Lenovo Caught Installing Adware on New Computers

Incompetance probably. They didn't realise that it would be that much of a bad thing.

I'll add I've witnessed bad mechanical design from Lenovo.

A friend bought a $1000 laptop (U330 touch) from them and a piece of plastic holding a hinge broke. When I looked at it, it was clear that the part could have been 10 times (yes, 10) thicker without adding much weight (about a gram I guess) and probably zero cost.

I find this mistake nearly unacceptable but the evil part comes when you ask for warranty and they tell you that you must have done something wrong, why would a hinge break otherwise? And you accepted the warranty terms, so its their right to say so.

Quality control also was an issue as the laptop first came with a malfunctioning keyboard and a non operating touch screen.

So yeah, now is not a good time to buy anything from Lenovo.

I've used both Bootcamp and Fusion for running Windows 8 and 7 (client insisted on using some Excel files, and some of the plugins only worked on Windows Excel...) and found both really quite pain free. In fact, whenever I can't get away with OpenOffice, I just use Fusion/Excel as a standalone app.

In fact Fusion on the MBPr was the first VM app I used that didn't suck; I used to run various VMs in VirtualBox on the XPS which had, in theory, the same specs and a better CPU and the lag was worse than ssh into a server on the other side of the world (not to mention the overheating)...

I hear you on moving away from Linux. You do get a feel, often, that OSX is consumer oriented and just "gets in the way". On the upside, when you need stuff, you can usually find it quickly and it just "works". That's the ecosystem. Still, if I was to go back, it would STILL be on a mac. One of my former colleagues wiped OSX and installed http://nixos.org/, so I'm sure a more popular distro would work out.

The thing is, well, this will sound like every other Apple addict out there, but, the hardware quality really makes a difference, and it is quite hard to explain. The MBPr is the first machine I've ever used that feels "perfect", as if they got everything right. And with most of my work done on the cloud anyway, I didn't need absolute top line specs; portability and things like battery life mattered more. Amongst the other machines in the house is an X230, which I wanted to get and boost instead of the XPS, but it feels almost ten years older.

As for price, in early 2014 I spent a few weeks looking for a good standard dev laptop for the company (which I've since left) and got a good feel for the alternatives. In raw specs, you can get a cheaper "laptop", something that will fit a backpack and work for a while unplugged, yes (think W530). If you need portability though, all ultrabooks at the time were more expensive if specced to the same level. We did buy a couple W530s and upgraded them a bit (32GB RAM, etc.) and all their users ended up using them like desktops. I do not know if this is still the case, probably not, but I've seen many nominally more powerful "ultrabooks" (like the YogaPad, whose user assured me he had better resolution than me) fail in other ways; battery life is one, creaky joints is another. It took me a few more months before I got over my psychological block and got the base spec MBPr when it came out in August... One thing to note is that there are corporate discounts; if you or your friends are employed by a big corp, you can save a few hundred. Also, the upgrades are REALLY expensive compared to alternatives - why pay 300 dollars for extra SSD when you can get an SSD-grade, flush-with-the-side card from Transcend on Amazon for under 50?

My own experience makes me suspect the same thing. I used to work for a company that was, at the time, trying to develop a privacy-enhancing product (ironically enough...) which did something somewhat similar (although not on the size of this fuckup -- they'd be intercepting, but not tampering with, encrypted traffic, and storing encrypted private data).

Virtually everyone in the engineering team raised a flag when the imbec...uhm, the Product Manager came up with the idea. We pointed out that a) this burdens us with the responsibility of storing sensitive data which can, at least, have significant legal implications and that b) even if it's encrypted data, it may be a little hard to market a privacy device that works by uploading user data to our server as a first step without being transparent about the whole process. Oh, and c) that the data recovery mechanism he proposed (which involved storing the users' private keys on our servers as well, just in case they lost their precious little gimmick) was, in this case, entirely retarded.

The whole thing didn't even make it to Legal, because everyone in the decision tree just thought that since there's no plaintext data being stored, there's no potential for a lawsuit (and when we told the PM about Lavabit, he came back two hours later saying he Googled it and that we're covered since we're not an e-mail provider). The bright heads in Marketing weren't exactly sure about the whole transparency thing. They thought we should keep it simple and just tell people that their data is safely encrypted and be done with it, because end-users don't need to know about tech mumbo-jumbo like encryption keys and all that.

I don't work there anymore (thank God) and they haven't launched in the meantime, but when I left, they were basically working on implementing this clusterfuck.

I'm sorry I can't be more specific than this (for obvious reasons, I hope). The point is, however, that decisions as complex as these (there's a stack of paperwork thicker than the Osbourne-1 involved in preloading anything on a laptop) are made through an elaborate process, not made "by mistake".

Someone knew there was a problem. The problem may have ended up misunderstood or washed out along the decision chain (although I find that fairly unlikely), but someone, at some point, decided this was ok.

I replace my laptop OS with linux too but I don't want to financially contribute to companies that pull shit like this. Lenovo isn't going to change their practice unless sales take a hit or get into a legal mess. I'll personally will not buy anymore Lenovo hardware, and those new dell xps laptops look pretty nice anyway.