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

that was consumer side Lenovo laptops, IdeaPad and the like 7+ years ago. They learned their lesson and even there don't do it any more.

This didn't affect ThinkPads.

Every time Lenovo is mentioned someone brings this up and I am thoroughly sick of it.

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

Windows 11 installed clean with support drivers has only minimal Lenovo items:

- Lenovo EasyResume Service - enables a grace period before hibernation

- Lenovo HotKey Client Loader - makes the special keys work

- Lenovo Intelligent Thermal Solution Service - fans go brrrrr

- Lenovo Platform Service - (not running)

- Lenovo PM Server - power management coordinator

The only other thing is their user-attended updater, Lenovo Update Service, that doesn't run in the background and doesn't do anything uncommanded. It finds driver, BIOS, and firmware updates. It's optional and you have to install it yourself.

It's not truly repairable if no parts are available.

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 factory.

On a desktop pc you can repair anything pretty easily. Some things we wouldn't even call a repair. A new monitor is call just that. A new screen for a phone is much more involved.

And then there's granularity.

Can that broken usb port be replaced or does it require a new motherboard.

Your $20 Apple watch repair has 2 components. The parts cost and the labour cost.

If the repair takes 2 hours by a skilled technician that's going to cost more than a 5 minute job that anyone can do. And in first world countries, it's probably labour that will dominate.

(I actually bought 3 of them, one for my son and one for my S.O. Those didn't need to last for hours at a time so they're on original battery+memory and work great)

I know it's in the industries interest to force E-Waste, but it's not in the public interest.

Actually, question: at which point in time is it less eco-friendly to keep using an old computer considering power consumption and the fact that for the same amount of work it will need to use more power for a much longer time? 10 years? 20 years?

But since then, there are fewer major improvements coming that fast. GPUs improve, but most people aren't hardcore gamers for whome that matters, and these can mostly be upgraded independent of the computer itself instead.

Other than that, if you're mostly just using your web browser, and maybe doing some spreadsheets and desktop-based email, what's the point? Even if you're doing more demanding stuff like Photoshop, we're at a point where the app's demands aren't growing fast either.

It's perfectly fine. I do wish I had more CPU cores, but it's probably better for me to get up and step away from the computer while it runs a big C++ compilation or something

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...)

Luckily there's another one I can charge from but it really feels like a ticking time bomb.

Is there a single technology company that you can't say this about?

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.

Same. I've been buying them off-lease for many years. You can usually get them for a couple hundred bucks. Best non-Apple computers I've ever used. Keyboards are awesome.

The last laptop I bought was a Dell XPS13 because research indicated it's a pretty popular Linux-compatible laptop. It's nice, but I'm going back to a Thinkpad next...

I have 5 old Thinkpads, all still operational. Some are now 10+ years old, and have been passed on to children. They've been through hell and still work. They are the toughest laptops I've owned, and they have repair manuals to boot. Nearly everything is replaceable.

Most non technical users see their computers the same way as a DVD player.

I think the overall trend is still toward Steve Job's vision. Looking at Tesla for example, does not fill me with optimism of a modular/repairable future.