Comment by ubermonkey

One of the finest laptops I ever had -- in my 30 year history with the form factor -- was an IBM Thinkpad 560Z. It was insanely compact, but powerful enough for my purposes at the time. It had a radical design for the time b/c it had NO removable media on board at all. It shipped with an outboard CD-ROM that I used often enough that it lived on my desk, and an outboard floppy drive that I don't think I used at all.

The shame of it was that a PC of that era had a super short useful life. Now we think nothing of keeping computers for 5 years or more; they're just so powerful that for most regular human tasks, there's no need for the kind of upgrade treadmill that dominated computing 25 years ago. After 3 years, though, the 560Z was almost unusable -- it had a TINY hard drive, and limited RAM. Windows was getting fatter and slower. But the physical computer itself was in GREAT shape -- even after years of heavy travel, it bore none of the crappy wear and tear I'd associate with colleagues' Dells (e.g.) later. I kept it on a shelf for a long time because it was so solid and pleasing that I couldn't bear to part with it despite its basic uselessness.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the 560Z was also my last Windows laptop. Because my job back then was mostly Office docs, and because Win98 was so awful, I shifted to a Mac when the 560 was done, and I've been there ever since.