I know there are a lot of genuine Apple enthusiasts out there in the world. And one of the reasons is because Apple makes some of the most beautiful gadgets on the planet. I like Apple products but more than that I am a fan of practical industrial design and when that design gets on to computing, nothing comes close to an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad. I just love them for their build quality and reliability. My favorite Thinkpad probably has to be the T420 and the W510.
I have been thinking about writing a review on this one for 2 years. Now that the laptop has been with me for the last 2 years, I think I could give out all what I went through with it. So the Thinkpad L412 then, lets have a look at what it comes with. The processor is a first gen Core i5 520M @ 2.4 ghz RAM is a generous 4GB upgradable to 8GB, the HDD is a not so generous 160GB and the only 2 things I like about this laptop is one the awesome Thinkpad keyboard thankfully Lenovo has retained it although the layout is a bit different from other thinkpad models, and the 1366x768 screen. I am aware there are much much better screens out there but for this laptop, its just perfect, to me.
One thing I am happy about is that I didn’t buy this laptop with my own money as this was my work laptop. I have had the privilege of using many Thinkpads, but this is probably one of the worst examples of what a Thinkpad should be. The reasons are pretty much evident if you have an L412 with you at the moment. First up, this laptop even with a normal 6 cell battery is heavy and with a 9 cell battery that I have it is super heavy to be carried around. According to Lenovo more than 70% of the components used in the making of this laptop was recycled from scrap or old laptops which is a very good thing but they had a lot of room for improvement. The laptop’s body doesn’t feel anywhere near a proper Thinkpad. Everything looks like cheap black plastic and like the good old thinkpads, a brushed steel hinge for the screen is a horrible omission. The whole thing makes you feel that Lenovo had only one thing in mind and that was to cut costs where ever possible. This is one of those rare Thinkpads that does not have an UltraBay. For those of you reading this wondering what it is, UltraBay was a technology developed by IBM that would let you swap your optical drive for a backup hard drive or sometimes even a battery! how cool is that? unfortunately things are not so cool with the L412. Thankfully it has a dockport underneath and it supports a docking station if you want to connect 2 monitors and a few extra peripherals.
So lets talk about performance. This laptop is simply made for the mainstream user and if you think you could do some image editing, video editing looking at the specifications, you are wrong. The processor is not a quad core one even though it looks like one and the processor has got a tiny 3MB L2 cache. Even for running your daily applications like your browsers, the tabs in them, Outlook, and all the other applications, you have loaded up the entire thing and the performance just goes sluggish. Overall this is one of the most hopeless laptops I have ever used.
The weight of this thing is something I still can’t accept after using this for almost two years. It is just heavy. It makes you think how can recycled plastic be so heavy. And it has the same thickness of 2 T420 stacked! Just horrible and I really wish I could rip off the Thinkpad logos off this thing. Because it simply isn’t a Thinkpad.
I have a Thinkpad T420 which I bought second hand and both the T420 and the L412 have the same battery. While the 9 cell battery on my T420 gives me 8+ hours of backup even on wifi, the L412 on the other hand barely manages to give me only 3.25 hours of battery backup with the same battery. I still haven’t figured out what on earth is chewing up all that battery.
If Lenovo wanted a cheap Thinkpad, they started well with the L412 but by the time they ended up, they made something that only says is a Thinkpad but does not look, weigh, perform or even feel it is anywhere close to the real thing. It just is a low cost computer and I hate to say it is a Thinkpad.