Unfortunately, it will take a while for the market to realize that Lenovo’s newer offerings are merely riding on the ThinkPad brand name, and share little with their predecessors when it comes to terms of durability, reliability, and support/service.

I’m puzzled by this, to be honest. Lenovo already has two brands that they could use for their “aggressively priced” offerings. IdeaPads have generally gotten good reviews for what they are — cheap, solid budget notebooks — why not focus their consumer efforts there? No, rather than develop their own brand, it seems that Lenovo would rather go for the quick buck, making ever-cheaper ThinkPads, and banking on people to remember the brand name rather than the quality it stood for.

It’s not xenophobic at all to think that a Chinese-made product will be, in some way or another, inferior if not outright harmful: it’s realistic. As consumers we have so much firsthand experience with shoddy Chinese workmanship, and as newspaper readers we have knowledge of so many harmful Chinese products–poisonous pet food in America, poisonous pot stickers in Japan, poisonous toothpaste in Australia–that it’s only natural that “crappy” is the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Chinese products.

Now, duh, obviously not everything made in China falls apart if you look at it too hard, and not everything they make is toxic. But way too much of it is that bad. Stereotypes are born of reality.

From the notebookreview.com Lenovo T500 review:
“To my great surprise, I found Lenovo had completely redesigned the keyboard, with weight savings as the primary goal. The old design has a much stronger back-plate, which is removed on the new revision. This cuts weight by 25 percent (6oz to 4.5oz) from the old model, but at the huge disadvantage of tarnishing the long-standing ThinkPad keyboard reputation. For now I am leaning towards weight savings, instead of cost savings as the main redesign reason, but I still don’t like it. Anyone who knows the ThinkPad name knows at least two things; boring business notebook and great keyboard. If you take away the keyboard and make other weight reducing or durability reducing changes to the notebook design, you will no doubt alienate many of your followers. I really hope Lenovo takes notice at this, cause I would take a brick glued to the bottom of the case before over a keyboard change such as this.”

With the promise of lifetime employment back then, a little brainwashing maybe wasn’t so bad….

Nice bit of nostalgia. Thanks.

http://news.cnet.com/2009-1082-269157.html

So it’s a bit more complicated than just reminiscing about the good old days at Big Blue.