In the case of the soldiers in Iraq, China had installed an independent chip specifically for keylogging. I don’t know if replacing the boot loader would even solve that.
Lenovo makes consumer crap with their own brand and they have Think -line of products from the big blue and the latter is pretty much comparable to all the other big players (dell, hp, fujitsu…) on desktop/laptop market. Each have their own annoyances and fuckups and in general if you ask opinion from 3 IT professionals on which brand to buy you’ll get 4-6 answers.
Personally if I’m looking for a laptop I’ll go to pre-leased and refurbished thinkpad. I currently have T465 and for wife I got pretty decent Tsomething from the office for peanuts.
I bought out both a T430 and L480 because of their build quality and stability, and just got a little confused as to whether the opinion changed recently or if they merged divisions.
I was recently provisioned a Dell and… well, I’m not buying that one.
I haven’t paid too much attention on what lenovo is doing lately, but at some point they brought L-series thinkpad-branded laptops on the market which was pretty much garbage. At least in here local stores sold first models of L-series as a ‘thinkpad grade laptops for consumer pricing’ and they were just bad on all fronts, as the L-series was just a competition on a*-brands trying to get their share for sub-300€ (or whatever that was at the time) laptops from your equivalent of walmart riding on the brand which they didn’t build.
Gladly that died out pretty soon and Think* brand is still somewhat strong with their T/W/X models as they used to be when IBM ran the business. Of course they had their own issues too, USB-C docks were garbage with everyone when they started to appear and people at the office still curse on thinkpads for various issues with firmware/hardware/whatever, but in my experience it’s been the same road for all the big players. Dell had a pretty decent sales/support going on at 2010(ish), but their hardware had plenty of problems, HP had pretty good pricing for their hardware a bit later, but they had massive issues with firmware and so on.
I’ve been pretty happy with thinkpads I’ve got since R50 brand new (if I recall correctly) and for me they’ve been available on second hand market in here since that. But that’s just a personal experience, I’ve never been in charge to buy hunderds of anything on IT department at work.
Still rings true a little, their quality is far better than their competitors though. I’ve had a lot less issues with the functionality of lenovo laptops over the crap acer or asus or dell produce.
It kinda became muddled around the X1 Carbon when they decided that thin chasis = better, and then started cutting features
I had to do a battery replacement on the L480. They had top-notch support on what part number to order, video guide on how to properly disassemble the case, remove ribbon cables, etc etc etc. I wish all companies had that kind of support.
the older lenovo models aren’t bad, but the shit they pump out recently is well, shit
They had a Chinese back door in the firmware. Don’t know if that’s still the case. https://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem-to-have-a-bios-level-backdoor.html They’ve had several major (intentional) security flaws over the years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo They had a modified UEFI that allows insecure execution of EXEs. The Lenovo laptops given to US military in Iraq had keyloggers that sent all inputs back to China.
Libreboot ftw
In the case of the soldiers in Iraq, China had installed an independent chip specifically for keylogging. I don’t know if replacing the boot loader would even solve that.
Oh I read it was a backdoored BIOS.
Yeah libreboot would probably not help much then.
There was more than one incident. There’s a whole list of incidents.
coreboot ftw
I thought Lenovo was two different brands, one consumer (terrible) and one corporate (decent). Is that no longer true?
Lenovo makes consumer crap with their own brand and they have Think -line of products from the big blue and the latter is pretty much comparable to all the other big players (dell, hp, fujitsu…) on desktop/laptop market. Each have their own annoyances and fuckups and in general if you ask opinion from 3 IT professionals on which brand to buy you’ll get 4-6 answers.
Personally if I’m looking for a laptop I’ll go to pre-leased and refurbished thinkpad. I currently have T465 and for wife I got pretty decent Tsomething from the office for peanuts.
I bought out both a T430 and L480 because of their build quality and stability, and just got a little confused as to whether the opinion changed recently or if they merged divisions.
I was recently provisioned a Dell and… well, I’m not buying that one.
I haven’t paid too much attention on what lenovo is doing lately, but at some point they brought L-series thinkpad-branded laptops on the market which was pretty much garbage. At least in here local stores sold first models of L-series as a ‘thinkpad grade laptops for consumer pricing’ and they were just bad on all fronts, as the L-series was just a competition on a*-brands trying to get their share for sub-300€ (or whatever that was at the time) laptops from your equivalent of walmart riding on the brand which they didn’t build.
Gladly that died out pretty soon and Think* brand is still somewhat strong with their T/W/X models as they used to be when IBM ran the business. Of course they had their own issues too, USB-C docks were garbage with everyone when they started to appear and people at the office still curse on thinkpads for various issues with firmware/hardware/whatever, but in my experience it’s been the same road for all the big players. Dell had a pretty decent sales/support going on at 2010(ish), but their hardware had plenty of problems, HP had pretty good pricing for their hardware a bit later, but they had massive issues with firmware and so on.
I’ve been pretty happy with thinkpads I’ve got since R50 brand new (if I recall correctly) and for me they’ve been available on second hand market in here since that. But that’s just a personal experience, I’ve never been in charge to buy hunderds of anything on IT department at work.
Still rings true a little, their quality is far better than their competitors though. I’ve had a lot less issues with the functionality of lenovo laptops over the crap acer or asus or dell produce.
It kinda became muddled around the X1 Carbon when they decided that thin chasis = better, and then started cutting features
I had to do a battery replacement on the L480. They had top-notch support on what part number to order, video guide on how to properly disassemble the case, remove ribbon cables, etc etc etc. I wish all companies had that kind of support.
Haven’t really used the older models but the x1c line is decent imo. Also t14. Z line is also good but focuses on different crowd.