I have a Yoga 530 (ARR/Ryzen). It's absolutely great for the price. Obviously it's not the same model as the author has, but to be frank that title is pure, utter sensationalist trash.
I had problems on my Yoga 730, replaced the Wifi chip with one that was under $20 on Amazon, never messed with drivers or anything, and it's been working great for years now.
AFAIK the wifi problem (in the case of the device I looked at, that manifested as constant wifi drops unless the laptop was plugged in (frequent enough to make it essentially unusable)) is just sort of a ...thing that one particular model of defective Wi-Fi card will do. IIRC it's a Realtek card.
Huh, that's interesting. I once worked for a laptop manufacturer, and the inverse problem (wifi only working when on battery) happened there -- it was an issue of high frequency electronic shielding off the power supplies. Something about how the modern auto-layout PCB software the ODM wanted to use had no way to take shielding issues into account and would want to lay traces in routes that an electrical engineer would never even consider.
I can't think how the inverse problem would happen, though. Maybe it's software indeed.
There are a lot of people who praise ThinkPads online, and that seems to gesture into good will in general for Lenovo. Unfortunately a lot of their cheaper computers are just trash. Even in the ThinkPad line they have now introduced the A, L and E series that are more "affordable", but in reality they cut a lot of corners that make the X, T and P series good.
to be honest the budget thinkpads have always been crap (as have most of lenovos non thinkpad laptops) its only the T/X/P/W models that were worth looking at, its entirely possible the newer AMD ones are better than in the past but i think AMD sill have a gen or two to go before theyre competitive in the laptop market
still theres nothing out there id consider replacing my X1C with, its a fantastic machine as was the first gen one it replaced, im not loyal to many companies for things, if i think i can get better elsewhere i will but ive yet to find a laptop that fits me better
good thinkpads are expensive (at least new, theyre very affordable refurbished) but to me theyre worth it as they simply last longer, my laptop lives a very hard life and im something of a cruel owner, lesser systems have caved in from such a life in the space of 12 months. my X1C took 5 solid years of abuse being hauled all over the world in an overstuffed backpack (including glasses of orange juice, beer, JD and coke, Umeshu and coffee spilled in it) the only issue it ever had was that a couple of letters on the keyboard stopped working following the umeshu spillage, i could probably have cleaned it up with isopropyl but i picked up a replacement for 15 quid instead
so yeah basically avoid the E/L/A series and maybe even the Tx95 (AMD) range and youre likely to get a very good system (with unquestionably the best keyboard on any modern laptop)
The site is suffering from Hacker News' hug-of-death. But it looks like it was a genuine rant about a piss poor customer experience. I have had issues with the Yoga too before where the display hinge malfunctioned but I had a much better experience with Lenovo support. They replaced it for free even though it was outside the warranty window (albeit by only a month). To each his/her own. Recommending people to never buy a Yoga is probably a tad bit too extreme.
Reminds me of the self-destructing speakers on the old Samsung Chromebook. Set wrong mixer settings and they silently burn up. In my case they melted through the case before I realized what was wrong.
How is that similar? In the Lenovo case, it's a transistor that's failing, and it doesn't sound like there's any immediate danger from it, whereas the Apple laptop batteries are literally catching fire.
Yes, both are design defects, but that's the only thing these issues have in common.
Lenovo seems to have gone down in quality. Their supply chain also doesn’t seem to be doing too well. Orders for a lot of their models are delayed by 6 weeks at least. Those who got deliveries are complaining about poor build quality, DOA and other issues. A glimpse through their forums will give you a good idea of how broken things currently are.
i think it depends on where you are, last year when buying mine id heard of terrible delays that would no doubt be made worse by my ordering on black friday, but 7 short days later it arrived with no QC issues at all, i can only put this down to the fact that im in the UK and maybe the units sent here come out of a different production plant
i had 2 systems from them last year and both were free of QC issues and arrived within 10 days of ordering. we do pay for this privilege though as thinkpads are drastically more expensive here than in the US (my X1C6 was almost double the US price for the same model)
As the owner of a Yoga 720-15, I can tell you that this laptop has had and is still having so many hardware problems... In general, Lenovo isn't exactly known for their QA process.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadIt seems like a software or driver problem, but no software fix seemed to work. Only replacement with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079QH5KW1/ solved the issue.
I can't think how the inverse problem would happen, though. Maybe it's software indeed.
still theres nothing out there id consider replacing my X1C with, its a fantastic machine as was the first gen one it replaced, im not loyal to many companies for things, if i think i can get better elsewhere i will but ive yet to find a laptop that fits me better
good thinkpads are expensive (at least new, theyre very affordable refurbished) but to me theyre worth it as they simply last longer, my laptop lives a very hard life and im something of a cruel owner, lesser systems have caved in from such a life in the space of 12 months. my X1C took 5 solid years of abuse being hauled all over the world in an overstuffed backpack (including glasses of orange juice, beer, JD and coke, Umeshu and coffee spilled in it) the only issue it ever had was that a couple of letters on the keyboard stopped working following the umeshu spillage, i could probably have cleaned it up with isopropyl but i picked up a replacement for 15 quid instead
so yeah basically avoid the E/L/A series and maybe even the Tx95 (AMD) range and youre likely to get a very good system (with unquestionably the best keyboard on any modern laptop)
Depends how far back your memory goes. I don’t recall such issues when IBM owned the brand.
https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2012/12/10/how-to-fry-spea...
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/aviation/457337-fa...
Yes, both are design defects, but that's the only thing these issues have in common.
i had 2 systems from them last year and both were free of QC issues and arrived within 10 days of ordering. we do pay for this privilege though as thinkpads are drastically more expensive here than in the US (my X1C6 was almost double the US price for the same model)