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Comment by nerdyadventurer | Hacker News Reader

Not related, I am asking this because Lenovo is mentioned on HN very often. Can anyone please explain what is special about Lenovo laptops? As I know it is China based company.

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Mostly due to the IBM legacy - the original thinkpad laptops where great mobile workstations. Some of that DNA remains (sadly not the original long-travel (by today's laptop standards) keyboards.

See eg:

"THINK: A brief history of ThinkPads, from IBM to Lenovo"

https://www.notebookcheck.net/THINK-A-brief-history-of-Think...

Good quality, good materials, matte screens, great keyboards, usually very linux compatible, durable, user raplacable parts (atleast in older models)... basically a very capable (although expensive) business laptop. You also have the dell xps series and the old HP probooks, but that's about it. (of course I'm talking about the business class laptops, so thnkpads, mostly T and somewhat X series, since lenovo also produces cheap crap).

Also, they used to be made by IBM "back in the day", until the chinese bought the brand and designs.

"matte" screens, not good screens! There are lots of x220 and similar with terrible, low viewing angle, 1366x768, low contrast displays. Transplants from XPS series displays are popular for obvious reasons.

I think a big part of the appeal is that the business workstations were popular for businesses, and those businesses would operate on a 2-, 3-, or 5-year upgrade cycle and unload used high-quality workstations on eBay for dirt cheap, which also made them popular with the hacker crowd.

Usually you have multiple options [1], with different resolutions and contrast/brightness levels with and without touch. The cheapest models usually suck, but once you go up a few levels, those displays are pretty good for a business laptop.

[1] example for t14 - https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...

To me it is the keyboard. I just don't like any other on a notebook, excluding gaming notebooks with full mechanical keyboards.

Plus they are the best thing ever you can buy used. Cheap, robust and better than anything you could buy for the same money.

Random ebay check: T480s 14" Laptop i5-8250U 8GB RAM 256GB - 70€

I find your post oddly self-contradictory.

I mean, yes, the loyalty to Thinkpads was in part because they had great keyboards. The first I had new, an i12200 series model 1163, was a badge-engineered thing made by Acer, with nasty plastic screen hinges that failed, only USB 1, only 1 SO-DIMM slot, etc... but it still had the IBM keyboard.

But the thing is that since the ?30 series (X230, T430, W530) Lenovo has gone over to awful chiclet keyboards.

So the model you cite is a late one with a nasty flat almost-no-travel keyboard.

Which is why I only use ?20 series or older, which have the good, 7-row keyboards.

I prefer the newer keyboards over the old ones. Plus trackpoint is something I use.

I am very fond of trackpoints, too. But preferring the modern keyboards? My ghast is flabbered.

Liking the flat abominations more?!

Surprise is no longer adequate and I am forced to resort to astonishment.

Lenovo, the company, bought the Thinkpad line from IBM. At the time the Thinkpad line had a near-religious following for quality and durability. Lenovo had done a decent job maintaining the Thinkpad reputation for enough of its models.

They also had unique innovations that few other laptops had: a finger joystick for a mouse, an overhead keyboard light (before we had glowing keys), expanding keyboards for small models, etc.

My first Thinkpad is a T490 from work randomly and if I would get to pick in the future I would pick Lenovo over HP or Dell.

They are great business laptops. Still amazing chassis quality and keyboard. Great driver support from Lenovo. I also get over 8h battery solid out of mine still, on low power plan in Win10.

But the business laptops of HP and Dell are also good, the HP Elitebooks and Dell Precisions/Latitudes.

It's just that when people buy Windows laptops, they buy cheap ass 300$ Acers from Walmart or a really expensive and loud gaming laptop. These business laptops are built to last for company use, and it does show. If a company buys 1000 laptops from HP, Dell, or Lenovo, and they are shit they won't buy from them again, so the quality has to be high. Yes, new they are expensive, but a lot of enterprise companies do 3 or 5 year hardware refreshes so used you can get them cheap. And company employees in general take care of their laptops or just use them docked 90% of the time. My keyboard looks new after 3 years because I most often have mine docked or hooked to an external screen/mouse/kb.

ThinkPad was originally an IBM line of laptops, which they later sold to Lenovo when they got out of the PC business.

ThinkPads had a reputation for being durable, but also somewhat repairable, so something of a DIY laptop community developed around hacking on ThinkPads more than any other laptop brand. This is clearly the market that Framework wants to appeal to.

I think most people are very fond of the ThinkPad Series which was bought by Lenovo from IBM in 2005. These laptops are very well built and have good Linux support. And in the past had outstanding repairability.

for me it's: matte display, physical mouse buttons including middle click, decent linux support, usually pretty good hardware quality

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