The problem is that Superfish is BIOS malware. If Lenovo is willing to infect its BIOS for profit, I'm not sure that running Linux is safe on their hardware.
Having proof from that incident that hw isn't necessarily safe, + the risk of a repeat offence affecting Linux, is probably a net positive for Linux security.
This is not really hardware. On some laptops you can (almost) replace BIOS with FLOSS coreboot. The incident proves the importance of FLOSS and user control.
ThinkPads are still the name of the game for enterprise laptop deployments. AFAIK, they don't contain any preloaded stuff beyond the OEM app (Lenovo Vantage). Some enterprises prefer the more stripped down Lenovo System Update instead, although I think users may need Vantage to change some hotkey, etc. settings.
Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new laptops regardless of vendor, and specifically add only the necessary drivers, etc.
TL;DW: they did a secret shopper laptop buying experience, the sales rep pushed the extra warranty hard, and included it (at cost) despite the buyer declining it.
> ThinkPads are still the name of the game for enterprise laptop deployments.
I suppose startups (where but everybody is on a Mac) are not enterprises, then?
> Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new laptops regardless of vendor, and specifically add only the necessary drivers, etc.
There were some Lenovos that had vendor crapware in the EFI partition that would get auto-reinstalled by Windows when you’d do a fresh install.
> Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new laptops regardless of vendor, and specifically add only the necessary drivers, etc.
This is what I've done with virtually every machine I've personally owned for oh... the last 20 years? Why is this not people's defacto way of setting up a new machine? It's obvious that preinstalls are full of bloatware and spyware. The only issue (primarily from the past) is that specialty hardware may not work without vendor-provided drivers. That's largely no longer true, especially for the big-name brands like Lenovo, Dell, Acer, ec.
Thinkpads are actually from a completely different factory than the Ideapads.
We have a lot of Thinkpads at work and we just can't even order an Ideapad or other consumer models like Legion if we wanted to. They just won't sell them to us. We've tried to get some because some developers needed GTX cards.
It's like there's 2 Lenovo companies just having the same name. I'd trust the B2B Lenovo not to put spyware on their systems (even though I'd reinstall them just in case). At work they even preinstall our images for us.
But the B2C Lenovo is a totally different beast and this is where the Superfish rootkit appeared. The total build of the machines is also very different. Cheap plastic feel, lacking the amazing keyboards etc. I love the thinkpad look and feel and hate the Ideapad ones (and the Thinkpads that are really ideapads, I think the E series (Or is it the L? I always mix those up)
Lots of love for ThinkPads out there on HN. Not to say they're wrong about their preference but I gave up on Lenovo a long time ago due to shenanigans.
Understandable, I'm still running an X201t, the newer models are deeply unappealing. I picked up a Precision M6700 for the office and I'm very pleased with the thing. I don't see any laptops much newer than that which I'd be happy with.
The current trend of soldered RAM & wireless radios is an utter dealbreaker, I can only hope the industry grows out of it.
1 old thinkpad linux over apple since 2003/4. Apple fan boy from 1986 to about then. I miss adb and the nubus, but that really is too much ti expect, now isn't it.
For that you need to know the offending APK ID in the first place, and you need to enable ADB access, and install a piece of software on your computer.
Right - there's no good way for a non-technical user to avoid being exploited like this.
I personally think hackers have a moral responsibility to make fixes like this more accessible to the average person. Tech corporations have made it clear they have no qualms about attacking their users in increasingly creative ways, and it's up to us to reclaim control over the devices which, in an ethical sense, are rightfully ours.
And you don't really remove it. You just deactivate it, and only for the main user.
If you do it without --user 0 it will actually uninstall it, but this only works for non-system apps and most manufacturers mark all their crap/spyware as system of course. Sigh...
Same with my samsung tablet forcing itself to update. "You can dismiss this 1 more time" - why? It's my device I paid for it. It's very tiresome. What device can I buy that's just mine to do as I please.
On desktop I'm already on Linux Mint. Looking for alts for phone and tablet.
I somewhat understand Samsung a bit. The amount of never updated Android devices that could be updated is immense, and support calls for long-banished issues that could be solved by a simple update are pointless and a waste of resources.
The problem is that users suffer from "update fatigue" because they have to be (rightfully) afraid of entire UI overhauls or even more bugs after updates since no one does QA any more but follows the "bananaware" principle instead - software ripens at the customer's home.
And app stores don't exactly make things easy because there is always only one version that can be updated to - no app store, including F-Droid, has an easy way to have one app with multiple concurrently available versions.
In Chile at least, when we buy not quite ready avocado's we wrap them on newspaper, it helps them mature and become softer faster, people have done this for at least since I have been alive and it works well
fdroid does let you see and install previous versions perfectly simply.
One day SlimSocial broke. I pulled up the app in fdroid only exoecting to see a changelog for some recent update, but was pleasantly suprised to see this perfectly obvious and convenient Versions pull-down to install old versions. I used it, and it worked.
I think that is an OS limitation not an app store limitation, and still disproves the claim that no appstore not even fdroid allows installing old versions or makes it easy. fdroid does allow it and even makes it easy.
For branches, lots of app developers just make a new app for that, and those can be installed concurrently. You can't do it conveniently yourself as an end user, the app developer has to do it. But they would probably have to publish branches too, so nodifference.
And people would upgrade if an upgrade wouldn't typically either be a risk to cause data loss, brick the device, downgrade it, mess up hardware support, install spyware, telemetry and other junk.
> "You can dismiss this 1 more time" - why? It's my device I paid for it.
That's not just mobiles either.. Windows 10 does the same :(
Sure it's nice for the average joe soap not turning their machine into a botnet node but I hate coming back to my PC and find it has rebooted while it was running some task for me.. Grrrr.
Sure it's nice for the average joe soap not turning their machine into a botnet node
It is, but we should really stop tolerating that as an argument for mandatory updates. Enabling security updates by default on Windows editions not intended to be professionally managed would be sufficient to achieve most or all of the same benefits without imposing the much-criticised costs to users. The same argument holds for other tech that wants to force changes in behaviour and/or phone-home behaviour on its buyer/owner/user once the purchase is completed, including almost any device associated with the word "smart".
Consider looking at CalyxOS, DivestOS, e.Foundation, or GrapheneOS on devices they respectively support as well.
I recently got a (cheap) Pixel C to try out DivestOS and was very pleased in spite of some device-specific compromises (bootloader can't be relocked, stuck at Android 8.x but with current/on-going patches).
I wonder if the ad bombardment we are suffering for some years now will eventually reach a critical point to trigger mass exodus or protests.
TV got annoying with ads and viewership greatly decreased but that was caused by the emergence of the internet I think, what new technology options we have to escape the current ads to?
The only other hope is that the massive amount of money in ads and data collection is actually a bubble that will collapse
btw. Ben Krasnow is the guy behind Applied Science youtube channel[0], I highly recommend checking it out
Digital TV in Belgium now includes unskippable ads, including in recordings of those shows. The reason why people switched to digital TV subscriptions, of course, was to be able to skip those ads in the first place.
Apparently Netflix can afford to offer a wide variety of content for a small monthly fee, without any ads, and spend money on content creation; but digital TV stations somehow don't make enough money off of subscriptions which are an order of magnitude more expensive. Economies of scale, perhaps?
Edit because I can't be bothered to reply to all the comments below: excerpts from other books (often by the same author, or in a similar genre) are not ads IMO. They're not intrusive. They're pretty much always relevant. They're fun to read. They don't contain tracking cookies. They're as benign as it gets.
I've read a few cheap paperbacks from the 1930s and 40s with a couple of pages of ads at the end; mostly for trousers, hairpieces or departments stores. Strange.
They're completely different from books in this context. A newspaper is usually read within hours from its print; a magazine within days; a book might require six months or six years to be read. Nobody except maybe the same publishing company and a few other businesses would have use for ad space that would require so much time to be seen.
You have never read a little golden book[0]? The back cover is often ads for other kids books. I recall the Goosebumps books did the same with a PO box that you could send a check to in order to get more books. Sci-fi paperbacks often have ads for other books as well.
I have a couple of German paperbacks which had one ad in the middle of a book, often for an instant soup or something like that. But at least it was easy to skip :).
Yes, that is exactly the kind of ads I was remembering, haven't seen them in a while. But it is funny how the ad text refers to the story it interrupts to pitch the soup :)
A newer fiction book I skimmed after finding it abandoned at a campsite seemed to have overt and contrived repeated mentions of bmw automobiles, including the models, in places such details didn't seem to have anything at all to do with the story.
It left me wondering if some authors now secure contracts to always use a specific brand of $foobar if $foobar makes an appearance in their stories.
The only time I've ever encountered this level of repeated brand shilling in a book I actually intended to read was Vonnegut's Bluebeard and its Sateen Dura-Luxe. But there it played a significant part of the story, and it's a fictional brand..
> Edit because I can't be bothered to reply to all the comments below: excerpts from other books (often by the same author, or in a similar genre) are not ads IMO.
Ah, so what you mean is you've never encountered an online ad in a printed book.
I respect Chomsky's well-constructed, dark analyses of how we got where we are. He usually stops after this 20-20 hindsight. The messy part, what to do about it, is left to the Chomsky consumer. Unfortunate for those who can only respond with depression or attempts to revive the past.
Yea... to be honest, after listening to Chomsky and doing activism for years, I think that's because effective action looks like things that would destabilize the US imperial state and economic system. Chomsky is tolerated in academia because he stops short of saying such things and sharply criticizes Communist countries often in ways that do not feel as solid as his research. I think he's very much worth listening to on the problems, but I ignore him on solutions.
You can't solve these problems while leaving concentrated centers of market power intact. Nor can you leave the market system that would regenerate them intact either. The trust busters took action in the early 20th century but here we are in a place where it's even worse than before. Nor can we leave the arms manufacturers and military contractors intact either. If all that goes, so does US dominance over world affairs and the influence of the dollar. To that I say: good.
Digital TV is where the content is sent as a digital video stream, rather than an analogue stream. This allows it to:
- make better use of the available bandwidth, allowing for more channels to be broadcast or less radio spectrum to be used
- offer multiple audio and video streams per channel, eg: surround sound support and translations into other languages
- better picture quality through higher resolution and the ability to recover from some transmission/reception errors
Commonly referred to as DVB (Digital Video Broadcast), it can be supplied over different bearers: terrestrial (DVB-T), satellite (DVB-S) and cable (DVB-C).
DVB is often combined with internet functionality into things like Hbb-TV, which allows for consumers to easily move between live broadcast channels and on-demand content supplied via an internet connection. Freeview in New Zealand uses Hbb-TV, and is broadcast over both terrestrial and satellite bearers, with on-demand video available for the major channels.
Cable TV may or may not be digital depending on the provider.
> Apparently Netflix can afford to offer a wide variety of content for a small monthly fee, without any ads,
For now, the most they'll do is advertise their other services. But true external ads seem inevitable, especially in the face of the balkanization of digital video content. It's just a matter of when.
Or YouTube. Without blockers or YouTube Premium, it's getting to be like watching old shows in syndication on one of these TV stations you can never remember the channel number for. Five minutes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, five minutes of ads for things not available in stores, back to the show etc etc.
The best is when the YouTuber bakes their own ad into the video so it can’t be skipped, and then that ad is interrupted by a normal YouTube ad.
Yesterday I watched a video where a normal YouTube ad was immediately followed by a baked in ad and then that was again followed by another normal YouTube ad.
His channel is an increasingly rare gem. It's very high quality and interesting content without all the extra cruft that is inescapable now, even with some of the better channels.
Thank you. I make a conscious effort to avoid the craft that I hate so much myself. Luckily, I have a day job that allows me to treat the channel as a hobby -- I know others are not in this position. Other downside is that the day job takes time away from making fun videos :) let me know if anyone has a topic suggestion.
Hi Ben, after yet another (3rd I think? could be 4th) round of binge-watching all your videos, I was wondering if you made any progress with "Wire EDM" that you mention in one of your videos. That process is (for me, at least) pretty much pure magic. And the resulting cuts are just unbelievable.
I haven't worked on EDM in a while. Check out BaxEDM and his other customers for a DIY wire EDM design. The BaxEDM channel recently showed one of those ultra right tolerance sliding parts where the joint disappears.
Honestly, just keep doing what you're doing - I don't think you've produced a video yet that I haven't found captured my interest. I'm sure you'd be tinkering and experimenting regardless of whether you shared your work on youtube, and I'm just thankful that you take the time to document it and share it.
There were suggestions when you used the meta?(windows) key and then typed something in Ubuntu. Windows does this too, I forget who did it first. I went from xp x64 to win 7 ultimate to win10pro and managed to keep the telemetry to a minimum as much as I could.
IIRC the Ubuntu change was pushed in a non-LTS distribution.
As an aside I think 5 year LTS is too few, with the advances made in AI/ML in the last decade five years on os support means that 80% of all the tooling is broken now, at least without spending lots of time backporting or hacking fixes in.
> advances made in AI/ML in the last decade five years on os support means that 80% of all the tooling is broken now, at least without spending lots of time backporting or hacking fixes in.
Ubuntu LTS releases are 2 years apart. You don't have to keep using 5-year old LTSes, do you?
If people could organize to they extent that one of the worst offenders' businesses would be metaphorically burned to the ground once a year, I think that would have an effective deterrent effect.
That's inadequate. You're just burning to the ground a corporate shell from which the profits have already been removed. Instead, jail the person behind it.
I'm already there. My TV set hasn't been used as a TV since before the pandemic, even Windows 10 is a complete non-starter for me let alone Windows 11, and if one of my favorite Android apps decides to get obnoxious with ads (hello, Scanner Radio!) it gets the ax.
Appropriate to see this and the new Framework announcement on the front page at the same time. Here's hoping Framework is positioned to take advantage of what seems like the whole industry lighting themselves on fire wrt respeting their users.
The Framework laptop is a cool concept and I can see myself getting one eventually, but the link is about a Lenovo (Android?) tablet. Not even remotely the same market or even thing.
I keep a running "what's my next laptop going to be?" thread running in my head. Lenovo was on that list because it's the "default implementation" of Linux laptops. But now - not so sure. If they're happy to pull this kind of asshattery, what other idiocy are they happy to do?
And Framework just made it onto that list this week, so the other post was timely too :)
I bought a second-hand HP 15s lately. Ryzen 5500U, supports NVMe SSD, and allows up to 32GB DDR4 RAM. I haven't used it extensively but the fans are impressively quiet (likely because the AMD hardware heats up less than Intel/NVIDIA tech) and I found myself liking the machine more than I expected to.
If you need RAM up to 64GB there are the 855 G7 models.
I'm sure the response would be something like "oh we gave you a discount on it when you purchased it for $399 instead of $1399. It's all in the EULA you agreed to when you first got your device."
That's exactly the logic Amazon uses for their Fire tablets. You can get them cheaper if you agree to have ads baked into the lock screen at a firmware level.
I agree. I have zero problems with my subsidized-by-ads Kindle, because I knew what I was getting when I bought it in the first place.
And, to Amazon's credit, the ads are unobtrusive. You get an ad for another book on your lockscreen; not a big deal, and most importantly, you are never, ever interrupted once you've unlocked the device. If Amazon ever switched to an intrusive-ad model, I'd pitch the thing in the trash without a second thought.
I bought a third gen Kindle I think, ad supported, no keyboard, for $30. This year I was charging it while reading and got up and kicked the cord, causing the kindle to smash into my heel, breaking the display.
I was able to get the latest Paperwhite, trading in the old, broken Kindle, for $58. If it lasts as long as my old one (8 years) I'll be fine with that. I don't use it often, I keep a lot of reference and old books (like Raymond Chandler), I stopped buying Kindle books after three consecutive books were missing the last chapter or so.
The kindle windows conversion program (Kindle preview 3) will handle nearly everything that the "email yourself a book @kindle.com" won't, and for everything else there's calibre.
I had a book and a couple of palm pilots and other portable LCD screened things over a decade ago, and the kindle is the best for the price I get them at.
incidentally I've found that if you don't activate the device and just add books via calibre, they don't actually show any ads on the reduced price version
Even with that, making it upfront and a choice at least invites competition. I can sort by ad-free price, or note that a different manufacturer charges $40 to remove the garbage.
That requires root and potentially open source drivers and unlocked bootloaders. Right to repair struggles with the progress it makes, that feels unobtainable.
This is awful behavior, and I'm not trying to diminish that in any way, but... Who sticks with the OEM software? One of the first things I do with any x86-based system is wipe the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows or a distro of choice.
The vast majority of people who buy a laptop expect the laptop they paid money for to work without having to "wipe the drive and install a fresh copy of" anything
On some laptops I'll stick with the stock windows install simply because that's what is often required to get full performance (GPU, battery life, etc). The most egregious I've seen so far is an ASUS Zephyrus G15 which gets ~20% worse GPU performance when using anything but the factory Nvidia drivers on the factory install. Installing drivers from Windows Update or straight from Nvidia incurs the speed hit, and while it's possible to download the right drivers from ASUS, getting them installed and in the right state is a pain in the rear.
And again it's the normies that suffer this abuse from these companies and it's not going to stop. Yes we can use custom roms, esoteric ADB hacks etc. to stop this abuse but your average consumer? They can't. Their devices they trust a significant part of their life with gets invaded by these sick marketing people thinking it's somehow conceivable for this to be OK. And there are developers out there that comply with that, that indeed help them. It takes decades for legislation to fix these issues, until then it is our duty to stop this where ever we can.
Please stop helping these sick corpo fucks. Do not implement this shit, do not help them abuse their customers against their will. Remember all those ethical dilemmas presented in Star Trek? Remember the evil Admiral ordering Captain Picard to do something against his conscious? "There are times, sir, when... men of good conscience cannot blindly follow orders."[0]. Remember these lessons when they ask you to abuse the privacy and freedom of their customers and DO NOT COMPLY!
And then you run up against the old saying (paraphrased) "You cannot convince someone whose livelihood depends on not being convinced"... the only way to stop this sort of behavior is to change the legalities such that marketers can be sued out of existence for anything considered shady practices. Then push that line every time something new comes up.
Unless these asshats are hit on the nose with newspapers when they shit in your house, they'll never learn to take it elsewhere.
Do not expect these people to understand. Make it impossible for them to act instead. Your average marketing person pushing more and more intrusive ads has the technological prowess of a 3rd grader. They cannot do their malicious business without support from programmers that actually understand the technology they abuse.
Lenovo left a sour taste for me after they pushed a BIOS update through Windows Update on my daughter's Flex that bricked the device (in the middle of a school-week, while she was doing online school).
There were dozens of reports of the same problem from other owners of that model, yet they refused to acknowledge the issue was theirs or offer any self-serve option (I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the BIOS from an attached USB with specific format and layout, but I presume they saved a couple of cents by removing that feature from the Flex models). Luckily the laptop was still in warranty and I got it "fixed" after 6 weeks, but will never purchase another Lenovo product again.
>I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the BIOS from an attached USB with specific format and layout
Source for this? I've seen it available on various enthusiast desktop motherboards, but I haven't seen it on laptops. I haven't even seen it on the pricier thinkpad line.
I've done it at least twice with my Thinkpad T495. Bootable USB with El Torito format, if I remember it correctly. Using Lenovo official ISO images and instructions, etc.
I can't find any Lenovo official documentation, but if you google for something like "lenovo laptop fn+r bios usb" you'll find a bunch of tutorials for how the recovery works.
It does not work on the Flex model line-up though (I presume because they didn't include the bootstrapper firmware or some h/w component).
GP said the device was "bricked", so I'm not sure whether that feature would work. "bricked" to me would imply BIOS is broken (otherwise it's not really bricked because you can reinstall the OS). The feature on various gaming motherboards involves you copying the BIOS file on a formatted USB, plugging it into the motherboard, and pressing a button (on the motherboard itself). This works even if the current BIOS is broken/corrupt.
That's correct: the BIOS was corrupt; the machine had no display at all, so no way to enter the BIOS menu or "boot" an OS.
Other Lenovo laptops have a recovery mode (Fn+R) where some bootstrapping firmware would flash a BIOS from USB, they neglected to include that feature in the (presumably lower cost) Flex lineup.
Some folks out of support went as far as desoldering the EPROM with the BIOS and hooking it up to a flash programmer, to get the laptop unbricked.
I realize they have a lot of different models and probably a limited test matrix, but it's still unforgivable to push a forced update that bricks the device to this level (and until that happened I didn't even know OEMs can push BIOS updates over Windows Update, probably because most of my machines are custom builds).
> I realize they have a lot of different models and probably a limited test matrix
Why would that be hard? They're the manufacturer; all they have to do is keep a handful of every model they've made, stick them in a room connected to network and power, and have Jenkins run a job on them that flashes the firmware and reboots. I know I'm oversimplifying, but I don't think I'm oversimplifying by that much, and it shouldn't be hard for the manufacturer to keep test units of their own hardware on hand.
I had to do this recently on an old Dell XPS 9530 circa 2013.
It had been sitting in a cupboard for a good year or two and when powered on it produced no video output, or BIOS/POST screen. The backlight for the screen didn't even come on.
While it wasn't particularly easy to troubleshoot. I eventually managed to flash an uncorrupted version of the BIOS over USB and it's been working fine since.
It is key for desktop motherboards, at least AMD ones where they reuse the same socket over multiple CPU generations.
I bought a motherboard and a new AMD Zen 3 CPU together recently. The motherboard wouldn't POST because the BIOS was too old to and didn't have Zen 3 support.
The only way to get it to work was to flash a new BIOS using the out-of-band update tool that works with just the PSU and USB stick attached.
Without that you would need a spare CPU knocking about...
Not sure what % of motherboards support USB BIOS Flashback but I remember AMD in Ryzen 2 era shipping out "loaner cpus" exactly for that purpose -- so people could buy a CPU/AM4 motherboard combo that needed the BIOS upgrade to boot it.
This is an invisible advantage that Apple has. Because Macs don't have a long tail of combinations of hardware, BIOS, firmware, etc they can actually recognize bugs and acknowledge them. This gives a better customer experience.
But because the hardware is proprietary, the length of that simpler tail still depends entirely on Apple's willingness to support it's legacy products.
This is true — and if you look at the history, it tends to support the person you replied to. They tend to support consumer hardware at least as long as most enterprise lines.
Considering that ten year old computers are still usable today, it means that the supported lifetime of Apple hardware is half of what it could be.
And it's not just the computer itself but the whole ecosystem that gets the boot periodically. Last year I built a Linux-based 24 track digital studio on the cheap by buying Firewire soundcards that no longer worked on the latest Macs. Great hardware that otherwise still worked perfectly.
It’s more that Apple is striking a balance between a reasonable hardware support timeframe and moving their software platforms forward with at a certain velocity without excessive legacy baggage.
Waste is a legitimate concern and Apple has very convenient trade-in and recycling programs to address that.
They made a design flaw (too short flex cable for monitor) on some laptops but only offered extended warranty fixes to the less expensive versions of that laptop.
Apple is not the champion you think it is.
Also they made their phone have random errors and slowness if you replaced the camera module with no error message so that you would blame the tech shop you got it repaired at for "breaking it".
At least within the eco system, Apple aren’t going to push ads onto your computer.
The dichotomy isn’t Apple vs PC anymore. It’s walled garden vs freedom. If you’re going to choose a walled garden, Apple sure is the nicest. If you want to own your hardware you need to start supporting the smaller players.
I don't believe Apple will pushing ads, but their laptop can't run OS other than macOS. So if they do harmful thing for macOS, there's no way to escape with same hardware, until Linux hackers make it possible to run Desktop Linux.
You can delete most iOS apps: Stocks, News, Mail, Safari are all removable. Also they are not ads and can actually do something useful. MacOS is also ad free.
While I agree that Apple is much better than others in not bundling adware with their product (the exception being App Store, which is also an advertising platform for them) they do bundle many apps with their device. And bundling is also a kind of advertisement / promotion. And on ios you can't remove some of these apps but only hide them.
> they can actually recognize bugs and acknowledge them
Unless it’s a hardware flaw and then they will usually ignore it until it looks like they may be legally compelled not to.
GPU failures, display flex cable issues, insufficient heat dissipation, the fact that the 16” MBP GPU pulls 100% power when connected to an external display, the fucking butterfly keyboard.
Don’t get me wrong I like my MacBook as much as the next guy, but if there is a hardware problem in a MacBook you’ll be lucky if they even acknowledge it.
The laptop screen is fine, it's the HDMI out limited to 1920x1080 that's problematic. Carrying a docking station around defeats the portability of the laptop IMO. And it's not like there aren't better options than Lenovo...
Well this really sounds nonsensical. I wouldn't believe if someone else told me but I feel like I can believe an HNer on such a subject. Thank you for letting us know. I would otherwise not imagine this can exist and wouldn't check when choosing a laptop. Now I wonder if my laptop supports higher resolutions on HDMI.
> Carrying a docking station around defeats the portability of the laptop IMO
You are not supposed to carry them, they are meant to be put on your table and stay there, already connected to external monitors, power supply and other devices, waiting for you to bring the laptop and connect it to just the dock.
Nevertheless small and lightweight "traveler docks" also exist.
Work issued T580. IT insisted docking stations were needed for higher resolutions. Doing some research, it turns out that is true but also one can buy a proprietary USB-C cable as well, my bad. It's the built-in HDMI that caps at 1920x1080 as I experienced.
Unfortunately ThinkPads have a design flaw. On mine, if I use the LAN adapter that came with the device, I won't be able to use the adjacent USB-C port!
I believe there is a setting to stop Windows from attempting to download/install non-Windows updates (including thirdparty drivers). If you still want automatic WU but not the other stuff, then you can set that.
Many years ago I remember reading about Toshiba laptops doing the same thing --- silently updating BIOS in the background and failing, resulting in a brick --- although that was the manufacturer crapware doing it, not Windows itself.
Personally, I never update BIOS unless there is a very good reason to, like a fix for detecting RAM or similar.
Luckily the laptop was still in warranty and I got it "fixed" after 6 weeks,
In Shenzhen, you can get your laptop's BIOS reflashed while-you-wait/watch. I was there a few years ago with a friend who needed his laptop fixed. Of course it wasn't a warranty repair, but the difference in MTTR (and cost --- about $20USD, and negotiable if you really want to) is a stark contrast.
I have a fairly vanilla custom machine and hit this too. I think there's something profuooundly wrong with a recent windows update related to driver signing.
Lenovo also possibly sabotages SuperIO chip when the charging port breaks and pins come in contact or standard repair diagnostics is attempted[1]. Considering this is not widely spoken about, I guess this is limited to lower end models available only in developing regions of the world(which makes it altogether more sinister if done on purpose).
I would take the video with a grain of salt - the guy says himself he doesn’t have the schematic, there might very well be an inline ESD protection IC connected to the pin..
But he demonstrates on camera, the pin from charging port leads directly to the SuperIO pin without any protections in between?
Besides there are several accounts of this on the comments of that video with similar Lenovo models. Sorin's viewership base in majority comprises of laptop repair technicians and he's quite respected in the community(Like Louis Rossmann).
Gentle reminder that Lenovo jumped the shark quite a while ago. The whole Superfish debacle, the spyware, the crapware, the endless stream of shitty decisions. Year after year, the hardware gets worse. Customer support gets worse.
The sad thing is that they're still better than everything else out there. Which says a lot about the laptop industry in general.
PC laptops are now budget machines so they compete on price. Anything that competes on price tends to become a deflationary race to the bottom.
This is part of why people feel almost stuck with Apple. Their hardware is a lot better than most of the competition, though it comes with a price premium, and while there are privacy concerns they are less than with these shitware-loaded machines. You can also install Linux on them if you really want no telemetry at all, even with M1 Macs.
Meh. The trackpoint and keypad on my X1 are far inferior to previous Thinkpads, like the X220, before they decided their overarching mission was to make things as thin as possible. The trackpoint is sometimes unusable and is a chore to use at all times whereas the older ones were fun.
FWIW, Intel has been forcing manufacturers hand when it comes to thickness. Since their high performance laptop processors have stagnated on the last decade, they've created programs to encourage thin laptops.
Both the old "Intel Ultrabook" and the new "Intel Evo" tightly restrict thickness in the 12-14" laptop segment.
I won't give Lenovo a free pass, but it's part of why keytravel and cooling solutions are pretty awful in modern small laptops.
>Both the old "Intel Ultrabook" and the new "Intel Evo" tightly restrict thickness in the 12-14" laptop segment.
How do those programs work? Do you need to meet a certain thickness to get called an ultrabook? Why can't manufacturers just opt out and make a notebook without "ultrabook" slapped on it?
Trademarks. Also, manufacturers might get money from parts makers (the big three mostly) for marketing using their trademarks, which means they need to meet the parts maker's conditions to get "free money".
Well yeah. I have an X220 and the keyboard and stick are great. I just wish there was an upgrade path to have those along with the nice display and audio of the X1.
Are there? There's Thinkpads, and pretty much nothing else. Everything else either has awful specs, awful hardware, or awful support. And don't even get me started on awful keyboards, those are now almost universal.
I'm always surprised that the XPS gets so much love. Everything about it felt sub-par to me.
I was pretty happy with my surface, while it lasted anyway. Ended up with a defective touch screen that couldn't be replaced, so I just got a full refund (thank you extended warranty).
For me, the big thing I've liked about the XPS is that it has a good balance of powerful hardware, weight, battery life, and looks. I especially enjoy the fact that it has a dedicated graphics card, since usually only gaming laptops have those. The only laptops with comparable specs (gaming laptops) are either too heavy, have poor battery life, or are just plain ugly.
That being said, the touchpad on it is just barely "ok"-level and the webcam (on my older model) is just awful. The friction on the touchpad is so high my wrist becomes sore, and the webcam is located on the bottom of the screen (with a microphone on the bottom front edge near the trackpad!). Even though these flaws have required me to switch to a wireless mouse and external webcam, I'm still pretty satisfied.
For my next laptop, I'll likely either buy the newest XPS model (the newer ones have webcams at a usable position), or try the Razor again (the one I previously tried had quite a small battery life).
(I would love to know the series of events that led a high-end laptop to have a webcam placed at a position that is only optimal for looking up one's nose.)
Loving my XPS 13 running ubuntu since 2018. Trackpad is great and I still get enough battery life to use for browsing at work all day
edit: sorry, I just remembered -- I did have to replace the SSD on this thing when it conked out in 2019! fortunately I bought it refurbished with a warranty of some sort and they shipped a new one fast.
Thank you for replying. I don't mean this as a dig at you or your choices but from a cursory glance that model has a significantly worse screen, a weird nose-and-finger webcam on the bottom of the screen, negligible price and spec differences (or probably a much worse value proposition compared to an M1 if you're ok with macOS and ARM), a touchpad which is pretty certain to be worse than Apple's, and a plastic body it looks like.
I think it wins on port options, the aesthetics you could argue as personal preferences, and optioned up it has the potential for maybe a better screen and a digitizer but at that point it loses badly on price. It's not a bad computer, but it's clearly a compromise on several issues and not really beating Apple enough at the stuff it does better that would compel a switch from purely a hardware or value standpoint. I think it's fine if you wanted to avoid Apple or macOS for software reasons, but that's about it. I've also had a pretty good track record with Apple hardware lasting ages while I watch peers with PCs that drop like flies every few years.
This is the point that many of us feel stuck with Apple. Every time I research Apple's alternatives I feel like I've wasted my time.
The display seems to be fixed as well, with the new OLED XPSes having a wider gamut than the Macs.
For what it's worth, it's the touchpads and displays that keep pushing me away from the 13-inch MBP. I much prefer the feel of most PC precision touchpads to the grainy texture of the MBP touchpad. As for the display, I like to set high-DPI displays to 2x scaling, since it tends to look and work better, but the 13-inch MBP's 2560x1600px only has 1280x800dp of real estate at 2x scaling, which feels very cramped in comparison to the 1920x1080dp of real estate on my XPS 13's 3840x2160px display.
I just got a brand new precision (XPS but with a Quadro card) and it’s unusable. Trackpad straight up broken, maybe due to battery swelling. Had to update firmware to get the headphone jack to function. Camera has strange flickers. Cleary I got a lemon but that’s terrible quality control.
We used XPS 13s as lab computers at a previous job and they would just stop powering on eventually. Sometimes removing and reinserting the battery would bring them back, usually not.
I switched from a MBP to a Razor Blade 14, with their 4k screen option. I forget what I paid but it was on par with a similarly specced MBP.
The only real compromise that I've noticed is that the battery life isn't as good. But part of the reason for that is that it has an actual graphics card (albeit not a great one). So it's more of a trade-off than a compromise, the ability to do light gaming is worth it for me.
We have a 2012 Macbook Pro 13" that's been handed down from me, to wife to kids. Incredible to think this machine is near 10 years old, and even with how much abuse it's been through it is still going strong.
Although I don't think Macs between 2014 - 2019 are as well built (have had a string of issues with those), I haven't had any other PC/Macbook last as long as that 2012 MBP. Some of my old Thinkpads still work, but have coil whine, noisy fans etc.
I'm still using my 2014 Lenovo (G50-70) as my daily driver. Upgraded RAM and SSHD (to an SSD) since then moving it from a 8GB / 512GB SSHD to 16GB / 512GB SSD. Both really worthwhile upgrades that have given this laptop legs I didn't expect it to have or need.
I guess one could claim "companies that compete on price in some large section of the market form internal dysfunctions that cannot be reliably walled off from the parts of the companies that produce high-end products". Indeed, there's always a suspicion, perhaps reasonable, when mass-market companies produce luxury products, e.g., McDonald's McCafe or Ford sports cars. Some such companies often try to avoid this, with limited success, using separate branding.
On the other hand, that's a bit counter my experience. Working in a large company, I feel like walls keep emerging spontaneously and piercing through them is the bit that requires work. Often people inside the company cannot tell apart two teams working on related things, but the teams just won't talk to each other. Much less allow any kind of convergence to happen.
The "convergence" may happen at a level of the management structure that isn't visible to the rank-and-file worker, but rather several "layers of abstraction" up in the realm of budgetary and policy decisions. For example, a "budget laptop" company that doesn't place a high priority on high quality UEFI firmware isn't going to suddenly spin up a top-tier embedded team just because they decided to make a "premium" product - it might not even occur to them as something they need to spend more effort on.
"They haven't ever been better than Apple laptop hardware, even in Intel-land"
Except of course for the monumentally defective and offensive keyboards Apple saddled its customers with for FIVE YEARS. And there are the soldered-in SSDs and RAM now, and glued-together chassis. And the hodgepodge of laptop & desktop parts crammed into the iMac to make it "thinner," which is absolutely asinine in a desktop computer.
I have always liked the keyboard more. My opinion is that Apple prioritizes how the keyboard looks and how thin it is over the actual function and experience of using it. It blows my mind that people buy their desktop keyboard which is basically a laptop keyboard in small case.
I believe the ability to repair or swap components has always been better with Lenovo.
Apple beats Lenovo in a lot of other ways though, audio quality being one that I personally experienced. On my old T430s the speakers were so bad I wished they had just not included them at all. They were like the speakers in those talking greeting cards.
Finding a good Mac-layout mechanical keyboard that I liked was a total chore, I eventually got the Vinpok Taptek which I'm really pleased with but I can't find replacement keycaps for the life of me.
One good source of Mac mechanicals is Matias, e.g. https://matias.ca/quietpro/mac/. In fact, it's the only company I've found that makes a true Mac layout: that is, a full symmetric set of command, option, and control keys on each side.
I had one of the Matias wireless keyboards with the numeric keypad. I bought it because at the time, Apple didn't make a wireless version of its full Magic Keyboard.
It was good for about a year. Then i started having connectivity problems. The Letter in the keys wrote off quickly. And a few of the keys started becoming less responsive. The quality just wasn't there.
Luckily, by then Apple came out with its version, and it's been flawless for a few years now. It's worth the extra money to go with Apple, if you're getting that kind of keyboard.
I... don't understand this. I've been using exclusively mechanical keyboards since the very early 90s, and I've been using nearly-exclusively Macs since the very early 2000s. I've never had an issue here. Mechanical keyboards, as a general rule, are programmable, and have swappable keycaps. It's a simple matter to swap the keycaps if you are adjusted to the Windows mandated keyboard layout ordering and how that's mapped automatically in macOS, or slightly more work to remap the keys /and/ change the keycaps. That's not even considering that some of the greatest pre-built mechanical keyboards in the 90s and early 2000s were Mac specific, like options using Alps key switches for instance.
There are many many many many mechanical keyboard options to use with a Mac. If you're legitimately having difficulty finding a solution, feel free to reach out to me via the contact information in my profile and I'll be happy to make some specific recommendations.
Judging by yours and the sibling comments it would appear that my research into the subject of mechanical keyboards a couple of years ago was somewhat lacking!
Also, for low profile keycaps you can get them on Novel Keys. I don't think anyone else makes low profile compatible keycaps, but that's one of the trade-offs for using low profile switches.
So the "best" laptop hardware lacks USB-2 ports forcing me to use a bunch adapters, has a touch bar which is absolutely useless and takes keyboard space, plays poorly with any non-Apple mouse, keyboard keys are too thin, the keyboard is distributed in the most annoying way (fn at corner? And yeah I know about remapping), and it's made to be has hard to repair as possible (on purpose). Yeah hard pass on the "best laptop".
I've only ever owned one Mac, but I had more hardware problems with it than with every other machine I've owned in ~30 years put together. Motherboard melted down (fixed for free despite being out of warranty, to Apple's credit), optical drive crapped out, ACPI crapped out, keyboard backlighting crapped out, screen discoloured, spectacularly awful thermals and fan noise, and of course the daft-by-design Mac keyboard layout.
Obviously that's all anecdotal and may be an outlier, but I don't find a naked assertion that "Apple makes the best x64 laptops" very convincing.
Can I run Linux on them? Can I get them with keyboards that aren't awful? Can I get them with next-business-day-on-site warranty? Not trying to be snarky here, I haven't owned an Apple product since the iMac, so I literally don't know. But I suspect the answer is "no".
Yes, you can run the latest Linux. Linux now has native M1 support.
Yes, Apple did finally fix the awful keyboards on its laptops from 2016-2020, and their keyboards are once again quite good. The trackpad is what it has always been: the best on any computer at any price.
I'm not aware that Apple offers any kind of on-site warranty service, so that's a no, but the flipside is that you are much less likely to need it than you are with PCs. (Please, spare me the endless downvotes for saying this. I support hundreds of PCs and hundreds of Macs, and have for a couple decades now. I'm not just making this shit up for my health.)
Thanks for the correction; it does have kernel support for the latest Linux kernel, but yeah, it's not a mature port yet. I do expect that it will have full support very soon, however.
I’ve never understood the next-business-day-on-site warranty thing people seem so keen on.
Apple products (top case stickers notwithstanding) are fungible: just buy another one from any Apple store in the universe and restore your backup, and let AppleCare deal with the busted one on their own schedule.
There’s nothing special about your laptop except the data. The factory pumps out bazillions of them.
> I’ve never understood the next-business-day-on-site warranty thing people seem so keen on.
> Apple products ... just buy another one
I think you answered your own question. Buying a new laptop every time something is broken is expensive. Lenovo offers quite cheap extended warranty plus the next-day repair is great. (EU: I paid less then 50E for another year of warranty after the original 2 years)
Not to one up, but Dell is even better. You can extend the warranty after it has expired! You can re-up but they have a clause that you must wait 30 days before making an accidental damage claim (and it cannot have happened during the time without a warranty, but that is not enforceable).
I actually did this once and tried to submit a warranty support on day 1 of buying the new warranty and was turned down, but they called me about a week later saying they would waive the 30 days and ended up doing about $500 in repairs for $130 cost of the new warranty.
(the other condition is that you are only allowed one accidental repair event per year)
This strategy does not pass "the car test" - we would not accept Ford to tell us to "just buy another car and let insurance figure out how to reimburse you for the busted one".
The difference is that a lot of people on HN make at least a few macbooks a month in salary.
I doubt there are nearly as many people on HN making even one entry level Ford Focus a month in salary.
Along a similar line of reasoning, I totally understand if Coca-Cola bans soft drinks from Pepsi on campus. But I would be much less understanding of Ford banning non-Ford cars in their employee parking lots.
> I’ve never understood the next-business-day-on-site warranty thing people seem so keen on.
I need my laptop to work. If it doesn't work, I can't work. If I can't work, I'm not getting paid. That's why "next business day" is important.
My laptop contains sensitive data. Data which is encrypted at rest, but which I'm nevertheless not going to ship to goodness knows where, for goodness knows how long. That's one reason why "on site" is important. The other is that I paid a lot of money for a piece of hardware; I'm not going to faf about looking for some Apple Store (of which very few exist in my country).
Lenovo charges ~15% of the purchase price for 3 year NBDOS support, which is very much worth every cent. Tech shows up, replaces $part, leaves, and I can get back to work.
None of my PC laptops ever had parts of the keyboard randomly die on me. None of my PC laptops, ever, had self-inflating batteries.
I experienced both on employer-provided MacBooks. Now, I may have been particularly unlucky here, but I think Apple hardware quality never having been surpassed is a bit of an optimistic statement.
>>None of my PC laptops, ever, had self-inflating batteries.
Lucky you then, I literally just replaced an inflated battery on a Dell latitude, can send some cool pics of the thing being swollen like a wet nappy if you want.
After 30 years of buying Apple, I gave up when it became common for the powerbooks to subject you to DC in the wrists, kill perfectly serviceable panasonic dvd drives and send HDs to nirvana on the clock. The number of recovery jobs I had to run for musicians and filmmakers between 2003 and 2010 was hair raising. Never again. My mac classic runs just fine.
I think the shielding of the power adaptor picks up some induction (or capacitance?) and you can feel that when you brush over it with your hand. If you use a grounded lead (the 3-prong cable that comes with the adaptor instead of the 2-prong duckhead) it doesn't happen. Because the voltage that will flow to ground and won't build up.
You can indeed feel it very clearly because it makes the surface feel rough and tickly. I'm also sensitive to it.
A lot of computers do this, my PC-XT did this back in the 80s. But Apple is one of the few with an all metal case. A lot of other makes have metal but it's usually just a sheet and not connected to the actual ground.
What I hate about Apple's current laptops is the sharp edges that cut into my wrists, and the keyboards that are too shallow to have real feedback. They seem made more to please the eyes, not the hands.
Maybe for certain subsets of the user group. I don't like the dongle-hell that is the Apple laptop line. I'll take my Lenovo or Dell laptop that has RJ45, multiple usb ports, and more. I also prefer a physical laptop dock (not USB3), but I always had such a headache with them for linux support.
Apple laptops are always a fair bit pricier for a given set of hw specs than any other manufacturer would be.
Additionally, they lack any level of reparability and a trip to the genius bar will often be quite expensive. Hell, look at the debacle that was the butterfly keyboard they pushed for something like 5-6 years.
Apple's keyboards, even before/after the butterfly keyboard, are inferior (in my opinion) than the keyboard on the Thinkpad line, and feel quite mushy by comparison.
The aluminum construction is quite solid, but not without it's issues. They seem to get far hotter in my experience, but perhaps that's them acting as heat sink so I'll give that a pass. The hard edges on the case are a pain-point to me.
I know a lot of people seem to prefer the apple touchpads, but I've never liked them. I prefer physical mouse buttons, and the click never felt right to me on apple touchpads. Part of it might be that gesture inputs with the touchpads aggravated my RSI, so I was never able to make use of them.
All said, I don't agree with Apple making the best x64 laptops, but they fielded a competitor like many others. They have the advantage of being the only true Apple laptop though, so if you're all-in on the Apple ecosystem, they're definitely the best choice. Otherwise, there are many laptops that might surpass the macbooks, depending on your individual preferences.
Over the past few years, I've owned an Asus laptop (thin/light), two Lenovo laptops, and an HP. Before that, a large Dell gaming laptop.
Most recently, I had bought the HP Omen 15, but realizing that the screen used PWM below 100% brightness, I sold it and bought a Lenovo Legion 5.
The previous Lenovo is a Y540. The Y540 is arguably "good but not great" build quality. If you squint, it looks kind of like there could be a slight curve to the bottom of the monitor where the two side hinges support it.
The Legion 5 is really well built. No unusual give, very smooth running fans, etc. It's also been super reliable, better than expected battery - really nothing to complain about.
Now I imagine if you spend $2-3k on laptops, you probably think these $1k laptops are garbage quality, but they seem better than the HP Omen 15, and certainly better than the Asus and the $1700 Dell I bought 8 years ago.
Some screens use DC dimming. It isn't an issue for most people, but post-concussion I've had to be pickier about screens. The HP gave me a headache with the 200Hz PWM. The Legion lets me use brightness levels other than 100% without a headache!
Yes, it's about the frequency and filtering. Some screens use ridiculously low switching frequencies that mean the resulting signal can't be filtered out with anything that would fit in a thin laptop.
I had a bad run of three Lenovo laptops and gave up on the brand completely after years of being an IBM/ThinkPad fan: a ThinkPad P40 (pen digitizer and power connector failures), a Yoga 720 15" (SSD, touch digitizer, and internal wi-fi failed), and a Legion 7 (known hinge design issue leading to failure).
I know the Legion 5 is good, which is why I (foolishly) thought the Legion 7 would also be good. It's the inconsistency within and across their product lines, and their god-awful depot support, that's made it a game of Russian Roulette to buy a Lenovo device — some people still swear by them because they either luck into, or do the deep research to find, the very specific models within certain lines that aren't failure-prone.
The 720 and Legion 7 failed within weeks, not months, and the 720 went to the depot twice and had at least one repeat or new failure within weeks after returning each time.
The P40 broke my heart the worst, though, because it had every feature I wanted and I paid through the nose for it thinking it'd be a 5-year device, minimum. It didn't make it to 2, couldn't get a refund, and didn't have the heart to sell it even for parts.
The 720 and Legion, though, failed so quickly that I got refunds from their retailers; I couldn't possibly resell them, and with the Legion 7 in particular I wasn't going to gamble with their depot service rejecting warranty coverage for the fault as people were reporting on Lenovo's own forums, and especially after the touch digitizer failed after the _second_ depot service for the 720.
> It feels wrong to buy a Linux laptop from the company that makes Github?
that bought Github, and don't worry, Github is going to morph into yet another Microsoft entity in the next 5 years and everybody will move somewhere else...
My theory is that was a leftover from when they were IBM and had huge contracts (think along the lines of 40k laptops at a time). So if something went wrong and you pissed off the wrong guy at one of those companies they would hold you to the 'fixed by the end of the next day' part of the contract. So IBM took care to make sure that did not happen. When they got bought out I was pretty sure that quality would slide eventually to the bean counters.
Lenovo refused to repair a laptop of my wife that had a broken display (always stayed black), because the USB port was also broken. The plastic guide was pulled out by an USB device, actually another manufacturing defect. That laptop was ~6 month old. The otherwise pristine laptop was mistreated they claimed, a pure lie.
That enterprise is evil and deserves no single cent. They sell cheap junk with adware/spyware and a fake warranty.
Edit: apparently I stand corrected I assumed this was a Windows Tablet, of course, the OS vendors should really step in here, they do have power in the equation. Ultimately, I would use the argument to the exec. team at Lenovo that the incremental revenue from these things just isn't worth it in the overall experience.
Often teams are tasked with coming up with new revenue models, it's often an internal, organizational issue as opposed to a coherent product vision.
This is despicable, and it's indicative of a trend I've been noticing over the years. Personal computing used to be about user empowerment. Today it seems to me that many tech companies treat their users as nothing more than either "eyeballs" to show ads to or as cows to be milked through vendor lock-in and subscription services. Either way, I feel the user experience has degraded in recent years, and I feel we increasingly have less control over our computers.
Thankfully alternatives exist. Linux and the BSDs keep evolving, Haiku and ReactOS continue to develop and may one day reach daily-driver status, there's still a thriving market for building your own x86-64 PCs (I'll be building a Ryzen 9 machine this weekend), and products like the Framework laptop, the PineBook, and the Librem laptop have me excited. Hopefully these alternatives will continue to evolve and take root so that way there's a formidable challenger to Big Tech.
People put up with it, and we all suffer. Google recently shat out a similarly offensive update to Android TV, so now the only UI on people's $4000 Sony TVs is 1/3 advertisements for stuff the user often doesn't even have access to. Disgraceful.
> Thankfully alternatives exist. Linux and the BSDs keep evolving, Haiku and ReactOS continue to develop and may one day reach daily-driver status, there's still a thriving market for building your own x86-64 PCs (I'll be building a Ryzen 9 machine this weekend), and products like the Framework laptop, the PineBook, and the Librem laptop have me excited. Hopefully these alternatives will continue to evolve and take root so that way there's a formidable challenger to Big Tech.
There are so many great Linux versions now which are end-user friendly. I've been impressed by Linux Mint and of course Ubuntu. The hardest part is just picking one and sticking to it.
That's very easily resolved with a fresh install though. And it's always been.
The problem with the more locked down nature of devices these days, especially mobile, is that that isn't an option anymore like with this Lenovo update.
Alternatives certainly exist - I've been moving myself rapidly in that direction after my nearly 20 years of Apple use has come to an end (at a remarkably low sysadmin-hours-per-year level, that's going to go up substantially). Unfortunately, most of them aren't quite ready for standard daily driver use.
I've been daily driving a PineBook Pro, and despite some custom kernel hacking I've done, I still don't have reliably sound after sleep... unless I don't have sleep enabled properly, at which point it won't last the night on battery. Pick your poison. Or do more kernel hacking. It's something related to device sleep/resume on the audio chip, which I eventually found some NDA'd datasheets for. Fortunately, I can use 2.4GHz wifi out where I live, because 5GHz is also weirdly broken unless you perform the right incantations after power cycle.
At this point, I think "those who can" move away from the core ecosystems have an obligation to do so, and try to pave the road in front of us. Right now, it's cobblestones at best (if you ignore the potholes), and a lot of people simply won't go that way. As long as the alternatives start with "Well, as long as you don't mind..." and then a list of features people consider important... they're going to remain alternatives.
But, at the same time, I find myself considering how much hassle is worth it to "remain in the ecosystems." Yes. I can do a lot of work to smooth out rough edges, write my own kernel modules to work around hardware quirks (I really should upstream the sleep changes), figure out alternatives to things that don't work, do Matrix bridges, and...
At what point is it simply not worth it? At what point is trying to keep up with modern consumer tech, to de-fang it, and make it work for me instead against of me just more hassle than it's worth? If anything mainstream is eventually going to get updates that turn it against me (which I consider updates like this to be), then... why bother? The benefits are great, but if the downsides and workarounds and time cost are too much, then I should consider if I actually want to be part of that.
I've already done this with cell phones. Apple pissed me off with on-device CSAM scanning enough (well, that was the final straw) that I've gone back to a flip phone. I could go Pixel, Graphene, etc, but I've decided to experiment with what I actually miss out on, going back to a flip phone. I've de-fanged my previous phone a lot, so it's less of a change than for a lot of people, but... a few weeks in, I actually haven't missed a smartphone that much.
I object strongly to the whole "You pay for the tech which then collects data and makes money on the backend optimizing the advertising feed to your pair of eyeballs" model that is more and more a part of consumer tech, so perhaps the right answer is to simply opt out of it. It's a recent addition to life. We can go back to what worked before.
You're right... But we don't live in a vacuum. I can try to live without WhatsApp but literally everyone in Europe uses it. It's just unavoidable. And that's just one example.
So, I still go the trouble to bend the ecosystems to my will... Like Matrix bridges. It's a lot of work I'll give you that.
I'm at a point in my life where I can be a bit cranky about stuff like this - and, my views on tech are well enough known that people almost expect me to be a bit cranky about it. I recently asked someone how he'd prefer to be paid, cash or check. His response was along the lines of, "Well, I'd prefer a payment app on the phone, but I know you don't use those, so... check, easier to scan and deposit that way."
If "everyone uses it because everyone uses it," well... great, there lies monopoly and abuses. I can get away with using somewhat less, without any real impact to my social or professional life - so at this point, being that friction point is perfectly fine with me.
But I grew up before cell phones. I grew up before smartphones. The concept of a smartphone beyond a "lol, Crackberry, I'll bet you a beer you can't put it down on the table for half an hour and not touch it!" stage is only a decade old. In that time, it's absolutely transformed the world - and, IMO, not for the better. Our collective response to the "Crackberry" behavior was, "oooh, I want one too!" My daughter has asked for her own phone (no, you're about a decade too young). When asked what people use phones for, her response is, "I don't know... but they look like they're really interesting!" Yeah... how to cut your phone use substantially overnight.
Just because the river is rushing towards "What makes tech companies the most money in the next quarter" doesn't mean we have to be part of it. And at this point, I think coming up with alternatives (technology based or not) is damned near a moral obligation.
For any software I may need, I'll always look for open source first, and strongly prefer it even if it has significant disadvantages to commercial offerings, as long as it's somewhat tenable to use. Not for ideological reasons, just because I don't like having the rug yanked out under me. Although I guess you could argue those are ideological reasons
What is increasingly scaring me: This time, the vendor was "nice" enough to only force you into viewing a subscription offer. However, there is really nothing technical that would keep them from forcing you to take the subscription if you want to continue using your device.
Vendors have enough control about locked-down devices that they could play ransomware and make arbitrary demands to their users without many problems. And "device" can be anything from phones to cars to smart homes or expensive specialized equipment.
I'm not sure how the legal situation is currently, but since the Stallman strategy of keeping devices free has evidently failed, I think it's high time for a comprehensive set of "digital consumer rights" that limit what vendors can do on "their" devices.
Yeah, sure, technically any vendor can push updates to brick your device, but that doesn’t happen because of the law. This stuff often gets through because it’s small enough, gray enough, and done by smaller companies. Have Apple pull something like this and you’ll see on the NYT.
Not quite the same, but there was a story yesterday about Apple doing this with a "Try the new Safari" notification. I think this falls under your "gray enough" category, but it is interesting they violated their own design guidelines.
And then what? It might generate a bit of outrage, but at the end of the day, users have no leverage (without legal support).
No one wants to lose their device or the data on it, so for individual users, there are not a lot of options apart from doing whatever the vendor wants
Doesn't happen yet. Entire industries are trying to bypass basic property law so you "own" your purchases in name only and the manufacturer has control de facto. The video game industry has been saying "buy or product" when they really mean "subscribe to our service"[1] for a long time. Bricking old multiplayer gamed had been common practice for years, and now some singleplayer games have been unnecessarily bricked when the publisher e.g. shut down the DRM server.
Companies like John Deere have been extending this strategy into their hardware for a while. The damage doesn't even have to be "bricking your device"; HN regularly features stories about forced updates that remove paid-for features.
> Have Apple pull something like this and you’ll see on the NYT.
Apple got close when their devices suddenly stopped running 3rd party software in the recent "OCSP Apocalypse".
I didn't follow it super closely but if I recall right Nest bought a competing brand of smart home devices (Revolv). They kept it around for a year or two and then in 2016 turned off the servers that mediated between the phone app and the device, bricking the devices.
Nothing only about it, considering any offer is like requesting a quote for my time. It's a task I must assess. I never feel bad about using adblocker or coupons to excess because gaining the opportunity to form my habits is something I charge for.
In this case I am thinking about entering the display advertising business and declaring their overlay ads as anti-competitive computer hacking and vandalism on my equipment.
I have been looking. I have a Lenovo tablet, it has the "Tips" app. That app cannot be disabled, and does have system control over the tablet, but I have never seen a notification come from it before.
As much as I'd love to have alternatives in this particular Simulation, there are none. You either use Apple and minimize your suffering, or you don't use Apple and go live in hell, provided by companies running their product design & development by teams of chimpanzees (obviously & unfortunately).
I bought one and returned it. It's a laptop without a keyboard, not a tablet.
I spent the first day waiting for Windows Update and turning off telemetry and other annoyances. I spent the second day trying mamy apps that were significantly worse than Procreate. I returned it on the third day.
If you want Windows on a tablet, with all its issues and annoyances, you'll get exactly that. If you want an iPad experience with access to productivity tools, you won't get it.
I wanted an iPad for replacing a Moleskine and a laptop. The laptop replacement part was OK, but it was a very unpleasant drawing experience. Opening and editing files sucked all the fun out of it. Procreate on the iPad felt a lot closer to the real thing: flip through pages, select one, pick a tool, have fun.
I can't overstate how annoyed and angry this tablet was making me compared to my friend's iPad.
With alternatives such as System76 and the modular Framework laptop emerging, as well as low-cost systems from Pine, Lenovo's claim as the default preferred choice of the Linux/*BSD and power-user set is very rapidly evaporating.
I've bought Thinkpads personally and professionally for 20 years. Idiotic cunning stunts such as this and Superfish have removed it from any future consideration.
Until System76 moves beyond the branded Clevo's they will not be able to compete with Thinkpads. They've talked about an internally developed laptop before, but still no sign of it.
The Framework laptops have the most potential right now IMO. I'm watching them to see how things go and will probably pick up a second gen of their laptops if they keep looking good.
I think it's a bit unfair to simply say they are "branded Clevo's". There was an interview about "right to repair" that I can't find right now where one of the founders of System76 addressed this and it sounds like they put a bit more effort into their hardware (and specifically, the accompanying middleware/firmware) than slapping some stickers on a Clevo.
Edit: I still can't find the interview, which was a good one, but I found this [1] earlier comment from someone who works there.
The do put in a lot more effort to make them work well with Linux and be as open as possible but they can't really do much about the quality, which is my main issue with the Clevos.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] thread[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/superfish-to...
Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new laptops regardless of vendor, and specifically add only the necessary drivers, etc.
TL;DW: they did a secret shopper laptop buying experience, the sales rep pushed the extra warranty hard, and included it (at cost) despite the buyer declining it.
I suppose startups (where but everybody is on a Mac) are not enterprises, then?
> Still, for a business with stricter security standards, it would be ideal to do a clean reimage of all new laptops regardless of vendor, and specifically add only the necessary drivers, etc.
There were some Lenovos that had vendor crapware in the EFI partition that would get auto-reinstalled by Windows when you’d do a fresh install.
Mac computers are not enterprise computers. They're first and foremost consumer machines.
This is what I've done with virtually every machine I've personally owned for oh... the last 20 years? Why is this not people's defacto way of setting up a new machine? It's obvious that preinstalls are full of bloatware and spyware. The only issue (primarily from the past) is that specialty hardware may not work without vendor-provided drivers. That's largely no longer true, especially for the big-name brands like Lenovo, Dell, Acer, ec.
We have a lot of Thinkpads at work and we just can't even order an Ideapad or other consumer models like Legion if we wanted to. They just won't sell them to us. We've tried to get some because some developers needed GTX cards.
It's like there's 2 Lenovo companies just having the same name. I'd trust the B2B Lenovo not to put spyware on their systems (even though I'd reinstall them just in case). At work they even preinstall our images for us.
But the B2C Lenovo is a totally different beast and this is where the Superfish rootkit appeared. The total build of the machines is also very different. Cheap plastic feel, lacking the amazing keyboards etc. I love the thinkpad look and feel and hate the Ideapad ones (and the Thinkpads that are really ideapads, I think the E series (Or is it the L? I always mix those up)
The current trend of soldered RAM & wireless radios is an utter dealbreaker, I can only hope the industry grows out of it.
I'm sure it doesn't bother Lenovo one bit though as people who actually care about this stuff are a fraction of 1% of their market.
Frustrating for sure...
Seriously, this shit is inexcusable.
I personally think hackers have a moral responsibility to make fixes like this more accessible to the average person. Tech corporations have made it clear they have no qualms about attacking their users in increasingly creative ways, and it's up to us to reclaim control over the devices which, in an ethical sense, are rightfully ours.
If you do it without --user 0 it will actually uninstall it, but this only works for non-system apps and most manufacturers mark all their crap/spyware as system of course. Sigh...
In this case, the offending APK ID is "com.tblenovo.lenovotips".
And I am pissed off that I had to learn that to fix a device that I own.
On desktop I'm already on Linux Mint. Looking for alts for phone and tablet.
The problem is that users suffer from "update fatigue" because they have to be (rightfully) afraid of entire UI overhauls or even more bugs after updates since no one does QA any more but follows the "bananaware" principle instead - software ripens at the customer's home.
And app stores don't exactly make things easy because there is always only one version that can be updated to - no app store, including F-Droid, has an easy way to have one app with multiple concurrently available versions.
Also, store them in the fridge
After you open them, yeah
In Chile at least, when we buy not quite ready avocado's we wrap them on newspaper, it helps them mature and become softer faster, people have done this for at least since I have been alive and it works well
One day SlimSocial broke. I pulled up the app in fdroid only exoecting to see a changelog for some recent update, but was pleasantly suprised to see this perfectly obvious and convenient Versions pull-down to install old versions. I used it, and it worked.
For branches, lots of app developers just make a new app for that, and those can be installed concurrently. You can't do it conveniently yourself as an end user, the app developer has to do it. But they would probably have to publish branches too, so nodifference.
That's not just mobiles either.. Windows 10 does the same :(
Sure it's nice for the average joe soap not turning their machine into a botnet node but I hate coming back to my PC and find it has rebooted while it was running some task for me.. Grrrr.
It is, but we should really stop tolerating that as an argument for mandatory updates. Enabling security updates by default on Windows editions not intended to be professionally managed would be sufficient to achieve most or all of the same benefits without imposing the much-criticised costs to users. The same argument holds for other tech that wants to force changes in behaviour and/or phone-home behaviour on its buyer/owner/user once the purchase is completed, including almost any device associated with the word "smart".
I recently got a (cheap) Pixel C to try out DivestOS and was very pleased in spite of some device-specific compromises (bootloader can't be relocked, stuck at Android 8.x but with current/on-going patches).
TV got annoying with ads and viewership greatly decreased but that was caused by the emergence of the internet I think, what new technology options we have to escape the current ads to? The only other hope is that the massive amount of money in ads and data collection is actually a bubble that will collapse
btw. Ben Krasnow is the guy behind Applied Science youtube channel[0], I highly recommend checking it out
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience
Apparently Netflix can afford to offer a wide variety of content for a small monthly fee, without any ads, and spend money on content creation; but digital TV stations somehow don't make enough money off of subscriptions which are an order of magnitude more expensive. Economies of scale, perhaps?
Edit because I can't be bothered to reply to all the comments below: excerpts from other books (often by the same author, or in a similar genre) are not ads IMO. They're not intrusive. They're pretty much always relevant. They're fun to read. They don't contain tracking cookies. They're as benign as it gets.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Golden_Books
[1] https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/2015/02/14/whats-rihan...
One could also think of "Read this excerpt from the next book by $AUTHOR" as an ad.
It left me wondering if some authors now secure contracts to always use a specific brand of $foobar if $foobar makes an appearance in their stories.
The only time I've ever encountered this level of repeated brand shilling in a book I actually intended to read was Vonnegut's Bluebeard and its Sateen Dura-Luxe. But there it played a significant part of the story, and it's a fictional brand..
Ah, so what you mean is you've never encountered an online ad in a printed book.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfIwUlY44CM
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYoKRS_eWZY
You can't solve these problems while leaving concentrated centers of market power intact. Nor can you leave the market system that would regenerate them intact either. The trust busters took action in the early 20th century but here we are in a place where it's even worse than before. Nor can we leave the arms manufacturers and military contractors intact either. If all that goes, so does US dominance over world affairs and the influence of the dollar. To that I say: good.
- make better use of the available bandwidth, allowing for more channels to be broadcast or less radio spectrum to be used
- offer multiple audio and video streams per channel, eg: surround sound support and translations into other languages
- better picture quality through higher resolution and the ability to recover from some transmission/reception errors
Commonly referred to as DVB (Digital Video Broadcast), it can be supplied over different bearers: terrestrial (DVB-T), satellite (DVB-S) and cable (DVB-C).
DVB is often combined with internet functionality into things like Hbb-TV, which allows for consumers to easily move between live broadcast channels and on-demand content supplied via an internet connection. Freeview in New Zealand uses Hbb-TV, and is broadcast over both terrestrial and satellite bearers, with on-demand video available for the major channels.
Cable TV may or may not be digital depending on the provider.
Is there some kind of meme/law that insists that over time every product gets ads... because there probably should be.
For now, the most they'll do is advertise their other services. But true external ads seem inevitable, especially in the face of the balkanization of digital video content. It's just a matter of when.
Or YouTube. Without blockers or YouTube Premium, it's getting to be like watching old shows in syndication on one of these TV stations you can never remember the channel number for. Five minutes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, five minutes of ads for things not available in stores, back to the show etc etc.
Yesterday I watched a video where a normal YouTube ad was immediately followed by a baked in ad and then that was again followed by another normal YouTube ad.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/HuygensOptics
IIRC the Ubuntu change was pushed in a non-LTS distribution.
As an aside I think 5 year LTS is too few, with the advances made in AI/ML in the last decade five years on os support means that 80% of all the tooling is broken now, at least without spending lots of time backporting or hacking fixes in.
Ubuntu LTS releases are 2 years apart. You don't have to keep using 5-year old LTSes, do you?
Maybe we need some sort of consumer collective to organize boycotts?
(If you define "bad" as "in a context where ads should not be", I think I agree with you.)
If people could organize to they extent that one of the worst offenders' businesses would be metaphorically burned to the ground once a year, I think that would have an effective deterrent effect.
I keep a running "what's my next laptop going to be?" thread running in my head. Lenovo was on that list because it's the "default implementation" of Linux laptops. But now - not so sure. If they're happy to pull this kind of asshattery, what other idiocy are they happy to do?
And Framework just made it onto that list this week, so the other post was timely too :)
If you need RAM up to 64GB there are the 855 G7 models.
That seems fine to me.
And, to Amazon's credit, the ads are unobtrusive. You get an ad for another book on your lockscreen; not a big deal, and most importantly, you are never, ever interrupted once you've unlocked the device. If Amazon ever switched to an intrusive-ad model, I'd pitch the thing in the trash without a second thought.
I was able to get the latest Paperwhite, trading in the old, broken Kindle, for $58. If it lasts as long as my old one (8 years) I'll be fine with that. I don't use it often, I keep a lot of reference and old books (like Raymond Chandler), I stopped buying Kindle books after three consecutive books were missing the last chapter or so.
The kindle windows conversion program (Kindle preview 3) will handle nearly everything that the "email yourself a book @kindle.com" won't, and for everything else there's calibre.
I had a book and a couple of palm pilots and other portable LCD screened things over a decade ago, and the kindle is the best for the price I get them at.
Also, in terms of who... most non-technical people take it out of the box and start using the device with the software on there.
Please stop helping these sick corpo fucks. Do not implement this shit, do not help them abuse their customers against their will. Remember all those ethical dilemmas presented in Star Trek? Remember the evil Admiral ordering Captain Picard to do something against his conscious? "There are times, sir, when... men of good conscience cannot blindly follow orders."[0]. Remember these lessons when they ask you to abuse the privacy and freedom of their customers and DO NOT COMPLY!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbVKLfmCDxgWe
Unless these asshats are hit on the nose with newspapers when they shit in your house, they'll never learn to take it elsewhere.
There were dozens of reports of the same problem from other owners of that model, yet they refused to acknowledge the issue was theirs or offer any self-serve option (I remember most laptops nowadays can re-flash the BIOS from an attached USB with specific format and layout, but I presume they saved a couple of cents by removing that feature from the Flex models). Luckily the laptop was still in warranty and I got it "fixed" after 6 weeks, but will never purchase another Lenovo product again.
Source for this? I've seen it available on various enthusiast desktop motherboards, but I haven't seen it on laptops. I haven't even seen it on the pricier thinkpad line.
And I use my re-write of geteltorio to flash it on a USB drive: https://github.com/hspak/geteltorito-zig
I've done this multiple times now without issues, but your milage by vary!
It does not work on the Flex model line-up though (I presume because they didn't include the bootstrapper firmware or some h/w component).
Expand the "Installation Instructions" part, and you'll see "Updating the BIOS from BIOS Boot Menu (independent of operating system)"
I don't know if Dell supports it across all their laptops, but it has on the ones I've owned.
Other Lenovo laptops have a recovery mode (Fn+R) where some bootstrapping firmware would flash a BIOS from USB, they neglected to include that feature in the (presumably lower cost) Flex lineup.
Some folks out of support went as far as desoldering the EPROM with the BIOS and hooking it up to a flash programmer, to get the laptop unbricked.
I realize they have a lot of different models and probably a limited test matrix, but it's still unforgivable to push a forced update that bricks the device to this level (and until that happened I didn't even know OEMs can push BIOS updates over Windows Update, probably because most of my machines are custom builds).
Why would that be hard? They're the manufacturer; all they have to do is keep a handful of every model they've made, stick them in a room connected to network and power, and have Jenkins run a job on them that flashes the firmware and reboots. I know I'm oversimplifying, but I don't think I'm oversimplifying by that much, and it shouldn't be hard for the manufacturer to keep test units of their own hardware on hand.
It had been sitting in a cupboard for a good year or two and when powered on it produced no video output, or BIOS/POST screen. The backlight for the screen didn't even come on.
While it wasn't particularly easy to troubleshoot. I eventually managed to flash an uncorrupted version of the BIOS over USB and it's been working fine since.
I bought a motherboard and a new AMD Zen 3 CPU together recently. The motherboard wouldn't POST because the BIOS was too old to and didn't have Zen 3 support.
The only way to get it to work was to flash a new BIOS using the out-of-band update tool that works with just the PSU and USB stick attached.
Without that you would need a spare CPU knocking about...
And it's not just the computer itself but the whole ecosystem that gets the boot periodically. Last year I built a Linux-based 24 track digital studio on the cheap by buying Firewire soundcards that no longer worked on the latest Macs. Great hardware that otherwise still worked perfectly.
Waste is a legitimate concern and Apple has very convenient trade-in and recycling programs to address that.
Apple is not the champion you think it is.
Also they made their phone have random errors and slowness if you replaced the camera module with no error message so that you would blame the tech shop you got it repaired at for "breaking it".
The dichotomy isn’t Apple vs PC anymore. It’s walled garden vs freedom. If you’re going to choose a walled garden, Apple sure is the nicest. If you want to own your hardware you need to start supporting the smaller players.
I even got Linux running on an decade old 12in PowerBook G4.
There is even a browser made for PowerPC, although the name escapes me.
Unless it’s a hardware flaw and then they will usually ignore it until it looks like they may be legally compelled not to.
GPU failures, display flex cable issues, insufficient heat dissipation, the fact that the 16” MBP GPU pulls 100% power when connected to an external display, the fucking butterfly keyboard.
Don’t get me wrong I like my MacBook as much as the next guy, but if there is a hardware problem in a MacBook you’ll be lucky if they even acknowledge it.
Even a ThinkPad?
I guess some models still have lower resolution screens, but I didn't look at then when I was evaluating the various options.
Well this really sounds nonsensical. I wouldn't believe if someone else told me but I feel like I can believe an HNer on such a subject. Thank you for letting us know. I would otherwise not imagine this can exist and wouldn't check when choosing a laptop. Now I wonder if my laptop supports higher resolutions on HDMI.
> Carrying a docking station around defeats the portability of the laptop IMO
You are not supposed to carry them, they are meant to be put on your table and stay there, already connected to external monitors, power supply and other devices, waiting for you to bring the laptop and connect it to just the dock.
Nevertheless small and lightweight "traveler docks" also exist.
As for docking stations - AFAIK today a docking station means a cube attached to any laptop with a USB-C cable. Lenovo probably expects you to use this: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/accessories-and-software/dock...
Many years ago I remember reading about Toshiba laptops doing the same thing --- silently updating BIOS in the background and failing, resulting in a brick --- although that was the manufacturer crapware doing it, not Windows itself.
Personally, I never update BIOS unless there is a very good reason to, like a fix for detecting RAM or similar.
Luckily the laptop was still in warranty and I got it "fixed" after 6 weeks,
In Shenzhen, you can get your laptop's BIOS reflashed while-you-wait/watch. I was there a few years ago with a friend who needed his laptop fixed. Of course it wasn't a warranty repair, but the difference in MTTR (and cost --- about $20USD, and negotiable if you really want to) is a stark contrast.
[1] https://youtu.be/kdQXSYUlUTw?t=615
Besides there are several accounts of this on the comments of that video with similar Lenovo models. Sorin's viewership base in majority comprises of laptop repair technicians and he's quite respected in the community(Like Louis Rossmann).
Citation: I bricked my own Lenovo applying the IME "critical" update.
The sad thing is that they're still better than everything else out there. Which says a lot about the laptop industry in general.
This is part of why people feel almost stuck with Apple. Their hardware is a lot better than most of the competition, though it comes with a price premium, and while there are privacy concerns they are less than with these shitware-loaded machines. You can also install Linux on them if you really want no telemetry at all, even with M1 Macs.
That really only applies to the consumer line. The thinkpad line is still pretty solid.
Meh. The trackpoint and keypad on my X1 are far inferior to previous Thinkpads, like the X220, before they decided their overarching mission was to make things as thin as possible. The trackpoint is sometimes unusable and is a chore to use at all times whereas the older ones were fun.
Both the old "Intel Ultrabook" and the new "Intel Evo" tightly restrict thickness in the 12-14" laptop segment.
I won't give Lenovo a free pass, but it's part of why keytravel and cooling solutions are pretty awful in modern small laptops.
How do those programs work? Do you need to meet a certain thickness to get called an ultrabook? Why can't manufacturers just opt out and make a notebook without "ultrabook" slapped on it?
Also you may know ThinkPad 25, that based on T470.
I was pretty happy with my surface, while it lasted anyway. Ended up with a defective touch screen that couldn't be replaced, so I just got a full refund (thank you extended warranty).
That being said, the touchpad on it is just barely "ok"-level and the webcam (on my older model) is just awful. The friction on the touchpad is so high my wrist becomes sore, and the webcam is located on the bottom of the screen (with a microphone on the bottom front edge near the trackpad!). Even though these flaws have required me to switch to a wireless mouse and external webcam, I'm still pretty satisfied.
For my next laptop, I'll likely either buy the newest XPS model (the newer ones have webcams at a usable position), or try the Razor again (the one I previously tried had quite a small battery life).
(I would love to know the series of events that led a high-end laptop to have a webcam placed at a position that is only optimal for looking up one's nose.)
edit: sorry, I just remembered -- I did have to replace the SSD on this thing when it conked out in 2019! fortunately I bought it refurbished with a warranty of some sort and they shipped a new one fast.
I think it wins on port options, the aesthetics you could argue as personal preferences, and optioned up it has the potential for maybe a better screen and a digitizer but at that point it loses badly on price. It's not a bad computer, but it's clearly a compromise on several issues and not really beating Apple enough at the stuff it does better that would compel a switch from purely a hardware or value standpoint. I think it's fine if you wanted to avoid Apple or macOS for software reasons, but that's about it. I've also had a pretty good track record with Apple hardware lasting ages while I watch peers with PCs that drop like flies every few years.
This is the point that many of us feel stuck with Apple. Every time I research Apple's alternatives I feel like I've wasted my time.
FWIW, I believe they've fixed this in recent revisions, as well as added a 16:10 ratio screen.
This is one of the very few laptops I'd consider vs a macbook at this point, especially given the preinstalled linux option.
For what it's worth, it's the touchpads and displays that keep pushing me away from the 13-inch MBP. I much prefer the feel of most PC precision touchpads to the grainy texture of the MBP touchpad. As for the display, I like to set high-DPI displays to 2x scaling, since it tends to look and work better, but the 13-inch MBP's 2560x1600px only has 1280x800dp of real estate at 2x scaling, which feels very cramped in comparison to the 1920x1080dp of real estate on my XPS 13's 3840x2160px display.
We used XPS 13s as lab computers at a previous job and they would just stop powering on eventually. Sometimes removing and reinserting the battery would bring them back, usually not.
The only real compromise that I've noticed is that the battery life isn't as good. But part of the reason for that is that it has an actual graphics card (albeit not a great one). So it's more of a trade-off than a compromise, the ability to do light gaming is worth it for me.
Not if you care about a good trackpad.
Definitely not if you care about running *nix with full vendor support.
Although I don't think Macs between 2014 - 2019 are as well built (have had a string of issues with those), I haven't had any other PC/Macbook last as long as that 2012 MBP. Some of my old Thinkpads still work, but have coil whine, noisy fans etc.
My Surface Pro was a hair below $2000. I was also considering a Lenovo X1 Yoga that was well above $2000. You sure that's competition on price?
On the other hand, that's a bit counter my experience. Working in a large company, I feel like walls keep emerging spontaneously and piercing through them is the bit that requires work. Often people inside the company cannot tell apart two teams working on related things, but the teams just won't talk to each other. Much less allow any kind of convergence to happen.
They haven't ever been better than Apple laptop hardware, even in Intel-land.
There seems to be this common bias in PC laptop evaluation that excludes Apple machines from consideration when doing comparisons.
Apple makes the best x64 laptops, and has for years. Sadly, they will stop soon.
Except of course for the monumentally defective and offensive keyboards Apple saddled its customers with for FIVE YEARS. And there are the soldered-in SSDs and RAM now, and glued-together chassis. And the hodgepodge of laptop & desktop parts crammed into the iMac to make it "thinner," which is absolutely asinine in a desktop computer.
I believe the ability to repair or swap components has always been better with Lenovo.
Apple beats Lenovo in a lot of other ways though, audio quality being one that I personally experienced. On my old T430s the speakers were so bad I wished they had just not included them at all. They were like the speakers in those talking greeting cards.
It was good for about a year. Then i started having connectivity problems. The Letter in the keys wrote off quickly. And a few of the keys started becoming less responsive. The quality just wasn't there.
Luckily, by then Apple came out with its version, and it's been flawless for a few years now. It's worth the extra money to go with Apple, if you're getting that kind of keyboard.
There are many many many many mechanical keyboard options to use with a Mac. If you're legitimately having difficulty finding a solution, feel free to reach out to me via the contact information in my profile and I'll be happy to make some specific recommendations.
https://www.keychron.com/pages/keychron-k3-wireless-mechanic...
Obviously that's all anecdotal and may be an outlier, but I don't find a naked assertion that "Apple makes the best x64 laptops" very convincing.
Yes, Apple did finally fix the awful keyboards on its laptops from 2016-2020, and their keyboards are once again quite good. The trackpad is what it has always been: the best on any computer at any price.
I'm not aware that Apple offers any kind of on-site warranty service, so that's a no, but the flipside is that you are much less likely to need it than you are with PCs. (Please, spare me the endless downvotes for saying this. I support hundreds of PCs and hundreds of Macs, and have for a couple decades now. I'm not just making this shit up for my health.)
Lets not promise the moon here. The M1's Linux support is far from complete and definitely not ready for general use.
Apple products (top case stickers notwithstanding) are fungible: just buy another one from any Apple store in the universe and restore your backup, and let AppleCare deal with the busted one on their own schedule.
There’s nothing special about your laptop except the data. The factory pumps out bazillions of them.
> Apple products ... just buy another one
I think you answered your own question. Buying a new laptop every time something is broken is expensive. Lenovo offers quite cheap extended warranty plus the next-day repair is great. (EU: I paid less then 50E for another year of warranty after the original 2 years)
I actually did this once and tried to submit a warranty support on day 1 of buying the new warranty and was turned down, but they called me about a week later saying they would waive the 30 days and ended up doing about $500 in repairs for $130 cost of the new warranty.
(the other condition is that you are only allowed one accidental repair event per year)
I doubt there are nearly as many people on HN making even one entry level Ford Focus a month in salary.
Along a similar line of reasoning, I totally understand if Coca-Cola bans soft drinks from Pepsi on campus. But I would be much less understanding of Ford banning non-Ford cars in their employee parking lots.
So will the Genius Bar. (If they don't, Apple has a 14 day return policy, so you can borrow anything they sell for free for two weeks.)
I need my laptop to work. If it doesn't work, I can't work. If I can't work, I'm not getting paid. That's why "next business day" is important.
My laptop contains sensitive data. Data which is encrypted at rest, but which I'm nevertheless not going to ship to goodness knows where, for goodness knows how long. That's one reason why "on site" is important. The other is that I paid a lot of money for a piece of hardware; I'm not going to faf about looking for some Apple Store (of which very few exist in my country).
Lenovo charges ~15% of the purchase price for 3 year NBDOS support, which is very much worth every cent. Tech shows up, replaces $part, leaves, and I can get back to work.
I'm the exact same way, which is why I have 4. Next business day is way too far away.
I always bring a mouse, I hate the little nubs even more :)
I experienced both on employer-provided MacBooks. Now, I may have been particularly unlucky here, but I think Apple hardware quality never having been surpassed is a bit of an optimistic statement.
Lucky you then, I literally just replaced an inflated battery on a Dell latitude, can send some cool pics of the thing being swollen like a wet nappy if you want.
I think the shielding of the power adaptor picks up some induction (or capacitance?) and you can feel that when you brush over it with your hand. If you use a grounded lead (the 3-prong cable that comes with the adaptor instead of the 2-prong duckhead) it doesn't happen. Because the voltage that will flow to ground and won't build up.
You can indeed feel it very clearly because it makes the surface feel rough and tickly. I'm also sensitive to it.
A lot of computers do this, my PC-XT did this back in the 80s. But Apple is one of the few with an all metal case. A lot of other makes have metal but it's usually just a sheet and not connected to the actual ground.
What I hate about Apple's current laptops is the sharp edges that cut into my wrists, and the keyboards that are too shallow to have real feedback. They seem made more to please the eyes, not the hands.
Apple laptops are always a fair bit pricier for a given set of hw specs than any other manufacturer would be.
Additionally, they lack any level of reparability and a trip to the genius bar will often be quite expensive. Hell, look at the debacle that was the butterfly keyboard they pushed for something like 5-6 years.
Apple's keyboards, even before/after the butterfly keyboard, are inferior (in my opinion) than the keyboard on the Thinkpad line, and feel quite mushy by comparison.
The aluminum construction is quite solid, but not without it's issues. They seem to get far hotter in my experience, but perhaps that's them acting as heat sink so I'll give that a pass. The hard edges on the case are a pain-point to me.
I know a lot of people seem to prefer the apple touchpads, but I've never liked them. I prefer physical mouse buttons, and the click never felt right to me on apple touchpads. Part of it might be that gesture inputs with the touchpads aggravated my RSI, so I was never able to make use of them.
All said, I don't agree with Apple making the best x64 laptops, but they fielded a competitor like many others. They have the advantage of being the only true Apple laptop though, so if you're all-in on the Apple ecosystem, they're definitely the best choice. Otherwise, there are many laptops that might surpass the macbooks, depending on your individual preferences.
Over the past few years, I've owned an Asus laptop (thin/light), two Lenovo laptops, and an HP. Before that, a large Dell gaming laptop.
Most recently, I had bought the HP Omen 15, but realizing that the screen used PWM below 100% brightness, I sold it and bought a Lenovo Legion 5.
The previous Lenovo is a Y540. The Y540 is arguably "good but not great" build quality. If you squint, it looks kind of like there could be a slight curve to the bottom of the monitor where the two side hinges support it.
The Legion 5 is really well built. No unusual give, very smooth running fans, etc. It's also been super reliable, better than expected battery - really nothing to complain about.
Now I imagine if you spend $2-3k on laptops, you probably think these $1k laptops are garbage quality, but they seem better than the HP Omen 15, and certainly better than the Asus and the $1700 Dell I bought 8 years ago.
Isn't that the normal way to dim an LED? Was the frequency too low, or what was the issue?
I know the Legion 5 is good, which is why I (foolishly) thought the Legion 7 would also be good. It's the inconsistency within and across their product lines, and their god-awful depot support, that's made it a game of Russian Roulette to buy a Lenovo device — some people still swear by them because they either luck into, or do the deep research to find, the very specific models within certain lines that aren't failure-prone.
The 720 and Legion 7 failed within weeks, not months, and the 720 went to the depot twice and had at least one repeat or new failure within weeks after returning each time.
The P40 broke my heart the worst, though, because it had every feature I wanted and I paid through the nose for it thinking it'd be a 5-year device, minimum. It didn't make it to 2, couldn't get a refund, and didn't have the heart to sell it even for parts.
The 720 and Legion, though, failed so quickly that I got refunds from their retailers; I couldn't possibly resell them, and with the Legion 7 in particular I wasn't going to gamble with their depot service rejecting warranty coverage for the fault as people were reporting on Lenovo's own forums, and especially after the touch digitizer failed after the _second_ depot service for the 720.
This list consists of companies that I will never, ever do business again. No matter what, period.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...
Microsoft Oracle Facebook Exxon McDonalds CocaCola Monsanto
I've got a zenbook 14, and it's tough of nails. Have dropped it so many times on hard surfaces and it's still trucking along.
The Microsoft of the 2020s is a very different company from the Microsoft of the 1990s.
that bought Github, and don't worry, Github is going to morph into yet another Microsoft entity in the next 5 years and everybody will move somewhere else...
It is, but in a discussion about forced updates and overtly user-hostile changes, I'll take the Microsoft of the 1990s please.
Now it seems like they are just pushing crap
That enterprise is evil and deserves no single cent. They sell cheap junk with adware/spyware and a fake warranty.
Edit: apparently I stand corrected I assumed this was a Windows Tablet, of course, the OS vendors should really step in here, they do have power in the equation. Ultimately, I would use the argument to the exec. team at Lenovo that the incremental revenue from these things just isn't worth it in the overall experience.
Often teams are tasked with coming up with new revenue models, it's often an internal, organizational issue as opposed to a coherent product vision.
Thankfully alternatives exist. Linux and the BSDs keep evolving, Haiku and ReactOS continue to develop and may one day reach daily-driver status, there's still a thriving market for building your own x86-64 PCs (I'll be building a Ryzen 9 machine this weekend), and products like the Framework laptop, the PineBook, and the Librem laptop have me excited. Hopefully these alternatives will continue to evolve and take root so that way there's a formidable challenger to Big Tech.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahaha
If you want to go bloat-free, buy from the business product lines, not the consumer ones.
Although with the always-online Windows 11, it might be time to dump Windows altogether.
The problem with the more locked down nature of devices these days, especially mobile, is that that isn't an option anymore like with this Lenovo update.
I've been daily driving a PineBook Pro, and despite some custom kernel hacking I've done, I still don't have reliably sound after sleep... unless I don't have sleep enabled properly, at which point it won't last the night on battery. Pick your poison. Or do more kernel hacking. It's something related to device sleep/resume on the audio chip, which I eventually found some NDA'd datasheets for. Fortunately, I can use 2.4GHz wifi out where I live, because 5GHz is also weirdly broken unless you perform the right incantations after power cycle.
At this point, I think "those who can" move away from the core ecosystems have an obligation to do so, and try to pave the road in front of us. Right now, it's cobblestones at best (if you ignore the potholes), and a lot of people simply won't go that way. As long as the alternatives start with "Well, as long as you don't mind..." and then a list of features people consider important... they're going to remain alternatives.
But, at the same time, I find myself considering how much hassle is worth it to "remain in the ecosystems." Yes. I can do a lot of work to smooth out rough edges, write my own kernel modules to work around hardware quirks (I really should upstream the sleep changes), figure out alternatives to things that don't work, do Matrix bridges, and...
At what point is it simply not worth it? At what point is trying to keep up with modern consumer tech, to de-fang it, and make it work for me instead against of me just more hassle than it's worth? If anything mainstream is eventually going to get updates that turn it against me (which I consider updates like this to be), then... why bother? The benefits are great, but if the downsides and workarounds and time cost are too much, then I should consider if I actually want to be part of that.
I've already done this with cell phones. Apple pissed me off with on-device CSAM scanning enough (well, that was the final straw) that I've gone back to a flip phone. I could go Pixel, Graphene, etc, but I've decided to experiment with what I actually miss out on, going back to a flip phone. I've de-fanged my previous phone a lot, so it's less of a change than for a lot of people, but... a few weeks in, I actually haven't missed a smartphone that much.
I object strongly to the whole "You pay for the tech which then collects data and makes money on the backend optimizing the advertising feed to your pair of eyeballs" model that is more and more a part of consumer tech, so perhaps the right answer is to simply opt out of it. It's a recent addition to life. We can go back to what worked before.
So, I still go the trouble to bend the ecosystems to my will... Like Matrix bridges. It's a lot of work I'll give you that.
I'm at a point in my life where I can be a bit cranky about stuff like this - and, my views on tech are well enough known that people almost expect me to be a bit cranky about it. I recently asked someone how he'd prefer to be paid, cash or check. His response was along the lines of, "Well, I'd prefer a payment app on the phone, but I know you don't use those, so... check, easier to scan and deposit that way."
If "everyone uses it because everyone uses it," well... great, there lies monopoly and abuses. I can get away with using somewhat less, without any real impact to my social or professional life - so at this point, being that friction point is perfectly fine with me.
But I grew up before cell phones. I grew up before smartphones. The concept of a smartphone beyond a "lol, Crackberry, I'll bet you a beer you can't put it down on the table for half an hour and not touch it!" stage is only a decade old. In that time, it's absolutely transformed the world - and, IMO, not for the better. Our collective response to the "Crackberry" behavior was, "oooh, I want one too!" My daughter has asked for her own phone (no, you're about a decade too young). When asked what people use phones for, her response is, "I don't know... but they look like they're really interesting!" Yeah... how to cut your phone use substantially overnight.
Just because the river is rushing towards "What makes tech companies the most money in the next quarter" doesn't mean we have to be part of it. And at this point, I think coming up with alternatives (technology based or not) is damned near a moral obligation.
Please do!
Vendors have enough control about locked-down devices that they could play ransomware and make arbitrary demands to their users without many problems. And "device" can be anything from phones to cars to smart homes or expensive specialized equipment.
I'm not sure how the legal situation is currently, but since the Stallman strategy of keeping devices free has evidently failed, I think it's high time for a comprehensive set of "digital consumer rights" that limit what vendors can do on "their" devices.
Apple discussion: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252412228
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28361730
And then what? It might generate a bit of outrage, but at the end of the day, users have no leverage (without legal support).
No one wants to lose their device or the data on it, so for individual users, there are not a lot of options apart from doing whatever the vendor wants
Doesn't happen yet. Entire industries are trying to bypass basic property law so you "own" your purchases in name only and the manufacturer has control de facto. The video game industry has been saying "buy or product" when they really mean "subscribe to our service"[1] for a long time. Bricking old multiplayer gamed had been common practice for years, and now some singleplayer games have been unnecessarily bricked when the publisher e.g. shut down the DRM server.
Companies like John Deere have been extending this strategy into their hardware for a while. The damage doesn't even have to be "bricking your device"; HN regularly features stories about forced updates that remove paid-for features.
> Have Apple pull something like this and you’ll see on the NYT.
Apple got close when their devices suddenly stopped running 3rd party software in the recent "OCSP Apocalypse".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
Nothing only about it, considering any offer is like requesting a quote for my time. It's a task I must assess. I never feel bad about using adblocker or coupons to excess because gaining the opportunity to form my habits is something I charge for.
In this case I am thinking about entering the display advertising business and declaring their overlay ads as anti-competitive computer hacking and vandalism on my equipment.
The vendor is too small-time to bother setting up post-sale monetization deals like this.
1. OnePlus: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/hds41u/oneplus_has...
2. Xiaomi: https://www.androidauthority.com/remove-ads-xiaomi-miui-1019...
3. Huawei: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/06/14/huawei-apparently-d...
I've also blocked manually a lot of domains with Blokada.
It's amazing and it doesn't require rooting your device.
I spent the first day waiting for Windows Update and turning off telemetry and other annoyances. I spent the second day trying mamy apps that were significantly worse than Procreate. I returned it on the third day.
If you want Windows on a tablet, with all its issues and annoyances, you'll get exactly that. If you want an iPad experience with access to productivity tools, you won't get it.
I wanted an iPad for replacing a Moleskine and a laptop. The laptop replacement part was OK, but it was a very unpleasant drawing experience. Opening and editing files sucked all the fun out of it. Procreate on the iPad felt a lot closer to the real thing: flip through pages, select one, pick a tool, have fun.
I can't overstate how annoyed and angry this tablet was making me compared to my friend's iPad.
I've bought Thinkpads personally and professionally for 20 years. Idiotic cunning stunts such as this and Superfish have removed it from any future consideration.
I know I'll miss the track point, as it seems I'm the only one to use it a lot.
The Framework laptops have the most potential right now IMO. I'm watching them to see how things go and will probably pick up a second gen of their laptops if they keep looking good.
I think it's a bit unfair to simply say they are "branded Clevo's". There was an interview about "right to repair" that I can't find right now where one of the founders of System76 addressed this and it sounds like they put a bit more effort into their hardware (and specifically, the accompanying middleware/firmware) than slapping some stickers on a Clevo.
Edit: I still can't find the interview, which was a good one, but I found this [1] earlier comment from someone who works there.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5umefi/system76_refr...