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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

#161

Post by hakfoo »

jtwaleson wrote: post #132
JTbane wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the build quality of Lenovo laptops have gone down so much it's appalling.

Disagree! I've been using Thinkpads since 2004 and was a bit obsessed with them around 2010 and almost had a museum with old machines I bought on eBay. I had two 701cs's butterfly models etc. Every model I've had was much better than the one before in almost every way. There's a lot of nostalgia with the older models, but man, compared to what we have today they were unusable and you would not carry something like th…

Entry level Thinkpads are not particularly impressive.

I have an E585 (bought it with the 2700U and 1080p screen upgrades, but added my own SSD and extra RAM because Lenovo charged the moon) and it replaced an X230 Tablet.

Even though it's the "upgraded" screen, it's still dim and disappointing. I understand very few Thinkpads have excellent screens; while the X230T's was brighter, it managed to burn the browser chrome after a few years of using it for lap-surfing.

The X230 had a slide-off-the-back-side battery. The E585's is inside the case. You could slide open little hatches to access the storage and memory on the X230. The E585 was a single-piece cover with 8 or 9 captive screws and then has to be pried apart with snaps.

The E585 has a rubber foot to prop it to provide clearance for the vents; the tape holding it on gave out a couple months ago, so I've stuck little white adhesive rubber furniture feet on it.

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

#163

Post by ToniCipriani »

hakfoo wrote: post #161
jtwaleson wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree! I've been using Thinkpads since 2004 and was a bit obsessed with them around 2010 and almost had a museum with old machines I bought on eBay. I had two 701cs's butterfly models etc. Every model I've had was much better than the one before in almost every way. There's a lot of nostalgia with the older models, but man, compared to what we have today they were unusable and you would not carry something like th…

Entry level Thinkpads are not particularly impressive. I have an E585 (bought it with the 2700U and 1080p screen upgrades, but added my own SSD and extra RAM because Lenovo charged the moon) and it replaced an X230 Tablet. Even though it's the "upgraded" screen, it's still dim and disappointing. I understand very few Thinkpads have excellent screens; while the X230T's was brighter, it managed to burn the browser chro…

Entry level ThinkPads aren't really ThinkPads, the E-series in particular. Those ones were previously known as ThinkPad Edge, which were designed by a different team.

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

#164

Post by hrrsn »

rnk wrote: post #89
alpaca128 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With "repairable" people mean repairs with freely available tools, parts and (ideally) schematics. Apple and others put in a lot of effort to stop independent repair shops from sourcing original parts or making them impossible to successfully replace due to hardware DRM. It is already impossible to upgrade some Macs with more RAM because they will simply refuse to boot if they find more RAM than they got in the facto…

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

Many components in an iPhone are paired to the logic board from the factory, so if they need to be replaced you have no choice but to go down the Apple sanctioned repair path (although the third party industry goes to great lengths to work around it). Some components, like the display, will show a warning notification in iOS for weeks and disable features like True Tone and auto-brightness if swapped with a third party part. Other components such as the cameras can't even be swapped between 100% genuine iPhones.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/82867/iphone-15-teardown-reveals...

The iPhone 6 disabled Touch ID when the home button was replaced but it'd still function fine as a button - until you restored the phone, which would fall over with an arbitrary error code forcing you to take the phone in to Apple for repair. There was a lot of backlash before they caved and fixed the update process: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple...

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

#165

Post by qball »

AraceliHarker wrote: post #3

"(Lenovo) said people buy new smartphones every other year but became accustomed used to buying new PCs every six or seven years. The industry needs to do better at motivating people to buy new devices" https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/microsofts-panos-panay-expla...

>but became accustomed used to buying new PCs every six or seven years.

Why would they buy any quicker? The average laptop in 2016 was only maybe 10% faster than a laptop in 2010 thanks to that stupid Ultrabook shit (and Intel refusing to push out more than a 10% YOY improvement in their standard-voltage desktop lineup), which resulted in 2020's CPU lineup only being about twice as fast as one made in 2010. And, so long as you had a machine with an SSD, there's very little difference between a laptop from 2015 and 2023 if all you're doing is browsing Facebook (which is what most people are doing with them).

Plus, at the end of the 2010s, tablets started to become mature enough to supplant laptops as the household's only computer, so you'd either buy a tablet or get a new laptop, but not both.

Phones are a different beast in two ways- first, if you're buying Android, you're throwing your phone away every 2 years anyway because the ecosystem sucks; Qualcomm is even more incompetent when it comes to hardware performance than Google is with software performance and it really shows, especially since Android allows manufacturers to stack a bunch of other unremovable shit and skins that does nothing but take up storage space, enshittifying the device right out of the box like having 10 unremovable IE6 toolbars did back when people still used IE6 (Lenovo is less guilty of this than some but it's still not as clean as a Pixel is). Plus, financial incentives exist (for both Android and iOS) to trade in one's old phone for a new one at a steep discount, they get smashed up far more frequently than laptops do in ways that make them impossible to fix, and they're fashion accessories to a point and it's nice to have the new one in a way that normal computers don't suffer from as much.

It's not rocket science; the industry became boring and stagnant so people moved on (and good GPUs have been unaffordable for the vast majority of the last decade including in prebuilts, so...)

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

#166

Post by hresvelgr »

isykt wrote: 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.

You don't pay the plumber to bang on the pipes, you pay him to know which pipes to bang on.

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

#167

Post by iancmceachern »

hef19898 wrote: post #101
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #99

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.

He certainly the most well known. I actually don't know of any others, do you?

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

#168

Post by osdril »

baz00 wrote: post #27

Step 1: stop soldering USB-C ports to the boards on your thinkpad line as they are NOT replaceable and will end the entire machine if damaged. That is the aforementioned T14 gen 3 in the article.

That's wild. Even on my "highly unrepairable" MBA M1 the USB-C ports are very easily replaceable (new board costs $20)

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

#169

Post by jtwaleson »

ToniCipriani wrote: post #163
hakfoo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entry level Thinkpads are not particularly impressive. I have an E585 (bought it with the 2700U and 1080p screen upgrades, but added my own SSD and extra RAM because Lenovo charged the moon) and it replaced an X230 Tablet. Even though it's the "upgraded" screen, it's still dim and disappointing. I understand very few Thinkpads have excellent screens; while the X230T's was brighter, it managed to burn the browser chro…

Entry level ThinkPads aren't really ThinkPads, the E-series in particular. Those ones were previously known as ThinkPad Edge, which were designed by a different team.

Exactly. Buy T, X or P series. For non-demanding users L series might be OK, but I prefer to buy second-hand / refurbished T series instead. Avoid E series, or at least don't expect any "ThinkPad-ness" from it.

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

#170

Post by baz00 »

osdril wrote: post #168
baz00 wrote: post #27

Step 1: stop soldering USB-C ports to the boards on your thinkpad line as they are NOT replaceable and will end the entire machine if damaged. That is the aforementioned T14 gen 3 in the article.

That's wild. Even on my "highly unrepairable" MBA M1 the USB-C ports are very easily replaceable (new board costs $20)

Yeah Apple do it right on their machines, at least the laptops. There is no excuse not to do this for other vendors but it costs fractionally more so they push the risk on to the users.
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