I think Lenovo is slowly abandoning what used to be the niche Thinkpad had filled in: great laptops for developers. There might be some good opportunities for startups. It's really frustrating to see that nothing ticks all boxes these days:
* 4:3 high-res matte screen (like Chromebook Pixel or some old IBMs)
* Good mechanical keyboard which includes insert, delete, begin, and end
* Robust case with serviceable Linux-friendly components
* Trackpoint
I'd really pay a high premium for a well-executed laptop with these features, and many people I know would do as well.
Interesting - I never thought of the Thinkpad niche as developers, I thought of it as business professionals. In an airport, it used to be the way you knew someone worked for a consulting firm was that they had a Thinkpad, especially if it was a tablet.
That might explain some of the keyboard choices. Caps lock, function keys, and the insert key might have important uses for developers. But if you're creating business documents, caps lock is unnecessary, insert confuses you when all your text starts getting over-written, and the function keys don't really do anything.
We've really never had anything which ticked all those boxes, so I don't see a regression there.
Only Lenovo is doing trackpoint seriously these days. Hardly anyone is paying any attention to Linux. I'm no expert, but I've never even heard of a laptop with a good mechanical keyboard.
It's not just Lenovo, it's the whole market which decided people want junk like 1mm thick retina tablets with soldered ram and permanent batteries. Lenovo and everyone on the block is selling high-resolution crap though, so I'm sure you'll get that any time.
The old T60p (and other T-series before they got into the hundreds) came damn close. 1680x1050 was solid at the time, and the keyboard on that plateaued peak that Lenovo/IBM have never really climbed past.
Well, the x220 had an excellent keyboard, and ticked all boxes except the screen. It even included an Ethernet port and a non-ULV CPU. The previous X1 Carbon was also pretty close in many respects.
The very old (think Pentium M) HP nc8000 had all those features, available in 1600x1200 and 1400x1050 resolutions -- those were good back then for a 15''.
Quite feature-complete for its time -- ab WiFi (5GHz and 2.4GHz), gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, FireWire, modem, serial port, SD card reader, two battery bays (about 5 hours of watching movies FTW), even IrDA (ha!).
The six keys were offset to the right and up, but nonetheless quite comfy. The touchpad, while somewhat small-ish, but otherwise excellent. Easy access to all extension ports. As for robustness, it survived at least five dismantling & rebuilds by the untrained owner ;-), including display upgrade from 1400 to 1600.
I've wondered about (and wished for) a mechanical keyboard on a laptop before. It'd increase the weight, thickness and cost significantly—but I don't think that would significantly hinder its popularity in certain circles, provided it did a good job of the implementation.
I'm a developer and I either don't care about or specifically do not want everything on your list except "robust case". You've confused "great laptops for developers" with "great laptops for nextos".
Dell Precision are laptops, not ThinkPads. It's easy to check off a list of features on a laptop. But putting it together properly is apparently amazingly difficult, even for Lenovo. Lenovo could literally take my X201 tablet, upgrade the display panel and CPU and I'd give them 3 grand.
Calling ThinkPads just a line of laptops is like calling Alan Turing "a computer guy".
At least, that's how it used to be. Lenovo seems intent on messing up IBM's engineering so they can market to the "I want to show off shiny stuff at Starbucks" crowd.
* 4:3 high-res matte screen (like Chromebook Pixel or some old IBMs)
* Good mechanical keyboard which includes insert, delete, begin, and end
* Robust case with serviceable Linux-friendly components
* Trackpoint
I'd really pay a high premium for a well-executed laptop with these features, and many people I know would do as well.