Lenovo exec promises 80% of its devices will be consumer-repairable by 2025

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/6/23884108/lenovo-consumer-repair-pcs-serviceability-framework

by goplayoutside • 3 years ago

130 86 3 years ago

rovr138• 3 years ago

“More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer,” Lenovo executive Luca Rossi told the Canalys EMEA Forum 2023, according to The Register.
“Batteries, SSD, many things will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste,” he reportedly said.

I guess something's something.

ilikehurdles• 3 years ago

Laptop like it's 1995-2014 all over again.

stkdump• 3 years ago

It's not like you will be able to upgrade the CPU. Even RAM isn't mentioned.

yesbut• 3 years ago

I never got how we all just accepted non-user replaceable battery devices with phones, laptops, and tablets. The main reason why people replace those devices is the battery. Its so eco of them.

nvy• 3 years ago

Because the repairable laptops were Thinkpad-class devices which weighed quite a bit and had fucking terrible touchpads.

When slim Ultrabooks (or whatever they were called) started appearing, those of us who actually use our laptops like a laptop (i.e. we take them places) loved how thin and light they were. Imagine fitting more than just your laptop into a backpack!

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

We don't, or we didn't all accept it. It was forced upon us, due to the masses not giving a f. The masses are just so uninformed, that they would rather throw cash out every 2 years (if not shorter) to buy a new device. The manufacturers of course like that behavior and reinforce it. The sheer masses of uninformed people create a huge incentive for them to continue this way.

mouse_• 3 years ago

In the past, I replaced the keyboard on (if I recall correctly) an x260. This involved a 30-minute tutorial on unscrewing several dozen differently sized screws, taking apart the device in its entirety from the bottom, removing the motherboard, removing more body fixtures, and finally pulling the keyboard out. Through the bottom.

Recently, I looked up the process for doing the same on the x13 gen 2, released fairly recently.

https://download.lenovo.com/lts/RTPW12C0/FOF/RTPW12C0-ThinkP...

You take two screws out of the bottom and the keyboard pops off. That's it. Fucking incredible if I do say so myself. Especially considering they achieved this WHILE ALSO making the device thinner and sleeker. It's a nice surprise to see some things becoming -more- repairable.

mhb• 3 years ago

Behold: A thin Thinkpad X220 with a nicer screen, better battery life, and a worse keyboard.

mtreis86• 3 years ago

X220 has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used, has anything matched it since?

greenyoda• 3 years ago

Big discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37778771

dlgeek• 3 years ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37778771

jtokoph• 3 years ago

What will it take to consider a device repairable? Will it count if a laptop has 1 or 2 parts that can be user replaced? (Like swapping a keyboard key cap...)

What if they have two tiers of a device class. Where the base tier has 4 nearly identical models with different skus that are repairable, and a premium tier with 1 sku that is not repairable. Does that count as 80%?

bman_kg• 3 years ago

At least there's some kind of effort to make devices customer repairable...maybe it will get popular and other companies also will shift to such model or production

mrweasel• 3 years ago

Unless they can also promise that their devices will be built without Uyghur slave labor, I don't see this change my position on never buying Lenovo.

herbst3• 3 years ago

Are there any technical devices that can promise that?

ClumsyPilot3• 3 years ago

Supply chain issues include children mining cobalt, slave labour used in fast fashion clothing, slave labour used in producing many foods, Nestle recently admitted to having it in inlt's supply chain. And avocados financing dangerous mafia.

Basically my point is, as a consumer it's not really possible to compare two companies, say Lenovo and Acer, and see which supply chain is 'cleaner'

est• 3 years ago

what would you buy instead? Halal laptops?

throwaway2990• 3 years ago

They are already repairable. The issue is getting the parts. Tho not impossible. If they make that easier it’s win win!

sacnoradhq2• 3 years ago

Lenovo Thinkpads were already on the side of repairability, but that declined after the Apple cargo-culting that began around the time of the T470. The T480 had dual batteries, 1 removable and 1 internal. The T490 was even more enshitified with only 1 internal battery and a lower runtime.

Taek• 3 years ago

I really miss the replaceable battery of my old Thinkpad. I had high regard for Lenovo for a long time, but somewhere around 2017 or so (wasn't buying laptops that often, I'm not sure what year it started) they really declined, and now Thinkpads feel like cheap plastic crapware with low customizability and a bunch of locked down components.

What frustrates me is that I bought 3 of them after they started to decline because I trusted the brand so much. My consecutive disappointments is one of the main reasons I no longer trust corporations or branding anymore.

herbst3• 3 years ago

Switched from a T420s to a T480s and now I really don't know what's next because I definitely lost any trust in Lenovo

Brian_K_White2• 3 years ago

I have the same story with Optima car batteries.

rjh295• 3 years ago

They held my laptop in repair for almost three weeks to get a replacement keyboard, then tried to charge me over £1000 GBP (near the cost of the laptop) to replace the mainboard citing "water damage". The laptop was fine except for the keyboard.

I'm getting a Framework next and will never buy a Thinkpad again.

baz00• 3 years ago

This is classic Lenovo. No one knows how shit they are until you have to deal with their repair services.

The trick you see is to buy 2 of them off a 3rd party seller with damaged boxes and stick one in the cupboard. This costs the same as buying 1 new one directly usually. You can usually recoup a fair chunk of the cash by selling whatever dead one you end up with.

(Got 2x T14 gen 3’s for £700 each)

sacnoradhq2• 3 years ago

Ouch. Forget that. I had on-site repair with parts for 3 years. Had one repair during COVID due to a blown charging circuit. They had it for a month and replaced it.

Out of warranty, I stocked up on parts from AliExpress. Need a spare CPU fan? I think I have 6. ;@]

ilyt3• 3 years ago

I miss thick laptops and phones. I'd gladly pay for just "a higher tier phone but twice as thick/bigger battery". There are few more rugged phones but mostly bottom end specs...

okasaki2• 3 years ago

So are they going to be reversing their trend of soldering the ram? Most of their laptops have soldered ram now.

rfoo2• 3 years ago

Soldering the RAM to the board has performance advantages which must be addressed before we reverse the trend. LPCAMM promised similar (only slightly worse than soldered) performance/energy characteristics as soldered LPDDR5X and is said to be launching in 2024 so hopefully we get replaceable RAM back in 3~5 years.

blkhawk3• 3 years ago

They were soldering RAM on well before there were performance advantages - actually there were often performance disadvantages as the soldered on RAM was often a slower speed tier than what you could get cheaply just a few years later.

So the "lets solve that before we can swap-able RAM" argument doesn't really fly.

There are also Performance advantages to soldering the ram directly to the CPU die. So make the whole CPU with ram on it swappable then?

weweersdfsd• 3 years ago

I hope they do. There will soon be so much e-waste from entry-level devices with 8GB RAM that can't be upgraded.

lillecarl• 3 years ago

Hopefully CAMM can solve the problem of RAM (replaces SODIMM)

rjh295• 3 years ago

Why do people care about soldered ram? It's so cheap, just get 64GB when you buy it if that is what you want.

opan2• 3 years ago

Not everyone buys machines new. In ten years that laptop on eBay is stuck with that amount of RAM, limiting its use.

fomine3• 3 years ago

CTO RAM price is SO expensive except for SV rich bubble

cookiengineer• 3 years ago

Apple made the same promises.

Now we have software-remote-locked parts which, when replaced, won't work unless Apple approves them. [1]

I bet laptop manufacturers are on their way implementing parts pairing, and Intel surely is happy to provide a platform for this.

[1] https://m.gsmarena.com/iphone_15_pro_max_teardown_on_ifixit_...

christkv• 3 years ago

Consumer and businesses need to vote with their money and buy laptops from framework and others like them. It will force the others to follow suite.

edwcross• 3 years ago

Someone please help Framework sell to businesses, otherwise those of us who want but cannot buy them will have to keep buying user-hostile laptops.

sneak2• 3 years ago

The Framework laptops are slow, power hungry, and low resolution, otherwise I would have one.

I further assume without any data whatsoever that the speakers are bad (because all non-Apple laptop speakers are bad).

Anyone but anyone has a lot of catching up to do with Apple laptops right now.

Gigachad• 3 years ago

Business don’t care about self repair. They care about high durability and low failure rate as well as good support. They will just send the laptops back to the company to have them repaired.

JimDabell• 3 years ago

Apple made the same promises.

When?

hedora3• 3 years ago

100% of their laptops, tablets and phones have been repairable in-store for 15+ years.

Lenovo is promising this for customers or channel partners. Apple doesn’t have much of a sales channel, so the promise is similar to current in-store practices at Apple.

PeterStuer2• 3 years ago

Anyone know 80% of what? Is that by SKUs, sold or produced device volumes, parts of products, turnover, ...?

helsinkiandrew• 3 years ago

80% of products is a little vague - even if 95% of Lenovos product SKUs were consumer repairable that could still mean that all laptops and tablets aren't - they make a lot of rack/server/storage/network products.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/05/lenovo_pc_boss_4_in/

"On repairability, we have a plan that by 2025 more than 80 percent of the repair parts will be repaired again so that they they enter into the circular economy to reduce the impact to the environment."

He added: "More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer, by the customer or by the channel and we are enabling this with a design for serviceability kind of approach."

This means that "batteries, SSD, many things, will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste."

mulmen• 3 years ago

I’m optimistic.

"batteries, SSD, many things, will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste."

Not a lot of servers have sealed batteries or SSDs. It definitely sounds like more consumer/user oriented devices. Servers are already very modular and field serviceable.

moffkalast• 3 years ago

Too bad that 80% of what Lenovo makes is not really worth buying, especially the low-end stuff. Hopefully this repairable 80% includes the other 20%.

consp• 3 years ago

So finally the end of the locked id's requiring a custom bios to get things working?

ralusek• 3 years ago

In 2006, the State Department bans Lenovo computers from their network. After MI5 identified “backdoors” and vulnerable firmware in Lenovo products, their computers are banned from the intelligence networks of all Five-Eyes countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States.
The military isn't taking chances. In 2008, Marines stationed in Iraq stopped using Lenovo tech after discovering data was being transmitted back to China. The U.S. Air Force replaced $378 million worth of servers purchased by Lenovo
Lenovo faced uproar when it emerged in 2015 that it had hidden an advert-delivering program made by Superfish on hundreds of thousands of computers

SilverBirch• 3 years ago

The title is a mischaracterization of what was said:

More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer,

At the customer not by the customer. What they mean by this is that a skilled (and probably approved) technician would be able to carry out a repair on-site.

I think it's actually a much more reasonable approach - devices should have a first-class vendor supported route for repair. Outside of that, obviously people should also be free to have a go and repair the device themselves, but there's obvious reasons why that should be at arms-length from the vendor.

Personally I already have an X1, I bought it for work, I have the full 5 year support package and it's great, I think it's a totally reasonable compromise. I'm an engineer using this device for work, I don't expect to be cracking it open and fixing it myself when something goes wrong, and I don't expect my employer to tolerate my not working because I don't have the correct tools.

themoonisachees• 3 years ago

The distinction is really important. This means that Dell for example is already at this metric, as all their laptops are opened with a few screws and their repair tech just swaps boards and sends the old one for RMA.

But in practice this also means that given parts availability, the devices can be successfully fixed by consumers. as an IT guy who worked in a lab full of dell laptops, i sometimes did the odd repair and dell would just send me the part overnight, i'd swap the part and put the old one in the box and a courrier would pick it up day of. Say what you will about the quality of their computers, but their repair program is extremely efficient for the consumer, and because they won't spend too much money training proximity technicians, they engineer their products to be easily fixable.

Netcob• 3 years ago

It's definitely much better than Apple, which will put a lot of work into preventing anyone but themselves being able to repair Apple hardware. If a third-party technician gets the means to repair a laptop, without any pseudo-franchising shenanigans, that's worth a lot nowadays.

Still, if they want something to brag about, they should imitate Framework...

hedora3• 3 years ago

Is it better than Apple though?

He says 80% will be repairable by customers or channel partners.

Apple is probably well above that already. They already offer repair service for their phones, tablets and laptops.

Also, when I stopped paying attention to thinkpads (due to them botching a warranty repair) ~100% were repairable. You could get schematic diagrams, etc.

Dropping that to 80% is a huge regression.

jabroni_salad• 3 years ago

The gentleman who said that is Italian, is it possible that he just uses a different variety of English and the phrase didn't mean what you think it means?

He also said: “Batteries, SSD, many things will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste,”

To me this implies a general improvement for repairability by anyone that knows how to crack the chassis. 'will not any longer' is also an interesting word choice. I would avoid getting lawyeristic with anything not in a written edited press release.

bitlax• 3 years ago

Why do people balk at using a Huawei phone but have no problem using Lenovo laptops? Honest question; I've always liked the hardware.

a96• 3 years ago

Maybe because once upon a time, they were IBM hardware while Huawei was always Huawei.

up2isomorphism• 3 years ago

But it was repairable in 2012, like X230. It just needs to do thing it used to do instead of a fake promise.

NoGravitas• 3 years ago

Reject MacBook, return to ThinkPad.

chakintosh• 3 years ago

Cue Lenovo buying Framework within 2 years.

strangejonathan• 3 years ago

Hello Guys! I'm a founder in the electronics repair space. I have been building XiRepair.com since highschool. We are in the trenches when it comes to conversations with OEMs surrounding the reparability of products. I did a recent talk that is published on https://jonathanjstrange.com/the-future-of-repair/ regarding the future of electronics repair. If you are interested in this subject I highly suggest you give it a read. Also hit my inbox if you have any questions regarding this fast evolving industry. @JonathanStrange

Lenovo exec promises 80% of its devices will be consumer-repairable by 2025

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