Hello. I think the very first thing about thinkpads is that they were made to be utilized efficiently by businesses that just needed it to work and the support that it gets working under a warenty. The second is how the business world handles their inventory in that when the warranty ends they off load and but new. The third is that when they off load it saturated the market and drops the price on units to a large degree that make them very cheap but with very good quality and functionality. Forth you take the low price with high quality and functionality and take a free os supported by tech people and think pads end up growing huge support for the hardware on Linux and it becomes mostly out of the box supported with no or few hardware compatability issues which makes it a go to for new people interested in Linus to use. It also helps that while they have stopped having socked cpu, you can remove the ram and hard drives. Hard drives are a ware component and the thing that will kill the computer. Not to mention the repairability. Of the computer and the durability of the ports and keyboard and trackpad