7 ms·

Gentle reminder that Lenovo jumped the shark quite a while ago. The whole Superfish debacle, the spyware, the crapware, the endless stream of shitty decisions.

by elric 5y ago

Gentle reminder that Lenovo jumped the shark quite a while ago. The whole Superfish debacle, the spyware, the crapware, the endless stream of shitty decisions. Year after year, the hardware gets worse. Customer support gets worse. The sad thing is that they're still better than everything else out there. Which says a lot about the laptop industry in general.

api 5y ago
PC laptops are now budget machines so they compete on price. Anything that competes on price tends to become a deflationary race to the bottom. This is part of why people feel almost stuck with Apple. Their hardware is a lot better than most of the competition, though it comes with a price premium, and while there are privacy concerns they are less than with these shitware-loaded machines. You can also install Linux on them if you really want no telemetry at all, even with M1 Macs.
- gruez 5y ago
  > PC laptops are now budget machines so they compete on price. Anything that competes on price tends to become a deflationary race to the bottom. That really only applies to the consumer line. The thinkpad line is still pretty solid.
  - mhb 5y ago
    > The thinkpad line is still pretty solid. Meh. The trackpoint and keypad on my X1 are far inferior to previous Thinkpads, like the X220, before they decided their overarching mission was to make things as thin as possible. The trackpoint is sometimes unusable and is a chore to use at all times whereas the older ones were fun.
    - NathanielK 5y ago
      FWIW, Intel has been forcing manufacturers hand when it comes to thickness. Since their high performance laptop processors have stagnated on the last decade, they've created programs to encourage thin laptops. Both the old "Intel Ultrabook" and the new "Intel Evo" tightly restrict thickness in the 12-14" laptop segment. I won't give Lenovo a free pass, but it's part of why keytravel and cooling solutions are pretty awful in modern small laptops.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >Both the old "Intel Ultrabook" and the new "Intel Evo" tightly restrict thickness in the 12-14" laptop segment. How do those programs work? Do you need to meet a certain thickness to get called an ultrabook? Why can't manufacturers just opt out and make a notebook without "ultrabook" slapped on it?
        dvdkon 5y ago
        Trademarks. Also, manufacturers might get money from parts makers (the big three mostly) for marketing using their trademarks, which means they need to meet the parts maker's conditions to get "free money".
    - fomine3 5y ago
      You should choose X2xx or T4xx line over X1. X1 is designed to be.
      - mhb 5y ago
        Can you give me a pointer to an X2xx that has a comparable keyboard and trackpoint to the old ones?
        fomine3 5y ago
        Nope. But X2xx/T4xx features still decent keyboard and TrackPoint compared to others including X1. Also you may know ThinkPad 25, that based on T470.
        mhb 5y ago
        Well yeah. I have an X220 and the keyboard and stick are great. I just wish there was an upgrade path to have those along with the nice display and audio of the X1.
  - poetaster 5y ago
    This is why I started a minor cult. The cult of the X220. News at 11. (central)
- 10000truths 5y ago
  There are plenty of 1000$+ laptops you can purchase these days with good specs that compete with Apple’s lineup of MacBooks.
  - elric 5y ago
    Are there? There's Thinkpads, and pretty much nothing else. Everything else either has awful specs, awful hardware, or awful support. And don't even get me started on awful keyboards, those are now almost universal.
    - kcb 5y ago
      Dell XPS and Surface
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        I'm always surprised that the XPS gets so much love. Everything about it felt sub-par to me. I was pretty happy with my surface, while it lasted anyway. Ended up with a defective touch screen that couldn't be replaced, so I just got a full refund (thank you extended warranty).
        Varriount 5y ago
        For me, the big thing I've liked about the XPS is that it has a good balance of powerful hardware, weight, battery life, and looks. I especially enjoy the fact that it has a dedicated graphics card, since usually only gaming laptops have those. The only laptops with comparable specs (gaming laptops) are either too heavy, have poor battery life, or are just plain ugly. That being said, the touchpad on it is just barely "ok"-level and the webcam (on my older model) is just awful. The friction on the touchpad is so high my wrist becomes sore, and the webcam is located on the bottom of the screen (with a microphone on the bottom front edge near the trackpad!). Even though these flaws have required me to switch to a wireless mouse and external webcam, I'm still pretty satisfied. For my next laptop, I'll likely either buy the newest XPS model (the newer ones have webcams at a usable position), or try the Razor again (the one I previously tried had quite a small battery life). (I would love to know the series of events that led a high-end laptop to have a webcam placed at a position that is only optimal for looking up one's nose.)
- lrem 5y ago
  > PC laptops are now budget machines so they compete on price. My Surface Pro was a hair below $2000. I was also considering a Lenovo X1 Yoga that was well above $2000. You sure that's competition on price?
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    I guess one could claim "companies that compete on price in some large section of the market form internal dysfunctions that cannot be reliably walled off from the parts of the companies that produce high-end products". Indeed, there's always a suspicion, perhaps reasonable, when mass-market companies produce luxury products, e.g., McDonald's McCafe or Ford sports cars. Some such companies often try to avoid this, with limited success, using separate branding.
    - lrem 5y ago
      That's a good argument. On the other hand, that's a bit counter my experience. Working in a large company, I feel like walls keep emerging spontaneously and piercing through them is the bit that requires work. Often people inside the company cannot tell apart two teams working on related things, but the teams just won't talk to each other. Much less allow any kind of convergence to happen.
      - dTal 5y ago
        The "convergence" may happen at a level of the management structure that isn't visible to the rank-and-file worker, but rather several "layers of abstraction" up in the realm of budgetary and policy decisions. For example, a "budget laptop" company that doesn't place a high priority on high quality UEFI firmware isn't going to suddenly spin up a top-tier embedded team just because they decided to make a "premium" product - it might not even occur to them as something they need to spend more effort on.
sneak 5y ago
> The sad thing is that they're still better than everything else out there. They haven't ever been better than Apple laptop hardware, even in Intel-land. There seems to be this common bias in PC laptop evaluation that excludes Apple machines from consideration when doing comparisons. Apple makes the best x64 laptops, and has for years. Sadly, they will stop soon.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  "They haven't ever been better than Apple laptop hardware, even in Intel-land" Except of course for the monumentally defective and offensive keyboards Apple saddled its customers with for FIVE YEARS. And there are the soldered-in SSDs and RAM now, and glued-together chassis. And the hodgepodge of laptop & desktop parts crammed into the iMac to make it "thinner," which is absolutely asinine in a desktop computer.
- fffad6ca80dcc 5y ago
  I have always liked the keyboard more. My opinion is that Apple prioritizes how the keyboard looks and how thin it is over the actual function and experience of using it. It blows my mind that people buy their desktop keyboard which is basically a laptop keyboard in small case. I believe the ability to repair or swap components has always been better with Lenovo. Apple beats Lenovo in a lot of other ways though, audio quality being one that I personally experienced. On my old T430s the speakers were so bad I wished they had just not included them at all. They were like the speakers in those talking greeting cards.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    Finding a good Mac-layout mechanical keyboard that I liked was a total chore, I eventually got the Vinpok Taptek which I'm really pleased with but I can't find replacement keycaps for the life of me.
    - grincho 5y ago
      One good source of Mac mechanicals is Matias, e.g. https://matias.ca/quietpro/mac/ https://matias.ca/quietpro/mac/. In fact, it's the only company I've found that makes a true Mac layout: that is, a full symmetric set of command, option, and control keys on each side.
linuxhansl 5y ago
I run a recent X1 Extreme (Gen 2) with Fedora as OS and aside from the the weird naming have zero complaints about it.
- flatiron 5y ago
  Lenovo still wins in regards to Linux compatibility. I don’t even really check anymore before buying one for friends and family.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
neogodless 5y ago
Anecdote: Over the past few years, I've owned an Asus laptop (thin/light), two Lenovo laptops, and an HP. Before that, a large Dell gaming laptop. Most recently, I had bought the HP Omen 15, but realizing that the screen used PWM below 100% brightness, I sold it and bought a Lenovo Legion 5. The previous Lenovo is a Y540. The Y540 is arguably "good but not great" build quality. If you squint, it looks kind of like there could be a slight curve to the bottom of the monitor where the two side hinges support it. The Legion 5 is really well built. No unusual give, very smooth running fans, etc. It's also been super reliable, better than expected battery - really nothing to complain about. Now I imagine if you spend $2-3k on laptops, you probably think these $1k laptops are garbage quality, but they seem better than the HP Omen 15, and certainly better than the Asus and the $1700 Dell I bought 8 years ago.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > realizing that the screen used PWM below 100% brightness Isn't that the normal way to dim an LED? Was the frequency too low, or what was the issue?
  - neogodless 5y ago
    Some screens use DC dimming. It isn't an issue for most people, but post-concussion I've had to be pickier about screens. The HP gave me a headache with the 200Hz PWM. The Legion lets me use brightness levels other than 100% without a headache!
  - dvdkon 5y ago
    Yes, it's about the frequency and filtering. Some screens use ridiculously low switching frequencies that mean the resulting signal can't be filtered out with anything that would fit in a thin laptop.
- trynewideas 5y ago
  I had a bad run of three Lenovo laptops and gave up on the brand completely after years of being an IBM/ThinkPad fan: a ThinkPad P40 (pen digitizer and power connector failures), a Yoga 720 15" (SSD, touch digitizer, and internal wi-fi failed), and a Legion 7 (known hinge design issue leading to failure). I know the Legion 5 is good, which is why I (foolishly) thought the Legion 7 would also be good. It's the inconsistency within and across their product lines, and their god-awful depot support, that's made it a game of Russian Roulette to buy a Lenovo device — some people still swear by them because they either luck into, or do the deep research to find, the very specific models within certain lines that aren't failure-prone. The 720 and Legion 7 failed within weeks, not months, and the 720 went to the depot twice and had at least one repeat or new failure within weeks after returning each time. The P40 broke my heart the worst, though, because it had every feature I wanted and I paid through the nose for it thinking it'd be a 5-year device, minimum. It didn't make it to 2, couldn't get a refund, and didn't have the heart to sell it even for parts. The 720 and Legion, though, failed so quickly that I got refunds from their retailers; I couldn't possibly resell them, and with the Legion 7 in particular I wasn't going to gamble with their depot service rejecting warranty coverage for the fault as people were reporting on Lenovo's own forums, and especially after the touch digitizer failed after the _second_ depot service for the 720.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I'll stick my neck out and say I'm a big fan of Asus. I've got a zenbook 14, and it's tough of nails. Have dropped it so many times on hard surfaces and it's still trucking along.
- thefunnyman 5y ago
  I’ve never used an asus laptop, but I’ve had a really bad time with their customer support when trying to get a motherboard replaced under warranty.

by elric 5y ago

api 5y ago

PC laptops are now budget machines so they compete on price. Anything that competes on price tends to become a deflationary race to the bottom. This is part of why people feel almost stuck with Apple. Their hardware is a lot better than most of the competition, though it comes with a price premium, and while there are privacy concerns they are less than with these shitware-loaded machines. You can also install Linux on them if you really want no telemetry at all, even with M1 Macs.

gruez 5y ago
> PC laptops are now budget machines so they compete on price. Anything that competes on price tends to become a deflationary race to the bottom. That really only applies to the consumer line. The thinkpad line is still pretty solid.
- mhb 5y ago
  > The thinkpad line is still pretty solid. Meh. The trackpoint and keypad on my X1 are far inferior to previous Thinkpads, like the X220, before they decided their overarching mission was to make things as thin as possible. The trackpoint is sometimes unusable and is a chore to use at all times whereas the older ones were fun.
  - NathanielK 5y ago
    FWIW, Intel has been forcing manufacturers hand when it comes to thickness. Since their high performance laptop processors have stagnated on the last decade, they've created programs to encourage thin laptops. Both the old "Intel Ultrabook" and the new "Intel Evo" tightly restrict thickness in the 12-14" laptop segment. I won't give Lenovo a free pass, but it's part of why keytravel and cooling solutions are pretty awful in modern small laptops.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Both the old "Intel Ultrabook" and the new "Intel Evo" tightly restrict thickness in the 12-14" laptop segment. How do those programs work? Do you need to meet a certain thickness to get called an ultrabook? Why can't manufacturers just opt out and make a notebook without "ultrabook" slapped on it?
      - dvdkon 5y ago
        Trademarks. Also, manufacturers might get money from parts makers (the big three mostly) for marketing using their trademarks, which means they need to meet the parts maker's conditions to get "free money".
  - fomine3 5y ago
    You should choose X2xx or T4xx line over X1. X1 is designed to be.
    - mhb 5y ago
      Can you give me a pointer to an X2xx that has a comparable keyboard and trackpoint to the old ones?
      - fomine3 5y ago
        Nope. But X2xx/T4xx features still decent keyboard and TrackPoint compared to others including X1. Also you may know ThinkPad 25, that based on T470.
        mhb 5y ago
        Well yeah. I have an X220 and the keyboard and stick are great. I just wish there was an upgrade path to have those along with the nice display and audio of the X1.
- poetaster 5y ago
  This is why I started a minor cult. The cult of the X220. News at 11. (central)
10000truths 5y ago
There are plenty of 1000$+ laptops you can purchase these days with good specs that compete with Apple’s lineup of MacBooks.
- elric 5y ago
  Are there? There's Thinkpads, and pretty much nothing else. Everything else either has awful specs, awful hardware, or awful support. And don't even get me started on awful keyboards, those are now almost universal.
  - kcb 5y ago
    Dell XPS and Surface
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      I'm always surprised that the XPS gets so much love. Everything about it felt sub-par to me. I was pretty happy with my surface, while it lasted anyway. Ended up with a defective touch screen that couldn't be replaced, so I just got a full refund (thank you extended warranty).
      - Varriount 5y ago
        For me, the big thing I've liked about the XPS is that it has a good balance of powerful hardware, weight, battery life, and looks. I especially enjoy the fact that it has a dedicated graphics card, since usually only gaming laptops have those. The only laptops with comparable specs (gaming laptops) are either too heavy, have poor battery life, or are just plain ugly. That being said, the touchpad on it is just barely "ok"-level and the webcam (on my older model) is just awful. The friction on the touchpad is so high my wrist becomes sore, and the webcam is located on the bottom of the screen (with a microphone on the bottom front edge near the trackpad!). Even though these flaws have required me to switch to a wireless mouse and external webcam, I'm still pretty satisfied. For my next laptop, I'll likely either buy the newest XPS model (the newer ones have webcams at a usable position), or try the Razor again (the one I previously tried had quite a small battery life). (I would love to know the series of events that led a high-end laptop to have a webcam placed at a position that is only optimal for looking up one's nose.)
lrem 5y ago
> PC laptops are now budget machines so they compete on price. My Surface Pro was a hair below $2000. I was also considering a Lenovo X1 Yoga that was well above $2000. You sure that's competition on price?
- jessriedel 5y ago
  I guess one could claim "companies that compete on price in some large section of the market form internal dysfunctions that cannot be reliably walled off from the parts of the companies that produce high-end products". Indeed, there's always a suspicion, perhaps reasonable, when mass-market companies produce luxury products, e.g., McDonald's McCafe or Ford sports cars. Some such companies often try to avoid this, with limited success, using separate branding.
  - lrem 5y ago
    That's a good argument. On the other hand, that's a bit counter my experience. Working in a large company, I feel like walls keep emerging spontaneously and piercing through them is the bit that requires work. Often people inside the company cannot tell apart two teams working on related things, but the teams just won't talk to each other. Much less allow any kind of convergence to happen.
    - dTal 5y ago
      The "convergence" may happen at a level of the management structure that isn't visible to the rank-and-file worker, but rather several "layers of abstraction" up in the realm of budgetary and policy decisions. For example, a "budget laptop" company that doesn't place a high priority on high quality UEFI firmware isn't going to suddenly spin up a top-tier embedded team just because they decided to make a "premium" product - it might not even occur to them as something they need to spend more effort on.

sneak 5y ago

> The sad thing is that they're still better than everything else out there. They haven't ever been better than Apple laptop hardware, even in Intel-land. There seems to be this common bias in PC laptop evaluation that excludes Apple machines from consideration when doing comparisons. Apple makes the best x64 laptops, and has for years. Sadly, they will stop soon.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago
"They haven't ever been better than Apple laptop hardware, even in Intel-land" Except of course for the monumentally defective and offensive keyboards Apple saddled its customers with for FIVE YEARS. And there are the soldered-in SSDs and RAM now, and glued-together chassis. And the hodgepodge of laptop & desktop parts crammed into the iMac to make it "thinner," which is absolutely asinine in a desktop computer.
fffad6ca80dcc 5y ago
I have always liked the keyboard more. My opinion is that Apple prioritizes how the keyboard looks and how thin it is over the actual function and experience of using it. It blows my mind that people buy their desktop keyboard which is basically a laptop keyboard in small case. I believe the ability to repair or swap components has always been better with Lenovo. Apple beats Lenovo in a lot of other ways though, audio quality being one that I personally experienced. On my old T430s the speakers were so bad I wished they had just not included them at all. They were like the speakers in those talking greeting cards.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Finding a good Mac-layout mechanical keyboard that I liked was a total chore, I eventually got the Vinpok Taptek which I'm really pleased with but I can't find replacement keycaps for the life of me.
  - grincho 5y ago
    One good source of Mac mechanicals is Matias, e.g. https://matias.ca/quietpro/mac/ https://matias.ca/quietpro/mac/. In fact, it's the only company I've found that makes a true Mac layout: that is, a full symmetric set of command, option, and control keys on each side.

linuxhansl 5y ago

I run a recent X1 Extreme (Gen 2) with Fedora as OS and aside from the the weird naming have zero complaints about it.

flatiron 5y ago
Lenovo still wins in regards to Linux compatibility. I don’t even really check anymore before buying one for friends and family.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

neogodless 5y ago

Anecdote: Over the past few years, I've owned an Asus laptop (thin/light), two Lenovo laptops, and an HP. Before that, a large Dell gaming laptop. Most recently, I had bought the HP Omen 15, but realizing that the screen used PWM below 100% brightness, I sold it and bought a Lenovo Legion 5. The previous Lenovo is a Y540. The Y540 is arguably "good but not great" build quality. If you squint, it looks kind of like there could be a slight curve to the bottom of the monitor where the two side hinges support it. The Legion 5 is really well built. No unusual give, very smooth running fans, etc. It's also been super reliable, better than expected battery - really nothing to complain about. Now I imagine if you spend $2-3k on laptops, you probably think these $1k laptops are garbage quality, but they seem better than the HP Omen 15, and certainly better than the Asus and the $1700 Dell I bought 8 years ago.

Dylan16807 5y ago
> realizing that the screen used PWM below 100% brightness Isn't that the normal way to dim an LED? Was the frequency too low, or what was the issue?
- neogodless 5y ago
  Some screens use DC dimming. It isn't an issue for most people, but post-concussion I've had to be pickier about screens. The HP gave me a headache with the 200Hz PWM. The Legion lets me use brightness levels other than 100% without a headache!
- dvdkon 5y ago
  Yes, it's about the frequency and filtering. Some screens use ridiculously low switching frequencies that mean the resulting signal can't be filtered out with anything that would fit in a thin laptop.
trynewideas 5y ago
I had a bad run of three Lenovo laptops and gave up on the brand completely after years of being an IBM/ThinkPad fan: a ThinkPad P40 (pen digitizer and power connector failures), a Yoga 720 15" (SSD, touch digitizer, and internal wi-fi failed), and a Legion 7 (known hinge design issue leading to failure). I know the Legion 5 is good, which is why I (foolishly) thought the Legion 7 would also be good. It's the inconsistency within and across their product lines, and their god-awful depot support, that's made it a game of Russian Roulette to buy a Lenovo device — some people still swear by them because they either luck into, or do the deep research to find, the very specific models within certain lines that aren't failure-prone. The 720 and Legion 7 failed within weeks, not months, and the 720 went to the depot twice and had at least one repeat or new failure within weeks after returning each time. The P40 broke my heart the worst, though, because it had every feature I wanted and I paid through the nose for it thinking it'd be a 5-year device, minimum. It didn't make it to 2, couldn't get a refund, and didn't have the heart to sell it even for parts. The 720 and Legion, though, failed so quickly that I got refunds from their retailers; I couldn't possibly resell them, and with the Legion 7 in particular I wasn't going to gamble with their depot service rejecting warranty coverage for the fault as people were reporting on Lenovo's own forums, and especially after the touch digitizer failed after the _second_ depot service for the 720.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

I'll stick my neck out and say I'm a big fan of Asus. I've got a zenbook 14, and it's tough of nails. Have dropped it so many times on hard surfaces and it's still trucking along.

thefunnyman 5y ago
I’ve never used an asus laptop, but I’ve had a really bad time with their customer support when trying to get a motherboard replaced under warranty.