[diffeomorphism]

It might help if they do what HP did and branch out their enterprise offerings.

This is, in my opinion, one thing that greatly helps apple build their reputation. When you mention "Dell" people first think of their cheap/bad inspirion stuff and not of the high priced xps, elitebook etc. models. Similarly for HP, similarly for Lenovo.

For the most part it helps to think of the consumer and non-consumer branches as completely different companies that just happen to have the same name.

[mcv]

Doesn't Lenovo do that already? When you say "Thinkpad", people think of indestructible laptops that pass a bunch of military tests.

[diffeomorphism]

Kinda, but not really. They do the branding for their premium models well, but they don't distance it from their consumer stuff.

Case in point: There are many comments in this thread about their their privacy disasters with the consumer line or how they don't like the service levels for the consumer line. On the one hand, this has nothing to do with how it works for thinkpads, on the other hand both are Lenovo.

As a similar example, suppose you have an article about a new Porsche and then 90% of the comments are about how they don't like something in their VW Golf. That would seems weird, right? Yet both are made by the same company.