 Ah, that's better. If you guys watch this channel, chances are you've got a fond memory of a think pad. Whether you were trying to get Need for Speed 2 SE to run on your parents work laptop or you were actually doing important things for yourself, the think pad was always up to the task with its rugged design and nipple for a mouse. But are those just rosy eyed memories or were these actually fantastic machines that would still hold up today? Well, the 25th anniversary edition is here and it might be everything I remember and more. Speaking of remembering, remember to check out Sennheiser's PXC 550 wireless headphones. They feature up to 30 hours of battery life, noise guard, hybrid active noise cancellation, and more. You can learn more at the link below. Rising out of its box, the ThinkPad anniversary edition is soaked in nostalgia. Everything about it just feels right. The keyboard, the track knob, and even the way it beeps at you when you press too many keys at once. The outer build quality feels exceptional, dare I say it, even up to the old IBM standard and every surface is sturdy while also surprisingly smooth. Iowise, the modern minimalistic trend is nowhere to be seen. It's got Ethernet, HDMI, three USB 3 ports, an SD reader, and Thunderbolt 3. So you won't be left stranded no matter what you need while you're working, just like an old ThinkPad. On that subject, let's meet the OG device that we'll be comparing it to. We took a trip down to the local electronics recycler FreeGeek Vancouver and picked up this sweet ThinkPad 560X, a model from before IBM had stopped making laptops and sold that business unit and its trademarks to Lenovo. At 20 years old, this thing, well, before we would even think about using it, it needed a really good scrub, but after some love from a shmoo removing tool, a new CMOS battery, wow, look at that duck cursor, man, and some old-school Windows know-how from Anthony, it was ready to go. So let's look at the specs of both computers. The ThinkPad anniversary rocks a solid, the last-gen Core i7-7500U dual-core CPU, which is so much faster than the Pentium MMX Tillamook in the 560X that there is no meaningful way to compare the two. It's got 170 times more memory with 128 times the storage, and the only real disappointment here is probably the GPU. 10 series graphics cards have been out for about a year and a half now, and the GT940 in here is better than nothing, but it won't handle anything but older games and maybe a bit of acceleration in Photoshop or Premiere. To its credit though, the anniversary edition kept all of its components nice and cool while remaining quiet, although it can err sometimes on the side of lower clocks for longer battery life and lower temperatures rather than higher clocks with more heat and more power. The keyboards on both feel almost identical, save for the very soft semicolon on the 560X, and that's a good thing since they both have amazing keyboards. The keys have a super long travel with this great tactile feedback, and the layout might be a bit strange these days. I may be wrong, but I don't think it's morning. Jeebo, shut the f*** up. Like it would be easy to accidentally hit function S instead of actually saving your work, for example, but it's nothing you couldn't get used to and pretty much every key you could need is present. I give it an A. As for the trackpad, to its credit, it tracks well and is surprisingly smooth to the touch, but it is pretty small since most of the vertical space here is taken up by the left, right, and middle clicks for the red pointing stick between the G, H, and B keys. Let's talk about that. With how god-awful the trackpads were 20 years ago, it is no great mystery why people who actually had time-sensitive work to do preferred these little nubbins. But these days, not everyone is going to like a track point, even with the four nipple options included in the box, and it does take a little getting used to. But we would never take points off for including it, because for us the anniversary edition ended up being all about options. For certain tasks like highlighting text or quickly switching between mousing and typing, the track point was, as the kids say, on point. For casual one-handed operation while sitting back, the touchpad was generally preferred, and for bigger movements, the included touch screen was a definite blessing. Though, I wish I could say the same about other aspects of the screen. What the balls, Lenovo! Where is my dedicated brightness adjustment slider? This experience has been totally ruined for me. Ruined! Yeah, I'm just kidding. The 1080p IPS display with a matte finish isn't cutting-edge, but it's still great for productivity and is definitely better than the 560X's 800 by 600 HPA display that has pixel response times in the hundreds of milliseconds. It really is too bad that its old owner didn't spring for the TN panel. So the ThinkPad 25th anniversary edition also includes lots of options when it comes to authentication, with Windows Hello added to its perfectly acceptable webcam and speakers, and a fingerprint reader to the right of the keyboard. Then, once it's unlocked, assuming that you went for the option with a second hot-swappable battery, this thing will keep going almost all day. Now, unsurprisingly, the ThinkPad anniversary edition isn't the premier multimedia laptop on the market. No high-resolution display, no amazing speakers with Dolby Atmos certification, and it sucks for games. But it is easily one of the best laptops for productivity, and in many ways it makes other devices these days feel like decorations or toys with its excellent keyboard, pointing stick, and battery life. Now, I don't know if it'll still be working 20 years from now, like our 560X, but I also don't see why it would let you down. It's everything we like about modern notebooks, with everything we remember liking about classic ones. So if you were thinking about pulling the trigger, I say go for it, as long as you can afford one, or even get one, since it's a limited production run. This episode was brought to you by TunnelBear, the easy-to-use VPN app. When people are shopping for a VPN, one of the features they look for is a kill switch. So before you connect to a network, your device starts to send information about itself and what it wants to do, and it tries to establish connections with all sorts of things, and there are other devices out there that are trying to connect to yours. 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