At the very least, AEG home appliances are made by Electrolux. Same internals as Zanussi, a step above the sad state of Sharp, Panasonic, Grundig (made by Beko). Not as good as they once were, though.

Funnily enough, I was chatting to the guy who came to repair my 10yr old Siemens dishwasher a month or so back. His advice - next time you buy one, buy a Beko, as they have long understood how to build a good product to a price cap. The marque brands are now trying to save costs by doing the same internally, but they are not as good at it!

Oh man, funny that you mention that. So Bosch/Siemens have the most reliable appliances (lowest failure rates), except for their bloody dishwashers. They use unique, expensive parts and are very hard to disassemble. Terrible choices, no idea why.

Beko use standard components (except the main board) found on dozens of other brands and most of them only require you to remove the bottom cover for access.

To be fair, Beko branded machines are pretty good. Just not that good. Especially for the premium price they want for some of their other brands.

I've worked on several Beko washers that overheated until the glass on the door cracked (flooding the place). But that's nothing compared to some Miele that will power the heater even if there's no water, getting it red hot and risking a real fire. Ditto for Indesit dryers.

> Thinkpads are no longer made by IBM, so, yeah.

I've heard this line of thought repeated alot--"Thinkpads went to crap once IBM sold them to Lenovo"--but I could swear I read an article stating that the Thinkpad team went to Lenovo as well, such that the same people still work on them.

I'll edit my post if I can find the source.

The Lenovo deal happened a long time ago. Does it matter much today what the team was like in 2004? People move on, etc. The thinkpad brand itself is quite a bit older, even.

Whether or not the team itself moved over, I believe they still use something very close to the original design and build process as the IBM ThinkPads.

This makes sense. They are everywhere in the South East Asia market for electronic goods and their products are trash. I presume a Chinese firm got them as marketing.