> From my experience I can say that the “old IBM machines were reliable and well constructed” is not true. They were bulky and over time, everything breaks.
Too right. I know the T40 series Thinkpads quite well (the 2004-5 era) and they're not very robust at all. Pick one up from the front edge and it'll just bend - the edges of the palm rest crack first, then the traces lift from the motherboard and the USB ports stop working. Back then it was common knowledge that you shouldn't pick up a laptop from the front edge. Nowadays that's no big deal.
The T60 series (2006-7) hugely improved chassis rigidity but lost out in keyboard quality and were noisier and a bit chunkier in profile. Both series were fantastic laptops and are still delightful to use, but they had obvious limitations and the changes made by Lenovo since then are not all unreasonable.
I can't remember if it was a T40 or T60 series, but I regularly picked it up from the edge, and this popped some solder joints loose on a BGA-monuted GPU. The board sort of still worked, but the problem kept getting worse, and I had to replace the board.
Too right. I know the T40 series Thinkpads quite well (the 2004-5 era) and they're not very robust at all. Pick one up from the front edge and it'll just bend - the edges of the palm rest crack first, then the traces lift from the motherboard and the USB ports stop working. Back then it was common knowledge that you shouldn't pick up a laptop from the front edge. Nowadays that's no big deal.
The T60 series (2006-7) hugely improved chassis rigidity but lost out in keyboard quality and were noisier and a bit chunkier in profile. Both series were fantastic laptops and are still delightful to use, but they had obvious limitations and the changes made by Lenovo since then are not all unreasonable.