I never understood how some people seem to not know that Lenovo and IBM are not the same company. When Lenovo, a completely different company, bought the rights to manufacture IBM products in 2005, the Think* brand was no longer IBM. The author states, eventually, his point being that Lenovo lost it’s mojo, but it never had any. The Thinkpads people remember with mojo were the IBM ones, and some Lenovo branded ones after the handoff, but that’s really just residual “mojo” from the old teams and processes. Lenovo was never good, and really isn’t now, and has a long record of bad behavior.
At this point I wouldn’t buy any non-Lenovo laptop.
I don’t know any other brand (excluding framework) that has a web page where I can enter the model number of my laptop and buy any part and order it and repair the laptop myself.
I will only buy a Lenovo laptop if it comes with a BSD and Linux friendly WiFi chipset. Most of their laptops are whitelist-only when it comes to WiFi cards, and tracking down the correct brand and revision of a specific compatible module is not worth the time invested. I have a stack of older Lenovo laptops that I've acquired in an attempt to reverse-engineer the BIOS/UEFI whitelists. Smarter people than me have been able to make it work on certain models, but overall Lenovo seems to detest the idea of a power user daring to switch to a better/more compatible WiFi module, despite their reputation for being "hacker's laptops".
It's for this reason the next, and probably last, laptop I buy will be the Framework.
I’ve had 3 so far. All upgrades the wifi from 5 to 6e and had no issues with ubuntu, manjaro, or windows with changing between Realtek?, killer, and ONK. Tho all are supporting amd/intel and windows/linux. Some Brand’s are intel only.
And yet you find very little information about the actual hardware in recent Lenovos. For example, i had the unpleasant surprise to discover that M.2 2242 in modern Thinkpads only supports wireless cards, and that i had just purchased a rare-to-find (in my area) 2242 SSD for nothing.
Don't even get me started on how ** the hardware is now to open and replace parts, compared to my previous T60. (soldered RAM? really?)
EDIT: I'm not at all claiming other mainstream vendors are any better. I've never found any decent hardware besides old Thinkpads and Macs.
I recently installed a Toshiba RC100 into my T480's WWAN slot. Are the newer models worse in this aspect? The T480 is not the newest, but still pretty modern.
HP also does it and they even have videos on youtube from hp support explaining how to replace each of the parts.
Lenovo has lost a lot of the quality in comparison. Typos in documentation and invoices, all kinds of support service nightmares even for people with most expensive support policies, X1 Extreme G4 shitty heatsink, thermal throttling to 800MHz, just take a look at forums.lenovo.com
Currently the only internal parts actually for sale are RAM, a subset of the SSDs, and the heatsink. I can't wait until I can buy some replacement parts for my framework laptop from their marketplace, but that day is definitely not here yet.
Not yet, no (though I'd love a different keyboard). But the slightly paraphrased conversation I'm replying to is:
"Framework laptop lets you buy parts"
"They don't sell parts yet though"
"Yes they do, see the marketplace"
When in fact the marketplace is almost entirely populated with placeholders, and they do not yet sell replacements for the vast majority of parts (including the battery, which to me is the "killer feature").
This is oversimplified if not wrong. You make it sound something like Lenovo bought the ThinkPad brand long after IBM stopped making them.
They bought all the know how, engineers, a full rnd lab iirc. The first couple generations of Lenovo ThinkPads were very similar if not indistinguishable from the IBM ones, and I agree with most people here that even current models are still among the best laptops you can get.
I dont know I used both IBM Thinkpads, and Lenovo ThinkPad's including current gen.
I do not find Lenovo ThinkPads to be any worse than the business offers from Dell, or HP. In some ways they are better, in some ways there are worse
I would avoid the non-Think* lines, as just like with the Consumer lines of Dell they suck...
They did introduce a Think branded L line recently, these I are approaching that consumer level branded as business line, but the T and P series are still very good IMO
> And let's not forget the excellent Linux support on the thinkpad line (partially thanks to Ubuntu?).
From what I heard, mostly thanks to thankless employees at Red Hat who get these machines for work and batter them into submission (by reverse-engineering the hardware and writing device drivers). Lenovo only deserves the middle finger here.
That relationship has become a lot better over the years. We get early access to new hardware, Lenovo did a lot to get fwupd integrated, etc.
No OEM preload necessary on the business line machines. RHEL/Fedora installs just fine OOTB. Some problems remain, especially with Thunderbolt (docking stations) but that’s not just Lenovos fault, IMHO.
It's not a monolithic solid entity, is it? As I see it, those doing actual work deserve praise and respect (Red Hat does a lot of kernel and low-level plumbing work), while management is… typical management. Same as Mozilla and some other companies.
Never had a P, but had my hands on recent Ts and Xs and they're definitely an order of magnitude worse than their respective ancestors. They're much harder to crack open and replace parts (some even have RAM soldered to the motherboard!), the shell is much more fragile, and there's so many tiny hardware failures that they're hard to list... my two favorites:
- something with the internal speakers/cables preventing it from making sound in a pseudo-random way (some positioning of the computer reliably triggers it, but there's no reliable position to have sound)
- lid detection sensor going crazy and putting systems to sleep because the screen has just moved a little... i can't explain to you how confused was the person who came to me with this problem that the laptop was going to sleep automatically and thought it was haunted or virused :) (and of course no BIOS option to disable the faulty sensor, we had to disable sleep mode on the OS)
Even the modern Ts (professional series) don't have a CDROM drive anymore. Being able to replace it with a second SSD/HDD was definitely a cool feature.
> Even the modern Ts (professional series) don't have a CDROM drive anymore.
Missing a DVD drive I * might* be able to understand, but CD-ROM? That ship has sailed, latest with universal support for USB boot or booting via network, IMHO.
This is all true, however my comments was comparing them to modern competitors on the market today, not the older ThinkPad which IMO is an unfair comparion and it unlikely IBM would have continued or been any different in the modern market as customers are demanding lighter, thinner laptops and have generally not rejected non-repairable non-upgradable options
Every major laptop vendor is going to the soldered ram, non-repairable, units. I dont like it, but to say "Lenovo is trash" because of that but then not acknowledge that Dell, HP,Apple, Microsoft, etc are all the same way is deceptive
Soldered RAM is smaller and cheaper. Optical drives are comparatively huge. These things are all reasonable trade-offs.
Also, you can still use a second drive; I have the NVME drive and added a 3.5" SSD I had lying around. Not all models have that obviously, but not all models had the UltraBay either.
The nice thing about the x220 at least when I got mine was that they where retired fleet laptops so you could get them dirt cheap and throw a few new components in them. I dread the day that the CPU and graphics are finally truly obsolete...
i think the fact that people associate Lenovo “thinkpads” with quality products says a lot about how much “mojo” the ibm “thinkpad” brand had. and in hindsight that ibm > lenovo deal was a bad deal for ibm.
I think it's an indicator of how bad other brands are. I bought my first Thinkpad in 2019 and (with the exception that its battery is internal) like it way more than my previous HP (1), Dell (1 personal/3 work), and Asus (2) laptops.
> in hindsight that ibm > lenovo deal was a bad deal for ibm.
IBM got out of an industry they didn't want to be in, but they still have a lot of positive brand feelings, and a large stake in Lenovo (not sure if they still hold that). Where's the bad for IBM?
They sold off their PC server line to Lenovo about a decade later, so clearly the first deal wasn't too bad.
IBM seems to want to focus on Enterprise, so getting rid of things that individuals use, while still having relationships to sell them (because individuals exist in the enterprise), seems to work for them. After IBM bought SoftLayer, Lenovo servers started showing up instead of SuperMicro.
