[GTALUG] brands matter; Lenovo's brands

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

(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