Lenovo also owns the Motorola phone brand, and they’re going to adopt/allow GrapheneOS. I think they know how to grab customers right now, and I honestly like it.
They’re usually also well supported on Linux, and even sell them with Ubuntu and Fedora pre-installed. Generally not a terrible brand.
Is that a good idea for a non tech person* with no Linux experience who absolutely needs to send documents successfully to others the first time without delay or should I just wait until my degree is finished and I am less dependent on document interoperability and have fewer absolute deadlines?
- My level of technical knowledge is here: if a program or usb device isn’t functioning, I know to check the driver, but I always have to look up what the device manager is called. On the other hand, I am capable of looking things up and following simple instructions, which has to count for something.
Not gonna lie, Linux is a pretty big learning curve, but it’s worth it to get away from Apple and (especially) Microslop Winblows. It’s the only OS that respects the user.
IMO switching to Linux as a new user is no harder than switching from Windows to Mac, which I think is something more people can identify with and aren’t afraid of, for the most part.
Couldn’t disagree more. Having to learn how to use the command line to complete basic tasks is a huge learning curve.
i think it heavily depends on the person’s use case. if someone is doing web browsing and maybe making a couple word documents, the learning curve is negligible. also, you dont need to use BASH to do most things, it’s 2026. most anything you can think of, you can do via GUI.
It doesn’t matter what the usecase is if the Wifi or speakers or camera don’t work. Or if all the icons and text are so small as to be nearly impossible to read.
Isnt lenovo the company that used to make the rugged military laptops that actually had Chinese or foreign backdoors installed?
Edit: for those interested https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/government-still-buying-lenovo-laptops
Edit 2 from a quick search. Lenovo laptops have faced allegations of containing backdoor vulnerabilities that could allow unauthorized access to data, particularly concerning military use. These concerns have led to bans on Lenovo products by various intelligence agencies due to potential cybersecurity risks.
 securityaffairs.com Wikipedia
Lenovo Laptops and Backdoor Concerns
Background on Lenovo’s Security Issues
Lenovo, a Chinese technology company, has faced multiple allegations regarding security vulnerabilities in its laptops. These concerns primarily revolve around potential backdoors that could allow unauthorized access to sensitive data.
Notable Incidents
Year Incident Description 2008 U.S. military investigators reported finding backdoored chips in Lenovo motherboards, which allegedly logged keystrokes and transmitted data.
2013Intelligence agencies in the U.S., UK, and Australia banned Lenovo PCs due to backdoor vulnerabilities discovered during testing.
2015The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charged Lenovo for pre-installing adware that created security vulnerabilities, leading to a settlement.
2016The Pentagon warned that Lenovo computers could introduce compromised hardware into the Defense Department.
That’s fucking depressing and SO ironic…
So in order to get more spying machines onto US IT networks, their honey pot is “build a product that is pro consumer”, and it will sell like hotcakes in the IT community.
What a fucking timeline
The shitty aspect is their actually not bad hardware. They last forever and seem to be held in high regards in the tech community but it’s as if people forgot a decade later than their still owned by Chinese. Still banned for security reasons for military use even currently after 20 years. Now the military still supplies them just not for mission critical purposes but for personal devices not govt use.
Wild. Every tech person at some point shills for Lenovo and they do have great things. Just screams Trojan horse to me still. IMO
Nice to see this pop up as Apple announce their 5yr plan to flood the world’s landfills & scrap yards with 8gb fused ram Neo’s.
Hasn’t Apple been soldering everything to the motherboard for ages now?
Oh yeah…for well over a decade. If you’re REALLY lucky the proprietary form factor m.2 is user replaceable and not just sad bits soldered direct to the PCB. (Edit: I really really hate Autoassume, that’s supposed to be “SSD bits”… I’ll leave it as is because it’s funny)
My wife has a 2017 MacBook Air, at some point in the last few years it stopped getting system and security updates. She didn’t notice until she got a pop-up from Chrome saying that her OS is no longer supported. Completely ignored it until around October last year when some websites stopped working and gave an error indicating out of date certificates.
(There’s a lot in those last 3 sentences that is wildly troubling to me…)
Took me from October until mid-January to convince her to TRY Linux. So I went to buy her a new m.2…and paid an extra £20 on top of standard because of the proprietary form factor. Luckily I bought before the major price hikes…got a 256gb m(ac).2 for ~£90. Would have just backed up her files and wiped the original drive but she wanted to be able to switch back to her exact installation if she didn’t like Linux…and the new drive is double the capacity 👍
Just a lil nitpick: article is by iFixit who is a Lenovo business partner. So perhaps less objective than one might hope.
It seems to me that Lenovo’s repairably is more affected by that iFixit partnership than the opposite. I don’t see anything factually wrong or suspicious in the article.
Nevertheless, a conflict of interests is possible.
I agree, but like others have said, it bodes well that they’re open about this in the article
I got a 2nd hand x220 years ago, and it refuses to die. Running cachyOS currently.
My next laptop will certainly be a thinkpad.
There’s a difference between ‘repairable’ and ‘upgradable.’ Most of the comments seem to conflate the two. Lenovo isn’t doing a Framework.
It’s a smart move. Differentiates them from other laptop-makers for corporate IT, who can do the parts swaps themselves. Also smart is associating the brand with iFixit and working to get a 10/10. That’ll be what sets them apart from all the others, at least for the next year or two.
The “upgradability” part in a small laptop is questionable to me, anyway.
The GPU is really compromised in that chassis, as having it in a slot compromises cooling big time, and limits how much power it can use. And while I love upgradable RAM for the CPU… it’d be better if they used faster CAMM modules. Many other brands have upgradable SSDs/WiFi.
Swappable ports are awesome, no question.
…But honestly, I’d rather have a smaller chassis, bigger GPU and better cooling right off the bat, like a Zephyrus chassis. And have it reparable, and make the whole motherboard standardized/swappable, but not compromise the chassis so severely by making it modular.
A think pad t series is not really much harder to take apart than a framework. Just more screws and fewer magnets. The screen is probably an exception however.
That’s his point. It’s similar to framework, but not the same.
Easy repairability is great, truly.
But framework offers more than that, easy repairability AND upgradability, because they offer new upgraded parts with the same compatibility as the old ones, so you can just drop them in.
Lenovo is not yet doing that. Which is fine. Just a noteworthy difference.
I would be curious to see how often people actually upgrade their frameworks.
I agree with their repair stance. It just feels like one of those things people will tell you they want and then never do.
Still maybe the explosion in memory prices will change the incentives and people will start holding things longer. It will be interesting to see.
I’ve been a ThinkPad user for about 4 years now, got a second-hand T470s running Fedora. It’s been an amazing experience! I’m not one for brand loyalty, but (so long as Lenovo doesn’t fuck them up) ThinkPads will always be my first choice for a laptop.
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Ok but how long is it going to be supported? If they abandon the idea its just a particularly expensive regular laptop, even if they keep supporting it you’re locked into ThinkPads ecosystem. It’s not truly repairable until its a standard that doesn’t rely on the benevolence of a single company.
What ecosystem? pretty sure the “ecosystem” is standardized computer parts for thinkpads.
So to go down the bullet point list:
- Swappable battery: I’m going to assume its a generic battery and therefore the best possible option here since I know some (a lot of) laptops have weird proprietary batteries. Point for Thinkpad.
- Industry standard m.2: Even notebooks can do this.
- Easy keyboard replacement: This looks like a lock in? Of the laptops I’ve seen where you can swap the keyboard, which is actually quite a few but in a really dodgy looking way, the keyboards look very different from this. Point for looking WAY easier but might take it away again if this keyboard really is proprietary.
- Swappable memory: I’ll give you that many notebooks solder this in but its easy to find a regular laptop with swappable memory.
- Streamlined display repairs: Much like the keyboard this looks awesome and WAY less jank than normal way you have to do it but it also looks like a proprietary part.
- Modular cooling system: I don’t really know enough to say on this one, most laptops have a cooling system you can take out with similar form factors but I doubt they’d work well with random parts from other machines, then again I doubt this laptop would work well with random parts from other laptops either so your still probably locked into buying the correct one from ThinkPad.
- Modular ports: This is actually pretty awesome, though again where else am I even going to get these modular ports.
Ultimately its still good, the stuff that’s already common has been made way easier and some new options have opened up for repair and replacement, I can’t really blame thinkpad for being the only ones providing this hardware when they’re the only ones making a laptop that would use it in the first place, its still an ecosystem lock in to a degree though even if its not an intentional one. It would be nice to see some competition in the space.
Yes, but if you are running Windows on them, do they still inject Chinese state-sponsored malware into Windows on every boot from UEFI/BIOS storage?
They were caught doing this on several occasions, to the point where Lenovo products are forbidden across significant swaths of the U.S. government and military.
How this hasn’t killed all serious interest is beyond me.
There’s this thing called uninstalling the factory OS and reinstalling with a clean image. If you go a step further you can even get rid of Windows altogether and install Linux.
Source?
One example of many.
You must be new to tech to not remember this. Wasn’t all that long ago.
Not even remotely the same thing OP is claiming. It’s their own windows flavor version with auto start script. It’s bad but not that bad.
Read it again. It occurs even with a full system wipe and re-install from Microsoft-direct media, or even a full hard drive swap. It is wholly independent of what is on the hard drive, the only restriction being that it can only successfully run when injected into Windows.
