How the beautiful bland ThinkPad reigns supreme in business

I love ThinkPads. I love the simple and minimal style. I love their configurability, their repairability and compatibility. I like that whenever I want a "new" one there are always thousands with the exact specification I want floating around on eBay or whatever. And I like their keyboards. The line is barely-changed after 35 years and two manufacturers, writes The Wall Street Journal, creating a business-class standard. The story marks Lenovo recapturing the market share top spot (24.4%) from HP (22.6%), ahead of Dell (16.7%) and Apple (16.1%)

The logo is the same, although in 2005 Lenovo did add the red dot over the "i" in "Think" that remains today. That logo has remained angled at 37 degrees on the device. And on the keyboard the small, red, old-timey trackpoint remains nestled between the "B," "G" and "H" keys (which Lenovo says some users swear by and some CIOs say they never use). Ports and camera placement have also been relatively consistent. And despite some experimentation with colors, the laptop itself primarily remains its original black. … Its strategy might seem counterintuitive in an industry where winners and losers are often determined based on their pace of innovation, and where to stay the same often means to become obsolete. Big consumer tech companies that dominated the early 2000s, like BlackBerry, Nokia and Motorola, ultimately couldn't keep pace with competitors and struggled. But for Lenovo, which plays in the enterprise space, it's paying off.

I would love if they really were "barely-changed"—imagine a 1992 model, below, but with a modern bezel-less display, modern ports, and all the power that big Bento-box of a case could pack in.