Well, ya see, I'm a little different than most people and therefore, my tastes are generally a little obscure. In this post, I'll just discuss my taste in laptops. It all started with the IBM ThinkPad 701c, the famous (yet technological deadend) dubbed "The Butterfly". It was abnormally small for the size of it's keyboard because an engineer got an idea while watching his children play with a jigsaw puzzle. It ended up being a "one-off" with no follow-up models at all since the market went to progressively toward bigger screens which negated the need to have a folding keyboard. Of course that didn't do away with the amazingly small size of this thing and the fact that even today, people still gasp when they see that keyboard unfold!
Then, on to my next laptop love; the IBM ThinkPad 600(e,x). For it, the screen was just the right size (13.3"), big enough so that you can see get a decent resolution, but small enough to keep the case small and easy to carry. The 600 was probably the last of the "old school" ThinkPads that were expected to sell for close to $5000, meaning that they were amazingly solid and had details that simply aren't seen today in the "normal" laptop computer. There were little doors and tight-fitting rubber plugs on all opennings, an amazing keyboard that many ThinkPad users still consider to be the best ever and a ultra-stiff case that gave it that German car feel that you simply don't find any more. It's successor, the T Series machines, although better in many ways, never recaptured the polish and "bespoke" feel that was part and parcel of the 600 experience. If you've ever gotten into one of the big BMWs or Mercedes; you know exactly what I mean.
So, I moved on and used a combination of T Series (T20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 40, 41, 42, 43) and X Series (X20, 31, 40, 41) over the years but never felt the same way about any of them. The 14.1" screens of even the smaller Ts made the machine a little big and heavy for a constant companion and the 12.1" screens of the Xs was a little too small and only gave XGA resolution at best which as a little less than what I prefer.
Then in 2008, Lenovo announced the X300. I knew immediately that it would the perfect size for me as an all-in-one machine. Less than an 1" thick, 3 pounds, built-in optical drive, and 13.3" high resolution LED backlit screen (1440 x 900).....selling at a heart-stopping $3000! After waiting for 2 years, I buy mine for $700 used (with a year of warranty left), and working on it for around 3 weeks now, I feel like I've finally found the successor to the last of the 600s, the 600X. The keyboard is the best I've worked on since then, and the screen is just right. The machine is FAST with the standard onboard SSD and the weight makes me not think twice about throwing it in a bag and taking it anywhere with me. There was even an magazine article the month that it was introduced (right after the Air) where the title was "Building The Perfect Laptop".
Talk about "Beauty and The Beast"; here it is with it's younger sibling, the ThinkPad W701 "Mobile" Workstation.
Well, I guess I can look forward to one more half-step upgrade down the road in the X301 and then I'll be waiting for another "special" product to come along. It kind of reminds me of the Japanese manufacturers: although they have a firm grasp of the realities of what part of the market they need to operate in to regularly make a profit, periodically they'd feel a need to flex their engineering muscle and demonstrate to the world what they CAN do. Then it's back to business as usual for a while.
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