IBM also jumps on the bandwagon with T61 and R61!
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hands-on/lenovo-t61-thinkpads-magnesium-rollcage--wolverines-bones-258878.php
"It has come to my attention that the T and the R series Thinkpads,
which were leaked by specs last month, have gnarly magnesium roll
cages that remind me of Wolverine's reinforced adamantium skeleton.
I've always been a Thinkpad fanboy. And while most of the other PC
makers are handling this Santa Rosa launch with minor upgrades, I'm
so glad to see the Lenovo Thinkpads are still evolving with robust
engineering. These are the fastest, toughest, quietest Thinkpads
ever."
There's a 3D, honeycomb sub frame below the surface, which makes
the lid not only stronger, but roughly 50% more durable against
uneven impacts (like a baseball hitting the back of the LCD in one
point). The antenna for WiFi and WWAN is placed inside the plastic,
but outside the lid cage, so reception is 2x that of the previous
generation. Flexing the laptop hard resulted in minimal flex, and
only a bit of protest from the optical bay. I'm tempted to make
comparisons to toughbooks and other rugged notes, but I'm
unqualified to do so.
Oh, I'm also happy to report that the IBM moniker, while not on the
wrist rest, isn't gone as reported. The logo, which is available
for Lenovo's use for five years from the purchase, is still on the
lid.
The Thinkpads also have better thermal management, thanks to
extremely tweakable software that shows you how much additional
juice you get from turning components off, as well as better
cooling hardware, along with that rollcage doing a great job of
dissipating heat. And they've even gone and made the bottom a
little bit more Mac-ish than the fugly old bottoms. It still has
the drive head parking, which it pioneered before the Macs, and a
fingerprint reader which is my preferred method of signing into
Vista these days.
And they've got some 1GB of memory hanging off one of the express
card controller (you'll have to sacrifice something) to be used as
a disk cache. This is their alternative to using hybrid drives.
They found it to be much faster than the very limited 256MB on a
drive, and now you can swap in big old perpendicular drives without
losing your big cache. It's called Intel Turbo Memory, and they
find that it can bring a 5400RPM drive to faster then a 7200RPM
drive in some cases."
