Lenovo has announced update to the ThinkPad W mobile workstation series for engineers, designers, and other pros by adding two new models. The first is the brand new ThinkPad W550s, their first slim mobile workstation. The second one is the ThinkPad W541, which is basically the same as the current standard-thickness W540 with a tweak.
These 15.6-inchers are available with Full HD or 3K displays, optional IPS technology, optional touchscreen on the W550s, and Nvidia’s Quadro professional grade video cards. The W550s will be equipped with the 5th Generation Intel Core i7 “Broadwell” processor in a dual-core variant, while the W541 still relies on the 4th Gen Haswell, including the full-blown quad-core i7 chips.
Alongside a full-size keyboard with numeric pad and multitouch touchpad, the laptops sport ThinkPad’s traditional TrackPoint pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard. The major change on the W550s and W541 over the touchpad and TrackPoint on the current-gen W540 is use of physical “click” buttons to accompany the pointing stick, whereas the W540 uses buttons integrated in the touchpad surface. The touchpad itself still uses integrated buttons.
For ThinkPad fans, this might be an important piece of information, since the same TrackPoint setup will be probably used on the upcoming and more popular mainstream T, L, and X series ThinkPads as well.
Pricing and availability dates are still unknown. For more details about the new mobile workstations and their specs comparison, you can visit the dedicated ThinkPad W550s and W541 product pages.