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Lenovo exec promises 80% of its devices will be consumer-repairable by 2025
- rovr138 3y ago> “More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer,” Lenovo executive Luca Rossi told the Canalys EMEA Forum 2023, according to The Register. > “Batteries, SSD, many things will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste,” he reportedly said. I guess something's something.
- ilikehurdles 3y agoLaptop like it's 1995-2014 all over again.
- stkdump 3y agoIt's not like you will be able to upgrade the CPU. Even RAM isn't mentioned.
- yesbut 3y agoI never got how we all just accepted non-user replaceable battery devices with phones, laptops, and tablets. The main reason why people replace those devices is the battery. Its so eco of them.
- nvy 3y agoBecause the repairable laptops were Thinkpad-class devices which weighed quite a bit and had fucking terrible touchpads. When slim Ultrabooks (or whatever they were called) started appearing, those of us who actually use our laptops like a laptop (i.e. we take them places) loved how thin and light they were. Imagine fitting more than just your laptop into a backpack!
- PeterStuer 3y agoIt's perfectly possible to have slim ultrabooks with replacable batteries. We used to have phones with replaceable batteries that were thinner than than even current gen laptops.
- modo_mario 3y agoThe hell do touchpads have to do with this? Besides, the T430 had one of if not the best touchpad I ever used.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThe question was: how did we accept this change? Answer: laptops that were non-repairable were far better in various ways. Now we've got good at all those things, the next step might be reintroducing owner-replaceability of batteries etc, but there's no point pretending a lot of people didn't prefer the advantages of the sealed ones.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoWe don't, or we didn't all accept it. It was forced upon us, due to the masses not giving a f. The masses are just so uninformed, that they would rather throw cash out every 2 years (if not shorter) to buy a new device. The manufacturers of course like that behavior and reinforce it. The sheer masses of uninformed people create a huge incentive for them to continue this way.
- mouse_ 3y agoIn the past, I replaced the keyboard on (if I recall correctly) an x260. This involved a 30-minute tutorial on unscrewing several dozen differently sized screws, taking apart the device in its entirety from the bottom, removing the motherboard, removing more body fixtures, and finally pulling the keyboard out. Through the bottom. Recently, I looked up the process for doing the same on the x13 gen 2, released fairly recently. https://download.lenovo.com/lts/RTPW12C0/FOF/RTPW12C0-ThinkPadX13Gen2_FRU_01_Keyboard.mp4 https://download.lenovo.com/lts/RTPW12C0/FOF/RTPW12C0-ThinkP... You take two screws out of the bottom and the keyboard pops off. That's it. Fucking incredible if I do say so myself. Especially considering they achieved this WHILE ALSO making the device thinner and sleeker. It's a nice surprise to see some things becoming -more- repairable.
- greenyoda 3y agoBig discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37778771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37778771
- dlgeek 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37778771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37778771
- jtokoph 3y agoWhat will it take to consider a device repairable? Will it count if a laptop has 1 or 2 parts that can be user replaced? (Like swapping a keyboard key cap...) What if they have two tiers of a device class. Where the base tier has 4 nearly identical models with different skus that are repairable, and a premium tier with 1 sku that is not repairable. Does that count as 80%?
- bman_kg 3y agoAt least there's some kind of effort to make devices customer repairable...maybe it will get popular and other companies also will shift to such model or production
- mrweasel 3y agoUnless they can also promise that their devices will be built without Uyghur slave labor, I don't see this change my position on never buying Lenovo.
- herbst 3y agoAre there any technical devices that can promise that?
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoSupply chain issues include children mining cobalt, slave labour used in fast fashion clothing, slave labour used in producing many foods, Nestle recently admitted to having it in inlt's supply chain. And avocados financing dangerous mafia. Basically my point is, as a consumer it's not really possible to compare two companies, say Lenovo and Acer, and see which supply chain is 'cleaner'
- est 3y agowhat would you buy instead? Halal laptops?
- throwaway2990 3y agoThey are already repairable. The issue is getting the parts. Tho not impossible. If they make that easier it’s win win!
- sacnoradhq 3y agoLenovo Thinkpads were already on the side of repairability, but that declined after the Apple cargo-culting that began around the time of the T470. The T480 had dual batteries, 1 removable and 1 internal. The T490 was even more enshitified with only 1 internal battery and a lower runtime.
- Taek 3y agoI really miss the replaceable battery of my old Thinkpad. I had high regard for Lenovo for a long time, but somewhere around 2017 or so (wasn't buying laptops that often, I'm not sure what year it started) they really declined, and now Thinkpads feel like cheap plastic crapware with low customizability and a bunch of locked down components. What frustrates me is that I bought 3 of them after they started to decline because I trusted the brand so much. My consecutive disappointments is one of the main reasons I no longer trust corporations or branding anymore.
- herbst 3y agoSwitched from a T420s to a T480s and now I really don't know what's next because I definitely lost any trust in Lenovo
- znpy 3y agoFramework laptops? I'll likely get a framework as my next laptop. I'll accept the lack of a trackpoint, but at least i'll get a laptop i can trust for some years to come.
- rjh29 3y agoI did the same thing and although it seems like a trackpoint is essential, trackpads are really good now and there isn't a huge difference imo.
- herbst 3y agoAren't there heat issues? I really like their models but I am already annoyed from the heat of my t480s (using it on the sofa a lot)
- okasaki 3y agoSo are they going to be reversing their trend of soldering the ram? Most of their laptops have soldered ram now.
- rfoo 3y agoSoldering the RAM to the board has performance advantages which must be addressed before we reverse the trend. LPCAMM promised similar (only slightly worse than soldered) performance/energy characteristics as soldered LPDDR5X and is said to be launching in 2024 so hopefully we get replaceable RAM back in 3~5 years.
- blkhawk 3y agoThey were soldering RAM on well before there were performance advantages - actually there were often performance disadvantages as the soldered on RAM was often a slower speed tier than what you could get cheaply just a few years later. So the "lets solve that before we can swap-able RAM" argument doesn't really fly. There are also Performance advantages to soldering the ram directly to the CPU die. So make the whole CPU with ram on it swappable then?
- rfoo 3y agoThe industry does not accept regression. It's okay back then cause what you described is not a regression when they happened - "a few years later" doesn't count, most people don't buy laptop for upgradability. For the last two DDR generations, we have: - During the early days of DDR4: (soldered) LPDDR4-3200 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR4-2400 - During the late days of DDR4: (soldered) LPDDR4-4266 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR4-3200 - During the early days of DDR5 (now): (soldered) LPDDR5-7500 vs (socketed) SO-DIMM DDR5-5600 Good luck explaining "ok uh our latest laptop is slower than our last generation but hey you can change the RAM after a few years and it will be faster!" to ordinary users, then.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> The industry does not accept regression In that caae I want my microphone jack returned please, and laptops with A-sized USB ports again.
- cookiengineer 3y agoApple made the same promises. Now we have software-remote-locked parts which, when replaced, won't work unless Apple approves them. [1] I bet laptop manufacturers are on their way implementing parts pairing, and Intel surely is happy to provide a platform for this. [1] https://m.gsmarena.com/iphone_15_pro_max_teardown_on_ifixit_reveals_more_of_the_same_-news-60025.php https://m.gsmarena.com/iphone_15_pro_max_teardown_on_ifixit_...
- christkv 3y agoConsumer and businesses need to vote with their money and buy laptops from framework and others like them. It will force the others to follow suite.
- edwcross 3y agoSomeone please help Framework sell to businesses, otherwise those of us who want but cannot buy them will have to keep buying user-hostile laptops.
- pimterry 3y agoThey just opened "Framework for Business" recently: https://frame.work/framework-for-business https://frame.work/framework-for-business
- sneak 3y agoThe Framework laptops are slow, power hungry, and low resolution, otherwise I would have one. I further assume without any data whatsoever that the speakers are bad (because all non-Apple laptop speakers are bad). Anyone but anyone has a lot of catching up to do with Apple laptops right now.
- Iulioh 3y agoSorry but what the fuck are you talking about Framework has a 2256 by 1504 resolution with the last Intel processors and 55/61wh battery for the 13' version The power hungry is debatable but that's not a framework problem, is an Intel problem Seems that not even HN is safe from Apple fan boys
- PeterStuer 3y agoAnyone know 80% of what? Is that by SKUs, sold or produced device volumes, parts of products, turnover, ...?
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago80% of products is a little vague - even if 95% of Lenovos product SKUs were consumer repairable that could still mean that all laptops and tablets aren't - they make a lot of rack/server/storage/network products. > https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/05/lenovo_pc_boss_4_in/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/05/lenovo_pc_boss_4_in/ "On repairability, we have a plan that by 2025 more than 80 percent of the repair parts will be repaired again so that they they enter into the circular economy to reduce the impact to the environment." He added: "More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer, by the customer or by the channel and we are enabling this with a design for serviceability kind of approach." This means that "batteries, SSD, many things, will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste."
- mulmen 3y agoI’m optimistic. > "batteries, SSD, many things, will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste." Not a lot of servers have sealed batteries or SSDs. It definitely sounds like more consumer/user oriented devices. Servers are already very modular and field serviceable.
- moffkalast 3y agoToo bad that 80% of what Lenovo makes is not really worth buying, especially the low-end stuff. Hopefully this repairable 80% includes the other 20%.
- consp 3y agoSo finally the end of the locked id's requiring a custom bios to get things working?
- ralusek 3y ago> In 2006, the State Department bans Lenovo computers from their network. After MI5 identified “backdoors” and vulnerable firmware in Lenovo products, their computers are banned from the intelligence networks of all Five-Eyes countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States. > The military isn't taking chances. In 2008, Marines stationed in Iraq stopped using Lenovo tech after discovering data was being transmitted back to China. The U.S. Air Force replaced $378 million worth of servers purchased by Lenovo > Lenovo faced uproar when it emerged in 2015 that it had hidden an advert-delivering program made by Superfish on hundreds of thousands of computers
- SilverBirch 3y agoThe title is a mischaracterization of what was said: >More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer, At the customer not by the customer. What they mean by this is that a skilled (and probably approved) technician would be able to carry out a repair on-site. I think it's actually a much more reasonable approach - devices should have a first-class vendor supported route for repair. Outside of that, obviously people should also be free to have a go and repair the device themselves, but there's obvious reasons why that should be at arms-length from the vendor. Personally I already have an X1, I bought it for work, I have the full 5 year support package and it's great, I think it's a totally reasonable compromise. I'm an engineer using this device for work, I don't expect to be cracking it open and fixing it myself when something goes wrong, and I don't expect my employer to tolerate my not working because I don't have the correct tools.
- themoonisachees 3y agoThe distinction is really important. This means that Dell for example is already at this metric, as all their laptops are opened with a few screws and their repair tech just swaps boards and sends the old one for RMA. But in practice this also means that given parts availability, the devices can be successfully fixed by consumers. as an IT guy who worked in a lab full of dell laptops, i sometimes did the odd repair and dell would just send me the part overnight, i'd swap the part and put the old one in the box and a courrier would pick it up day of. Say what you will about the quality of their computers, but their repair program is extremely efficient for the consumer, and because they won't spend too much money training proximity technicians, they engineer their products to be easily fixable.
- Netcob 3y agoIt's definitely much better than Apple, which will put a lot of work into preventing anyone but themselves being able to repair Apple hardware. If a third-party technician gets the means to repair a laptop, without any pseudo-franchising shenanigans, that's worth a lot nowadays. Still, if they want something to brag about, they should imitate Framework...
- 3y ago
- strangejonathan 3y agoHello Guys! I'm a founder in the electronics repair space. I have been building XiRepair.com since highschool. We are in the trenches when it comes to conversations with OEMs surrounding the reparability of products. I did a recent talk that is published on https://jonathanjstrange.com/the-future-of-repair/ https://jonathanjstrange.com/the-future-of-repair/ regarding the future of electronics repair. If you are interested in this subject I highly suggest you give it a read. Also hit my inbox if you have any questions regarding this fast evolving industry. @JonathanStrange
- bitlax 3y agoWhy do people balk at using a Huawei phone but have no problem using Lenovo laptops? Honest question; I've always liked the hardware.
- a96 3y agoMaybe because once upon a time, they were IBM hardware while Huawei was always Huawei.
- up2isomorphism 3y agoBut it was repairable in 2012, like X230. It just needs to do thing it used to do instead of a fake promise.
- NoGravitas 3y agoReject MacBook, return to ThinkPad.
- chakintosh 3y agoCue Lenovo buying Framework within 2 years.