IBM ThinkPad X40

Austerely designed and priced rather heavily, products from IBM still enjoy demand among the company’s long-time devotees who consider such design as the only best possible design of a notebook and the TrackPoint as the best pointing device, and so on. Well, I don’t mean to sound contemptuous about IBM’s notebooks. They are really good work tools for the corporate sector, and the compact X40 model is not an exception:

IBM’s style is followed closely in every detail. You can easily guess the brand irrespective of the position of the lid, open or closed:

The lid is actually bare, save for the company’s logo in the bottom right corner and a small panel with look-through indicators:

There is a bare minimum of ports on the notebook, as usual for IBM. The right panel carries a power connector, one D-Sub, and one USB port combined with a power connector for the company’s external optical drive. And there’s also a vent opening there, that’s all.

The front and rear panels are virtually empty.

Some more connectors can be found on the left panel:

Here we’ve got a PCMCIA slot, headphones and microphone connectors, an SD card-reader (I don’t know why they preferred this exactly format to others), one USB port, and connectors for network and phone (modem) cables.