Basically everyone wants to mimic Apple superficially. Apparently Lenovo thinks people are buying W540s because they look like MacBooks[1]. It wasn't enough to ship the X1 all weirded out, they had to go fuck up the rest of the line, too.
Lenovo even had a blogpost where they claimed "most users adapt" in a short amount of time. Not that there was any benefit, just that they needed to modernize the design and it wasn't that harmful. Idiots.
The X201t is like the pinnacle of their design. 16:10 screen (important if you use Windows, especially inside a RDP app - 1366x786 just doesn't have enough vertical pixels).
The X201 also had a FULL keyboard. They used every cm of the laptop to fit all the keys in. The newer X series 12", they remove keys, and added blank space around the keyboard. Here they are trynna cram stuff in, and they literally throw away 2-3 keys worth of space.
Lenovo is just beyond incompetent in designing things at this point. I don't know about the sales side, but since everyone else in this space is just as bad, it probably doesn't harm them. But if Dell ever wakes up and says "oh, hey, maybe we should make real laptops", they'd steal away ThinkPad's marketshare pretty quickly.
Oh and just to insult us on top of all these bad changes, they ship utterly crap panels with some of the laptops. I bought a T440p last year, and I absolutely hate it. It has a viewing angle of 0 - there's no point at which you can view it and get anything remotely decent.
1: I've tried MacBooks... the ergonomics are terrible, as is the heat. Beautiful displays though.
Lenovo changed from producing business notebooks to consumer centric stylish notebooks that tries to mimic Apple notebooks.
Very sad, given that IBM ThinkPad and later Lenovo ThinkPad up to T420/X220 where very good robust devices and had a great build quality including a good keyboard and screen. I would pay premium price for a T420 series notebook with a brand new Intel i7 chipset that support 16+ GB RAM (or the T60p series style with a 4:3 display).
I've posted this on another thread, but it looks like Dell is trying to make real laptops. The newest XPS ultrabooks have received rave reviews, and some of them even ship with Linux preinstalled [1]. That said, my personal laptop is a Lenovo T440s, because IMHO Lenovo still wins on upgradeability. I was able to buy a base model, and in short order had the RAM upgraded to 12GB (the max this model supports) and swapped out the hard drive with a SSD from Amazon. I'm not sure how feasible that is with any of the other laptops being discussed here.
I just bought an X250 after searching around for an alternative. The XPS 13 looked pretty good and I was about to buy it ... but no physical nipplepoint buttons. Maybe next time I'll be willing to risk it. (Yeah, the X250 looks like it has plenty of downgrades from the X201, but it's better than a T440p, and at least it's a known quantity whereas Dell has an even worse rep...)
I'm typing this on an X230, with 16GiB RAM. I busted the screen recently and considered an X250... it's such a shame that "ultrabook" means "one DIMM slot" these days, i.e. they max out at 8GiB RAM - same as I was using in '2009 on my old X61s!
Luckily replacement screen parts are quite affordable these days. And before anyone complains, I do use all this memory, currently dom0 has 4GB free.
Good news! There are 16GB SODIMMs from "I'M Intelligent Memory". You'll have to look around to figure out what model exactly, but people have put them in new X series and they work.
Lenovo even had a blogpost where they claimed "most users adapt" in a short amount of time. Not that there was any benefit, just that they needed to modernize the design and it wasn't that harmful. Idiots.
The X201t is like the pinnacle of their design. 16:10 screen (important if you use Windows, especially inside a RDP app - 1366x786 just doesn't have enough vertical pixels).
The X201 also had a FULL keyboard. They used every cm of the laptop to fit all the keys in. The newer X series 12", they remove keys, and added blank space around the keyboard. Here they are trynna cram stuff in, and they literally throw away 2-3 keys worth of space.
Lenovo is just beyond incompetent in designing things at this point. I don't know about the sales side, but since everyone else in this space is just as bad, it probably doesn't harm them. But if Dell ever wakes up and says "oh, hey, maybe we should make real laptops", they'd steal away ThinkPad's marketshare pretty quickly.
Oh and just to insult us on top of all these bad changes, they ship utterly crap panels with some of the laptops. I bought a T440p last year, and I absolutely hate it. It has a viewing angle of 0 - there's no point at which you can view it and get anything remotely decent.
1: I've tried MacBooks... the ergonomics are terrible, as is the heat. Beautiful displays though.