First non-thinkpad in 15 years.( W530u wishlist ) [ Edited ]

[jeskeca]

I'm the guy who would only buy thinkpads. My friends and coworkers think pigs can fly and hell froze over because I bought a non-thinkpad. To put this in perspective, here is a picture of just the current thinkpads I have in the house...

(from left to right) T43, X61-T, X62, W500, W520

 ..and here is the USB travel keyboard I use on all my home and work computers...

I'm sad that this past week I bought my first non-Thinkpad laptop in over 15 years. I'm writing this with the unlikely hope that someone at Lenovo might read it and care. I seriously prefer thinkpad keyboards, the trackpoint, thinkpad ergonomics, and Windows... but I don't find current Lenovo offerings competitive. 

Here is the machine I WISH I could have just bought...

(Fantasy) Lenovo W530u. <5lbs WITH 90 watt-hour battery, <1 inch thick, 16:10 aspect ratio 15.4" display, 'classic' thinkpad keyboard layout and trackpoint, Ivy Bridge i7, switchable NVidia "Kepler" discrete graphics, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, NO optical drive.  $2000-$3000. 

Instead, I replaced my W520 "back breaker" (6.3lbs) and 170W power-brickyard (1.8lbs) with a Retina Macbook Pro (4.46lbs) and 85w power adaptor (1.4lbs)... here are the reasons...

1) 15" thin and light ... The 15" Retina MBP is less than 1/2 the thickness, possibly 1/3 the volume, and just a little more than half the weight of my W520 (with the 9-cell). I'm willing to deal with a slightly thicker Thinkpad if I can get the thinkpad 7-row keyboard and trackpoint, but this size and weight difference is not even close and the W530 has a compromised 6-row keyboard also.

2) 16:10 instead of 16:9 ... PLEASE, stop making laptops designed for HDTV movies. I don't buy a $2-3k graphics discrete graphics workstation so I can watch DVDs. I buy them to WORK! (and occasionally game)! Honestly I was happier with the 4:3 aspect ratio on my late T40 and T42 because of the additional vertical real-estate. I understand letterbox is all the rage in laptop form factors, but please, 16:10 is going far enough. 16:9 is less usable for webpages, documents, programming, and all manner of real things we do with computers. Stick to 16:10. (or bring back 4:3!) 

3) Make a small power brick.. consider total travel size... The W520 170W power brick seriously feels like I'm carrying a whole additional laptop. The thing is RIDICULOUS. How can Apple ship me a machine with better performance (same cpu, slightly faster 3d graphics, more battery life), and use a small 85W power brick instead of Lenovo's silly 170W monster? If I include the 9-cell and a power-brick that make the W520 remotely competitive in battery life and utility, the W520+brick is seriously more than double the size and weight of the rMBP+brick. 

4) No optical drive. Please. I don't watch DVDs on my $2k+ laptop. If I watch video, it's streamed. I havn't handled a DVD in over two years except to install operating system software. I don't bring optical media when I travel. Other than an OS install, I havn't used an optical drive in a laptop in a long time. Even back on my old T43 I put a battery in the optical drawer because I never used the optical drive.

5) 5-7hr "real" wireless web usage under 5lbs, and without that big battery sticking out the back. 

6) KEEP the thinkpad rounded front edge.. The MBP has a really sharp front edge which is no good. Every thinkpad I've owned has a much nicer smooth curve to the front of the wrist-rest. I'm afraid of how sharp the front of the X1 Carbon looks.

7) I have not used the new chiclet 6-row keyboard, so I can't judge it. I like the 2011 W520 layout tweaks. From the pictures I'm less enamored with the 6-row layout. I much prefer the separated function key design on the X1-Carbon pictures to the run-together function-keys on the W530. I prefer my page-up/down in the upper-right. I sometimes accidentally hit the tiny browser left-right keys near the arrows when coding, and they thankfully do nothing in my code-editor. If they were page-up/page-down I fear I'd have to unbind them. 

I understand the Retina Macbook pro is "cheating" in that everything is soldered down. I'm fine with a bit of thickness compromise to socket some of the parts (battery, memory, SSD). I'm also fine with the parts soldered down. I just want a 15-inch 16:10 aspect ratio machine that is competitively thin-and-light (<1inch), with current parts, and a thinkpad keyboard and trackpoint. -- LIke the T430u, but with 16:10 aspect ratio 15.4: screen.

Good luck Lenovo! Wow us with some new machines soon.

[jeskeca]

Ohh, and just to drive the point home more visually... here is my outgoing W520 underneath my new Retina Macbook pro which is faster, slimmer, lasts longer, and has that gorgeous 16:10 2880x1800 display. I included the power brick, because the bulk/weight savings there is just as significant and important as in the laptop itself.

and top down...

Lenovo, please make us a W5x workstation this slim yet powerful!

[ColonelONeill]

Personally, I'm fine with the dimensions of the W520. Can't tell the difference when it's in a backpack anyway. That said, thinner and lighter seems to be all the rage these days.

Would like to see a return of 1920x1200 on this machine though. A bump to 2560x1600 would be neat too.

There are problems with using the 85W adapter; running the machine at full load will absolutely drain your battery despite the AC adapter being attached. That's just extra wear on the battery and extra strain on the power adapter. Would be an issue if you left the machine to render for a couple of hours or if you game for a few hours.

Not sure about your system, but my W520 will resume to password prompt in about 2 seconds. Still truly not sure what the point of a 30-day standby time is on a laptop. Seems like a marketing gimmick to me. I could just hit hibernate and get a thousand day 'standby' time.

[jeskeca]

The weight difference is pretty substantial. Bulk is a factor, especially that 170w power brick.

W520+9-cell = 6.26 lbs

170W power brick = 1.8lbs

Total ~= 8lbs

Retina Macbook Pro = 4.46lbs

85w power brick = 1.4lbs

Total ~= 6lbs

It's also nice that the rMBP will actually charge on the lighter 45w charger (1.13lbs). 

I have not noticed the rMBP power brick not able to keep up at full load. It might be that things I do are not consistently a "full load", but I wonder if anyone's workload is. I have no problem with them offering a 170w beheamoth. I'd just like the laptop to work with smaller options, since when traveling I don't need 5hrs+ of 100% workload. 

I just tested my W520 and you're right, the standby resume is really fast. I guess I'm often noticing the hibernate resume. This might be better if it had an SSD like my rMBP. As for the 30-day standby, it's not about the 30-days, it's about being able to standby for 24-48 hours without sapping the battery. 

[Fullmetal99012]

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ColonelONeill wrote:

Personally, I'm fine with the dimensions of the W520. Can't tell the difference when it's in a backpack anyway. That said, thinner and lighter seems to be all the rage these days.

Would like to see a return of 1920x1200 on this machine though. A bump to 2560x1600 would be neat too.

There are problems with using the 85W adapter; running the machine at full load will absolutely drain your battery despite the AC adapter being attached. That's just extra wear on the battery and extra strain on the power adapter. Would be an issue if you left the machine to render for a couple of hours or if you game for a few hours.

Not sure about your system, but my W520 will resume to password prompt in about 2 seconds. Still truly not sure what the point of a 30-day standby time is on a laptop. Seems like a marketing gimmick to me. I could just hit hibernate and get a thousand day 'standby' time.

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My W520 never had a problem with speed(except for me allocating too much system assets to a VM). I also never had a problem with battery life on the W520's 9-cell, and even now, as I have a 6-cell on my W530.  Higher resolution might be nice, but I don't have any issues with doing editing on 1920x1080.

Thinner and lighter isn't always good when you need workstation power.

as for the weight, even when I'm carrying around my school books, I don't notice the weight of the laptop.

[jeskeca]

    Higher resolution might be nice, but I don't have any issues with doing editing on 1920x1080.

I think you missed a bit of the point. The retina 2880x1800 is nifty, but my ask is not for more pixels, but for for 16:10 aspect ratio instead of 16:9... for more vertical real estate. (honestly I prefered 4:3 aspect ratio, because it has even more vertical real-estate)

IMO, one of the best things about 2880x1800, is that it gives you tons of real-estate for productivity and crisp fonts..and when you want to have fun, you can game at 1440x900 without blurry pixel scaling.

    Thinner and lighter isn't always good when you need workstation power.

AFAIK, the retina macbook pro is faster than the W520 and W530, so I'm not sure what the reference to workstation power is about. I can't say I'd notice the CPU difference, but the GPU is absoltuly faster. (rMBP 650M = 2080 3dmark 2011 1GB) (W530 Q-K2000M = 1797 3dmark 2011, admittedly 2GB) 

Regarding performance, there are also some more subtle issues than the raw hardware performance....

Gaming is one of the things I do with the machine, and while the rMBP GPU is almost 2x faster than my W520 GPU, it's not just the GPU making the rMBP faster. It's the fact that on the rMBP I can run 1440x900 without blurry pixels (i.e. it's clean pixel doubled to 2880x1800). My W520 is 1900x1080, which means either the GPU has to work harder to do that higher resolution, or I have to suffer with blurry pixel scaling that looks really really bad. I think my W500 was faster at gaming than the W520, because it was only 1400x1050. In fact, I think I liked the W500 better than the W520 in all ways except batter life. 

[Jimbo]

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jeskeca wrote:

    (W530 Q2000M = 1261 3dmark 2011)

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Wrong processor (don't forget the K in K2000M). See here.

I've tried out the Retina MacBook Pro, and it's an interesting machine. It shows what you can do when you tailor everything to less size and weight, but still want to provide decent performance.

But neither of the above two machines has a strong enough graphics processor for my purposes, so I need a dual-fan cooling system to handle faster GPUs. Plus my image processing work requires me to be able to resolve every pixel with my eyes, which requires a 17" display for a 1920-pixel-wide display.

The extra pixels on the Retina display are interpolated pixels, at least within the Mac OS. My understanding is that you can install software within the Mac OS to instead give you independent control over each pixel, just as with a regular display. And you can individually control each pixel within Windows.

16:10 is much better for photography, and Apple is the only laptop manufacturer to my knowledge that still provides 16:10 displays. So on my 16:10 1920x1200 ThinkPad W700 display, an image from a digital SLR camera (which has a standard 3:2 aspect ratio) displayed full-screen covers 1800x1200 pixels, and only 120 pixels, or 6.25% of the 16:10 display's width, is wasted. On the other hand, with a 16:9 1920x1080 display, the digital SLR image instead only covers 1620x1080 pixels, and two-and-a-half times as many pixels (300), or 15.6% of the width of that display, is wasted.

The only reason manufacturers have settled on 16:9 displays is that it's the same aspect ratio as HDTV, and thus such displays take better advantage of the economies of scale and are cheaper to make (i.e. it's cheaper, with less wasted material, to cut a larger 16:9 sheet of LCD panel materials into smaller 16:9 sheets of material). But what the heck, just charge me extra for 16:10 -- I'm willing to pay for it.

That's the problem with many laptop manufacturers these days, and Lenovo is a prime example. Many of them won't give you features that could easily be made available, that cost more, but which many users would be willing to pay for. And those users tend to be workstation users. So if Lenovo charged an extra $50 for a traditional 7-row keyboard (which they've discontinued because 6-row is cheaper to produce), would long-time ThinkPadders pay for it? Of course they would! Would workstation-level customers pay for a 16:10 IPS display? Of course! Would they pay for a color calibrator that uses decent software that actually works? Of course! (We don't yet know how well the dysfunctional calibrator of the W510/W520 works on the W530.) So workstation users (the users with the deepest pockets) migrate to other brands as ThinkPad advantages lessen.

BTW, please no one should try to tell me that the W530's FHD display is just as good as IPS, which is not the case as you can see by comparing this to this (the W530 uses the same FHD display as the W520).

Anyway, if a year from now Lenovo is no longer offering W-series laptops, the two messages at the top of this thread will tell you why. Especially with all the TV advertising dollars that Apple has poured into that machine.

Jimbo
The ThinkPad W700 Resources Page

[jeskeca]

Wrong processor (don't forget the K in K2000M). See here.

Thanks for the correction. I edited my post to fix it. 

Apple is the only laptop manufacturer to my knowledge that still provides 16:10 displays.

Apple is the only company in the world to do alot of things. It's also now the largest company in the world and one of the most profitable. Seems like there might be a reason. I'm not even an Apple fan. Actually I mostly dislike the lack of choice. I use an Android phone. I previously used all thinkpads (for the touchpoint mostly). I still dislike MacOS. The design advantages of the Retina Macbook Pro are just too big to give up. 

The extra pixels on the Retina display are interpolated pixels, at least within the Mac OS.

That's not true. They are interpolated for non-retina optimized apps. Retina optimized apps can access all the pixels. However, dpi scaling is just not as simple as accessing all the pixels. For example, I'm using Retina-optimized Google Chrome (canary), and the font rendering is gorgeous and using all the pixels. Normal web images are "upscaled" because otherwise they would all be too small. There are some HTML extensions to communicate the DPI of images, which website designers can use to serve high-dpi images for these high-dpi displays. Apple and Google are doing it today for Retina, though really we need some kind of "reactive images" standard in HTML to do this really well. 

I didn't write much about the Retina display because this is the lowest priority on my list. Note I didn't ask for Retina resolution on my "dream thinkpad workstation". I'd be fine with 16:10 LED backlit IPS 1400x1050. Once you go higher than this, retina resolution is really nice, because you can half-rez games at 1440x900 without blurry pixels.

Honestly, I'd prefer either 1400x1050 or 2880x1800 (ish) and nothing in-between. I find 1900x1080 (or 1900x1200) the worst of all worlds. Too many pixels for the GPU to handle when gaming with "native" pixels, not enough pixels for crisp scaled gaming resolutions, not enough pixels to force apps to deal with DPI issues so most windows software is just "too small" to deal with. I don't want the pixels for more screen-real-estate, I want them for crispness. My eyes are strained bad enough on little laptop displays vs my 30" desktop display.

It will admittedly be a while before Windows and windows-apps are ready for retina resolutions and the dpi scaling issues they entail, since microsoft doesn't seem to be pushing this ATM.

Anyway, if a year from now Lenovo is no longer offering W-series laptops, the two messages at the top of this thread will tell you why. Especially with all the TV advertising dollars that Apple has poured into that machine.

If the current W series sales are tanking, I just hope Lenovo realizes it's not because there is no market out there. I'd happily pay MORE than they are charging, but they have to build a more compelling machine. 

[hormel]

Doe the Mac pro Retina perfrom as well or better than the W530/520's?  The thinkpad work stations are spec-ed better,  but I hear the mac pro retina still performs better.  Not sure how true that is though.  If it is true, I don't understand how that is.  It just seems strange how Apple can make a laptop that is thiner, has lower specs, and still out perfroms the best of laptop workstations (W530/520).  

[jeskeca]

Does the Mac pro Retina perfrom as well or better than the W530/520's?  The thinkpad work stations are spec-ed better,  but I hear the mac pro retina still performs better.  

Where is the W530 specced better?

W530:

 i7 quad-core 2.6ghz, turbo up to 3.6 (6gb cache)   (i.e. the high end processor option)

 NVidia Quadro K2000M  2GB DDR3 ( 1797 3dmark 2011 )

Macbook Pro 

 i7 quad-core 2.6ghz, turbo up to 3.6 (6gb cache)  (i.e. the high end processor option)

 NVidia 650M 1GB GDDR5 ( 2080 3dmark 2011 )

The only edge the W530 has is the 2GB of VRAM... but it's giving up more because the VRAM is DDR3 instead of GDDR5. There might be workload-dependent advantages, but the 650M + GDDR5 benchmarks higher. Maybe the 2GB DDR3 is better for CAD/workstation use? I'm willing to wave this off as a wash. I don't see any W530 which is specced better.