Lenovo x240 sucks

This post is in part a tirade against a specific Lenovo laptop and in part the illumination of a general rule of thumb. Lenovo's Thinkpad x240 is supposed to be a high end, professional laptop and being that it is from the glorious Thinkpad line, it is supposed to be a highly reliable machine. I purchased one in February last year and it died today. I'll need to send it in for repair and I'm sure they'll fix it but if one pays north of a grand and a half for a laptop, one expects it to not cop out in less than a year. This is not the only problem that I have had with this laptop but it is the one which has pushed me beyond the edge and forced me to write this.

I don't completely blame Lenovo here. They are merely a symptom of a deeper malaise: the absolute crapness of new technology and how it produces disposable objects which are lacking in quality and durability. It does produce shiny objects with tons of features that nobody needs. It produces objects of desire which send people insane periodically and leaves them salivating as they peruse them in shop windows and on websites. Have you seen their dead fixated eyes as they drool over that latest and greatest gadget or that expensive dress? What are they purchasing from all that money that they have painstakingly accumulated working too many hours at jobs which completely suck the life out of them? They buy fancy, expensive shit and then they buy more fancy, expensive shit to go with what they bought earlier and to protect their earlier shit. A good example is a phone. Nobody needs all the features of the modern phone except in case if they expressly desire to turn into walking zombies. But they go to terrible lengths, including signing up years of their life on contracts or paying ridiculous sums of money up front, to buy what are essentially higher meaningless numbers. More pixels, bigger screens, faster processors, more RAM. And then they use it all essentially to fire up facebook and share on it the ridiculous selfies they have taken or their mindnumbing photos of food. Nobody needs 3 GB of RAM for photos of food! But there they have it, all that power and all that shiny metal and shiny screen and it all needs to be protected now with a case which must be as nice and fancy as the phone it protects. The phone breaks down in a couple of years because it packed all those extra functionality which nobody needed in the first place but which provided more points of possible failure. And the cycle starts again. More hours at a dead job, more salivation, more desire for higher numbers, a new phone, a new case, a couple of years of life, ad infinitum.

I am writing this on a HP laptop that I bought many years ago for 300 bucks. It has never failed me and has given me absolutely no issues. With this 1 data point, I'd like to extrapolate a bit. All fancy, expensive things suck. They suck because they are fussy and because they are liable to failure in more ways than a simpler alternative is. And they suck at a deeper level. Nobody needs them but everybody wants them and they sell their life and soul in their eternal pursuit. It's a rotten business inside and out.