2024 has been a good year. While I was hoping to get more content out and share more with you, several things ate my free time for breakfast and it didn’t quite work out as intended. Despite that, the statistics from both YouTube and this website paint a positive picture. Views are holding steady and only a slight drop in subscribers per year. Funny enough, the number of uploads for 2023 and 2024 is the same.

Website statistics are likely a result of search engines and other bots combing the content and learning from what I write here. I wrote very little, likely as a result of doing a lot of writing for school, so doing it as a hobby was less attractive. My goal is to write more articles in 2025.

As has been my tradition, I will break down each month and pick a highlight for me.

January

January was a slower start to the year, but it had me feature the P53, which was capable of 128GB of RAM—a very impressive piece of gear. Workstations aren’t super common around here, so looking at one, especially a P-series, is always fun. I remain grateful for Rob Herman helping me frame what makes a workstation an important addition to a laptop lineup. As an aside, he was a familiar face I met in person at Lenovo Tech World 2023.

February

Speaking of workstations, this highlight for February came in a nice carrying case that helped sell the idea that this was true portable power. It isn’t often we see hard cases for laptops so this was fun to look at for that reason as well. The owner had a portable monitor tucked away in the lid making for a comprehensive setup.

March

March saw the release of the series of interviews I did with Luis Hernandez, a wonderful storyteller and all-around great human being. He worked for both IBM and Lenovo, retiring as the VP of Lenovo Commercial Product Solution Development. You can see the full interview below:

April

This month was mainly releasing the interviews I did with Luis in terms of main channel content. I did feature the L14 G2 which had more modularity than the T series of the same generation. Thankfully the T series now has just as much. Looking at a modern L series was still very educational.

May

A conversation with David Hill is always a highlight. In May we discussed the Lenovo Skylight project and David shared stories of its development and how Richard Sapper created this sleek-looking laptop that was never released. 

June

This video may be close to the highlight of the year for me, being able to bring you a sealed Lenovo Skylight, open it and tour the operating system. Special thanks to David for locating it and for Tommy to help me get it to Canada. In terms of rare machines, this is pretty high up on the list.

July

Lots was going on in July but the video that stands out is releasing the full interview I had the pleasure of doing with Tom Hardy for the 30th anniversary of ThinkPad several years ago. The video contains just over 30 minutes of additional conversations and stories. It is worth the watch to hear some of Tom’s stories about the challenging and rewarding environment that design work brings.

August

August is a draw between two smaller laptops. The Toshiba T1910CS with the weird trackball attachment was a lot of fun to film and was the first laptop I filmed in my renovated film space. The runner-up is the ThinkPad 240X which was the first Japanese-exclusive ThinkPad I’ve featured on the channel and one of the smallest ThinkPads to be featured as well.

September

The IBM TransNote is a strange device with an even stranger story. One day I will release the video of the one I have in my collection, I promise. David Hill remembers working on it with Dr. John Karidis of butterfly keyboard fame on the ThinkPad 701C. It is clear to see why the machine didn’t make it to another generation but it clearly left an impact as many people I have interviewed over ther years reference this device.

October

My highlight here is an upgrade to my tool kit. To make a long story short, I follow David Hill on X/Twitter and enjoy his Design of the Day posts. One post was for a company, HOTO showcasing a flashlight. After a little digging, I saw they made a screwdriver kit and wanted to treat myself. I’ve been enjoying it ever since. Honestly, I should probably treat myself a little more often than I do. I imagine that the production quality would continue to improve if that were the case. The challenge is how to improve production quality without adding additional work and not impacting the speed of production. Being a one-person crew that does everything, every additional step needs to pay off and then some for it to be worth slowing things down.

November

This next highlight is thanks to Dan Basterfield, who is an amazingly knowledgeable and kind individual with quite an excellent ThinkPad collection. He digitized some service tapes like the one I did for the ThinkPad 701C and asked me to share them with the greater community. You can expect to see another release from this VHS collection soon in 2025.

December

The last item to bring up would have to be the LG-IBM video. Back in 2022 I covered the story of LG-IBM in detail on this website, but didn’t have a machine to present. This changed and I was able to create a video showcasing not only the IBM ThinkPad 570 but also probably the strangest rebrand in the IBM lineup at that point.

Thanks everyone for watching and reading and I will see you next year!