New Fad, Vertical USB Ports

It’s pretty apparent to me the design engineers for some of the coming laptops have never used a USB cell phone data card.  I see a number of new machines coming out and they’ve decided to turn the USB ports so that they are no longer horizontal. 

Lenovo has certainly done this with the soon to be released ThinkPad T500.  See https://shop.lenovo.com/ISS_Static/merchandising/US/PDFs/t400_and_t500_datasheet.pdf.  This is no big deal for the typical wired mouse, but what about the cell sticks, memory sticks, etc?  Lots of those devices aren’t going to work with the USB port in a vertical orientation.

There are a couple of other things I dislike already (on paper) about the new ThinkPad T500.  They switched back to ATI for the video chipset.  What the heck is going on?  They change the chipset maker every model year.  I don’t like that.

And then there’s the Intel Active Management Technology (iAMT) stuff.  I don’t want any “active” management taking place.  I want to set the darn thing on full performance with injected nitrous. 

Oh well, I’m sure it’s a killer machine in person.  I wonder if they’ll send me an eval unit in the next few weeks.  Lenovo, if you have a 17” model coming, please send me one.  I would assume the model would be a ThinkPad T700 or something.

Anyone notice in the specs is says, “Memory - Up to 8GB of PC2-8500 1066MHz DDR3” ???  Ok, that’s pretty cool.  HDMI is cool. And I would imagine a nice 17” backlit LCD at 1920x1200 would be kewl.  We’ll see.