Thinkpad advertising in Sweden from 1992 and forwards






During the COVID-19-pandemic the Swedish Royal Library opened up its digital repositories with scanned Swedish newspapers. Usually these are only, due to copyright reasons, available in place at the Royal library (or possible to order for a considerable sum of money). During the era of open digital repositories I took the chance to search and download clippings regarding Thinkpads (adds, reviews et cetera). I searched all Swedish available newspapers containing the word Thinkpad from 1990 and forwards and downloaded all that seemed interesting. There are some misrepresentation because some of the newspapers are not scanned or OCR:ed, but the big ones are. And of course - during the 90:s at least - Thinkpads were expensive and the advertisments were published in the major newspapers from the bigger cities (SvD and DN from Stockholm and GP from Gothenburg) and those newspapers directed to business (like DI - "Dagens Industri" - The Daily Industry(?)). Unfortunately it was very hard to get decent cuts from full page adds - which is sad because IBM had a couple of really good one. So some of them are left out - other cut to fit this format. Unfortunately some of the adds have been cropped in a disadvantageous way because of limits in the presentation in the systems of the Royal Library. They did not scan them to be screenshoted by me. If you want to have the possibility to zoom et cetera - please right-click and download the picture. Or even better - check them out in their original setting (You will get some leads in the captions).


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Interesting to watch are of course stats on the models. But I have also tried to include some context when possible, saving some other advertisments that are placed together with those for Thinkpads. Among what you can see is the famous Lap Power-add and adds for NMT-phones. The clip from "Aftonbladet 1994-07-27" is actually a mention of Thinkpads in a short story ("I hennes majestäts tjänst") by the Swedish author Jan Guillou. There are also some more regular news articles - one about a person getting robbed of his Thinkpad, and another about working from home using digital technique - something quite exotic in 1999. There are also an Editorial from Svenska Dagbladet in 2002 mentioning ThinkPads while discussing the use of computers in every day life.


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Prices are always interesting. Thinkpads were rather pricey during the 1990:s - me myself who was a teenager during this time would not have afforded one. Adding to this - if you compare the prices of the 90:s with changes in inflation they were even pricier. It is possible to calculate this with SCB/Statistic Sweden's Currency Converter. A 700C costed around 40 000 SEK in 1993 which today would be a price of 55 000 SEK (~$5600). Hopefully you did not loose it... There are a certain change over time since the 90:s to the 10:s in Thinkpad paradigms. In the first ten years or so all advertisment are directed towards companies, the seller are small specialized computer sellers and the adds themselves are very boring. After the millenium the focus is on Space and people doing extreme travelling. The price is not as much as earlier and most adds are created by IBM themselves. A "sell a lifestyle"-approach who I think was generally quite common during this time. Around 2005 or so things changes again. The advertisments are directed towards ordinary persons - students, pupils at gymnasium-level education et cetera. The businesses are bigger - sellers are such companies as Media Mark and (now defunct) PC-City. So the Thinkpads travels from Yuppie to Adventurer to Normie. Today there are not much computer advertisments in the press anymore. You sell computers in another way today. I stopped my collecting of newspaper clips a bit after the Thinkpad was abandoned by IBM and continued by Lenovo.



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