I suppose startups (where but everybody is on a Mac) are not enterprises, then?

> Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new laptops regardless of vendor, and specifically add only the necessary drivers, etc.

There were some Lenovos that had vendor crapware in the EFI partition that would get auto-reinstalled by Windows when you’d do a fresh install.

This is what I've done with virtually every machine I've personally owned for oh... the last 20 years? Why is this not people's defacto way of setting up a new machine? It's obvious that preinstalls are full of bloatware and spyware. The only issue (primarily from the past) is that specialty hardware may not work without vendor-provided drivers. That's largely no longer true, especially for the big-name brands like Lenovo, Dell, Acer, ec.

We have a lot of Thinkpads at work and we just can't even order an Ideapad or other consumer models like Legion if we wanted to. They just won't sell them to us. We've tried to get some because some developers needed GTX cards.

It's like there's 2 Lenovo companies just having the same name. I'd trust the B2B Lenovo not to put spyware on their systems (even though I'd reinstall them just in case). At work they even preinstall our images for us.

But the B2C Lenovo is a totally different beast and this is where the Superfish rootkit appeared. The total build of the machines is also very different. Cheap plastic feel, lacking the amazing keyboards etc. I love the thinkpad look and feel and hate the Ideapad ones (and the Thinkpads that are really ideapads, I think the E series (Or is it the L? I always mix those up)

The current trend of soldered RAM & wireless radios is an utter dealbreaker, I can only hope the industry grows out of it.