[owenversteeg]

Yikes. Has iFixit jumped the shark? An AI generated press release on behalf of Lenovo, who is (from my perspective) essentially paying them for good PR? And this paid relationship - Lenovo paying iFixit - isn’t disclosed until the very last line of the article, so you have to first read 1500+ words of AI slop?

That made me start looking into their scores. The Thinkpad E14 Gen 7 gets a 9/10 despite soldered ports, a pile of easily breakable plastic clips, a flimsy plastic case, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly. To me that sounds _worse_ than the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4/10 (soldered storage unlike the E14, easily replaceable ports, and a riveted keyboard/top case assembly.) I would personally rather have replaceable ports than non-soldered storage, but putting my personal preferences aside, I think it’s hard to argue that difference between the two is worth going from a 4/10 to a 9/10.

[liz_ifixit]

Hey, I head the editorial team at iFixit and honestly appreciate the feedback. Totally fair to suggest we should've flagged our relationship with Lenovo at the head of the article. It's a tricky thing, to figure out how to message our business relationships with companies when we're also scoring their devices. I've added a fuller note about our business relationship with them to the beginning.

What Lenovo pays us for: They send us devices. We score them and report internally on their repairability. Lenovo has actually made their repairability snapshot reports public, so you can see some of the documents we've given them, for instance: https://www.ifixit.com/Document/sunTY6dbbJvOMRjP/Repairabili...

What Lenovo doesn't pay us for: Any particular score (they've worked really hard for the 10/10). This blog post/press release.

There are other companies paying us for similar services, and most of them do not get 10/10s or glowing coverage on our site. Companies don't get any extra credit for working with us instead of providing repair in another way.

To be clear, our repairability scoring is an objective system that involves engineers taking apart dozens of devices in each category to calibrate each scorecard. Making a new scorecard takes us hundreds of hours. Giving a score to a product using that scorecard is also a time-consuming human thing, disassembling a product, building out a disassembly tree (like the one in the snapshot I linked above), turning the process into something legible to our spreadsheets.

M5 MacBook vs. ThinkPad E14 Gen 7, the ThinkPad wins on modular storage, modular memory, battery replacement is dead simple, it’s easier to get inside, and you only need a Phillips screwdriver and a pry tool for most common repairs. A lot of the concerns you bring up ("easily breakable," "flimsy") are matters of durability. We generally prefer clips over glues, and we didn't find the clips to be unusually breakable in our testing. Durability matters, but we try hard to separate it from repairability in our scoring. Assemblies and soldered ports absolutely played into why the E14 Gen 7 didn't get a 10/10.

Re: AI-generated prose... we do indeed use LLMs to support our small team of human writers when drafting content. That said, we don't publish anything without multiple humans reviewing. In this case, we were thorough in our human fact checking, but I agree we missed the mark on style.

[owenversteeg]

Hi Liz, I appreciate you coming here to comment, and the modifications to the article. I also appreciate the public documents.

Looking at the differences between the M5 Macbook Pro vs E14 Gen 7 I still don't quite feel that the scoring is fair. It is true that the battery is more difficult to replace and the memory/storage are soldered in the Mac. However, the soldered ports for the Thinkpad are a pretty big downside. I bet that if you surveyed regular users, they would be more likely to prefer replaceable ports to upgradeable memory/storage. The battery replacement also does not seem terribly difficult on the Mac; most of the repair guide is about Apple's neurotic use of torque drivers and adhesive activators. If you are happy with the build quality and durability of modern Thinkpads, these steps are entirely unnecessary.

I suspect a substantial factor in the scoring is Apple's fasteners - the drivers for which, of course, are now in every electronics repair kit in the world, not to mention typically included for free with replacement parts on Amazon. Is this really worth a substantial hit to Apple's scores?

[accrual]

Not GP but I appreciate the transparency, thank you! The snapshot document was particularly cool to see.

[lenaivo]

Thank you for saying it. There was somehting nagging me after a while. Even the quotes from Lenovo read as being AI generated, which begs the question if the quotes are real or paraphrased of factual at all.

[owenversteeg]

You’re welcome. It’s a real shame IMO. I used to be a huge Lenovo guy, until the quality of the products dropped off a cliff a decade and change ago. Disappointing to see that instead of making a better product they decided to pay iFixit to write AI-generated puff pieces.

[internet2000]

iFixit makes sense when you think of it as a content mill made to sell overpriced screwdrivers.

[opan]

They are actually very nice screwdrivers. I had a cheaper no-name set before and ended up stripping screws a lot more often. I got their Mako kit and it's worked great the last 4 years or so. If you ever do work on old game consoles I would especially recommend it. Has the bits for the consoles and the games. Game Bit for GameCube, SNES, GB(C) games, Y bit for GBA and GBA games, security Torx for Xbox 360. The only times it falls short are for very recessed screws like on a Rock Band drum kit, you need a long dedicated driver to fit in there, I think anything with a socket tends to be too thick.