The Reputation Gap between Lenovo and Thinkpad?

At least here in Canada, there appears to be a large gap between the reputation of the Thinkpad and that of the sales and support of Lenovo. Lots of love for the Thinkpad, none for Lenovo. You can see this most clearly on resellersrating.com.

Is this an accurate perception?

Trying to decide if I should go ahead with a Thinkpad purchase...I've been burned before and not looking foward to going through it again.

 

My W520 is my first laptop. I'm Canadian, and my purchase went fine.

 

AFAIK, most of the Thinkpads are still designed in the US, and manufactured in China, but for some reason, most of the drivers I have seen are written or packaged in Japan.

 

What I'm hearing is people waiting nearly a month to get their laptops and poor and indifferent customer support. I like being babied, they don't sound like the right folks for me to deal with.

 

I suspect Lenovo, like most other manufacturers, has part of the company that deals with business users (responsive) and part that deals with consumers (outsourced, understaffed, not responsive). Dell learned its lesson with outsourcing and brought some of it back to the US after business users got pissed off.

 

Mine shipped only a few days after ordering. Have yet to deal with support though.

 

Minus the fact that my screen is currently back ordered and so I have yet to get my laptop back I was very pleased with how my call to support went. They also paid for overnight shipping for the box to my house and overnight shipping once I put the laptop in and was sending it back to the repair center.

Lenovo W520.

 

I have a W570. Sales support was fine. However I'm having troubles getting anything else done such as checking on my warranty or purchasing warranty
from my sales rep in the US.
Renee

 

Thinkpads are designed primarily in Japan.

I haven't experienced anything really bad with Lenovo. People who are burned often complain, but people don't generally say anything when everything goes fine. Probably the explanation.

 

My main problem with calling customer service is they often have accent that makes it hard to understand what they are saying (often took 2 or 3 times repetition), even though they are trying to be helpful.

 

I judge a company by how well it handles things when they go bad. So, if there are a lot of complaints, I avoid them.

 

Heh... I was just on the phone to Lenovo support (they had the wrong warranty info for me) and as soon as I heard the Indian accent I wondered if my fairly complex problem would be understood. It only took two attempts, although the guy at the other end had his mic badly placed so for the entire call I heard his heavy breathing down the line... he sounded like he was running

 

Ya know; I'll bet that they say the same thing about us calling them!


Have a Magical Day!

 

He is probably running when he heard another Thinkpadder on the other end. I find that lot of people whom use Thinkpads would go into great depth with the technicians and customer support regarding what the problem is and how the depot should go about fixing it. And lot of us do not take no for an answer.

Regarding Lenovo and Thinkpad, well Lenovo did purchase the Think branded product from IBM so that they can gain a larger foothold in the western market, without having go through the trouble of organic growth and start from scratch.

As such most people know more about Thinkpad then Lenovo... it is not a strange behaviour.

 

I've never ordered one from Lenovo, but the problem is with reading horror stories is they are the extremes. People only write things if they are really angry or really happy, you do not get the median. And EVERY manufacturer has it's horror stories.

And I hate IBM ThinkPads with such a passion, took apart too many T4x models and I am so used to Lenovo ones, that it is torture to service an IBM ThinkPad.

 

yes the IBM thinkpad got too many parts and screws holding them.... it is quite easy to lose track of these screws.

The complicated assembly is one of the reasons why IBM Thinkpads cost more than an equivalent business laptop from say HP and Dell.

 

I've had my x200s for almost 3 years and have called support 4 times (battery, battery, power brick buzzing, hard drive cover crack).

I think the call center that handled every one of my calls was in the US (Atlanta maybe?). I had no problem understanding them. They shipped out my replacement parts overnight every time. Overall, I thought they did a great job.

 

I ordered my T520 on the Aug 3rd.
It shipped Aug 5th.
It is currently ~900km away, and should arrive this week.

 

It might be because while ThinkPads are unique machines designed almost entirely by Lenovo (and previously IBM), their non-ThinkPad computers are basically generic ODM boxes with a Lenovo logo.

 

The reputation gap is like that of inspirion vs latitude/precision. Using a regular lenovo after owning a thinkpad makes you think you’re using a totally different brand.

 

Does Lenovo develop ThinkPad entirely by themselves now? Last I heard IBM still helps them out with the design process. In America, IBM does the service for ThinkPads, so getting a ThinkPad fixed under warranty through our shop is always pleasant (dealing with IBM). Dealing with Lenovo to fix IdeaPad and Essential is horrid..

It's not even in the same league. I could never go back to any consumer grade notebook except the extreme gaming laptops.

 

I dont know I call them up say this is broken (only had a keyboard replaced) adn they send it to a distributor and I pick it up. Nobody works on my laptops just as nobody works on my jeep.

I couldnt agree more.

 

IBM only offers parts inventory, customer call management, phone technician support, etc. They don't do design for PC.

Lenovo has design in NC (which is where David Hill is based), this is where they pen the initial design and do the basic prototyping.

For more advanced design and prototyping, they go to Japan.

China Shenzhen and Shanghai has their equipment testing centers, where they do all the requisite milspec tests, acoustic tests, etc.

IBM doesn't do PC design anymore, their PC division all got sold to Lenovo.

Lenovo also rely on ODM for certain designs, i think final motherboard design would be something that the ODM do for Lenovo. As Wistron and Compal all have their company logos on the blueprints.

 

I've ordered CTO units from lenovo.com and it took me more than 1 month before they sent me a confirmation email (upon which I immediately cancelled my order and ordered from ebay)， while Dell can effectively build any laptop/ desktop you order and ship within 5 days. When I called their ordering customer service the people there don't speak English at all and prompted me to cancel my order I've heard similar stories online as well, so their ordering department (apart from sales) is a complete joke.

On the other hand, Lenovo technical support is quite nice actually. Even with basic warranty I get to a knowledgeable person soon and get the support I need. Stark contrast with customer order support.