Had Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, we would have faster horses. In the annals of marketing wisdom, this is an oft-cited example of a visionary whose insight alone carried the day. Respectfully listening to customers… well, it’s a bit overrated. Surveys or focus groups will only yield incremental improvements. Revolutions come from individual genius. The modern world gave us Steve Jobs, the genius behind the iPhone, the example always pulled out of pockets to show how far computing and communications has come. May he rest in peace.
But can users ever be trusted? In 1985, Coca Cola listened to thousands of the public and changed its classic formula, only to have to go back to it after sales of the revamped soda fizzled.Cassidy Lammers, worldwide marketing manager for Lenovo’s workstations, has her own story. “We asked users what they wanted in a workstation. We want more power, they said,” tells Cassidy on the first day of SIGGRAPH2018 in Vancouver, where Lenovo has rented out a room to show off its thinnest and lightest mobile workstation. “We gave them the P50 and the P70. Just kidding, they said. We meant thin and light.”
“The P1 is the lightest of the mobile workstations,” says Cassidy. “It may be the thinnest, or one of them. We're still waiting for the measurements.”
Mobile workstations users are accustomed to lugging around huge machines, pretending they are portable. Seventeen-inch screens, large capacity rotating hard drives, power supplies as big as a brick all contributed to a backbreaking load. The P1 is downsized in all areas, including a very handy little (for a mobile workstation) 135-Watt power supply that is 35 percent lighter than its predecessor. The P1 weighs in at 3.76 lbs without the power supply.
The P1 will be available with a touchscreen. How popular a touch screen will be remains to be seen. Lenovo will probably not have asked users if they wanted one, given their unreliability. The touchscreen will work with the ThinkPad pen, so let’s see if they’ll use it to sketch designs.
Squeezing 135 Watts into a small form factor can create a thermal issue. Will the fans be going full blast? The P1 shown at SIGGRAPH had two grills on the bottom surface over air inlets. It may not have been enough. Production units (coming end of this month) have had a design change to allow an expanded inlet area that goes from edge to edge to allow more air in. The back rest tilts the keyboard as well as raises the rear of the unit to let air enter the grill areas. Air is exhausted from the thin strip of vents across the back edge of the chassis.