windows 3 and had a 16 shades grayscale 640×480 lcd. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Contura#Contura_Aero_series .
On that hardware you could not:
* edit images, certainly not images of 10,000 x 5,000 pixels, which is normal these days.
* edit video
* edit, or even play, sound
* connect to a network (unless using plip or something like that)
* use X11 if running Linux
* browse the web
You could use a word processor (but a book had to be divided into chapters, which always went wrong when assembling the final print, if you’d be using Word, Wordperfect was better, but only the MS-Dos version). You could code on it, using Visual Basic, or run Dogwaffle to download mail and usenet news over uucp. You could create a not very complicated spreadsheet, or run minesweeper. It also had a very nice keyboard and an interesting trackball.
The amount of data our systems handle these days in incredible. A big brush in a painting application in 2003 would be 64 pixels; today people tell me they need brushes with 10,000 pixels diameter. And we’re finding ways to make that work.
In short, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about, but then, the “everything used to be better when I was younger” crowd usually is wrong.
I am a relatively young person, and most ThinkPads that I admire today I got my hands on when they were already very, very outdated. Only then I realised that computers that I am used to are actually total crap, and these “relics from the past” were just incomparably better, higher quality and much better built. Yes, they were much slower, had less clear screens, but none of today’s modern machines can compete with them in terms of quality and longevity.
You are probably comparing the best from the past with the average or worst of the present. This is called “survivor bias” and explains why music from the past is always the best, buildings from the past are always more beautiful and the 1 ancient computer that you still like to use is build better than new ones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_manufacturing_and…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w
The sad state of software is real. Operating system manufacturers have moved their focus away from the desktop, and they were the ones everybody were following when it came to application look, feel, or even feature set, not to mention providing all the needed underlying technologies and APIs. In the Windows ecosystem there is literally nothing to work on, as the entire Win32 API has had a deprecation hammer circling over it for years, and every one of the multiple attempts at replacing it (beginning with Windows Forms) has been a colossal failure.
Anyone remember the Butterfly keyboards on the smaller ThinkPad laptops? The hardware was too small for a full size keyboard, so someone created a keyboard that split in half and as you closed it, one side would move in and drop down into the body and then the other side would go down on top of it and then the display would close. Open it up and the keyboard opened up like a butterfly. The keyboard was actually pretty good. And of course you had the eraserhead instead of the touchpad. Good old days. Give me that and a very good processor (with great drivers) and a super HD monitor and I would be in heaven. Okay, a big hard drive and large amount of RAM would be needed.
My dad had that laptop.
The nipple mouse gets old very quick in a modern GUI, and I think the screen was only 10 inches.
The keyboard action was pretty cool, though. There was sci-fi futuristic feeling about it.
Just get X62… https://www.notebookcheck.net/Enthusiasts-bring-classic-ThinkPad-des…
The Thinkpad T23 was the ultimate thinkpad.
ThinkPads are known for ruggedness. My 2009 T500 with an WSXGA+ screen is still going strong. If the T25 had a 16:10 screen …
did you see the price? It’s insane for a 1080p laptop… I can get a retina for that money.
I love Thinkpads and I love the design of this particular model but $2k is too much.
Thinkpads were always on the expensive side of things… us poor mortals would just get them used.
Edited 2017-10-07 17:59 UTC
or get a corporate job, and chances are you’ll be issued one for free.
There really isn’t such a thing as optimised for 16:9 on the web. Like come on, every web page has vertical scrolling built in. When was the last time you accessed a page you didn’t have to scroll down on? It’s just a complete myth that content is optimised for a horizontal to vertical ratio online. Video is maybe the only exception, and who really cares about the horizontal black bars?
Edited 2017-10-07 20:55 UTC
For 1899 I expect a laptop to be faster than a 7 year old AMD desktop CPU (1075t). The passmark scores are pathetic for the dual core ultrabook garbage chip in that thinkpad. It should have been a proper quad core.