Lenovo Abandons 20-Year Classic Design of ThinkPad: Cancels Independent Magnesium Alloy Skeleton
Lenovo's latest ThinkPad P16 Gen3 laptop has officially cancelled the classic standard independent magnesium-aluminum alloy skeleton design, also known as the "roll cage." This design has been used for 20 years since the ThinkPad T60 in 2006, which was also the first product after Lenovo acquired IBM's PC business.
Magnesium aluminum alloy has the advantages of lightweight and high rigidity, and is widely used in high-end laptops, but mostly only as a shell material.
The ThinkPad P series is positioned as a mobile workstation and must have extremely high structural strength to cope with various harsh usage scenarios, so an independent magnesium alloy roll cage is used at the bottom of the body.
Although this slightly increases the overall thickness of the body, the length, width, and height will all increase by one or two millimeters, it is worthwhile for better reliability and durability.
In addition, some older models also have a magnesium alloy inner skeleton on the back of the screen.
Now, Lenovo has abandoned this design and instead integrates the magnesium aluminum alloy into the body shell.
It is currently unclear why Lenovo is doing this, after all, reducing the body size by a few millimeters doesn't seem worth it.
It is not ruled out that Lenovo is compressing hardware costs under the impact of rising CPU processor and storage prices.
Hopefully, Lenovo has simultaneously developed a new process that can still maintain extremely high body strength after removing the magnesium aluminum alloy skeleton, while also being lighter and thinner, otherwise it will be difficult for old users to accept, especially the audience of workstation products are often extremely stable.
The ThinkPad P16 Gen3, as a mobile workstation, remains expensive as always.
The lowest configuration is equipped with Core Ultra 5 255HX, RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell graphics card, 32GB DDR5 memory, 1TB SSD, and the price is 29499 yuan.
The top configuration is equipped with Core Ultra 9 285HX, RTX PRO 5000, 128GB, 12TB, and the price is as high as 105499 yuan.