IBM ThinkPad T61p Craigslist deal. Good/bad?

Would you take chances and buy the right to use for 3 years or 5, knowing that ideally you'd switch in 3?
That's just a safe play.
But why not to switch from the day 1?
Because they were no one. I know for a fact that some companies that were long term IBM clients, moved to Dell the very moment the new logo appeared
They didn't take chances there.

Made by is no longer a valid term. It's incorrect.
We are talking about two different things.
"Made by" costs significantly more than "made for".
I'm not talking about legal definitions, but rather about a far more simple thing - the last model that was designed and tested by IBM.
That's what I call made by.
But I'm not even claiming that it was T43, it could even be the T61p It's very hard to guess, especially from within. 3.5 years ago when the C2D was fresh and fabulous, Intel was already testing the 64 and 128-core consumer grade processors. So if you bought them at that point how long would it take to switch to something completely made by you?
Nobody knows. Up to you

 

The best person to ask about this would be Ajkula66 at Lenovo.com forum or forum.thinkpads.com, he had most of the different variations of Thinkpads. There were some T4x (up to T43) that were made in USA, before IBM moved to China, Mexico was the hub for producing Thinkpads.

Or you could ask Erik to see whether he can release any secret information to the eager Thinkpad fans.

Some later model T43 had the Lenovo name on the sticker on the bottom, I think T60 was in the design pipeline when Lenovo took over. Z60 was the first widescreen laptop that IBM designed (this is from an article i read), but it was not released until Lenovo took over. Z60x was a transition hardware, as it had similar chipset as T43, but with slightly upgraded features (i.e. SATA hdd), it was really used to test the consumer acceptance of the widescreen laptop.

Although, whether Thinkpad is owned by Lenovo or IBM is quite trivial, as the design and engineering team that is responsible for Thinkpads, remained intact (mostly) when Lenovo took over.

Regarding IBM logo, any pre-2008 Thinkpads would have the IBM logo on it, even the Lenovo Thinkpads as part of the agreement between Lenovo and IBM. Since before Lenovo took over IBM, no one knew about this brand outside of China. Basically Lenovo was trying to associate itself with IBM's rock solid brand image, in this way people wouldn't freak out about the Lenovo branding.

 

True...
I like your collection, Lead_org
BTW, my R40 was made for IBM in UK (early 2003).