(This was part of a reply to Peter, but I decided to make it a separate message. I hope you don't find it too didactic.) Brands matter. They are meant to telegraph certain things to the customer. Of course the brand's meaning can be changed: it isn't a contract. The perception of a brand in the potential customer base takes a long time to develop. It is cultivated by marketing, but not just marketing. We techies get a feeling based on past products. A wise vendor does not jerk around the message of a brand. Unless it is a throw away brand. It takes a long time to build a brand but it can be destroyed quite quickly. Think of how Loblaws, over the last 40 years, has elevated the house brand "President's Choice" to actually have a premium connotation. In the computer field, IBM's and then Lenovo's Think* brands have commanded tremendous loyalty, only occasionally misplaced. A large part of that is that the Think* devices have mostly lived up to their implicit promise. Lenovo's Think* brands are mostly solid conservative business machines. Most Think* systems that support Windows also support Linux. (There are Think* things that don't: non-computers and Android or ChromeOS computers.) The markups are high and the discounts can be large. They have long support cycles. I have had Think* firmware updated a decade after the machine was released. That makes Lenovo's occasional ThinkPad slips much more notable: - old timers often claim that ThinkPads are going down hill. + part of that is that thin and light is something a majority of customers want but it has to come at the cost of serviceability. ThinkPads were known to be rugged as tanks but tanks are heavy + part of that is users don't like change. But some changes are good. Objectively, touchpads are way better now than 10 years ago, and part of that involved getting rid of physical buttons. + some features (wired ethernet port, serial port, VGA port) are really niche now but those who want them really want them - the ThinkBook line really seems to be exploiting the brand without matching the values - ThinkPad displays are often mediocre. Not bright enough (nits), not great colour gamut. Inexcusable in an expensive notebook. - the ThinkPad Android Tablet was a disaster that I got fooled by. Lenovo's Legend brand, as I understand it, is aimed at gamers. It is intended to compete on price and performance. It isn't aimed at you or me. I've never bought one. - in the notebook range, gamers want gaming performance (GPU) at the cost of weight and power consumption (heat, noise, short battery life). I want the opposite. - in the desktop range, gamers want NVidia dGPUs. I don't. Lenovo has other desktops, none of which has seemed a good buy to me. Sometimes their other notebooks have been interesting. I have a nice Lenovo Yoga 2 pro notebook that is about 10 years old. For all of those ten years, it gets a machine check during the Linux booting process but works anyway. The ThinkPad team was able to duplicate this but could not interest the IdeaPad team to fix it! Apple has a great brand too. Sometimes it seems like a cult. I know little about Macs because they are the opposite of what I want: an expensive closed proprietary system. I did buy a used MacBook Air M1 but that is for running Fedora Asahi when that's ready. Dell branding confuses me. Ditto Acer. HP Elite brand seems to be roughly similar to Think* HP Envy Brand was being developed by HP (my desktop is one) then the diluted it to the point of it being meaningless.
From reading the ads, HP seems to have completely gibberish names for its consumer laptops. For example HP 15-fc0004ca, HP Laptop 15-dy5024ca, HP 17-cp2030ca are the first three I find here: <https://www.hp.com/ca-en/shop/list.aspx?fc_form_nb=1&sel=ntb>n
Disclaimer: I have an MBA in marketing. I studied this stuff at length. On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 12:01 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk < talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Brands matter.
More to the point: SOME brands matter. And they matter to varying degrees. Search for anything on Aliexpress and you'll find hundreds of brands, most of which will be totally irrelevant to your choice. A memorable brand requires LOTS of investment. And different companies treat their brands with diverse strategy; Compare Nestlé (which has its name on top of every product in its family) with Mondeléz (whose ownership of most of its brands is buried in the small print). They are meant to telegraph certain things to the customer. Of course the
brand's meaning can be changed: it isn't a contract.
Sometimes that change is unintentional. 🙂 The perception of a brand in the potential customer base takes a long time to
develop. It is cultivated by marketing, but not just marketing.
Companies will go to great lengths to define their various brands; what they are supposed to mean, who is their target audience, etc. When was the last time a beer or car ad actually talked about the product? The next step is actually executing that strategy based on quality, price, distribution (who can sell it) and promotion. Think of how Loblaws, over the last 40 years, has elevated the house brand "President's
Choice" to actually have a premium connotation.
More successfully, it has established its other house brand, the black-and-yellow "no name", as its lower-cost option (sometimes with the same contents as President's Choice 🙂). It's even segmented its many store brands (No Frills, Loblaws, Zehrs, Fortinos, Superstore) by audience and local economy. In the computer field, IBM's and then Lenovo's Think* brands have commanded
tremendous loyalty, only occasionally misplaced.
Brands are assets with value that can be bought and sold. IBM, which established the "Think{}" brand, sold it along with its whole PC business to Lenovo in 2005. Lenovo simply acquired that which IBM had built up over decades. A large part of that is that the Think* devices have mostly lived up to
their implicit promise.
Some have. Traditionally models beginning with T were IBM's powerhouse Thinkpads, X were the ultralights, i were multimedia, and all were made in Japan. Then Lenovo started coming out with cheaper lines to be able to compete with low-end units while maintaining the brand identity, and manufactured in Indian Mexico and China. Before the Lenovo purchase the only lower-cost models were in the R line. Lenovo's Think* brands are mostly solid conservative business machines. That's the brand IBM built, and that Lenovo maintained for some models. For others, they "diluted the brand", something that happens far too often. But hey, their marketing worked on you. Most Think* systems that support Windows also support Linux. (There are Think*
things that don't: non-computers and Android or ChromeOS computers.) The markups are high and the discounts can be large.
IIRC IBM (and later Lenovo) have had generally two separate lines, for business and consumer models. The former were more expensive (but generally higher build quality and specs) and the latter aggressively priced to compete with HP, Dell and others. + part of that is that thin and light is something a majority of
customers want but it has to come at the cost of serviceability. ThinkPads were known to be rugged as tanks but tanks are heavy
Some. The X series I had was an ultralight. + part of that is users don't like change. That's not universal, especially in the field of tech where things can change so fast (like whether a laptop needs a built-in CD/DVD player). Sometimes the users demand change, and conservative approaches don't survive.
+ some features (wired ethernet port, serial port, VGA port) are really niche now but those who want them really want them
I'm quite certain that Lenovo does market research to tell them what features are needed in new models, and sales figures to tell them what features are no longer desirable. - the ThinkBook line really seems to be exploiting the brand without
matching the values
Different brand. Different audience. Different expectations. There are indirect ties (the use of Think, the black color and styling), but it's not a Thinkpad, it's something else.
- ThinkPad displays are often mediocre. Not bright enough (nits), not great colour gamut. Inexcusable in an expensive notebook.
"Thinkpad" now includes a massive diversity of quality, cost, features, tradeoffs and target audience. Not sure that such a sweeping statement can be useful anymore. - the ThinkPad Android Tablet was a disaster that I got fooled by.
There have been in the past x86-based Thinkpad tablets that have been well regarded. The current Yoga line works nicely for some. Lenovo Android devices are mostly produced for the Chinese domestic audience and only unoficially get sold internationally. By and large Lenovo uses its Motorola brand for internationally-sold Android devices. Apparently this year they're looking to come out with a "Thinkphone" to capitalize on the brand. I'll withhold judgment until I see the reviews. Lenovo's Legend brand, as I understand it, is aimed at gamers. It is intended
to compete on price and performance. It isn't aimed at you or me. I've never bought one.
Over the years a LOT of Thinkpad models have not been aimed at you or me. I'm not sure I'm getting the point here. Apple has a great brand too. Sometimes it seems like a cult.
Apple knows its audience well and gives that audience what it wants (notwithstanding that every brand has its clunker from time to time). Dell branding confuses me. Ditto Acer.
You're being way too kind to Lenovo. They're all producing a wide range of models for all needs from student to developer to gamer to frequent flyer to commodities broker. Most have high-end models, low-end models, etc. Lenovo may be better at naming its models but they're all competing in a very tight market with mostly the same component parts. I find that going online to Lenovo, Dell and HP enables you to indicate what you need and they point you to relevant offerings. In my own experience I can't get caught up in sub-brands and model numbers. I'll look at specs and I'll read reviews. Personally I buy my PCs in a store, where non-spec issues like balance, build quality, screen readability and keyboard feel can be tried out. FWIW my desktops have all been custom-assembled and my laptops have been Asus and Acer. They have served me well so I will look at them first if I need something new, but there is not much to separate the brands and loyalty is pointless unless you're a high-volume buyer. Don't get caught up in branding. These days PCs are nearly a commodity and there's very little to separate the makers except for after-sale issues such as warranty and ease of repair. The only distinctive brand here is Apple and you either buy into their world or you don't. - Evan
I think both Hugh and I have associated Lenovo's name with the T series: I have a T440p that replaced a previous T-series thinkpad and did superior service. I'll either replace it with a Framework, or another T. --dave On 9/16/23 02:51, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote: Disclaimer: I have an MBA in marketing. I studied this stuff at length. On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 12:01 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org<mailto:talk@gtalug.org>> wrote: Brands matter. More to the point: SOME brands matter. And they matter to varying degrees. Search for anything on Aliexpress and you'll find hundreds of brands, most of which will be totally irrelevant to your choice. A memorable brand requires LOTS of investment. And different companies treat their brands with diverse strategy; Compare Nestlé (which has its name on top of every product in its family) with Mondeléz (whose ownership of most of its brands is buried in the small print). They are meant to telegraph certain things to the customer. Of course the brand's meaning can be changed: it isn't a contract. Sometimes that change is unintentional. 🙂 The perception of a brand in the potential customer base takes a long time to develop. It is cultivated by marketing, but not just marketing. Companies will go to great lengths to define their various brands; what they are supposed to mean, who is their target audience, etc. When was the last time a beer or car ad actually talked about the product? The next step is actually executing that strategy based on quality, price, distribution (who can sell it) and promotion. Think of how Loblaws, over the last 40 years, has elevated the house brand "President's Choice" to actually have a premium connotation. More successfully, it has established its other house brand, the black-and-yellow "no name", as its lower-cost option (sometimes with the same contents as President's Choice 🙂). It's even segmented its many store brands (No Frills, Loblaws, Zehrs, Fortinos, Superstore) by audience and local economy. In the computer field, IBM's and then Lenovo's Think* brands have commanded tremendous loyalty, only occasionally misplaced. Brands are assets with value that can be bought and sold. IBM, which established the "Think{}" brand, sold it along with its whole PC business to Lenovo in 2005. Lenovo simply acquired that which IBM had built up over decades. A large part of that is that the Think* devices have mostly lived up to their implicit promise. Some have. Traditionally models beginning with T were IBM's powerhouse Thinkpads, X were the ultralights, i were multimedia, and all were made in Japan. Then Lenovo started coming out with cheaper lines to be able to compete with low-end units while maintaining the brand identity, and manufactured in Indian Mexico and China. Before the Lenovo purchase the only lower-cost models were in the R line. Lenovo's Think* brands are mostly solid conservative business machines. That's the brand IBM built, and that Lenovo maintained for some models. For others, they "diluted the brand", something that happens far too often. But hey, their marketing worked on you. Most Think* systems that support Windows also support Linux. (There are Think* things that don't: non-computers and Android or ChromeOS computers.) The markups are high and the discounts can be large. IIRC IBM (and later Lenovo) have had generally two separate lines, for business and consumer models. The former were more expensive (but generally higher build quality and specs) and the latter aggressively priced to compete with HP, Dell and others. + part of that is that thin and light is something a majority of customers want but it has to come at the cost of serviceability. ThinkPads were known to be rugged as tanks but tanks are heavy Some. The X series I had was an ultralight. + part of that is users don't like change. That's not universal, especially in the field of tech where things can change so fast (like whether a laptop needs a built-in CD/DVD player). Sometimes the users demand change, and conservative approaches don't survive. + some features (wired ethernet port, serial port, VGA port) are really niche now but those who want them really want them I'm quite certain that Lenovo does market research to tell them what features are needed in new models, and sales figures to tell them what features are no longer desirable. - the ThinkBook line really seems to be exploiting the brand without matching the values Different brand. Different audience. Different expectations. There are indirect ties (the use of Think, the black color and styling), but it's not a Thinkpad, it's something else. - ThinkPad displays are often mediocre. Not bright enough (nits), not great colour gamut. Inexcusable in an expensive notebook. "Thinkpad" now includes a massive diversity of quality, cost, features, tradeoffs and target audience. Not sure that such a sweeping statement can be useful anymore. - the ThinkPad Android Tablet was a disaster that I got fooled by. There have been in the past x86-based Thinkpad tablets that have been well regarded. The current Yoga line works nicely for some. Lenovo Android devices are mostly produced for the Chinese domestic audience and only unoficially get sold internationally. By and large Lenovo uses its Motorola brand for internationally-sold Android devices. Apparently this year they're looking to come out with a "Thinkphone" to capitalize on the brand. I'll withhold judgment until I see the reviews. Lenovo's Legend brand, as I understand it, is aimed at gamers. It is intended to compete on price and performance. It isn't aimed at you or me. I've never bought one. Over the years a LOT of Thinkpad models have not been aimed at you or me. I'm not sure I'm getting the point here. Apple has a great brand too. Sometimes it seems like a cult. Apple knows its audience well and gives that audience what it wants (notwithstanding that every brand has its clunker from time to time). Dell branding confuses me. Ditto Acer. You're being way too kind to Lenovo. They're all producing a wide range of models for all needs from student to developer to gamer to frequent flyer to commodities broker. Most have high-end models, low-end models, etc. Lenovo may be better at naming its models but they're all competing in a very tight market with mostly the same component parts. I find that going online to Lenovo, Dell and HP enables you to indicate what you need and they point you to relevant offerings. In my own experience I can't get caught up in sub-brands and model numbers. I'll look at specs and I'll read reviews. Personally I buy my PCs in a store, where non-spec issues like balance, build quality, screen readability and keyboard feel can be tried out. FWIW my desktops have all been custom-assembled and my laptops have been Asus and Acer. They have served me well so I will look at them first if I need something new, but there is not much to separate the brands and loyalty is pointless unless you're a high-volume buyer. Don't get caught up in branding. These days PCs are nearly a commodity and there's very little to separate the makers except for after-sale issues such as warranty and ease of repair. The only distinctive brand here is Apple and you either buy into their world or you don't. - Evan --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org<mailto:talk@gtalug.org> Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. 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| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Disclaimer: I have an MBA in marketing. I studied this stuff at length. (I think that's actually a claimer.) Thanks for adding a lot to this topic. For those interested in marketing, there is a great CBC Radio series, Terry O'Reilly's "Under the influence". On in an hour (11:30 Saturdays). You can also get it as a podcast: <https://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence> | More to the point: SOME brands matter. And they matter to varying degrees. Absolutely. Most techies start with the conscious attitude that brands don't matter. (We don't always realize that our less conscious reasoning cannot ignore branding. And we should not.) | > They are meant to telegraph certain things to the customer. Of course the | > brand's meaning can be changed: it isn't a contract. | | Sometimes that change is unintentional. For sure. But consider product defects (not usually planned). How the company reacts to a problem very much reflects on the brand. | Lenovo's Think* brands are mostly solid conservative business machines. ThinkPad, ThinkCentre, ThinkServer -- each of those have a consistent message, with nuances you mentioned. ThinkBook breaks that pattern. | That's the brand IBM built, and that Lenovo maintained for some models. For | others, they "diluted the brand", something that happens far too often. But | hey, their marketing worked on you. People I've heard from are happy with their L and E series. I haven't bought a ThinkPad for a decade. I have bought ThinkCentres as recently as this year. Why? I find that I can get more bang for my buck with other brands, and with the features I want. | + part of that is users don't like change. | | | That's not universal, especially in the field of tech where things can | change so fast (like whether a laptop needs a built-in CD/DVD player). | Sometimes the users demand change, and conservative approaches don't | survive. The most vocal customers are the ones that don't like the changes "forced on them". I would guess that those are the most loyal customers. I also bet they don't buy a lot of units. For years you could hear complaints about the (lack of?) trackpad buttons in newer T series models. I have a friend who really really wanted an optical drive in a laptop. This year. It is possible, but only in pretty limited number of models, all horrible. | > - the ThinkPad Android Tablet was a disaster that I got fooled by. | | There have been in the past x86-based Thinkpad tablets that have been well | regarded. The current Yoga line works nicely for some. x86 tablets are a quite different thing. So much so that they don't get called tablets. Slates? Surfaces? Convertibles. - they are much clunkier in so many ways. Worse + weight + battery time + display + touch control + fluidity of interface - they run all the Windows software. - accidentally can usually run any Linux distro | Lenovo Android devices are mostly produced for the Chinese domestic | audience and only unoficially get sold internationally. Now. But that doesn't describe the ThinkPad Android Tablet. It appears that they abandoned it early, without announcing that. Not as quickly as HP killed its TouchPad tablet, but not as explicitly either. I have some Lenovo tablets, not aimed at the Chinese domestic market. They are limited but reasonably priced. And they don't have a ThinkPad brand. | By and large Lenovo | uses its Motorola brand for internationally-sold Android devices. Phones. I don't remember that being the case for tablets. | Over the years a LOT of Thinkpad models have not been aimed at you or me. | | I'm not sure I'm getting the point here. The jumping off point is that Think* is aimed at conservative customers but Lenovo in general and Legend in particular isn't. Peter is struggling with a Legend desktop and appears to want and need something closer to what a ThinkCentre is aimed at providing: solid, well-supported, long-lived. | Don't get caught up in branding. These days PCs are nearly a commodity and | there's very little to separate the makers except for after-sale issues | such as warranty and ease of repair. The only distinctive brand here is | Apple and you either buy into their world or you don't. To a point. Lenovo has built a bit of a moat around the Think* brands and gets to charge a premium. Some of this premium is spent on things that their audience wants. Most interesting for GTALUG: they will make sure Linux works (at least in theory). Apple has a much bigger moat. They use their premium for a lot of engineering that PC makers cannot afford. I'm not sure that Apple make much profit on PCs -- they have a lot of engineering costs. Most PC makers leave a lot of the innovation to Intel and Microsoft (AMD not so much). For example "ultrabook" is a trademark of Intel. Intel made reference designs to show how it could be done. They made specifications that had to be met to allow that branding. Here's another example of bad branding. Asus has a line of notebooks called "Vivobook". This is supposed to be below their ZenBook line. I have two models of these that are drastically different in quality / price / features. - the Vivobook X415 is a very ordinary laptop. 1920x1080 IPS display (the minimum for me). Processor: i3-1005g1. Not horrible, ordinary. - the Vivobook S 14X is amazing. For example, the display is 2880x1600 OLED display with 120Hz refresh. Processor: Ryzen 7 6800H. They really should segment the Vivobook brand. Perhaps they think that they have with the "S". <https://www.asus.com/ca-en/laptops/for-home/vivobook/>
All points about brands/branding noted and appreciated. I got the Lenovo Legion T5 because I wanted a desktop, and it seemed to me that the niche for high-quality and well-built desktops -- what used to be called "enterprise" or "business" models -- had largely collapsed, being supplanted by either high-end laptops that business users would tote around and if necessary plug into a docking station, or by cheap consumer-grade desktops that were shoddily built, underpowered, and meant to be thrown away in a few years (more economical than investing in long-lasting hardware that would be outmoded too quickly). So what is someone who wants a good desktop unit to do? A few years ago one of my desktop units failed. I replaced it with a miniPC, a minisform model I put more RAM and two 2TB SSDs into, and it runs just fine. Maybe that is the way to go. (I have a portable high-resolution LCD screen now, and I think I'll eventually just carry around miniPCs rather than laptops.) But then again I also have a 14-year-old ThinkPad that still runs like a dream once I put in an SSD; one of the last models with the "real" IBM keyboard in it. Perhaps mistakenly, I thought that the combination of new hardware with the rough requirements gamers have for their machines -- able to be run hard for long periods of time, for instance -- would give me durability and was the Next Best Thing to the trouble of actually assembling a desktop machine myself. (I actually like to build computers, but I just don't have the time these days, unfortunately.) Seems I was wrong, or at least wrong that this model from Lenovo would be like that. I didn't even consider ThinkCentres, which word-of-mouth had rated as overpriced and underpowered, and in any event I wanted (and still want) an extremely reliable machine that I can re-use my 3.5" spinning disks in along with other desktop-sized hardware. My three desktops are located in different offices, and they make a mini-cloud of backups etc. Most of my academic colleagues took an entirely different route -- by and large they use a high-end laptop as their main computer, and either go for a docking-station setup or just use a cheap "business" desktop for email/web work, a reversal of the old approach where the laptop was for light duty and the desktop for serious work. I am not a market of one (yet). But there are times when it is starting to feel that way. And not working in tech, I don't hear what's current, whose machines are reliable, and the sort of unwritten lore that would help inform sensible purchasing choices. I suspect this list of desiderata would apply to many in this group: - reliable and long-lived - user-upgradeable and user-fixable - high storage capacity - fast, or fast enough for work purposes - able to manipulate high-end graphics (and sometimes high-end audio) files Things I don't need are: high framerate, portability, small form-factor, Windows, the latest wireless speed standard, anything more than ordinary ethernet, optical disks. I can plug in USB peripherals for keyboard, mouse, portable devices, or even optical disks. I can even use offboard DAC high-end audio over USB, which works quite well. I have thought about building a NAS system, to reduce my need for local high-capacity storage, but every time I look into it, the plethora of software choices and the difficulty of configuring a server to do what is normally done locally makes me just, well, give up. Essentially, for a desktop unit I want a server-type machine that is also capable of working with large graphics images, mostly static. I don't think there is anything like that for general sale, and so it isn't just branding -- it's having enough people to sustain a market for such a product. For that matter, I far prefer manual transmission in cars, but that's a preference that is hard to sustain these days. Fortunately that's just a preference and not a matter of work. Thanks to everyone for all the reflections; there is more to the problem than I was properly aware of. Today I will open up the Legion and see how easy/difficult it is to replace the CMOS battery and to bypass the high-end graphics card. The saga continues. On 9/16/23 11:55, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk<talk@gtalug.org>
| Disclaimer: I have an MBA in marketing. I studied this stuff at length.
(I think that's actually a claimer.)
Thanks for adding a lot to this topic.
For those interested in marketing, there is a great CBC Radio series, Terry O'Reilly's "Under the influence". On in an hour (11:30 Saturdays). You can also get it as a podcast: <https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fradio%2Fundertheinfluence&data=05%7C01%7Cpeter.king%40utoronto.ca%7Cccbd434a8b5d4b2f363d08dbb6cd5c59%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C638304765354476275%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=errATnN%2BKBi80CSeWJDQJgP2XedOJCAbKymLcgzg8zY%3D&reserved=0>
| More to the point: SOME brands matter. And they matter to varying degrees.
Absolutely.
Most techies start with the conscious attitude that brands don't matter. (We don't always realize that our less conscious reasoning cannot ignore branding. And we should not.)
| > They are meant to telegraph certain things to the customer. Of course the | > brand's meaning can be changed: it isn't a contract. | | Sometimes that change is unintentional.
For sure.
But consider product defects (not usually planned). How the company reacts to a problem very much reflects on the brand.
| Lenovo's Think* brands are mostly solid conservative business machines.
ThinkPad, ThinkCentre, ThinkServer -- each of those have a consistent message, with nuances you mentioned.
ThinkBook breaks that pattern.
| That's the brand IBM built, and that Lenovo maintained for some models. For | others, they "diluted the brand", something that happens far too often. But | hey, their marketing worked on you.
People I've heard from are happy with their L and E series.
I haven't bought a ThinkPad for a decade. I have bought ThinkCentres as recently as this year.
Why? I find that I can get more bang for my buck with other brands, and with the features I want.
| + part of that is users don't like change. | | | That's not universal, especially in the field of tech where things can | change so fast (like whether a laptop needs a built-in CD/DVD player). | Sometimes the users demand change, and conservative approaches don't | survive.
The most vocal customers are the ones that don't like the changes "forced on them". I would guess that those are the most loyal customers. I also bet they don't buy a lot of units.
For years you could hear complaints about the (lack of?) trackpad buttons in newer T series models.
I have a friend who really really wanted an optical drive in a laptop. This year. It is possible, but only in pretty limited number of models, all horrible.
| > - the ThinkPad Android Tablet was a disaster that I got fooled by. | | There have been in the past x86-based Thinkpad tablets that have been well | regarded. The current Yoga line works nicely for some.
x86 tablets are a quite different thing. So much so that they don't get called tablets. Slates? Surfaces? Convertibles.
- they are much clunkier in so many ways. Worse + weight + battery time + display + touch control + fluidity of interface
- they run all the Windows software.
- accidentally can usually run any Linux distro
| Lenovo Android devices are mostly produced for the Chinese domestic | audience and only unoficially get sold internationally.
Now. But that doesn't describe the ThinkPad Android Tablet. It appears that they abandoned it early, without announcing that. Not as quickly as HP killed its TouchPad tablet, but not as explicitly either.
I have some Lenovo tablets, not aimed at the Chinese domestic market. They are limited but reasonably priced. And they don't have a ThinkPad brand.
| By and large Lenovo | uses its Motorola brand for internationally-sold Android devices.
Phones. I don't remember that being the case for tablets.
| Over the years a LOT of Thinkpad models have not been aimed at you or me. | | I'm not sure I'm getting the point here.
The jumping off point is that Think* is aimed at conservative customers but Lenovo in general and Legend in particular isn't.
Peter is struggling with a Legend desktop and appears to want and need something closer to what a ThinkCentre is aimed at providing: solid, well-supported, long-lived.
| Don't get caught up in branding. These days PCs are nearly a commodity and | there's very little to separate the makers except for after-sale issues | such as warranty and ease of repair. The only distinctive brand here is | Apple and you either buy into their world or you don't.
To a point.
Lenovo has built a bit of a moat around the Think* brands and gets to charge a premium. Some of this premium is spent on things that their audience wants. Most interesting for GTALUG: they will make sure Linux works (at least in theory).
Apple has a much bigger moat. They use their premium for a lot of engineering that PC makers cannot afford. I'm not sure that Apple make much profit on PCs -- they have a lot of engineering costs.
Most PC makers leave a lot of the innovation to Intel and Microsoft (AMD not so much). For example "ultrabook" is a trademark of Intel. Intel made reference designs to show how it could be done. They made specifications that had to be met to allow that branding.
Here's another example of bad branding. Asus has a line of notebooks called "Vivobook". This is supposed to be below their ZenBook line. I have two models of these that are drastically different in quality / price / features.
- the Vivobook X415 is a very ordinary laptop. 1920x1080 IPS display (the minimum for me). Processor: i3-1005g1. Not horrible, ordinary.
- the Vivobook S 14X is amazing. For example, the display is 2880x1600 OLED display with 120Hz refresh. Processor: Ryzen 7 6800H.
They really should segment the Vivobook brand. Perhaps they think that they have with the "S". <https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.asus.com%2Fca-en%2Flaptops%2Ffor-home%2Fvivobook%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cpeter.king%40utoronto.ca%7Cccbd434a8b5d4b2f363d08dbb6cd5c59%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C638304765354476275%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=XndckooRwfIfxzrB8%2BWz4qM6ol%2B0ppritLjZBs8U4u0%3D&reserved=0> --- Post to this mailing listtalk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing listhttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgtalug.org%2Fmailman%2Flistinfo%2Ftalk&data=05%7C01%7Cpeter.king%40utoronto.ca%7Cccbd434a8b5d4b2f363d08dbb6cd5c59%7C78aac2262f034b4d9037b46d56c55210%7C0%7C0%7C638304765354476275%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=P6dZ75AZI%2BqTW7dCjHIRouDloKeR4C7%2BDf3D8IuSnPI%3D&reserved=0
-- Peter King peter.king@utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42
On 2023-09-16 13:11, Peter King via talk wrote:
... I have thought about building a NAS system, to reduce my need for local high-capacity storage, but every time I look into it, the plethora of software choices and the difficulty of configuring a server to do what is normally done locally makes me just, well, give up.
For me, it's the other way. I started with NAS with btrfs over 8 disks. Then, I got rid of all other computers, and turn that into my main computer. Less maintenance, less headache.
| From: Peter King via talk <talk@gtalug.org> A wonderfully clear and evocative elegy! All rational. | To: D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Cc: Peter King <peter.king@utoronto.ca> | Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2023 13:11:24 -0400 | Subject: Re: [GTALUG] brands matter; Lenovo's brands | | All points about brands/branding noted and appreciated. I got the Lenovo | Legion T5 because I wanted a desktop, and it seemed to me that the niche for | high-quality and well-built desktops -- what used to be called "enterprise" or | "business" models -- had largely collapsed, being supplanted by either | high-end laptops that business users would tote around and if necessary plug | into a docking station, or by cheap consumer-grade desktops that were shoddily | built, under-powered, and meant to be thrown away in a few years (more | economical than investing in long-lasting hardware that would be outmoded too | quickly). So what is someone who wants a good desktop unit to do? I don't mean to push Lenovo. I pick them to discuss because I'm slightly more familiar with them (mostly on paper). As far as I can tell, there are still full-sized business towers. Here's a page from Lenovo. <https://www.lenovo.com/ca/lenovopro/en/desktops/subseries-results/?visibleDatas=1033%3ATower%2CTower%25C2%25A0&sortBy=bestSelling> They aren't particularly inexpensive. Some might be missing important features. I favour AMD processors but they are under-represented. None is offered with Linux. Interestingly, they include your model (newer variants). Lenovo has a separate category "Workstation". It includes desktop ThinkStations and notebook ThinkPads. <https://www.lenovo.com/ca/lenovopro/en/d/deals/workstations/?sortBy=priceUp&visibleDatas=1035%3AThinkStation> Some of their servers (ThinkServer) look a lot like "desktops" (towers that go under desks): <https://www.lenovo.com/ca/lenovopro/en/d/deals/servers/?tabkey=Server%20%26%20Storage%20Deals> The one inexpensive model has a Celeron processor. ====================== Perhaps you are inferring too much about the quality of your Legion box from a few datapoints. ============================== My desktop is a decade old (HP Envy). The only things I changed inside the box in that time (mostly in the first year): - replaced the GPU (to drive my high resolution displays) - added RAM - added an SSD For my next desktop, I expect to live with the iGPU. That leaves disk bays the only issue with SFF or smaller boxes. Personally, I don't really fill up modern disks (they are big!). I do want backups, but they need to be separate from the computer anyway. | A few years ago one of my desktop units failed. I replaced it with a miniPC, | a minisform model I put more RAM and two 2TB SSDs into, and it runs just | fine. Maybe that is the way to go. Ah, so you are quite familiar with that form factor. | (I have a portable high-resolution LCD | screen now, and I think I'll eventually just carry around miniPCs rather than | laptops.) A laptop really is more portable than mini PC + display + keyboard + mouse. | But then again I also have a 14-year-old ThinkPad that still runs | like a dream once I put in an SSD; one of the last models with the "real" IBM | keyboard in it. 14 year old laptops have processors that use a lot of power when sleeping. Kind of annoying in a laptop. They probably don't have USB 3, also annoying. They don't have good displays. They are surely heavy. They won't have HDMI-out. The DisplayPort probably cannot drive UltraHD. By now, the battery is probably worn out and it isn't easy to get decent replacements. The oldest processors generation that I'm happy to use in notebooks is "Haswell" (launched 10 years ago). We still use a ThinkPad T530 (Ivy Bridge), but always plugged in and without an external monitor. | Perhaps mistakenly, I thought that the combination of new hardware with the | rough requirements gamers have for their machines -- able to be run hard for | long periods of time, for instance -- would give me durability and was the | Next Best Thing to the trouble of actually assembling a desktop machine | myself. (I actually like to build computers, but I just don't have the time | these days, unfortunately.) Seems I was wrong, or at least wrong that this | model from Lenovo would be like that. Reasonable. One has to look at what makes a cheap model cheap. What corners are cut? What proprietary things make replacement / upgrade hard? But you have to ask the same question about business desktops too. The sheet metal is likely of a higher gauge, but they still may put in proprietary traps. I have old Dell business computers that require you to buy extra "sleds" to install more hard drives (why??) and those have all the problems of proprietary bits. They often have lovely tool-less access to all the parts. I have a ThinkCentre M75s to which I added an NVMe drive. But I cannot easily source the odd gizmo that is a support and heat sink for it (I have faked it). | I didn't even consider ThinkCentres, which word-of-mouth had rated as | overpriced and underpowered, and in any event I wanted (and still want) an | extremely reliable machine that I can re-use my 3.5" spinning disks in along | with other desktop-sized hardware. My three desktops are located in different | offices, and they make a mini-cloud of backups etc. I don't buy new ThinkCentres. I opportunistically buy used ones -- not a quick process. Underpowered only matters up to a point. My decade old i7 is actually fast enough for me. Having lots of drive bays isn't something that desktops do. Servers, maybe. You probably need a bespoke system (i.e. made to order). | Most of my academic colleagues took an entirely different route -- by and | large they use a high-end laptop as their main computer, and either go for a | docking-station setup or just use a cheap "business" desktop for email/web | work, a reversal of the old approach where the laptop was for light duty and | the desktop for serious work. Quite sensible. But a bit wasteful: you have to replace the whole computer when the weakest component pinches. | I am not a market of one (yet). But there are times when it is starting to | feel that way. And not working in tech, I don't hear what's current, whose | machines are reliable, and the sort of unwritten lore that would help inform | sensible purchasing choices. | | I suspect this list of desiderata would apply to many in this group: | | - reliable and long-lived | | - user-upgradeable and user-fixable | | - high storage capacity | | - fast, or fast enough for work purposes | | - able to manipulate high-end graphics (and sometimes high-end audio) files No longer mainstream: - 5.25" bays (optical drives; 5.25" floppies). - 3.5" bays (hard drives) - 2.5" bays (laptop HDDs, older SSDs) Only these internal expansion capabilities remain: - PCIe slots (video cards, a few after-market expansion card) - m.2 slots (NVMe drives, WiFi / BlueTooth cards) - DIMM / SODIMM slots for RAM (endangered) The "user-fixable" requirement is clearly not binary. You might want to be a bit flexible on this because it's not a good use of your time on an academic treadmill. | Things I don't need are: high framerate, portability, small form-factor, | Windows, the latest wireless speed standard, anything more than ordinary | ethernet, optical disks. I can plug in USB peripherals for keyboard, mouse, | portable devices, or even optical disks. I can even use offboard DAC high-end | audio over USB, which works quite well. I have thought about building a NAS | system, to reduce my need for local high-capacity storage, but every time I | look into it, the plethora of software choices and the difficulty of | configuring a server to do what is normally done locally makes me just, well, | give up. The paradox of choice. You can buy NASes off the shelf. For our household, I bought a few many years ago. Now they are no longer supported, even though the hardware is fine. In future, we'll roll our own so that they won't get orphaned. William Park made a good point: why not skip the NAS. | Essentially, for a desktop unit I want a server-type machine that is also | capable of working with large graphics images, mostly static. I don't think | there is anything like that for general sale, and so it isn't just branding -- | it's having enough people to sustain a market for such a product. What aspect of "server type" do you require? I think that almost any machine these days is capable of working with large graphics images, mostly static. You might want to think hard about how many 3.5" drive bays you want. You can get HDDs with really high capacities these days. It isn't obvious to me that RAID works well with drives that big. | For that matter, I far prefer manual transmission in cars, but that's a | preference that is hard to sustain these days. Fortunately that's just a | preference and not a matter of work. Manual exists but makes less sense when the automatics get similar or better fuel economy. And EV's are a whole different kettle of fish. | Thanks to everyone for all the reflections; there is more to the problem than | I was properly aware of. Today I will open up the Legion and see how | easy/difficult it is to replace the CMOS battery and to bypass the high-end | graphics card. The saga continues. I hope that went well.
As one of those academics (in Computer Science, no less), I use a Macbook Pro that I connect to a Dell widescreen at work, and a Phillips 328E1 4K widescreen at home, which I mostly using in Landscape mode. It's blisteringly fast, works everywhere, runs forever (like 1/2 a day) on battery, and has all the software available that I could want (almost completely FOSS). It's not Linux, but it's Unix in a terminal window. The majority of my colleagues run Macs, with Windows and Linux about tied for the rest. My machine was a bit pricey, but many people have Macbook Airs, which are also great at a great pricepoint. My servers all run Linux, and I used a Linux laptop until (a) my Linux wouldn't connect to a projector at a conference, and (b) Apple put Unix under the GUI. So I've been a happy Mac/Linux user for 2 decades. ../Dave On Sun, 17 Sept 2023 at 16:01, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: Peter King via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
A wonderfully clear and evocative elegy! All rational.
| To: D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Cc: Peter King <peter.king@utoronto.ca> | Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2023 13:11:24 -0400 | Subject: Re: [GTALUG] brands matter; Lenovo's brands | | All points about brands/branding noted and appreciated. I got the Lenovo | Legion T5 because I wanted a desktop, and it seemed to me that the niche for | high-quality and well-built desktops -- what used to be called "enterprise" or | "business" models -- had largely collapsed, being supplanted by either | high-end laptops that business users would tote around and if necessary plug | into a docking station, or by cheap consumer-grade desktops that were shoddily | built, under-powered, and meant to be thrown away in a few years (more | economical than investing in long-lasting hardware that would be outmoded too | quickly). So what is someone who wants a good desktop unit to do?
I don't mean to push Lenovo. I pick them to discuss because I'm slightly more familiar with them (mostly on paper).
As far as I can tell, there are still full-sized business towers. Here's a page from Lenovo.
They aren't particularly inexpensive. Some might be missing important features. I favour AMD processors but they are under-represented. None is offered with Linux.
Interestingly, they include your model (newer variants).
Lenovo has a separate category "Workstation". It includes desktop ThinkStations and notebook ThinkPads. < https://www.lenovo.com/ca/lenovopro/en/d/deals/workstations/?sortBy=priceUp&visibleDatas=1035%3AThinkStation
Some of their servers (ThinkServer) look a lot like "desktops" (towers that go under desks): < https://www.lenovo.com/ca/lenovopro/en/d/deals/servers/?tabkey=Server%20%26%...
The one inexpensive model has a Celeron processor.
======================
Perhaps you are inferring too much about the quality of your Legion box from a few datapoints.
==============================
My desktop is a decade old (HP Envy). The only things I changed inside the box in that time (mostly in the first year):
- replaced the GPU (to drive my high resolution displays)
- added RAM
- added an SSD
For my next desktop, I expect to live with the iGPU. That leaves disk bays the only issue with SFF or smaller boxes.
Personally, I don't really fill up modern disks (they are big!). I do want backups, but they need to be separate from the computer anyway.
| A few years ago one of my desktop units failed. I replaced it with a miniPC, | a minisform model I put more RAM and two 2TB SSDs into, and it runs just | fine. Maybe that is the way to go.
Ah, so you are quite familiar with that form factor.
| (I have a portable high-resolution LCD | screen now, and I think I'll eventually just carry around miniPCs rather than | laptops.)
A laptop really is more portable than mini PC + display + keyboard + mouse.
| But then again I also have a 14-year-old ThinkPad that still runs | like a dream once I put in an SSD; one of the last models with the "real" IBM | keyboard in it.
14 year old laptops have processors that use a lot of power when sleeping. Kind of annoying in a laptop. They probably don't have USB 3, also annoying. They don't have good displays. They are surely heavy. They won't have HDMI-out. The DisplayPort probably cannot drive UltraHD. By now, the battery is probably worn out and it isn't easy to get decent replacements. The oldest processors generation that I'm happy to use in notebooks is "Haswell" (launched 10 years ago).
We still use a ThinkPad T530 (Ivy Bridge), but always plugged in and without an external monitor.
| Perhaps mistakenly, I thought that the combination of new hardware with the | rough requirements gamers have for their machines -- able to be run hard for | long periods of time, for instance -- would give me durability and was the | Next Best Thing to the trouble of actually assembling a desktop machine | myself. (I actually like to build computers, but I just don't have the time | these days, unfortunately.) Seems I was wrong, or at least wrong that this | model from Lenovo would be like that.
Reasonable. One has to look at what makes a cheap model cheap. What corners are cut? What proprietary things make replacement / upgrade hard?
But you have to ask the same question about business desktops too. The sheet metal is likely of a higher gauge, but they still may put in proprietary traps. I have old Dell business computers that require you to buy extra "sleds" to install more hard drives (why??) and those have all the problems of proprietary bits. They often have lovely tool-less access to all the parts.
I have a ThinkCentre M75s to which I added an NVMe drive. But I cannot easily source the odd gizmo that is a support and heat sink for it (I have faked it).
| I didn't even consider ThinkCentres, which word-of-mouth had rated as | overpriced and underpowered, and in any event I wanted (and still want) an | extremely reliable machine that I can re-use my 3.5" spinning disks in along | with other desktop-sized hardware. My three desktops are located in different | offices, and they make a mini-cloud of backups etc.
I don't buy new ThinkCentres. I opportunistically buy used ones -- not a quick process. Underpowered only matters up to a point. My decade old i7 is actually fast enough for me.
Having lots of drive bays isn't something that desktops do. Servers, maybe. You probably need a bespoke system (i.e. made to order).
| Most of my academic colleagues took an entirely different route -- by and | large they use a high-end laptop as their main computer, and either go for a | docking-station setup or just use a cheap "business" desktop for email/web | work, a reversal of the old approach where the laptop was for light duty and | the desktop for serious work.
Quite sensible. But a bit wasteful: you have to replace the whole computer when the weakest component pinches.
| I am not a market of one (yet). But there are times when it is starting to | feel that way. And not working in tech, I don't hear what's current, whose | machines are reliable, and the sort of unwritten lore that would help inform | sensible purchasing choices. | | I suspect this list of desiderata would apply to many in this group: | | - reliable and long-lived | | - user-upgradeable and user-fixable | | - high storage capacity | | - fast, or fast enough for work purposes | | - able to manipulate high-end graphics (and sometimes high-end audio) files
No longer mainstream: - 5.25" bays (optical drives; 5.25" floppies). - 3.5" bays (hard drives) - 2.5" bays (laptop HDDs, older SSDs)
Only these internal expansion capabilities remain: - PCIe slots (video cards, a few after-market expansion card) - m.2 slots (NVMe drives, WiFi / BlueTooth cards) - DIMM / SODIMM slots for RAM (endangered)
The "user-fixable" requirement is clearly not binary. You might want to be a bit flexible on this because it's not a good use of your time on an academic treadmill.
| Things I don't need are: high framerate, portability, small form-factor, | Windows, the latest wireless speed standard, anything more than ordinary | ethernet, optical disks. I can plug in USB peripherals for keyboard, mouse, | portable devices, or even optical disks. I can even use offboard DAC high-end | audio over USB, which works quite well. I have thought about building a NAS | system, to reduce my need for local high-capacity storage, but every time I | look into it, the plethora of software choices and the difficulty of | configuring a server to do what is normally done locally makes me just, well, | give up.
The paradox of choice.
You can buy NASes off the shelf. For our household, I bought a few many years ago. Now they are no longer supported, even though the hardware is fine. In future, we'll roll our own so that they won't get orphaned.
William Park made a good point: why not skip the NAS.
| Essentially, for a desktop unit I want a server-type machine that is also | capable of working with large graphics images, mostly static. I don't think | there is anything like that for general sale, and so it isn't just branding -- | it's having enough people to sustain a market for such a product.
What aspect of "server type" do you require?
I think that almost any machine these days is capable of working with large graphics images, mostly static.
You might want to think hard about how many 3.5" drive bays you want. You can get HDDs with really high capacities these days. It isn't obvious to me that RAID works well with drives that big.
| For that matter, I far prefer manual transmission in cars, but that's a | preference that is hard to sustain these days. Fortunately that's just a | preference and not a matter of work.
Manual exists but makes less sense when the automatics get similar or better fuel economy. And EV's are a whole different kettle of fish.
| Thanks to everyone for all the reflections; there is more to the problem than | I was properly aware of. Today I will open up the Legion and see how | easy/difficult it is to replace the CMOS battery and to bypass the high-end | graphics card. The saga continues.
I hope that went well.--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
On 2023-09-17 17:02, David Mason via talk wrote:
As one of those academics (in Computer Science, no less), I use a Macbook Pro
One of my cousins is a nuclear physicist (studying neutrino oscillations, no less). He uses Linux, both on his notebook and on the "big iron" supercomputer he uses.
On Sat, Sep 16, 2023 at 1:12 PM Peter King via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
A few years ago one of my desktop units failed. I replaced it with a miniPC, a minisform model I put more RAM and two 2TB SSDs into, and it runs just fine. Maybe that is the way to go.
For many uses this works just fine. The miniPC offer simplicity, small size and low power consumption if you're OK not being able to upgrade more than RAM and storage.
(I have a portable high-resolution LCD screen now, and I think I'll eventually just carry around miniPCs rather than laptops.) But then again I also have a 14-year-old ThinkPad that still runs like a dream once I put in an SSD; one of the last models with the "real" IBM keyboard in it.
If that matters, it's still possible to buy an original IBM-PC type keyboard <https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/SFNT> regardless of where you get your PC. They've taken the original design and made faithful duplicates, as well as Mac-friendly key layouts.
Perhaps mistakenly, I thought that the combination of new hardware with the rough requirements gamers have for their machines -- able to be run hard for long periods of time, for instance -- would give me durability and was the Next Best Thing to the trouble of actually assembling a desktop machine myself. (I actually like to build computers, but I just don't have the time these days, unfortunately.)
A good chunk of this can be done online. The state of the art of online assembly, NZXT.com, does ship to Canada. But Canadian retailers such as Canada Computers offer local services that are similar if not as slick. You of course then deal with the various brands for motherboards, power supplies, cases, etc. but if you trust the store you generally will do OK. This is the preferred path for gamers, since high-end GPUs have special needs. I rarely hear people in this list talk about water cooling.
I didn't even consider ThinkCentres, which word-of-mouth had rated as overpriced and underpowered,
You had me at overpriced. It's not that they're under-powered -- you can easily buy a ThinkCenter with an i9 inside -- so much as being too expensive for the power you want. This raises the word that is critical to our discussion that hasn't been said yet: VALUE. Everyone has their own tradeoffs of price versus performance versus features versus intangibles (shapes and positions of the keytops, for instance). To some people the value of the brand is worth the premium, which takes us back to the original subject.
I am not a market of one (yet). But there are times when it is starting to feel that way
That's what the custom PC makers listed above are pretty-well designed to address; those people for whom one size fits one.
I suspect this list of desiderata would apply to many in this group:
- reliable and long-lived
This is usually measured by warranty length. For instance: typically cheap storage drives will have a year or two warranty, high-end drives (that might otherwise have identical specs) five years or more. All part of the value tradeoff.
- user-upgradeable and user-fixable
I find a remarkable amount of PC hardware not user-fixable. User-replaceable may be as good as it gets. Keep in mind that "user-upgradeable" has a shelf life for many components, even if building your own PC. Eventually your CPU and RAM sockets will obsolete, after which upgrade parts will become rarer (and more expensive) to the point where it may be cheaper to replace than upgrade. Be realistic about what (and how soon) you can see yourself upgrading.
- high storage capacity
High is in the eye of the beholder. If you have a home server the individual stations may not need much.
- able to manipulate high-end graphics (and sometimes high-end audio) files
That's too vague for a recommendation, because "manipulate" takes many forms. High-end video editors and format conversion tools can chew up plenty of CPU and/or GPU. Good luck. Apologies if I've been stating the obvious. - Evan
| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | If that matters, it's still possible to buy an original IBM-PC type keyboard | <https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/SFNT> regardless of where you get your PC. | They've taken the original design and made faithful duplicates, as well as | Mac-friendly key layouts. I assume that those are trying to be like the IBM Model M keyboards for desktop IBM PCs. These are not like the classic ThinkPad keyboards that Peter and many pine for.
| From: Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | On Sat, Sep 16, 2023 at 1:12 PM Peter King via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: | > I didn't even consider ThinkCentres, which word-of-mouth had rated as | > overpriced and underpowered, | > | You had me at overpriced. There's a robust resale market. That's where I've bought all but one of my ThinkCentres. Prices vary (not an "efficient market"). | To some people the value of the brand is worth the premium, which takes us | back to the original subject. I actually appreciate support. I've had updated firmware released for 8-year-old ThinkCentres. I also like the mechanics. How it is easy to disassemble and reassemble the boxes. | > I suspect this list of desiderata would apply to many in this group: | > | > - reliable and long-lived | > | This is usually measured by warranty length. For instance: typically cheap | storage drives will have a year or two warranty, high-end drives (that | might otherwise have identical specs) five years or more. All part of the | value tradeoff. The warranty length is a hint, just like the branding. In fact it often follows the branding. I cannot imagine returning a storage drive. The security and privacy risks are obvious. (Without Secure Erase, you cannot be sure that all your data has gone from the drive.) So I take the warranty as an unreliable signal of the manufacturer's confidence in the product. There are also lots of very technical issues that probably affect reliability. - CMR vs SMR - SLC vs MLC vs TLC vs QLC vs ... - DRAM cache vs pseudo SLC cache vs HMB - over provisioning | > - user-upgradeable and user-fixable | > | I find a remarkable amount of PC hardware not user-fixable. | User-replaceable may be as good as it gets. One question is: how large is the module that needs to be replaced? Also: how much skill is needed to do so? The same is true of cars and many other appliances. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
I forgot to mention. One area where branding can come in handy is in identifying a niche in which the brand establishes a reputation for expertise. If running Linux and having it explicitly supported by your hardware is critical to you, then you are part of the market that brands such as Tuxedo <https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en> and System76 <https://system76.com/> are seeking. (The latter even makes its own distribution <https://pop.system76.com/>!) Conversely, if you want to support brands that identify your needs as explicitly worthy of support, then giving them your business will contribute towards keeping these brands healthy. - Evan
On Sat, Sep 16, 2023 at 03:13:58AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
I forgot to mention.
One area where branding can come in handy is in identifying a niche in which the brand establishes a reputation for expertise.
If running Linux and having it explicitly supported by your hardware is critical to you, then you are part of the market that brands such as Tuxedo <https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en> and System76 <https://system76.com/> are seeking. (The latter even makes its own distribution <https://pop.system76.com/>!) Conversely, if you want to support brands that identify your needs as explicitly worthy of support, then giving them your business will contribute towards keeping these brands healthy.
I saw a video recently where Louis Rossmann gave an update on having used his Framework laptop for a couple of years now. Mostly happy, although he still misses the natural layout of the thinkpad keyboard. He runs linux and most things work, except apparently sleep mode doesn't work properly so the battery still drains quite a bit in sleep mode which of course it shouldn't. The Framework laptops at least look interesting. -- Len Sorensen
| From: Lennart Sorensen via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | I saw a video recently where Louis Rossmann gave an update on having | used his Framework laptop for a couple of years now. | He runs linux and most things work, except apparently sleep mode doesn't | work properly so the battery still drains quite a bit in sleep mode | which of course it shouldn't. That's odd. I thought Linux support was one of their goals. And it should be close to a very standard Intel system. I just saw a YouTube review of the Arch-based version of Asahi Linux for Macs. It seemed to have much much worse battery run time than MacOS. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFx6R26aRHw> See 8:55. 4.5 hrs vs 13 hours for playing videos in a loop. With experimental GPU drivers, 8 to 9 hours. So there is promise. This is understandable: they are reverse-engineering everything and Asahi is still a beta or maybe alpha. | The Framework laptops at least look interesting. I like modularity but the kind they provide doesn't seem worth the extra price. The most interesting to me is updating the processor. But that takes a motherboard replacement, which is very expensive. So far, only one generation update has happened and that is not worth a lot to me. We'll see if larger jumps will be supported.
The more this thread continues the more I am reminded about the role of inertia in branding and marketing. Gaining a new customer (ie, getting them to switch brands) is a lot harder than keeping existing ones, especially in mature markets. It's why many big scummy companies treat you like dirt until the moment you threaten to switch, at which point they shunt you to "retention" departments that sometimes offer the only situations one could call competitive. Maybe. I'd say that now HP, <https://hpdevone.com/linux-laptop> Dell <https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-ca/000138246/linux-on-dell-desktops-and-laptops> and Lenovo <https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/faqs/operating-systems/what-is-linux/> all expend the minimum necessary effort to support Linux, though that support takes different forms. All know that you can't sell servers that won't support Linux, and we don't have the compatibility issues of the early days (where support meant not just PC markers but those of add-on interfaces such as Adaptec and Digitech). Now most compatibility issues are either BIOS related (mostly solved, and the fault of Microsoft rather than hardware makers) graphics card and USB dongles (not an issue for servers and not actually the fault of the laptop makers). The "Thinkpad love" I see here IMO appears to reflect the age and experiences of the discussion participants. Early in the days of PCs there was way more diversity in hardware that could be explicitly Linux friendly or hostile, and IBM was friendlier from the start when not all were. Recall that in the 90s and 00s, HP, IBM and Dell (well DEC which was eventually consumed by Dell via Compaq) all had big legacy Unix/minicomputer businesses to protect, plus under Ballmer Microsoft was overtly and aggressively hostile. IBM probably did the best job in not letting all this get in the way of providing Linux support early on its high-end PCs, and that reputation has stuck to the Thinkpad brand to this day. It would be interesting to see how anyone here who has only started buying computers in the last 15 years or so regards this reverence for Lenovo. - Evan
On Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 7:16 PM Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
The more this thread continues the more I am reminded about the role of inertia in branding and marketing.
Gaining a new customer (ie, getting them to switch brands) is a lot harder than keeping existing ones, especially in mature markets. It's why many big scummy companies treat you like dirt until the moment you threaten to switch, at which point they shunt you to "retention" departments that sometimes offer the only situations one could call competitive. Maybe.
I'd say that now HP, <https://hpdevone.com/linux-laptop> Dell <https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-ca/000138246/linux-on-dell-desktops-and-laptops> and Lenovo <https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/faqs/operating-systems/what-is-linux/> all expend the minimum necessary effort to support Linux, though that support takes different forms. All know that you can't sell servers that won't support Linux, and we don't have the compatibility issues of the early days (where support meant not just PC markers but those of add-on interfaces such as Adaptec and Digitech). Now most compatibility issues are either BIOS related (mostly solved, and the fault of Microsoft rather than hardware makers) graphics card and USB dongles (not an issue for servers and not actually the fault of the laptop makers).
The "Thinkpad love" I see here IMO appears to reflect the age and experiences of the discussion participants. Early in the days of PCs there was way more diversity in hardware that could be explicitly Linux friendly or hostile, and IBM was friendlier from the start when not all were. Recall that in the 90s and 00s, HP, IBM and Dell (well DEC which was eventually consumed by Dell via Compaq) all had big legacy Unix/minicomputer businesses to protect, plus under Ballmer Microsoft was overtly and aggressively hostile. IBM probably did the best job in not letting all this get in the way of providing Linux support early on its high-end PCs, and that reputation has stuck to the Thinkpad brand to this day.
It would be interesting to see how anyone here who has only started buying computers in the last 15 years or so regards this reverence for Lenovo.
I think I bought my first laptop in 2011 (so I guess that puts me in this category :-)). I have always had Linux on my computers, to the extent of not signing on with an employer when they needed me to run only Windows. I have owned thinkpads, HPs, and had experience on a couple of other brands (netbooks and MSI). Thinkpads have generally have had the best support for Linux - and not because Lenovo cares, but simply because majority of the developers I know of preferred using thinkpads. Having said that - I have had really positive experience with Lenovo support. HP wouldn't care what I had on the laptop and reimaged Windows on it. Not to mention trying to setup Linux on it was a nightmare (and I think I fit the category of advanced Linux users). In another case (I think it was an MSI), I knew the hardware was supported by Linux, but I could only get everything working with Fedora rawhide. Coming back to thinkpad support though - I have rarely had issues with them supporting hardware irrespective of the OS running on it. It was easier of course if it had Windows, but they would send out a technician who had their own boot disk to boot into their diagnostic OS and confirm the issue (I did pony up the extra $s for the in person support). My employer also has kernel developers working with Lenovo for some of their laptops to ensure that Linux support is in, which has resulted in a number of fixes to bioses and to the kernel. I believe we do it with a few other OEMs, but Lenovo was the one I cared to find out about since I have a thinkpad. Dhaval
I'm not so impressed with Lenovo's support of it's Legion laptops. My model as well as other Legion models have no speaker output in Linux. The headphone jacks work but no sound out of the speakers. I would have thought that having sound working was a bare minimum in terms of Linux support. I dual boot and sound works fine in Windows. Apparently this problem is being worked on and eventually we'll see a fix in a future kernel but it's frustrating always having to drag my headphones around. Jim On Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 11:00 PM Dhaval Giani via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 7:16 PM Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
The more this thread continues the more I am reminded about the role of inertia in branding and marketing.
Gaining a new customer (ie, getting them to switch brands) is a lot harder than keeping existing ones, especially in mature markets. It's why many big scummy companies treat you like dirt until the moment you threaten to switch, at which point they shunt you to "retention" departments that sometimes offer the only situations one could call competitive. Maybe.
I'd say that now HP, <https://hpdevone.com/linux-laptop> Dell <https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-ca/000138246/linux-on-dell-desktops-and-laptops> and Lenovo <https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/faqs/operating-systems/what-is-linux/> all expend the minimum necessary effort to support Linux, though that support takes different forms. All know that you can't sell servers that won't support Linux, and we don't have the compatibility issues of the early days (where support meant not just PC markers but those of add-on interfaces such as Adaptec and Digitech). Now most compatibility issues are either BIOS related (mostly solved, and the fault of Microsoft rather than hardware makers) graphics card and USB dongles (not an issue for servers and not actually the fault of the laptop makers).
The "Thinkpad love" I see here IMO appears to reflect the age and experiences of the discussion participants. Early in the days of PCs there was way more diversity in hardware that could be explicitly Linux friendly or hostile, and IBM was friendlier from the start when not all were. Recall that in the 90s and 00s, HP, IBM and Dell (well DEC which was eventually consumed by Dell via Compaq) all had big legacy Unix/minicomputer businesses to protect, plus under Ballmer Microsoft was overtly and aggressively hostile. IBM probably did the best job in not letting all this get in the way of providing Linux support early on its high-end PCs, and that reputation has stuck to the Thinkpad brand to this day.
It would be interesting to see how anyone here who has only started buying computers in the last 15 years or so regards this reverence for Lenovo.
I think I bought my first laptop in 2011 (so I guess that puts me in this category :-)). I have always had Linux on my computers, to the extent of not signing on with an employer when they needed me to run only Windows. I have owned thinkpads, HPs, and had experience on a couple of other brands (netbooks and MSI). Thinkpads have generally have had the best support for Linux - and not because Lenovo cares, but simply because majority of the developers I know of preferred using thinkpads. Having said that - I have had really positive experience with Lenovo support. HP wouldn't care what I had on the laptop and reimaged Windows on it. Not to mention trying to setup Linux on it was a nightmare (and I think I fit the category of advanced Linux users). In another case (I think it was an MSI), I knew the hardware was supported by Linux, but I could only get everything working with Fedora rawhide. Coming back to thinkpad support though - I have rarely had issues with them supporting hardware irrespective of the OS running on it. It was easier of course if it had Windows, but they would send out a technician who had their own boot disk to boot into their diagnostic OS and confirm the issue (I did pony up the extra $s for the in person support). My employer also has kernel developers working with Lenovo for some of their laptops to ensure that Linux support is in, which has resulted in a number of fixes to bioses and to the kernel. I believe we do it with a few other OEMs, but Lenovo was the one I cared to find out about since I have a thinkpad.
Dhaval --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
| From: Jim Ruxton via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | I'm not so impressed with Lenovo's support of it's Legion laptops. My model | as well as other Legion models have no speaker output in Linux. The | headphone jacks work but no sound out of the speakers. I would have thought | that having sound working was a bare minimum in terms of Linux support. I | dual boot and sound works fine in Windows. Apparently this problem is being | worked on and eventually we'll see a fix in a future kernel but it's | frustrating always having to drag my headphones around. | Jim Lenovo tells you in their PSREF documents whether a platform supports Linux. In theory, this means that if you try to run Linux on one that is supposed to support Linux, and it fails, you can get phone support. As far as I know, Legend laptops are not listed as supporting Linux. That means: support is Linux's problem, not Lenovo's. That's not too bad: Linux folks are much better at support than the folks on Lenovo's support line. Remember: you may need to be an active contributor to the solution. Business computers are conservative. Usually Linux already supports their features. Other computers are more innovative. Sometimes it takes a bit of time for Linux support to show up. Legend notebooks often have NVidia GPUs. That's not a great choice for Linux. I assume we all know why. I'm no expert on sound, but I've found "pavucontrol" gives me more controls. Maybe you can find a setting there that gets your speakers working.
On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 1:44 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: Jim Ruxton via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | I'm not so impressed with Lenovo's support of it's Legion laptops. My model | as well as other Legion models have no speaker output in Linux. The | headphone jacks work but no sound out of the speakers. I would have thought | that having sound working was a bare minimum in terms of Linux support. I | dual boot and sound works fine in Windows. Apparently this problem is being | worked on and eventually we'll see a fix in a future kernel but it's
I'm no expert on sound, but I've found "pavucontrol" gives me more controls. Maybe you can find a setting there that gets your speakers working.
Thanks but I wish it was that easy. There is a lot going on in the Linux world to get this fixed. https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Ubuntu/Ubuntu-and-legion-pro-7-16IRX8H-audio-is... Hoping in the 6.6 kernel the fix will appear. Jim
--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
| From: Jim Ruxton via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Thanks but I wish it was that easy. There is a lot going on in the Linux | world to get this fixed. | https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Ubuntu/Ubuntu-and-legion-pro-7-16IRX8H-audio-is... | Hoping in the 6.6 kernel the fix will appear. In my experience, the Lenovo fora are not very useful. This thread is enormous so it might be productive. (I don't think that I'll dip in.) But the Lenovo folks are unlikely to solve the problem. It's best solved upstream (Ubuntu), or upstream of upstream (the Linus kernel). Ubuntu typically is further behind its upstream than Fedora is. The second message in that forum gets quite technical (not common for that forum) so that is promising. But there are 17 pages of following messages and it was months ago, so I guess this is a hard nut to crack. Consider looking at <https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=208555> It too is long.
On 9/19/23 01:44, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: Jim Ruxton via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | I'm not so impressed with Lenovo's support of it's Legion laptops. My model | as well as other Legion models have no speaker output in Linux. The | headphone jacks work but no sound out of the speakers. I would have thought | that having sound working was a bare minimum in terms of Linux support. I | dual boot and sound works fine in Windows. Apparently this problem is being | worked on and eventually we'll see a fix in a future kernel but it's | frustrating always having to drag my headphones around. | Jim
Lenovo tells you in their PSREF documents whether a platform supports Linux. In theory, this means that if you try to run Linux on one that is supposed to support Linux, and it fails, you can get phone support.
As far as I know, Legend laptops are not listed as supporting Linux.
That means: support is Linux's problem, not Lenovo's.
That's not too bad: Linux folks are much better at support than the folks on Lenovo's support line. Remember: you may need to be an active contributor to the solution.
Business computers are conservative. Usually Linux already supports their features.
Other computers are more innovative. Sometimes it takes a bit of time for Linux support to show up.
Legend notebooks often have NVidia GPUs. That's not a great choice for Linux. I assume we all know why. I thought NVIDIA have open sourced the drivers outside of userspace for 2000 series and up. The git repo is here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules. Not sure if which distro your using has the packages for it, but I would be surprised outside of that if it doesn't work fine for newer GPUs. That's if you install the driver package for it if it exists.
Or perhaps you have something else in mind, Nick
I'm no expert on sound, but I've found "pavucontrol" gives me more controls. Maybe you can find a setting there that gets your speakers working. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
| From: Nicholas Krause via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | I thought NVIDIA have open sourced the drivers outside of userspace for 2000 | series and up. The git repo is here: | https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules. Not sure if which distro | your using has the packages for it, | but I would be surprised outside of that if it doesn't work fine for newer | GPUs. That's if you install the | driver package for it if it exists. It can help nouveau. I don't know if nouveau uses it yet. But this is important for managing clocking and power on recent NVidia cards. Nouveau doesn't work for me. This is on a card so old that the new stuff isn't needed. So I use the proprietary drive. And my card is now "legacy"; the legacy proprietary drive won't support wayland. That means my computer will shortly be unable to run current Linux distros. A replacement video card (AMD) is worth more than the computer at this point. Summary: good use of an nvidia card requires proprietary drivers. nvidia had unconscionable restrictions that made nouveau impractical. They have fixed that. At least that's how I understand things.
On Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 10:16:05PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
The "Thinkpad love" I see here IMO appears to reflect the age and experiences of the discussion participants. Early in the days of PCs there was way more diversity in hardware that could be explicitly Linux friendly or hostile, and IBM was friendlier from the start when not all were. Recall that in the 90s and 00s, HP, IBM and Dell (well DEC which was eventually consumed by Dell via Compaq) all had big legacy Unix/minicomputer businesses to protect, plus under Ballmer Microsoft was overtly and aggressively hostile. IBM probably did the best job in not letting all this get in the way of providing Linux support early on its high-end PCs, and that reputation has stuck to the Thinkpad brand to this day.
No, DEC went to Compaq went to HP where the itanium love finally killed the Alpha. Not Dell. -- Len Sorensen
On 2023-09-19 10:09, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
On Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 10:16:05PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote: [snip] No, DEC went to Compaq went to HP where the itanium love finally killed the Alpha. Not Dell.
DEC actually provided lots of support to Linux. Very early on there were ports of a 64 bit version of Linux to the Alpha processors. There was also a tiny variant that was the boot bios. Possibly the biggest booster of Linux in DEC was Jon Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) We had a bunch of Alpha machines and I was sad to see them go. -- Alvin Starr || land: (647)478-6285 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||
On 2023-09-19 11:45, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
DEC actually provided lots of support to Linux. Very early on there were ports of a 64 bit version of Linux to the Alpha processors. There was also a tiny variant that was the boot bios. Possibly the biggest booster of Linux in DEC was Jon Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer)
IIRC, the DEC Alpha was the first 64 bit CPU Linux was ported to. There was an article about that (written by Jon Hall IIRC) in the Linux Journal.
On Tue, 2023/09/19 11:49:09AM -0400, James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: | > Possibly the biggest booster of Linux in DEC was Jon Hall | > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) | | IIRC, the DEC Alpha was the first 64 bit CPU Linux was ported to. There was | an article about that (written by Jon Hall IIRC) in the Linux Journal. Jon "maddog" Hall is a good man, and he is still actively promoting Linux and open source. I think he was recently at Ohio Linuxfest, and I think is currently in Brazil, doing the same. John
On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 10:09 AM Lennart Sorensen < lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
Recall that in the 90s and 00s, HP, IBM and Dell (well DEC which was eventually consumed by Dell via Compaq)
No, DEC went to Compaq went to HP where the itanium love finally killed the Alpha. Not Dell.
Yup. Sorry. I'd confused them with EMC which is what Dell acquired. - Evan
It would be interesting to see how anyone here who has only started buying computers in the last 15 years or so regards this reverence for Lenovo.
- Evan
Off-topic due to my buying history, but ... My old principal computer, an HP/Compaq laptop, is mostly out of action due to a failing keyboard. Until I get motivated to replace the keyboard I've substituted a refurbished Thinkpad T460s from the computer store here in town. Debian 12 simply installed (from the network install CD) and from then on just worked -- down to the Fn mappings for F1..F12; the guy at the store wondered whether those would be available. The Wikipedia page suggests that good Linux support is expected from Thinkpad T series. Also that the T460s dates from 2016, which is why I consider myself barely on-topic. This is my first run-in with a netbook style laptop. I miss having an optical drive, but added a USB DVD drive, and that did everything I need to do, including booting the Debian installer, IIRC. The DVD drive and mouse use all 3 USB ports, so I will probably be docking it to a powered USB hub if I get more ambitious. After the thread on favourite desktop managers (for which I thank everyone), I log in with the MATE manager, and everything goes the way I want. That includes being able to open audio CDs to read in to Rhythmbox -- it seems I lost that on the HP/Compaq with Xfce.
participants (14)
-
Alvin Starr -
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Dave Collier-Brown -
David Mason -
Dhaval Giani -
Evan Leibovitch -
James Knott -
Jim Ruxton -
John Sellens -
Lennart Sorensen -
mwilson＠Vex.Net -
Nicholas Krause -
Peter King -
William Park