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Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025
- some_random 3y agoFantastic 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.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoThere 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.
- bzzzt 3y agoYeah, 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 ;) )
- jonfw 3y agoworks 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
- nicolaslem 3y agoLenovo, Dell and HP still have lines of business laptops with user-serviceable parts, space parts available, repair guides on Youtube...
- AraceliHarker 3y ago"(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" https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/microsofts-panos-panay-explains-balancing-surface-keeping-oems-happy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/microsofts-panos-panay-expla...
- vacuity 3y agoNow 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.
- dmoy 3y agoWhat 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.
- bsmith 3y agoWhat's wrong with the Fairphone?
- Uvix 3y agoFairphone is repairable but not upgradable.
- LeonenTheDK 3y agoNot 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.
- lovegrenoble 3y agoreparing and upgrading please
- internetter 3y agoGoing full circle on that thinkpad line, are we?
- ReptileMan 3y agoBack 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.
- pjmlp 3y agoPC was the exception during the 16bit days, and it was due to IBM failing to prevent clones that it happened in first place. Most non technical users see their computers the same way as a DVD player.
- freedomben 3y agoI 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.
- leonheld 3y agoThank you Right to Repair and thank you Framework!
- g8oz 3y agoI'd settle for them honoring their warranty.
- ireallywantthat 3y agoHaha! Why isn't this by default? Why is this even non-default?
- fortran77 3y agoI 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.
- a3w 3y agoI tried to replace my wireless card in my T440s. For a decade, Lenovo mostly forbids these upgrade via whitelisting in Thinkpads. Hello, other vendors...
- throwway120385 3y agoIt 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.
- manishsharan 3y agoI 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.
- duped 3y agoThis 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.
- foooorsyth 3y agoI’m out of the loop. Is this sentiment due to Chinese ownership or previous mishaps? Both?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- intalentive 3y agoDoesn’t every CPU have a state-enforced back door? I assume no device is secure.
- duped 3y agoI'm not really worried about state actors that don't have state sponsored industrial espionage.
- concinds 3y agoThe 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pscoutou 3y agoI suspect Lenovo is being motivated by rumblings from the EU. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023/07/10/council-adopts-new-regulation-on-batteries-and-waste-batteries/ https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2023...
- baz00 3y agoStep 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.
- benoliver999 3y agoOh it's funny you say that, I have a T495 and one of the USB-C ports has stopped working. Luckily there's another one I can charge from but it really feels like a ticking time bomb.
- dmbche 3y agoI don't do a lot of hardware, but they really aren't ? You couldn't remove it and solder another connector in it's place?
- CaveTech 3y agoNope, and it's more and more common. I had to trash a $2k monitor due to faulty USB C connector. They require full board replacement.
- nicolaslem 3y agoAssuming 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.
- jollyllama 3y agoI'm guessing it was 5/5 as of 13 years ago.
- PumpkinSpice 3y agoIsn'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?
- freedomben 3y agoNo. Some lines are definitely better than others (like I only buy the T-series now), but some are on the same level of Apple minus the hardware DRM
- d3w4s9 3y agoSome T series laptops are already using soldered RAM: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/thinkpad-t14s-g2/22tpt14t4s2#tech_specs https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
- isykt 3y agoI 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.
- miragecraft 3y agoI 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.
- sokoloff 3y agoWithout 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.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoOk how about this: "The company hasn't made any design choices with the express purpose of making repair more difficult."
- sokoloff 3y agoI 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.
- bfrog 3y agoMy x220 is endlessly repairable already,what happened was they went the wrong direction in that regard shortly after.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pmarreck 3y agohttps://frame.work/ https://frame.work/ : Already exists
- freedomben 3y agoPrior 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!
- pmarreck 3y agoI have a Framework Laptop 16 on preorder. Removable GPU = both battery savings AND prevention of gaming temptation when I need to work. >..<
- autoexec 3y agoFriendly reminder that Lenovo has repeatedly shipped laptops infested with malware and backdoors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_incidents 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" 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-vulnerabilities-impacting-millions-of-device-users-worldwide/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovo-patches-uefi-vulnerabil... Repairable or not, use Lenovo at your own risk.
- chx 3y agothis is just propaganda that was consumer side Lenovo laptops, IdeaPad and the like 7+ years ago. They learned their lesson and even there don't do it any more. This didn't affect ThinkPads. Every time Lenovo is mentioned someone brings this up and I am thoroughly sick of it.
- vorpalhex 3y agoMy 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.
- miohtama 3y agoLenovo got fined for $3.5M for installing spyware that hijacks HTTPS connections, so it’s a bit stretch to call it propaganda https://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovo-receives-3-5m-fine-for-pre-installing-adware-that-hijacks-https-connections/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovo-receives-3-5m-fine-for-... 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.
- Run_DOS_Run 3y agoLenovo'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.
- nfriedly 3y agoProbably 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!)
- itsoktocry 3y ago>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.
- amalcon 3y agoIt'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.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago"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)_/¯
- pianoben 3y agoLevono 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.
- neogodless 3y agoAnecdote: 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.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago>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.
- southernplaces7 3y agoGiven 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?
- InvisibleUp 3y agoToshiba 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".
- rnk 3y agoThey 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.
- buzzlite 3y agoOn 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).
- beebeepka 3y agoIs 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.
- r053bud 3y agoI'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...
- itsoktocry 3y ago>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...
- verdverm 3y agoThis is why I bought a https://frame.work https://frame.work and am a happy customer. Will do business with them again
- iteratethis 3y agoDon'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.
- d3w4s9 3y agoWell, 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.
- rgreekguy 3y agoBack to the future!
- fumar 3y agoToo 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.
- redder23 3y agoThey 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.
- bubblethink 3y agoJust 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.
- russelg 3y agoIt 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.
- distract8901 3y agoI 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.
- DiabloD3 3y agoAlso Lenovo PC boss: But we're still shipping in-BIOS state sponsored malware. We were caught at least twice, and we're still in business.
- padf 3y agoRepairable by who? With Lenovo vendor locking CPUs on desktops? https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-vendor-locking-ryzen-based-systems-with-amd-psb/ https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-vendor-locking-ryzen-bas...