What will my next Thinkpad be?
At IBM, our primary workstations have been Thinkpads for a number of years now. Ok, so we sold off that business to Lenovo lately, but there are no plans to change supplier, as far as I know. Being a techie, I wish my system was refreshed every 6 months, but we all know that kind of refresh cycle wouldn’t make sense from a business perspective. But I can still dream about my next system, can’t I… If I could choose a la carte what my system might be, besides an Apple Powerbook 17″ (we used to make their processors, but that’s almost over now), I don’t think it exists yet. Take a look at the specs I want in this dream Thinkpad:
- Pentium IV 3-4Ghz Dual-Core (or a Dual-Core IBM Power5…)
- 4Gb RAM (to run all those VMware images and our middleware smoothly)
- 15″ LCD Widescreen, running a high resolution, like 1440×900
- 500Gb HDD, 5400-7200 rpm (variable speed to conserve battery)
- Hot-swap bay for DVD-DL and 2nd 500Gb HDD
- A battery that lasts 12 hours, while not using power saving features (I want to be able to read my screen, not dim it down to 30 candelas)
- Usual assortment of USB2, Firewire and optical/digital audio
- Lit-up keyboard and integrated webcam
- Every possible networking option built-in: Gigabit ethernet, 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, IRdA, EVDO, etc
Of course , this beauty could run OS X (we can dream) or that-future-version-of-Linux-which-understands-all-this-new-hardware. This list is by no means earth-shattering, I mean, all the technology is pretty much here, and I haven’t changed the paradigm of mobile computing. Now, if I had asked for speech recognition that actually works and an embedded time management AI helping me plan my day/week/year and, now THAT would be demanding a lot.
