There's a significant difference between Superfish, an intentionally installed application that deliberately mitigated security features in browsers to inject ads, and a security flaw that arose from poor design or a lack of good QA process. The latter are sloppy but ultimately an inevitable part of complex design; the former is an obnoxious lack of respect for your customer that deserves a serious penalty in damages and a complete reset of your brand's goodwill.

That said, I think there's an argument that customers being in a position to sue over security flaws might not be such a bad thing. It might push companies to make security and privacy important features rather than second-class add-ons.

Any argument you make will contradict itself, because you make it a subjective matter. So choosing superfish could be seen as a lack of good QA process.

....what? "windows/gnu/linux/apple" - what does any of these companies/products have to do with this? Lenovo put its customers at risk, if a judge sided with them it would be atrocious.

When were you last sold a machine with Linux and spyware pre-loaded?

Right, never.

Ubuntu

The difference between Lenovo's use of Superfish and Ubuntu providing anonymized search data to Amazon is night and day in terms of "spyware".

I don't like either, but Lenovo's actions were negligent to the point where they have exposed themselves to a justified lawsuit -- Ubuntu did not.

Which is why people shouldn't use Ubuntu and vendors shouldn't pre-install it.

You bought a machine with Ubuntu pre-loaded?

Does it look strange to you? Have seen this a lot these days, at least in the EU.

Not personally, but it's not like they're that hard to find.

Citation Needed. I live in the Bay Area, and cannot find an x86 laptop with desktop Linux preinstalled at Central Computers, Frys or Best Buy. Is System 76 what you mean, or ordering online from Dell for the XPS 13? Because that is not my definition of easy, certainly not compared to walking into a retail store.

Ordering something online is far easier than going to a retail store. I can drive for a few minutes to get to a Best Buy, look around to see if what I want is in stock, tell the salesperson who has been hounding me for the past 10 minutes that I'd like to buy it, wait in line at the register, then drive home or I can go online and be done with it in a few clicks.

Thinking mainly of System 76 and the dozens of other similar companies around the world. Sure not quite as easy as walking into a retail store, but on the other hand I don't know anybody who bought their (non-Apple) laptop at a retail store.