And now we have yet another reason to dislike Lenovo

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Here is another Louis Rossmann video where he goes off on a phone made by Motorola and sold by Lenovo. (Warning! Louis' language gets really raw in this rant although he does make very valid points about how low Lenovo has sunk.)

The issue here is less about this one product and more of being another example how Lenovo is making their products more restrictive, cheating their customers in the process (more or less becoming another Apple). Yes, Lenovo made some good products in the past; I've had a couple of them and recommended them. They probably still have some that are good. The problem with them started with the installation of Superfish, an advertising program that may have also included malware and spyware and was difficult to remove, then DRMing the batteries of some of their laptops/notebooks that prevented the use of aftermarket batteries even after Lenovo no longer sold those batteries, then "advising" people that buying used computers is dangerous because they might have malware on them, and now the abomination that Rossmann crudely rants about in his latest video. I wonder what else will surface.

Just because a company has made good products and provided good customer service in the past doesn't mean they will always make good products and have good customer service. I used to be a Samsung SSD fan girl (but not for the rest of their products other than the Gusto flip phone I had) because they were reliable and Samsung provided good customer service. Sadly, that has changed.

The decline started when their Pro series SSDs changed from being MLC to TLC with the 980s, resulting in reduced write life and poor data retention as the number of writes remaining went down with use. Granted, the TBWs were still high enough that it is unlikely most people would ever exhaust them but it was still a reduction from the previous level of quality. Adding insult to injury, the first 980s were buggy and needed to get a firmware upgrade to avoid bricking them after being in use for a short while (some of the 970 EVO Plus models had a similar issue).

Then 990s came out with the same kind of bug in the firmware that had to be reflashed to avoid bricking them. You would think that they would have been watching for this after the 980 fiasco.

Their customer service has also plummeted. Even the website has gone downhill. I'll spare you the details since I believe I've made my point.

Other companies—not just computer companies—that used to put out good products and provide good customer service have gone downhill while others that used to be bad have cleaned up their act. The point of this thread is not to violate any sacred cows; it's to point out that Lenovo, despite having had a good reputation for good products and customer service in the past is no longer that company. And Lenovo, and other companies like them, will continue to cheat us until we spread the word about them and vote with our feet and wallets.

Please don't get this thread shut down by violating forum rules when discussing this issue. Just stay on the topic—the decline of Lenovo and, maybe, other companies with similar problems—and keep personalities out of it.

[AndyMH]

I've always been a fan of lenovo, but in that context a new laptop to me would be a second-hand T490. I've no idea what their latest thinkpads are like and I would never buy any of their consumer grade hardware (same applies to any other manufacturer).

[MurphCID]

You know the T490's look pretty nice, and if you get one with 24gb of memory even better. The early X1 Carbons also look nice as well, although you cannot replace ram since it is soldered on the motherboard.

[Peter Linu]

The decline and fall of the world...

In every area, there are more companies producing stuff than the world will EVER need. This competition results in quality being sacrificed at the alter of profit. And yet noone plants trees or closes coal mines.

[TitForTat]

Well, I do agree to some aspects. He is right with the customer service. But Lenovo as a corporation aims quite heavily on corporate customers, ordering devices in the hundrets or thousands. In that environment, they even send IT staff with spare parts and spare laptops (at least in my old firm where I worked in the past). These huge customers are Lenovo's bread and butter. It's a shame that customer service for maybe smaller businesses or private individuals suck. That should be equally as important. But most of the time the business decision goes there, where the money is. The most recent example is the aquisition of VMWare by Broadcom and pushing prices so high, that even small businesses can't affort it. Their support is just not worth the hassle, so smaller customers get sacrificed in order to sqeeze more money out of bigger customers that can drop that kind of dough Broadcom is asking.

I was also looking forward to their new T14 Gen5 model, because they return to let users replace/upgrade parts again. Quite strange to promote sustainablity on one hand and their anti consumer behaviour on the other.

Just to clarify, I do not defend Lenovo here! But such behaviours seem to be a common thing amongst big corporations now. Therefore, I am less surprised.