[ltp] Survey: Your Ideal Business Laptop

[Richard Neill]

Frank Myhr wrote:
> Hi Nils,
> 
> I appreciate your concerns and thank you for sharing them here. I don't
> want to waste your, my, or anyone else's time. The bad news is I can't
> say for sure that I'm not. Hopefully the survey doesn't take too much
> time to fill out.
> 
> There is some reason to be positive. Matt Kohut of Lenovo has stated
> that if 15,000 or more customers were willing to pay for a ThinkPad with
> a premium screen, Lenovo would at least consider building it:
> http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=220
> 
> I've heard the same, privately, from another Lenovo employee.
> 
> The survey is a step toward gathering such a critical mass of paying
> customers. If you had to put money on the result, you'd probably be
> richer predicting failure. But you never know unless you try, right?
> There are a lot of passionate ThinkPad owners out there.
> 

Agreed. I'm one of them and I filled out the survey - thank you for 
doing it!

One other thing I miss about the older TPs is the wonderful 2+1 mouse 
arrangement. There's a diagram of what I mean here, and it shows how you 
can have both scrolling and middle clicking without any possible 
interference between the two. (It also permits middle-dragging).
http://www.richardneill.org/a22p-mdk11-0.php#x

FWIW, I'd love to see the return of the high-quality soundcards, with 
line inputs, 15" screens @ 1600x1200, IrDa, more USB ports, 
fold-out-feet at the back to raise the keyboard angle, some customisable 
key-caps (let me have bigger ctrl and alt-keys by swapping key-caps, and 
kill the windows keys), a return to the older (X22-style) black 
velvet-feel paint finish, the 760-style customisable name badge(*), and 
the older style double lid-lock (which actually was much easier to open 
with one hand - IBM called these "smart latches").

(*)When I got my 760 a decade ago, it was a really luxurious item. One 
of the neat features was a small space on the bezel for a name-badge, 
about 1cm-4cm. IBM enclosed a form and an SAE which you could send to 
them and have, for free, your own choice of name to stick on the front 
of the machine. It looked really neat.

I still buy TPs because they are good machines, but I used to be able to 
make other laptop-users really green with envy (those poor people who 
were stuck with a Dell were really missing out!) The geek-cred isn't 
there any more.

Richard