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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

2 points:

1. Journalists love to headline percentage profit declines, because it's a bigger number, but large companies often have big swings in profitability. Revenue changes are much more important, and the article states the revenue was down 24%.

2. I'm still baffled that this can be remotely surprising to anyone. All these "pandemic surge" companies (think Home Depot, Lowes, Peleton, and here Lenovo with laptops) had to have known this was just temporary. I mean, they sell durable goods, and obviously the pandemic pulled a ton of demand forward (as well as added demand). Nearly every kid in the country needed a laptop for remote school during the pandemic. How on earth did anyone think that demand could continue?

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Re: 2, it's just that nobody involved has any incentive to act like good times won't continue indefinitely. That's the natural consequence of pricing companies as the present value of their future earnings.

That's why you pick stocks on what you think is run well/built to make money within the time frame you want your money there.

Because then there's presumably a better chance that they will deliver on those earnings.

Executives don't care. Of course they knew. They'll do anything for money even if it means destroying lives. They need that bonus and they need it now.

I don't see anywhere in that fine article that stated that Lenovo implied that sales were going to continue to go up, or that their actions were going to "destroy lives".

Where did you come up with this?

Steelman: the irresponsible hiring sprees that many companies went on could be considered rather unethical considering all of them have the foreknowledge that the corona-era growth was temporary.

Layoffs do cause damage to people's lives.

Steelman of the other side: Not producing the laptops that children needed to school from home during Covid would have been damaging, too. Not producing exercise equipment for people stuck at home would have been damaging, too. And so on.

Absolutely nothing stopped them from advertising those positions as temporary. I would be willing to bet most job offers seen by normal people said nothing about urgency, they were likely sold as permanent positions.

And no, I do not think it should be up to the job seeker to understand larger industry trends before signing on.

Which positions should be temporary? Only new hires?

A company sees demand and hires people. If demand falls, some people will be let go, but not necessarily the ones who just joined.

All jobs are temporary, there has been no such thing as jobs for life in my entire lifetime.

Nobody said anything about jobs for life. When you are in a position where you know that certain events are pulling unprecedented demand forward, you know those certain events have an expiration date.

I don't think honesty in job listings is beyond the pale to ask of huge corporations. If you need temps due to sudden demand, hire temps.

However, the hiring spree did increase salaries significantly.

I'm fine with both.

Layoffs do cause damage to people's lives, but so does not having a job in the first place. The question is whether it would have been better to never have had these additional pandemic jobs at all.

To be clear, I'm not saying there is a single correct answer. Layoffs really do cause damage, and in many cases people left more stable jobs. Still, though, so often I see on HN and elsewhere that layoffs are just the worst thing imaginable and an indication that "management has failed", and I don't agree with that at all. If people are treated with respect (and I'm not really talking about any messaging, I'm talking about if they receive a decent severance), I don't really see a problem. E.g. if someone is hired, say works for a solid 2 years, but then is laid off with say 6 months of severance, I think that person was treated fairly. But I'd probably have a very different answer if someone was hired on for 3 months, made significant changes in their family situation to accommodate that job, and then the company realized they f'd up and panicked, and that person was laid off with 2 weeks severance.

Completely agree, wasn't it Meta that hired a guy from India, who sold everything there and moved to the US only to be laid off a couple of days before starting?

Now that destroys lives and is a dick move.

There is no indication that any of the people that Lenovo hired are part of the layoff. Elsewhere I read that Lenovo have been doing all of the hiring in the R&D dept which was not included in the layoffs.

I agree with you, but is anyone getting 6 months severance from 2 years of work?

Not sure I'd classify Lenovo as a durable good in the strictest sense of the word.

I know many who overpayed for a Lenovo laptop only to find, it was intentionally made incompatible with Linux (microcontrollers between core components), the firmware updates from a legitimate source would brick the battery charger, the hardware under limited use would fail within the warranty period (1 year, from GPU overheating), and a number of other issues.

I'll never buy a Lenovo again after this, and my experience has been common based on what others have said. This has nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with quality of product that was released at a premium price. They made their sales initially, but they burned their brand down in the process.

Tfw you get bought by a Chinese company

Lenovo have a problem with their USB C ports. Durability is not good enough for them to be the only source of power. Daily plugging and unplugging breaks them eventually. Accidentally pulling the cable sideways breaks them quickly. We stopped selling them a year or two ago.

Lenovo lost me as a customer when I tried to order a laptop from them, their garbage website refused to work (some random error during the checkout process). I contacted their support for help and to check stock. Never heard back. Several months later they begin spamming me with marketing emails and feedback about how much I'm enjoying my purchase (???).

Not giving them a single cent after that experience.

No one wants to pour cold water on excitement.

Apple did the disciplined thing.

I think it’s much more understandable for software companies, especially subscription based ones to have bet on a “new normal”

> I think it’s much more understandable for software companies, especially subscription based ones to have bet on a “new normal”

Glad someone posted this, I completely agree. After all, there are still many aspects that are a new normal, e.g. the cratering of central business district commercial real estate values reflects this, and many more people are using things like video conferencing than before the pandemic. But durable goods? Did they think we would all remodel our kitchens twice??

In an alternative world where laptops are selling like hot cakes I would say it's because AMD woke people up who hadn't seen enough improvements to justify a purchase since 2012, the wild economy that has people job hopping, and of course the massive power requirements as Meta pushes APIs from the wildly successful metaverse to Facebook feeds.

Yep. It was like in Y2K. I told the companies I was advising at the time that the boom in sales would nosedive afterwards, because everyone used it as an excuse to replace all their kit. They didn't believe me...

About 1. Yes, that. The headline means that even in our current maybe-huge Schrodinger-crisis the company is still profitable, despite being clearly impacted.

It reminds me how this shows the true capabilities of management. You see, if management and economists could do what they claim to do, predict changes in the market and adapt to them.

Well then the 24% and 75% numbers would be the same number. Why? They would have seen it coming, and responded and adapted the firm, before it did this kind of damage.

I've never once seen managers actually succesfully to do this, or even close. I've seen them keeping up hiring and scaling companies right into oblivion though.

I didn't think PCs were part of the "pandemic surge" like Peleton was. If that was true then surely we should see a similar drop in MacBook sales. Do we have any figures on that?

Yes, sales down 40%, worse than the overall PC market decline of 28%:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/04/17/apples-mac-had-a-...

All of the PC spike and drop data is in the article. The Mac slump is even worse: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/analysts-say-mac-sal...

Macs also have the Apple Silicon effect. My M1 Pro replaced a 2015 MacBook as my primary laptop. Though, in fact, for a lot of things (though not generative art and a lot of multimedia in general), the 2015 system is still fine. Don't expect to need a new laptop soon.

Yeah I was thinking about this.

I have a 2021 M1 Pro mac, an iPhone 14 pro and the M1 iPad. I have an oled LG TV and an Xbox series x.

I won’t be looking to upgrade any of those for the foreseeable future.

For the first time in my life I’m sated when it comes to tech.

I’ve always had one eye on the next thing since I was 12 but right now all my devices have reached the point where they are so good I have no FOMO at all.

I have no real interest in VR but will keep an open mind over apples head set.

To be honest if Apple made a fucking toaster I’d probably be one of the losers lining up for it!

To be fair, it would probably be a really nice toaster

My wall-mounted TV is fairly old but dealing with a 65" plasma which would be difficult to dispose of even for money makes me lie down until the feeling goes away.

Could use a new iPad but I used it a lot more when I was traveling more. Maybe again, especially if I do more traveling where I don't need a laptop. Could also replace my 8 year old iMac but works as a web browser and I can do everything on my laptop with external monitor--and there are pros and cons to doing stateful work. on 2 different machines.

Why would it be difficult to dispose of? How did you get it home? You can rent a truck from home depot for pretty cheap and I don't think dumps would deny you the ability to throw away a TV

>How did you get it home?

It was delivered.

They most certainly would deny you in Massachusetts (not that my town has a dump; I have a dumpster) and none of the consumer recycling places like Best Buy will take TVs over about 35 inches or so. You'd have to trek around to find a commercial recycler and, at that point, I'm just going to stick it in the back of my garage until the end of time.

In any case a more significant project than I need to take on right now. What I have is fine.

During the pandemic, some of my company's Lenovo laptop orders were backlogged by weeks (or months for a brief period). We had difficulty obtaining laptops for remote employees, even when lowering requirements to "Anything reasonably suitable".

At the same time MacBook Pro's did not have significant changes in order times. I suspect this is because that for large corps, Macs are not as prevalent as Windows laptops. More "specialist" less "commodity".

Personally, I have 10 year old Macs still usable. This message comes from a 2012 MacMini - laptop level hardware. Equivalent age Windows laptops are either Linux (which is also not as corporate common) or our of service.

Yes, but the MBP costs what like 1800 while the Windows laptops corporate is willing to buy often cost around half that or less?

Some of that is surely profit, but some does seem to pay for engineering and part selection of things and methods that don't suck and don't self destruct 2 months past the warranty end date.

> Yes, but the MBP costs what like 1800 while the Windows laptops corporate is willing to buy often cost around half that or less?

Yes, also why the corp waited on those Lenovo orders rather than switching some developers to Macs.

And telling IT to support a new operating system company wide could be an expensive decision.

Most Lenovo business laptops (thinkpad x/p series) are just as expensive as MacBooks for a business buyer. Maybe the E series are cheaper though.

Though I agree that a lot of employers seem to not even bother with a business line laptop anymore so ThinkPads or MacBooks are out of the question. I'll never understand cheaping out on laptops though. It's an even more bone headed move than not offering drinks or coffee at the office, because employees having to use cheap laptops as their 40h a week tool is just going to hurt the business. That's not even considering the support burden that comes with having a fleet of bad or slow hardware

I'm at a large corp, and there was a backlog on Mac's. It took a year for one of my colleagues to get theirs.

Even used laptops were hot. I had a bunch of old Thinkpads that I sold for double or triple what I could sell them for today.

People wanted any computer they could get their hands on. WFH, kids attending school from home...

Yeah, I was outfitting a new team in early 2020 at the same time that COVID hit. For us, it was a pain/expense to get computers and monitors. Everybody was kitting up for WFH so demand was high.

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