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by falcrist 871 days ago
IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo in 2005, so your timeframe correlates with the laptop division no longer being part of IBM.

Not that Lenovo is a bad company persay, but IBM was historically a company that focused on corporate sales and Lenovo is a company that seems to target the consumer market. As far as I can see, individual consumers are much more price sensitive than corporations. That would explain the steady decline in quality.

I'm certainly not an expert, so there are probably other valid explanations. Unicomp bought IBM's keyboard manufacturing division (or at least the equipment used to build model M keyboards), and experienced a decline in quality simply due to (allegedly) not updating the old tooling until fairly recently.
2 comments
dijit 871 days ago
What I find interesting is that the decline definitely exists but it's slow.

I might have expected something like 2-3 years until Thinkpads would be essentially toned down consumer devices, but it's nearly 20 years later now and Thinkpads (while certainly not legandary any longer) are still quite serviceable business laptops.

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falcrist 870 days ago
I'll have to take your word on recent Lenovo laptops. It's been well over a decade since I got my Yoga 11. The hinge on that laptop was quite good. The keyboard sucked though.

Perhaps they retained enough of the original employees that workflow and procedures remained similar, which resulted in similar products for a long time.

Certainly the tooling wouldn't have changed immediately.

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dabber 870 days ago
> Not that Lenovo is a bad company persay

The argument can certainly be made though. At least regarding their consumer laptop decision circa 2015 when, in addition to the quality issues, they were shipping the Superfish ad-ware which was installing a notably insecure self-signed root certificate to deliberately Man-in-the-Middle HTTPS connections so it could inject display ads. See:

- https://marcrogers.org/2015/02/19/lenovo-installs-adware-on-...

- https://blog.erratasec.com/2015/02/extracting-superfish-cert...

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falcrist 869 days ago
I specifically said that because I DON'T want to discuss whether it's a good company or not.
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