Lenovo Thinkpad T440p

So I have left ISA Technologies and joined Readify, and they have a cool budget for every consultant to pick their own laptop. So I was mulling between getting a MacBook Pro 13/15 or some Windows laptop. As I have learnt myself (and from many others) that the keyboard layout in the Mac would not bode well with Windows, I decided to go down the rabbit hole in search for a decent Windows laptop.

I have pretty much narrowed down the brand to:

Lenovo - thanks to it's Thinkpad reputation
Asus - heard a lot of good things and price point advantage over others. But decided against it after speaking to Funj - failure rate is quite high.
Toshiba - next to IBM Thinkpads, Toshiba is well known for it's reliability and high engineering as well
Sony - they do make great laptops, but too bad Sony decided to drop the Vaio line and stop making/developing the Vaio product line.

So, it's down to Lenovo vs Toshiba. Went around the usual suspects (TGG, JB, DSE) and play around with a few. Everyone has high regards of the Lenogo Yoga Pro 2, and it looks great on paper. Super high res screen, thin, 8GB RAM/256GB SSD, nice keyboard. Seems to tick all the boxes....until I tried typing on it. All is well until I try to hit the backspace. What a disappointment. Why did Lenovo had to shrink the backspace key down to a non standard size. I keep missing it and hitting the "\" key instead. Eliminated!

Next up, the Toshiba Kirabook - it's very MacBook Air like, and even has a super high res display. All boxes are ticked as well. But I thought about it again and I am going to get a workhorse and will need to survive the abuse of a consultant, so I decided against getting a Ultrabook.

Back to square one - Lenovo Thinkpads. I have always wanted an IBM Thinkpad back in the days, so this seems like a good compromise.

Now here comes the headache - for around $2000 dollars, there are several Thinkpads to choose from. namely:

1. T440 - eliminated because the highest resolution was 900 lines - lame.
2. T440s - eliminated because although it's lighter than T440p, it's so much more expensive (almost $2.4K speced up)
3. X1 Carbon - eliminated because the screen was too high of a resolution and apparently the keyboard is not as good as the T440 series
4. T440p - finally decided on this. 1080p screen, backlit keyboard, 16GB/256GB SSD, ultrabay for 2nd hard drive, Ultra dock.

Anyway - here is a gist of difference of the T440x series:

1. T440p = p for powah! Better CPU choices, more upgradability
2. T440s = s for slim, but costly and uses slower CPUs (mobile series)
3. T440 = entry version, almost identical to T440p but not as sturdy (no carbon fiber base), and standard 900 lines display.

There you go, here is my new workhorse for the next 2 years :)