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Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

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Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#101
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a reference for this? My web search didn't find a result.

Look up Lewis Rossman, he runs a repair shop and complains all the time about this

And he is one of the worst eigjt-to-repair advocates there are, given how often he even gets the most basic stuff wrong when it allows to create attention.

Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up Lewis Rossman, he runs a repair shop and complains all the time about this

And he is one of the worst eigjt-to-repair advocates there are, given how often he even gets the most basic stuff wrong when it allows to create attention.

What is a better advocate that you'd recommend

Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#103
I've been running OpenBSD on my T480s for a bit now. I think it's an absolutely amazing machine. I love the keyboard, I love the physical shutter over the camera, and I love how I'm not worried I'm going to break it. I just ordered a replacement battery for it as well and it was an extremely easy process to install. Even though I upgraded my RAM to 32gb, I think I'm limited by my old 4 core i7 and starting to notice it during some especially long compilations. Nothing too bad though...

Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#104

Anecdote: My employer recently bought me a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. Due to concussions and general flicker sensitivity, I don't do well with 60Hz screens, and I prefer AMD CPUs. This one came with a 240Hz screen. Overkill! But... Bluetooth was unreliable. Every few hours, it vanished from Windows as if it didn't exist. A moment of sleep and wake was enough to bring it back, but it was still annoying to lose mouse and hea…

>those made for businesses are much less frequently repairable.

It's funny, because the most serviceable laptops I've ever taken apart were the old enterprise ones my dad's company used to issue him, where half the parts were serviceable without even opening the chassis.

Of course, that changed recently when some fruit company popularized the "ultrabook" category and now every company is trying to sandwich every component in the 1cm span between two screwless sheets of aluminum.

Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously somewhat subjective, but to me soldering does not disqualify something being "repairable", unless it requires a proprietary soldering machine or something. What you're describing sounds "modular"

When a repair requires soldering, it significantly reduces the number of people who can do that repair themselves. I can do it, but most of my non-technical friends could not, even though several of them could replace a hard drive or even a DIMM in their desktop PC.

[dead]

Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from a company that's demonstrated it can't be trusted to give you a secure device. Is there a single technology company that you can't say this about?

Really depends on your threat model; I think most companies stop short of shipping malware from their UEFI implementation. That said, I don't think Framework has yet done anything questionable?

The problem with Framework is that BIOS updates are really rare. I been running the 3.0.6-beta for my 12th gen for almost 8 months I think and the full release has yet to come. I bet it will never happen as they are focusing on AMD and 13th gen + 16" one at the moment.

Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#108

Friendly reminder that Lenovo has repeatedly shipped laptops infested with malware and backdoors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in... ) sometimes doing so in exchange for money. They've also hidden malware in UEFI so that even reformatting your hard drive wouldn't help. In one case, after they were found out they first claimed "we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not fi…

agreed, i was about to comment "but will these 4 out of 5 devices allow removal of the lenovo crapware?"

Same reason I left Verizon for Fi, avoidance of their bloatware. Couldn't imagine going back to a phone with apps I cannot uninstall (like Amazon & NFL apps, seriously, I don't care about sportsball at all and haven't used Amazon in more than 6 years)

Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#109
post #37

I always hear about how modern laptops and smartphones “aren’t repairable” and then I spent a week in Shenzhen.. where there were floors and floors of independent repair people doing specialized fixes to the most intricate parts. I had an old Apple Watch repair for about $20, only to discover that I got ripped off — I could have negotiated it down to much less.

Repairable means I can replace most major components in my laptop (wifi, ram, battery, SSD, BT, etc) with nothing more than a torx and screw driver. No soldering, or specialized equipment.

Add power supplies to that list. In my experience it's by far the most common component to die, and sometimes it's hopelessly and needlessly integrated.

Re: Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

#110

Friendly reminder that Lenovo has repeatedly shipped laptops infested with malware and backdoors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in... ) sometimes doing so in exchange for money. They've also hidden malware in UEFI so that even reformatting your hard drive wouldn't help. In one case, after they were found out they first claimed "we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not fi…

To add a reference, here's a reproduction of my comment on a discussion of Lenovo from 4 years ago [1]:

I want to emphasize how bad the TLS MITM malware was (adware is too nice a term): they installed a TLS MITM attack by adding the same CA public key to the trust store of every non-business device they sold, and then proxied all internet traffic through an on-device MITM proxy that contained the private key to that CA. Yes you read that right: every device with this malware had the public and private key used to decrypt the TLS traffic of every other device with this malware, effectively exposing every user to have all of their traffic both decrypted and MITM'd again by anyone who tries. This train wreck was malicious and incompetent.

I don't consider this a technical failure, this is a fatal business failure: either nobody in Lenovo reviewed this software integration from a privacy and security perspective, or they did review it and the business deal overruled the security team's ability to veto it, or they're so inept that they didn't notice how bad it was. In any case, this indicates an organizational dysfunction so severe there's no way I can trust Lenovo with my personal or business security again.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22194428 | Lenovo now shipping Ubuntu on high end workstations in the US

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