As I’ve posted before, I am seriously selective when it comes to laptop.
Late last fall some of DI’s old IBM Thinkpad T4x fleet started to die off. Now, these laptops are amazing. User-serviceable, parts-interchangable, and very sturdy. But they were aging, and even the best-built laptops will start to show their age after 3 or 4 years of non-stop travel.
Since then, I’ve made a couple of corporate purchases to try and find suitable replacements for the T4x’s, with varying degrees of success.
The Toshiba Portege I picked up was Macbook Air-nice in the looks department, but it runs Vista like a dog with a brick tied to its head. An XP downgrade came with it, but I also was not terribly impressed by either the keyboard or the screen. It was okay, but not a shoe-in.
Macbooks are a near-certainty for not working long-term at DI. Yes, OSX is awesome, but I continue to be underwhelmed by every iteration of Apple laptop I pick up. I’m still in love with Mac Minis and iMacs. I have a Mini on my desk, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to dump our corporate-standard Dell desktops in favor of iMacs running Boot Camp ever since beta 1. But the laptops? Sorry. The great hardware features (battery life, fast wifi on resume) simply can’t overcome the substandard optical drives, unresponsive keyboards, and inexcusably high hard drive failure rates.
I took a chance on the new Thinkpad T61, my first “new” Thinkpad purchase since IBM tossed the entire Think* brand to Lenovo. It was a T43p with a dual-core processor and Vista. Not bad, but it certainly won’t win any awards. In its favor? It runs WoW and Warhammer like a dream. Oh, and Photoshop (as if productivity really matters when you’re using a laptop). It was good, but too consumer-grade bulky for my taste.
And aside here: I am a HUGE Thinkpad fan. I’ve been using them for YEARS. The next time you’re walking through an airport, watch the laptops you see people using. The power users? the big corporate movers and shakers? Almost invariably carry Thinkpads. Especially if you fly through the week during business-people-travel-time. Oh, you’ll see Macs and Dells and Sonys and even the occasional Acer or Toshiba (these last two tend to be limited to the consumer crowd), but the sleek black laptops will be the majority. There’s a reason for that.
My most recent purchase was for Nathan Martin, after his T40 (which was 4 years old) started to show signs of decrepitude. So I took a chance and ordered in a Thinkpad X300. This was my first experience with the Thinkpad ultraportable line.
I think the Lenovo Thinkpad X300 just may be the most perfect laptop ever. I’m not sure I can understate this. Is “lovelust” a word?
After all, I couldn’t keep coveting Nathan’s laptop. That’s a sin. (Although, I’m sure I could probably throw jealousy, lust, and maybe even a bit of idolatry in there as well). And I think an abacus would have been a step up from my Macbook. 
Lenovo Thinkpad X300 (for which I have the Covetousness)
I now have 4 of these beauties, and they are the new official laptop fleet for Destiny Image. <3
