The Lenovo ThinkPad exists in the aesthetic of that ancient office worker who’s been working at your office since the ’90s, since people wore cheap suits every day to work.
And all through the 2000s and 2010s, as people shed their Dilbert-inspired office wear for business casual and then just casual. And ThinkPad has been coming in day after day after day for long enough that his deeply uncool, dated look has become timeless and trendy again.
Now the old fella has shown up with a slick, streetwear inspired look, and… I feel funny about it. A good-looking laptop to be sure, but the ThinkPad X9 White Moonlight Edition just doesn’t look very ThinkPad, given the ThinkPad’s 33-year history. Thanks to Videocardz, which reported on the story, we now know a little more about the funny-looking addition to the ThinkPad family.
quite a curveball
We know the ThinkPad aesthetic. It’s classic. It’s basically the Ford Econoline of laptops. Durable, dependable, ubiquitous, and broadly unchanging for so many years that it becomes something like the banal version of a cultural, daily-life landmark.
Dull, black plastic case. Two physical buttons above the trackpad, holdovers from when everyone was used to a mouse with left- and right-click buttons. The iconic red TrackPoint, which looks like a red apple Jelly Belly had fallen onto the keyboard and gotten stuck.
What’s a TrackPoint? Back in the olden days, many laptops had a small nub sprouting from the middle of the keyboard like a forest mushroom, and lots of people preferred pushing it around to move the cursor, instead of using the trackpad.
Lenovo kept up retaining these elements with its ThinkPad even while every other laptop on the market chased the MacBook aesthetic of streamlined simplification, ever since it debuted in the ’90s.
All of these design elements are gone on the ThinkPad X9 White Moonlight Edition. Somehow it feels strange, and un-ThinkPad-like. But it is beautiful.
Want one? Well, you’re gonna have to go to China, because the ThinkPad X9 White Moonlight is exclusive to the Chinese market.
The post Lenovo Launches a Thinkpad That Looks All Wrong—but Is All Right appeared first on VICE.
