Lenovo's latest ThinkPad P16 Gen3 notebook has officially canceled the classic standard independent magnesium aluminum frame design, also known as the "roll cage". This design has been used for 20 years starting with the ThinkPad T60 in 2006, which was also Lenovo's first product after acquiring the PC business from IBM.
Magnesium-aluminum alloy has the advantages of lightweight and high rigidity, and is widely used in high-end notebooks, but most of them are only used as shell materials.
ThinkPad P series positioning mobile workstations must have extremely high structural strength to cope with various harsh usage scenarios, so an independent magnesium alloy roll cage is used at the bottom of the fuselage.
Although this will slightly increase the overall thickness of the fuselage, and the length, width and thickness will increase by one or two millimeters, it is worth it for better reliability and durability.
In addition, the back of the screen of some older models is also equipped with a magnesium alloy inner frame.
Now, Lenovo has abandoned this design and instead integrated magnesium-aluminum alloy into the fuselage shell.
It’s unclear why Lenovo did this, as shaving a few millimeters off the phone doesn’t seem worth it.
It cannot be ruled out that it was affected by rising prices of CPU processors and storage, and Lenovo used this to reduce hardware costs.
I hope that Lenovo will develop a new process at the same time. After removing the magnesium-aluminum alloy frame, it can still maintain extremely high body strength and become thinner and lighter. Otherwise, it will be difficult for old users to accept it, especially for products such as workstations, which tend to have an extremely stable audience.
As a mobile workstation, ThinkPad P16 Gen3 is not cheap as always.
The lowest configuration is equipped with Core Ultra 5 255HX, RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell graphics card, 32GB DDR5 memory, and 1TB SSD, and the price is 29,499 yuan.
The top version is equipped with Core Ultra 9 285HX, RTX PRO 5000, 128GB, 12TB, and the price is as high as 105,499 yuan.
