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Comment by pertinhower | Hacker News Reader

"We will significantly reduce preloaded applications." As a primary Mac and Linux user, it is absolutely incredible to me that any PC that isn't given to customers for free would have more than zero preloaded so-called applications by default. I accept that my television, or Google, or Facebook dumps advertising on me, because otherwise how would they monetize? But since when did it become okay to load multi-hundred- or thousand-dollar devices, for which customers have paid dearly, with advertising and bloatware that benefits only the manufacturer? Are you guys paying for this crap?

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Lower-end PCs typically have something like 5% margin, compared to substantially more on a mac. And that's assuming you configured the hardware in a way that someone wanted to buy it before it became semi-obsolete on the store shelf and has to be sold for even less.

The manufacturers have to make up the money somewhere. With a complex product at commodity rates, with customers mostly having no idea what the differences are between them (and for good reason, it's all just a set of nasty price/perf/quality tradeoffs that I wouldn't want to look at), you compete on very basic features and the price that they dominate.

That might well be true for many PCs, but the ThinkPad range is pretty high end and comparable to Macs in both specs and price. As far as I can tell, it's not just the low-end crap that's affected by this issue?

ThinkPads didn't have the software installed. Only the lower-end stuff.

They didn't have Superfish installed, but they do come with bloatware.

It's hardly the only area where a paid-for experience includes obviously unwanted advertising.

Further, I don't see that consumers have much choice if they don't want to reinstall a fresh OS -- every major brand of PC I know of includes similar bloat. Also remember laptops don't come with a nice fresh Windows CD you can install from -- they come with a branded recovery disc (or partition) which "recovers" it to factory condition.

>It's hardly the only area where a paid-for experience includes obviously unwanted advertising.

True, but we shouldn't pretend that this isn't a product of very recent history. When cable television channels started running ads, and when movie theaters began running commercials before the feature, it was really shocking to people. Most were enraged at the time.

The Overton Window has changed us.

I'm a Linux user paying for good hardware. I don't use Windows, so I don't have to deal with its issues. It wouldn't help me at all to buy hardware that doesn't support my uses, so I'll continue to buy what works best for me.

Yea I agree with you on the pre-loaded applications, but how is it different from a Samsung TV coming pre-loaded with their applications? I'm not sure why you assume the TV is ok but the computer isn't. Both are pretty expensive appliances.

I don't mean the TV itself. I mean TV programming.

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