* Good Linux support.
* Good price / performance ratio.
* Trackpoint.
Note that I only look at T series. The corporate-oriented T and X series were not affected with Superfish at all.
Unfortunately preloading of software with (to put it mildly) limited usefulness is epidemic in the whole industry, and we also learned that Superfish is only one of many products built with the "Komodia MITM toolkit"! So, I really see this as one outlier in a crappy business. This could have happened to every laptop manufacturer that has crapware in their default-install. Which is every single of them.
Lenovo's CTO stated, "We're not trying to get into an argument with the security guys. They're dealing with theoretical concerns." If the CTO and the department that's responsible for choosing the default software are both "completely separate" from everyone at Lenovo who has a clue about security, what does that say about Lenovo?
❝In general, we get pretty good feedback from users on what software we pre-install on computers.❞
And yes, I'm pretty sure that security in third party software is at most an afterthought. Security holes hardly every are as blatant as the one created here, and my guess is that the normal process is to "just get an update from the vendor, should any security holes become apparent."
With the constant change of bundled software, do you really think that a thorough security review takes place? I'm very sure that this will only be done on the utilities, tools and drivers that are built to operate on a much broader range of devices (e.g. the ugly "battery icon" power manager blemishing most Lenovo PCs' taskbars), will also be installed by "enterprise"-customers, and generally are maintained over longer time periods.
The decision on including crapware certainly is done somewhere in marketing, and then just passed on to whoever has to build the default image.
I really do think there is a niche for linux compatible bare bones laptops. I know that some companies make them, but most are of low quality. Maybe Dell will come out with more options in the future.
But to answer your question, I would buy again, but would choose a competitor over them if all other things were equal.
It's the hardware that counts and to date Dell and Lenovo have been pretty consistent in offering solid corporate hardware.
So personally I would buy Lenovo hardware particularly if payments made to them for including the irrelevant crap actually knocks a few dollars off the retail price!
So, to be honest, I'm not sure.
I don't think it was malicious intent by Lenovo to install adware on user's computers, rather, they were negligent to the fact they were dealing with an incompetent software vendor.
I wouldn't hesitate to buy another Lenovo.
Was Lenovo's repeated downplaying of the problem also just negligence?
How do you reach this conclusion?
1) komodia.com/about doesn't have any geographic information on it.
2) Their whois entry says Israel, but is (deliberately?) misleading. Is that phone number real?
Registrant Phone: +00.6142772739 The leading digits "614" don't match the calling code for Israel which is 972, nor any Palo Alto area code. Instead it's Columbus, Ohio?
3) It's hard to be sure what was recently on their website, because of a claimed DDOS. But archive.org still has some old info https://web.archive.org/web/20150220024525/http://www.komodi... which points to a PO Box in Israel, and gives a phone number with an Israel calling code.
The matter of supporting them in this behavior gives me pause, though.