Dinesh Joshi wrote:
Hi guys,
I just came across a slashdot article ( http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/17/124244 ) which said that the user base of IBM Lenovo laptops is falling just because they are now being manufactured/owned by the Chinese. I just want to get your opinions. Some say that the quality has indeed deteriorated while others say its just psychological. Many feel that these people are just plain biased while some say that the Chinese are less accountable than their american counter parts.
Personally, I am not biased against the Chinese but Chinese goods tend to have the "cheap" feel to them and I think that they have definitely lowered the quality and have cut costs at the same time while trying to improve their margins.
What say the group?
To some extent the have brought down their quality. There was a time when people bought thinkpads because you would not need to worry about anything. If you have important stuff on the laptop and had the money, then you would always go for a thinkpad. They had some important features that made them superior and therefore carried a premium. Acer was the one you bought to get Value for Money provided you are willing to live with a little bit of problem. Now Lenovo has lowered the price to compete with Acer. The only way they could do that was to strip off the advanced features.
Take a look at any of the older thinkpad. They had a heat-sink made of some fancy metal with fabulous heat conductivity. IBM engineers used to demonstrate by connecting extenders into a glass of water and show it boiling in 15 seconds. The lenovo thinkpads use normal copper for heat-sink. They also earlier used padded hard disks for shockproofing it to prevent damage in accidental drops. Now that is quietly removed from all but the top end of their laptops.
What they are doing makes business sense. Most of the consumers and business buyers want cheaper notebooks and do not want to pay for these extra features. IBM's pride did not allow them to provide strip down models.
Anyway, the HP (being an american company) has screwed up quality and the sub-terranian levels to which they have dropped, I will actually be willing to pay a premium for a Chinese brand if the alternate is to buy HP. so it is not whether you are american or chinese, it is quality v/s price. 5 years of having Florina as the CEO has moved Compaq / HP's laptops from being the most desired to the most shunned.
Regards Saswata
-- Regards,
Dinesh A. Joshi