Friendly reminder that Lenovo has repeatedly shipped laptops infested with malware and backdoors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...) sometimes doing so in exchange for money. They've also hidden malware in UEFI so that even reformatting your hard drive wouldn't help.
In one case, after they were found out they first claimed "we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns" and only after it started being reported by more and more news orgs did they finally admit to what they'd done and release instructions on how to fix it.
Sadly, those instructions removed the bloatware, but left the vulnerability it introduced in place giving users a false sense of security, and only after they were caught out for that in the press did they finally release a "removal tool"
To add a reference, here's a reproduction of my comment on a discussion of Lenovo from 4 years ago [1]:
I want to emphasize how bad the TLS MITM malware was (adware is too nice a term): they installed a TLS MITM attack by adding the same CA public key to the trust store of every non-business device they sold, and then proxied all internet traffic through an on-device MITM proxy that contained the private key to that CA. Yes you read that right: every device with this malware had the public and private key used to decrypt the TLS traffic of every other device with this malware, effectively exposing every user to have all of their traffic both decrypted and MITM'd again by anyone who tries. This train wreck was malicious and incompetent.
I don't consider this a technical failure, this is a fatal business failure: either nobody in Lenovo reviewed this software integration from a privacy and security perspective, or they did review it and the business deal overruled the security team's ability to veto it, or they're so inept that they didn't notice how bad it was. In any case, this indicates an organizational dysfunction so severe there's no way I can trust Lenovo with my personal or business security again.
That's unnecessarily alarmist FUD from a decade ago that has nothing to do with today.
Windows 11 installed clean with support drivers has only minimal Lenovo items:
- Lenovo EasyResume Service - enables a grace period before hibernation
- Lenovo HotKey Client Loader - makes the special keys work
- Lenovo Intelligent Thermal Solution Service - fans go brrrrr
- Lenovo Platform Service - (not running)
- Lenovo PM Server - power management coordinator
The only other thing is their user-attended updater, Lenovo Update Service, that doesn't run in the background and doesn't do anything uncommanded. It finds driver, BIOS, and firmware updates. It's optional and you have to install it yourself.
Disagree! I've been using Thinkpads since 2004 and was a bit obsessed with them around 2010 and almost had a museum with old machines I bought on eBay. I had two 701cs's butterfly models etc. Every model I've had was much better than the one before in almost every way. There's a lot of nostalgia with the older models, but man, compared to what we have today they were unusable and you would not carry something like that around! Super heavy, easily scratched rubber paint, bad plastic.
Now a lot of things I miss a lot. The modularity, latches, ThinkLight, the upside down Thinkpad logo on the outside shell (oriented correctly towards the user, not the other people in the room), 7 row keyboard, good Fn keys functionality like media keys. The T400 that I regularly stood on to impress people how sturdy it was. But all of these things cost a lot in terms of weight and size (except the logo which was just copying the change that Apple made).
Just so you know the context: these are the machines I used a lot. T42p, R60, T400, T440s, T470s, T495s, T14s Gen2 (current).
If you respect the sturdiness vs. form factor trade-off, I believe build quality has gone up with every machine I bought.
Entry level Thinkpads are not particularly impressive.
I have an E585 (bought it with the 2700U and 1080p screen upgrades, but added my own SSD and extra RAM because Lenovo charged the moon) and it replaced an X230 Tablet.
Even though it's the "upgraded" screen, it's still dim and disappointing. I understand very few Thinkpads have excellent screens; while the X230T's was brighter, it managed to burn the browser chrome after a few years of using it for lap-surfing.
The X230 had a slide-off-the-back-side battery. The E585's is inside the case.
You could slide open little hatches to access the storage and memory on the X230. The E585 was a single-piece cover with 8 or 9 captive screws and then has to be pried apart with snaps.
The E585 has a rubber foot to prop it to provide clearance for the vents; the tape holding it on gave out a couple months ago, so I've stuck little white adhesive rubber furniture feet on it.
Entry level ThinkPads aren't really ThinkPads, the E-series in particular. Those ones were previously known as ThinkPad Edge, which were designed by a different team.
Exactly. Buy T, X or P series. For non-demanding users L series might be OK, but I prefer to buy second-hand / refurbished T series instead. Avoid E series, or at least don't expect any "ThinkPad-ness" from it.
TBH, if anyone else brought a remotely competent eraser pointer to market, I'd probably consider them. Even the hyperconfigurable Framework doesn't offer one.
Sometimes you can find a random business-line HP or Dell with one, but the Dell one I tried (some 7th generation Core i5 I rode for five years at work) was so terrible, especially on scrolling, that I just plugged in an external mouse, and it's a feature that appears on random models intermittently when it does appear, so it might not meet any of my other (admittedly limited) requirements.
I used to be a Thinkpad fanatic due to nice build quality and good Linux support.
But in the past few years, I have taken to just buying Dell's midrange business laptops. The build quality can vary by model but they are cheaper, ubiquitous, have great support while in warranty, and Linux always runs just fine on them if you pay attention to the hardware you're buying.
Same. I've got a work Precision 7670 in top spec, literally a £7000(!!!!!) machine, and it overheats within 5 seconds of being under load, the CPU hits 100C and throttles down hard. It's equipped with a 3080Ti but it's the same story - the GPU overheats and throttles down to 200MHz, so anything you play is just a stuttery mess. And it's not surprising - inside it there are 2 heat pipes going to two small fans with only one air outlet. Even my "gaming" MSI laptop with half the spec has much beefier cooling, it can run its 3070Ti under full load indefinitely. Not to mention their £400 thunderbolt docks that work maybe 50% of the time.
Same hardware. Absolute turd. Also the screen on mine is the OLED one which is so reflective I can't see anything on the screen other than my own reflection. Who designed that POS!
What model? I've been pretty happy with Dell machines at work. Happy enough I bought an older model refurb for 200 dollars shipped, which fits the chargers and docks and such I had lying around from work.
5550 - two complete thermal failures. 7670 has blown up two $400 docks, won't charge half the time, blue screens once a week, weighs a ton, gets hotter than satan's nuts.
Wild! I have not at all had any of those issues, and I've had at this point 9 different Dell machines for work or play in the last ~10 years, all laptops. I'm typing this on a Latitude 5421.
Granted - My work has been heavy on memory but light on CPU, so perhaps I'm not applying enough deadly heat.
The design of T490 was a big "F U, users" from Lenovo.
My magnesium top cased T480 (non-s) with 64 GiB RAM, (4) 72 Whr batteries and the internal one still works and is good enough for the girls I go out with and Windows 11 Enterprise.
I purchase the business version of the ThinkPads and the warranties are fine. In fact, HP, Dell and Lenovo use the same company in my area when they send out technicians to work on them.
I swear the trackpad on my work-issued one takes 5 minutes to warm up before it is useable. It is quite possibly the worst laptop I've ever owned, and I've had a Vostro and a 2018 Macbook with the dodgy keyboards.
2. Windows has an interesting "feature" that will blindly auto-install software that is embedded in a certain location in the BIOS. If a rootkit is placed there, Windows will always try and install it.
It's bad for Lenovo, but it's also bad that Windows has this anti-feature.
Re: #2 - The UEFI bloatware/rootkit checked the Windows version: if you used Windows 8 or up it used the "feature" called "Windows Platform Binary Table", but Windows 7 didn't have that, so for Windows 7 it overwrote CHKDSK.EXE with a Lenovo loader on every reboot. So, yeah, they were overwriting OS binaries on disk, not just relying on WPBT. (But no reports of binaries being overwritten on on Linux)
I'm surprised they got around windows file protection! That had been around since at least XP so I wonder what they did to avoid it.
The writers of the malicious software lenovo has so far been caught including in their products were specifically targeting windows users, but I see no reason to think that they wouldn't include malicious software that targets linux if some seedy company decided it was worth the effort to write it and offered lenovo enough cash. Their total lack of integrity and respect for their customers is enough that I could never feel fully confident that I was safe just because I was running a non-windows OS.
Wow. Could you point us to more technical information about this "feature" of Windows? I'm hoping someone has reverse-engineered it somewhere, but I'm not finding anything with some brief Googling.
It definitely could if they wanted it to. I'm less worried about that because of the threat of PR blowback that helps keep them in check, but if it's really important to you then you should probably avoid Lenovo. Frame.work is quite a nice option.
Same reason I left Verizon for Fi, avoidance of their bloatware. Couldn't imagine going back to a phone with apps I cannot uninstall (like Amazon & NFL apps, seriously, I don't care about sportsball at all and haven't used Amazon in more than 6 years)
When a company engages to such deceptive business and outright illegal business practices, there is little reason to trust them for a decade or two until we can be sure everyone who worked there by the time is gone.
> until we can be sure everyone who worked there by the time is gone.
That seems a little extreme. I always maintain a skeptical eye, but most corporate leaders have an eye for profits and PR, and their personal integrity/moral compass doesn't play a large role in their decision making. As long as it's bad/risky PR for Lenovo to do stuff like that, the incentives are on our side. Always be watching though, and I personally favor vendors who have good track records.
Well... I can look at it from the other perspective; in my previous org, the director came like 15 years ago from Oracle, and his ideas, management style, and goals were very much aligned with what you'd expect Oracle was like 20 years ago. It took firing him and two managers below him to turn around the org, despite adopting new practices, new ideas, working in completely new directions, etc.
I wouldn't completely discard the idea to be honest.
Thanks for sharing, that does make sense. Humans are creatures of habit and the way we are brought up is a strong lean on us in future decision making. Changing philosophies can be very hard
History is not propaganda. Lenovo repeatedly sold out their customers, lied to them, and put them at risk of everything from spying to remote code execution. They've more than earned their reputation and it should haunt them every time they are mentioned.
Maybe after several decades have gone by without incident I might consider that they've changed their ways, but I sure wouldn't count on that happening.
My Lenovo android tablet started installing adware suddenly, more than a year after purchase. This was a clean device with a single program and the adware came with.. Lenovo ads.
Yeah I think it's fair to say Lenovo is still no good here.
How is this propaganda? Either it's true or it is false. You haven't said or proved this is false.
"consumer side" still Lenovo.
"They learned their lesson" and so have we.
"7+ years ago" it still happened
The only propaganda is coming from you.
All of these links do though and they include examples of more hard coded passwords, more Lenovo spyware, and more insecure Lenovo software that exposed users to threats:
I always hear about how modern laptops and smartphones “aren’t repairable” and then I spent a week in Shenzhen.. where there were floors and floors of independent repair people doing specialized fixes to the most intricate parts. I had an old Apple Watch repair for about $20, only to discover that I got ripped off — I could have negotiated it down to much less.
With "repairable" people mean repairs with freely available tools, parts and (ideally) schematics.
Apple and others put in a lot of effort to stop independent repair shops from sourcing original parts or making them impossible to successfully replace due to hardware DRM. It is already impossible to upgrade some Macs with more RAM because they will simply refuse to boot if they find more RAM than they got in the factory.
Many components in an iPhone are paired to the logic board from the factory, so if they need to be replaced you have no choice but to go down the Apple sanctioned repair path (although the third party industry goes to great lengths to work around it). Some components, like the display, will show a warning notification in iOS for weeks and disable features like True Tone and auto-brightness if swapped with a third party part. Other components such as the cameras can't even be swapped between 100% genuine iPhones.
The iPhone 6 disabled Touch ID when the home button was replaced but it'd still function fine as a button - until you restored the phone, which would fall over with an arbitrary error code forcing you to take the phone in to Apple for repair. There was a lot of backlash before they caved and fixed the update process: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple...
And he is one of the worst eigjt-to-repair advocates there are, given how often he even gets the most basic stuff wrong when it allows to create attention.
> how often he even gets the most basic stuff wrong
Such as? That's an outlandish claim unless you have receipts to back it up.
He does get things wrong occasionally, he's only human after all, but he tends to publish very public retractions which is more than can be said for professional journalists.
You'll have to elaborate. Are you trying to convince me that the lead developer of Graphene (strcat) harassing Rossmann over a tame Youtube comment somehow reflects badly on Louis?
That's certainly a take, but not one that I can ever agree with.
On a desktop pc you can repair anything pretty easily. Some things we wouldn't even call a repair. A new monitor is call just that. A new screen for a phone is much more involved.
And then there's granularity.
Can that broken usb port be replaced or does it require a new motherboard.
Your $20 Apple watch repair has 2 components. The parts cost and the labour cost.
If the repair takes 2 hours by a skilled technician that's going to cost more than a 5 minute job that anyone can do. And in first world countries, it's probably labour that will dominate.
I think when we generally talk about whether something is "repairable" we're referring to the ease of repair, which translate to the repair being affordable and makes economical sense so people actually do it vs buying a replacement.
Without any extraordinary effort and having only typical DIY skills, I have repaired a half-dozen of my family members' iPhones that people complain are "not repairable".
To me, "repairable" means "capable of being repaired in a practical way". I'll also grant you the unstated "at a reasonable price", which for me, having a cheapskate nature, I've always found the repair parts (batteries, screens, and buttons) to be extremely reasonable in price.
For people who don't want to DIY it, most every mall has a kiosk that will do it for 2-3x what I paid, but still <15% of the price of a new iPhone.
I still look at the outcome. If a manufacturer puts a Torx screw instead of a Philips, was that choice made to make it harder to repair? What about a Security Torx instead of a Torx? What about a Pentalobe or Tri-wing instead of a Phillips? A Triple-Square instead of a hex socket? If they glue in the battery which serves to protect the battery and also makes it more difficult to repair?
"If it can be repaired in a practical way, it's repairable" seems more resilient and probably no more a judgment call than the design questions above.
Repairable means I can replace most major components in my laptop (wifi, ram, battery, SSD, BT, etc) with nothing more than a torx and screw driver. No soldering, or specialized equipment.
This is obviously somewhat subjective, but to me soldering does not disqualify something being "repairable", unless it requires a proprietary soldering machine or something. What you're describing sounds "modular"
When a repair requires soldering, it significantly reduces the number of people who can do that repair themselves. I can do it, but most of my non-technical friends could not, even though several of them could replace a hard drive or even a DIMM in their desktop PC.
On thinking about it more I agree with you. A very simply soldered thing is maybe ok, but the vast, vast majority of soldered things are no-gos for repairs for non-pros. It's too easy to damage components and destroy the board, even if you know how to do it. If the Framework required soldering, I'd be very critical about it's repairability/modularity, so I'm being inconsistent.
I don't think it should be required that my grandma should be able to fix it for it to qualify as repairable. There are tons of phone repair shops that do battery and screen swaps. I'm sure if the devices were even moderately more repairable and parts existed they would be happy to do a lot more with expert knowledge. I wouldn't mind if I could take my device to these shops and get it fixed. Sure, doing it myself may be a nice bonus but I think we can let some people specialize. What I don't think is acceptable is if only the original manufacture can source parts or perform repairs (if they decide to at all)
Add power supplies to that list. In my experience it's by far the most common component to die, and sometimes it's hopelessly and needlessly integrated.
Shenzhen isn't a good example here. In Shenzhen you can ask people to upgrade your laptop's RAM by unsoldering it, but usually those laptops are considered nonupgradable everywhere else in the world.
"(Lenovo) said people buy new smartphones every other year but became accustomed used to buying new PCs every six or seven years. The industry needs to do better at motivating people to buy new devices"
What I want is a frame.work equivalent repairable and parts-replaceable smartphone. I know it's not practical right now because the commodity and consumer-purchaseable parts that go into a framework laptop don't exist for a smartphone analog right now, and the phone would probably be unacceptably large for most people. But I'd buy it if I could just replace the flash myself every 3-5 years, battery every 2-3 years, etc, and have security updates.
Not to mention getting one and its parts outside of the EU is difficult and/or expensive. As a North American I'd be happy to hear if this is different now.
For people in the US it's not really available. Also phone vs laptop. While there is some overlap, I think of the two as different devices for different use cases.
Dang it looks like you can't. It's soldered into the main module? And they don't sell replacement parts for it. You can only send it back to the company. Which I guess is better than nothing.
But also can't seem to figure out how to buy it lol
I want a thick and strong chassis, the ability to pick which (camera) sensors are plugged in, standardized Single board computers, and add in batteries. Phones should be DIY projects with Cheap off the shelf components.
If only they would try to make that work. I don't vape, but have noticed those that do seem to take customizing their pens pretty seriously by changing out certain components. I heard someone describe it as like a Jedi building their lightsaber haha. I'd like to do this for a phone for sure, but it'd be hard to get manufactures on board I think.
>but became accustomed used to buying new PCs every six or seven years.
Why would they buy any quicker? The average laptop in 2016 was only maybe 10% faster than a laptop in 2010 thanks to that stupid Ultrabook shit (and Intel refusing to push out more than a 10% YOY improvement in their standard-voltage desktop lineup), which resulted in 2020's CPU lineup only being about twice as fast as one made in 2010. And, so long as you had a machine with an SSD, there's very little difference between a laptop from 2015 and 2023 if all you're doing is browsing Facebook (which is what most people are doing with them).
Plus, at the end of the 2010s, tablets started to become mature enough to supplant laptops as the household's only computer, so you'd either buy a tablet or get a new laptop, but not both.
Phones are a different beast in two ways- first, if you're buying Android, you're throwing your phone away every 2 years anyway because the ecosystem sucks; Qualcomm is even more incompetent when it comes to hardware performance than Google is with software performance and it really shows, especially since Android allows manufacturers to stack a bunch of other unremovable shit and skins that does nothing but take up storage space, enshittifying the device right out of the box like having 10 unremovable IE6 toolbars did back when people still used IE6 (Lenovo is less guilty of this than some but it's still not as clean as a Pixel is). Plus, financial incentives exist (for both Android and iOS) to trade in one's old phone for a new one at a steep discount, they get smashed up far more frequently than laptops do in ways that make them impossible to fix, and they're fashion accessories to a point and it's nice to have the new one in a way that normal computers don't suffer from as much.
It's not rocket science; the industry became boring and stagnant so people moved on (and good GPUs have been unaffordable for the vast majority of the last decade including in prebuilts, so...)
Now Lenovo can join smartphone manufacturers and Google on the as-successful-as-drug-empires stage! Seriously, increasing profit for the sake of profit is a terrible goal. We as consumers need to be less susceptible to the marketing hype and demand to have only technology that serves us.
Seems to be plenty of decent second hand machines. I'm typing this on an ex-corporate T470 I got for £250. Spend another £120 replacing the battery and pushing upto 32G of ram
(I actually bought 3 of them, one for my son and one for my S.O. Those didn't need to last for hours at a time so they're on original battery+memory and work great)
I know it's in the industries interest to force E-Waste, but it's not in the public interest.
They are stopping to buy new phones every year too. Modern midrange phones already have every feature you really need, a standard user-replaceable battery would probably kill the whole upgrade cycle.
Back through the 90s and 00s, I think that ~3 years was the norm, at least for the part of the population that even owned computers.
But since then, there are fewer major improvements coming that fast. GPUs improve, but most people aren't hardcore gamers for whome that matters, and these can mostly be upgraded independent of the computer itself instead.
Other than that, if you're mostly just using your web browser, and maybe doing some spreadsheets and desktop-based email, what's the point? Even if you're doing more demanding stuff like Photoshop, we're at a point where the app's demands aren't growing fast either.
So? If the reason is that the new one is far better, that seems fine. If the reason is that the old one broke beyond repair, that is not fine.
Actually, question: at which point in time is it less eco-friendly to keep using an old computer considering power consumption and the fact that for the same amount of work it will need to use more power for a much longer time? 10 years? 20 years?
I bought a used T530 6 or 7 years ago. The machine is 10 years old and it's still my daily driver. My desktop is of a similar vintage, probably 2011 or so.
It's perfectly fine. I do wish I had more CPU cores, but it's probably better for me to get up and step away from the computer while it runs a big C++ compilation or something
On my EU wishlist is a law mandating standard form-factors for laptop batteries (and chargers). All batteries must be user-replaceable without tools and interchangeable with those from other manufacturers. There can be 4 to 5 different form-factors to address the various sizes and power-profiles of laptops. Batteries must have standard voltages and amperages but OEMs can differentiate themselves on other factors like mAh capacity, longevity, etc. Kind of like AA, AAA batteries but appropriate for laptops. Any laptop that doesn't conform to the standards should be hit with a 50-euro enemy-of-the-planet/douchehat tax (rather than an outright ban). The industry is already there since most laptops are designed by ODMs like Clevo and Compal. The last 20 years has provided little evidence of innovation happening on batteries and chargers in the budget segment. All the custom chargers and battery sizes are designed purely to force incompatibility on customers- for planned obsolescence, to reduce competition and charge more for after-sales support. Such a law would stop this practice by OEMs of engineering planned obsolescence into their bottom-tier cookie-cutter clevo-crap but still allow companies like Apple to "innovate" on vanity metrics like slimness. An industry consortium or committee (like W3 for the web or the 4G/5G committees) can be setup to propose new revisions to the standards (if required) once every 10 years (not lesser).
Step 1: stop soldering USB-C ports to the boards on your thinkpad line as they are NOT replaceable and will end the entire machine if damaged. That is the aforementioned T14 gen 3 in the article.
Usually no. If you damage the connector it tears the traces off the board irreparably. If it doesn't do that then there are two rows of pins which need to be resoldered. One row is under the connector. It is near impossible to solder those properly without non trivial equipment. Usually if you get a repair they solder only one pair of pins to the board and that means your USB connector only works plugged in one way up.
This is one reason amongst many that I'm not a particularly big fan of USB-C
Assuming you can find the part "full board replacement" may not be as bad as it sounds for a monitor. Your main point still stands though, ideally a faulty connector shouldn't require to replace anything besides the connector itself.
Yeah Apple do it right on their machines, at least the laptops. There is no excuse not to do this for other vendors but it costs fractionally more so they push the risk on to the users.
Lenovo's repairability of their products has unfortunately dropped a lot and I hope they take it seriously and get back to the quality they used to have.
I own several ThinkPads from the last 10 years. The older models were all very easy to repair.
I definitely won't be buying the new models anymore. I can live with the fact that socketed CPUs have been replaced with soldered ones due to aesthetics (thinner laptops), but soldered RAM is where my pain threshold is reached.
I still believe that quality products must be repairable. I consider everything else to be cheap, throwaway products. No matter how much money "premium brands" charge for their junk with glued battery, glued SSD and fixed RAM in recycled aluminium packaging.
This is great, but I can't trust a Lenovo device and I'm always a bit shocked when I see developers buying ThinkPads from a company that's demonstrated it can't be trusted to give you a secure device.
The US also does extensive industrial espionage. You just don’t hear about it because other developed countries don’t want to harm their relations with the US, and authoritarian countries see no propaganda purpose in disclosing that they’re constantly getting hacked.
Really depends on your threat model; I think most companies stop short of shipping malware from their UEFI implementation. That said, I don't think Framework has yet done anything questionable?
The problem with Framework is that BIOS updates are really rare. I been running the 3.0.6-beta for my 12th gen for almost 8 months I think and the full release has yet to come. I bet it will never happen as they are focusing on AMD and 13th gen + 16" one at the moment.
At least the 12th gen is very vulnerable to hardware access as you can't disable unauthenticated DMA access through the USB ports (it's what https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/latitude/dem... calls SL0). I asked their support and they aren't planning to fix it in the forseeable future.
My employer recently bought me a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. Due to concussions and general flicker sensitivity, I don't do well with 60Hz screens, and I prefer AMD CPUs. This one came with a 240Hz screen. Overkill!
But... Bluetooth was unreliable. Every few hours, it vanished from Windows as if it didn't exist. A moment of sleep and wake was enough to bring it back, but it was still annoying to lose mouse and headphones unexpectedly.
Two support calls, but all they did was reinstall a bunch of the driver updates I had already reinstalled (and they installed Geforce Experience because Vantage said it was available.) Unsurprisingly, none of that fixed the issue. The next step was a factory reset and/or replacement, which would've been a big PITA because of time I already spent doing setup. And it still might not have solved the issue.
Instead, I spent $23 on an Intel AX210 WLAN/Bluetooth chip, and performed the replacement (of a Realtek chip) in well under 10 minutes. Taking off the bottom panel was relatively easy, and I did not see any damaged clips. M.2 and SODIMM chips are readily replaceable, and so was this WLAN chip. It also fixed my problem completely without resorting to losing a lot of time repeating my setup.
If there's a point, it's that budget and mid-range gaming laptops are often quite repairable, where as thin and light / ultrabooks, especially those made for businesses are much less frequently repairable. I think the reason is two-fold... in general businesses will just pay for repairs, even when it means sending a device back. And of course smaller machines tend to get soldered components and optimize for size instead of access.
You have to think about the compromises you're willing to make, or to have built into your purchases.
>those made for businesses are much less frequently repairable.
It's funny, because the most serviceable laptops I've ever taken apart were the old enterprise ones my dad's company used to issue him, where half the parts were serviceable without even opening the chassis.
Of course, that changed recently when some fruit company popularized the "ultrabook" category and now every company is trying to sandwich every component in the 1cm span between two screwless sheets of aluminum.
Isn't this a bit of a no-op for Lenovo specifically? I've been using Lenovo-made laptops for years, and never had trouble with DIY repairs - replacing keyboards, screens, batteries, adding RAM, etc. Their devices are pretty modular and DIY-friendly.
I wish they made charging plugs easier to replace, as these inevitably get damaged after 1-2 years, but that's really the only complaint I can think of. Is the situation different for other device types, or are they just trying to score an easy (if deserved) PR win?
I would pay a shameful amount of money for a big, fat laptop in the style of the old school thinkpads with modern hardware.
I don't give a fuck how thin or light my laptop is. I want it big and beefy with some monstrous heatsinks and fans that don't sound like a jet engine after 3 seconds of CPU load. I want all the ports and a battery that weighs five pounds.
Current design trends for laptops has resulted in significantly worse machines. It's why I still use a T530 from 2013 as my daily driver. I'll probably keep using it until it finally develops a fault that I can't repair. Barring a catastrophic accident like a spill or a drop, I expect it to keep on chugging for at least another 5-10 years.
I've been running OpenBSD on my T480s for a bit now. I think it's an absolutely amazing machine. I love the keyboard, I love the physical shutter over the camera, and I love how I'm not worried I'm going to break it. I just ordered a replacement battery for it as well and it was an extremely easy process to install. Even though I upgraded my RAM to 32gb, I think I'm limited by my old 4 core i7 and starting to notice it during some especially long compilations. Nothing too bad though...
>I've been running OpenBSD on my T480s for a bit now. I think it's an absolutely amazing machine.
Same. I've been buying them off-lease for many years. You can usually get them for a couple hundred bucks. Best non-Apple computers I've ever used. Keyboards are awesome.
The last laptop I bought was a Dell XPS13 because research indicated it's a pretty popular Linux-compatible laptop. It's nice, but I'm going back to a Thinkpad next...
Given all the well documented "don't trust Lenovo" comments here, anyone have anything specifically negative to say about any other brands in particular? Genuinely curious. For example, Asus, Acer, Toshiba etc?
Toshiba no longer makes computers. Thanks to their 2015 accounting scandal, they had to sell their computer division to Sharp, who now sells some very unremarkable machines under the name "Dynabook".
Prior to Framework I only bought Thinkpads (I'm a linux user), but framework has gotten really good. They've added a lot of fixes/polish from their first gen models, and I'm super excited for the future!
Probably 10 years ago, my brother installed some new RAM in his Lenovo laptop on Christmas day, after which point it refused to turn on - with either the new or old RAM. We contacted Lenovo and they sent someone out to our house about 2 days later to replace then entire motherboard. (They installed the new RAM, and the laptop worked great after that.)
It left me with the impression that Lenovo had questionable quality / end-user repairability, but excellent support (as long as it's still under warranty!)
>It left me with the impression that Lenovo had questionable quality
I have 5 old Thinkpads, all still operational. Some are now 10+ years old, and have been passed on to children. They've been through hell and still work. They are the toughest laptops I've owned, and they have repair manuals to boot. Nearly everything is replaceable.
"Questionable quality but excellent support" 100% describes my experience. The mobo in my Lenovo laptop has died, like, three times at this point, but they'll send out a technician to my house to replace it within a day or two. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Levono service is the best I've experienced. Anecdotally of course - when my tower PC that I bought in 2019 started crapping out this year, they sent a repair person to my home several times, each time replacing parts without question, including a $4K graphics card (which turned out to be the fix). That warranty is worth its weight in gold and I happily extended it.
It's interesting because Thinkpads (back when they were IBM branded, but still manufactured by Lenovo) were probably second only to Apple's build quality at the time. Just anecdotally, but these days, I even trust Dell's build quality over theirs.
Well, maybe start with allowing users to swap RAM sticks first instead of continuing shipping those disgusting laptops with 8GB soldered RAM. For most of their consumer laptops (with the exception of gaming laptops), it's basically impossible to replace RAM sticks. Nowadays even ThinkPad lines are increasingly doing this.
I can get why this is done for thin and light laptops. But not everyone needs that. I am completely willing to have 200g added to the weight of a laptop to get replaceable RAM.
Fantastic to see and I hope that this extends to upgradability too, it's absurd that the only way to get more storage on so called "professional" products like macbooks is to purchase a brand new one.
There is nothing professional or unprofessional about a device except a name. In the old days, business-targeted devices such as PCs and laptops had user-serviceable parts so that the support could quickly replace a broken fan or faulty memory die and you could get back to work. These days are long gone and I'm sorry to say I blame Apple for a large part of it.
works great if your employees are onsite and you have a big support dept. You're going to need to have employees w/ spare time waiting for repairs, you're going to need to stock extra parts, you're going to have to hire guys with skills to do that work. For those of us who are remote, or who don't have a big IT dept, that was never a good option.
I can get a brand new company macbook shipped to my house in less than 24 hrs if anything goes wrong w/ my machine, and things rarely go wrong. You can't realistically beat that
Yeah, how dare they design laptops not filled to the brim with unnecessary components?
Those 'faulty' memory parts were often 'fixed' by reseating them, a problem soldered-on memory doesn't have.
Broken fans were probably the cheapest obtainable.
Those things just don't break so often anymore. I prefer welded shut quality stuff over a never ending chain of repairs.
I like Apple for batteries that last longer than 12 months, screens with high resolution and reference color, lightweight housing that's not too flimsy. (just don't talk about the keyboards from 2016-2018 ;) )
Back to the early 2000s ... it is amazing development, but why and how it was allowed to come to the current situation must be discussed and prevented from repeating.
I think a lot of how we got the current situation was Apple. They proved that most people don't care about modularity/repairability, and they argued reasons why closed/locked-down is better (and some of those arguments weren't entirely without merit, despite being self-serving). This convinced a lot of decision-makers to go that route.
I think the overall trend is still toward Steve Job's vision. Looking at Tesla for example, does not fill me with optimism of a modular/repairable future.
Don't remember the model, but a Lenovo of a family member had a broken Wi-fi card, just when it was 2 weeks out of warranty. No goodwill from Lenovo, they estimated repair costs a significant fraction of the price of the whole laptop. Plus my family member would not have his laptop for 2 weeks, whilst he needs it for his business.
So I tried to do it myself. Studying official materials, repair videos, the like. The important thing I learned is to get exactly the correct Wi-fi card because the laptop (the BIOS I guess) rejects any other type not on the "allow list".
So I ordered it and connected it, which was easy enough. Still rejects it.
Also, the laptop shipped with a wrong keyboard layout. Which my family member reported directly after purchase but Lenovo refused a return.
At work I also have a company issues Lenovo. It keeps prompting for firmware updates. The last time I applied it, it crashed the entire machine and it took me days to get it in working order again.
Your mileage may vary but to me these are Russian roulette machines. Fragile, full of arbitrary limitations, shit software, worse support.
I was very impressed with my Thinkpad X13s. I was able to open it up, just screws, --no glue to soften with a heatgun, careful spudging, or suction devices to pull things apart--and replace the 512 GB M.2 card with a 1 TB one.
I tried to replace my wireless card in my T440s. For a decade, Lenovo mostly forbids these upgrade via whitelisting in Thinkpads. Hello, other vendors...
It seems overzealous but they might be doing this to maintain FCC licensing. Speaking from experience, different radio/antenna combinations can leak different kinds of noise which would prevent you from getting certification with certain combinations. Their laptops might be noisier than the competition and with the added overhead of supporting different WLAN and Wifi cards with the built-in antennas they went over the edge.
I think my T480 is the last upgradeable laptop in the ThinkPad T series. The newer models have soldered rams only with only one slot available for upgrade and just not worth the effort.
They are all just reading the room and they see what is coming. They just do this because they are scared of right to repair and other laws and regulations and they will not be ready for it. So what they do is start early. They also see it as a selling point of course just with rise of public awareness, the success of Framework ... so even without any laws the move for sure is towards devices that are better repairable.
Is this move in anticipation of upcoming regulations? That has to be it, right?
Lenovo is fairly competitive in the 700-1500€ market but the thin and light models have soldered ram. Not great when they sell you single channel with zero ability to add more sticks on some models. It's not as terrible now due to ddr5 but still leaves bad taste.
It would be great if this includes removing the vendor-lock that Thinkstations apply to AMD workstation CPUs when they're installed. This creates an amount of ewaste as these CPUs are otherwise fully functional.
Just remove soldered wifi and wwan whitelists from current thinkpads. The rest is already good enough. Intel trying stupid shit makes sense, but lenovo has started soldering wifi on AMD laptops too.
Too bad the hackintosh days are nearing an end. One of my favorite computers ever was an x230 with IPS screen running MacOS. It had a great keyboard, sensible small size, and swappable batteries.
They forgot to add, however, "97.5% of our sales were in that 5th category last quarter, suck it liberals!". And we are only starting in the last 3 days of calendar year 2025.
In one case, after they were found out they first claimed "we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns" and only after it started being reported by more and more news orgs did they finally admit to what they'd done and release instructions on how to fix it.
Sadly, those instructions removed the bloatware, but left the vulnerability it introduced in place giving users a false sense of security, and only after they were caught out for that in the press did they finally release a "removal tool"
The wikipedia page doesn't even list all their offenses or the most recent events. See also : https://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovo-patches-uefi-vulnerabil...
Repairable or not, use Lenovo at your own risk.