I support the company that makes the closest thing to a product I want. Reimaging the computer is a lot easier than installing your own pointing stick.
Imagine if you bought a car that detected when you were driving to a particular business, locked out steering, and instead drove you to a competitor that had "partnered" with the manufacturer. You totally own the car, and no one ever told you it had this "feature."
Imagine if you bought a gun that would refuse to fire when pointed at people who had purchased protection from the manufacturer. You don't find out about this feature until the guy invading your home has it.
Lenovo lied to your face. It sold laptops that claimed to navigate to the websites you entered in the URL bar, but instead displayed a version edited by Lenovo on behalf of its partners.
Normalizing this sort of thing is not okay and anyone buying Lenovo post-Superfish shares the moral responsibility when this is our future.
A more apt analogy might be Amazon silently editing books to include product placement for corporate sponsors.
You even tried to fabricate examples where the surprise factor of the product not working as expected at a key moment was the bulk of the problem. As if that's somehow not the biggest flaw of a touchpad.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo...
In any case, Lenovo isn’t the only manufacturer that includes a pointing stick in their laptops. HP’s EliteBook series, for example, has one. There’s a full list of manufacturers here².
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¹ — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039306
² — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick#Naming_and_bran...
I know that elitebooks, latitudes, etc used to have these too. None of them do anymore.
Many Windows OEMs maintain their cheaper-than-Apple status by optimizing the things people compare (gigahertz, RAM capacity, HDD capacity) and putting in the cheapest shit possible on the rest (pixel density, keyboards, cases, hinges, and especially trackpads).