The ThinkPad line of business and prosumer laptops began under IBM in 1992 and has been under Lenovo's umbrella since 2005. But that takeover wasn't as clean as you probably thought. With many ThinkPad fans considering 2005 as a watershed year when the entire line changed, I take a look at whether that's really true and at a specific example of late-stage IBM design, the ThinkPad X41T.
Fair warning - this video will make a case that the question itself is unanswerable. But it will hopefully give you a little bit more insight into how the ThinkPad line developed and what the takeover of IBM's PC division by Lenovo really meant.
Windows XP Tablet Edition content ahead!
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Lenovo has a selection of current ThinkPads on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4cy8HtY
You can also shop for new, refurbished and vintage models on Ebay: https://ebay.us/9j6JLx
You know, I was thinking the Thinkpad was going to go to crap after Lenovo bought it, but overall I didn’t have anything negative to say. I wore mine out, keeping it way beyond it’s end of life and it kept chugging. It was difficult to part, in fact, but so goes change.
We switched from Dell to Lenovo at work and the amount of times I’ve had to totally reformat a computer for something just randomly not working right and not being able to find another fix for it has gone to almost zero. Before, with 20 computers, every couple months we had to reformat at least one laptop.
Not a single person has complained about missing Dell in two years.