Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing made an interest declaration the other day. He’s going to split their PC business into two units, one that does basic stuff aimed at consumers and businesses and another one that will get the Thinkpad brand and shoot for the higher end. The “Think” brand is needed to better compete with Apple, he said. As someone who recently switched to a Thinkpad after more than a decade on Apple laptops, all I can say is that Lenovo has a lot of work if it wants to even approach Apple’s customer service. Don’t get me wrong — I love the Thinkpad hardware. But almost everything dealing with Lenovo has been suboptimal.
The whole thing reminded me of that classic put down Senator Lloyd Bentsen delivered to Dan Quayle back in the 1988 campaign: Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.
It starts at the start. Go to Lenovo’s web site and try to order a customized Thinkpad.
For the X1 Carbon, there’s a laundry list of features on the customizing list – CPU, display, graphics system, memory and so on., Slowly click your way through the list — there’s a delay between every click. Click, sigh, click, sigh. But it’s all a trick. Almost nothing can be customized on the X1. Not the CPU, not the display or graphics system. But they’re still all on the list. On most models, you can’t even upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB. Why? What the…
Oh well. So you finally order and your new laptop arrives. Time to boot it up. It’s not quite as speedy as you expected and when it’s done you can see why. Crapware is everywhere. There’s a ton of Lenovo nonsense — taking over simple functions like the wifi settings, the battery, it’s own software update app. Why do I need all this? Then there’s the actual crapware. Nitro Pro PDF, Norton VIP Access, SugarSync. There’s a cost to users from all this crapware. After the first week or two, my machine couldn’t load any Windows updates, not even critical security patches. The Lenovo support boards were filled with angry customers and no answers. Eventually, the answer turned out to be that the Nitro crapware program was interfering with Windows Update. A patch would be available soon. Hello, I have a quicker fix, Lenovo – don’t install crapware on my new computer.
I paid extra for the extended three-year warranty. I got an email with a spreadsheet attached, which I had to fill out with my serial number, model number and other gibberish and email back to Lenovo to activate my policy. Why? They have all this information — they just took my order and sent me the machine. Maybe they have outsourced the warranty to some third party but why is that my problem?
I ordered right before the Windows 8 roll out. I did it on purpose so I’d get a machine with Windows 7 in case there were big problems with the newer version. After a couple of weeks, I was ready to upgrade. Buried on Lenovo’s site was a 3-page list of instructions, including a list of programs I should uninstall before updating. I followed all the steps and held my breath. Almost everything worked fine but later, looking at the device manager in the control panel, I could see a few hardware driver problems. Resolving all the problems took multiple visits to the support web site, running the Lenovo update program over and over and some additional fishing around on Google for advice. Not smooth.
Apple, obviously, makes none of these mistakes. The ordering and customization process on the web is simple, quick and easy. First boot is clean and quick. There is no crapware to remove because there is no crapware. Small system updates arrive as needed and install. Information about your AppleCare warranty arrives in the mail. And when it’s time for a major OS update, it too arrives via the system updates and simply installs.
Lenovo has great hardware chops but if they want to take on Apple in the high-end computer market, they’ve got to make some serious improvements.
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