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It's pig ugly, but it's not a bad design, just philosophically different to how Apple work.

Apple take their platonic ideal of design - a perfectly smooth pebble of metal and glass - and try and compromise it as little as possible in the process of making it a computer. They're amazingly good at that process, but inevitably face compromises.

Lenovo (and IBM before them) build purely for performance and let form follow function. If a bulge in the chassis means a better machine, they put the bulge in the chassis.

For example, you'll notice a VGA port on the side. Apple would consider it an unacceptably bulky legacy port. Lenovo fit it because their target market values being able to hook up to a projector without a fragile and easy to lose adapter. There are hundreds of really clever bits of design on a Lenovo, but they're all about Getting Stuff Done.

I've alternated between Mac laptops and Thinkpads for as long as I can remember, probably over a decade. They're both the best in their field by a very long way, but they're competing in very different markets based on very different design philosophies.



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