Consumers will be able to purchase either a ThinkPad Z60t widescreen or a ThinkPad T43 with biometric fingerprint readers starting Sunday, China's Lenovo Group said. The laptops will retail starting at $699--a 50 percent price drop from their usual $1,399 price tag online. The computers are expected to compete with similar designs from Office Depot's other PC suppliers: Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Toshiba.
It's the first time ThinkPad-branded computers have sat on store shelves since IBM backed out of the retail business in 1999 in favor of a direct-sales model.
I just thought I'd throw that out there. Pretty big change for the Thinkpad. I wonder if this will boost sales, and if the $699 model is as solid as the Thinkpads made by IBM before the Lenovo deal? Comments?
Give what you cannot keep to gain what you cannot lose.
I suspect a retail presence will boost sales; many people like being able to hold and touch before forking over the cash.
As for build quality, only time will tell. Lenovo seem pretty keen to leverage the IBM branding they bought rights to while they can, but that doesn't mean what's under the hood will be anything like the old IBM.
Time will tell, I guess. It will be very interesting to see if Lenovo can do without the IBM connection when that expires in a bit. What is going to sell is quality and reliability for a competitive price, as always. That means, among other things, either not having a machine breaking down or, if it does, having the warranty service work correctly. IBM's warranty work, in my albeit limited experience, was pretty great on business machines.
I see that HP has a Turion business laptop with a three-year warranty for under $1,000 US (HP nx6125-$968 at Newegg). That is real competition. I am a big fan of longer warranties.
lol, I guess its just your usual kick in the box by your friendly disgruntled delivery guy
As fo Lenovo, if anything I expect them to do better as IBM did with its last batch of notebooks, cause there were some problems with T42 series.
Now if they could only ditch those unreliable Hitachi drives and they would have a winner on their hands.
Yeah, I agree, Leo. I checked the Office Depot flyers in the paper this past Sunday and I went to the local store a day or so ago. The flyers talked about selling Thinkpads, but no great prices. Plus, I was surprised to see that the store had none in inventory.
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Originally Posted by Leoslocks
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