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Perhaps your love of science brought you here.  Or was it a Lenovo product?  Cute scientists?  A combination of the three? However you arrived, I hope you enjoy stories of scientists, from academia to industry, discussing their work and the Lenovo products they use for getting their work done (okay, and helping with some play).

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Remember the Good Ol' Days...When a ThinkPad Could Get You a Used Car, Wedding Ring, or Several Trips to Europe?

2/12/2015

2 Comments

 
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Much like mobile phones, ThinkPads were status symbols in the 1990s and early 2000s.  The money to purchase a ThinkPad during these periods could buy a used car, fine jewelry, a year of college, and so forth.  With laptops now often costing less than a smart phone or a school textbook, it's easy to forget how unobtainable laptops (not just Thinkpads) were to the majority of the population until fairly recently.( In fact, I didn't purchase my first laptop until 2003; it was a Dell Inspiron 8200 purchased for $1600. Though it was an inexpensive consumer model, in today's market, this would be in the high range).

I'm ashamed to admit that I've never taken a formal statistics course.  Even so, as a scientist I like to make sense of data.  In this case, out of sheer boredom, I decided to data mine PC Magazine to track how the cost of ThinkPads have declined in price in 1998 to the present, while controlling for inflation:  
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Now, this is a bit of a rough science, since I had to use the price of the system being reviewed.  Admittedly, they are significantly more expensive than base models, but I don't think most of us would be selecting the lowest specs, anyway. When controlling for inflation, it seems the greatest change in price was between the T60 and T400 (a 43% decrease); this price drop allowed me to buy my black beauty in 2008 :). To further emphasize how much our world has changed, a T440 costs about 30% of what a ThinkPad T40 did, a 70% reduction in a decade.   
  
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From the Dec. 21, 1993, issue of PC Mag, "Revenge of the Nerds."
So...in 1998, for the price of an IBM 600 (the predecessor to the T series), what could you have gotten?  Well, the money could have gone for half the price of a new Ford Taurus (interesting design, isn't it?  I guess you love it or hate it.  I'm in the former). 
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What would you have chosen in 1998? A ThinkPad or a new Ford!
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That's the slashed price! Keep on slashing, IBM.
2 Comments
Alexander link
2/12/2015 08:53:27 am

The best part statistics is the absurd interpretation!

The obvious choice is to say it is a reflection of the growing acces and market for tech...

If you find yourself again, bored, alone, contemplating the meaning of life, maybe you could compare this data to similar relationships for other, comparable models.
This could let us see how Lenovo's laptops have prices comparably over the years.
Has thinkpad always dominated a certain price range? Have thinkpads always been "high end"
I know we have opinions on the matter but this would be an interesting confirmation.
I'd be especially interested to see what their more recent bracket has been? (I know a lot of my professors had macs [much I my chagrin])

Reply
Greg Costa
2/12/2015 09:25:28 am

Hi Alex, I'm not sure what you mean by the interpretation, since I didn't interpret the data. Essentially, what we're seeing in the graph is that commoditization has driven down prices of components but we have hit a plateau.
As far as its once being a status symbol, there is no arguing that was that case. In fact, in 1997 "At the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he felt the IBM ThinkPads were the best-built laptop computers on the market. So much so that he brought them to Apple’s designers as a model of where the PowerBook line needed to go.." During the OJ Simpson trial, Judge Ito traded in his laptop for a custom IBM ThinkPad 755--the ThinkPad logo was flipped right-side up to make it more visible that he was using a ThinkPad (IBM supposedly had no part in this). But as far as a comparable systems, in 2001, an Apple PowerBook was reviewed in PC Mag for $2999 (MSRP); a Gateway Solo in 2001 was $2800; a T21 reviewed during this period...$3900.

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    About Gregory Costa

    Gregory Costa is a decent biologist, mediocre writer, terrible formatter, but true Lenovo enthusiast, who admires the use of their products in both the academic and industrial setting...when he's not busy delighting himself in science, nature, or his OkCupid profile.

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